Low Devotions

Breaking the Circles of Eternal Punishment

Photo by Fanni Dmtr on Unsplash

Midway upon the journey of our life, we found ourselves in a dark forest, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Dante’s words sound like the soundtrack to the human condition. Our condition. We wander in a thicket of our own making, a dense forest of symbols and systems of beliefs that obscure any clear path to reality, surrounded from every direction by our human-made constructs. We take their existence for granted, as though they were part of the natural order, yet they’re nothing but artifices, elaborate fictions sustained only by collective faith and repeated social rituals. The world, to a great extent, has become a world of our own design. In it lie both ingenuity and deception, for the constructs aren’t neutral, they guide and misguide us, largely devised—or at least deployed—with manipulative intent, serving a few while ensnaring the rest. The genuine realities of life, such as nature and the universe, are subordinated to the grand mental and cultural schemes we have superimposed on existence. And the more we rely on our constructs, the more the real recedes, for we have, in effect, replaced the world with a representation of the world, and lost the distinction between the two.

Same as in Jorge Luis Borges’ story, where an empire’s cartographers draw a map so detailed that it comes to cover the very territory it represents, models and symbols have come to precede and determine the real. The map has become the territory, as the simulation has replaced reality. We now live inside that map. Our systems of power and belief, codes and evaluation, have grown so intricate and true to us that the underlying reality withers away, unable to come through the overlay of crafted meaning. Signs don’t point to actual things anymore. They point to other signs in infinite loops. They are signs without referents. We make our way across a vast hall of mirrors in which what is reflected is merely other reflections. Truth itself has become elusive. In a realm of manufactured meaning, we risk finding that behind it no solid reality remains, only an abyss, the desert of the real.[i]

Is it possible, waking into the middle of the day, if not into the middle of our life, to realize that the world we have built is only a set, a veil of projections too brittle in their design to withstand pressure from below? That we live enmeshed in a web of fictions we take for reality? From the very beginning, we have drawn lines where none naturally exist to forge for ourselves a labyrinth of terms and symbols that pretend to summarize the wild and complex flow of existence. Nearly every aspect of civilized life is an artifact of collective imagination: work and money, religion and nation-states, marriage and divorce, language and culture. None of these, however, exists inherently in nature, they are simple, arbitrary frameworks propped up by shared belief and constant reinforcement.

How have we become so entangled in them that we’ve started to mistake them for the actual world? The answer lies in the way we perceive and cognize reality. Our minds, far from being some sort of passive mirrors, are in fact active projectors of patterns—they impose order on experience long before we learn about money or countries. We see the world in terms of objects—sequences—space—time. We never grasp raw existence directly. The filtered version we perceive is shaped and reshaped by our senses and beliefs, the world in itself remains beyond our direct grasp. We only know our mind’s representation of it. In that sense, a degree of constructed illusion is built straight into our experience, and building atop this innate framework, we are quick to absorb the specific constructs of our culture. The first great construct that enables all others is language. It is our original virtual reality, a rich and elaborate system of representation. Using words, we label and narrate existence, and little by little turn life into organized experience, since we can only perceive and think within the confines of the concepts our language provides.

Languages carve up reality in specific ways. Through them, cultures create entire cosmologies and value systems, explain why things are and what matters, but in the end, this tremendous power to shape understanding also means language can confine us, as we are all, to some degree, prisoners of the vocabularies we inherit, of the idioms and nuances that filter our every thought. A concept like “sin,” when ingrained by religious language, frames how one regards their natural human impulses. A phrase like “illegal migrant” redefines a fellow human being as a violator. When language spreads manipulative constructs, it overpowers and subdues reality. Much of societal confusion is language run amok, deforming physical and nonphysical manifestations, words gaining lives of their own, bewitching us. Countless ideas big and small, like the market, money, nation, race, achievement, are effectively just structured sounds and scribbles endowed with meaning by collective agreement.

Money, in essence, is a shared hallucination, a communally upheld symbol for value. A banknote or a token of cryptocurrency has no objective value to a starving person—they can’t eat it or drink it, its power comes only from social agreement and trust (or coercion) backed by institutions. But, around this empty center, we have built a massive, manipulative system. Money has become a tool of control. Those who have it can bend the world to their will, those without it find themselves bent to the wills of others. The pursuit of money, or profit, is enshrined by capitalism as the driving force of society, to the point that capital generates its own imperatives beyond human needs, while the real, material basis of life, like land and water, human labor and creativity, are subordinated to financial abstractions and algorithmic transactions. As capitalism has perfected the art of turning concrete things into representations and manipulating those representations for gain, all that matters is what can be priced, traded, commodified, and ultimately exploited. Under its empire of signs, nature and human beings alike are reduced to data and numbers, entire communities are turned into “human capital,” even time itself becomes a resource to monetize—we speak of “spending” time, which, interestingly, is the meaning assigned to the concept of time in English. Some other languages have different collocations: French, Spanish, and Italian use ‘pass’: time is something one passes through/by, conveying movement rather than value; Japanese: to experience time; German: to bring time over/across; Russian: to conduct time, with the meaning of ‘engaging’ with time; Korean: to send time, as in time is sent away.

Photo by Kilian Murphy on Unsplash

Religion, too, was among the first grand constructs, giving rise to entire cosmologies that held sway for millennia. It provided meaning and moral order but also served as a tool of exploitation. The religious worldview subordinates the physical world to a supernatural narrative, much at the expense of a genuine understanding of nature. Reading Dante’s Inferno, we see how medieval culture codes moral and political reality into a grand mystical journey through hellish concentric circles, each circle a construct of sin and punishment mirroring earthbound institutions. These vivid punishments are cultural inventions laid out to convey moral truths, yet how often did they also aim to instill fear and obedience? Religion, in its institutional form, can be willfully manipulative, promising heavenly reward or threatening damnation to enforce the rules set by earthly figures and authorities, creating a powerful simulacrum, an imagined order said to be more real than any empirical facts. At its extreme, it asks people to distrust the evidence of their senses, their own worldly experience as a whole, the findings of science in favor of a truth prescribed in holy texts or the edicts of the clergy. The authentic reality of the cosmos is reinterpreted through an imposed narrative that serves institutional power.

Likewise, the constructs of nation-states and societies function as elaborate imagined orders. A nation is, as historian Benedict Anderson puts it, an “imagined community,” millions of people who mostly never meet, yet deeply feel they are one people because of shared symbols and myths.[ii] Flags, borders, anthems, national histories provide a collective identity that is regularly manipulated by leaders to steward loyalty and sacrifice. The nation can demand one’s life in war or one’s submission in peace for an idea that exists largely in minds and on maps. The reality might be a patchwork of diverse communities and ecosystems, but the construct turns it into a singular Homeland, a Fatherland or Motherland that must be defended, the ruling classes, throughout history, harnessing nationalism to rally the masses while cloaking their own interests in the garb of national destiny. Culture is saturated with ideas like saluting flags and celebrating founding myths—all in the service of differentiating “ours” from “theirs.” It becomes second nature to see the world divided into nations as if they were as real as mountains and rivers, but the very lines on maps that we kill and die for are drawn by us, arbitrarily, our genuine reality of one species living on one planet partitioned by imagined boundaries that possess deadly significance.

Imaginary orders have come to permeate even the most intimate realms of our lives. Marriage and the nuclear family model are cultural constructs that define how we pair bond, who we can love and how. The idea that romantic and sexual life must fit a certain officially sanctioned pattern—monogamous, lifelong, state-registered—is a social imposition on the spectrum of human desire and kinship. This way, societal constructs reach deep into our personal realities, point-blank, telling us which feelings are legitimate and which identities are allowed. Work, too, is framed not just as a practical activity or the exertion of effort to produce a valuable result, but as a moral duty. The Puritans turned it into a sign of salvation; modern culture turns it into a measure of one’s worth. Even if the work is alienating or destructive to nature or self, the construct dictates that one must work to have dignity, to the point of work itself feeling like an end. We have built a world where to simply exist, one must earn permission via employment in the market economy. From a larger, cosmic perspective, it is completely absurd, but within our cultural frame, it is an unquestioned norm.

All these structures are upheld by collective belief and reinforced by networks of power within a particular culture, the conscious and unconscious guide for how we perceive the world and interact with it, the arena in which all artificial mights operate in concert, painting and erecting the stage sets. Through culture, which trains us, from birth, how to play our part in the grand illusion, we learn not only a language but a whole system of living: how and what to desire, what to aspire to, how to behave, whom to obey, etc. It is an exquisitely orchestrated show, and like any theater, it runs on suspension of disbelief. We collectively suspend disbelief in the fictions that underpin our lives as we agree, tacitly, to treat paper bills as precious and view borders on a map as sacred divisions, to regard certain costumes or titles as markers of authority as well as consider rituals like wedding ceremonies and voting as profoundly meaningful. Culture reinforces the agreements by saturating daily life with symbols and reminders that naturalize the artificial and make the made-up feel innate, and it all works as a smokescreen that prevents us from seeing the subtle ways in which we are shaped and dominated in perpetuity. Culture merely presents itself as how things are. It obscures the fact that it is how someone intended them to be, grooming us to think in terms of its constructs and accept their necessity, beyond any doubt. Those who don’t play along are punished or marginalized, further proof that the constructs serve as instruments of control, exploitative mechanisms that channel human energies and natural resources into organized funnels that benefit some at the expense of others. What is it, though, we can see with objectivity? We can see that the manipulation is sometimes overt, as in laws and propaganda, and sometimes subtle, as in social expectations and pressure, etiquette, etc., but it’s no coincidence that those who question fundamental constructs are labeled heretics or fools—questioning the fiction threatens to unravel the whole, therefore skepticism must be dissuaded. Reminiscent of Dante’s warning at the gate of Hell: “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here,” or, in our setting, “Abandon all doubt, ye who enter this fabrication,” to become a member of society, one is expected to renounce the possibility of any reality outside the sanctioned narrative. The genius of artificial constructs is that they preemptively stifle the imagination of alternatives, insinuating this is the only way, the natural way, ordained by God or reason or custom, and the hope that things could be different, more just and real, is discarded at the door as we are left with existential, unspoken grief, that our experience of life seems to miss something essential, as though we were exiles from a vaster, more authentic world.

Two forces have, in modern times, greatly driven these illusions to new heights: capitalism and digital life. Capitalism has proven to be not just an economic system, but a cultural and psychological one, infiltrating every aspect of life with market principles and actively commodifying reality. Everything must either be exploitable or be dispelled. Traditional cultures, with all their flaws, at least rooted people in land and community, in myth, in cosmology. Capitalism uproots those bonds and replants us onto consumerism and wage labor. A person’s worth is equivalent to their purchasing power or productivity, nature’s worth equates to its price on the market. What an utterly gruesome alienation! We are strangers to the very world that begot us, interacting with nature as resource and with each other as competitors or customers instead of fellow beings. We’ve come to embrace a second nature—a counterfeit ecosystem of commodities and indices—layered atop the first.

The digital revolution, especially, has entrenched our removal from unmediated reality, placing the hyperreal literally in our face and at our fingertips at every waking moment. We construct avatars online and refine lives that may only have a tenuous link to our physical existence, endlessly engage with symbols like texts, images, videos, virtual currencies, etc., all metrics quantifying our social worth. Communication becomes more abundant but considerably less authentic. We respond to others’ personas rather than their persons, the self is transformed into even more of a construct—a profile, a brand. Meanwhile, we speak of “real life” as that which happens offline, implying that what occurs online is somehow not entirely real, yet the distinction blurs as digital interactions shape our feelings and beliefs as strongly as any personal experience. Cyberspace is the new map that is fast subsuming the territory. Here, within this map, our social reality and political discourse are increasingly dictated by digital flows of information, as is our perception of truth. One can live in a filter bubble, a custom virtual world tailored by algorithms to reinforce one’s prejudices, a solipsistic simulation where inconvenient truths rarely penetrate, whose exploitive potential is immense. We see it in targeted ads, in the engineered addictiveness of apps that constantly grab our attention, aka the new currency, in misinformation campaigns sowing collective delusions as the digital domain turbocharges all the older constructs of money, propaganda, identity, etc., in a further drift from tangible reality and face-to-face living, toward a realm where there are no fixed points and everything is malleable. What, then, remains for us of unconstructed reality?

What might it take to rediscover a balance, or at least crack the dominance of artificial, make-believe dominions? Could it start with something as simple as realizing that our constructs are only that, constructs? If we view the map as just one layer over others, the territory is not so much lost as waiting to be rediscovered. Could we learn to dwell in a kind of double-vision, to live by the code while remembering its contingency? Somewhere beneath all the layers of artifice, nature keeps on going, even as we do our best to mask it. The stars still burn with nuclear fire, forests still carry out photosynthesis, the unknowable reality-in-itself, the noumenal world, persists beyond our phenomenal projections.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, studying children, holds that knowledge is not a passive reflection of reality, but an active process of building mental structures that help us understand and interact with the world.[iii] We each put together pieces of reality, like children building mental Lego models. The pieces can be more or less adequate but never identical to the world’s actual underpinnings. Ernst Von Glasersfeld, a philosopher and psychologist who developed the theory of radical constructivism, goes further to say that knowledge isn’t a mirror of objective reality at all, that in fact it functions to help us adapt to our experiences and environment, that is to say our ideas and constructs are tools for living and not truthful pictures—we made them to solve problems as we perceive them, not to uncover a mythical “God’s-eye” truth. Which means all our constructs, even the most entrenched, are mutable. They can be replaced if they cease to serve our adaptation. It also means that when our constructions fail, when they lead us into crises or contradictions, reality nudges us to revise them. The “real” world shows itself precisely where our constructions break down. Every collapse of an economic bubble and every personal breakdown is an interface with the real, informing us that our model no longer fits the facts.

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

So, how can we retrieve authentic reality? Revolutions only succeed in installing new constructs. Nostalgia merely romanticizes an earlier interface. The answer, if it exists, lies in perceptual divergence, in a sustained refusal to accept deception as the price of reality, in the cultivation of states in which constructs become visible as constructs. We must learn to see them for what they are, treat them as hypotheses instead of edicts, as denouncing or replacing them with better ones only tightens the loop. They can’t be dismantled from the outside because there is no outside in any usable sense. We have to recognize the weight of the systems we carry and are carried by and then loosen our grip without discarding them completely, since we find ourselves inside them not just materially but cognitively, our so-called intuitions shaped by them, our reflexes patterned by them, our thoughts, even when rebellious or innocent, already phrased in the terms they supply. And, last but not least, we must step out of the inner city of signs.

No matter how oppressive or stagnant a system of thought is, alternative constructions are always possible. We’re not doomed to wander the same mental circles forever, we can redraw the map provided we are willing to venture outside familiar constructs and risk uncertainty. Why not, for starters, take inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines of flight, escape routes by which one slips out of dominant orders and invents new ways of being? Every act of genuine creativity, every moment of true critical thinking, is a line of flight. It is an absolute refusal to be limited by what the matrix codes say is possible or real. Think of the mystics who stepped outside religious dogma to seek out enlightenment, or the artists who broke every known convention to redefine beauty. In each case, a crack was made in the wall of consensus “reality,” and through that crack reality itself could finally shine through.

In Dante’s narrative, after a long trek through the fake and perverse structures of Hell, the poet emerges on the other side. He has faced illusion and terror, seen the worst of human failings represented in infernal architecture. In the end, he and his guide climb until they reach the surface. “And then we emerged to see the stars again,” writes Dante, with relief. The plain sight of the actual, untamable stars signifies a return to truth, to the wider cosmos untouched by the shadows of Hell. It is a return to authentic reality after a long detour through constructed delusions.

As for ourselves, we will likely always live with some degree of artifice, that is part of our condition: we find comfort in the very illusions that imprison us, insofar as stepping outside patterns we’re acquainted with can be as frightening as leaving a simulated paradise to wander in a dark, unfamiliar forest. But perhaps we can, like they say, take heart in knowing that reality itself supports a possible fightback. The very fact that our constructs lead to crises like the environmental collapse, social fragmentation, pandemics, mental ill-health epidemics, etc., is reality signaling that the game is unsustainable. The failure of a simulation is the opportunity to break through to something real. And, provided we resist succumbing to our own creations, we can reconsider and reformulate them, reclaim our role as constructors rather than captives by employing a philosophy of provisional inhabitation and of transparent artifice.

We need to search out new, uncommon forms of culture to ensure our models serve human and ecological welfare instead of enslaving or distorting it. We need to live inside the construct but live as one who knows it is a construct, a non-performative knowing, if you will, that must demand a practice of attention exceeding comprehension. It means creating spaces of perception in which the obvious is no longer sufficient, and the background—what the construct renders invisible—is perceived again. It means privileging modes of encounter that do not resolve into utility or (self-)affirmation. It means risking incoherence, not for the sake of obscurity, but for the sake of a deeper coherence that remains unconfirmed, or which may never be confirmed. It means living with fewer conclusions, with more delay, with the restoration of time, of slowness as a legitimate mode of resistance, and above all, it means learning to regard every cultural given as contingent and manufactured for purposes that may, or not, or no longer apply. The point is not to escape them. The point is to see through them long enough to remember there was a world before our world. Underneath the weight of our own projections, beneath the surface of simulation, in the actual press of matter and time and the unknowable mechanisms of being, that world continues.

---

References

[i] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

[ii] Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

[iii] Evans, Richard I. Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas. E.P. Dutton, 1973.

---