Sixty-Seventh Post
I love The Onion. Back in February, an article about the inherent fallacy of money appeared (check it), and it was pretty brilliant. The gist of the piece: money is totally made up; it possesses only the power that we all agree to grant it. Money supposedly represents…what, the gold and/or silver that the federal government has? (I tried to figure it out, but the Wikipedia entry was confusing.) But federal notes get printed with seemingly reckless abandon – certainly faster than the rate at which we’re acquiring precious metals, at least – so it can’t be with any particular basis in reserves.
Anyway, what’s great about the article is that the sudden realization of the reality of money seems to incite some kind of grand liberation. There is confusion, yes, but I think it would be pretty hard to read the piece without thinking, “yeah – this would be fucking awesome!” And it’s not just because money is often used as a means of oppression (yeah, it can do plenty good, but its pursuit is pretty crummy news, even from the most mundane of perspectives)…the reason why the article’s vision is so great is because, with one satirical stroke, it demolishes one of our world’s most foundational illusions. It reveals to us some actual truth.
What I really like about the article is how useful it is as a metaphor. At the end of my first year of graduate school, I successfully proposed my thesis on something called “not-self,” which is a fundamental concept in Buddhism. The idea, basically, is that the “self,” with which each of us identifies as being a true manifestation of who we are, well…isn’t. It’s only a real thing as far as each of us believes it to be a real thing.
There isn’t a single thing that we can hold, or point to, or look at, and say, “that’s my self.” All we’ve got is what we perceive to be a collection of stuff that we decide to call self. Some memories, some ideas, some dispositions, some behaviors – that’s it. We categorize these ethereal constructs (you can’t point to memories, either), and say, “yup, that’s me.” But, interestingly, we also have some memories, some ideas, some dispositions, and some behaviors that we’ve decided are not what we consider self, even though all these things come from the same place: inside our heads. How is some of what’s in us self, but other of what’s in us not?
The answer sidesteps the question. As someone studying psychology, I necessarily believe that people are able to change. Individuals can go from being too anxious to leave their homes to having no difficulties making quick trips to the local supermarket, touching all those things that used to freak them out. How does this happen? Well, they’ve changed who they are. They went from being one self to another self. The argument might be that the latter self was the “true” one, just begging to be set free, but how on earth can that be proven? The reality is that the former self, however negative, was just as legitimately experienced as self.
So what is our sidestepping answer? This thing that we consider self is invented. Through whatever conditioning we’ve experienced in our lives, we decide what self is. One day, we decide that self is obsessive-compulsive; later, after some different conditioning (i.e., psychotherapy), we decide that self is not obsessive-compulsive. The point is that there is no fundamental self; it is without inherent qualities. There does not exist a “this stuff in me is self, and that stuff in me is not” – we just make it up!
The reason that any of this is useful is because we all give a great deal of power to this invention. If we experience things that the self doesn’t like, then it can become sad, or angry, or ashamed, or traumatized. And we experience things that the self doesn’t like all the time. If we explode the self, seeing it for its various processes, then its influence is extinguished. The point of not-self is to see the reality of self; it only has power to upset us if we grant it that power. More specifically, it is only able to distort the world around us – which is really just a bunch of valueless processes – if we grant it that ability. Self disables us from truly experiencing reality.
Like money, the self is not inherently real. We just make them both that way (because it’s expeditious), and in doing so, we place our behaviors into bondage. When we realize the nature of things, we not only are able to throw down our oppression, but we are also able to better see the world as it is.