The Secret of the Secret: the power of thought in an un-magical world

In my girlfriends closet there is a magical little box. Inside this box are neatly folded pieces of paper. On one of those papers is written in swirly handwriting a recipe for the perfect boyfriend, written years before I met her.

So how do I match up? Some of it describes me perfectly (handsome, funny, interesting), some of it does not (gentleman, modest, rich). Still I cannot escape the idea that my whole existence was retroactively created by this magical little box. That’s anyway what my girlfriend is convinced of.

This type of wishful thinking, where the goal is not just to have a nice, comforting fantasy, but to actually make it into a reality, has many names. Some call it manifesting, some call it magic thinking, some call it a “reality distortion field”. Many books have been sold, like for example “The Secret”, that promise the reader that a focused desiring can make miracles happen.

So… does it work?

On a first pass, the answer seems to be a sobering no. We do not live in a magical world; we live in a universe ruled by laws of nature, not human fancy. Pure thinking can perhaps inform and influence our own actions, which in turn have an impact on external reality. But there can be no short-circuit; thinking cannot directly influence this external, objective reality.

But is it really that obvious? Is this objective reality really so unbendable?

Let’s do a thought experiment. Close one eye and look around. What you see is a perfectly flat, two-dimensional representation of the world around you. Stop looking at things, and start looking at the picture itself. Notice the shape of the picture frame; a lying oval, its roundness disturbed by the intrusion of your nose. Try to look at what you see as if it were a strange modernist painting that you don’t know how to interpret. This is how a painter must see in order to paint realistically. Whenever I try to draw something, I’m surprised about how it never turns out the way I see it, but strangely distorted. Why does that happen? This distortion is in fact nothing but our interpretation of what we see. When we see a table from the side, we see a table that is about as long as it is wide. But we know it’s actually much longer. This conflict between our direct perspective and our spatial interpretation of it accounts for the weird distortion so often seen in children’s drawings (and drawings of adults who are bad at drawing).

So in the end, what do we see when we look around? Do we see objective reality, or do we see our interpretation of it? What would be left of reality when we take the human perspective away from it? There would be no grass, no trees, but just light hitting randomly distributed matter of different types.

If our reality is constituted by our interpretation of it, our thinking about it, would it be so crazy to believe that we can change it just by willing it? Or more importantly: is it possible to really change reality without believing that it’s possible to change it just by willing it?

I’m not taking any chances. I’m not happy with the world as it currently is, and my very limited power to change it. I have some ideas about how it can be improved, so I wrote them down in swirly handwriting, neatly folded the paper, and put them inside the magical little box in my girlfriend’s closet.

The mysterious Third Thing: its two opposed rejections (part 3)

The knowledge of the Third Thing makes for a disturbing presence in that part of our mind which is not unconscious but also not fully conscious. We are too ashamed to speak this knowledge directly, but it nonetheless expresses itself through a conspicuous denial.

A man might become confused when he says to his wife “You look even more beautiful without make-up” and she acts annoyed instead of grateful. It was just a compliment right? Yes, but a compliment that serves as a denial of the cliché that a woman needs make-up in order to make herself attractive to men. By positing his wife as the exception, the husband half-consciously reaffirmed the rule.

How do you fight an idea when even its rejection can serve as a reproduction? It’s much easier to fight a man who says “Women need make-up to be attractive to men” than it is to fight the poor stupid husband who is caught up in this idea much like many women are.

The thing to do then is to hold the idea to light and say “This is wrong”. The difficulty then is how to deal with the flood of denial from people who say “Of course it’s wrong, who said it was right? I sure didn’t!”

This is what makes the phrase “Black lives matter” so incredibly powerful. It shouldn’t offend anyone, since no one (neo-nazis and KKK excluded of course) is claiming that black lives don’t matter. So what is white America so upset about? What America is desperately trying to deny is that in its public unconscious, black lives do not matter as much as white ones. A black life doesn’t have the same value as a white one. This is why so many people try to change the phrase to “All lives matter”, to erase the disturbing implications of “Black lives matter”. Ironically, this white resistance is the triumph of the black movement, since it shows that racism is much more widespread than a handful of clansmen and neo-nazis. “All lives matter” finally makes tangible the institutional racism that oppresses black people.

So here we have two different rejections of a Third Thing knowledge. “Black lives matter” rejects the content of the idea, while “All lives matter” rejects the notion that this idea is even operative.

Often the lines between these two rejections are more blurred, especially in left-wing circles. When a man says “Fat women can be super attractive”, is he saying that because he feels accused of thinking something mean about fat women, or because he is trying to create a society where attractiveness isn’t constrained by beauty standards? The former only reproduces the Third Thing, while the latter challenges it.

The only way to loosen the hold that the Third Thing has over us is to become conscious of it. This can be a painful process because of the often horribly racist and sexist content, and because uttering this content is highly stigmatised. But what if this stigma is caused only in part by an honest societal rejection of sexism and racism? What if this stigma is also caused by the societal repression of sexism and racism? Maybe the time has come to challenge the stigma, to be able to say: “The world, including me, is racist and sexist”.

The mysterious Third Thing: its obscure birth and involuntary reproduction (part 2)

The unloved field of Lacanian mathematics postulates that 1 + 1 = 3. The third element that is added to the 2 here represents the common ground that 1 and 1 need to enter into a relationship with each other.

When I talk to another person, there are never just two subjects involved. To communicate, we need a third thing to be present. Most obviously, this third thing can be said to be a shared language. But we need more. I need to know what to do when he sticks out his hand as he introduces himself. I need to know who Donald Trump is in case we should talk about current events. I need to know how to react when he lets out a soft whistle as he nods his head towards a woman sitting at the bar wearing a red dress and high heels.

So how do I come to know all these things? I never followed a course on human interaction, taught by some superhuman. I learned everything I know just by interacting with other humans.

In my previous post I described the mysterious Third Thing as a disembodied knowledge, a knowledge that lives in the minds of everybody but at the same time independent of any person or group of persons. This knowledge isn’t taught, it spreads through assuming.

How do you feel when someone assumes you know something but you don’t? You feel like you should have known it. After all, why would the other person assume this knowledge if it wasn’t apparently commonly held knowledge? So why would someone assume a knowledge in another person? Probably because someone else assumed this knowledge in them.

In this way we can imagine the birth of language by way of a stupid caveman and a smart but insecure caveman. One day the stupid caveman returns to the cave with a dead rabbit. He sees the smart but insecure caveman and tells him “Groomph”. The stupid caveman is too stupid to realise that the smart but insecure caveman has no way of knowing that by “Groomph” he really means “Gather wood to make a fire while I skin this rabbit”. An awkward silence ensues as the smart but insecure caveman wonders how to say “I don’t know what you’re trying to say”. The stupid caveman repeats his “Groomph” more threateningly, shaking his dead rabbit. The smart but insecure caveman panics, and guesses correctly the meaning of “Groomph” by gathering the wood necessary to make the fire. Now, because the smart but insecure caveman doesn’t want to seem like he didn’t know something the stupid caveman did know, he starts using the word “Groomph” as if he knew its meaning all along. If the other cavemen and women were as smart and insecure as he is, they too will have guessed its meaning and pretended like they too knew its meaning all along.

“Groomph” isn’t a very pretty word to express “Gather wood to make a fire while I skin my dead rabbit”, but now the cave people are stuck with it. They can’t simply change the word without returning to the old situation of incomprehensible grunts and awkward silences. Instead, every time a caveman utters the word “Groomph”, its meaning is solidified.

The Third Thing isn’t language, or even culture, but it attaches itself to it. It lives and reproduces itself by the same mechanisms. It’s a kind of cultural unconscious. You can learn a language and you can be taught to shake someone’s hand, but you are never taught that fat women are unattractive, or that it’s better to be white than black. Such knowledge sneaks in through the back door as we learn to be a normal, functional member of society.

The mysterious Third Thing: its hidden presence in society (part 1)

Our identities are determined by three agencies; ourselves, others, and a mysterious Third Thing sometimes called society. What is mysterious about this Third Thing is that it’s a kind of disembodied knowledge. Its knowledge isn’t determined or controlled by any one person or group of persons; it lives independently of people, even though in the minds of people is the only place where it can live.

Imagine you’re a girl in high school. Your friends are talking about someone named Amber, who you don’t know. You ask “Who’s Amber?” Suddenly the conversation falls silent. Your friends are staring at you looking shocked. “Don’t you know? Amber is like the most popular girl in school! Everyone knows that!”

You didn’t know Amber was the most popular girl in school, but now you do. You don’t feel like you’ve learned something new, you’ve only discovered that there was a gap in your knowledge. This is caused by your friends’ assertion that everybody knows that Amber is the most popular girl in school. This assertion implies that “everybody” is not meant literally, as the collection of all people, since you are part of that collection and you didn’t know, making the statement “everybody knows” obviously untrue.

“Everybody” is not a collection of people, it’s the Third Thing. Your high school has created a local Third Thing that knows Amber is the most popular girl in school. All the boys and girls in school, including Amber herself, have to deal with this fact whether they like it or not. If you don’t know about it, you can never be fully part of your school’s ecosystem, your school’s mini-society. You just don’t “get it”.

Another example is the fat woman. Even if you personally think that fat women can be super sexy, at the same time you know that “objectively”, fat women are unattractive. Nobody explicitly told you, but it is simply known. Of course, it is known by women as well. If a woman is fat, she can feel unattractive because of it, even though everyone around her always tells her how beautiful she is. She could have a boyfriend who wants to have sex with her everyday, but still feel unattractive, because she knows that “everybody knows” fat women are unattractive. She also knows that despite her boyfriend’s affection, he also knows that “everybody knows” fat women are unattractive.

So how does this knowledge come to be? Surely it’s not because actually, objectively, fat women are unattractive. Anyone who has ever seen a Rubens painting knows that in a different culture, a few healthy rolls of fat can be a sign of beauty and eroticism. What is considered attractive is subjective, but in this case on a societal level instead of a personal. The subject here is again this mysterious Third Thing.

“I’m not racist, but…”

“I’m not racist, but it’s a fact that blacks go to prison much more often than whites”. Let’s analyze this oft-heard racist statement. It’s true that blacks go to prison more often than whites, but somehow we know that this person is not about to lament the institutional racism of the legal system.

How do we know?

It has everything to do with the “I’m not racist, but…” part. If they weren’t about to say something racist, why the need to deny being a racist? Is it the motive of the racist to pretend not to be a racist, all the while secretly furthering his racist agenda?

A more interesting approach is to take the racist’s words at face value. What if they honestly believe they’re not a racist? For a true racist, white superiority is not a conviction but a fact; a fact that political correctness keeps us from admitting to ourselves.

Isn’t it a fact that a black man would rather go stealing  than earn a hard days work? They’re all either in prison or on the street corner selling drugs. Isn’t it plain as day? The racist fails to see his enjoyment of these “facts”.

A first mistake would be to deny his facts, or counter them with examples of black people who play a positive part in society. That would be like protesting the Holocaust by claiming that not all Jews are bad.

A second mistake would be to start patiently explaining how the legal system is racist. To the racist this must seem like a paranoid schizophrenic explaining that he’s not paranoid, that everyone is actually conspiring against him.

After all, what motive does the legal system have to be racist? Are all judges and juries secretly racist? To repute the racist, we must bring into the discussion such abstract concepts as institutional racism and unconscious bias.

To claim that effectively the entire world is racist is not a common-sense position. Its truth is only visible from an engaged, radical egalitarian perspective. It can’t be based on fact or rationality, since it’s impossible to say when somebody fails because of a lack of opportunity, or because of a lack of ability.

Being anti-racist is not a matter of common sense, it is a political engagement, an ideology about how the world should be. The idea that everyone should be of equal worth is an ideal we constantly have to fight for. Often this fight must be fought with ourselves, not others.

What we are left with is then the exact opposite of what we started with. The answer to “I’m not racist, but…” should be “Though I am effectively, spontaneously a racist, I nonetheless think that actually the legal system is biased against blacks”.

The Institute of Sexism

Even though I’m a sexist, I try to be the least bad kind. But there’s something like a baseline of sexism which is hard to get below. This baseline is what is known as institutionalised sexism. It’s the way in which everybody, the world, society as such is sexist. The most powerful tool of this universal sexism, the way in which it affects even the most liberal college student, is unconscious bias.

Imagine a work meeting. Your department had a major screw-up, and co-workers are busy shifting the blame away from themselves. Suddenly, your male boss stands up from his chair and starts to shout. How do you feel? Now imagine the exact same scenario, but this time the boss who starts shouting is female. How do you feel? If I’m being honest, the shouting woman makes a completely differently impression on me as the shouting man. It’s the difference between “Damn, he’s really angry this time” and “What’s wrong with her?”

Why is that? Isn’t it sexist to take a man’s anger seriously but not a woman’s? It is. So does that make me a sexist? At this point I would shrug and say, “Well this is simply how it is. I don’t want to be sexist but a shouting man just means something different than a shouting woman. I can’t help it.”

But is that a valid excuse? No.

First of all, it would be the ultimate sexist crime to suggest that the anatomical differences between men and women determine the effect of their shouting, so that we are correct in taking the one seriously and not the other. A more forgivable approach would be to say that certain attitudes about men and women are unfortunately so entrenched in society that we have adopted them blindly, like a child adopts its mother tongue.

But I can’t really claim to be a victim of these societal attitudes, as I reproduce them every single day. Saying “This is simply how it is” is at best a lazy reproduction of the status quo, at worst a perversely gleeful affirmation of it (like soldiers who find a perverse pleasure in carrying out violent orders, free of any accountability).

So the only way out is to admit that yes, I am a sexist. There are now two traps waiting for me, both called Guilt. The first one is that of shared guilt. Since everybody else is sexist too, can it really be that bad? Who would judge me personally? The second trap is a vain dramatisation of my guilt that aims to shift the focus on me, rather than on those I have failed.

As an ethical being, it’s not only your responsibility to be good, but also to define for yourself what it means to be “good”. In the face of institutionalised sexism, this is the ethical heroism that men need to show more often.

White male guilt

In a world where women get rape and death threats just for being on twitter, black men get shot dead just for having a phone, and gay men get beaten up just for holding hands, it seems silly to focus on the problems of straight white men. Their only worry should be to fail at life despite having every privilege imaginable handed to them from the very start. So why is it worth writing about white male guilt anyway?

I remember in 2014 how Emma Watson launched the HeForShe campaign, inviting men to the discussion about feminism and gender inequality. Despite it’s somewhat awkward name (HeForShe might conjure up an image of a white knight saving the damsel in distress), I liked the idea of inviting men to actively take part in the struggle against gender inequality. Even though I had been interested in feminism before, I felt awkward about calling myself a feminist simply because it had always been a movement by and for women. Until HeForShe, men generally played one of two roles in the feminist struggle: either they were actively, violently opposing it, or they were simply not being part of the problem.

I think men can and should play a larger role. Men cannot declare neutrality when there are so many among them who commit violence against women. But as it turns out, simply inviting men to join the struggle is not enough. HeForShe’s goal was to get 1 million men and boys around the world to commit to end gender inequality, but got stuck just above 200.000. Because to make men join the fight against gender inequality, they first have to be convinced that this inequality exists. And for them to acknowledge this inequality exists, they have to deal with the question of their Guilt.

How guilty is a man for being a man in a sexist world? Is it ok to not invite that female colleague when informally discussing business, because the atmosphere is just more relaxed when it’s just the guys? Is it ok to compliment a woman on the street on how she looks? Is it ok to look at porn? An important part of the feminist struggle is to show how societally accepted behaviours like these stem from the same attitudes towards women as those that drive men to rape and kill.

So how would you feel if one day you’re an upstanding citizen, and the next day you’re a criminal, because someone changed the law overnight? Would you accept your guilt and vow to change, or would you long back for the times when you never did anything wrong? This is the impulse that men have to fight today.

Why do I hate women?

Eight years ago, when I was a student, I remember going to the bakery to buy some bread. The bread cost 2.85 but I only had a twenty note. The cashier asked me if I had any change, I said sorry, I didn’t. The cashier, visibly annoyed, started counting out my change while complaining that it was only the beginning of her shift and already she was running out of change. I felt guilty and awkward to be there, and vowed to next time get my bread at the supermarket, though it didn’t taste as good.

Walking home though, I started to feel angry. It wasn’t my fault the cashier was running out of change, why did she want to make me feel bad about it? She should have been happy to have a customer, but instead she made it so I didn’t want to go back there. Coming home to my dorm I decided to tell the whole story to my neighbour, who was outraged. “You know”, he said, “only a woman could have done that. A man wouldn’t have cared about the change.”

I was relieved that he verbalised the thought I didn’t even dare admit to having. I immediately, emphatically agreed. We looked at each other like we uncovered a well-kept secret. Despite all we had been taught about the evils of sexism, we had found the undeniable proof that there was something inherently detestable in women.

Looking back on it, it seems pretty clear that all I found was an excuse to justify my hatred towards women. My hatred of women was unconscious, I didn’t know that I had it until I found a reason to express it, and felt relieved doing so. I didn’t know the real reason I unconsciously hated women and I still do not know today. Which raises the question: do I still hate women? Spontaneously I would answer no, of course not, that’s ridiculous. But maybe I just learned to hide it better from myself?

I sometimes like to tell people the story of the worst person I have ever met. The worst person I have ever met was the mother of my ex-girlfriend, who at 50 reinvented herself as a lesbian, buddhist, vegetarian mosaic-artist. This is already plenty reason for me to hate somebody, but on top of that she was so self-involved that she couldn’t spare any love for her daughter, who desperately needed it.

A mother who doesn’t love her child is a terrible thing, but what about a father who doesn’t love his child? Isn’t it just as bad? It should be, but somehow I feel it’s not. Sexism has a tendency to attach itself to every criticism levelled at a woman, no matter if the criticism is valid or not. Does that mean women should never be criticised? No, because luckily there’s an easy way to detect this sexism that sneakily tries to hitch a ride on valid criticism: just imagine you were criticising a man.

Even when I discover a hidden sexist motivation for what I thought was perfectly valid criticism, I still don’t know what I’m fighting. Why do I hate women? Is it some deep childhood trauma or is it just institutionalised sexism? To what degree am I guilty then? If there is a God, how will he judge me? I tell myself I do more than most to fight my hatred, but I get the feeling that it makes it even worse, because now I feel proud for not hating women as much as some others supposedly do.

In Defense Of Objectification

When people talk about objectification they usually mean the kind where a man treats a woman as a lust-object. Many feminists stress how violent and damaging it is. But the problem with objectification is that it’s a bit too loosely defined. Officially it just means treating a person like an object.

Think back to your teens. Have you ever seen your teacher outside of your school, and was kind of shocked that they had a life of their own? This can also be said to be an effect of objectification. You didn’t think of your teacher as a full person, with their own wishes and dreams, but you thought of them as a teacher-thing. A person reduced to its function. A two-dimensional character in the story of your life.

In fact, when are you really aware of another person’s subjectivity? Of course theoretically I know that other people have the same wealth of inner life as I have, but the only times I really experience it is when they do something I didn’t expect them to. It’s a terribly anxious feeling usually. Think about when you’re in love, and you’re not sure if the other person feels the same way about you…

Some will say I’m just playing with semantics, but if objectification is only bad in a certain context, maybe the real bad guy is hiding somewhere in this context. Let’s flip the roles; would it be bad when a woman objectifies a man? Of course it wouldn’t, because she will probably not sexually harass said man because of it.

It’s usually assumed that objectification leads to harassment and other kinds of violence against women, but I don’t buy it. Harassment has nothing to do with sexual desire. A man doesn’t whistle at a woman because he hopes it will lead to sex somehow. He does it to put her in her place. He feels threatened by her sexuality and wants her to hide it, so he can feel safe and in control again.

If there’s a hell below, we’re all gonna go

Something I don’t like about identity politics is the implicit shifting of blame towards the hegemonic Other. Like a feminist who says men are responsible for raping mother nature, or a vegetarian blaming non-vegetarians for rampant thoughtless consumerism. It is as if people enjoy assuming some marginalized identity in order to absolve themselves of the world’s crimes (to the detriment, of course, of people who actually are discriminated against because of their identity). It reminds me of a great Curtis Mayfield lyric:

“Sisters, niggas, whities, jews, crackers! Don’t worry… If there’s a hell below, we’re all gonna go.”

I’m tempted to change it to: “Feminists, vegetarians, cisgender males, gays, blacks, whites, disabled, able-bodied! Don’t worry…” The good news is of course that there’s no hell. There’s no final judgement passed, no cruel God who asks “Have you done enough to make the world a better place?” So how come it feels like that for so many people?

Maybe it has something to do with the depoliticization of politics. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberal-democratic capitalist order was accepted as the best system possible. The world had finally found a rational set of rules which, in the end, would mean prosperity for all. So when kids were starving in Africa, it couldn’t be because of some fault in the system. It couldn’t be because of huge corporations buying up the best farming land in Somalia to grow aloe vera. No, it was because we didn’t care enough. Similarly, when global warming reared its ugly head, it wasn’t because of unregulated industry producing tons and tons of CO2 gas. No, it was because you and I left the fridge door open for too long.

Over and over, the message was that we’re all personally responsible for making the world a better place. Not politicians and revolutionaries, but citizens and consumers have the task of dealing with the suffering of those less fortunate. The feeling of guilt this produces however is, I think, totally unproductive. It leads to people splitting themselves up in tiny little lifestyles, blaming ‘normal people’ for the state we’re in, destroying our solidarity.

It’s time we realize that we’re all in this together. It’s time we realize that we didn’t make the world the way it is, but together we can change it.