The Primary Cause of Mind-Loss

There are many forms of and paths to mind-loss, but at the heart of it is a very simple idea: that the fundamental question - what am I here for? - has been answered. 

The meaning of life has been revealed. The moral, philosophical, existential unknown that has been at the core of human struggle for thousands of years is now known.

By everyone.

The problem is that it isn’t good news.

To the question what am I here for, why am I alive? - the answer, communicated, reinforced, enforced through every possible behavioural mechanism, is that you are here to generate additional profit for an organisation, individual, or group of individuals who already own assets that could easily sustain the lives of millions of humans. 

This is the answer.

This is the truth.

It hides nothing, it suggests nothing further; it offers neither justifications nor defences nor exceptions nor escapes. There is no more ‘why’. 

This is the meaning of life. This is what it is.* 

We have the answer. The problem is, we wanted a different one.

We wanted it to be to love each other or to create art that is true to myself or to build a warm hearth and raise a family around it or to be custodians of the earth or to worship God and do His will whatever it may be or to bring peace where there is war or to skydive into Burning Man festival. 

But it’s none of those things. Your life will be spent in the service of the profit of other people. They will accrue unimaginable wealth from your work, and though you may be fortunate enough to reach a position of modest success and material comfort, most people who are alive in the world today, like most people who have ever lived on planet Earth, are alive so they can contribute to the accumulation of excess capital by someone else.**

So many of the cognitive assaults that cause mind-loss come, primarily, from the realisation and internalisation of this truth: here is the precise role which is allocated to the overwhelming majority of humans, and which has almost certainly been allocated to you. 

A human being who is aware of their surroundings and their actions can have no doubt that this is the full extent of their purpose in life: you are there, you exist, so that you can augment the profit that accrues to someone or something else. In almost every human life, this will be done through the process of salaried employment. If you fail to maintain salaried employment (or an activity which makes a similarly productive contribution to the excess wealth of others), your usefulness is in doubt.  

There are, necessarily, consequences that flow from this articulation of purpose. 

The most damaging, and one of the main drivers of mind-loss, is the realisation that someone, or a group of people, or a system, wields phenomenal power over you.

This realisation, even if most people make it on a level below the actively conscious, cannot help but generate psychological repercussions. These, when they begin, are the first steps on the pathway to mind-loss. Everyone who walks that road will take a different direction, will have different scenery on their way – some will head towards the destination of mind-loss through the varying routes of anxiety, depression, delusion, addiction, and so forth – but all these responses are essentially the same: it is ourselves, on realising the truth of our existence, crying out no! I see that it is this way, but I want it to be another way! 

Our unimportance – and I have trod my own journey towards mind-loss, which I have tried to chronicle as honestly as I can in these pages - is our vulnerability. The realisation of that vulnerability is a mammoth, if often hidden, trigger for mind-loss.

When we have reached a level of unimportance as a generator of excess profit, decisions are made about us over which we have no control. We may lose our jobs, our incomes, our homes; we may lose in time our capacity to provide food and shelter for ourselves, our children, our other dependents. These consequences are known to the decision-making apparatus, but that apparatus has long ago made the decision that whatever hardship, poverty, hunger, misery, suffering it causes for you and your family, is far less important than the continued accumulation of a certain quantum of excess wealth. They could use some of their excess money to provide for you, but it is more important that they have vastly more money than any person or group of people could ever meaningfully spend, than it is that you are able to provide a safe home, however modest, for yourself and your young.

Described in terms of the monetary theory of ‘absolute economic utility’, the judgment has been made that it is better for someone else to burn fifty thousand pounds than it is for you to use it to pay for shelter, heat, or food. 

This realisation is often made at a level below the conscious. Like an earthquake in the seabed, its impact may be delayed, and is transmitted through an alternative medium. There are hundreds of millions of people with symptoms of mind-loss; there are not hundreds of millions of people setting fire to banks, corporate headquarters, data centres, utility companies, tax collection offices, legislative chambers.** 

I had a client whose capacity to verbally articulate emotion was limited, but he was a skilled visual artist. At the onset of his realisation of the meaning of life, I suggested that he sketch or paint a scene to depict what he was feeling. He returned with a set of pen-and-ink illustrations, rendered in the style of a graphic novel, showing this:

1. A man has alighted from a train in a residential area in the outskirts of a town. There are no geographical or environmental elements that correspond to any readily identifiable real-life location. It’s sunset; the colours suggest incoming cold. The man is not uncomfortable, but his clothes are slightly too thin for the temperature. Ahead and on each side of him are long rows of houses, all illuminated warmly. He is about to begin the final leg of his journey: to his home.
   
    
2. The man is walking between the warmly-lit houses. The lamps, candles, wall- and ceiling-lights that illuminate the rooms of the houses fill the windows. At the same time, light is leaving the sky, and more cold is entering the air. In the man’s hand is a set of keys.
   
    
3. The man has walked further away from the station, and into the residential area. He may be on the same street; he may have entered a similarly proportioned street. Lights glow against darker background that indicates the passage of time; they are not brighter, but deeper, warmer. There is, unusually, a number and a street-name on the man’s key fob. It does not correspond to any number visible on the house doors.
   
    
4. The man is at an open door. The light that fills the home behind the door is suggestive of safety, warmth, family, security. There is a caption above the open door: Come home to cosy. There is a figure in the doorway, silhouetted. The man is communicating with him. He holds open his hand to show his key-fob.
   
    
5. The door is now closed, and the man has restarted walking. Ahead of him is four-way crossroads, in each direction what appears to be a long road lined on either side with houses, all with the same light in the windows. It is now full night, and the hunched shoulders of the man suggest a deeper cold. We can see the name on the key fob. It does not match the names of any of the streets at the crossroads.
   
    
6. There are now children at the man’s side. They are his children. They too are wearing clothes that are slightly too thin for the temperature. Their heights and builds suggest ages at which we would normally expect children to be in bed during the hours of darkness. The man shows his key fob to his children.
   
    
7. The man and his children are now small figures against in an expanding backdrop of infinitely lengthening streets in every direction, each lined with an infinite number of identical, warmly lit houses. The man is beginning to understand that none of the houses will match the name and number on his key fob. The children have not yet realised this, but in time they will.

I kept one of these illustrations, had it framed and mounted in my office. It was number two in the sequence. It hung there, at a 90-degree angle to my left, level with my eye-line when seated, but only for weeks. I found, with the knowledge I had about the rest of the sequence, the hope of home that it suggested - a hope that I knew would be destroyed - to be unbearably bleak. It created in me a sense of impending desolation so utter that I found it impossible to look at; it seemed to radiate coldness, loss, emptiness, absence. I took it down, wrapped it in thick black cardboard, and sealed it with industrial-strength adhesive tape in an opaque plastic box. When I think of it, as I am now, it is in the same way I would think of a piece of reactor core from Chernobyl.

*A great deal of cultural output purports to describe the search for, and revelation of, the purpose of life in different terms and with different conclusions, often involving organised religion, ‘spiritual’ practice, individual goal- or dream-achievement, individual goal- or dream-erasure, collectivism, materialism, humanism, environmentalism, simplification, and other methods of reality-denial. It is the contention of this author that the entire body of this work is a deliberate attempt at concealment of the true status. 

**If you feel this does not apply to you: you are the someone else.