Invective against the Ideological

Systems theory, reduction to type, and the supremacy of the nihilist.

 

 

In a game, where there are a set number of pieces, with set modes of interaction, there are a finite amount of possible outcomes. Indeed, the more holistic, the more proscriptive the rule-set for each actor, the fewer the number of possible results. This is true even when one multiplies the number of actors in play; so long as there are the same number of rule-sets in play across actors, the possible results remain consistent, indifferent to scale.

This is because each actor can only iterate within their rule-sets, such that they will behave in a predictable way at a systemic level; knowing how a collective of individuals will behave, you can model them as a group. In fact, if you know the rule-sets and actors in play, you can forecast the end result of the game far before any of the actors ever achieve it. That is to say, if I know the criteria each player uses in making their moves, then I can know the entire course of the game without any of them having to iterate a single move.

This is what we in the game theory/system-cybernetics world call a 'solved game', or 'solved problem'; one that can be forecast, because one knows all the reactions in play. In theory, any system involving fixed rule-sets can be solved, no matter how many rules or actors are in play, even if one doesn't know the explicit rules used; enough observation allows one to deduce them. For instance, we can create a stellar model, and if we know all the forces in play, we can forecast its operation ad infinitum, even if it is thousands of years into the future and we have no observations to vindicate its predictions. Indeed how we know we have the right rules, the ones in effect, when our forecasts match up with empirical data. These route leads to scientific concepts such as the "clockwork universe", which suggest that if we discovered every elemental law, then we could create a perfect forecast for every event that would happen until the end of time, or even retroactively into the past. Predictability, simplicity, tedium; such is a solved game.

The only thing that disrupts a system from being solvable... is an actor with changing rule-sets. One whose actions cannot be forecast, because their decision parameters cannot be known ahead of time. This is what we could call a 'contextually-aware' or 'emergent' actor, one that adapts to the specifics of the situation which it confronts and alters its rule-set based on experience. So long as an actor remains emergent, with an undefined ruleset, it cannot be predicted and hence the predictive power of the model around it collapses. A wildcard, in other words, which limits how much anyone can say with confidence.

 

Let's be explicit. A person, with set rules and modes, reactions and responses, is effectively a solved game. You can plug them into any situation, and knowing how they will respond, you can predict the result. That is true whether those rules, those responses are simple or complex. Hence an ideological person, with a creed and mores, with established positions and values, is in essence predictable. Their actual performance of them is from a systemic perspective superficial; the results can be easily extrapolated. It isn't hard for an observant spectator to witness this, when two specimens of a known ideology with an established rule-set or response-set come into conflict; how they will use the same general arguments and tactics, often very similar language, and each will seem to be executing a familiar script. In a sense, they are, only that script is unwritten, implicit. Still if one took the time to trace it out, it would be just as real, just as effective. A small amount of variation is likely, but the more you know of someone's particular ideology, their systems for decisions, the more you can anticipate how they will act in a given context. This is intuitively obvious, as is the inherent pro forma, meaningless nature of such interactions. Why even bother, if one knows how it is going to end, after all?

The only thing, let me repeat: the *only* thing that prevents this from being true in all cases is an emergent actor, and an uncertain rule-set. In human terms, this means a person who isn't established within a framework of ideology, of known logics and methods. Someone's predictability, and the associated superficiality of their actual actions, is directly related to the extent and consistency of their rule-sets. Their ideology, their creed, their priorities and all. As easily understood and as easily forecast as a machine, once you have bothered to grasp their rules. Such a person can be extrapolated throughout their entire lives, every circumstance they will encounter, to what in systems talk is an 'end run' result. Most folk instinctively do not like the idea of predestination, of fate, but simply because there is nowhere these prophecies are explicitly written does not mean they are, as said earlier, still implicitly there. Just waiting, for a forecaster to realize them. Like a part in a closed system, a ball in a pachinko machine, they are just carrying out what is already known.

If one is to be anything more, they cannot have a holistic rule-set; one in the course of life often wants such a thing, sometimes quite badly, especially in the spheres of philosophy, and many men have made their fame across history for offering an attempt at one. For centuries, an entire continent's academics seemed preoccupied with trying to create just such a consistent, all-inclusive rule-set. But if one has one, or to the precise extent in which they have any rule-set at all, they are predictable, and in a certain sense less alive, less human, less important in and of themselves. More predictable, thus at an individual and systemic level, able to be more easily subsumed into a greater fabric. The only way to retain humanity, meaning, and independence, amongst a host of other such associated things, is to be beyond ideology, fixed positions and reactions, and to be highly emergent. In human terms, to be not necessarily indecisive, but uncommitted. Not to be totally without a rule-set, but to be without a fixed one, which remains consistent or predictable; even a very extensive rule-set, if constantly changing, retains its autonomy and its emergent character. In theory, just such a thing is a human mind, with all of its constant reactive and integrated interplay, evolving and adapting perpetually.

But in practice, it is all too easy to see how easily people settle onto certain rule-sets, and stick with them across time. Across persons, aswell. How any theoretical plasticity and emergence in the brain is stifled by its own consistent structures, its higher-level constants imposed by conscious decision. It is not an inaccurate observation that many people, the vast, vast majority, irrespective of origin or qualities, often seem to be performing things entirely by rout. There is no fundamental fact of our biology or our existence which prevents us from becoming consistent, fixed in our ways.

 

But it is still important to remain free. How can we justify any meaning or value to our lives after all, if they can simply be modeled, forecast to a high degree of accuracy? If our actions are already accounted for, without really the need for us to perform them to know what will happen, but we perform them anyway? It is not hard to express why one doesn't wish  to become a fixed actor. But there are very few who ever have the mind to consider, that when they sign up for an ideology, a set of rules and responses, that that is exactly what they are doing. They are becoming not individual humans, erratic little actors, but instances of that ideological type, who perform the rule-set wherever relevant. So it is funny, for some people to suggest that one can be both an individual and part of a collective. That one can be both a human and, for instance, a Catholic. As if the two had not two very different modes of basic response, as if in their very architecture of their actions they were not completely dissimilar. An ideology is not something like a coat, an aesthetic flavor which one on a whim takes or discards; it is intimately bound up in their very existence within the world, in their actions and their thoughts and perceptions.

There is no both ways; there are only extremes, and a spectrum between. On one, a free, autonomous and unpredictable human; on the other, a fixed, iterative and perfunctory instance of a type. Almost all fall somewhere between, as there are very few truly all-inclusive rule-sets and very few who possess no consistent ones. But on the former, there are many who will never meet an exception, an externality that their rule-set cannot account for; what we call an 'outside context problem'. There are many who will in the course of their lives end up behaving exactly according to forecast, in a foreseeable way, even though in theory they might have met a challenge that would disrupt such. A very large number of these are certain to exist, though exactly what proportion of the whole it is very difficult to say. With the utmost certain, we can say that in this age, with its high-saturation and high-propagation of memes and systems, that the balance lies very far in the direction of consistency, of ideology, predictability. Autonomy, individuality, being in certain words radical; these are a very small proportion indeed. This is the fundamental condition of our age, one which we can blame on the systems of information we have today, but one which is not necessarily unique, by any means. Just exceptional.

 

In this light, Nihilism is a sort of anti-predictability, anti-collectivist, anti-iterative and anti-perfunctory philosophy. By relentlessly denying meaningfulness to systems encountered, and thus voiding the momentum which binds them together, one never accedes into a creed, a preformatted set of rules, a packaged answer or mode of life, remaining instead constantly dissatisfied, constantly open and developing, emergent. No rule-set is made sacred, given permanent status in the mind, and thus all remain in motion, turning, swiveling, reflecting differently in the light, clinking together and adjusting, creating one mode of response at one instant, and then another the next, as the components which built those rules have changed somehow all the while. This is behind the ever-exceeding ethos of Nihilism, the relentless drive to pursue a better option, a higher mode; while any might seem desirable in itself, one is unwilling to remain with it, to settle, and thus even a favorable rule-set doesn't remain in the mind intact, and become predictable, established. It continues to move, even if at one particular moment it might be exactly the rules of a specific ideology or another. They do not remain fixed, they do not form a constant, and that is enough. With motion as eternal as the sea, as the drift of vaporous gasses across Jupiter's surface, the mind of the Nihilist goes. And in so doing, he affirmatively, through deliberate unwillingness to remain constant, to remain still, ensures his independence, his freedom, his agency, the consequence of his actions and his decisions, his irreplaceability in the grander scheme. Perversely, by denying outright any constant meaning, by serially denying meaning to the things they encounter, especially in an age with no shortage of systems and rule-sets, they gives their life constant meaning.

That is the dark beauty of nihilism, the noble heart of an upstart, an outsider's philosophy. It preaches a dark message, in denying to mankind things he so often desperately wants: consistent rules, consistent interpretations. But it gives in return freedom, value to the individual and their life, and the possibility for constant change, an infinity of answers and options, a multiplicity extending endlessly. In the negation of everything, denying anything permanence as a pole-star, it creates everything, gives it all weight and worth of its own, never reducible to another. It is a dark faith indeed, that operates through a dark road of denial and rejection, but only through this means is existence revealed. Only these paths open up all ways, all options, all ends, and make of life more than an exercise along a fixed track. No other philosophy can offer you that.

Not forever, anyway. Existentialism, an extraordinary philosophy in itself, offers you something similar, at first. It starts through a similar negation of all, in order that in the absence of assumed and imposed structures one might have space to discover and establish their own, to create their own rules and systems. It too gives a breath of freedom, and makes of a man an individual, and for most purposes impossible to predict or to replace with another identically. It gives each man worth upon this life. But existentialism by itself only does this once, performs this magic negation and liberation the first time, which if thoroughly done does all it needs to do, in avoiding all the evils of an inherited rule-set, an existence or mode of living isomorphic to another's. But there is no guarantee against finding a rule-set of one's own that will last, and persist. A fixed way, even if it is blind, an inexploitable; still to a certain degree a life with a line already drawn under it, even if one cannot know it.

For anything more, one needs nihilism. Through the rejection and negation of the self, even those things one has found on one's own, existentially, it ensures that we can never be stuck in a prison or destiny of our own making, that we can never define our own future to ourselves. Nihilism offers us a chance to escape even a doom of our own making, a fixed conclusion of any sort, a life which is in any degree ever solved. While to some, that notion is a terrifying one; a life without a proper conclusion, with a confident resolution?! While to some, verily, that is a horrifying prospect, it is nevertheless one unique to nihilism. No other philosophy can allow the same degree, whether one finds such desirable or not. For the truly restless, for those who will suffer no abridgment of freedom or continued meaning, only a nihilistic road will suffice. I would offer every person the ability to chose for themselves, whether to remain restless, itinerant in all things, or whether to gamble on a lasting peace. At it may be that after going the nihilist road for a very long time, after keeping my mind and convictions in constant motion, agitation, for many cycles, I myself will eventually settle down with one result I like particularly.

But in writing this, it is my purpose to caution against falling unawares into prisons of our own making, whether that is by something as stupid and unthinking as subscribing to an ideology and its provided rule-set, or something as elevated and divine as making our own through the existential journey. To describe foremost against the former, but also to offer full disclosure as to the latter, and explain the special character of nihilism in relation to all this, as a furthest-possible step against such evils. Once one knows these, and are aware of the stakes, the reality implicit in all of these things, I trust them to make the proper decision.