Subjective Objective
I have a problem. It’s based in a dualism, a tension between two ways of being. I want to solve this problem, to reduce my anxiety, but the dualism continually resurges and thwarts every attempt I make to resolve the conflict.
What is the problem? That there is a real, objective universe out there, but I am a conscious being who experiences that universe through biased perceptions and invisible assumptions. It is hard to notice these distorted lenses because we see and comprehend the world through them. It’s a bit like trying to see your own eyes. We were never designed to do it. But the invisible givenness of our perceptions is not inherent to reality, it is only inherent to us and our particular brand of consciousness. This is the subjective.
But a new consciousness has slowly been ascending. It was always there, but very weak. Any thoughtful person has always known that there are other perspectives out there, but through most of history, there was no way to create any kind of systematic objective perspective on the world. When writing showed up, it started to become possible, but it mostly only existed in the minds and writings of philosophers. Eventually, empirical philosophy developed the scientific method and the institutions of Western science. Even so, the objective perspective was the realm of scientists and philosophers and the vast majority of people never encountered it. Soon, however, it started to yield tangible fruits, at which point money and power found use for it and it began to expand exponentially. But the greatest boon did not come until the advent of thinking machines. These allowed mathematical, statistical, empirical methods to bypass the constraints of human subjectivity for the first time. Once these machines were networked into the internet, the objective realm began to expand at an unprecedented pace. And so today the objective is everywhere. It surrounds us, encroaching on our lives from every direction so that we cannot move through this world without being observed, measured, and manipulated by it. Whether we accept that way of thinking or are even aware of it, our lives are increasingly shaped by the objective.
And this is the problem. We must grapple (consciously or unconsciously) with the objective, but to do this is contrary to our design. We are subjective beings. Subjective experience is the only thing we have and the only way we are designed to live. We are not equipped to deal with the scale or speed of the modern world. We are meant to embrace what is before us, living mostly in the moment, caring about a small network of people, belonging among them and giving little thought to the world beyond us, aside from awe and wonder at the scale of the night sky… and suspicion of outsiders and “others”. This is The Universal Integrated Human Life System. It hides in the invisible lenses of our subjective experience and gently directs us to fulfill The Biological Imperative — to survive and reproduce.
We all feel the fundamental dissonance between these two forces at a subconscious level. We sense as anxiety the growing encroachment of objectivity into our lives. Technology (in particular digital technology) is the mechanism through which objectivity seeps in, so we often use the word “technology” to refer to this feeling.
We view technology with both awe and suspicion. There is an alien incomprehensibility to it. A computer’s thoughts make no sense. This is why we fear self-driving cars that are statistically safer than human drivers. It’s not the fact that they make mistakes, it’s the way that they make mistakes: “To err is human, but to really screw up, you need a computer.” We see a fatality that could never have happened with a sober human behind the wheel, and we freak out because we can’t imagine how to protect ourselves against such an alien mind. Again, the true source of this is the dissonance. A computer is an objective mechanism that does not use anything like our subjective experience to make decisions. It uses numbers. We use stories. And just as the numbers would tell an objective mind to go with the safer car, regardless of how the accidents occur, the stories of those accidents tell our subjective minds to keep human hands on the wheel.
In our subjectivity, we look for a world of stories and will accept no other, but the objective view has been stripping those stories away one by one, revealing a meaningless void. And that is its weakness. It, of and in itself is meaningless. It is devoid of any motive or desire to do anything, and the closer you get to it, the harder it is to maintain your own desires. The more objective you become, the less driven, the less subjective, the less human.
This is not to say that objectivity is just a neutral stance on the world that anyone can adopt. Quite the contrary, objectivity has a particular philosophical bent to it, and it is precisely because of this that it saps your humanity. Its assumptions and conclusions are incompatible with certain ways of seeing the world. Christianity, Confucianism, Communism, Humanism — all philosophies with a should — are contradicted by this view. Anything that survives is some form of Pantheism or Existentialism, both of which take the world as-is, without any ideal of what it ought to be.
Thus it is a paradox that objectivity keeps increasing and encroaching in our lives. As soon as it gains power, it should stop because it has no reason to do anything. This would be true, except that it is not pure objectivity that encroaches. The force at work here is at its core subjective. The winners of our age (indeed, the winners of every age) are the ones who find ways to combine these two opposing forces. The greatest advantage is found in using the power of the objective but directed through subjective preference.
This is a perilous project. It’s a bit like holding a vat of hydrochloric acid in the middle of your body, hoping it will break down food without dissolving your own tissue in the process. Fortunately, we have evolved very effective mechanisms to do precisely that. Not just our stomachs, but also our minds are carefully designed to hem in the noxious substance. Our primary defense against objectivity is self-deception, which we are exceedingly good at. If both these opposing forces are to live together in the mind, they must not know about each other. The left hand must not know what the right is doing. It’s a bit like Machiavelli’s prince: vile in reality, but projecting the image of virtue. We are all that prince, but the audience we deceive is our own selves. We must think ourselves fair and objective but in reality be closed-minded and biased. We must think ourselves virtuous, but in reality be radically selfish. David Foster Wallace famously compared our awareness of our own self-centeredness to a fish’s awareness of water. Our difficulty in seeing this is no accident. Whether by intelligence or not, we were designed this way.
This radical self-centeredness, the cornerstone of subjectivity, is also the underlying motive behind the encroachment of objectivity. The market is built upon it, and the market drives the increasing use of objectivity in the pursuit of this subjective goal. It weeds out competitors who fail to walk the tightrope and fall off either into the inaction of objectivity or the ineffective stubbornness of subjectivity. In the end, only the fittest survive, and thrive. Charles Koch is a master example. With great patience, he applies an objective, engineering mindset to the task of changing politics, building models and questioning his assumptions about methodology without ever examining or noticing the unrealistic assumptions and hypocrisy in the views he is trying to promote, views that are intricately tied to his own subjective experience of life.
The solution for normal people is to avoid a true understanding of the objective and stay immersed in The Matrix of subjective experience. But this has become increasingly difficult due to objective encroachment. Rather than technology building The Matrix as happened in the movie, the effect of technology in our time has been to deconstruct The Matrix that nature has created for us to live in. This is only increasing as objective powers are used to describe and manipulate our subjectivity. If you ignore this and attempt to double down on subjectivity, you are making yourself into a sheep, to be led wherever technology and its motivators desire. Currently, that destination is a new matrix: the Attention Matrix, a virtual world built using psychology and technology whose purpose is to extract increasing amounts of human attention with little value placed on the relationships and activities which might otherwise receive that attention. This is the way of the tech addict: Offer your life force to the new gods. Embrace the dopamine loop. Plug in and zone out.
But these artificial realities aren’t options for me anymore. Metaphorically speaking, my stomach lining has broken down. I have lost the separation barrier between these two systems of thought, so the natural way of synthesis-through-ignorance is no longer possible. Like Cypher, I took the red pill and there is no going back no matter how much I want to.
I presume that there are many others for whom this is true, so you may understand my pain and the difficulty I find in creating a new synthesis. Perhaps you have found answers and a way of being whole in the world, some way of understanding what a human is and still being human at the same time. Perhaps I can learn from you.
But in talking to people about this stuff, I have found that each person is unique and what drives each of us is slightly different. Just as the larger movement of objectivity requires subjective force behind it, I personally have a desire, a need, a compulsion to discover the truth, regardless of what it may be and what it may cost me. This truth compulsion has been with me from childhood, and it is what propelled me through the painful process of coming to the above realizations. It is extremely difficult for me to ignore.
Still, I have found that resolving the tension in favor of objective truth is not sustainable. My best hope is to find some compromise, to establish some artificial DMZ in my personality. The idea is to be objective in one context but subjective in another and to accept this distinction and intentionally ignore the inherent conflict. The advantage is that I’m making an intentional choice instead of blindly accepting the subjective perspectives that nature and culture hand to me. The disadvantage is that I’ll always know that it’s a choice and I will have to constantly renegotiate it. This knowledge and renegotiation tend to draw me into objectivity, so it may be difficult or impossible to carve out a space to live subjectively. But I do not know because I have not tried, and there are many possibilities in this vein to be explored.
If anyone has had success in addressing this problem, comments are enabled. I would love to hear about it.
