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The agonies of humiliation involved in submitting to contigency

From R.D. Laing’s Divided Self Pg 84:

Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is thus omnipotent and completely free – but only in phantasy. Once commit itself to any real project and it suffers agonies of humiliation – not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to be kept apart.

It’s hard not to immediately relate this to social media. Does the saturation of images on social media leave users swamped by fantasy representations of themselves and others, ideas of what they could be even if they currently are not, in a way which affirms their imagined omnipotence? As long as we imagine we could be anything, we resist become something. It creates a psychic pressures towards refusing to shape our life even as circumstances continue to do it for us.

The influencer economy creates an incentive to cater to the existential predicament this leaves people in. Suggesting action rather than dreaming. But it does so in a way which affirms the underlying dynamics of fantasy by imagining a perfect outcome. Consider the ‘monk mode protocol’ which is currently everywhere on YouTube:

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