The Man’s life is trash. Every day he slaves in a foundry, sweat streaming from his pores until his clothes reek. He works non-stop in filthy conditions for hours until the end of his shift, when he trudges home, head bent, feet scuffing the paving stones. As he approaches his walk-up tenement, discarded food wrappers swirl by on vortices between parked cars. He is trapped here; he knows it.
The people in the Man’s world view him as an outsider. They refuse to be downtrodden. Together, they hold their heads up, smile at each other and slap each other boisterously on the shoulder. To their thinking, to submit is to be weak; and they regard the Man as weak. They shun him. To survive, they need to ignore the hopelessness of their situation, and they do this by determinedly acting out survival. They do this when they meet each other – forcefully acting out happiness and contentment. And by doing this, gradually they become a tribe. The foundry people stick together and despise outsiders; this includes the bosses of the foundry who they imagine are people who do not understand what life is really about. But if they act happy, then are they happy? Their act occurs whenever they are together in groups. They do it on cue, and eventually it becomes a habit – something they do reflexively once they belong to the tribe.
Acting happy creates a belief in happiness, but if the happiness is affected then there is no feeling attached. However, why would they assume that there is supposed to be a feeling if their understanding of happiness is just a behavioural state? What started as a means of survival became a tribal ritual, and now it has become a symbol of their identity. This identity is the mechanism that permits them to deny the hopelessness of their situation, and so the habitual faking of happiness takes away their incentive to form strategies of escape. Someone who systematically acts out their wellbeing is concealing from themselves the causes of their own wellbeing. How then could they understand that their belief in their wellbeing is something that they have themselves constructed?
The Man refuses to play the game of the foundry people because he still dreams of escape. However, the strongest condemnation of the foundry people is reserved for people who are insiders but who refuse to deny their situation. Among such people we find the Man: the insider treated worse than an outsider. The Man’s refusal to conform behaviourally threatens the foundry people by providing evidence of their miserable situation. They need to reject the Man because to pity him is to acknowledge the situation they are denying.
Occasionally, someone from the foundry escapes to a better life. The foundry people nod grudgingly and wish them well, but behind their back they make snide remarks about the betrayal of their roots, and gradually such people are transferred to the world of despised outsiders. Escapees who return to visit quickly learn not to bother eulogising their new life. The foundry people don’t want to hear, and accuse the escapee of pretension or disloyalty.
So the Man has a choice of escape or conformity. Conformity seals off escape by creating a false belief in happiness in a place of despair. He can try to escape, and if he fails he can try again; but when he tires of failing, he will eventually have to submit. One day, he will meet his colleagues from the foundry and switch into the easy banter, the joshing, and the physical enactment of roughneck tribal bonding. And then his life will be locked into a cycle of daily grind. He will be held in place by a belief in happiness that is actually a pretence that he and the foundry people conspire together to create. But this belief is merely a behavioural construct, and it traps them into their denial of misery, and therefore self-destruction.
This is the last of what I call the four core Scenarios. In case you didn’t spot it, they have a symmetry in that each involves a different aspect on emotional tactical deception. This, in summary is as follows:
Scenario A: suppression in the second/third person
Scenario B: suppression in the first person
Scenario C: affectation in the first person
Scenario D: affectation in the second/third person.
I will keep referring back to this throughout the book. If, at any time, you need a quick reference summary you can refer to the Appendix where they are summarised in a flowcharty kind of way.