Subjectivity Part 2: A Universe Unto Yourself

I feel like it’s important to talk a bit more about the human subject just to demonstrate, in another way, the importance of subjectivity and how powerful of a tool it can be. Humans are an incredibly deep well of complexity, a twisting maze of chaos and contradiction, an ocean of life and movement and beauty.

Every human is a universe unto themselves. With pinballs of desire rattling inside caves of memory, insecurity, and emotion. With landscapes of imagination stretching up into endless skies of wonder and curiosity. With black holes of the unconscious dragging imagined futures into its dark gravity. With pools of creativity ready to burst the dam and spill over into every crevice. With winds of language swirling and touching everything and stars of reason and logic shining lights on every little creature of an idea that runs around in the dark. We are all extraordinary machines, miracles, superheroes in everyday clothes.

You know, humans navigate through time linearly from birth to death, but we constantly carry around with us the past, present, and future – all the time, all at once. Every decision we are making now is based on experiences and memories from the past as well as potential outcomes in the future. Everyone you meet is constantly blurring their past selves with the future self they desire to be. So…maybe said in a more coherent way…As you move through life, you imagine a future self that you desire to become, and you use that along with what you’ve learned from your past experiences to make decisions in the present. Your present is the collision of your past experiences with the person you one day hope to become.

So journeying into the self is a lifelong endeavor, but it is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling things that you can pursue in this life. Compare the self to the objects in this world that we desire. Compare a universe of imagination, empathy, symbolism, and curiosity with a red 1967 Ford Mustang or a stack of hundred dollar bills or even respect and authority. Those objects are all hollow and shallow and relatively meaningless in comparison. They will never and can never bring happiness. Happiness is found in your inner life – within you, the subject, and not within any object. Objectivity is cold and boring. Subjectivity is alive and exploding with possibility.

I also think…ok, now this next point is going to out me as a bit of conspiracy theorist, but bear with me here. I think that objectivity is a way to control us. Humans are powerful and extraordinary, but unpredictable machines. Corporations want you to think objectively. They need you to desire the object that they manufacture regardless of your subjective feelings toward it. They can’t manufacture an object that fulfills everyone’s subjective desires, so they create branding and messaging designed to make you think about yourself more or less objectively – to see yourself as this thing floating around in space. And to be more focused on objects than you are on your inner self. Corporations don’t want you to dive into your inner self and realize that buying a bunch of objects will never fulfill the deepest desires that splash around in the core of your consciousness. Consumers are objects desiring objects, and that makes us predictable.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari calls this idea “hacking your heart.” Corporations, technologies, and algorithms are getting to know you better than you know yourself. They do this by gathering data on you just like they would any other object in the world, and they draw conclusions. And we are letting these machines hack our hearts. We let Amazon tell us what products we need. We let Youtube tell us which videos to watch. We let eHarmony tell us who to marry. We let a PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessments) test tell us when we’ve learned what we need to know. We let career aptitude tests tell us what to study in college or which job to take. We no longer know what we believe and what we love and what we value, because our subjectivity is being replaced by corporations and technologies. We are being hacked.

But it doesn’t stop with corporations. The government wants you to think objectively and to think about yourself objectively. A politician can’t market his brand of politics to every individual subject, so he and all of his cohorts train you to think objectively. That way they can control you. You’re either a democrat or republican, a conservative or a liberal – those are the objects you pursue instead of your own true values and ideas. You vote for people and platforms, which are just distracting you from the things that you really care about.

And last but not least…the church.

Ok. Now I love the church, and I believe that everyone should attend. My wife and I go almost every Sunday. I sing solos and occasionally lead worship or preach. But make no mistake that the church is trying to turn God into an object. God is the amount of money you tithe, the number of mission trips you go on, the political views you hold, the doctrines you believe. God is the thing that makes you feel certainty, clarity, safety, and confidence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German minister and theologian, called this idea the “deus ex machina.” Back in the 1930’s, he saw that Christians were using God to alleviate fears and provide security and make you feel happy even in the face of the terror and death of war and genocide. Instead of seeing a God that illuminates your inner world and helps you dive deeper into your subjective self, Bonhoeffer says that the church helps us see God as the object that makes us feel safe and secure and removes any doubt.

The more objective you are, the less control you have over your own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires.

French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, is known in part for his theory of the mirror stage of development. This is when a baby first recognizes themselves in a mirror. His point, I think, his ideas are a little confusing in my opinion – maybe it’s the translation from French to English or maybe it’s because I’m a freakin’ doof – but his point is that the mirror stage is not really a moment in time that vanishes like some other stages of development. The mirror stage begins a lifetime of the person seeing themselves from the outside – as an object. And this can create all kinds of body image issues and self-consciousness, because you imagine seeing yourself through the eyes of others. You filter your own view of yourself through the biases, agendas, words, thoughts, and feelings of other people. So marketers, politicians, the church, lawmakers – they are all taking advantage of that. They want to stoke that fire so that you look at yourself as an object, so that you’re always looking at yourself in the mirror. The more you do that, the more they can control you.

If you are looking inward and building up your inner life and diving into your own subjective universe, then no one has any power over you but you…and God.

Annoyingly Self-critical Sidenote: I thought I did a pretty decent job describing the vastness of the human subject and explaining how a human is a universe unto him/herself. I don’t think I did a very good job explaining my point about how institutions like corporations, governments, and churches try to control you by making you think more objectively. I was really confident about that point when I starting writing. Now I’m less confident. What do you think? I also tried to cover way too many ideas in this one post. I can do better.