Gossamer Tethers of Our Reality Constructs

Naming and exploring the Noumonicon.

So much of our daily lives are spent locked inside a strange set of mental constructs. I’ve been searching for a word to describe them, and maybe one exists, but I have yet to find it. So let this piece be an ode to the search for the proper word, by virtue of us bringing it into existence together.

Let us first start with a description of what it is I’m referring to.

A set of reality blinders, a sort of mental Overton Window that has been overlaid onto us, by which we stroll through our lives with the full knowledge that something about a given thing is off or outright wrong, but continue to ignore it simply for the sake of being socially obliging. Other reasons include easing our mental worry, upkeep of status quo, and outright cognitive dissonance.

They are not Monads, these things—though the term has crossed my mind in relation to them. So what are they? They are things we simply suffer for the lack of psychic strength of repelling them, of going against the grain. In essence a complacency we endure to keep our status quo lives going, while the armatures of society around us are designed to keep us numb to the logical faults and inconsistencies that would otherwise make us take a step back, or outright mutiny.

They are in many ways mental paradoxes, jagged distortions of the gossamer constructs of reality, and they exist at all levels of the scale, micro and macro.

Let us take a macro example. In Hollywood, for instance, we glorify so many things, from drugs and porn and violence; yet in our daily lives we regard the same things with suspicion or outright revulsion, and most of us accept the idea that we are mostly meant to live chaste lives. We teach our children that these things are bad, yet when we view the absolute saturation of the same things around us in modern culture, we brush it off with milquetoast acquiescence: “That’s just the way things are.”

The self-deceptions of the nous come in ‘large scale’ varieties, like the income tax, the federal reserve, our economies in general. We know the utter illogicality of MMT, for instance, know that printing endless money into a perpetual inflation-bubble cannot possibly end well, or be in any way remediated in the future. Yet we just go about our daily lives, with the darkening clouds looming ever-closer, never questioning how or why this is done. Never questioning the terminal insanity of how or why it’s possible for the same thing which cost a hundred dollars thirty years ago, to now cost a thousand.

Of course we as simple citizens at least have an excuse, to an extent. But the economists, politicians, and corporate drivers of these policies, too, can sense with visceral reflexiveness, the utter irreconcilable madness of such policies. Yet something—some kind of voice of un-reason, a taming normalcy bias, simply edges them on with the words “it’s all right, things will simply be okay, no matter how crazy this looks.”

And normalcy bias is indeed the closest thing to this. For the unfamiliar, it is a cognitive bias, a sort of mental paralysis, which keeps people frozen in a state of status quo in the face of impending doom. It’s why people don’t evacuate or run away as a tsunami heads their way, instead standing and watching blithely.

But don’t confuse it with the ‘deer in headlights’ frozen shock; it is distinctly different from that. In normalcy bias, we aren’t frozen from a neurological overload of fight-or-flight instincts, but rather made insensate from a ‘negative panic’, or debilitating denial of reality.

The human brain loves comfort, normalcy, the status quo, not rocking the boat. In order to keep those tangible levels of comfort going, the brain will go to great lengths in clothing, disguising, and outright ignoring the large elephants stomping through those neural synapses.

Part of it, I suppose, is our fear of change. At least when it comes to our personal lives, where the ‘micro’ versions of these deadened-nerves of the mind hold roost. For this, in some ways, the micro-variants are the most tragic.

These ignored realities crop up daily in our lives as mental discomforts we find easier and more convenient to brush away, to push back into the recessed corners, rather than face them.

And why? For one, it takes mental exertion to face them. It takes a doughty mental strength, paid in the currency of ego drain, to turn the flashlight inward. To examine and expose inconsistencies, to probe and question them. To ward off the unavoidable sting of uncomfortable admissions. Thorns stuck in our skins are less painful when left unperturbed, granting us our precious ataraxic state.

So, what can we name these ephemeral constructs? Are they related to Kant’s noumenons, ‘things within themselves’ outside of phenomenal cognition? Or are they related to nous and logos? It seems to me closer to Russian scientist Vedansky’s concept of the noosphere.

Constructed with the same noo/nou root of noumenon and nous, noosphere combines the concept of mind with that of the biosphere

no·o·sphere
(nō′ə-sfîr′)
n.
A state of interconnected awareness among all minds, postulated as resulting from humanity's biological and cultural evolution.

The mental chains which are ligature and lineament of these very mental constructs I allude to do seem to be a product of the interconnectedness of our mutual minds. It is in that very discomfort of knowing we are trampling an overlapping understanding that we shrink back into ourselves, and refuse to weigh the hammer of the mental challenge before us. It is a sort of peer pressure, a heightened sympathetic knowing that the fabric of this noospheric understanding is a mutually shared one, and that we should not ruffle it for others.

In a sense, it is a type of mental prison we construct, subconsciously or inadvertently, for ourselves.

In the spirit of neologistic forays like The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I propose some names for them: Might we combine Nou/Noo with Gulag? Noulags, Noulogs? It references the mind, while simultaneously intimating both prisons and Logos.

How about panopticon? Noumopticon?

To have a little fun with it, and to get really dystopian, I decided to ask the Bing AI chat engine for assistance. I requested for it to create a new word, which combines noumenon, logos, panopticon, and gulags, which can be loosely related to a mental prison of sorts.

The chat AI found no issue with the project, confecting together the following:

That is startlingly copacetic. With a terse prompt, the AI got the gist of what I was going for: a system of ideological control that imposes a single rationality on reality and subjects all dissenters to surveillance and imprisonment.

Not bad.

It was even so kind as to provide me with these two images to go along with the definition, unbidden:

It calls to mind Kurzweil’s The Age of the Spiritual Machines.

But back to our word. Noulogoptigul is rather a turgid mouthful, wouldn’t you say? The machines have not yet mastered the finer points of subtle artistry and sensitivity to aesthetic.

Conversely, noumakon, noumicon, noumonicon has an interesting ring and appeal. Combining a portion of noumenon with the suffix of panopticon gives us a sleek, robust result that slips off the tongue. It even conjures an affinity to ‘icons’, which in some ways represents the pith of what they are—icons of the mind—which we, the idolators, are too poor of soul to rebuke, too benumbed in our complaisance to become iconoclasts.

It doesn’t hurt that it also evokes images of crossing the Rubicon; a very apt and helpful parallel.

Not to mention H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, perhaps another inadvertently insightful reference.

Psychic Distortions

So, what are some other examples of these noumonicons, now that we have an appropriately operative word? I had mentioned how the more intimate ones are in some ways most devastating.

First, allow me to invoke the infamous ‘5 Monkeys’ experiment, to which it draws comparisons. Apocryphal though it may be, the experiment was in fact mimicked with similar results in the 60’s. Nor do we really need an official demonstration to confirm results plainly experienced in our daily lives; the inculcated behaviors of humans, who inhere a given response from the wider social matrix of the world as a sort of reflex, which is then mirrored down to others, who then exercise that very reflex lacking the original stimuli, begetting a sort of metaphysical basilisk that shudders through us generationally, like a tapeworm leeching on our psychic ichor.

Politicians. These are reality constructs of the noumonicon of the first order. We watch their stilted words, their modeled, mannered deportment. Primly suited to look alike, to fit some ‘standard’ psychic definition of what ‘trust’ and ‘authority’ should represent, that subtle code-switch. The basilisk inside us glows and lets out a throaty rumble of approval—its version of the purr.

We see these bizarre constructs, who all look alike, the artifice of charm and counterfeit charisma. Eidolons of our manufactured consent, with their plastic faces, spray-tans, spray-painted hair and teeth, like a cynical puppetmaster’s effigy.

So they stand stockstill in front of the cameras, and their mouth opens. They read off their measured, pre-baked words, mouths straining with perfect ventriloquist exertion. The basilisk inside us growls its elation.

But a mental discoherence begins, a cognitive distortion, a de-alignment from the reality matrix. Somewhere deep inside, beneath that subsonic growl of the noumonicon, a spark is formed. We can sense it, instinctively, that something is not right; that we’re being misdirected.

We know it’s a facade, that thing—the masquerade before us. But the psychic discohesion makes us worried, fills us with a sense of incompletion, emptiness, loneliness, even dread. Breaking from the reality matrix, the comfortable constructs we’re used to, is not wise. It’s the cutting of the umbilical cord which has always nourished us like a mother. Can we survive alone, in that wild blue yonder of the unknown, without the basilisk’s gentling coos?

We re-examine. Everything about the construct before us is tailored to our very specifications, a cognitive model. The bright deep blue of the suit to evoke trust and sanctity, bonhomie. The deep red of the tie to strike a contrast, ply us with a dash of fervor, patriotism, family by blood. “I’m with you, I’m one of you!” it seems to say like an electric shock through our brainstem.

Yes, it is now an it in the formulations of our deepest subconscious layers, before the disparate qualia that comprise it can be reformulated downstream, it remains nothing more than a confection of inter-related insect parts, to be studied and dissected in that dilated moment of our sudden upstream introspection.

Pared down to its manifold parts, were we to give license to the sudden courage to linger in those upstream subterranean crevasses, we would see the thing as it is, its true manifest form: A creature undulating to hidden forces—the interests of the gray eminence behind the scarlet curtain.

But we have gone too far. The discomfort spreads like a paresis, a fire through the darkwood of our psyche, a scribbling underbelly pressure. We fling ourselves to safe shores, the comfortable and well-worn paths. We know instinctively we’ve strayed too far, past the familiar cairns of our cognitive equilibrium.

We pull back—those diffuse elements now consolidate once more into that ingratiating smile, the oily glint in the eyes. We understand now, that it’s not really speaking to us, but through us. But we no longer seem to care. The comfort of the known and trodden wraps us in its warm arms, the wild blue yonder of comprehension now a fleeting specter, a glancing light on the horizon, fading away.

We accept the pastiche before us, who speaks to us in all the harmonizing tones we’ve come to expect, appealing to our baser selves, soothing us. We’re now all right with it—with our spineless equivocation, our retreat from truesight. The memories of what we saw in those briefest edgewise glimpses of comprehension now ebb away into afterimages, like peering down an inky, bottomless well.

Afterwards, we go about our lives, knowing we’ve been fleeced. But the defense mechanisms of our cognitive dissonance are already in place. The fleeting discomfort is now but a dull ache somewhere at the back of our minds, easy to push away and ignore, like a low, barely-audible rumble of thunder in the distance.

Incongruity

Presidents are the ultimate agents of the noumonicon in our minds. These surrogate-constructs are designed to present the appearance of concern for our interests, yet in actuality are nothing more than the front-facing ‘spokesmen’ for global enterprises whose pursuits are so vastly incongruent to our own as to not even be remotely overlapping at the Venn diagram fringes.

Academia is the modern purveyor ne plus ultra of a fantastic array of noumonicons of every sort. Each offering strives to outdo the last in how far the sheer illogical incongruity extends. For instance, the current academic de rigeur of writing ‘Black’ in capital letters, with ‘white’ in lower case. Academic articles, which once had the air of scientific inquiry—much less authority—and rigor to them, have now been turned into masterclasses of inadvertent self-deprecation and delegitimization where self-serious scholars straight-facedly pen sentences with the two aforementioned words adjacent to each other, without even a hint of self-awareness in the form of shame.

Modern academia ornaments our language with such a breathless array of illogical conceits, that we’re left mentally worn by the resultant incoherent soup as we struggle to balance the noumonicons against our better judgment.

There is such a variety of mental ‘leaps’ of logic required to be performed just to acquit oneself in the eyes of the modern culture enforcers that it freights us all with a psychic overage that slowly depletes our mental energies, sapping our wherewithal, dulling and stultifying our senses and sympathies.

It’s akin to inserting strings of broken code, poorly optimized scripts and logic deadends into a computer program, then expecting it to function adequately. In fact, due to the increasing noumoniconic burden we’re expected to heft in our daily lives, we slowly become a society of mis-programmed machines, bad code clogging up the logic pipelines, degrading our bandwidths for comprehension and normality.

It’s no surprise then that society is progressively sinking into a terminal madness, an eruption of mental illness. At some fundamental level, our brains prefer orderly logic as it creates efficiency in data outputs, no different to optimized, smoothly-running computer code. The more ‘errors’ and infelicities you introduce into the system, the more bogged down it gets, a pollution of the mind which spawns incoherence, driving uncertainty and blockages of pathways critical for healthy mental processes.

And is it not at all surprising, that this explosion coincided with the cultural dissonance borne of the post-2008 era I so scathingly described in this article?

Fracturing Identity at the Altar of Transhumanism

Just take a look at the chart of U.S. antidepressant usage. A mass increase after 2000, presumably owing to the social disruptions caused by the internet age. But after that early bump, it appears fairly steady up until that crucial 2008 financial crisis and Obama era, which introduced an explosion of toxic identity politics which ripped through the social fabric of the country like a mass psychogenic plague.

Now the rate at which fledgling noumonicons are manufactured in our minds for the sake of dealing with the vast logical incongruencies around us has shot past even that. They are attempts to plug the holes of a sinking ship, but each new plug creates cracks that spider through the aging timber, leading to the widening of new holes.

We are pushed to accept an endless tidal rush of ‘new realities’ around us that defy not only all reason and logic, but everything we’ve ever learned and been taught about human biology, sociology, and psychology, etc.

The noumonicons subsequently pile up in our minds like viscous grease in a complex gearwork, forcing us to turn our mental processes inside out, contrive an internal simulation for ourselves, one at perpetual dissonance with deeper, baser instincts: The ones inherent to the basal ganglia and the reptilian portions of the mind rather than the neocortex, which can be tricked and blinded by illusion.

But the primordial instincts know; they are far too ancient and deeply-rooted to be gulled by such modern artifice. Every day we’re increasingly browbeaten to accept some new abnormality, then gaslighted into the belief that “it has always been this way, we were merely too obtuse, too selfish(!) to notice before.”

No! I shout from the mountaintop, it hasn’t always been this way! Rise up against the tyranny of the noumonicon, resist the liminal daze which seduces us into complaisance, exchanging psychic comfort for the currency of natural truth like a thirty-silver’d purse. Down with the tyranny of unconscious acquiescence.

Instead, let us choose the three golden C’s: consciousness, conscience, and conscientiousness.

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