"I Just Lost The Game, And So Did All Of XU"
Dissimulation and Democracy
For My Next Trick
Experimental Unit has heretofore been described as an informal organization. There are profitable comparisons to be made here to the notions of The Imaginary Party12, created by Tiqqun3, and of the Union of Egoists4, created by Max Stirner5. These connections will be further explored at some point in these pages, but for now, a new archetype will be explored: Experimental Unit as game. We can consider this idea in two ways, what we might call “they way up” and “the way down” in honor of Heraclitus6.
The Way Up
“The way up” refers to the sense in which Experimental Unit is an emergency response concept emerging from a planetary crisis understood in normative historical physicalist terms. Here, Experimental Unit exists as a checkpoint, a way-point which stitches together several key themes in order to serve as a concentrated source of inspiration for the bright and inquisitive prospective emergency responder.
In this sense, Experimental Unit resembles an Alternative Reality Game7, joining such phenomena as QAnon8 in the ranks of innovative conceptual projects serving as sparks for the imaginative kindling into which emotional desolation and hypertelia9 have transformed what passes for “the world10.” This is “the way up” because Experimental Unit in this sense starts from ground level and is working upwards through various personal and collective emergencies in order to deliver the practitioner to what is basically Svarga11 brought about by technical, political-philosophic, and poetical means.
The Way Down
“The way down” is the sense in which Experimental Unit refers to the emergence of (the illusion of) incarnation from the ineffable Absolute12, See here also “The One” in Neoplatonism13. This sort of high spiritual concept can be easily connected to the notion of a game through the concepts of Ludus Amoris14, from Western mysticism, and Lila15, from Hinduism. Within these concepts, “the world,” or creation, exists because the Absolute (God, all-that-is, the Great Mystery16, the great everything-nothing, etc.) is playing a game with itself.
In the sense of “the way down,” Experimental Unit refers to nothing less than this absolute experiment (Æ17), namely the “descent” of the Absolute into the experience of incarnation. It is in this sense that Experimental Unit stands ready to take responsibility for all, all the evil and joy alike which are ever experienced.
You Are Me And We Are All Together18
I Am You And What I see Is Me19
“The way up” is “the way down” because a consequence of the practice of Experimental Unit as emergency response and public worship/merrymaking initiative20 will be the creation of our own present situations. We will create this universe “again,” and our own lives21. It is the sense of the illusion of incarnation that we shall have been delivered to this experience, and the proper response to the emergencies we face shall draw us into the warm folds22 of the ultimate mystery.
The resolution to the “problem” of theodicy23 will be to discover that it is we ourselves who are responsible for all states of affairs24, and it is we who both execute and experience every evil we have ever heard of25. At this point we discover the ineffable entanglement of gratitude and grief26 within the divine psychology which is our own.
“Why is God Hiding?”
Ask Yourself
Within Pandeism27, the notion is that God withdraws after creating the universe, leaving behind a cosmos which is entirely divine but in which the traces of divine intention are difficult, if not impossible, to find. In other words, we have here the dissimulation of the divine, the divine forgetting28. The notion of the game played by the divine of hiding itself from itself (hiding eternity from eternity, yielding temporality, etc.) can be connected to the theoretical terrorism of Jean Baudrillard29 in two ways: through his writing on dissimulation itself, and his notion of the only real democracy in gaming.
Baudrillard treats of dissimulation in the first chapter of Simulacra and Simulation. Known, of course, more for his treatment of simulation, Baudrillard is a bit dismissive of the concept:
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."30
Baudrillard’s reading of dissimulation is revealed to be much too simple when we consider the question of what must be forgotten, or dissimulated within the self (considered here in terms of Atman/Brahman31) in order for the notion of “reality” to be at all intelligible. If the Absolute is everything, then we must forget ourselves as that in order to fashion ourselves to be partial bodies within a larger universe, engaged in dramas constituted by space, time, and other categories and features of experience which can only emerge through divine forgetting, or absolute dissimulation (the dissimulation of the Absolute).
We can also connect this notion of dissimulation to Taqiyya32, in which faith is denied in order to preserve it. We can also connect from here to the concept of plausible deniability33, employed by those of the clandestine persuasion. These both also relate to the Dark Forest Hypothesis34, which is normally applied to exopolitics35, but which, like all good speculative “science fiction” concepts, applies most gravely to the transpersonal36 and transpolitical37 crises playing out on this planet.
What Are You Trying To Tell Me? That One Day Everyone Will Believe38?
“No. I’m Trying To Tell You That, When You’re Ready, You Won’t Be Required To.39”
With respect to gaming and democracy, Baudrillard lays out his thoughts in the chapter “The Babel Syndrome” from his book The Perfect Crime.
Unlike all the illusions which present themselves as truth (including that of reality), the illusion of gaming presents itself as just that. Gaming does not require us to believe in it, any more than we are called on to believe in appearances once they present themselves as such (in art, for example). But because they do not believe in the game, there is an all the more necessary relationship between the players and the rules of the game: there is between them a symbolic pact, which is never the same relationship one has with the law. The law is necessary, the rule is of the order of fate. There is nothing to understand in the rule. The players themselves do not have to understand each other. They are not real for one another, they merely partake of the same illusion, and this must indeed be shared between them -- a fact which renders it superior to truth and the law, both of which claim an undivided sovereignty.
Hence the paradoxical fact of illusion as the only true democratic principle. No one is equal before the law, whereas all are equal before the rule, since it is arbitrary. The only democracy, therefore, is that of gaming. That is why the popular classes indulge in it with fervour. Though the fruits of gambling are unequal -- ruled by `luck', though this is an inequality for which you do not have to answer to your conscience -- the distribution of opportunities is equal, because it is that of chance. It is neither just nor unjust. And so the people of Babylon end up preferring the chance distribution of destinies, because it leaves them free to act in total innocence. Uncertainty being our fundamental condition, the miracle of gaming is that it transforms that uncertainty into a set of rules, and thus stands outside the natural condition.
With this form of thinking based on Gaming and the Lottery, on Singularity and Arbitrariness, an end is put to the obsession with a rationalist God encompassing all the details of the universe in his vision and ruling all its movements. The idea that the slightest thought, the tiniest beating of a butterfly's wings, could be accounted for in the overall programme of creation was an exhausting situation, entailing the maximum degree of responsibility for everyone. With the Lottery and random turbulence, we have thrown off this obsession. What a relief to know that innumerable processes take place not just without us, but without God either -- without anyone! The Ancients were cleverer than we are. They had bestowed responsibility for the world -- for its chance happenings, its whims -- on the gods, which left them free to act as they saw fit. The gods were the incarnation of the play, chaos and illusoriness of the world, not of its truth. Perhaps with Game and Chaos Theory we are casting off this historical responsibility, this terroristic responsibility for salvation and truth, which is exploited by science and religion, and recovering that same freedom enjoyed by the Ancients.
Baudrillard’s words here are highly consequential for Experimental Unit. When combined with eternal recurrence40, the principle of infinite reincarnation referenced above shows us how the notion of the Absolute can be combined with a sort of lottery. Each cycle through temporality, the eternal adopts a different standpoint. As is well known and often commented on, “no one asks” to be born41, “no one chooses” whom they are born as42. Or at least, we forget that we have chosen this, that we choose every second43.
Hence the arising of democracy in this forgetting, which allows us to experience the illusion of choice. Each choice we make is literally an “election44.” These choices of ours constitute our responses to the transpersonal and transpolitical emergenc(i45)es we face, the (ultimately symbolic46) challenges with which which is our experience of the ability to co-create the nature of the Absolute with everything that we elect to do.
Experimental Unit, then, is the watchword given to the flowing of all these considerations by the illusory incarnation known as “Adam Stephen Wadley4748.” These names are immaterial49, but the workings can be seen everywhere.
Search your feelings; you know it to be true50.
Postscript: Isn’t It Ironic5152 (Process Theory53)?
The title of this article derives from the game known only as “The Game54.” Which consists entirely in its own dissimulation. The Game is also notable in its constitution of an absolute exploit (Æ) (see “The First Few Things To Know About Experimental Unit55”): everyone is always already playing the game.
When we remember56 the game, and have the ability then to remind others of it, then we become aware of a situation of dramatic irony57. We become aware that the others present are playing a game—and even winning!—when they have no awareness of it. We remember that in all the times when we do not remember the game, that we are still playing it. Hence we stand in a state of dramatic irony with respect to all those unawares, including ourselves at other times.
There is a homology here with “the game” of Experimental Unit, which in its constitution admits of the futility58 (or perfection59?) of all goal-oriented activity60, since every choice leads in fact to every state of affairs (or, alternately, no choice is ever made, and no time ever passes61). We are able, in such moments of lucidity62, to recall that, happily, Parmenides and Heraclitus agree about everything63.
Faced with this situation, when we remember the game Experimental Unit, what do we do?
“Go On Singing64.”
After all, “You’ve Always Been The Caretaker65.”
Sweet Dreams66.
😜 67