The Secular Fundamentalist

The Dictatorship of the Toys: Hegemony of Games and Fantasy

(MODERN REGIME PSYCHOLOGY)



In the adolescent society, products are not so much end uses as image devices.

Corporations ‘imaginize’ their products by crafting them into mythic symbols that fuse the worlds of waking and dreaming.  Advertising has evolved from the spruiking puff, with its descriptor-based exaggerations and lists of benefits, to elaborate metaphoric fantasies of desire and fulfillment. Propaganda has morphed into evocational, irrational and non-linear gestalts that pump the goods and services they represent, straight into the unconscious.  Thorough research keeps honing these practices from being an inspired art form to a methodical and systematic science driven psychological onslaught.

Insofar as the imagined component of a product is greater that its overt use values, it becomes a toy.  The conversion of product into toy is the engine room of overproduction and consumption. A use value has some boundaries that are defined by the utility provided.  Dreams have no such limitations.  Neither does the accelerating productivity that feeds them.  By tapping the power of dreaming, capturing the sources of imagination and infantilizing the entire culture, the toy maker idearchs and their imagineers have acquired power over mass populations beyond the wildest dreams of their totalitarian predecessors.

In the post modern era, after the jingles have become silent, there will be a certain incredulity at the degree of consciousness control exercised over modern people and the ability of corporations like Coca Cola and McDonalds, to raise insignificantly trivial products into icons more powerful than the pyramids.

“You mean they actually paid real money to buy that stuff?”

“Well no, it was toy money for big kids who never grew up, who always wanted more and were never satisfied for very long.  The more they filled up their lives with toys and the more elaborately they were made, the emptier and more diminished their lives became.  The more they played with them, the less they played with each other, or their children, who were already orphaned by long hours of toy making.  So they gave them toys instead and their unhappinesses multiplied, like the things they threw away, including life itself; for new toys were more important.  They broke themselves so that their toys might grow and multiply to impress the other kids who only loved toys, who died for them, killed for them and almost destroyed the planet for them...”

As the world of necessitous production is turned into a toy emporium, the interactions around it are transformed into games and fantasies.  The ability to differentiate between game playing and authentic interaction becomes blurred beyond recognition.  Sport becomes business.  Business becomes gamesmanship.  Play becomes entertainment more real than life itself.  Relationships become playthings.  We have learnt to play at life as if we were characters in a fantasy show.  If it gets boring or difficult, we switch channels, situation, spouses, children, persona or image.
 
This world of game playing most properly belongs to the world of the young, who have to immerse themselves in virtual realities.  These stand in for the experiences they are yet to have and thus prepare them as far as possible for the Real Adult Thing.
 
This is not to say that adults shouldn’t play games.  It is just that they have to understand their boundaries so as not to risk becoming drowned in them.  They need to be able to understand that play, games, toys and entertainment are sideshows.  They are a legitimate diversion from the more central, but often mundane processes of life only within reasonable, limited and clear rules of engagement.  In the absence of such adult perspective, games become an avoidance of, or inability to access emotional, moral, or intellectual depth, commitment, or transparency; i.e., the means to and evidence of existential security and growth into genuine selfhood.
 
None of us is immune to the blandishments of the game, particularly if enough money and hype is thrown at it, but adults understand the nature of their fantasies and are capable of engaging other people or social situations as they really are.


Wendy liked to be spanked.  As a child, she had played spanking games with her brother and cousins when there had been no adults around.  These games stopped as they reached adolescence, but their power over her imagination did not.
 
To relieve the now almost constant sexual itch, the fourteen-year-old would regularly masturbate. When she was absolutely sure no one around, she would do this while also vigorously applying her mother’s hairbrush to her buttocks, until by degrees, she fell into a sweating, breathless and violent orgasm of masochistic pleasure. The pain was a nitrous fuel to the sexing, as was the shame and guilt she felt afterwards.  It was her darkest secret.

It was therefore only some years later and quite by accident that this covert predilection revealed itself.  One day, a young man playfully smacked her.  Her reaction so involuntarily and transparently revealed her feelings that he tried it again, and then again.

This practice became a regular, frequent and ever more elaborate part of their sexing.  They explored its possibilities and nuances with all the enthusiasm of first flush success.  However, as time went by, their relationship began to develop some less endearing features.

He was not content to stay within her comfort zone.  At first it was an ‘athletic’ challenge to elevate her pain tolerances, which she was able and very motivated to do, up to a point. However, he kept upping the ante past that point into the domain of torture and abuse.  Her urgent pleas that he not go at her too hard, too quickly and too many times were increasingly ignored.  Thus it was that fear began to insinuate itself into her sexual feelings; fear that was arousing and exciting too, for a while.

As he accumulated power in their relationship, she became more supine.  Gradually his affection became infused with contempt.  As he got to know her better, his playful insults became hurtful and then wounding blows, aimed at her vulnerability and weaknesses.  Increasingly he made her feel incompetent and stupid.  The master and slave game crept out of the bedroom and set itself up in style wherever it liked.  She became his servant to the extent that one day when she did not do something to his satisfaction, he felt entitled to hit her in the face.  She told her friends that she had ‘fallen over’.

She had heard of ‘the white wall’ from endurance athletes.  At a certain point of exhaustion and pain, the sufferer goes through it into ‘the rapture’; a flush of endorphins that flood a body stressed to its extremes.  She reached it once…...and that at last was enough to persuade her that she had to get out of the relationship.
   
The end of the affair was as messy and unpleasant, as its beginning had been exciting and promising.  He reacted with rage and violence when she first suggested that perhaps they should ‘see less of each other’.  The power he had over her was too great to give up voluntarily.  He could no longer see her needs beyond his own.  It took several court restraining orders to convince him otherwise.
 
Her confidence and self-esteem were very battered.  It took a tremendous effort and the loyal support of close friends for her to see that his violence was not her fault and that she was worthy of more than abuse.  As she freed herself from his influence, anger at what he had done to her gradually replaced her fear of him. She blamed his cruelty and brutality for all that had gone wrong between them.
 
Only as the wounds healed was she able to recognize the effects of her own behavior and attitudes.  Whatever he had done, she eventually accepted that she had significantly contributed to the pattern of abuse by helping set it up and then going along with it.

As she reflected on what had happened, she realized that the fantasy game had been so powerful it had overwhelmed everything else and colonized the entire relationship.  Neither of them got beyond the realization of their sexual needs or became sufficiently aware of their own fullness of being, let alone that of the other.  When things went wrong there was neither enough fabric in their relationship, nor a sufficient individual maturity for either of them to draw on, that might have empowered them to pull back from a destructive spiral.

She had not anticipated that the games of her childhood and the sexual fantasies that arose from them could have such tough consequence in an adult context.  And yet her sexuality was intensified rather than cured by catastrophe.  Not only was ordinary sex unexciting, but orgasm was almost out of the question unless accompanied by masochistic fantasizing.  In that sense she was in a predicament somewhat analogous to a homosexual for whom ordinary heterosexual relationships would be, in the most intimate moments, not with the opposite sex partner, but a phantasm of a same sex one.  And while that is doable, it is a big compromise.

The fact was she wanted a relationship that gave her the chance to keep exploring her sexuality. On the other hand she didn’t want a repeat of the last one.  She realized that minimizing the risk of that would mean finding and creating a relationship that met all the ordinary criteria for developing trust and security first. Then she might have the chance to negotiate her sexual agenda in reasonable safety. 

She understood that the nature of her sexuality was not only potentially dangerous for what it was, but also for the kinds of people it attracted; people who couldn’t or didn’t want to enter equitable or full relationships.  Thus she resisted the temptation to select potential partners on the basis of sexual interest and stayed clear of the B & D scene.

She had grown up enough in herself to realize that in all likelihood the outcome was going to be something of a compromise. ‘Vanilla’ relationships were tough enough all by themselves without imposing an intimate version of an extreme sport on them.

As she pondered further on her disastrous sexual adventure, she began to see that like any activity involved with powerful sensation or emotion, whether it be exotic food, exciting work, power, sex, drugs or extreme sports, it had to be treated with extreme respect and care. Any protracted overuse or over stimulation would eventually cause injury and/or dysfunction; just as surely as habitually redlining a car tachometer would ruin its engine.
 
She comforted herself in the face of her disappointment and sexual frustration with the story of the bell curve.  It is a graph representation of the statistical distribution of outcomes.  On this curve the vast majority of ‘hits’ are somewhere in the middle.  Relatively few lie at the positive and negative extremes near its base.
 
She came to understand that on the Great Bell Curve of Life, not only was a middle path the safest, where the herd gathers around itself, but that the relatively few outcomes at the extreme negative and positive ends often involved the same sort of people.  They might be either roller coasting through life’s fortunes, or perhaps simultaneously juggling their polarities.  She wanted to have it all, but she knew deep down that the more she ‘went for it’, the more unstable and violent the oscillations of her life would likely become.

And yet she also knew that there are a very, very few who are dazzling winners in the great gambles of life.  They have overcome the odds against them and are beacons to the ordinary punters to keep playing them despite their losses.
 
She ached for the charmed sex life of a Percy Grainger, but did not want to live so perilously without the wealth and fame that helped procure his perfect courtesan dominatrix and wife, Ella Ström.  And being childless and rich, she had little else to do except think about new, exciting and exotic ways of giving Percy yet another thrashing whenever he had ‘composers block’, or even when he didn’t.

However, she also wondered what it would be like for Ella to be locked into permanently playing surrogate for Percy’s severe, demanding, possibly incestuous and neurotically dependent mother.  And she wondered how it would be for him to be forever stuck emotionally as a naughty little boy who had never got over the incestuous feelings his mother’s beatings aroused in him. While as a composer he was enormously successful, as a character he seemed something of a mess. Ella may well have had to deal with a man who could hardly see her at all, except as an extension of his own needs, just like her (Wendy’s) own former lover.
 
Perhaps there was something in the old Greek Aphorism that you had to be careful what you asked of the gods, for they just might grant it.
 
She eventually found a decent and understanding partner who had enough good points to work on and deficits that she could live with. He rather liked the idea of spanking his wife, but the reality was he didn’t have much of a clue as to what was really involved.  He had neither ‘the feel’ of a genuine sadist, nor the acting ability of a gigolo.  However, at least he hadn’t picked up vicious habits and he was to some extent trainable.
 
They kept this practice out of the family home after they started having children.  Every few months they would send the kids off to their grandparents while they went off for ‘a dirty weekend’ at one of those places that had all the gear and panic buttons, ‘just in case’.

He was never going to be the dominant of her dreams.  With him she never got those flaming adrenaline and endorphin rushes that had made the initial weeks of her first encounter so incandescent.  Thus it was that these occasional weekends gradually petered out in the wash of a busy life and absorbing family responsibilities.  She never forgot what it was once like, but accepted that life moves on and desire must necessarily find a smaller place in the heart.

When she struck a particularly depressing peri-menopausal moment just before her forty-second birthday, her dull but affectionate husband offered her the present of an evening with a certain ‘Master Michael’, to cheer her up a bit.  She knocked it back in the same spirit of affection, for it was a humble, well-meant and thoughtful gift.  Such an incendiary match might rekindle flames that could burn down the comfortable, but tinder dry structure of their existence.

That evening she took him to bed and mustered the enthusiasm to make his night.  For him it was an unexpected treat for which he was very grateful, but he would never really know how much of a gift it was.  He never had.

In the end, the biggest compromise is not the sexual one, but coming to terms with the fact that despite all the elaborate sexistentialist protestations to the contrary, reproductive behavior and desire is a bit player in the real business that reproduction is for, which is the hard work of bringing up another generation.

Hornbaggery is 10% of the deal.  90% is about the often tough and demanding partnership and mentoring politics.  But when you tune it to the buzz of discourse in late consumer societies, you could be mistaken for believing that it was the other way round. We get to hear about the fun stuff, not the boring and difficult bits.  And only a carefully cultivated culture of childlike sensibility would ever countenance such a gross distortion of the adult reality.

In the fully-grown, the child’s eye view of reality is both a sad loss and a dangerous delusion, for it obscures the authentic adult landscape and the real challenges, obstacles, dangers and rewards that make it up.  The games that the child-adult plays represent such a small cross section of not only what is theoretically possible, but also what is there to be found at hand.  The real adult thing isn’t easy, but it builds an existential fitness to withstand, learn and grow from its vicissitudes.  Sometimes the deepest satisfactions in life are built on the ruins of desire, fantasy and sexual games.
   
The game can altogether take over even nations.  It can so cushion their sense of reality that something as serious and real as say a disaster is likely to be understood as only happening to other people; or it is just a special effects scenario with rescue, resolution and romance edited into the final shots.  It is someone else’s game plan, as seen on TV.  When Real Disaster does strike, the adolescent dreamers wake in pained disbelief that this could happen to them!

New York, New York
World Trade Center Tow’rs,
Like London bridge
They crashed like a vase.
But was it the news?
Or was it a scene?
A disaster movie?
Or something obscene?

A reality bubble inflated with gas
Gave birth unto something
That’s busted its ass.
An alien glistening, hissing uncoiled,
Dripping with hate and afterbirth soiled,
Jetted downtown into Seinfield’s block
To burn Jerry’s jokes,
Every one in his stock.

Jerry was mortified. 
His quips no longer seemed funny. 
Crowds gathered for miles around,
Angrily demanding their jokes back. 
A two year old screamed for blood
And The President said,
“Take this bottle in remembrance of me,
For this is your vengeance;
The sacrifice of your enemies.”
The Child drank itself back to sleep. 
The crowds went back to their laughs
And although The Emperor’s Clothes had been rent,
He was saved by the curtain.

Here we go round the mulberry bush
With the teddy bears,
One step
Two step
And we all fall down.

A world built around toys is both enchantment and trap, like exotic tropical carnivorous plants that drown and dissolve their victims.  They drown in their own needs and dreams, and the labor requirements to meet them, so that the production war machine can be fertilized, grown and replicated.