Stop Hacking Yourself: The Tyranny of Conscious Will

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I’m not a relationship expert by any means, but I have a hard time imagining that an attitude of hacking leads to a constructive outcome in a marriage. Would you hack your partner into some optimized version of themselves? Or if you have children, do you search out hacks for their growth and development? Could you imagine hacking your grandmother?

They’re silly, but these aren’t trivial questions.

Many of us apply this same attitude toward our own selves. 

And if you wouldn’t treat another person that way, why do the same to yourself?

What callous disregard for oneself is implied by such an attitude?

What the “hacking” approach to the unconscious implies is the dominion of conscious will over the unconscious. It’s a tyranny of self by self. 

In some ways this is implicit in Western thinking, an attitude that traces back to the Cartesian model of res cogitans and res extensa. There is thinking stuff, with which we identify ourselves, and there’s everything else, the material world (and our flesh along with it).

This tyrannical attitude of will is the same that thinks we understand a butterfly by pinning it to a foam block and preserving it.

While it lends a certain precision to inquiry, it’s a stale and lifeless process.

It reveals nothing of the relationships that make the thing so real.

And it’s this unawareness of the primacy of relationships that has led to ecological breakdown on a macro scale as well as widespread discontent, dis-embodiment, and dis-placement on a micro scale. 

Other people, nature, the unconscious...these entities defy our predictions and expectations.

They’re irrational and illogical. They refuse to comply.

Oh, but we can make them, can’t we?

Yet in search of dominion over them, the constant fitting into ever-tighter and more predictable boxes, we stifle something essential about them.

This hacking attitude involves a prioritization of the known over the unknown. It’s hubris of the intellect in the face of the seemingly irrational unconscious. And anytime we sacrifice the unknown for the sake of the known, we inhibit growth. 

Nothing flourishes in a box.

Let’s consider what “hacking” involves by metaphorical association.

Hacking is a word that invokes a computational paradigm. Computers, in case you weren’t aware, are machines built to precise specifications for known purposes. They run on generalized sets of programs that allow a wide range of behaviors.

This is all well and good.

But the history of artificial intelligence reveals the limitations of the computational approach to intelligence.

Early researchers were humbled to find that their most sophisticated machines were utterly incapable of performing tasks that even an insect could perform. The highest technological advances of our species, rendered inferior to an ant.

Machines are capable of a good amount.

But what they’ve only recently become adept at is learning. No amount of hacking can match the complexity of a human being. Whereas programming involves a known outcome, learning involves an unknown one.

The beauty -- and risk -- of the unknown is that it could be far beyond anything you imagine. It could be a greater good or a more crushing low. The mystery of it is the value of it.

If you wish to live as a machine, hack away.

If you wish the dignity of human growth and development, allow yourself the discomfort of the unknown, of wriggling and squirming and fumbling your way forward. What you sacrifice in predictability you gain tenfold in vitality.

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