Alan Watts: Man is a Hoax (Being in the Way, Ep. 20)
Alan Watts explores how we are trained into separation from childhood, forced to focus on the never-arriving future rather than the present. He traces how ego identity is constructed by society and why it creates a lifelong sense of frustration.
Core Ideas
- The future hoax: From childhood onward we are constantly preparing for something in the future rather than living in the present. Schools, grades, jobs, quotas — always strung along. “Planning for the future is only worthwhile to people capable of living completely in the present.”
- Person = mask: The word “person” comes from persona (per-sona, “sound goes through”), the mask worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama. We’ve confused the role with the organism. “How to be a real person” = “how to be a genuine fake.”
- The commanded volunteer: Children are required to do things that are appreciated only if done voluntarily — especially love. The whole ego is built on this contradiction, producing a permanent sense of frustration.
- Self and other are inseparable: Like the north and south poles of a magnet, self and other are polar — opposed but inseparable. The secret the child is never let in on. Instead the child is defined as a stranger in the earth, not as a symptom of it.
- We are the Big Bang: We are still part of the Big Bang — it is still happening. “We are all the little curly-cues out at the end of the original cosmic bang. We are it. We are not effects of it.”
- The 19th-century myth: The idea that the universe is blind energy, essentially stupid, and human consciousness is a fluke — this is just a story, but people believe it without realizing it’s a myth.
- Education as salt: To make a child a tolerable companion you salt them with education. Then psychoanalysis draws the salt out — but its assumptions don’t include the insight that you are basically the whole world.
Key Quotes
“Your actual self — what is finally and fundamentally you — is not a separate and lonely part of the world, but the real you is the world itself, everything that there is, expressing itself as this particular organism here and now.”
“Planning for the future is only worthwhile to people capable of living completely in the present. When the plans mature, if you can’t live in the present you can’t live in the future for which you’ve planned.”
Confucius: “A man who understands the tao in the morning can die contented in the evening.”
“How does Shiva dance the cosmos? I just do it, just like you open and close your hands.”
Detailed Timestamps
- 00:04 — Children as candidates for humanity, on probation, not real human beings yet
- 00:05 — Always preparing, never arriving (Arthur Murray school of dancing analogy)
- 00:06 — Make the quota, get a higher quota. Conditioned to desperate need of a future
- 00:07 — Dividing life into work and play
- 00:08 — Money never buys pleasure — all pleasures depend on disciplines (Sausalito boat ownership)
- 00:09 — Conditioned to a defective sense of identity
- 00:10 — “We’re educated to live in the future and never live in today”
- 00:12 — Person = persona = mask. “How to be a genuine fake”
- 00:14 — Child is defined as free agent, praised or blamed, required to love
- 00:15 — Required to do voluntarily what is commanded — the core contradiction
- 00:16 — Di-tension (ego/separation) vs. co-tension (openness/belonging)
- 00:17 — “You are not a separate lonely part of the world”
- 00:19 — “I have a body” vs. “I am a body” — language shapes identity
- 00:20 — Breathing: do you breathe or are you breathed? Why meditation focuses on breath
- 00:21 — Self and other as polar, inseparable (magnet analogy)
- 00:22 — Words as intellectual boxes; inside requires outside
- 00:25 — Passing the buck in psychotherapy; all the way back to Adam and Eve
- 00:27 — We are still part of the Big Bang. The wiggly-line argument for arbitrary boundaries of identity
- 00:30 — Hindu god vs. Christian god — you don’t need to explain how you do it
- 00:32 — Initiation rites: “we’ve been pretending you’re just a child, now here’s the secret”
- 00:33 — Education as salt; psychoanalysis draws the salt out; but its assumptions are 19th-century
- 00:35 — The fully automatic model of the universe is believed without being recognized as myth
Where It Shows Up
- Meditation practice — Watts’ point about breath as the bridge between voluntary and involuntary maps directly to Dave’s own meditation observations (see 2024-09-08-Journal)
- Education and identity — The “commanded volunteer” paradox resonates with management: requiring people to be intrinsically motivated while extrinsically commanding it
- Language dictates thought — “I have a body” vs “I am a body” is a pattern that shows up in org design too (we “have” a team vs we “are” a team)