Social Games And Trances

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

If a person receives complete and unconditional freedom and is freed from all influences from other people and from all social obligations, then he will find himself in complete emptiness. Perhaps yogis and Buddhists are striving to achieve such a state, but for a representative of Western civilization and a bearer of the Western mentality, such "enlightenment" of consciousness can be, if not murderous, then at least very depressing.

Socially approved trances

We are used to living in a state of various mental, social, ideological or intellectual trances. What Western culture calls "mental illumination," Buddhists would call "intellectual drunkenness." People get drunk from beautiful or energetic ideas, from fashionable concepts, from bold scientific theories. They can be headlong into work, their own business, what they love, or they are just so afraid of losing their job that they can no longer think about anything else.

In Western culture, love and sensual hobbies are valuable, erotica permeates all spheres of life and has been promoted with varying degrees of intensity for several centuries. We revel in resentment, revenge, or simply enthusiastically discussing someone's stupidity, absurdity, vulgarity. We are turned on by the spirit of competition and competition, ambition is spinning our heads, and the masters of thought and legislators of social fashion and style urge us to be even more ambitious. All this is a thick mixture of various trances and "induced states" of the psyche and consciousness.

But it is important to note that in culture there are privately approved forms of social and mental dances: from intoxication with political struggle and ideological anger - to the quiet joy of family life and tears of affection when leading your children; from the excitement of a working trance - to insane fun at a party; from the "heat of cold numbers" and intellectual fascination with beautiful theory - to the melodious melancholy, inspired by a drunken conversation with an old friend. These trances are so tightly embedded in the organization of the life of a modern person that more often than not they interfere, but, on the contrary, are urgently needed for his normal socialization.

Destructive trances

However, we are susceptible not only to constructive and mobilization trance, which helps us to successfully integrate into the team, adjust ourselves to a working mood, or receive approving comments on the words we have expressed quite banal, but correctly emotionally colored and “ideologically consistent” words. Unfortunately, we are also susceptible to negative, destructive trance.

One of the manifestations of such trances are “bad social games” and “destructive social scenarios.” Participation in social games is very much conditioned by exposure to certain types of social trances. The concept of "social games" was introduced into everyday life by Eric Burnham, he used this concept to describe the tendency of people with obsessive persistence to reproduce the same mistakes in their lives. So the girl constantly falls in love with those men who very quickly begin to cheat on her, the other every time falls in love with a new alcoholic, the young man constantly chooses powerful and selfish women as his companions in life. All these people, with some kind of incomprehensible obsession, play out the same plot in their lives, carefully choosing a partner in a play suitable for this play.

One of the mechanisms for launching such social games is the habitual state of mental or social trance for a person. People cannot stand spiritual emptiness and very rarely know how to fill it with some new content. We fall into habitual social trances with the same readiness with which an alcoholic grabs a glass in his hands. Being in a state of despair and resentment is sometimes easier to experience than being in a state of emptiness. Suffering and mental rushes, especially if they are mixed with passion and strong emotions - this is still life. And the absence of feelings and emotions is perceived almost like death. The exit from social and mental trances is very often accompanied by a "mental hangover".

Internal mechanics of social and psychological games

When describing games, we used two terms "psychological games" and "social games". Those obtrusively reproduced plots that Eric Byrne spoke about are better called “social games,” in the sense that a person always needs partners to play these plots. This is a play by at least two actors. A mental trance is the state into which we can fall, regardless of the presence of another person with poison - this is a performance by one actor.

A girl who grew up in a family with a strong and domineering mother, who all the time suppressed her father - a weaker person both personally and socially, can constantly select young people for her partners whom she herself can control and suppress. And a young man, who grew up in an alcoholic family, will choose a girl as a friend, something similar to his mother - a woman who was forced to drag the whole family on her.

Those families in which there was a kind and harmonious relationship between the parents transmit "good social games" to the children. Young people find partners whose communication style and set of habitual emotional reactions resemble the behavior of a mother or father. But unfortunately, the children of "good families" also sometimes create "dysfunctional families." This happens if the casting of an actor for the role of a spouse fails: a girl who is in many ways similar to her mother suddenly begins to play not according to the plot, and besides, she also requires her husband to change the way of life and the logic of interaction in the family. The young man makes counterclaims to her. In such a situation, we can witness the creation of a new "bad game".

Scandals and quarrels bring strong emotions and feelings to life, they are very energetic, intense and usually unfolding on a large scale. All the former kind and gentle feelings in comparison with them seem "insipid" and sluggish. Only violent emotions, played out with great dramatic intensity, begin to possess genuine reality.

Thus, the main mechanism of being captured by social games is the effect of imprinting from the first performances that were performed in front of the child by his parents. The mechanism for launching games in adulthood in humans is a conflict of expectations and behavioral stereotypes. Family life (whether it is formalized or not) puts people in a situation where they have to interact with each other at different levels: from sex to solving existential issues, from home improvement to planning the future.

A conflict of expectations can arise at any level, and spread like a fire to everyone else. Further, life turns into an action-packed series with a series of monotonous, but increasingly gaining scope and drama of conflicts. At some point, a break may occur. But divorced spouses, on an unconscious level, are looking for partners who are no longer similar to their happy parents, but to the person with whom they have experienced years of life saturated with emotions.