Are we “Raised in Captivity”? Pt. 2
This is the second part of my summaries and thoughts about stories found in Chuck Klosterman's book: “Raised in Captivity” (click here to read part 1). The second story that I felt was intriguing is called “The Secret”.
The Secret
This story is about “Cope”, a man being interviewed for federal employment by“Marsh”, who conducts the interview. Marsh mentiones that the job Cope is interviewing for is a job that you cannot quit. When Cope answers: “I would never quit. I’ve never quit anything in my life”, Marsh just replies : “That response proves you still don’t understand”. Nevertheless, Cope agrees and both men take a long elevator ride down and into a room, where coins are being flipped by computers and humans alike. Marsch continues to explain, that simulated coin tosses (by the computer) give a 50-50 chance for heads or tails, but real coin tosses (performed by humans) don’t anymore. “The universe is unraveling”, Marsh states. “The coin flips are just the emergent manifestation of a perception shift”. Nobody knows why it is happening. “It’s something that can only work one way, which is the only way it’s ever worked. And then, at some point, it stopped working.” Realizing what this means, Cope wants to quit, but quitting the job is not an option anymore. He proceeds to take the stairs back up (45 feet high, even though the original elevator ride took much longer) and goes home. Home where things feel familiar but different. Home where Cope isn’t sure about whether things are the same way now, as they were in the morning.
This story is interesting to me because I deeply felt this “perception shift” Marsh talks about a few times in life. Once introduced to a new idea or concept by someone, you start to perceive the world in a different way. And even though it may take a while to understand, after you do there is no turning back. Your whole perception of the world changes and you wonder how you were so blind before. There are many times in a human life where we can experience this. For me, there are two times that come to mind. The first one was learning about Jordan Peterson’s early work (before the “Twelve Rules” books) that e.g. showed me how a scientist can be religious. A believe I couldn’t understand when I was in university, just a couple of years earlier. I still remember talking with a friend of mine about how irrational people are that believe in science and religion at the same time, as they are clearly so contradicting. More in general, Peterson’s early work showed me a different way of understanding the world and I could not understand how naive I was previously.
Another one of these perception shifts occurred to me during my military experience and more specific during my foreign deployment. At the moment you might not realize it, but when reflecting afterward you do. When talking together with another veteran to a relative young comrade (after my deployment), this came apparent. Our young comrade was interested in the experiences of a foreign deployment and both of us more experienced soldiers said: “It’s a great experience, but you leave the deployment a different person than you went in. And there is no coming back from that.” That sounds grim but is true. But that’s not unique to a foreign deployment. It is true for many experiences. If you do a gap year and travel the world when you’re 19, well that makes you a different person to whom you were before. The gap year of course having a “nicer” ring to it, compared to a deployment in a warzone.
The timing of my two experiences is more subtle and stretched than the one talked about in “The Secret”. All in all, this was one of the stories that left a familiar taste, because I am fascinated by perception shifts. I love to experience the world in a perception redefining way, and love to gain experiences that are truly perception shifting (at least to me).