We the prisoners
Yesterday, I was watching the new updated television miniseries, The Prisoner (2009). It is a remake of the 1967 British television series of 17 episodes which starred Patrick McGoohan who also co-created the series. The Prisoner, one of the most innovative of television series being right up there with Twilight Zone, is not without deep philosophical underpinnings. This is picked up by Keith Booker, in his book Strange TV, who observes The Prisoner (1967) is roughly contemporaneous with the arrival of Continental theory, especially of a French structuralist and poststructuralist variety. Booker informs the reader that the French postmodern theory revealed that the stable, autonomous subject of bourgeois ideology is a myth and that the individual subjects are not just controlled, but actually constructed by impersonal forces larger than themselves (such as language), forces that the subject can thus subsequently never entirely escape or resist" (p. 72). This, to an noticeable measure, is exemplified by both television works of The Prisoner.
My first reaction to the 2009 version of The Prisoner, which I put down in my notes, was this: The trick is to make the prison big and spacious enoughhiding the bars so that one has a false sense of freedom; so the inhabitants don't realize theyre prisoners. As I thought about this more relating it to Buddhism and my recent reading of Vaihingers book, The Philosophy of As If (1925) and Jeremy Benthams, The Theory of Fictions, which is in C.K. Ogdens book, Benthams Theory of Fictions (1932), I realized that our modern world is a fictional constructif you like, a grand illusionthat is equally a grand diversion, always leading us away from the horizon! of true reality as if truth is to be greatly feared. It even provides us with the illusion of escape.
I certainly think it is true that modernity which began with the Enlightenment with its carefully crafted fictions found in science, jurisprudence, philosophy and psychology, to name just a few categories, has either consciously or unconsciously created a prison so immense and deadly, so as to cause us to wonder, like Number Six in, The Prisoner, shall I ever escape?
This leads to the picture of the dystopic postmodern world which is actually the truth of modernity. It is through postmodernism that we are able to see the illusion of modernitythe Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, so to speak. But unlike Dorothy and Toto we have no home to go to since we are products of modernity. We are in the condition of Number Sixwe cant remember our home except in bits and pieces.
The only real escape from the world Number Six has, which is not portrayed in either television series, is the mystical path that runs invisibly perpendicular to our palpably fictional modern world and its postmodern counterpart which is also a fiction. But even the mystical path can become manipulated so that awakening is an illusion in the example of learning to live in the here and the now in which the person is unknowingly condemning themselves to a perpetual present which is a form of spiritual paralysis or the same, the skeptics ataraxia.
It should not surprise any of us that mysticism is almost a taboo for those who cuddle their chains and choose to live in a world built upon fictions. The Christians hate it and not far behind are the pop Buddhists who are content to live in the surreal village of modernity that Number Six is trying to escape from teaching us that just sitting is all we have to do to be happy. Incidentally, these same Buddhists want to argue that the Buddhas path was not mystical despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And since they know they cant win th! eir only alternative is to expunge or simply ignore all that speaks of the mystical from the canon of Buddhism thereby guaranteeing a life of imprisonment and suffering for all those who come to Buddhism trying to escape.
