Zeland’s Pendulums as A Gateway to an Autotelic Paradigm

Vadim Zeland´s pendulums is a concept that may become one of the cornerstones of contemporary psychology. Their greatness comes from the fact that they are born from an analysis of a phenomenon that is in plain sight and that can be described as those inorganic, ambiguous, parasitic, and yet enchanting predators that flood our existence day by day. A pendulum can be anything that absorbs the subject’s energy and seeks, first and foremost, its own preservation. It could be anything from the taste of a specific food to a business company. Whether the preservation of the pendulum is in accordance with the needs and desires of the subject is an aspect that would have to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. According to Zeland, the essence of a pendulum could be summed up in the phrase, “Stop doing what you are doing and, instead, do what I do.” This is very obvious in the case of advertisement and spiritual preaching, but what about more subtle scenarios?

A musician, for example, could be considered a pendulum the moment he decides to play in public, for his sound is replacing either the quietude of silence or whatever mundane noise is going on in a current environment. His mere performance would entice one to stop paying attention to whatever one is doing, for example, a conversation with a friend, and either give him your full attention or divide it in two. In either case, there is an evident energy demand on the side of the artist that is seeking to catch attention.

Another example would be a boy who dreams of being a premier league player and who ends up playing for one of their teams. He would obviously be devoting most of his life, energy, and desire to the team. The team in question would see the boy’s well-being as contingent on him scoring as many goals as possible in the shortest amount of time, but such utilitarianism on the part of the pendulum wouldn’t matter to the subject. In a similar fashion, one wouldn’t mind spending hours listening to one’s favorite musicians, hence why many people are willing to attend music festivals that last for days. In these sorts of cases, the energy balance finds a good equilibrium for both the pendulum and the energy-giving person to get exactly what they are looking for.

Deep within, the subject knows himself to be an organic object that fulfills a function useful for the subsistence of the pendulum, in this case, the success and relevance over time of a football team that perceives him as a means to an end, which is nothing more than such as the self-preservation and relevance over time of the team itself. That is why clubs such as Real Madrid are willing to pay enormous amounts of cash to get the finest talent they can in order to keep their reputation and relevance sturdy over time.

In these cases, the objectified subject finds in his objectification by the pendulum the reason for his life, the influence of the pendulum turns him into an autotelic being, that is to say, he finds his final goal within himself. Auto means “to himself,” and telos means “finality” or “goal” in Greek. Here, it is possible to appreciate a certain paradox or contradiction: that an agent exogenous to the subject helps the subject to find a purpose in himself and to avoid alienation. The individual does not necessarily have to be isolated to avoid being alienated, unless any possible reality other than his isolation is alien to his primordial desires, a hermit would be the perfect example of this. To speak of primordial desires is to speak of what is genuine in each one of us, their execution achieves in the subject a return to childhood and may even slow down the ageing process. An athlete is perhaps the perfect example of this: the amount of energy given by him is enormous, yet the relationship between him and the sports pendulum could hardly be considered as parasitical or one-sided, but on the contrary, it is auto-telic and fulfilling.

In other words, we could agree that the source of joy is that of auto-telos.  This auto-telos may reside to a greater or lesser degree in the subject’s relation to external agents in his world rather than in his inner world. However, there is no denying the human inclination to internalize the objects of the external world as well, or alternatively to generate new objects from the configuration of internal images. What is important to focus on is that in both cases, the auto-telos are either creative or introspective.

This is due to the fact that introspection leads to creativity, i.e., to the creation of new elements in the individual’s surrounding world, while on the other hand, creativity, especially in its resting phase (as when an artist completes a work) leads to a phase of introspection that can be either torturous or pleasurable. Let us not forget the tragic case of David Foster Wallace, who, feeling that his literary work was not good enough, drove him to the fatal decision of ending his own life. Post-creative introspection can be a source of both life and death, depending on the predominant drives of the subject. The understanding of a subject´s predominant drives can be intuited through a thorough analysis of his belief system.

In a more negative scenario, an individual may find himself caught up in a pendulum he never chose and for which he has no natural inclination. This can be the case of youngsters who are forced to, for example, engage in certain career paths by demanding parents and who eventually develop a sense of enmity and resentment with the pendulum they have been condemned to serve.

So, where does the average person stand in all of this? I believe that if we continue to dive through this framework, pendulums serve either as a catalyst of individual will and realization or as a means of demise. In either case, we can agree that self-awareness (which is basic in order to achieve actual awareness of surroundings and the way they affect the self) is key to turning pendulums into our servitors rather than our masters.