When you are visited by chaos and swallowed up; when nature curses you or someone you love with illness; or when tyranny rends asunder something of value that you have built, it is salutary to know the rest of the story. All of that misfortune is only the bitter half of the tale of existence, without taking note of the heroic element of redemption or the nobility of the human spirit requiring a certain responsibility to shoulder. We ignore that addition to the story at our peril, because life is so difficult that losing sight of the heroic part of existence could cost us everything.
I had to force myself to sit down at the computer. I had to force myself to concentrate, and to breathe, and to keep from saying and meaning “to hell with it” during the endless months that I was possessed by dread and terror. And I was barely able to do it. More than half the time I believed that I was going to die in one of the many hospitals in which I resided. And I believe that if I had fallen prey to resentment, I would have perished once and for all — and that I am fortunate to have avoided such a fate.
If we strived toward higher values? If we were more truthful? Wouldn’t the beneficial elements of experience be more likely to manifest themselves around us? Is it not possible, if your goals were noble enough, your courage adequate, your aim at the truth unerring, that the Good thereby produced would … well, not justify the horror?
We respond to sudden an unpredictable change by preparing, physiologically and psychologically, for the worst. And because only God Himself knows what this worst might be, we must in our ignorance prepare for all externalities. And the problem with that continual preparation is that, in excess, it exhausts us. But that does not imply in any manner that chaos should be eliminated (an impossibility, in any case), although what is unknown needs to be managed carefully, as in my previous book repeatedly stressed. Whatever is not touched by the new stagnates, and it is certainly the case that a life without curiosity – that instinct pushing us out into the unknown — would be a much-diminished form of existence. What is new is also what is exciting, compelling, and provocative, assuming that the rate at which it is introduced does not intolerably undermine and destabilize our state of being.
When we began to work together, our conversations were decidedly awkward. He was not accustomed to the subtleties of social interaction, so his behaviors, verbal and nonverbal, lacked the dance-like rhythm and harmony that characterize the socially fluent.
Compliance with those indications and reminders is, in large measure, sanity itself — and is something required from every one of us right from the early stages of our lives. Without the intermediation of the social world, it would be impossible for us to organize our minds, and we would simply be overwhelmed by the world.
To name something — to use the word for the thing — is essentially to point to it, to specify it against everything else, to isolate it for use individually and socially.
Scarlett is now learning to talk — a more sophisticated form of pointing (and of exploration). Every word is a pointer, as well as a simplification or generalization. To name something is not only to make it shine forth against the infinite background of potentially nameable things, but to group or categorize it, simultaneously, with many other phenomena of its broad utility or significance.
That is exceptionally important, because there are unlimited problems and there are hypothetically unlimited potential solutions, but there are a comparatively limited number of solutions that work practically, psychologically, and socially simultaneously. The fact of limited solutions implies the existence of something like a natural ethics — variable, perhaps, as human language are variable, but still characterized by something solid and universally recognizable at its base. It is the reality of this natural ethic that makes thoughtless denigration of social institutions both wrong and dangerous: wrong and dangerous because those institutions have evolved to solve problems that must be solved for life to continue. They are by no means perfect — but making them better, rather than worse, is a tricky problem indeed.
Negotiation for position sorts organisms into the omnipresent hierarchies that govern access to vital resources such as shelter, nourishment, and mates. All creatures of reasonably complexity and even a minimally social nature have their particular place, and know it. All social creatures also learn what is deemed valuable by other group members, and derive from that, as well from the understanding of their own position, a sophisticated implicit and explicit understanding of value itself. In a phrase: The internal hierarchy that translates facts into actions mirrors the external hierarchy of social organization.
The best player is therefore not the winner of any given game but, among many other things, he or she who is invited by the largest number of others to play the most extensive series of games. It is for this reason, which you may not understand explicitly at the time, that you tell your children: “It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game!” How should you play, to be that most desirable of players? What structure must take form within you so that such play is possible? And those two questions are interrelated, because the structure that will enable you to play properly (and with increasing and automated or habitual precision) will emerge only in the process of continually practicing the art of playing properly. Where might you learn how to play? Everywhere … if you are fortunate and awake.
It is useful to take your place at the bottom of the hierarchy. It can aid the development of gratitude and humility. Gratitude: There are people whose expertise exceeds your own, and you should be wisely pleased about that. There are many valuable niches to fill, given the many complex and serious problems we must solve. The fact that there are people who fill those niches with trustworthy skill and experience is something for which to be truly thankful. Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness. It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter. When you are tightly boxed in or cornered — all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions — all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.
No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn. It was for this reason, among others, that Carl Jung regarded the Fool as the archetypal precursor to the figure of the equally archetypal Redeemer, the perfected individual.
Much of that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless.
Great mythologized heroes often come into the world, likewise, in the most meager circumstances and in great danger. But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master. Thus, it is necessary even for the most accomplished (but who wishes to accomplish still more) to retain identification with the as yet unsuccessful; to appreciate the striving toward competence; to carefully and with true humility subordinate him or herself to the current game; and to develop the knowledge, self-control, and discipline necessary to make the next move.
He had ceased criticizing what he was doing or himself for doing it, deciding instead to be grateful and seek out whatever opportunities presented themselves right there before him. He made up his mind to become more diligent and reliable and to see what would happen if he worked hard at it as he could. He told me, with an uncontrived smile, that he had been promoted 3 times in 6 months.
It is said, with much truth, that genuine communication can take place only between peers. This is because it is very difficult to move information up a hierarchy. Those well positioned (and this is a great danger of moving up) have used their current competence — their cherished opinions, their present knowledge, their current skills — to stake a moral claim to their status. In consequence, they have little motivation to admit to error, to learn or change — and plenty of reason not to. If a subordinate exposes the ignorance of someone with greater status, he risks humiliating that person, questioning the validity of the later’s claim to influence and status, and revealing him as incompetent, outdated, or false. For this reason, it is very wise to approach your boss, for example, carefully and privately with a problem (and perhaps best to have a solution at hand — and not one proffered too incautiously).
The oldest child can take accountability for his younger siblings, instead of domineering over and teasing and torturing them, and can learn in that manner how to exercise authority and limit the misuse of power. Even the youngest can exercise appropriate authority over the family dog. To adopt authority is to learn that power requires concern and competence — and that it comes at a genuine cost. Someone newly promoted to a management position soon learns that managers are frequently more stressed by their multiple subordinates than subordinates are stressed by their single manager. Such experience moderates what might otherwise become romantic but dangerous fantasies about the attractiveness of power, and helps quell the desire for its infinite extension.
These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them. Such ignorance and ingratitude are often conjoined with the willingness to use tired cliches of cynicism to justify refusal to engage either in the dull but necessary rigors of convention or the risks and difficulties of truly generative endeavor.
Now, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with the expression of concern for planet-wide issues. That is not the point. There is something wrong, however, with overestimating your knowledge of such things — or perhaps even considering them — when you are a mid-20-year-old with nothing positive going on in your life and you are having great difficulty even getting out of bed. Under those conditions, you need to get your priorities straight, and establishing the humility necessary to attend to and solve your own problems is a crucial part of doing just that.
Excuse the cliche, but it is necessary to walk before you can run. You may even have to crawl before you can walk. This is part of accepting your position as a beginner, at the bottom of the hierarchy you so casually, arrogantly, and self-servingly despise. Furthermore, the deeply antihuman attitude that often accompanies tears shed for environmental degradation and man’s inhumanity to man cannot help but have a marked effect on the psychological attitude that defines a person’s relationship to him or herself.
This means, first, for example, that discipline — subordination to the status quo, in one form or another — needs to be understood as a necessary precursor to creative transformation, rather than its enemy.
Limitations, constraints, arbitrary boundaries — rules, dread rules, themselves — therefore not only ensure social harmony and psychological stability, they make the creativity that renews order possible. What lurks, therefore, under the explicitly stated desire for complete freedom — as expressed, say, by the anarchist, or the nihilist — is not a positive desire, striving for enhanced creative expression, as in the romanticized caricature of the artist. It is instead a negative desire — a desire for the complete absence of responsibility, which is simply not commensurate with genuine freedom. This is the lie of objections to the rules. But “Down with Responsibility” does not make for a compelling slogan — being sufficiently narcissistic to negate itself self-evidently — while the corresponding “Down with the Rules” can be dressed up like a heroic corpse.
The production of increasingly ordered and complex geometrical figures — often circles within squares, or the reverse — regularly accompanied an increase in organization of the personality.
That is the moral of both narratives: follow the rules until you are capable of being a shining exemplar of what they represent, but break them when those very rules now constitute the most dire impediment to the embodiment of their central virtues.
Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules. Every creative act, genuine in its creativity, is likely to transform itself, with time, into a useful rule. It is the living interaction between social institutions and creative achievement that keeps the world balanced on the narrow line between too much order and too much chaos.
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed that all learning was a form of remembering. Socrates posited that the soul, immortal in its essence, knew everything before it was born anew as an infant. However, at the point of birth all previous knowledge was forgotten and had to be recalled through the experiences of life.
These stories call to capacities that lie deep within our nature but might still never develop without that call. We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels, but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form. That is part of being a creature that is part nature and part culture. An unforgettable story advances our capacity to understand our behavior, beyond habit and expectation, toward an imaginative and then verbalized understanding. Such a story presents us in the most compelling manner with the ultimate adventure, the divine romance, and the eternal battle between good and evil.
And, having done so, are you going to think your way through the problem, terrible as that might be, and begin to address it? Or are you going to ignore what you now know, pretend that everything is all right (even though you know, emotionally — as a consequence of your anxiety — that it is not), and pay the inevitable psychological and physical price? It is the former route that will require you to voluntarily confront what you are afraid of — the terrible, the abstract monster — and, hypothetically, to become stronger and more integrated as a result. It is the later route that will leave the problem in its monstrous form and force you to suffer like a scared animal confronted by a predator’s vicious eyes in the pitch of night.
There is nothing more important than learning to strive under difficult and frustrating circumstances to play fair.
You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you. Something manifests itself out of the darkness as compelling, as worth living for; following that, something moves us further down the road, to the next meaningful manifestation — and so it goes, as we continue to seek, develop, grow, and thrive.
The danger is, of course, signified by the presence of the presence of the immortal, predatory reptile; the promise is hinted at, as a dragon archetypally guards a great treasure. Thus, the drawing represents a psychological progression. First, you find yourself interested in something. That something contains os is compose of potential, or information. If it is pursued and caught, it releases that information. Out of that information we build the world we perceive, and we build ourselves as perceivers. The dragon, perched on top of the round chaos, represents the danger and possibility of the information within.
Engaging with the first part of the Enuma Elish requires us to understand a second fundamental realization of the ancients: the fundamentally social nature of our cognitive categories. That is why everything is personified in children’s books: the Sun, the Moon, toys, animals — even machines. We see nothing strange in this, because it so profoundly mirrors our perceptual tendencies. We expect children to view and understand the world in this manner, and we can easily fall back into doing so ourselves.
The cross, for its part, is the burden of life. It is a place of betrayal, torture, and death. It is therefore a fundamental symbol of mortal vulnerability. In the Christian drama, it is also the place where vulnerability is transcended, as a consequence of its acceptance.
By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.
All these heroes act out what was perhaps the greatest discovery ever made by man’s primordial ancestors: if you have the vision and the courage, you can chase away the worst of snakes.
Turned to stone: What could that possibly mean? It certainly means to be unable to move — but it also signifies something deeper. It means to be hunted; to become a rabbit confronted by a wolf; to become the horrified and awestruck object of the predatory gaze.
Because the individual brave enough to voluntarily beard the serpent in his lair is most likely to gain access to the untold riches that exist in potential, awaiting us in the adventure of our life, away from security and what is currently known. Who dares wins — if he does not perish. And who wins also makes himself irresistibly desirable and attractive, not least because of the development of character that adventure inevitably produces.
Drama — formalized imitation, enacted upon a stage — is precisely behavior portraying behavior, but distilled ever closer to the essence. Literature takes that transmission one more difficult step, portraying action in the imagination of the writer and the reader. It is only the greatest of storytellers who can manage that transformation, representing the greatest and most vitally necessary of acts in the most interesting, profound, and memorable words.
Everyone requires a story to structure their perceptions and actions in what would otherwise be the overwhelming chaos of being. Every story requires a starting place that is not good enough and an ending place that is better. Nothing can be judged in the absence of that end place, that higher value. Without it, everything sinks into meaninglessness and boredom or degenerates and spirals into terror, anxiety, and pain.
Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
The analogy with Christianity is obvious, and the message, in essence, the same: The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms. The healthy, dynamic, and above all else truthful personality will admit to error. It will voluntarily shed — let die — outdated perceptions, thoughts, and habits, as impediments to its further success and growth. This is the soul that will let its old beliefs burn away, often painfully, so that it can live again, and move forward, renewed.
Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future — they all matter.
In one sense, it is a trivial issue. But seen another way, it is not trivial at all, for two reasons. First, if something happens every day, it is important. In consequence, if there was something about it that was chronically bothersome, even in a minor sort of way, it needed to be attended to. Second, it is very common to allow so-called minor irritations to continue for years without comment or resolution.
Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.
In all the decades of her married life, she never had an outburst of genuine rage; she never directly and conclusively confronted the fact that she hated her home and her subordination to her husband’s taste. Instead, she let him have his way, repeatedly, increment by increment, because she claimed that such trivialities were not worth fighting for. But she was chronically repressed and constantly resentful, and felt that she had wasted much of the opportunity of her life.
You have been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. You have become distrustful even of hope itself, as your hope has been repeatedly shattered (and that is the very definition of hopelessness). The last thing you want is to know more. Better to leave what is enshrouded in mystery. Better, as well, to avoid thinking too much (or at all) about what could be. When ignorance is bliss, after all, ’tis folly to be wise.
If your wife or husband (or whomever else you are tangled up with, unhappily, at the moment) says something that comes to close to the painful truth, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up — and is therefore very likely to be offered. This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly, and more obviously, defensive: if you can chase someone away from something you yourself do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present. Sadly, it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds, and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and self-betrayal. You must nonetheless still live among other people, and they with you. And you have desires, wants, and needs, however unstated and unclear. And you are still motivated to pursue them, not least because it is impossible to live without desire, want, and need. Your strategy, under such conditions? Show your disappointment whenever someone close to you makes you unhappy; allow yourself the luxury and pleasure of resentment when something does not go your way; ensure that the person who has transgressed against you is frozen out by your disapproval; force them to discover with as much difficulty as possible exactly what they have done to disappoint you; and, finally, let them grope around blindly in the fog that you have generated around yourself until they stumble into and injure themselves on the sharp hidden edges of your unrevealed preferences and dreams. And maybe these responses are tests, too — tests deeply associated with the lack of courage to trust: “If you really loved me, you would brave the terrible landscape that I have arrayed around myself to discover the real me.” And perhaps there is even something to such claims, implicit though they may be. A certain testing of commitment might have its utility. Everything does not have to be given away for free. But even a little unnecessary goes a long way.
And you still must live with yourself. In the short term, perhaps you are protected from the revelation of your insufficiency by your refusal to make yourself clear. Every ideal is a judge, after all: the judge who says, “You are not manifesting your true potential.” No ideals? No judge. But the price for that is purposelessness. This is a high price. No purpose? Then, no positive emotion, as most of what drives us forward with hope intact is the experience of approaching something we deeply need and want. And worse, when we are without purpose: chronic, overwhelming anxiety, as focused purpose constrains what is otherwise likely to be the intolerable chaos of unexploited possibility and too much choice.
But if you do not make clear what you want clear, then you will certainly fail. You cannot hit a target that you refuse to see. You cannot hit a target if you do not take aim. And, equally dangerously, in both cases: you will not accrue the advantage of aiming, but missing. You will not benefit from the learning that inevitable takes place when things do not go your way. Success at a given endeavor often means trying, falling short, recalibrating (with the new knowledge generated painfully by the failure), and then trying again and falling short — often repeated, ad nauseam.
First, noting, much less communicating, feelings of (petty) anger or pain due to lonesomeness, or anxiety about something that might be trivial, or jealousy that is likely unwarranted is embarrassing. The admission of such feelings is a revelation of ignorance, insufficiency, and vulnerability. Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced and, in your ignorance, pointing you in the wrong direction.
Someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive. That knowledge brings with it an arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise, but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete. I will trust you — I will extend my hand to you — despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in your, and perhaps in me.
A certain necessary humility must accompany such raw revelations. I should not say — at least not ideally — “You have been ignoring me lately.” I should say, instead, “I feel isolated and lonely and hurt, and cannot help but feel that you have not been as attentive to me over the last few months as I would have liked or that might have been best for us as a couple. But I am unsure if I am just imagining all this because I am upset or if I am genuinely seeing what is going on.”
We use our past effectively when it helps us repeat desirable — and avoid repeating undesirable — experiences. We want to know what happened but, more importantly, we want to know why. Why is wisdom. Why enables us to avoid making the same mistake again and again, and if we are fortunate helps us repeat our success.
Extracting useful information from experience is difficult. It requires the purest of motivations (“things should be made better, not worse”) to perform it properly. It requires the willingness to confront error, forthrightly, and to determine at what point and why departure from the proper path occurred. It requires the willingness to change, which is almost always indistinguishable from the decision to leave something (or someone, or some idea) behind. Therefore, the simplest response imaginable is to look away and refuse to think, while simultaneously erecting unsurmountable impediments to genuine communication.
If you truly wanted, perhaps you would receive, if you asked. If you truly sought, perhaps you would find what you seek. If you knocked, truly wanting to enter, perhaps the door would open. But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.
“What would happen if I took responsibility for doing them?” It is a daunting question. What is left undone is often risky, difficult, and necessary. But that also means — does it not? — that it is worthwhile and significant. And you may have the eyes to see that there is a problem, despite your all-too-frequent blindness. How do you know that it is not, therefore, your problem? Why do you notice this issue and not some other? This is a question worth considering in depth.
If you want to become invaluable in a workplace — in any community — just do the useful things no one else is doing. Organize what you can see is dangerously disorganized. Work, when you are working, instead of looking like you are working.
Because it is not fun, oddly enough, if you can move any piece anywhere. It is not a game anymore if you can make any old move at all. Accept some limitations, however, and the game begins. Accept them, more broadly speaking, as a necessary part of Being and a desirable part of life. Assume you can transcend them by accepting them. And then you can play the limited game properly.
People need meaning, but problems also need solving. It is very salutary, from the psychological perspective, to find something of significance — something worth sacrificing for (or to), something worth confronting and taking on. But the suffering and malevolence that characterize life are real, with the terrible consequences of the real — and our ability to solve problems, by confronting them and taking them on, is also real. By taking responsibility, we can find a meaningful path, improver our personal lot psychologically, and make what is intolerably wrong genuinely better. Thus, we can have our cake and eat it, too.
At least if you misstep while doing something, you can learn from doing it wrong. But to remain passive in the face of life, even if you excuse your inaction as a means of avoiding error — that is a major mistake. You must risk something that matters.
Peter Pan, the magical boy, is capable of everything. He is potential itself, like every child, and that makes him magical, in the same way that every child is magical. But time whittles that magic away, transforming the fascinating potentiality of childhood into the oft-apparently more mundane but genuine actuality of adulthood. The trick, so to speak, is to trade that early possibility for something meaningful, productive, long term, and sustainable.
It is no only cowards who are terrified by what lurks down in the chaotic depths. It is a rare person who has not suffered through disappointment, disease, and the death of a loved one by the time childhood ends. Such experiences can leave those who had them bitter, resentful, predatory, and tyrannical — just like Hook. With a role model like the captain, it is no wonder Peter Pan does not want to grow up. Better to remain king of the Lost Boy. Better to remain lost in fantasy with Tinkerbell, who provides everything a female partner can provide — except that she does not exist.
After all, Pan says, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” But the psychological insightful unseen narrator objects: “To live would be an awfully big adventure.” Pan’s hypothetical lack of fear of death is not courage, but the manifestation of his basically suicidal nature, the sickness of life.
It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness — and there is a touchy despondence and arrogance that goes along with it. It smacks of Neverland. In the same manner, the attractive potential of a directionless but talented 25-year-old starts to look hopeless and pathetic at 30, and downright past its expiration date at 40. You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?
The great founder-god became anachronistic but, more importantly, he began to close his eyes when he knew full well he should have kept them open. Osiris stopped paying attention to how his kingdom was being run. That was willful blindness, and there is no blaming that on mere age. It is a terrible temptation, as it allows the sequestration into the future the trouble we could face today. That would be find if trouble did not compound, like interest — but we all know that it does.
More importantly, however, Horus has the will to see, along with the ability. This is courage itself: the refusal to shrink from what makes itself known, no matter how terrible it seems.
There is no killing Set. He is eternal as Osiris, eternal as Isis and Horus. The evil that threatens at all levels of experience is something — or someone — that everyone has to contend with always, psychologically and socially. But for a time evil can be overcome, banished, and defeated. Then peace and harmony can prevail for as long as people do not forget what brought them both about.
What would a human being who was completely turned on, so to speak, to be like? How would someone who determined to take full responsibility for the tragedy and malevolence of the world manifest himself? The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.
Life would be simple if that were the case. But there is the you now, and the you tomorrow, and the you next week, and next year, and in 5 years, and in a decade — and you are required by harsh necessity to take all of those “yous” into account. That is the curse associated with the human discovery of the future and, with it, the necessity of work — because to work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.
Animals do not seem to consider the future in the same manner as we do. If you visit the African veldt, and you observe a herd of zebras, you will often see lions lazing about around them. And as long as the lions are lying around relaxing, the zebras really do not mind. This attitude seems a little thoughtless, from the human perspective. The zebras should instead be biding their time until the lions go to sleep. Zebras do not seem to have any real sense of time. They cannot conceptualize themselves across the temporal expanse. But human beings not only manage such conceptualization, they cannot shake it. We discovered the future, some long time ago — and now the future is where we each live, in potential. We treat that as reality. It is a reality that only might be — but it is one with a high probability of becoming now, eventually, and we are driven to take that into account.
First, consider that most of the positive emotion people experience does not come from attaining something. There is the simple pleasure (more accurately, the satisfaction) that comes from having a good meal when hungry, and there is the more complex but similar satisfaction that is associated with accomplishing something difficult and worthwhile. Graduation Day marks the event. It is a celebration. But the next day that is over, and you immediately face a new set of problems. You are no longer king of the high school: you are bottom dog in the work force. You are in the position of Sisyphus. You strove and struggled to push your boulder to the pinnacle, and you find yourself, instead, at the foot of the mountain.
There is a near-instantaneous transformation that comes as a consequence of attainment. Like impulsive pleasure, attainment will produce positive emotion. But, also like pleasure, attainment is unreliable. Another question thus emerges: “What is a truly reliable source of positive emotion?” The answer is that people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal.
But you take aim at a trivial goal anyway, and develop a rather shallow strategy to attain it, only to find it is not satisfying because you do not care enough. It does not matter to you — not deeply. Furthermore, the fact that you are not pursuing the goal you should rightly be pursuing means that you are feeling guilty, ashamed, and lesser at the same time.
This is not a helpful strategy. It is not going to work. I have never met anyone who was satisfied when they knew they were not doing everything they should be doing. No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives.
It is the same instinct, and it is best attended to. If you do not follow the right path, you will wander off a cliff and suffer miserably — and there is simply no way that the most profound parts of yourself are going to allow that without protest.
If the cost of betraying yourself, in the deepest sense, is guilt, shame, and anxiety, the benefit of not betraying yourself is meaning — the meaning that sustains. That is the most valuable of opportunities that lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
You ask yourself — you pray to discover — what you did wrong. And the answer arrives. And it is not what you want. And part of you must therefore die, so that you can change. And that part that must die struggles for its existence, puts forward its rationale, and pleads its case. And it will do so with every trick in its possession — employing the most egregious lies, the bitterest, most resentment-eliciting memories of the past, and the most hopelessly cynical attitudes about the future (indeed, about the value of life itself). But you persevere, and discriminate, judge, and decide exactly why what you did was wrong, and you start to understand, by contrast, what might have been right.
Your resolution trumps your nihilism and despair. The struggle you have had with your own tendency to doubt and dissimulate protects you against the unwarranted and cynical criticism of others. There is a high goal, a mountain peak, a star that shines in the darkness, beckoning above the horizon. Its mere existence gives you hope — and that is the meaning without which you cannot live.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. Your are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others. A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall, a building, a cathedral — the glorification of the Highest Good.
If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path. The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning manifests itself when you are on the path of maximum virtue.
It is the complete bloody catastrophe we previously described: famine, war, and domestic strife. All this might make the reasonable individual doubt the wisdom of listening to God and conscience, and of adopting the responsibility of autonomy and the burden of adventure. Better to be lying in a hammock, devouring peeled grapes in the security of Dad’s tent. What calls you out into the world, however — to your destiny — is not ease. It is struggle and strife. It is bitter contention and the deadly play of the opposites.
Such discussions give people the superficial sense of being good, noble, compassionate, openhearted, and wise. So, if for the sake of argument anyone disagrees, how could that person join the discussion being considered anticompassionate, narrow minded, racist and wicked?
It is, of course, the case that being required to do stupid, hateful things is demoralizing. Someone assigned to a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment. Why? Because every fiber of their genuine being fights against that necessity. We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and dangerous.
I believe that the good that people do, small though it may appear, has more to do with the good that manifests broadly in the world than people think, and I believe the same about evil. We are each more responsible for the state of the world than we believe, or would feel comfortable believing. Without careful attention, culture itself tilts toward corruption. Tyranny grows slowly, and asks us to retreat in comparatively small steps. But each retreat increases the possibility of the next retreat. Each betrayal of conscience, each act of silence, and each rationalization weakens resistance and increases the probability of the next restrictive move forward.
If you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?
If you decide to stand up and refuse a command, if you do something of which others disapprove but you firmly believe to be correct, you must be in a position to trust yourself. This means that you must have attempted to live an honest, meaningful, productive life.
The alternative is despair, corruption, and nihilism — thoughtless subjugation to the false words of totalitarian utopianism and life as a miserable, lying, and resentful slave.
When we meet, one on one, people also tell me that they enjoy my lectures and what I have written because what I say and write provides them with the words they need to express things they already know, but are unable to articulate.
I suggest that when speaking to a large group you should nonetheless always be attending to specific individuals — the crowd is somewhat of an illusion.
What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing. Achieving that means your listeners are not distracted by everything they could be thinking about while in attendance. If you are an audience member at a performance, and you are not completely enthralled by the content, you become preoccupied by some slight physical comforts, and shift from place to place. You become aware of your own thoughts. You begin to think about what you need to do tomorrow. You whisper something to the person beside you. That all adds up to discontent in the audience, and audible noise. But if you, as speaker, are positioned properly on stage, physically and spiritually, then everybody’s attention will be focused with laser-like intensity on whatever you are saying, and no one will make a sound. In this manner, you can tell what ideas have power.
We have committed an error, or a series of errors. We have spent too much time clamoring about rights, and we are no longer asking enough of the young people we are socializing. We have been telling them for decades to demand what they are owed by society. We have been implying that the important meaning of their lives will be given to them because of such demands, when we should have been doing the opposite: letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden. Because we have not been doing this, they have grown up looking in the wrong places. And this has left them vulnerable: vulnerable to easy answers and susceptible to the deadening force of resentment.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both foresaw that communism would appear dreadfully attractive — an apparently rational, coherent, and moral alternative to religion or nihilism — and that the consequences would be lethal. The former wrote, in his inimitably harsh, ironic, and brilliant manner, “In fact, I even wish a few experiments might be made to show that in socialistic society life denies itself, and itself cuts away its own roots. The earth is big enough and man is still unexhausted enough for a practical lesson of this sort and demonstratio ad absurdum — even if it were accomplished only by a vast expenditure of lives — to seem worthwhile to me.”
The central scientific axiom left to us by the Enlightenment — that reality is the exclusive domain of the objective — poses a fatal challenge to the reality of religious experience, if the later experience is fundamentally subjective (and it appears to be exactly that). But there is something complicating the situation that seems to lie between the subjective and the objective: What if there are experiences that typically manifest themselves to one person at a time, but appear to form a meaningful pattern when considered collectively? That indicates something is occurring that is not merely subjective, even though it cannot be easily pinned down with the existing methods of science. It could be, instead, that the value of something is sufficiently idiosyncratic — sufficiently dependent on the particularities of time, place, and the individual experiencing that thing — that it cannot be fixed and replicated in the manner required for it to exist as a scientific object. This does not mean, however, that value is not real: It means only that it is so complex that it cannot yet and may never fit itself within the scientific worldview. The world is a very strange place, and there are times when the metaphorical or narrative description characteristic of culture and the material representation so integral to science appear to touch, when everything comes together — when lief and art reflect each other equally.
The communists produced a worldview that was attractive to fair-minded people, as well as those who were envious and cruel. Perhaps communism may even have been a viable solution to the problems of the unequal distribution of wealth that characterized the industrial age, if all of the hypothetically oppressed were good people and all of the evil was to be found in their bourgeoisie overlords. Unfortunately for the communists, a substantial proportion of the oppressed were incapable, unconscientious, unintelligent, licentious, power mad, violent, resentful, and jealous, while a substantial proportion of the oppressors were educated, able, creative, intelligent, honest, and caring.
The ideologue begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representation hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world. Some examples include “the economy,” “the nation,” “the environment,” “the patriarchy,” “the people,” “the rich,” “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the oppressors.” The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena.
Since the ideologue can place him or herself on the morally correct side of the equation without the genuine effort necessary to do so validly, it is much easier and more immediately gratifying to reduce the problem to something simple and accompany it with an evildoer, who can then be morally oppressed.
Their followers, desperate to join a potentially masterable new dominance hierarchy (the old one being cluttered by its current occupants), become enamored of that story. While doing so, being less bright than those they follow, they subtly shift “contributed to” or “affected” to “caused.”
Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm. The wealthy are wealthy because they exploit the poor. The poor are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy. All economic inequality is undesirable, unproductive, and a consequence of fundamental unfairness and corruption.
Thinkers powerfully influenced by Marx and overwhelmingly influential in much of the academy today modified the Marxist simplification essentially by replacing “economics” with “power” — as if power were the single motivating force behind all human behavior (as opposed to, say, to competent authority, or reciprocity of attitude and action).
Ideological reduction of that form is the hallmark of the most dangerous of pseudo-intellectuals. Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid. Their self-righteousness and moral claim to social engineering is every bit as deep and dangerous. It might even be worse: ideologues lay claim to rationality itself. So, they try to justify their claims as logical and thoughtful.
Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems. Of course, power plays a role in history, as does economics. But the same can be said of jealousy, love, hunger, sex, cooperation, revelation, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, religion, compassion, disease, technology, hatred, and chance — none of which can definitely be reduced to another. The attraction of doing so is, however, obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery — and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations of the ideology can be vented.
There is another typical feature of ideological pursuit: the victims supported by ideologues are always innocent, and the perpetrators are always evil. But the fact that there exist genuine victims and perpetrators provides no excuse to make low-resolution, blanket statements about the global locale of blameless victimization and evil perpetration. No group guilt should be assumed — and certainly not of the multigenerational kind. It is a certain sign of the accuser’s evil intent, and a harbinger of social catastrophe.
To take the path of ressentiment is to risk tremendous bitterness.This is in no small part a consequence of identifying the enemy without rather than within. If wealth is the problem at issue, for example, and the wealthy perceived as the reason for poverty and all the other problems of the world, then the wealthy become the enemy — indistinguishable, in some profound sense, from a degree of evil positively demonic in its psychological and social significance. If power is the problem, the those who have established any authority at all are the singular cause of the world’s suffering. If masculinity is the problem, then all males must be attacked and vilified. Such division of the world into the devil without and the saint within justifies self-righteous hatred — necessitated by the morality of the ideological system itself.
It is much safer morally to look to yourself for the errors of the world, at least to the degree to which someone honest and free of willful blindness might consider. You are likely to me much more clear minded about what is what and who is who and where blame lies once you contemplate the log in your own eye, rather than the speck in your brother’s. It is probably that your own imperfections are evident and plentiful, and could profitably be addressed, as step one in your Redeemer’s quest to improve the world. To take the world’s sins onto yourself — to assume responsibility for the fact that things have not been set right in your own life and elsewhere — is part of the messianic path: part of the imitation of the hero, in the most profound of senses.
Consider the characters fabricated by second-rate crafters of fiction: they are simply divided into those who are good and those who are evil. By contrast, sophisticated writers put the divide inside the characters they create, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness. It is much more psychologically appropriate to assume that you are the enemy — that it is your weakness and insufficiencies that are damaging the world — than to assume saintlike goodness on the part of you and your party, and to pursue the enemy you will then be inclined to see everywhere.
We should let it go, and begin to address and consider smaller, more precisely defined problems. We should conceptualize them at the scale at which we might begin to solve them, not by blaming others, but try trying to address them personally while simultaneously taking responsibility for the outcome.
Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare.
The carbon that makes up coal also becomes maximally durable in its diamond form. Finally, it becomes capable of reflecting light. That which is valuable is pure, properly aligned, and glitters with light — and this is true for the person just as it is for the gem. Light, of course, signifies the shining brilliance of heightened and focused consciousness. Much of consciousness is visual and therefore dependent on light. To be illumined or enlightened is to be exceptionally awake and aware — to attain a state of being commonly associated with divinity.
Heat and pressure transform the base matter of common coal into the crystalline perfection and rare value of the diamond. The same can be said of a person.
You can see this occurring most clearly in the case of a 2-year-old having a tantrum. He has lost himself temporarily, and is for the moment pure emotion.
Lack of internal union also makes itself known in the increased suffering, magnification of anxiety, absence of motivation, and lack of pleasure that accompany indecision and uncertainty. The inability to decide among 10 things, even when they are desirable, is equivalent to torment by all of them. Without clear, well-defined, and noncontradictory goals, the sense of positive engagement that makes life worthwhile is very difficult to obtain. Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame, and the self-devouring physiological forces unleashed by stress. The poorly integrated person is thus volatile and directionless — and this is only the beginning. Sufficient volatility and lack of direction can rapidly conspire to produce the helplessness and depression characteristic of prolonged futility.
The social consequences are just as serious as the biological. A person who is not well put together overreacts to the slightest hint of frustration or failure. He cannot enter into productive negotiations, even with himself, because he cannot tolerate the uncertainty of discussing potential alternative futures. He cannot be pleased, because he cannot get what he wants, and he cannot get what he wants because he will not choose one thing instead of another. He can also be brought to a halt by the weakest of arguments. One of his multiple, warring subpersonalities will latch on to such arguments, often contrary to his best interest, and use them, in the form of doubts, to buttress its contrarian position. A deeply conflicted person can therefore be stopped, metaphorically, with the pressure of a single finger exerted on his chest (even though he may lash out against such an obstacle). To move forward with resolve, it is necessary to be organized — to be directed toward something singular and identifiable.
Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. If you aim at nothing, you will become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher.
Those beginning graduate work were often still immature and confused. But the discipline imposed upon them by the necessity of research — and more particularly, thesis preparation — soon improved their characters. To write something long, sophisticated, and coherent means, at least in part, to become more complex, articulate, and deeper in personality.
I typically encouraged my clients to choose the best path currently available to them, even if it was far from their ideal. This sometimes meant tolerating at least a temporary decrease in ambition, or in pride, but had the advantage of substituting something real for something available only in fantasy. Improvements in mental health almost invariably followed.
It has become self-evident to me that many commitment have enduring value: those of character, love, family, friendship, and career foremost among them (and perhaps in that order). Those who remain unable or unwilling to establish a well-tended garden, so to speak, in any or all of those domains inevitably suffer because of it. However, commitment requires its pound of flesh. To pursue an undergraduate degree means sacrifice and study, and the choice of a given discipline means forgoing the possibility of other pathways of study.
But very often failure is a consequence of insufficient single-mindedness, elaborate but pointless rationalization, and rejection of responsibility.
The commitments and the sacrifices thereby entailed matured those who endured and made them better people. So, what is the conclusion? There are many things to which we might commit ourselves. A case can be made for the arbitrary and even meaningless nature of any given commitment, given the plethora of alternatives, given the corruption of the systems demanding that commitment. But the same case cannot be made for the fact of commitment itself: Those who do not choose a direction are lost. It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.
But proper discipline organizes rather than destroys. A child terrified into obedience or shielded from every possible chance of misbehavior is not disciplined, but abused. A child who has been disciplined properly, by contrast, does not battle with, defeat, and then permanently inhibit her aggression. Such a child does not even sublimate that aggression, or transform it into something different. Instead, she integrates it into her increasingly sophisticated game-playing ability, allowing it to feed her competitiveness and heighten her attention, and making it serve the higher purposes of her developing psyche. A well-socialized child does not therefore lack aggression. She just becomes extremely good at being aggressive, transmuting what might otherwise be a disruptive drive into the focused perseverance and controlled competitiveness that make for a successful player.
Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful — even one thing — then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine.
Art is the bedrock of culture itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically, and come to establish productive peace with others. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine — and beauty is divine — because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic. And we must be sharp and awake and prepared so that we can survive properly, and orient the world properly, and not destroy things, including ourselves — and beauty can help us appreciate the wonder of Being and motivate us to seek gratitude when we might otherwise be prone to destructive resentment.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
I do not see the house, with its specific shingles, colors, flowers, and architectural details, despite the interest that might have been elicited in me had I paid careful attention. By this point in my life, I have seen so many houses in so many places that I know what a house is likely to do when I walk by it — which is very little. Thus, I ignore the engaging idiosyncrasies and beauties of its details — its unique character, for better or worse — and see just enough to stay oriented as I walk past and continue to think and be elsewhere as I do so. There is real loss in that. I am simply not there in my adult neighborhood the same way I was as a child in my hometown. I am separated from the reality of the world. And a very deep feeling of belonging is missing in some important way because of that.
Perception has been replaced for me with functional, pragmatic memory. This has made me more efficient, in some ways, but the cost is an impoverished experience of the richness of the world.
I knew perfectly well that I was missing out on beauty and meaning and engagement, regardless of whatever advantages in efficiency my impatience brought. I was narrow, sharp, and focused, and did not waste time, but the price I paid for that was the blindness demanded by efficiency, accomplishment, and order. I was no longer seeing the world. I was seeing only the little I needed to navigate it with maximum speed and lowest cost. None of that was surprising. I had the responsibilities of an adult. I had a demanding job. I had to take care of my family, and that meant sacrificing the present and attending to the future. But having little children around and noticing their intense preoccupation with the present, and their fascination with what was directly around them, made me very conscious of the loss that accompanied maturity.
Some, in fact, never lose the glorious vision of childhood. This is particularly true of artists (and, indeed, seems a vital part of what makes them artists).
It is frightening to glimpse, even for a moment, the transcendent reality that exists beyond. We think we border our great paintings with luxurious, elaborate frames to glorify them, but we do it at least as much to insist to ourselves that the glory of the painting itself ends at the frame. That bounding, the bordering, leaves the world we are familiar with comfortably intact and unchanged. We do not want that beauty reaching out past the limitations imposed on it and disturbing everything that is familiar.
How is that knowledge generated? What is comprehended and understandable does not just leap in one fell swoop from the absolutely unknown to the thoroughly and self-evidently articulated. Knowledge must pass through many stages of analysis — a multitude of transformations — before it becomes, let us say, commonplace.
Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge. They make their voluntary foray out into the unknown, and they take a piece of it and transform it into an image.
In doing so, they elevate and transform what is too dangerous into something cutting edge.
That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling fully into the chaos, instead of transforming it. But artists have always lived there, on the border of human understanding. Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.
The artists do not understand full well what they are doing. They cannot, if they are doing something genuinely new. Otherwise, they could just say what they mean and have done with it. They would not require expression in dance, music, and image. They are guided by feel, by intuition — by their facility with the detection of patterns — and that is all embodied, rather than articulated, at least in its initial stages. When creating, the artists are struggling, contending, and wrestling with a problem — maybe even a problem they do not fully understand — and striving to bring something new into clear focus. Otherwise they are mere propagandists, reversing the artistic process, attempting to transform something they can already articulate into image and art for the purpose of rhetorical and ideological victory. That is a great sin, harnessing the higher for the purposes of the lower. It is a totalitarian tactic, the subordination of art and literature to politics.
When they are successful they make the world more understandable. They move the unknown closer to the conscious, social, and articulated world. And then people gaze at those artworks, watch the dramas, and listen to the stories, and they start to become informed by them, but they do not know how or why. And people find great value in it — more value, perhaps, than in anything else. There is good reason that the most expensive artifacts in the world — those that are literally, or close to literally, priceless — are great works of art.
It is easy to make the opposite error, as well: that art should be pretty and easily appreciated, without work or challenge: it should be decorative; it should match the living-room furniture. But art is not decoration. That is the attitude of a naive beginner, or of someone who will not let their terror of art allow them to progress and learn.
Art is exploration. Artists train people to see. Most people with any exposure to art now regard the work fo the impressionists, for example, as both self-evidently beautiful and relatively traditional. This is in no small part because we all perceive the world now, at least in part, in the manner that only impressionists could manage in the latter half of the 19th century. We cannot help doing so, because the impressionist aesthetic has saturated everything. Now we all see the beauty of light that only the impressionists could once apprehended.
Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism. Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value. Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of those.
In the first case, you have betrayed yourself. You did not play the medium- to long-term game properly, and are suffering the consequences. You are not the sort of person other people choose to have around. You might not even be the sort of person you want to have around.
Refusal or inability both leave a geographic area in memory — unexplored, active, and rife with danger. It is a psychological truism that anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.
The successes are both confidence building and exhilarating. Not only are we moving toward our ultimate desire, we appear to be doing so properly. The obstacles and failures are, by contrast, anxiety provoking, depressing, and painful. They indicate our profound ignorance. They indicate that we do not understand with sufficient depth where we have been, where we are, or where we are going. They indicate that something we have built with great difficulty and wish above all to protect is flawed — to a degree both serious and not fully understood.
It is a very low-resolution representation of a house. It is more hieroglyph than drawing; more concept than sketch. It is something that represents the idea of house, or perhaps home, generically, like the word “house” or “home” themselves.
Which, then, were real? It could could easily be argued that her original story was more accurate. It was, after all, as direct an imprint as might be left on the open book of a 4-year-old’s mind. It had not been altered by any previous therapeutic intervention. Was it not, then, the genuine article?
The next time I saw him, a week later, he had finished the book. His face had hardened. He looked older and wiser. I had seen this happen frequently in my clinical practice when people incorporated the darker parts of themselves, instead of compartmentalizing them. They no longer had the habitual look of deer caught in the headlights. They looked like people from whom decisions emanated, rather than people to whom things merely happened.
We face a multitude of prospects and by choosing one pathway rather than another, reduce that multitude to the singular actuality of reality. In doing so, we bring the world from becoming into Being.
Not only do our choices play a determining role in transforming the multiplicity of the future into the actuality of the present, but — more specifically — the ethics of our choices play that role.
Everyone seems to know this. We are universally tormented by our consciences for what we know we should have done yet did not do. We are tormented equally by what we did but know we should not have done. Is this not a universal experience? Can anyone escape the pangs of conscience at 4 o’clock in the morning after acting immorally or destructively, or failing to act when action was necessary? And what is the source of for that inescapable conscience? Even the most malevolent, it appears, must find justification for his or her evil.
To do so, we need to know where we have been, where we currently are, and in what direction we are headed. We reduce that account to its causal structure: we need to know what happened and why, and we need to know it as simply and practically as possible.
It is for such reasons we are so captivated by people who can tell a story — who can share their experiences concisely and precisely, and who get to the point. That point — the moral of the story — is what they learned about who and where they were or are, and where they are going and why.
No one teaches a beloved son to cringe in terror and cowardice from what confronts him. No one teaches a beloved daughter that deceit will set the world right, and whatever works expediently is to be practiced, honored, and mimicked. And no one tells anyone he or she cares for that the proper response to Being is hatred and the desire to produce pain, suffering, mayhem, and catastrophe.
This is not a casual statement. It is not naive. It is not a matter of asking of a present, unearned. God is no granter of casual wishes. It is a matter, first, of truly Asking. This means being willing to let go of anything and everything that is not in keeping with the desire. Otherwise there is no Asking. There is only an immature and too-often resentful whim and wish: “Oh, that I could have what I want, without doing what is necessary.” And to ask, seek, and knock is, as well, to determine what must be asked for. And that has to be something that is worthy of God. Why else would it be granted? How else could it possibly be granted?
You know that when something does not go well, you should analyze the problem, resolve it, apologize, repent, and transform. An unsolved problem seldom sits there, in stasis. It grows new heads, like a hydra. One lie — one act of avoidance — breeds the necessity for more. One act of self-deception generates the requirement to buttress that self-deceptive belief with new delusions. One devastated relationship, unaddressed, damages your reputation — damages your faith in yourself, equally — and decreases the probability of a new and better relationship. Thus, your refusal or even inability to come to terms with the errors of the past expands the source of such terror — expands the unknown that surrounds you, transforms that unknown into something increasingly predatory.
Why was I at risk? What was it about the world that made it dangerous? What was I doing or not doing to contribute to my vulnerability? How can I change the value hierarchy I inhabit to take the negative into account so that I can see and understand it?
If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.
They often evince a certain pride at reaching such a conclusion, as both had generally decided ahead of time that the whole idea was pointless. So, I ask: “That is the plan, is it? You are going to be married for 60 years. You put a small amount of begrudging effort into having one date. You were already not getting along, so there was a negligible probability you were going to take any pleasure in it. Besides that, irritated at me as you were for my childish suggestion, you were both motivated to make it go horribly, just as it did.”
Naive people are possessed of the delusion that everyone is good, and that no one — particularly someone loved — would be motivated to cause pain and misery, either for revenge, as a consequence of blindness, or merely for the pleasure of doing so. But people who have matured enough to transcend their naivete have learned that they can be hurt and betrayed both by themselves and at the hands of others.
To trust is to invite the best in your partner to manifest itself, with yourself and your freely given trust as the enticement. This is a risky business, but the alternative is the impossibility of true intimacy, and the sacrifice of what could have been two minds in dialogue working in tandem to address the difficult problems of life for a single mind striving in solitude.
There is an inevitable yearning in our natures for the completion that someone else might provide. There is a sense that you are missing something, otherwise, and that only the proper romantic union will provide it. It is true, too — you are indeed missing something. If you were not, sex would never have evolved. The entire biological course of our destiny, since reproduction progressed past the mere division of cells, appears driven by the fact that it was better for two dissimilar creatures to come together to produce a comparatively novel version of themselves than to merely clone their current embodiment.
A marriage is a vow, and there is a reason for it. You announce jointly, publicly: “I am not going to leave you, in sickness or health, in poverty or wealth — and you are not going to leave me.” It is actually a threat: “We are not getting rid of each other, no matter what.” The part of you that claims to desire freedom (but really wants to avoid any permanent and therefore terrifying responsibility) desires a trapdoor through which escape might be made, if and when it is necessary. Do you really want to keep asking yourself for the rest of your life — because you would always have the option to leave — if you made the right choice?
But you do not find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble. Furthermore, if you have an escape route, there will not be enough heat generated in the chamber you find yourself jointly trapped in to catalyze the change necessary in both of you — the maturation, the development of wisdom — because maturation and the development of wisdom require a certain degree of suffering, and suffering is escapable as long as there is an out.
You are not going to get along with your partner — not easily, unless you agree to be tyrannized and silent (and even then you will take your revenge) — because you are different people. No one just simply gets along, precisely because of that.
Imagine further that each has their hands around the neck of the person in front of them. All are squeezing with just enough force to kill in a few decades.
Tyranny is obviously not so good for the person enslaved, but it is also not good for the tyrant — because he or she becomes a tyrant, and there is nothing ennobling about that. There is nothing but cynicism, cruelty, and the hell of unregulated anger and impulsivity. Slaves are miserable, wretched, angry and resentful. They will take any and all chances whatsoever available to them to take revenge on their tyrants, who will in consequence find themselves cursed and damaged by their slaves.
Negotiation is exceptionally difficult. We already discussed the problems associated with determining what you want and then mustering up the courage to tell someone exactly that. And there are the tricks that people use, too, to avoid negotiation. Perhaps you ask your partner what he or she wants — perhaps during a difficult situation. “I don’t know” is a common answer. It is not acceptable, however, in a discussion that cannot in good faith be avoided. The phrase often means: “I don’t want to talk about it, so go away and leave me alone.” That brings the discussion to a halt, and it can stay halted forever.
“I don’t know” means not only “Go away and leave alone.” It also frequently means “Why don’t you go away, do all the work necessary to figure out what is wrong, and come back and tell me — if you’re so smart.”
It is difficult and painful because it takes courage and even some foolhardiness to continue a discussion when you have been told in no uncertain terms by your partner to go the hell away. It is a good thing, however — an admirable act — because a person bothered by something they do not wish to talk about is very likely to be split internally over the issue at hand. The part that wants to avoid is the part that gets angry. There is a part that wants to talk, too, and to settle the issue. But doing so is going to be cognitively demanding, ethically challenging, and emotionally stressful. In addition, it is going to require trust, and people test trust, not least by manifesting anger when approached about something touchy just to determine if the person daring the approach cares sufficiently to overcome a serious barrier or two or three or ten to get to the horrible bottom of things. And avoidance followed by anger is not the only trick in the book.
Tears are an effective defense mechanism, as it takes a heart of stone to withstand them, but they tend to be the last-ditch attempt at avoidance. If you can get past tears, you can have a real conversation, but it takes a very determined interlocutor to avoid the insult and hurt generated by anger (defense one) and the pity and compassion evoked by tears (defense two). It requires someone who has integrated their shadow (their stubbornness, harshness, and capacity for necessary emotionless implacability) and can use it for long-term benefit. Do not foolishly confuse “nice” with “good.”
You will be tempted by avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to employ the trapdoor of divorce so that you will not have to face what must be faced. But your failure will haunt you while you are enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship you stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not improved a whit.
It is even more delusional than that, because, of course, if you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation of romance, and the general absence of reality that accompanies the privilege of making one person pay for the real troubles of existence while the other benefits unrealistically from their absence. You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts (at least in the beginning), and all you have to do is scoop the whipped cream off the top of each of them and devour it.
Traditional roles are far more helpful than modern people, who vastly overestimate their tolerance for freedom and choice, tend to realize. In a less rapidly mutable society, everyone has some sense of their respective duties. That does not eliminate the tension (nothing eliminates the tension), but at least there is a template. If there is no template for what either of you should be doing when you live together with someone, then you are required to argue about it — or negotiate about it, if you are good at that, which you are probably not. Few people are.
The next thing you have to do is actually talk to your partner for about 90 minutes a week, purely about practical and personal matters. “What is happening to you at work?” “What is going on, as far as you are concerned, with the kids?” “What needs to be done around the house?” “Is there anything bothering you that we can address?” “What do we have to do that is necessary to keep the wolf from the door next week?”
If you are old enough, you know that people are badly broken. When you are young and not very experienced, you are likely to make 2 assumptions, in a rather unquestioning and implicit manner, that are simply not true. The first is that there is someone out there who is perfect. The second assumption is that there is someone out there who is perfect for you.
Romance is play, and play does not take place easily when problems of any sort arise. Play requires peace, and peace requires negotiation. And you are lucky even then if you get to play.
Maybe you want to take that pathway and facilitate the affair because you want to play the martyr: “My wife left me to have an affair, and poor me.”
“Where is the spontaneity, the light jazz, cocktails, and excitement of sudden unexpected attraction? Where is the tuxedo and the little black dress?” That is what you expect? Even unconsciously, in your foolish fantasies? How often did you manage that when you were dating? Ever? And you want two jobs, two kids, a reasonable standard of living — and spontaneity? And you are not about to “settle” for anything less?
Good luck with that. It is not going to happen, not without a lot of effort.
Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.
What shall I make of the possibilities that I see in play in front of me, complex, worrisome, exciting, dull, restricted, unlimited, fortunate, or catastrophic as they may be?
Objects that play by the rules of the game we consider real can only be one thing at a time, and certainly not themselves and their opposite, simultaneously. Potential, however, is not like that. It is not categorizable in that manner. It is tragedy, comedy, good and evil, and everything in between at the same time. It is also not tangible, in the sense that the things we consider must be tangible. It does not even exist — except as what could be exists. Perhaps it is best considered as the structure of reality, before reality manifests itself concretely in the present, where reality appears to most self-evidently exist.
But creatures such as us do not contend with the present. We have to fight to “be here now,” the advice of the sage. Left to our own devices, we turn our minds instead to investigating the future: What could be?
Could it be that we communicate in stories because what everyone is doing in the world is fundamentally a story? Could that mean that the world of experience is, in truth, indistinguishable from a story — that it could not be represented in a manner more accurate than that of the story?
We see animated intent everywhere — and we certainly present the world that way to our children. That is why Thomas the Tank Engine has a face and a smile, and the sun has a face and a smile.
It is not as if we are born with an instinct for the periodic table of the elements. No. We only managed to get that straight a few hundred years ago, and it took a lot of conscious time and effort to formulate. It is not that interesting, intrinsically, because there is no story associated with it. It is an accurate and useful representation of the objective reality of what is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, but it is a struggle to master perception of that abstracted sort.
We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same. Otherwise, we would not all be human. We would not even be able to communicate. To communicate, paradoxically, there must be things about you and others that can go without saying.
Everyone viewing the movie accepts that as a given: “Of course the Evil Queen turns into a dragon. There is no problem with that.” Why, exactly, is that universally acceptable? On the face of it, the transformation makes no sense at all.
That idea is deeply embedded inside of us. We know that human beings are innately afraid of reptilian predators, for example — and that there is good reason for that. It is not merely that we are prepared to learn fear of them: the fear itself is innate.
The malevolence in the heart of people that makes them criminal falls into that category, as does the evil that drives the totalitarian war of revenge, rapine, greed, or sheer love of blood and destruction. And that malevolence also exists in your heart, and that is the greatest dragon of all — just as mastering that malevolence constitutes the greatest and unlikeliest of individual achievements.
Half of the hypothalamus drives our use of what has been explored previously to quell and satisfy the basic demands of life, including our capability to protect ourselves in the case of attack. The other half is always asking, What is out there? What could it be used for? How might it be dangerous? What are its habits? So, what is the story? Eat, drink, and be merry, until the provisions run out — but watch out, always, for the monsters. Then venture out into the dangerous but promising unknown world and discover what is there.
If you understand the polarity of nature, its terror and benevolence, you recognize two fundamental elements of experience, permanent, eternal, and unavoidable, and you can begin to understand, for example, the profound pull toward sacrifice. It is a religious trope that sacrifices keep the gods happy, and coming to understand just who the unhappy gods are, so to speak, and just how terribly they are when they are unhappy is a genuine step toward wisdom — a genuine and humbling step. Modern people have a hard time understanding what sacrifice means, because they think, for example, of a burnt offering on an altar, which is an archaic way of acting out the idea. But we have no problem at all when we conceptualize sacrifice psychologically, because we all know you must forgo gratification in the present to keep the wolf from the door in the future.
There is nothing but sterility without unpredictability, even though a bit less unpredictability often seems eminently desirable.
And it is not ignorance that prevents them. The know of her existence, and they are well acquainted with her power. It is willful blindness, and it is a bad move. They desire to shield their new and precious daughter from the negative element of the world, instead of determining how to provide her with the strength and wisdom to prevail, despite the reality of the negative. All this does is keep Aurora naive and vulnerable. Maleficent shows up anyway, as she most certainly will, and there is a message in that: invite the Evil Queen to your child’s life. If you fail to do so, your children will grow up weak and in need of protection, and the Evil Queen is going to make herself known no matter what steps you take to stop her.
This is what happens to those beauties, so to speak, who remain far too unawakened when they hit 16: They do not want to be conscious, because they have not developed the courage and ability to face the negative element of the natural world. Instead of being encouraged, they have been sheltered. And if you sheltered the young people, you destroy them. You did not invite the Evil Queen, even for short visits. What are your children going to do when she shows up in full force, if they are entirely unprepared? They are not going to want to live. They are going to long for unconsciousness.
Imagine the realm of the Dragon of Chaos as the night sky, stretching infinitely above you on a clear night, representing what will remain forever outside your domain of understanding. Maybe you are standing on a beach, looking up, lost in contemplation and imagination. Then you turn your attention to the ocean — as grand in its way as the starry cosmos, but tangible and manifest and knowable, comparatively speaking. That is nature. It is not mere potential. It is there, in its unknowability, instead of removed from comprehension entirely. It is not yet tamed, however; not brought into the domain of order. And it is beautiful in its mystery.
Imagine, further, that the beach on which you stand is the shore of an island. The island is culture.
Imagine, instead, that animals have a niche — a place or space that suit them. Their biology is matched to that place. Lions are not found in the open ocean, and killer whales do not roam the African veldt. The animal and its environment are of a piece.
Why do you and others fall prey to resentment — that terrible hybrid emotional state, an admixture of anger and self-pity, tinged, to various degrees, with narcissism and the desire for revenge?
I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have too easy a time — who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem — who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment. You can encounter people, contrarily, who have been hurt virtually beyond all hope of repair who are not resentful and who would never deign to present themselves as victims. ***
We commit the sin of omission, alternatively, in the belief that what we are avoiding will just go away, which it seldom does. We sacrifice the future to the present, frequently suffering the slings and arrows of outraged conscience for doing so, but continuing, rigidly and stubbornly, in any case.
And for what? For a wish based on the idea that whatever egotistical falsehood conjured up by the act of deceit will be better than the reality that would have transpired had the truth been enacted or spoken. The liar acts out the belief that the false world he brings into being, however temporarily, will serve at least his own interests better than the alternative. That is the arrogance of someone who believes that he can alter the structure of reality through pretense, and that he can get away with it.
At minimum, he will not be living in the real world, or in the same world as other people, and so he will be weaker than he would have been had he learned what was true instead of having substituted for it what is false. Second, for the liar to genuinely believe that the is “going to get away with it,” carries with it the belief that he is smarter than everyone else — that is, the everyone who will not notice. Perhaps he will get away with one, two, or ten lies, of increasing severity, as he is emboldened by success. Each time he succeeds, however, his arrogance will increase, as success is rewarding and will inspire efforts to duplicate and even increase that reward. This cannot help but motivate larger and riskier lies, each associated with a longer fall from the heights of pride.
The fourth form of arrogance that justifies deceit has to do with a warped sense of justice, often brought about by resentment. People employ deception in this fourth set of circumstances because they are resentful and angry about their victimized positions in the hell and tragedy of the world. This response is entirely understandable, although no less dangerous because of that. The logic is simple and even compelling, particularly in the case of people who have been truly hurt: “I can do what I want because I have been unfairly treated.” This reasoning can be seen as simple justice. If you have bene the victim of what appears to be some malevolent cosmic joke, then why should not you do whatever is in your power to set things a little bit right for yourself?
Another motive for a sin of omission? The claim that it is justifiable to take the easy path. This means living life so that true responsibility for anything important never falls on your shoulders.
Some of that is inertia and cowardice, but some of it is also motivated by a deep sense of disbelief in your own personality. Like Adam, you know you are naked. You are intimately aware of your flaws and vulnerabilities, and the faith in yourself dissolves. This is understandable, but neither helpful nor, in the final analysis, excusable.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Conscience is no less than the sharing of moral knowledge with the self.
“To hell with it” is a multifaceted philosophy. It means “This is worth sacrificing anything for.” It means “Who cares about my life. It is not worth anything, anyway.” It means “I do not care if I have to lie to those who love me — my parents, my wife and children — because what difference does it make, anyway? What I want is the drug.” There is no easy coming back from that.
The right attitude to the horror of existence — the alternative to resentment, deceit, and arrogance — is the assumption that there is enough of you, society, and the world to justify existence. That is faith in yourself, your fellow man, and the structure of existence itself: the belief that there is enough to you to contend with existence and transform your life into the best it could be.
The fact of your voluntary focus on the abyss, so to speak, indicates to yourself at the deepest of levels that you are capable of taking on without avoidance the difficulties of existence and the responsibility attendant upon that. That mere act of courage is deeply assuring at the most fundamental levels of psychological being. It indicates your capability and competence to those deep, ancient, and somewhat independent biological and psychological alarm systems that register the danger of the world.
It is easy to optimism to be undermined and demolished, however, if it is naive, and for cynicism to arise in its place. But the act of peering into the darkness as deeply as possible reveals a light that appears unquenchable, and that is a profound surprise, as well as a great relief.
The same holds true for the issue of gratitude. I do not believe you can be appropriately grateful or thankful for what good you have and for what evil has not befallen you until you have some profound and even terrifying sense of the weight of existence. You cannot properly appreciate what you have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so.
With each step you take against yourself or others as a consequence of your unhappiness and resentment, there is more to be ashamed of, and more reason for self-directed antagonism. It is not for nothing that 1 person in 5 engages in some form of serious physical self-harm in their lifetime. And this does not include the most serious act — suicide itself (or the more common tendency toward suicidal ideation). If you are unhappy with yourself, why would you work in your best interest?
It is hard to imagine a story more sympathetic to mere mortals. If God Himself experiences doubts in the midst of His self-imposed agony, how could we mere humans not fall prey to the same failing?
One of the killers wrote that he considered himself the judge of all that exists and that it would be better if the entire human race was eradicated.
They set reliability and strength in a crisis as a conscious goal and were able to manage exactly that, so that the devastated people around them had someone to lean on and see as an example in the face of genuine trouble. That, at the very least, made a bad situation much less dreadful than it might have been. And that is something. If you can observe someone rising above the catastrophe, loss, bitterness, and despair, then you see evidence that such a response to catastrophe is possible. Courage and nobility in the face of tragedy is the reverse of the destructive, nihilistic cynicism apparently justified under just such circumstances.
Then you might well ask yourself, “Well, why not walk down that dark path?” It seems to me that the answer to that, to state it again, is courage: the courage to decide “No, that is not for me, despite the reasons I may have for being tempted in that direction,” and to decide, instead, “Despite the burden of my awake mortality, I am going to work for the good of the world.”
There is an undeniable vulnerability around children that wakes you up and makes you very conscious of the desire to protect them, but also of the desire to foster their autonomy and push them out in the world, because that is how you strengthen them.