Man is a void

Or, "know thyself" -- and calm down please.

Dear M,

Most people define themselves by what they are, but they rarely consider how much they aren’t.

Each of us is a speck of being in an infinite ocean of the unknown. We say I am this, I am that — we have a much more difficult time accepting what we lack. I don’t know, I don’t feel, I don't have: these are more applicable to us than what we claim to be — especially since the things we claim to be shift from day to day, and hour to hour.

There are whole countries who don’t know we exist and we don't know anything about whole countries. American history, Italian history, and Chinese history are all a mystery. We educate ourselves about a few facts and pretend we have a handle on whole nations. We call ourselves educated because we took a course, or read a book, and comfort ourselves that we’ve pulled back a veil on creation. We haven’t touched the surface and we probably never will.

We live in bodies whose operations we don’t only not control, but which we aren’t aware of, and don’t understand. They pump and fight and patch without our assent. We discover new things about our minds every year and slowly chip away at self-delusion. To be ignorant of ourselves is the rule and we pretend Americans are stupid for not following events in Ukraine. We make fun of each other, whenever some crisis hits, for becoming just-yesterday “experts” in medicine, or finance, or geopolitics. But we never had a chance to be anything else. We become conscious about a subject when we bump into it — rarely before. The world hits first; the mind tries to keep up.

To not understand your own God or your country is the rule — to not admit it is the fashion. True ignorance is anything which keeps you from being free, as Christ Himself said. Knowledge is power only if you have a chance to use it. If you don't have a chance to use it, knowledge is comfort — the belief that you can handle something if it comes; an island you can rest on in the middle of a black and stormy sea — at the very least something to keep you from getting bored*. What we call ignorance generally isn’t the practical stuff you don’t know: it’s not knowing the few things your neighbors expect you to know.

True maturity is finally realizing your ignorance and your need — that you’re some kind of a void. Every industry, every occupation from the highly-paid doctor to the lowest burger flipper is a recognition of our poverty, emptiness, and insufficiency. These jobs look to ward off others' hunger, sadness, boredom, a lack of safety, a lack of fitness, a lack of shelter — an inability to travel far or fast. We're all profiteers in the interminable war against indigence. And in fighting one of these in somebody else (what we call “a job") you’re trying to fight them all indirectly for yourself. If you're fighting all of them in someone else you’re either family, or a slave. Nobody can love his neighbor as himself. Nobody has the time, the resources, the care, or the energy. And if he latches on to one neighbor wholeheartedly he abandons a thousand others.

The more developed a society, the less sufficient the man. We become physically richer as we become more interdependent, and the deep-down recognition of our interdependence in turn makes us feel insecure. We dream about getting back to gardening, to buying land, to raising sheep — to going off the grid. A man works HVAC his whole life, or designs rockets, or sells cars, and once he “makes it” he tries to run off into the country and start tending cabbages. We make it look like a hobby, but it’s fear — the recognition of how small you are, and how anything can be stolen from you unless it comes from you first. The drive towards self-sufficiency, or autarky, is a distrust of what we can't see, and beyond this of other people.

Man’s finiteness and how he deals with it defines him. Love — the recognizing of poverty in others and seeking to fill it — becomes the center of his existence; the main thing we judge him by other than how he tries to fill it in himself. We praise God for being all-loving and forget that He’s all-encompassing. His love — His chief characteristic — is just as much a result of his goodness as His richness, and we blame ourselves for not being able to keep up.

When we tap into Him we become givers and saints, reflecting abundance. When we grasp too hard at this life out of fear, or poverty, or emptiness, we become damned. We can't fill ourselves, and the attempt to do it ruins us**.

Yours,

-J

P.S.

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”

Genesis 7 is the direct result of Genesis 3. Without a direct connection to God, the giver of all life, creation tries to steal life from itself — and the end result is universal cannibalism. The only way to stay alive is killing something else.

P.P.S. Even things like racism are less a result of our sin than of our smallness.

The classing of people into races and nations and ethnicities is a tool: an attempt to discern relations and needs and tendencies without recourse to personal character and record — the latter of which is impossible on a large scale.

So we pretend racism is evil, and in many ways it is. But in a world where people barely know their coworkers, recourse to generalities isn’t a flaw — it’s the best we can do.

Tocqueville writes, in the Goldhammer translation of Democracy in America,

GOD does not contemplate the human race in general. At a single glance he takes in every human being separately, and in each he sees the resemblances that make him like all the others and the differences that set him apart. God therefore has no need of general ideas; that is, he never feels the need to subsume a very large number of analogous objects under a single form in order to think about them in a more convenient way.

This is not the case with man. If the human mind undertook to examine and judge individually all the particular cases that came to its notice, it would soon become lost in a sea of detail and cease to see anything. In this extremity it has recourse to an imperfect but necessary procedure that is as much a proof of its weakness as a compensation for it. After giving cursory consideration to a certain number of objects and remarking that they resemble one another, it ascribes a single name to all of them, sets them apart, and proceeds on its course.

General ideas attest not to the strength of the human intellect but rather to its insufficiency, for in nature no beings are exactly alike; no facts are identical; no rules are applicable indiscriminately and in the same way to several objects at once. General ideas are admirable in one respect, namely, that they allow the human mind to make rapid judgments about a great many things at once, but the notions they provide are always incomplete, and what they gain in breadth they lose in exactitude. As societies age, they acquire knowledge of new facts and every day, virtually unwittingly, grasp some number of particular truths. As man grasps more truths of this kind, he naturally discovers new general truths.

One cannot look at a multitude of particular facts separately without ultimately discovering the common thread that ties them together. Out of a number of individuals comes the notion of species, and out of a number of species, inevitably, comes the notion of genus. Hence the longer a people has been enlightened, and the more varied the forms of its enlightenment, the more accustomed it will be to general ideas, and the greater its taste for them.

Thus the anti-racist and the anti-sexist shoot themselves in the foot: they're pretending to do what they can’t. In their attacks on prejudice they themselves employ prejudice. They “save” women wholesale by randomly destroying men. They condemn whites to “save” blacks. In every attempt to fight “injustice” they have to define the unjust, and in a world where some races are on top of the others, they can’t define the unjust by individual behaviors. They champion one group that’s been maligned by maligning innocents from other groups — not a reversal of policy, but a continuation of it. They don’t realize that what they fight isn’t a bug, but a feature.

*Schopenhauer writes of boredom,

[T]he two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. We may go further, and say that in the degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two. The reason of this is that each of these two poles stands in a double antagonism to the other, external or objective, and inner or subjective. Needy surroundings and poverty produce pain; while, if a man is more than well off, he is bored. Accordingly, while the lower classes are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, in other words, with pain, the upper carry on a constant and often desperate battle with boredom.

And the extremes meet; for the lowest state of civilization, a nomad or wandering life, finds its counterpart in the highest, where everyone is at times a tourist. The earlier stage was a case of necessity; the latter is a remedy for boredom.

**As Ronnie James Dio put it,

The Devil is never a maker

The less that you give, you’re a taker.