THE WORLD IS NEVER ENOUGH A Journey to the Heart of the 21st Century Human By L.A. Grainger-Brown PUBLISHED BY: L.A. Grainger-Brown on Smashwords Copyright 2012 L.A. Grainger-Brown Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. * * * THE WORLD IS NEVER ENOUGH * * * Table of Contents Introduction Part 1 – The Meaning within One The Individual The Grand Narrative Wither the Individual? We – The Great Mediocre Biological Imperative Depraved Animal Part 2 – The Meaning Without One The Shore Side Drowning Man Parting The Waves I am King Here The Pendulum An Eternal Cycle Endnote Introduction This short work is written in the full knowledge that the author knows next to nothing, and in the full faith that an honest exchange of beliefs is the only way to accumulate anything more than that. The title of this book is a statement: ‘the world is never enough.’ It is factual: because the world isn’t – because it never can be. My purpose is writing this is to examine why this is true of the 21st Century individual – in fact, of the individual of any era. I chose the title because, in as few words as possible, it expresses that relentless, frustrated urging that I myself feel almost every day on waking, and escape from only at night through an exhaustion that enables sleep to close over the same unyielding activity. My purpose in writing is to reach out to those of my age cohort, of teenager through to young adult who feel as I do – as I believe we all do. However, inasmuch as these formative struggles are never entirely reconciled, it pertains to every age and demographic. This is for those who similarly have trouble sleeping; who ‘feel the weight of the world’ bearing down on them. It is for those who feel an ambition that reaches beyond the workaday. It is not ambition in the narrow sense that it is generally used that keeps one awake thus. It is a more global ambition; it is the desire to lie on the deathbed, look at one’s own past and declare, as King Ozymandias did, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Yet, this unsleeping ambition is tainted by bitterness. As the subject of Shelley’s poem did, we too will one day be submerged beneath history. Worse, this obscuration will happen only should our works be amongst those rarities that reach any level of renown in our own era at all. For the vast, unrecognised majority of us nothing that comes from us will ever need to be forgotten by the world. To these unsleeping people, as much as to myself, my message is one of cautious optimism, without the mass of caveats by which such a statement is typically book-ended. It is one of freedom, though its destination is alien to your current frame of mind. You, the reader, must simply trust in me when I say that every train-of-though that I offer up herein is genuine, deeply personal, and intended as a rational attempt at an analysis of the self – and of selves everywhere. It does not purport to be the one true analysis. I hope only that it informs some small part of one of the many re-writes of your own, personal, manifesto which you will inevitably complete at some point in the future. If it cannot be this, then perhaps it is at least more entertaining than a reality television show. It is not much of a consolation prize, but at least it is something. Part 1. The Meaning within One Meaning lies within context. So, let me first furnish you with a contextual backdrop to the story of the individual – of yourself – in the 21st Century. I make no apologies for the fact that I must frame this as a dialogue between me and my contemporaries in the West. This is a text for those who dwell within the liberal-democratic, first world sphere: for that is from whence I come and also the backdrop to all I know. ‘The Individual’ First, as in all things: why? Why this subject? What value, to examine the individual of our particular era? Is the individual not a spent resource? A carcass picked at by a host of thinkers down the ages, until by now all that is original and valuable of its flesh has been consumed? The answer: because the individual is not dead. The individual is never a static force in history or even the day-to-day. The conceptual construct of ‘the individual’ – that I must use out of brevity – is misleading in that it creates the impression of permanence, as though the individual is a timeless, unchanging template for all peoples, stretching back into the mists of time. Ironically, this impression is a direct contradiction of the original meaning behind the word. Therefore, the individual as a concept must be reclaimed from death. And the wider we cast the net of our enquiry, the more we find this same false impression inherent in the terminology with which we discuss the one and his or her surrounds. By beginning a top-to-bottom analysis of ‘the individual’, one immediately finds that even the sociological environment within which the 21st Century individual exists is impermanent. It is my sincere belief that, in our epoch, humans – as a collection of individuals – change drastically from one generation to the next. Not biologically: that mighty process moves with glacial impassivity. Rather, it is the mind – or more accurately – the worldview of every generation that is systematically different from the former. These generational differences are due to the accelerating rate of technological development, globalisation, and the pace at which the informational horizon expands and access deepens. In many ways, the intensification of change in technology, which has occurred since industrialisation, mirrors that in the generational worldviews of humans. The difference between age cohorts manifests itself in the categorisation of the ‘x, y, z’ generations. These are simply the collative labelling of the many component differences that make these general differentiations necessary; it is the social encoding of something pre-existing. However, these alphabetic labels, and the rapid trend of intergenerational change that they identify, elicit the question: is the pre-existing doctrine on the individual and his worldview still valid? The framework within which the individual dwells is invalid as a standard measure from one generation to the other – should not the individual within each age cohort also be differentiated from their peer that went twenty or thirty years before? Not only can the individual never be ‘one’ single entity unified in time; furthermore, with the passing of very small periods of time, the species changes so radically as to redefine the community within which it and its peers cohabitate. The ‘individual’ must be both disaggregated from its universality-implying epithet ‘the’, and also removed from its complementary, enduring concept – that of ‘the society’. When evidence of rapid flux is applied to both the concepts of the individual and their society, their shared façade of immortality is removed and the interrelation between them, as well as each concept in isolation, becomes much less certain. Unfortunately, the theoretical realm within which the individual dwells – philosophy, which seeks to define the individual as an actor within a combined social and political system – is inept to see the episodic change in the constitution of its subject. Political philosophy is one of the many human sciences which are taken for granted. This is a fault of the discipline itself. It has been the tradition of political philosophy, since the time of Plato and his immutable ‘Forms’ or truths, to search for single, unchanging general rules that relate to the human condition. In searching for this one all-encompassing formula, the subject matter – humankind – is conflated from the individual level to the social level, and from there with all antecedents and precedents to form that eternal entity, the ‘human condition’. The individual – already a typecast category – is submerged beneath the weight of time, environment, stereotype and generalisation. Worse, this conglomeration of separate entities and eras does not answer the great question for which it was envisioned. To misuse a colloquialism; the eggs are broken, but the cake is unforthcoming. The answer to this question is not my purpose. I would, rather, choose the more humble goal of examining what has become a semantically null concept: the individual as he and she truly are, at the current time. Together we shall try and reclaim ‘the individual’ – a term with which we are all familiar – from what it has become: a falsity, conflated with invalidity in order to solve an insoluble. The Grand Narrative In order to reach the individual that is ourselves, let us first consider the macro-environment in which it – we – exists. Forget the human condition. I shall leave that for the philosophers, who are eminently more qualified than I. We shall hone in on the middle step between the human and his generalised ‘condition’. Let us turn to the generation-specific mores of the 21st Century, in the Western sphere of our planet. I shall deal only briefly with the economic and technological points that I raised above. Their contribution is, if not self-evident, then at least straightforward. Their combined influence on the individual can be summed up as: we exchange resources for other – increasingly more specialised and novel – resources; and we take part in an increasingly uniform, increasingly more global, system of information services and mechanisation. Their effects on the individual can be inferred from their function. Economists and information technologists have a much deeper handle upon these spheres than I, and I would direct the reader in their direction, if their proclivities indicate them that way. Therefore, let us turn to a more ephemeral and less predictable component of 21st Century individual life. Let us turn to the keystone assumption upon which the entire liberal-democratic, capitalist, post-Enlightenment society – of which we are, every one, a part – is founded. Specifically, let us look at the conglomeration of effects that the political consensus has on the citizen. If one were to try and encapsulate the worldview at the core of modern liberal-democracies, one would, by default have to subsume within it the worldview of the 18th century philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill made the case for individual liberties in his text On Liberty on the basis of a doctrine of imperfect knowledge. He argued that no assumption or theory about human life could be asserted with absolute certainty of its correctness, and hence all opinions must be open for discussion in society. The individual is given freedom in the West because of the unknowability of anything. Positive freedom springs from the negative capacity of us individuals and groups of us to be certain of anything. Mill took a dim view of the abilities of himself and his fellow man. However, although Mill refuted certainty, his worldview was not nihilistic for the simple reason that he saw in humankind the two redeeming features of “corrigibility” – the capacity to learn through trial and error; and “rationality” – the ability to reason dispassionately. Because of these two human attributes Mill proposed a progressive view of human existence. Humankind had emerged in prehistory without the shadow of certainty to guide its diverse members through their lives, but through dissimulation and a dialectic of ideas, the weight of evidence grows more and more behind ideas as they progress towards an “incontestable” state of near-perfect truth. Mill’s idea was one of progress on a grand scale, with humankind as the historical vehicle for the evolution of ideas. Thus Mill showed us a grand narrative of our species – the progress of which is the progress of knowledge itself. The text On Liberty forms one of the keystones of the modern liberal democracy. Its caricature of evolving ideas stands as arguably the most persuasive case for freedom of thought and expression in the modern era. Yet Mill overlooked one corollary of his conclusions – that being the individual, who is not ‘the individual’, but is nevertheless the lowest building block of the grand narrative of human progress that so captured his imagination. Mill – and liberal-democracy – is not unique as a system that enshrines the one amongst the masses, on the basis of assumptions made about individuals in general. A flaw inherent in most political philosophies is that they treat the human nature elements of their systems in a collective manner. Karl Marx did the same thing in The Communist Manifesto, so taken was he with the interplay of class-sized economics. Before Marx, Hegel formulated a similarly obscuring system in The Phenomenology of Spirit when he spoke of the “World Spirit” as an almost living thing, which moves History – that is, human history – towards its destiny. The ideas of these great thinkers were too great to encompass the individual as anything other than a template ubiquity. Unfortunately, the individual is anything but ubiquitous in nature. As experience dictates, no two human beings are fundamentally alike – even identical twins of similar upbringing have distinguishable traits. Therefore general theories of politics – the public interaction of humans – are built not upwards from the individual, but rather around this inconvenient, ineffable single being. This is due to the impossibility of capturing a workable formula for human individuality. Yet it is upon such theories that political systems are built. We, the citizens of governments everywhere, are trapped within a system that we did not choose – because there is no alternative – and that does not cater to us, but to an abstraction thereof. And so, we, the individuals of the 21st Century, are surrounded by mores that are tailored to the ubiquitous; mores shaped by a grand narrative that holds true to no specific era or generation – and especially not ours. Wither The Individual? The individual in philosophy and politics is a null concept. On some level this is something that both you and I have always known: it is one of those statements that, when posited, are so glaringly obvious as to make one wonder why it needs saying at all. But, it is crucial to an examination of you and I – of us all, as individuals. There is much contradiction in this realm of thought. To begin with, Mill was more than half-right in his theorising, which is why his ideas now underpin the world-dominating political regime. As I have already alluded to, he stated that no absolute certainty can be assumed when considering any facet of human life, rather than it cumulatively improves itself. This supported his thesis of a grand narrative and his subsequent prescription that political institutions should not impose anything but the minimal constraints required to bind together a community. This is intended to allow the human qualities that move our History the necessary room for innovation. The only weakness of his prescription is that it gives a systemic remedy for an individual problem. Liberal-democratic rights do indeed suit the vastness of individual variation and our various contributions to our host-society. Yet where does the empirical uncertainty of knowledge leave the individual? Especially when each of us lives as we must do: with the certainty of our own mortality; the concrete certainty of time ticking by in measured increments? Politics and social systems, essential as they are as preconditions for the individual, can never redress the inner turmoil of their constituents. And so, within our elegant political machinery, does the individual wither? We have more goods and services, more information, more rights and liberties than any of our forbearers. But still this question weighs heavily: what is the point of human life? How to use such riches? And, why is this question unanswered? Modern liberal-democracies have long since placed man on the moon; plumbed the depths of all but the deepest oceans of our planet; have conquered time and space with our machinery. Amidst these sky-reaching achievements, my – our – own insecurities and confusions seem embarrassingly insignificant. And that is the problem. The grand narrative is so grand as to belittle the individual, who is but an atom, in a moment, of this massive machinery churning towards the fate of mankind. But to the individual, these afflictions are anything but insignificant. Have you ever woken up and, in that moment of inactivity before the needs of daily activity materialise, seen nothing of lasting importance in your life, either now or stretching off forever into the future? I have. And these moments are all the more crushing because you – the victim – are aware that the only reason you don’t feel this always is because the lists and quantities, times and places of the daily ritual fill so much of immediate and upcoming daily existence. It seems that categorisation and division are the only way to overcome this malady, to atomise consciousness so it cannot dwell upon the truth which it has evolved far enough to finally conceive. This truth is: that there is no empirical or ethical justification for the existence of the average, or simply not superlative, individual, other than to lift up those who are superlative and to comfort their own mediocre peers. On its journey to becoming an accepted social force in Western society, feminism coined a powerful metaphor to describe the disadvantages faced by a woman in the workplace – that of the ‘glass ceiling’. This metaphor applies equally to every individual in relation to the accepted wisdom of the 21st Century. It describes the situation we are all, personally, consensual prisoners in. We – The Great Mediocre History is changed by the superlative, whilst the mediocre watch on. This is what we are told. No! Rather, it is what we assume. Faced with the vastness of the progressive evolution of our species, and believing in the individualism of freedom, we in the Western world assume that individuals are the agents of history. We tell ourselves, that the human condition is improved by the superlative, whilst the mediocre watch on. This is a logical assumption to make. Our shared rights and freedoms are based on the power of the individual. But in day-to-day life, none of us see the coveted power of the individual enacted. We all assume that it is our neighbours; our celebrities; the rich, the politicians and presidents; who alone have the power to change the metanarrative of our species. We contrast our own limited means and abilities with the limitless narrative and consider our institutions, which enshrine the capabilities of the one as the motive force of society. Inevitably, we conclude that this machinery is for others to use in their contribution to the vastness that stretches, timeless, overhead. Hegel said that the history of humankind is one of dialectic: of bloodshed, of conflict between ideas and purposes. Progress comes out of the synthesis of conflicting forces, and is once again challenged. Thus we must be far improved relative to earlier humans, as we are the inheritors of so many more lessons learnt from conflict. Yet what separates the modern from the pre-modern human? Simply an increase in these three things: average duration of life, availability and access to material needs and luxuries, and knowledge gained through individual education. All the higher purposes proposed throughout the revolutions and counter-revolutions of history have been refuted and dispossessed to the point where in the so-called most ‘advanced’ nations on earth, the sole principle of social organisation is the right of the individual to do as they please, and access whatever they can affordably acquire, with the sole limitation of not harming others, or the community. Due to the expanding parameters of our world – to the huge digitalisation of economic and informational processes – the individual is confronted by the boundless expanse of the universe. Exposed before it, we truly are one against the universe. And, faced with such an enormity, the only logical conclusion that each individual, in isolation, can reach is that we are not worthy to dream. We are not those with the superlative gifts to move the monolithic universe we see before us. Much less can we contribute to it. In ancient times the equivalency to this effect would be to count oneself amongst the pantheon of the gods. Progress, therefore, is a social phenomenon – but it advances the position of the individual not one iota. The 21st Century man or woman is no different from their ancestors of millennia past in their participation in the mass delusion of hierarchies. Except, whereas medieval – even prehistoric – man placed himself at the bottom of a pyramid topped by fatalism and intermediated by nobility and monarchs, their 21st Century descendant now place themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy topped by the grand narrative and intermediated by a planet-spanning cohort of their – supposed – betters. The Western society of the 21st Century has a proud heritage of social, political, technological and economic progress. But we – those within this edifice – are confronted daily with our personal alienation from global progress and daily must shy away from the fact that we are more adrift than ever our forebears were. In many ways, the ancient individual had a stronger grasp and agency upon his – smaller – world and its narrative than do we. Biological Imperative In the face of these modern realities, we – the ‘mediocre’ – can only turn to biological inheritance for some shred of the agency that we believe we were promised. To raise a fraction of the next generation that will ensure the continuation of the human race, in our own image and also possessed of our own qualities: this is an achievable part to play in the grand narrative. This allows many of us mediocre individuals to leave the great to innovate whilst we ourselves persevere, not sinking beneath our own pointlessness. This is the compromise that many of us reach – or will reach – as our years do progress and we see that the great works we dreamed of in our childhood years make no impression on the face of the great ceiling beneath which we toil. Thus we convince ourselves – with no other prompting than our own experience – that we have nothing to contribute besides, perhaps, our offspring. But before we turn to the effect of historical insignificance, let us first examine the biological imperative; the life-meaning that we reach by compromise. The biological imperative of a group as vast and boundless as the human race is not enough imperative for the life of an individual, in the same way that the night sky would be recognisably no different if it were one star shorter. Only in terms of a general rule can such solace be found legitimate. If all the mediocre were to reach the same conclusion of our equal disposability at the same exact moment, then there would be no stars in the night sky and it would cease to be recognisable, except as a black abyss without reference point or illumination. Thus the justification for individual existence is the cumulative need of collective existence. But, speaking as one of those same-justified individuals: this is not enough! Incontrovertible as it may be, I reject it even as I write it. Why? Because I am at liberty; I am free, I have rights. Surely, these are for a purpose? In this way, political authority conditions a logical sense of entitlement in me as a human being. But, again logic drags me down from my self-deluded heights. It could be anyone sitting where I am sitting, or standing where you stand, reading this, wearing those clothes, thinking these thoughts. Where you sign your name, to mark yourself down as an empowered agent in the universe in general, you might as well sign an ‘x’. The justification for an individual life is so tenuous as to fail to encompass any purpose other than life for the sake of universal consistency. The continuation of the one is purposeful only for the negative reason that the precedent of one death, if followed as a general rule, would result in the extinction of the human race. Whilst this logic creates a basis just strong enough to commit the rational mind to continued existence, the absence of individual purpose creates a very real lacuna of implicit meaning in the life of a non-superlative individual. Never mind that the superlative individual does not exist. Never mind that but for slight differences in talent, constitution, compassion and intellect, all humans are of the same species and the same gene pool. Never mind these, for the superlative being is a reality to the minds of all Western individuals – ‘I am not the best, for if I were to be, what poor justification this system would have!’ Never mind that we are all flawed: the dream of the perfect is what motivates the Western world. And, as every individual knows all too well: they are not perfect. So we have the paradox of the socially conditioned, higher-thinking organism – and so we understand at last why Rousseau called such a being a “depraved animal.” Depraved Animal In the post-Enlightenment human, we have a being that, even the most mediocre of which, is capable of the self-same level of analysis that refutes philosophical rationalisations of its own existence. By equal measure, emotion dictates that it cannot accept the biological imperative that is the only narrative justification for its particular existence. Leaving aside inculcated values, a purely empirical human, rational in the true sense of the post-Enlightenment tradition, can find no tangible or evidential logic to support the effect of anything external to themselves which therefore binds them to a secular higher purpose. And if they could? Why, then all hope would be undone! If you were the next leader chosen, the next great hero, then what would that say of the infallible narrative of mankind and History? So: you are a modern-era human. So: the political architecture that delimits your entire external world tells you that ‘we humans have unlimited potential as a species – our advancement parallels that of all the highest things; we are destined for a collective greatness that justifies our liberty.’ So: you are at war with your surrounds and yourself. Because there must be a purpose for you, as you have been told. But there is none forthcoming. So: either, the whole edifice which subsumes you must come down; or else you are nothing at all before the universe; a coincidence of biology and time, resulting in a mediocre being soon to be swept to an unremarkable grave. So: we have, in ourselves, a being that is capable of abstract reasoning, and perceptive enough to realise that there is no intrinsic reason for its own existence or to guide its individual conduct. Hence we have our depraved animal – depraved and debased by the very faculties that ostensibly separate it from animals. Taken all together, one must admit that in reality the individual is a far cry from the rational and corrigible actor upon which our political system is founded. We have, evidenced in ourselves, a creature excluded from the narrative of which it believes itself part. * * * Take a moment to reflect. You will find that all I have said so far is true. If you reject it, it is out of emotional response alone. You have lived your whole life up until this point in some form of compromise understanding about the world. To have it stated plainly is always a shock. The whole purpose of the status quo is to enable higher functioning of society – to enable the cumulative motion of the species, through the accretion of massed, individual effort. We are psychologically programmed to seek out our own version of the status quo, in order to fulfil our simple, biological task in the grand narrative. It is only when one compares one’s own internalised view with another’s, and another’s, that the disparity between all three gives one pause. No two perceptions of the status quo are the same. It is this same lack of uniformity that makes political philosophy an imperfect science. But this is an aside – for later discussion. Let us return to the crux of the matter: When we go in search of the intrinsic meaning of the individual, we find no such thing. High and low – far and wide – a host of other, greater minds than you and I have searched for such a thing. There is not intrinsic value in the existence of any one individual. You will have to admit that now. It is hard! My god, I know it is. But admit it: you must. Now, we can make progress. Part 2. The Meaning Without One The Shore Side And so we arrive at the shores of the sea. Alone, fleeing from forces that would destroy us, followed by only a few – you, the few who will have read this far – we stand before the lapping shores and gaze out of the magisterial might of the water. This is both the story of Moses and the Israelites and of our intellectual journey. We have shed the baggage of our former state – in our case that of denial; in the case of Moses, that through which the Nile so luxuriously flowed – and we are now outcasts to it. We, the intellectual journeymen and –women, are not pursued by a host bent on vengeance. But we are equally alone. We have only three things still reliable to the use. Firstly, we have the knowledge that the history of our race progresses apace. Secondly, we know that we, as single beings, cannot impact on that grand narrative. Third, we know that the only true role of the individual in the grand narrative is one of Darwinian legacy: we exist, because our ancestors existed. We survive to perpetuate, and thus to maintain or bolster the machinery of the narrative. Beyond that, all is adrift for us. So, if we are to go on living – as, it would seem, we are biologically predetermined to do so, through the weight of history – what should we live for? Is there anything at all worth living for? What position can a meaningless person take? It is time to compare the various general views of the status quo that individuals such as we harbour, for if one is to survey the landscape of their community, they would find the struggle of the individual to be a hidden problem. Somehow, every stranger in the street gives the appearance of contentment, or at least of purpose. How then, do the majority address this gaping hole in their lives? What meanings do we meaningless create? The palliative chosen in common is that of belief. The individual in themselves is without meaning. Yet we are, in the main, driven to persevere – either by instinct, stubbornness, or something else that resides within the human being. Hence, throughout the ages the individual has searched without themselves for something larger. What they – we – have taken refuge in is varied, but there are three general ways that can be taken in the face of eternity. Drowning Man At a time such as this the human mind seems a curse. I have oftentimes repeated to myself what has become a sort of personal credo to me in times when I feel most powerfully the acute mental stress that arises from the contradictions of individual life: we are too evolved for our own good. What cruelty, that I can perceive and deduce my own hopeless state? The birds and the beasts are not so concerned. To be self-aware: perhaps this is what the Bible means by the Original Sin. There is no joy in these words. There is no solace. I repeated my credo as a teenager, and have continued to do so, out of the very human desire to articulate these feelings that course through the veins. There is a reason the ancient Greeks thought the heart performed the role of the brain also – because when one thinks something powerful, one feels it with one’s whole body. This leads us to the first of three positions that can be taken by the self-aware individual. This is an emotional reaction – it is a permanent fixity in the first stage of grief. In fact, it is not so much an intellectual response, as an acceptance. It is simply acknowledging the lack of any true purpose. Consider the writings of Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher, who deemed the social malaise, and greatest crisis, of his age to be an absence of metaphysical values – a resort to nihilism. Nietzsche exhorted his fellow man to overcome this social trend. He hoped that it would be overcome, so that the project that is civilization might continue. Yet nihilism as a resort of the valueless – the lost – is not a dead tradition. It emerges in doctrines of postmodernism and deconstruction. The message is modified – for example: there exists a truth, but it is eminently unknowable – but it remains the same at its base. It is the same emotional reaction that one feels at the loss of something precious. It is the philosophy of the disillusioned. Those who once believed in a higher value than themselves, but, finding themselves unable to participate in it, created an equivalency between a single entity’s impotence in the face of the universe and a lack of purpose for all things therein. This is the philosophy that takes the state of the world as a personal affront, and, child-like, refuses participation. Nihilism has not been conquered – as Nietzsche feared that it would not – because it is a perfectly logical response. It is perfectly logical for the postmodern individual to reach such a state of mind when they look in every direction, and find in all parts technologically-enhanced depictions of their true place in the grand narrative of our species, and beyond, the solving emptiness of space. It is perfectly logical for an individual, thus confronted, to surrender the intellectual confrontation between their worldview and the world itself, and sink, like a drowning man, into the ocean of apathy. The only problem is, the nihilist belief makes the individual every bit as helpless as a drowning man. Such a worldview can only be dealt with by diversion and distraction. I wrote earlier that the only way to deal with the solving emptiness I occasionally feel is through the effects of timetabling and directed effort. No doubt this is the same for many: endless work creates the illusion of meaning, even if the components do not add up to a meaningful result. There is no agency claimed for the individual, and hence the individual ceases to be the liberal-democratic citizen. A pretender amidst their peers, such a person exposes themselves to the daily corrosion of their will, because their belief creates negative emotion that has a locus within and hence can only be escaped when self-awareness is escaped, or temporarily forgotten. The nihilist reaction is ripe with the tension that is the thinking human, hamstrung by their capacity for emotional understanding and empathy. To return to the heart-brain concept espoused by the ancient Greeks: the unconscious action of feeling what is thought complicates the process of each greatly. Fear of certain feelings limits the span of what can be thought; the thinking of certain thoughts causes the body of the individual to punish itself. As a species, our misery is because we feel too much of what we think. But it is not our genetic inheritance to process in this way; the interlinked machinery of mind and heart can be used in other ways, in response to the reality the individual finds themselves in. The nihilist’s path is one way, but it is the way of sadness and emptiness. The state of the universe and the individual within it can be dealt with in ways that do not allow this understanding to crush the emotional core of the individual. Parting the Waves The second act of belief is that of religious observance. Whereas nihilism seeks to obviate the grand narrative by declaring it and everything else – human or elemental – meaningless, religion offers the path of transcending the narrative, society, and the material universe. To clarify, by ‘religious’, I mean all belief systems, of any doctrine. I mean any doctrine which it is possible for an individual to invest their sense of purpose in in an interactive sense; be it monotheism, polytheism, science, or philosophy. I do not distinguish between the devout Christian and the devout Universalist, the devout Buddhist and the devout humanist. The doctrine is irrelevant – it is simply a vehicle which the individual invests in to identify a meaning outside of them that in turn creates meaning within them. To understand the true functioning of religious belief, one must merely examine the characteristic that they share: that of recapturing human agency for the individual. Fatalism, a monotheistic Godhead, a pantheon of gods, scientology: all of these belief systems view mankind in its entirety, in terms often described as ‘mankind.’ However, unlike the sense of impotence that the grand narrative instils, these doctrines allow the individual to transcend this helplessness and make contact with a higher power, or to contribute to a higher purpose than they contain within themselves. In essence, one can replace the word ‘religious’ with ‘participatory’ as a preface to ‘belief’. This is a system that empowers the individual by an external logic. In many religious beliefs, we may speak to the gods as individuals through prayer. Differently, but in a similar vein, the contemporary humanist believes in the capacity of the one to directly participate in global affairs, and hence of the fundamental value of all humans – if only because each has the potential to be an agent of positive change beyond themselves. The end result in all of these is the surmounting of the social and political hierarchy – in which the individual devotee locates themselves – with an overarching message of empowerment through direct action. The reader must forgive me that I shall not speak further on religious systems, knowing, and having experienced, less than others in this regard. In addition, in the interests of full disclosure to the reader, I would state my own position on religion in general. I am an agnostic, which neatly places me in the category of those intimidated by the depth and weight of the debate, but not seeing any pressing need to delve into it, nor feeling any spiritual impetus to do so. As such, I would prescribe the generalist advice that, if one makes a rule of disregarding any direct or indirect incitements to intolerance or autocracy of thought within the cannon of all the belief systems that I have herein termed ‘religious’, one finds a body of ethical precepts that would be better followed than not. For example, if one considers the Ten Commandments of the Judo-Christian religions, excluding those first four precepts that are oriented more towards guaranteeing internal uniformity of the organisation of believers and, if I may put it so, religious monogamy in the disciple, one finds a remarkably succinct and unobjectionable set of moral directives. I would hasten to add that any religious precept that meets Immanuel Kant’s ‘universal law’ of ethics, in the same way that the Commandments I have indicated achieve, are worthy of the esteem in which they are held by their adherents. To the extent that religious belief prescribes a worldview that creates a harmony amongst individuals, it is an empowering response to individual meaningless and is therefore both socially and individually fulfilling. I am King Here Both nihilist and religious belief take the metanarratives of existence as the level at which individual meaning must be found. In order to force individual meaning into an otherwise uncaring milieu, the latter creates a power beyond those which they themselves must daily acknowledge. The former simply submits to the extra-personal environment in which they find themselves. Both subscribe to the delusion of hierarchies that lies within the human psyche; either through submission or an attempt to transcend one delusion with something that may well be illusion. However, whilst nihilism plumbs the negative aspects of this delusion, religious belief chooses the more positive path of creating a level of the hierarchy that is beyond the social, political, even global sphere, and linking this to the exercise of human agency. Whether these theoretical constructs are valid, or based in reality – or any dimension within or without – I cannot tell. This is by design. The whole foundation of religious belief is that it must be inconceivable to the individual: for its purpose is to remedy all that is conceivable to them. There is a middle way between nihilism and religion. It combines aspects of each belief, and yet is compatible with neither. It is the way of individualism, for the sake of the individual. It has many branches and manifestations. Yet its basic tenet can be summarised as this: one should seek out happiness whilst one completes one’s biological mission. The biological mission concept varies from individual to individual. It can encompass the biological imperative of family which I spoke of earlier and it can also involve the simple acceptance that one is here, on the earth at this time. The logic is simply: ‘I am, therefore I should make the best of it’. Higher meaning is not as important as the opportunity of the present – meaning comes into being by the efforts of the individual, or else meaning is inferred in one or several states of mind or body that the individual can occupy. Agency is, without question, placed at the forefront of this worldview. It is its keystone assumption. The individual has sovereignty over themselves and their mind and is responsible first and foremost to themselves. They set the terms on which they will live. Inevitably, this must mean a narrower scope of meaning than religion – as meaning can only be found in the elements of life that the individual can directly influence. The individual is adrift before the powers of chance, but what they can wrest control of themselves, belongs firmly and indisputably to them. Arguably, this mindset is at the core of capitalism and of liberal-democratic thinking. The cult of the individual is the flagship of 21st Century Western culture. The trends within our 21st Century society: careerism, materialism and its more specific cousin consumerism – these are all symptoms of the individual beliefs that underpin them. As with any trend, individualism can be taken too far. Rampant hedonism and egoism are two examples of logical extremes to which this worldview can be taken. The homeless drug addict, who has forsaken all else for the pursuit of the pleasure – or respite – that their substance of choice brings them, shares a kinship of belief with the corporate high-flier who disdains to drop money into their hat when they meet on the footpath. They are very different for a host of personal identifiers, moral decisions and individual histories, but at base, both accept their own agency as the prime motive force in their lives and hence the universe, from their points of view. To both, meaning lies wherever they choose it to reside. The Pendulum And so, we have the three general categories into which fall personal reactions to the common destiny of those in the West in the 21st Century. These categories are much the same as those of centuries past, only they are exacerbated by the intoxicating and overwhelming quantity of resources available to the individual. These modern-day resources serve only to make the realisation that individual agency – on any truly meaningful, historical scale – is a fallacy all the harder to bear. All three beliefs share the kindred act of annexing the totalitarian, unreachable grand narratives of species and collective destiny that populate the world of the individual. All three are testament that you must divorce yourself from these things at any cost. They are as untouchable as fate, or the original gods of ancient-times. Do not allow the trappings of postmodern society to deceive you into thinking otherwise; prolonged deception merely lengthens the distance of the inevitable fall. So, what position would I take amongst these three? Does it matter, since all are means to the same end? Stated plain, I refute nihilism and I have no true mandate in the realm of belief, as I’m sure you, the reader, have not, else you would not have continued to read this far. So we – I and you – are in the main agnostics and individualists. But I have already said I was once a nihilist, struggling as many teenagers do with these concepts. And the religious awakening is so commonplace as to join the canon of the social cliché. In truth, the individual changes their worldview and beliefs on many occasions throughout the span of their life. At many points along this span they will play host to a confluence of several of them, or of more specialised offshoots of the three main belief systems. Beliefs are not held rationally. Instead, belief systems, once known to the individual, exist in a constant state of contention within their mind. What is held to be a rational belief is a merely that which has corresponded the most consistently with the external world in that individual’s past experience. This is what I referred to in the Introduction when I said that I hope these writings inform one of the many rewritings of your own personal manifesto; I am content in the knowledge that it will not, and can never, inform them all. At some point, if not now, you will deem these scribbling thoughts aberrant and fanciful. I know I shall, at some point in my lifetime. But that does not change the incontrovertible fact, held within the mind – the most powerful of machines imaginable – that I believe it now. And belief is not rational; it is not just, or by any means ethical. But it is essential to the survival of the individual. An Eternal Cycle In time all things come full circle. The concepts of karma, of heaven and hell, are founded on the general observation that events replicate themselves in human interaction. Perhaps this is due to the false security of certainty that this replication creates, or because it creates the façade of control: it is hard to say why. In linguistics we find pleasure and art in repetition: alliteration, simile, anaphora, parallelism, the one-liner ironically turned on its original user. In visual arts we enjoy the enforced patterns that we can create by the rendering of control and the exercise of manipulation over the external through paint, sketch and photography. On a larger, more problematic, scale, the behavioural characteristic of stereotyping is an attempt to create uniformity and predictability in interactions with unknown others. Whatever the signs, whatever the symptoms, they are collectively indicative of the tendency toward conservatism in the human psyche. Because of this inherent conservatism we are inclined to accept the status quo as the standard of our lives. We do not notice changes in ourselves; perhaps we will not allow ourselves to see such changes. In this sense our own minds are against us. Consciousness is a continuum, and from this springs all manner of paradoxes. We do not see change in ourselves, for it happens so gradually. We think in linear patterns – from birth to death, from BCE to AD, from point A to point B – but we enshrine repetition, nevertheless, because it comforts us. It gives us the sense that we can predict our environment and so control the world we live in. Thus repetition and conservatism – the accretion of like experience – gives us a sense of day-to-day power. Our political architecture echoes this tendency though common and procedural law and corporate knowledge. Herein, lays the greatest socio-political mistake of the West. That mistake is to confuse human tendency with human nature. Permanence plays no inherent part in the individual’s life: that it does not is evidenced by the yearning towards its achievement in relationships, art, business and politics. The problem with liberal-democratic political theory is that it does assume a relative permanence of ideas within the individual. Even John Stuart Mill, who holds that human knowledge is fallible and no belief absolute, writes wistfully of a stage of human development in which the bulk of opinion is rationally incontestable. This assumption may hold true for sciences based on empirical observation and replication of results, but it fails to encapsulate the changeability of the human psyche. The liberal-democratic system is based on the illusion of individual agency in the grand narrative of our times. But we – its citizens, living as we do – see this illusion for what it is, and in our oscillating, irrational efforts to circumvent for ourselves the dread corollaries of this truth, we disprove the system of which we are a part. We are beings of endless, cyclical flux in a structure built on the linear, enlightened progression of all mankind. For beings such as us, the world can never be enough. This world can never be enough – but then, nor can any world. Nor has any world or era prior been enough for the individuals that inhabited it. The world is alien to you: it is revealed by our senses but has no comparable sensory organs to perceive the individual. It recognises the footprint of our species only through the collective weight of our footfall. The sum totals of the senses equate to nothing more than an immersive experience. Immersion is a persuasive ordeal, yet it does not infer meaning; our perceptions have no influence beyond that which the individual prescribes to them. The truism is that the observer creates the reality. Hence, the timeless rhetorical question: ‘If a tree falls in the woods, and no-one is there to hear it, does it truly fall?’ The answer to this question is: it makes no existential difference. Neither the tree nor the individual will be changed in their fundamentals by the witnessing or otherwise of such an event. The tree and the watcher are not connected by any medium. The one can see, hear, taste, touch, smell the falling of the other – but no more than that. However, the watcher will seek for meaning. Perhaps the watcher is a prehistoric shaman, or perhaps a modern-day tourist. The meanings they infer will be different, but both will entertain a train of thought commenced by the tree falling. We humans are great storytellers. We search for conservative meaning through stories. We seek to impose our desires on the external world. But in truth, we allow the external world to impose itself on us. We allow it to cloud our perception. The danger lies in the fact that the external world holds no meaning in relation to the individual. The individual is meaningless. The external world is a chain of causality. Beyond our participation in this physical process, we are at liberty to determine what we will. We are entwined in a place that cold logic dictates we play no part in, so we must take recourse in the illogical to escape within ourselves from that in which we are entwined. To admit this is to fall like a tree. But to accept it is to grow, as it once did. We are entwined in the world. But we are not defined by it; we are not directly linked to its causal chains in anything but body. The mind can be the greatest curse or the greatest happiness. Let us return to the crux of the matter: When we go in search of the intrinsic meaning of the individual, we find no such thing. High and low – far and wide – a host of other, greater minds than you and I have searched for such a thing. There is not intrinsic value in the existence of any one individual. You will have to admit that now. It is hard! My god, I know it is. But admit it: you must. Now, we can make progress. Endnote I have drawn you a thumbnail sketch of the pressures that are exerted on you. What to take from this caricature? How to react to what you see in the mirror? Perhaps none of what I have said reflects on you or your life. But I think at least some of it is accurate for everyone. I think at least some of what I have said strikes a chord of recognition within you. What you do with that recognition – that is your prerogative, as is everything under the sun. But I would urge only that you examine what lies within. Socrates is quoted as saying that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’; the truth in this saying is born witness to by the millennia that it has endured. Unfortunately, he made no mention of the fact that there is nothing harder for the observer to examine than themselves. I have tried to show some facets of you and of myself, for our collective examination. What you and I do with what knowledge we take away is, thankfully, up to our own agency. ### Connect with Me Online This short work is an invitation to you, the reader, to examine your own life. It contains all the knowledge I have gleaned from my own introspections and life events. If this project interested you, or changed your thinking in any small way, please have check out the following page for further information: http://www.facebook.com/TheWorldIsNeverEnough. I wholeheartedly encourage you to post any comments or ideas that you may have about this ebook or its contents. Alternatively, contact me in person at: theworldisneverenough1@gmail.com All the best on your journey, and travel safely, L.