The Great Reconstruction

Part Four: In Search of Existential Health in a Defective World

In my view, I will consider this post a success (and your entire annual paid membership for that matter) if one of the following things happen:

• You learn something new that simultaneously makes you a more profound and whole human being, and contributes to the common good of all humankind.

• You are willing to examine and scrutinize a long-held belief, assumption or theory that has never really occurred to you before to question.

• You discover a new area of knowledge, way of thinking, or body of ideas you are compelled or inspired to investigate further.

• You feel hopeful and empowered by the realization that what you think and do matters, and you’re the kind of person who can have an extraordinary impact on the world around you.

This is Part Four of this series “The Great Reconstruction”.

In Part One, Everything is not okay... but life is the greatest good, I share how this series is a culmination of thoughts, sparked by the words spoken to me, “I never feel okay.”

Something is not right, and deep down we know it. In our life, in the world, in the answers and explanations we have been given – something is off and doesn’t line up. In Part One, I wrote about this angst:

“We’ve tried to fix it. On a species level we created religion, philosophy and spirituality to explain, overcome, numb or manage our existential angst. We’ve taken up grand political and revolutionary movements to guarantee us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We put our faith in science and technology to straighten things out. Nothing seems to work.

There’s this psychical black hole and regardless of how much money, possessions, thrills, achievement, recognition, fitness, self-improvement and Netflix we throw at it, we are never quite satisfied or at least not for long.”

What is the actual problem?

In the series I have diagnosed the problem as “defects” in existence. It’s not that there is actually something about life that is "wrong, but because it is not as we wish it would be, we perpetually feel anxiety and angst, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes subtly, sometimes demonstratively.

A “defect” is defined as a “shortcoming, imperfection, or lack.” Our human existence falls short, and is imperfect and incomplete in ways we wish it wasn’t. The three defects are:

Human mortality - we all die (inevitability of death)

Human groundlessness - we don’t know why we are here (lack of absolutes like the meaning of human existence)

Human insatiability - we are never satisfied (unabating desire for fulfillment)

Despite these defects, life is the greatest good. Is the best way to honor, enjoy and fully actualize the greatest good of life to deny or accept these givens of human existence? And what does it mean to “accept” them?

There is no ideal world for us to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to us how we respond to it. We are stuck in a dilemma. One horn of the dilemma is what happens when we face the defects of our existence. The other horn is what happens when we fail to face them.

In my view, the prevailing approach, effect and result of most meaning-making belief systems, whether they be religious, philosophical, spiritual or secular, is denial or failing to sufficiently address the defects of human existence. That is not meant to be a criticism or judgement. All belief-systems are created by human beings caught in the throes of the dilemma of the human condition, which means they act in part as coping mechanisms.

I could make the argument, and actually do in my series, The Evolution of Religion, that the religious imagination was born to bolster the necessary psychological immunity and resiliency for species survival. But what enabled our species to survive and thrive then, is what’s preventing and threatening our existence and progress now.

Part Two of this series, What if the meaning of life is... life?, is challenging our inclination, assumption or belief that life is meaningful primarily as a launching pad to something else. A few examples would be:

• Life is meaningful because we know it is only a temporary or transition stage to eternal life.

• Life is meaningful because it is the backdrop to discovering who or what we are beyond it.

• Life is meaningful because the metaphysical or ontological Beyondness of existence is extraordinary.

• Life is meaningful because it is in the process of a cosmic evolution toward a spectacular new age.

What’s evident about all the above scenarios is that they can’t seem to find our everyday walking-around life enough on its own, without adornment. It seems we are forever seeking to “super size” life to make it worth living.

In Part Two of this series, I essentially made the point that life is the greatest good and deeply meaningful because:

• Life allows for existence

  We can debate how “good” or “bad” existence is generally or your or my existence particularly, but without life there would be no existence at all. Even if its true that death results in non-existence, without life it all would be non-existence and we would have never known any existence.

• The lived human experience includes love, joy and beauty

  While it’s true that we experience and witness misery and suffering in the world, we also experience what we use words like “love”, “joy”, and “beauty” to describe. Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world.” His point transcends aesthetics and is referring to the good that resides in each of us and connects us deeply together. Life is meaningful because it is the context and raw materials for love, joy and beauty.

• Human beings are context-transcendent

  It’s true that each of us are bound to specific and fixed coordinates of body, era and place on the timeline of history. But as it turns out, the gift of life uniquely to Homo sapiens is that we acquired and fine-tuned a set of capacities, skills and tools that allow us to transcend our human reality at any point in time, and create a different one. Some of those capacities include language, critical thinking, complex reasoning, art, human empathy, and purposeful collaboration.

So here’s the question:

Is life meaningful and worth living solely on the basis that we were snatched out of non-existence to live, able to experience love, joy and beauty, and occupy a space of infinite potentialities and possibilities to create the best of all possible worlds?

In Part Two of this series, I referred to the above description as the “Grand Invocation”, which summons each of us to live life courageously, resolutely and spartanly with no reserve, no retreat, and no regret. In fact, in Part Three of this series, Is the world worth saving?, I argue that we have a worthy rationale for going all-in on remaking the world in acceptance of the three defects of human existence.

More Good News

Yeah, Charlie looks a little unhappy and exhausted. But what Charlie doesn’t know is that there is a lot of good news about facing life as it is and remaking society in the interest of creating the best world possible, which we all could enjoy together.

I want to challenge the assumption that what we most need is a transcendent, supernatural or world-escaping ideology in order to make life work. That we, in fact, can accept human morality, human groundlessness and human insatiability and live our best life possible individually and collectively.

I’ve mentioned several times how most meaning-making systems and ideologies thwart progress. Let me be more specific. In my view, any enterprise of religion, spirituality, or philosophy (or any meaning-making belief system) is unhelpful to the extent that it:

• Diminishes our enthusiasm and commitment to work toward the best world possible in the present, in anticipation of a better eternal life in the future.

• Prejudices an enlightened, transcendental, mystical state of being over the common human experience in our temporary, impermanent and fragile world and existence.

• Implies that the necessary powers to change and remake the world are divine, supernatural or suprahuman in nature, and beyond ordinary human abilities and capacities.

• Locates the truth, knowledge, wisdom, and insight for higher living in an exclusive or special group of religious, spiritual, or philosophical gurus and elaborate conceptual frameworks, rather than the full depository of collective intelligence that we all contribute to.

• Perpetuates ideologies that determine one’s relative worth and value based upon their ideological devotion, and divides up the world into us and them, believers and unbelievers, saints and sinners, innocents and scapegoats.

• Attempts to deny, bypass, circumvent or escape the defects and givens of human existence by substituting false, feel-good, and beguiling promises and beliefs in their place.

• Vilifies, belittles or disparages the material world and human nature as the impediment to wholeness, liberation and well-being.

Think of yourself right now, reading this. Maybe you are a Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Mormon or Atheist. Maybe you are a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, Whiteheadian process thinker, or Zizekian materialist. Whatever it is you believe, to the extent that your understanding of these religions and philosophies is guilty of any of the above eight items is an indication of it’s value, in my opinion.