MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Young people do it naturally and spontaneously. The rest of us have to decide consciously whether or not to work, to reach higher in life.
Without wishing to be overly didactic, I think the time is right for me to speak about aspiration and the work of transformation. A lot of popular authors have poured ink on this subject, so I'll try to be as original as possible. I will die of embarrassment if my take on "personal excellence" sounds like Tony Robbins, Tom Peters, Zig Zigler, or Earl Scheib, none of whom I bothered to study much because they looked so dorky and happyface on TV.
It should surprise no one that transformation proceeds from our understanding of philosophy. Grasp a truth and change, it's as simple as that. The aspirant character wishes to undertake such comprehension as rapidly as possible, in hot pursuit of the Real Deal, which is self. Am I real? How do I face the certainty of my death? What shall I do, until I lose my power to act?
Most of the basic truths are faced at age ten (or never). The advanced class takes all of puberty, adolescence, mating, and marriage to complete -- at the successful conclusion of which we find it necessary to start over, to redefine ourselves as individual people, beyond the awkward entanglements of family. This much is probably driven by DNA, a silent memory shared by all of humanity, to grow oneself and ultimately face the fact of adulthood alone.
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Alone means uniquely. I realize precisely how hard that is. From the drugstore sameness of our biology, to the pressure of mass media, we are relentlessly reminded that no one is an unique creature. The war that Ayn Rand fought 50 years ago was a pyrotechnic literary assault on the notion of collectivism and irresponsible determinism -- that we are interchangeable, helpless pawns in the vast armies of "dialectical history," to use the Marxist expression -- or that life is fundamentally pointless and nauseating, as brainy Existentialists alternately moaned or joked (and lectured about in U.S. university courses). In economics, we are told that individual men and women do not meaningfully exist. In law, we are treated indentically by the State, who interprets our behavior not as unique individuals, but rather according to a detailed set of majority specifications of "legally permitted" behavior that heretics ignore or evade at their peril.
I know it's hard work becoming an individual. That's the point. If it wasn't difficult and dangerous, everybody could and would do it. There would be new Martin Luther Kings and Margaret Thatchers by the boatload, clogging up the headlines with an incredible pace of social transformation, for example. Kids wouldn't be morons who limit the scope of their lives to shopping malls and sports arenas -- they'd be profoundly unique, individual prodigies, excelling in math or rocket science or moral philosophy, or all three, with vastly divergent insights on current affairs. Opinion polls would cease to function, if everybody responded with a personal, thoughtful answer.
I suppose we have some evidence, suggesting that individuality and personal expression are on the rise. The internet brought a thousand new voices online (including mine), and several million nitwits (including me) have home pages that reiterate an identical claim, over and over -- Hey! I'm different!
Would that we were. But our stories are mostly alike, and our hopes are nearly always the same. Peace, prosperity, joy. Celebrate the fact that we live. Discuss the means of improving same.
For those of you who want something a little more difficult, I have a suggestion. All abstract knowledge depends on the structure of language and conceptual definitions. I assume that you already know the basics of logic. If not, please visit Wolf's Crash Course in Classical Logic, linked somewhere on the way to another copy of The 51 Percent Solution at http://www.cthonia.com/lyceum.
Logical inference is only as good as our grasp of the terms. That's why it's a bad idea to attempt to reason about God -- an essentially goofy concept that admits of no verifiable or cognitively helpful definition. I am not now arguing for a dogma that either asserts or denies the existence of God. Rather, I am saying that the term itself is silly. No wonder that mankind has three hundred separate beliefs as to the character of God, none of them remotely cogent. See Queenie's newly edited compendium of Religious Isms at http://www.cthonia.com/atrium.
The point of questioning language and the meaning of terms is to get at the real work of personal growth. You are a zombie, unless you personally advance your understanding beyond the dictionary definition of a term. Further, I submit that our language has several thousand completely dumb concepts that don't deserve to be studied (sovereignty, faith, unicorn, general welfare, sacrament) -- while the terms we need most are either completely unknown or poorly defined. These missing concepts are those which each of us struggles independently to grasp and which no one has satisfactorily defined.
Where is the word that expresses and explains the content of discovery when a child grasps for the first time that he or she is alive?
What idea distinguishes between love of justice and romantic love?
Define dignity, liberty, mercy.
I know that the business of immediate activities makes it difficult to focus on abstract understanding, however vital it may be to our growth. I'm presently engaged in a difficult project (a new novel), as well as several other business responsibilities. But the distant future matters more than I can express. The central purpose of my adult life has not changed in thirty years, and it remains a vital personal objective that illuminates everything else, including the most mundane of routine tasks. It gives me the fuel to keep working, to keep exploring and sharpening my wits, because I have to climb every inch of an uncertain terrain that stretches from yesterday to my highest value. I'm fighting for my future. It's a steep uphill struggle, from ignorant youth to the attainment of an individual quest. If I get there, I'll know that my life was not in vain, that I achieved something that required decades of preparation and personal struggle, and that I was correct about spiritual courage. A distant pinnacle is implicit in human aspiration. I know what mine is.
What's yours?
Winston Churchill did a great job of growing himself, as did M.L. King and many others. The fascination of biography is a broad testament to the human potential for greatness and our shared hope that my individual life will mean something, too -- that it won't be wasted or insignificant or forgotten. Parents often sacrifice themselves for children. I don't recommend it, but the pull of family can be stronger than the temptation to separate and stand alone. In The 51 Percent Solution archived at http://www.wolfdevoon.com, I blessed all parents, acknowledging the heavy burden they chose sincerely and carry diligently. But parenthood is best done by young couples, in the thrawl of devotion. At a certain point, you have to let go, if you want your kids to stand on their own two feet as adults in their own right. That implies an occasion to restart your own life as an individual, no longer mindful of toddlers or teenagers or a spouse (beloved or otherwise). There is a limit to how long we can remain altruistically devoted to the lives of others. All men and women share the same destiny, sooner or later, to grow alone or grow not.
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