Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
As always when one starts engaging in some new educational endeavor, for a while the fabric of reality begins to unravel itself in a particular way. The words in the textbook stand up, jump off the page and make their way into the streets. During the corona virus quarantine Eric Dodson, a professor at the University of West Georgia, uploaded all his Humanistic Psychology lectures onto YouTube. I had just completed After Socrates by John Vervaeke and had fallen deeply in love with Soren Kierkegaard. Who, after listening to Christopher Mastropietro wax lyrical about Kierkegaard, would not fall sweepingly into his arms? Mastropietro’s ability to loosely possess the English language with eloquence, grace and a hypnotizing cadence is exceptional. He is one of the best orators of our time. Once I emerged from the vertiginous whirlwind of Mastropietro’s Kierkegaard, and had begun to gather myself, the YouTube algorithm led me to Dodson’s work. And thus began my education on existentialism.
Three weeks in, my day-to-day encounters with people, challenges, tasks etc. are all shrouded in an existential cloak. Existentialism has received such a bad rap that many believe that this cloak must be a dark and gloomy one, I haven’t found it to be so. Well, what existentialism does is to bring us face-to-face with reality and the nature of life. Reality is harsh, but when we stop running away from it through various numbing agents, distractions and addictions, and truly reckon with it, there is a freedom to be found there. A lightness in the heaviness and play in the seriousness. Reality accepted is a reality which releases and all the anxiety, fear, uncertainty, dread etc. don’t cling to the brief candle of our lives like poison ivy.
Every morning, I walk to the gym, and on my way, I pass trees which I find myself reaching out to touch. There is something that I find soothing when I touch the texture of leaves. There are also thickets which I end up brushing up against. By the time I get to the gym or home later in the day, my jacket has gathered a glorious number of blackjacks and I spend the next 10 minutes of my day de-blackjacking (is that a word?) my fleece. That is the plant’s way of spreading its seeds, through other animals like me. Unfortunately, this particular human animal is indoors at day’s close, with the blackjacks ending up in the trash. Plants, especially weeds, are very crafty, so they may wind up in a place they can find root regardless of my actions. Anyway, this is how I sometimes feel when it comes to our existential angst, anxiety and fears. In our refusal to face reality, we gather these as we make our passage through life and end up spreading them to other people around us. They show up in our work, in our restless filled ‘rest’, spirituality, and colonize every aspect of our lives. Inadvertently, our attempts to flee reality only worsen things for us, and at an alarming rate at that.
So here I was watching the Ashley Madison Netflix docuseries, and I began to observe its entire unfolding through an existential lens. Just a little bit of context, Ashley Madison is an online dating website for married people who have the desire to participate in extramarital affairs. Included in the service offered by Ashley Madison was discretion. Clients were under the impression that all their data would be secured. It wasn’t. The company was hacked, and a lot of client data was released onto the dark web. It was a big deal at the time because highly public personalities were implicated in the matter. It was a shit show, if you will allow me some french. I learnt a lot from the docuseries, in light of my current existential preoccupation, about others but mostly about myself.
Lying to Ourselves
In conversation with one of my clients who has a bent towards the law being the daughter of a magistrate and the plan being to go into law herself in the near future, we had a discussion over statutory rape. A month ago, a 17-year-old girl posted a video on social media thanking her boyfriend for their four-year-anniversary gift (an iPhone 15). Turns out that the boyfriend is a forty-something married pastor from the East Rand. There was social uproar because if the math is mathing, then they started dating when she was 13. Black Twitter (now X) called for his arrest.
My young interlocutor felt that this matter was black and white and that the pastor should be arrested because that is just the law. There is a famous musician in South Africa, Busta929, who is notoriously known for dating young girls and he has pretty much gotten away with it. Here is the thing, even if our legal system were practically what it theoretically purports to be, this would not put the slightest dent in curbing this behavior. Reason being this problem is cultural. It has been widely accepted and is deeply entrenched in black culture in particular. When I was in high school, everyone was dating a guy in varsity. Now that I think about it, I too was dating a guy in varsity at the time. It was dating in the most innocent of ways, an only holding hands type of thing, it didn’t escalate beyond that because my mother was nothing to be played with. She once caught me holding hands with him and both our lives were threatened, and she meant it. Lol. My mother objected to dating in its entirety, it did not matter whether the guy was a peer, older or younger; she just did not want me to date. The fact remains I was a minor in a romantic relationship with a guy who was a varsity track athlete. In Yizo Yizo, which first aired in 1999, Hazel (played by Nomonde Gongxeka-Seopa) dated a taxi driver. No one so much as batted an eyelid. When behaviors are a constrictor knot, the law is ineffective in undoing these impossible knots. No outside structure, particularly South African law enforcement, will be able to dismantle these behaviors. It has to happen from the inside out. When we cry foul on social media with our mouths and yet our right hands are behind our backs doing the very thing we are publicly protesting against, we are doing something worse than engaging in hypocrisy, we are engaging in self-deception.
In the docuseries, self-deception is rife. For the most part, I noticed that people would engage in “morally reprehensible” behavior if there is the slightest chance that they will get away with it as long as they can still wear the mask of being a good husband or wife to their spouse and community. Most of us will steal money if we know we can get away with it. It isn't so much that we are honest people, it is that the perfect opportunity has not yet presented itself. Our honesty or faithfulness is contingent, and this contingency undermines the entire value enterprise.
We have a CEO, Noel Biderman, who went on talk show after talk show with his wife, Amanda, repeatedly telling the world that even though they were in the adultery business, as a couple they were ‘happily monogamous.’ Meanwhile, Biderman is soliciting the services of barely legal escorts in the background. Then, we have Sam Radar, who portrayed the picture of the perfect, doting husband on social media platforms, and yet had been having trysts before and during his marriage with Nia. When Radar was first implicated in the scandal, he repeatedly lied to his wife about the extent of his clandestine activities. He had even made advances on one of Nia’s closest friends who as a result cut ties completely with Nia and her family. It wasn’t until the threat of undeniable exposure loomed did, he eventually come clean to Nia. It reminds me of a C.S. Lewis quote where he writes that it is no use saying you choose to lie down when you can no longer stand up. Nia, herself, engaged in self-deception by convincing herself that somehow what she did as a wife, could earn the faithfulness of her husband. She made sure that she carried out the duties of a great Christian wife. As if we can control anyone’s behavior but our own. Even our own behavior sometimes stymies us. We say that we won’t do something, then we end up right where we did not want to be. As Emeli Sande puts it in Heaven, “Oh heaven, oh heaven/ I wake with good intentions/ But the day, it always lasts too long.” The stoics remind us to separate the things we can control and the things we can’t control; other people belong in the latter category. We should rather adopt the posture of the humanistic psychologist, Carl Rogers, who wrote, “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” More on our response to other people later.
For the most part, we assess each other according to behavior. We have rigged the game of life where behavior becomes the most salient thing. We do not go any deeper and it is about how we can outwardly convince other people we are who we portray ourselves to be. It is more important for us to appear honest or be perceived as honest, rather than being honest. We have this entire thing backwards, turning our lives into fodder for self- deception. The litmus test for the state of our lives, according to Tom Bilyeu, is how we feel about ourselves when we are by ourselves. Personally, this has quietened a lot of noise for me, and it has helped me come to terms with who I currently actually am and the values that I currently hold and be ok with it. Not as a static personality but accepting myself in the process of constant becoming.
When it comes to behavior, the same behavior can stem from two different places. The obvious one is killing. You can kill someone in self defense or you can kill because “somebody gotta die” as that Lupe Fiasco song goes. Same behavior, different processes leading to the behavior. The existentialist Jean Paul Sartre introduces the concept of radical freedom in his writings, where radical is the word derived from the word meaning root. Behaviors are to be understood at the root or rather they should emerge from the root. The actions we take should be an exercise in radical freedom where we willingly choose them, and own them, regardless of the consequences. Sartre differentiates between what he calls “good or bad faith,” from whence behavior comes. It can come as an exercise in radical freedom or by blaming other people or making excuses. When discussing Kierkegaard, one of the points which Vervaeke and Mastropietro make is how Kierkegaard placed great emphasis on the “how” rather than the “what” of behavior. As we decide on our next steps, are we being faithful to the spirit or the letter?
As we rounded up our conversation, we came to the realization that any true change can only be truly achieved at the individual level first, where the individual takes full responsibility for their actions and faithfully straps the Sisyphean weight of that responsibility to their back. It is the individual who ultimately chooses, who can no longer hide behind the skirts of the collective, if anything were to change. “We are old hands at denying the truth of ourselves, of turning our heads, of refusing to turn the telescope inwards,” (Ian McCallum). This is the only place where we can begin, inwards, not with other people, or society. It is within ourselves. Once we are able to clear away the webs of self-deception, we can really start living authentically. McCallum writes:
Because we all have something of the hag and the hyena in us. We are all, in our own subtle ways, manipulators, conmen and we own a little bit of the beggar, too. We are pathetic, but we are also wonderful. And when we know this, when we recognize our inflation, or the scavenger, the conman, and the road-rage creature within us, then we can learn how to say yes and no to them.
There is a story about how Diogenes the Cynic walked through the ancient Greece marketplace carrying a torch saying that he was looking for one honest man. Described by Plato, as a “Socrates gone mad,” he did this in an attempt to expose the hypocrisy and general dishonesty of how people interact with one another. Let us turn that lamp inwards and set it up in the clearing of our hearts to illuminate all our ways.
We have all interacted with the internet long enough to know that the internet does not forget. I bought an android phone a couple of days ago, and while setting up my gallery, a picture that I had taken more than a decade ago popped up on my screen. I had forgotten about the picture, but the internet has a long memory. Unnerving. With that being said, when we engage in self-deception, we also begin courting delusions. Both Biderman and Radar knew this about the internet when they pursued their duplicitous behavior but they still lied, to the bitter end. Self-deception removes us so far from reality that our judgments become unsound because they are based on a reality we’ve warped and essentially sucked out of our thumbs. Not that we should own our actions because of the looming risk of exposure but rather because they are ours to own.
Vervaeke describes wisdom as the ability for us to attune ourselves to what life asks of us and to respond harmoniously. He also acknowledges self-deception as one of the greatest hindrances to the development of wisdom. Dodson points out that it is our addiction to our own self-importance that leads us astray. We think that we are so special, wealthy, beautiful, famous, privileged that reality does not apply to us. We are so sure that we are that much smarter than everyone else that we can pull the wool over everyone else’s eyes. We reduce other people to objects of manipulation and control. But the thing is, the sun shines on us all. The further we climb up the stairs of self-importance, the precipitous the fall when all delusions disapparate.
The antidote, according to Dodson, presents itself in three parts: cultivating humility, self-awareness, and courage. Our need for self-importance is our way of establishing some semblance of control, but control is an illusion. Life is characterized by uncertainty and imminent death, and we don’t actually know what will happen to us thereafter. We just don’t know and admitting that is difficult for most of us. All we can do is empty ourselves of the stories we tell ourselves, and approach life with palms upturned, and watch it unfold with wonder. Confucius wrote that the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their proper name. It is about seeing things as they really are, including ourselves. Self-awareness brings us back to shore when the tides of self-deception have dragged us too far in. A commitment to self-awareness will steer us clear of the advancing coastline. That commitment requires courage and so does moving forward in the face of reality at its harshest and most naked. It’s the Paul Tillich idea, that we need to muster the courage to be while the world shifts beneath our feet. Plato described self-deception as the worst form of deception; so, it seems the worst is the best place to begin.
Hell is Other People
Season 1 Episode 4 of Being Mary Jane begins with a Bob Marley quote: “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just have to find the ones worth suffering for.” Marley points us to the fact that being relational is risky and that it is a risk we have to accept if we are to know others and be known by others. The deeper we are in a relationship, the higher the risk that when those people cause us pain, it is going to hurt like hell. It is no secret that the people who we are most intimate and vulnerable with, know where all our buttons are and which to push if they wish to detonate us. It is not just that other people know our depths but that from those depths, expectations rise to the surface. We expect those who love us to act in certain ways, to show up in particular ways and at other times to be able to read our minds and figure out our needs without us having to spell them out. We start creating our relationships in our own images and want our romantic partners, particularly, to fall in line. When people fail to live up to our expectations, which they inevitably do as we do theirs, the fires of hell start burning. Over a long enough timeline, our relationships become a spectacular inferno destroying us in unimaginable ways. And so, watching the docuseries, I felt the anguish as Nia’s story unfolded but I also felt the betrayal of a company that swore to keep its client’s data private. Anger bubbled within me when hackers decided to play God which led to people taking their lives. I felt all of these as a spectator, with no dog in the fight. I could only imagine the people who were living this incendiary mess. A large part of me agreed with Jean Paul Satre when he wrote that hell is other people. When the emotions subsided however, I recalled Dodson’s words that other people don’t cause us nearly as much pain as we cause ourselves. In Noname’s song Beauty Supply she raps, “New identity, same enemy… me.” Hell is usually ourselves.
Even if, for argument’s sake, hell is indeed other people, what then is the alternative? Do we go off to some cabin in the woods like Ted Kaszynski and swear off people forever? Do we, as American psychologist Rollo May says, build up a stockade and refuse to let anyone in which also prevents us from participating fully in the lives of others. As someone who usually retreats into my interiority when life feels like Tekken 6 and I am really “being taught what fear is”, it is encounters with other people, a handful of friends, books, music that expand my consciousness and enrich me. Even if these were all to fade away, there would be God. As Saba asks in Photosynthesis, “how you lonely in a room with God?” The trinitarian God always entreats to relationship with others, to the practice and perfection of agape. Afterall, when Jesus went up the mountain to pray, He eventually came down.
In Alone with Others, Stephen Batchelor reminds us that our relationship with others is not an accidental, spatial occurrence, it is ontological. Being in relationship with others is fundamentally constitutive of who we are. This brings to mind that age old question of whether the tree that falls in the forest with no one perceiving its fall really falls? When we call to others and there is no one to hear our call, do we really even call out? Do we even exist? As bats echolocate with objects around them, we orient ourselves with the people around us. It is the way we know that we exist. The word “existence” has its etymology from the Latin words which directly translate to “standing out.” In a way, the tree falling in the woods does not exist because it does not stand out. Our individuality emerges from our collectiveness.
Almost 8 billion people are currently roaming the earth, yet loneliness is at an all-time high. Many people are living the alternative, and it is just not working. Loneliness is not just characterized by isolation, but as Batchelor points out, there is another side to the loneliness coin. Loneliness is also characterized by a lack of participation. Regardless of the inner experience we may have, it “only achieves true completeness when it has been spoken,” (Batchelor). Our call has to be answered by others, necessarily so. Batchelor continues:
No matter how profound an insight one may gain, as long as it stays inarticulately concealed within an introspective silence, it remains one-dimensional and incomplete. However inadequate our words and concepts may be in accurately communicating our experiences; it is only in the act of conceptualizing them to ourselves and subsequently articulating them to others that they finally come to completeness. Only through articulation can an inner experience realize a degree of dimensional complexity that fully harmonizes with our ontological constitution.
For better or worse, we are inextricably tied to other people. However, we do get to create the dynamic between us and others. In The Discovery of Being, May shares how he has seen that the fear of castration (losing one’s power) has been replaced by the fear of ostracism. This would make sense in this era of loneliness. People over participate relationally, which means that they lose themselves in others. They lose their distinctiveness to the homogenizing factor of conformity. They lose themselves in their marriages and all the different roles of their lives that they have mistakenly begun to identify with. In this relational scenario, our individuality is threatened, and is not accepted as a necessary component of the unity found in all relationships.
At times an inclination to individuality at the cost of participation disrupts our existence, and at times our individuality is threatened with dissolution through submission, imposed or voluntary, to the will of another or to the force of an impersonal collective. (Batchelor)
In a way, while Nia had fully immersed herself in her role as mother and wife, Sam felt straightjacketed by his roles as father and husband. His infidelity was an internal cry for freedom, resistance against over participation. The weight of his responsibility was overwhelming, and he escaped it with transgressive acts. In a way, Sam was carried away by his preconceptions of what falling in love meant. It meant getting married, having children and providing for his family. When the reality of all of that congealed into a day-in-day-out existence, he balked. He projected his life forward into the future and could not reconcile it with reality. Sam acted out of bad faith by getting married and having children. Not that there's anything wrong with getting married and having children, but he approached his life as someone wearing the borrowed and ill-fitting robes of someone else. He didn’t soberly choose his life; he blindly followed an idea. The problem with wearing other people’s robes is that there will come a day when you take them off, leave them on the floor and step over them as you make your way out of the door.
At times an inclination to individuality at the cost of participation disrupts our existence, and at times our individuality is threatened with dissolution through submission, imposed or voluntary, to the will of another or to the force of an impersonal collective. (Batchelor)
One of the ways we can negotiate the relational landscape in a way that affirms and in a way that does not oscillate between the two extremes of the relational continuum is by taking complete responsibility for our actions. It is by making decisions in good faith and accepting whatever comes with those decisions. When we accept full responsibility, then we can begin to unburden others. We can relieve them of the need to carry our existential burdens in the name of love. We can actually lie down in the beds we’ve made and get a good night’s sleep while we are at it.
In I and thou Martin Buber articulates how we can perceive and engage with others in such a way that encounters with others are creative and personhood-building. When we instrumentalize people then we approach them in a “I and It” way, and we participate in an erasure of personhood. There is a way to say “I” in the spirit of ubuntu (I am because you are) that truly honors the other person. Buber expounds on this personhood constitutive I as follow:
How much of a person a man is depends on how strong the I of the basic I-You is in the human duality of his I. The way he says I- what he means when he says I- decides where a man belongs and where he goes. The word “I” is the true shibboleth of humanity. Listen to it. How dissonant the I of the ego sounds! When it issues from tragic lips, tense with some self-contradiction that they try to hold back, it can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represent contradiction, it can make us shudder. When the lips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or disgusting. Those who pronounce the severed I, wallowing in the capital letter, uncover the shame of the world spirit that has been debased to mere spirituality. But how beautiful and legitimate the vivid and emphatic I of Socrates sounds! It is the I of the infinite conversation, and the air of conversation is present in all its ways, even before his judges, even in the final hour in prison. This I lived in relation to man which is embodied in conversation. It believed in the actuality of men and went out toward them. Thus, it stood together with them in actuality and is never severed from it. Even solitude cannot spell forsakenness, and when the human world falls silent for him, he hears his daimonion say You.
This Socratic I cost Socrates his life. He had committed himself so faithfully to the “actuality of men” that he was willing to die for it. Authority had turned against him, but this wasn’t the match that set the fires of hell. Instead, he quelled what would have been inflammatory and riotous, and refused to turn his back on man. Loneliness was not on the cards for him, and his being alone did not prevent him from being with others in the Batchelorian sense. Sometimes, the way we uniquely participate in the world may drive us to solitude, this is okay. This doesn’t mean that we abandon our existential stances to drive out solitude, but we exercise what Albert Camus referred to as an existential defiance and embrace the solitude. Perhaps you may find some comfort in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke “You suffer, you say, because the people closest to you are distant: this shows that your world is beginning to grow vast. And if what’s near you is far, then how enormous your whole extent is, reaching all the way up to the stars.”
At the end of the day, when it comes to other people; your freedom is what you choose to do with what’s been done to you. You are absolutely free to be unaffected. You are absolutely free to run towards this freedom even if this spells death. As Satre puts it, “men are condemned to be free.”
The Calculus of Felicity
When I was young, I learned very quickly that life isn’t fair. What took me quite a long time, too long to admit, to learn is that life is not about being happy. Everything I did was aimed at maximizing happiness or turning unhappiness to happiness which I truly believed was the whole point of this living thing. I felt life was about getting everything you wanted and worked hard for. It was about accomplishments, getting married to the dream guy, having two boys (non-negotiable, lol!) and living the “mama I made it” life. It didn’t help that, according to the church, being blessed meant having material possessions. In a way, there was a lot of Nia in me. It did not take me too long to be dissuaded from these notions though. Life, the great teacher.
I’ve always been different to everyone around me. I thought differently and behaved differently as well and just stuck out like a sore thumb. This difference caused me a lot of pain and trying to fit in, and repeatedly failing at it, was one long saga. I wore my difference like a scarlet letter, ashamed of it. At some point, I befriended my difference, because I was tired of fighting it and it, incredibly, became my superpower. However, even though I had completely owned my difference, the pain was still there. Other people have a hard time dealing with difference, it makes them uncomfortable, and they don’t know what to do with it which usually means they push back on it. Before, the pain came from the inside (I was causing myself pain), this time the pain came from the outside (other people), but it was much easier to deal with. I would rather be at war with others than be at war with myself. Over time, the effect that other people have on me has decreased substantially. All this to say is that I no longer fought suffering by trying to wish it away, I made peace with the fact that suffering is just going to be a part of life. My thing then became about doing what I can to get through it, and each time making a concerted effort to not let it destroy any part of me or change me in ways that I do not wish it to change.
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with the calculus of felicity which is also known as hedonic calculus. It’s actually pretty cool the way he has broken down the factors that drive our hedonistic decisions and actions. There are seven parts to the calculus: intensity (how intense the pleasure will be), duration (how long the pleasure will last), certainty (how sure we are that the pleasure will elicit pleasure), fecundity (how pleasure is affected by the repetition of the action), propinquity (proximity of the pleasure with regards to space and time), purity (the degree that the action is pure) and the extent (the number of people who will be affected by the pleasure.)
Without even being completely aware of it, we engage in this calculus on a regular basis, and here you thought that mathematics wasn’t your thing. We have this idea that life is about scoring high on the hedonometer and yet we know how fleeting pleasure is, just like happiness. The pursuit of happiness only makes us more dissatisfied with our lives. It eludes our grasp each and every time. We spend most of our time in pursuit, never taking the time to enjoy what we do have. According to Kierkegaard, there are three stages of reality we can live in. The aesthetic stage is characterized by a focus on personal pleasure and individual experience. In this stage,we seek fulfillment through external experiences, such as art, beauty, or sensations. This is a life driven by passion and desire, where we seek immediate gratification without worrying about the consequences of our actions. This is where most of us have made a home.
The ethical stage, on the other hand, is focused on the pursuit of moral values and principles. In this stage, we recognize our responsibilities and obligations to society and seek to live according to a higher ethical standard. This involves making difficult choices and sacrifices for the greater good, rather than indulging in personal desires. The ethical stage represents a move towards a more mature and responsible way of living.
Finally, for Kierkegaard, the religious stage is the highest and most fulfilling stage of existence. In this stage, we turn to faith and spirituality as a way of finding meaning and purpose in life. It involves a deep commitment to a religious belief system, as well as a willingness to surrender ourselves to a higher power. Through faith, we can find a sense of peace, fulfillment, and transcendence beyond the limitations of the material world.
While not all existentialists were religious, they did all agree on one thing. They all believed that life was about much more than being happy. Dostoevsky believed that to close ourselves off to the dark aspects of life is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is not about getting what you want, for that only makes you a prisoner of your pleasures. True freedom, which he calls our most advantageous advantage, is that we can choose anything that life offers us. Instead of choosing the things we like, that would be Maynard wine gums for me, we can choose something we don’t like, like that salty liquorice from Woolworths (barf!), for the sake of it. What this does is remind us that we actually have not given up all our power to our pleasures. Things like preferences are actually quite arbitrary in that we can consciously choose differently. We can learn to like other things or just let life surprise us. When we lean towards our preferences then we close ourselves off to certain aspects of reality. Existentialism calls us to experience life, the dark parts and the light parts, the things we like and those we don’t, the rational and irrational, happiness and suffering.
In The Coolest, Lupe Fiasco raps, “I love the Lord, but sometimes it’s like that I love me more/ I love the peace and I love the war/ I love the seas and I love the shore.” Lupe acknowledges our contradictions and paradoxes which are a part of our human experience. He does this in a lot of his songs. He juxtaposes two extremes which widens our aperture of perception and consideration when it comes to human beings and opens up the conversation between these extremes and everything in between. In This is War by 30 Seconds to Mars, a similar theme can be picked up:
A warning to the people/ The good and the evil/ This is war/ To the soldier, the civilian/ The martyr, the victim/ This is war/ It’s the moment of truth, and the moment to lie/ The moment to live and the moment to die/ A warning to the prophet/ The liar, the honest/ This is war/ To the leader, the pariah/ The victor, the messiah/ This is war
If there is one thing that existentialists and Christians believe is that life is war, and apparently so does 30 Seconds to Mars. It is a fight against being caught up in the winds of over-participation, avoiding the claws of non-being, and a fierce fight to contend with reality as it is and not run away from it.
***
“Life is short. Have an affair,” goes the Ashley Madison tagline. Whenever we are reminded of the fleeting nature of life, there are two popular human responses. The first has to do with maximizing pleasure. We think of all the pleasurable experiences we’ve missed out on and seek to do right by them. Geez, we think, surely, I cannot die without seeing the majestic Egyptian pyramids or having a raunchy ménage à trois. Our response is a bucket list of experiences. On the other hand, we let loose the restraints of propriety. We think of all the things that we would have done if there were no penal consequences. We would lie, cheat, steal and even kill. There are people, very few of them, who when confronted with their mortality would choose to live their lives as they have been living. The life they are living is the life they should be living, and they are greatly satisfied with it. Their response would not be to have an affair with a stranger, but they would choose to look deeper into the eyes of those they have built a life with. The excitement and the thrill would be inconsequential, irrelevant even. These are people who are living life on their own terms, who have chosen and owned their choices. These are not people who need rescuing from their lives by a tagline or need to be poked and prodded to show up in their lives. These people are free.
Even when we have chosen to follow through on the Ashley Madison tagline and taken steps of embarking on an affair, we are soon confronted with a problem, who to choose? I personally have a hard time wrapping my mind around dating apps for a number of reasons, with one reason being the cataloging of human beings. Cataloging, in general, brings about the problem of choice. The more choices we have, the freer we think we are. Except the more choices we have, the more likely we are to question our choices once we have made them. We will keep second guessing ourselves particularly when the reality of our choices becomes apparent. “What if” becomes the soundtrack of our lives playing over and over again in the back of our minds. Perhaps we think the best way to overcome this problem is to keep our options open and spin plates. When we do this, there are certain depths of relating with other people that we will not have access to. We remain on the pleasure/consumption axis, not venturing further than the aesthetic stage.
According to the existentialists, all reality inheres an action. We have to choose a path. We have to become involved. Commitment, as Dodson sees it, does not mean being rigid; it means being faithful to reality. When we make a decision, and along the way reality discloses itself in a way that would require us to make a different decision, then we do it. Commitment does not mean that we do not get to change our minds, it means that we own our decisions and whatever that follows as a result. Above all, action is required.
The soul in its essence will say to herself: no one can build the bridge on which you in particular will have to cross the river of life- no one but yourself. Of course, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods ready to carry you over the river, but only at the price of your own self. In all the world, there is one specific way that no one but you can take. Whither does it lead? Do not ask but walk it. As soon as one says, “I want to remain myself,” he discovers that it is a frightful resolve. Now he must descend to the depths of his existence. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
