Song of my angst - Self defeat in the US

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the mind’s functioning is its ability to give shape to a person’s life. A mind has many choices in how to entertain itself when not being educated. To a certain extent, living a life shapes one’s mind. Yet the mind catches the pieces that fall in between these impressions, creating ideals and compelling a human life toward realizing them.

How does it achieve this? I am amazed at its ability to perceive events, and run the body through cycles of ingestion, digestion and disposal, all while gradually drawing an existence into line with the strength of its will. The mind knows where it wants to go, and pulls that which isn’t headed there into its orbit.

Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher who asserted that every detail of one’s life derives from human choice, would be irked were he alive and present to read my above statements; I have implied that humanity is a puppet living in the shadow of an autocratic life-deciding entity.

I wouldn’t blame him for rolling his eyes, nor even someone who hadn’t devised a philosophy on the dominance of human choice in all situations; life would not be very rewarding if it were true that an alien awareness controls it from beginning to end.

But total choice comes with what another prominent existential thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, called angst. Experience grows more complex as it gathers, and one’s chances of making a fatally wrong decision only grow with that complexity. In a model of total responsibility, there are two forces: yourself, and your attempt to perpetuate that self by making super-intelligent decisions every moment.

Perhaps in the middle of the 20th century, an existentialist could overcome cognitive overload by retreating to an extended, intensely moody walk. Upon returning home, he/she could then continue on a satisfying decision-making path. Yet with the
surplus of information that now defines daily experience, a long walk won’t suffice. Choice is in danger of drowning in an excess of options.

Humankind is born condemned to be free, Sartre said, but maybe the truest damnation has only come about recently: to become free of freedom in a process of cultural, sensory and perceptual globalization.

Up until now, the United States’ values of wealth and freedom – embodied in entrepreneurial drive and liberty of expression – have been rocks upon which millions of citizens have founded their lives. Now, the Patriot Act has undermined Americans’ security in expressing their often-passionate and diverse opinions. Additionally, confidence in the US economy has reached its lowest point in two decades, and predictions are bleak.

We may now be experiencing a reprisal of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” except this time rather than Biff failing to carry on his father’s business, Americans have failed to sell their way of life to the world. Existential dread has shifted its gaze from material abandonment to cognitive incapacitation. In striving to save the entire outside world, the American will has turned from choice and toward compulsion.

I would like to believe that I alone determine the shape of my life – or as Sartre might put it, that it is my responsibility to create my existence. Yet I wouldn’t know where to begin were that level of choice available to me. I find myself stuck between a stifling and unsatisfying relationship to freedom.

Simone DeBeauvoir wrote inThe Ethics of Ambiguity that “the means [of living] determines both the definition and fulfillment.” Life seems to me more complex than are my own means. I am willing to make a place in my mind for a foreign consciousness to help me chart a way through my American existence.

When belief quakes

Hearing about the recent natural disasters in Myanmar and China from my stable home in New England has thrown my imagination into hyperactivity.

I see only still pictures and words about these events, but they come to movement and life inside my mind. I look for parallels to them in my experience, but find consistent alienation from them. Thinking about my in-tact foundations and these countries’ damaged ones has brought me to thinking about why each is as it is.

I see no external reason for China and Burma’s misfortunes, nor for my ongoing physical security. The two settings - East Asia and the United States - are as distinct in current situation as the cultures that they house; in Asia, a road to recovery is straining to get underfoot, while summer is approaching New England in a slumping economy but generally stable period.

This distinction is not so clear in my mind.

In the midst of a young adulthood in which the church I grew up in has been shown to be rife with sexual misconduct, and my home-country’s government has initiated and perpetuated a highly destructive war, I do not feel the stability that I see around me. My outer state may be well and East Asia’s in ruins, but on a human level, we are both falling apart.

Perhaps this is but a symptom of Nietschze’s philosophy, that “history repeats itself,” but the US and East Asia are now being forced to rebuild themselves. Each is being brought to a realization of vulnerability, and to a humility before change.

When one looks at the central value systems of Eastern and Western culture, each has now lost what was at its core.

Christianity, the value system that dominates the US, teaches salvation from the immanent world through good works. The US’ current dependence on oil and near –golden-calf idolization of celebrities point to the fact that we have become disconnected from our ideal of autonomy from material possessions. Buddhism, a religious staple of East Asian countries and proponent of the idea that the immanent world is paradise, took major blows when that world destroyed parts of itself through natural disaster.

The exterior lives of Christianity and Buddhism’s ideals have started to crumble. My biggest question is: What is rising up beneath them?

When I am struggling for answers to question miles above my head, I have found it helpful to look at the details of my surroundings for clues.

As an example, recently I have been mulling over the place of gay marriage in my ethical thought system. A friend had informed me that he had seen “Now that gays can marry, siblings should be given the same right,” written on a wall of a stall in an MIT men’s room. Upon hearing this, I wondered whether biological risk or cultural belief should determine romantic morality. I looked at the facts in front of me: incestuous marriages do proven genetic harm, while the gay marriages I had seen only made people morally uncomfortable. While moral ground may shift in human conversation, genetic integrity is less malleable. Based on the resources I had on hand, I judged gay marriage less harmful than sibling marriage.

I have neither studied conservative religious precepts nor engaged in a homosexual relationship myself; being a factual beggar on the issue, I am sticking with my choice of standpoint until a greater wealth of experiential knowledge arrives.

I’m not sure what the official “Christian” and “Buddhist” stances are on gay marriage, but I do think the logical method above illuminates the existential state of both religions.

Burma, having recently allowed international aid into the country, and China, reaching out for help in commercials and solicitations from the Red Cross Society of China, are looking outside of their present destruction.

The U.S. is calling on both its liberal and conservative political extremists to look outside their belief systems, to unify in order to save a national future darkened with the threats of debt and grave international dischord. Both Asia and the U.S. are, in fact, seeking – the East a new material foundation, and the West a new transcendence.

The evidence points to hope for a new international future. As our opposing ideals fail us, we are envisioning new ones in order to recreate that eternal, yet ever-living principle: the self.