THE QUESTION OF LIVING IN A COLLAPSING WORLD

I. A TINY LITTLE ONE EYED DOG

There I was, standing on the pretty cobblestone street in between two of my favorite cafes. Having a cigarette. Thinking. Of all the things happening to us and our world today.

And a tiny brown dog with just one eye popped up and came and sat beside me. As if to say: hi. What are you thinking about, big guy? Why are you frowning so hard? I laughed. What a delight. I brushed his fur. And thought about how brave you’d have to be a one-eyed dog in a big, gleaming city.

His mom came along. I nodded and looked down. She giggled. He’s pretty cool, I said. She nodded with pride.

And I felt good. Not: I felt healthy, amused, pleasantly surprised, had a rush of pleasure. But…

II. THE MORAL COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD

Our world is now suffused by what I can only call the demonic. We speak these days of energy or “vibes.” What we don’t know is that we’re now awash in demonic energy. Thanatos, the death impulse.

What do I mean by that? My friends say: you can’t write about that! Even my lovely wife pauses. And me? I suppose that I worry about disappointing myself. I’ve never been a good liar. I don’t know where to begin. So here I am, with a certain truth, perhaps alone.

Do I mean it literally or metaphorically? Both and neither. I mean it in the sense of human consciousness. But let me introduce you to this idea step by step.

And you can wonder, it’s only fair, whether or not I’ve gone crazy. I suspect, though, that many, many people feel what I do, only they can’t quite say it, name it, bring themselves to call it what it is.

So. There I was, making friends with a tiny one-eyed dog, and wondering: how am I going to talk about demons?

When I say I felt good—let me pause. I’ll come to that.

The way I felt was striking. Because in truth it’s a way of feeling, of knowing ourselves, of relating to the world, that’s becoming alien to us.

I want you to think about the world today with me.

It’s easy to observe that the world around us is now morally collapsing. What strikes you about that? Not in a superficial way: war, violence, greed. But that they’ve become all so banal as to evoke just shrugs.

The moral collapse of our world makes us feel a certain way. We feel anxious, we feel afraid, we feel upset, unmoored, disoriented. We may have expected self-serving leaders, we may have come to be disappointed in our institutions, and even to accept our own failed dreams. But all this is something beyond that.

What do we know about human consciousness? Our souls. Where does the microcosm meet, embrace, become the macrocosm? What’s true about us has always been true. It is the fundament of what makes us human. And it has gone by many, many names. It’s a Law. One of the Great Laws of Being. You know it, already, in many of its forms, not just one. Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the Golden Rule, and so on. Every prophet and every seer, every saint and every poet, has taught it to us.

But to say that it’s a teaching is wrong. They are only just reminding us of who we are. Of the way of being that is right, and in that sense, is the root of “morality.”

III. THE EXPERIENCE OF OURSELVES

I’ve put that in quotes because today we have forgotten what the good is or why it matters. I don’t mean in the sense of a jeremiad or a lecture, it’s not there to hector or goad you. It’s not a form of moralizing. We’re going to use it to understand ourselves, and our place in time, being, and the world.

I mean this in a phenomenological sense, which is to say, the experience, the feeling. Of being, or becoming, moral beings. So: there I am, standing beside my new friend, the tiny one-eyed dog. And what do I feel?

I felt good. But not in a trivial way. Not in the way of synonyms for good. Pleasure, delight, surprise, etcetera. Not at all in that way. I felt good about being in the world.

I felt: it’s my duty to befriend such a little guy. To take care of him, even if it’s just for a moment. To just stand there, and respect him. His bravery, courage, his being, to try and imagine, or “connect with,” or stand in the presence of, his little being or presence or consciousness.

And in this, I felt good because I was experiencing the moral good. I felt alive. Why? The good is eternal. In it, we are an unbroken circle. We are one. And if we cannot stand in the presence of the good, we never touch eternity. Human beings were not made to never touch eternity. We need it as desperately as we need water and air. Denying ourselves the experience of the good leaves us alienated, alone in cosmic time, alone in timeless being, riven, broken inside, and, ultimately, where do we end up that way? We are always in pain and always in rage. We have broken the circle and now stand outside it. Does this sound like an apt description of where we are now?

Do you understand the vital link I’m trying to make for you? I’m trying to teach you something that will crush the noise and bullshit of this age like a great hammer, if you truly understand it. But let me continue, and perhaps we’ll get there together.

IV. THE MOST WOUNDED AMONG US

I felt good because there I was enacting the Great Law of Being, which says that we are all one. In our age, we might say, the way that it needs to be put, should be put, goes like this.

We are asked to begin with the most wounded among us.

Tending to them, taking care of them, seeing them, standing beside them, just even being in their presence.

But who are they, the most wounded among us? Perhaps they are the forests. The oceans. Certainly, they are all the animals who we treat like nothing. They are the people, too, whose lives appear not to matter to the monstrous systems now controlling what is left of life, which is it’s transformation from Eros to Thanatos, but I’ll come to that, too.

The point is simple. In our age, which is an age of so much horror, so much hurt, so much pain, our imperative is simple. To begin with the most wounded among us.

And it is an imperative. Kant spoke of this as a philosophical matter, often, we’re told it’s a religious one. But this is a Great Law of Being. It is something every single one of human history’s great minds and spirits have agreed on. When we ignore, forget, minimize, disobey this law, where do we end up Perhaps in hell itself.

You see, a life that is good, that is spent well, must be made up of—can only be made up of—moments of goodness. There is no way out of this fundamental truth. None.

IV. WHY WE FEEL SO BAD IN THIS AGE

Why do we feel so bad in this age?

Why? I want you to really think about with me. Not just accept it, shrug at it, or dispense with it.

It’s true that an unstable world makes us feel anxious, scared, and frightened. These are material concerns for our own welfare, usually. How will I pay the bills, what will happen to my career, my kids, my grandkids, etcetera. And all that is true.

But this doesn’t answer the question, not fully, and not adequately. It only tells us: there is a presence of what creates discomfort here. But that is not enough to explain why we don’t feel good.

The reason that we don’t feel good is hiding in plain sight. We are not obeying the Great Law of Being. It has come to have little place in our lives. It’s an afterthought. There is no room for it in the system. It’s a nicety. A folly. Perhaps there are moment where we tend to our families, or our friends, and suddenly, we feel a flash, just a glimmer, of this mightiest of light. And then, suddenly, those moments are gone. And we are back to feeling bad.

Do you understand what I mean a little bit? You might imagine that what I’m saying is trivial, and maybe it is. I’m not trying to impress you, just to teach you. There’s a big difference, and the first part of this lesson is distinguishing between the presence of the bad, and the absence of the good.

Now. How do most people spend their time these days? They have become slaves of the algorithm. We’re going to discuss that more in the future. Just think of how much time people spend enmeshed in the algorithm, which essentially makes all their decisions for them, from whom to fuck, to whom to date, to what to watch, and so on. Attention, intention, interaction, knowledge, information. All of it is now circumscribed and controlled.

And the algorithm will never, ever tell you anything like: tend to the most wounded among you. That would be ridiculous. So much so that that sentence is laughable, precisely because it’s so ridiculous.

The algorithm will only ever tell you something like: desire me, want me, have me, fuck me, own me, possess me. And then it will instantly take you to the next moment of hyperconsumption. Addict you to it. Make you a junkie to this cheap simulation of desire, which will never fulfill you. That’s it.

V. THE GREAT LAWS OF BEING

So. Of course people are feeling bad. Not just because the world around us is collapsing in dramatic and frightening ways. But more deeply, because, they themselves have given up the capacity, the ability, to live good lives. Genuinely good ones. Again, I’m not moralizing. I’m just observing, and let me make the distinction clear.

People today are enmeshed in living simulations of lives in which there is little to no room for the Great Laws of Being. The Great Laws of Being aren’t just there for the sake of niceness or what have you. They are there so that we have the moral experience of the good. And the beautiful, true, just, etcetera.

So that we have the moral experience of the good. This is what makes us feel good. Too much of our modern psychology overlooks this, or pretends that this fundamental relationship doesn’t exist. It does that to attain the status of a value-free science. But that is wrong, not just because it’s false, but because we do not mature and grow without living in accordance with the universe, creation, and being.

And the truth is that the world can be burning around us, right down to our very rafters, and we can still have some feeling of the good. That is not a trivial one of pleasure or happiness, but one of the high forms of strength, courage, purpose, beauty, truth. We grow and mature this way. We “become ourselves” in the act of our moral development and unfurling.

I can take you in my arms when the fire draws closer. And isn’t that when I should?

VI. THANATOS AND THE DEMONIC

I have tried to make it very, very clear for what a lived experience of the good is. In the smallest, everyday kind of way. Me and the little one eyed dog.

This is Eros. The life force. It flows through us like a mighty river when we obey the Great Laws of Being. The most fundamental of which is to love. When we enact moments like these, we say that we “feel fully alive.” And we feel that way because we are becoming purer in life force, we are in the center of the current of the mighty river.

Now let’s understand the demonic, Thanatos, the death impulse.

There I am, on my phone. I’m staring at the screen. A rictus grin on my race. Will this person like me? Heart me? Follow me? I’m grinning, but not in happiness. In a kind of anxious flush of anticipation, beneath which is fright, inadequacy, unworthiness. Which will soon enough transmute to anger, rage, disappointment, and then become nothing at all.

I never notice the tiny one eyed dog. I never look down, look up, look around, look anywhere.

I am not one with life at all. I am not here in the universe at all. I am in the algorithm, and I am only a formula to be solved by the mathematics of desire. I’m gratification and need and hunger. But the point is that none of this primal wanting can be slaked by anything, anything, that the simulation of life has to offer. It can only be put right through its very essence, and this is where logic fails us.

Our need to be loved isn’t logical. It’s the very opposite. We are looking for something, someone, somewhere to love. No rational sense can be made of it. Trying to say that we “give” and “receive” doesn’t work at all, which is why our modern models of relationships are such a mess, and so is all the advice about them. The need in us to receive is only satisfied by giving, and here the limits of Western rationality are reached.

And now we are called to think at a higher level than mere cause and affect. We must think analogically and symbolically. The beloved dwells within us when we love. We are one. Object and subject disappear. Observed and observed merge. And finally Eros flows.

The demonic is the absence, the negation, the impossibility of all this. It is being trapped in the futility of primal desire, impossible to fulfill, because the presence of life itself has been erased. We go on clicking and swiping because we know, that the next time, it has to work. But it can’t. We’re addicted to the absence of what it is we most desire.

And in all this, we have become nothing. We annihilate ourselves. In true and startling ways. As free actors. As moral agents. As loving things, not wretched supplicants before false mathematical gods.

This is Thanatos, the impulse, craving for, towards, into, death, and it is what ripping apart our world now.

Can the algorithm make you feel good, in the way we’ve talked about, the good? Of course, if it could, we would be in a new utopia, a golden age of cooperation and kindness and justice and beauty. We are not, because none of this can make us feel anything but woe, anguish, and torment. At best, we feel indifferent. The algorithm will never, ever tell you: begin the most wounded among you. Why would it? It’s only there to seduce you with pain wrapped in the illusion of pleasure.

And this is the demonic, its lure and its purpose. To teach us futility, to tell us that there is nothing left in the moral universe except the triumph of evil, to annihilate us.

VII. COMMUNION AND ANNIHILATION

We’ve become wretched things this way. It’s not just that “we’re unhappy.” It’s far worse than that. It’s that we’ve given up on the idea that the good is something to value, cherish, treasure, enact, fulfill, become, create, and when we do, when we stand in the presence of the good, then Eros flows through us, all separations erased, lover and beloved one, subject and object unified, observer and observed in communion.

Thanatos takes this from us, which is hope itself, the sacred nourishment of the soul, the desire, the need, for communion. Communion is between life. And it replaces it with the opposite of communion, which is annihilation, and annihilation is the demonic’s truest and greatest power. With whom are we in communion the way that we are choosing to live—or not to live—now? Nothing and no one. The mathematics of the idol we call desire. And that is all.

What lies this way?

How much further down Thanatos’s abyss do we have to go before we wake up and see where we already are?

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)