I hope you take the time to read this and if the ideas are encouraging or engaging, please feel free to let me know. Or argue with me. Anything is better than silence and inaction when it comes to moving the state of our species and the planet forward.
As a side note, I plan to make a Facebook page in support of syndividual action and thought, and will be posting links and further relevant discussions and videos there. You will be able to find it on my Facebook page when I have created it.
So, without further ado, section II (for this blog it is the fourth section or blog article).
II
Total Change
Our improvement and change cannot be solely a matter of laws, of politics, of philosophy, economics, religion, rhetoric, technology, art, individual action, or even of adequate knowledge in the new and scientific sense of the word knowledge. The barriers to change are total, incorporating all aspects of what it means to be a human. This sense of the total and holistic requirements of real change is quite daunting, and doubtless is a serious aspect of the current malaise of disillusionment of which I have spoken. After all, we have seen some epic failures in the arena of change-making: Leninism, Maoism, Fascism, etc. These examples show that many generations before ours have not been as disillusioned; many have pinned their hopes on the power of religion to transcend humanity in this world (think of the birth of Christianity), or a theory, or politics, or drugs. Some have pinned their hopes for implementing real change on politics alone. Just think of the American Revolution and the many revolutions that surrounded that time period, or of the enthusiasm of the political-minded in our generation– they have wedded their childhood hopes for real change with the belief that that change must or should be anchored in political change. I could go on (in fact I will for just a little while longer), to point out the different generations and social groups and organizations that have not been disillusioned, that have believed and fought for the real possibility of change. Recall the enthusiasm of Bacon and the scientific community right up till the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when the amoral compass of science’s products became much clearer – and dark tsunamis of violence and rage and ill-used technologies tore the world asunder. Recall the hippies, and the energy and sincerity and hope they generated and expressed before the majority of them lost steam, splintered, got jobs, had families, or became disillusioned or distracted: their anchors for change were philosophy, music, sex, and drugs (I might well be missing a few, since I was not a hippy and am not a hippy scholar!). These are real points for changing our world – but they cannot be the only ones, and they cannot be conceived as the central ones. Not everyone values those aspects of life equally, nor should they be made to. The same goes for any other major movement thus far for changing our world for the better.The changes we seek in our heart of our hearts will have to be, as William Shakespeare calls it, “a sea change”: “Full fathom five my father lies. / Of his bones are coral made. / Those are pearls that were his eyes. / Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change/ into something rich and strange. / Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell” (The Tempest, 1.2.400-406 ). The change will have to be total. When the metamorphosis is complete, the changes will be internal, psychological, spiritual, and all outward changes will be but outward manifestations of our redeemed potentials. We will have dragged as a people all or most of our dark potentials forcibly to the bottom of the well. We will have brought into the light, or at least hovering near the surface, our greatest gifts, our deepest and most irenic potentials. Sea nymphs ring our knell, and we are indeed headed towards a fate rich and strange: but it can be one that descends upon us unwilling, or it can be one that we have marked from afar, uncertain of the details, but certain that it will be a better world by far than the one we inhabit now.
So the rejoinder to my rejection of the myth of permanence, indeed, the concern that makes it necessary to proclaim it a myth, is the contention that we need to get our shit together. It is a stinking mess. As noted, one thing it is important to admit is that the kind of total change we need is not going to be easy to accomplish. But difficulty does not equal impossibility. Nor do we need to suddenly ascend to the perfect society. We just need to do a whole hell of a lot better than we are doing right now. Drastic improvement, not perfection. And as I have taken the time to argue, we can drastically improve, all of us together. The realistic path towards this total improvement is to achieve a critical mass of syndividualistic behavior by most members of our civilization. An excellent illustration of the total change achievable by the critical mass that I hope for us to achieve can be found in Neil Postman’s extended discussion of the dangers television poses to the sustained wellbeing of our culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death. There he writes of the critical mass achieved by our television-oriented culture, but the metaphor and the general manner of achieving total change applies to my goals here:
I find it useful to think of the situation in this way: Changes in the symbolic environment are like
changes in the natural environment; they are both gradual and additive at first, and then, all at once, a
critical mass is achieved, as the physicists say. A river that has slowly been polluted suddenly
becomes toxic; most of the fish perish; swimming becomes a danger to health. (Postman 27-28).
The idea here is to reverse the rise of a toxic critical mass - to gradually create a healthy and robust critical mass of positive syndividual behavior, to create a critical mass where the majority of us behave as syndividuals, not individuals, and that behavior becomes the dominating social atmosphere for individual and group conduct. In such a way positive and enduring total change is possible.
Now it really would not be very cool of me to yell “Yo, we can make a difference, we have the potential, deep down we are awesome and we just have to dig ourselves out of this shithole” if I didn’t at least provide some very general guidelines on how I think we can make that total change I have spoken of. After all, I have generally described what it will look like, but I have not said what we need to do to get there. And so I will do that now.
First things first, we need to realize that not all freedoms are created equal. The way some people talk and act, freedom is an absolute good that must be protected in as many forms as possible or the basic rights of individuals will be infringed and the world will come crashing down. It is precisely the opposite. If we continue to blindly protect and endorse the freedoms to poison the environment, poison ourselves to the detriment of our society, blindly consume without regard to the effects of our ravenous consumption, honor and empower the greedy, gain undue and disastrous influence over political affairs (yes, I am talking about lobbying influences) and other patently destructive and nefarious freedoms, then we certainly will follow the route of absolute freedom to a very ignoble and destitute end. More on what that will look like later. Being an individual and being free are all well and good in theory. But in reality, Thoreau’s idea of the self-sufficient everyman is dead-wrong, and Donne was dead right:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod
be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in
mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions, 17).
Individuality and freedom are conditional and interdependent realities – and therefore as “goods” or existences as ends we pursue they are limited, interdependent, and conditional in scope. We are not islands, but clods of one continent (perhaps we are crappy material after all!). But I will elaborate on these last ideas lest the non-philosophically minded spit on this blog (in reality, their computer screen!) out of frustration.
We do not exist independently. Everything we do takes places in a world shared by other living species, especially our own species. Our world is a world with limited resources, no matter how great and near-infinite those resources may at times seem. Our world is a world of intermingled actions and causations, a world full of billions upon billions of butterfly causes and effects. So our individual existences are conditioned by these parameters; the limited resources and the intermingled causality of the world place limits, causes, and effects upon our individuality – and consequently upon the exercising of our freedoms. If I buy a thousand tons of timber, unless I and others are willing to share the use of that timber without compromising the quality and durability of the timber, in the name of absolute freedom (and property rights), unless we come up with conditioned terms of shared use, those resources are now unavailable for “free” use to anyone else. The same for any other finite resource. Consequently, the notions of freedom and the individual as they exist in current legal, political, and social practice throughout much of the Western world are not notions that have long-term viability. These notions cater to the whims of the powerful and the greedy. They are, in good part, a serious aspect of the dilemma we find ourselves in. We have not done enough to protect ourselves from the abuses of freedom, from the over-reaching (what the Greeks called hubris or over-stepping one’s bounds) of individuals in the name of that which we deludedly hold as quasi-sacred: individuality.
So we must replace these dominant notions of the absolute individual and absolute freedom. Because though we recognize that we must place limits on the individual and on the exercise of freedom (we have, after all, made it illegal to kill, to steal, to lie under oath, etc.), these limits are atavistic and out of focus, and many of us are secretly all hungering for absolute freedom and absolute individuality. We have forgotten the Golden Rule. In the back of many of our minds, we are thinking, “absolute freedom for me if I am lucky enough to get it, but not for everyone else.” We both cheer on and jeer at the ridiculously wealthy – we want what they have, but we sure as hell wouldn’t give it up if we had it. We want our society to allow it and even approve of it – so that there is a chance that somehow we too can have it. But we simply can’t all be thinking that: it will take us to where we are – and down to mass perdition. For my part I propose these replacements for freedom and the individual: the syndividual and mediated freedom. And by these terms I don’t just mean ideas that I will systematize and define – I mean actual practices that closely correspond to the ideal. I am advocating a combination of praxis and theory – one or the other won’t do.
It comes down to desire. It really should have very little, at least in the beginning, to do with laws and external restrictions to action. All other things we have set our hands and minds to in the effort to improve this world will be for naught if we change not our desires within. Again, a sea change. If we don’t change our desires, the “right” laws will be just like a weak stone wall set up to prevent the ocean from washing on the beach: good luck with that. Desires, like individuals, like our freedoms, are conditional – and conditioned. We condition ourselves to desire certain things, and we condition others. We see what others want, and if those desirables give the illusion of happiness, we want them too. So a syndividual does not secretly desire absolute freedom and absolute individuality. The syndividual recognizes these desires as illusory and destructive. The syndividual places conscientious checks and balances on his desires: he desires these balances more than he desires the standard items and habits that inhabit our world’s matrices of desire. More importantly, the syndividual wants total change, because he sees that the world is not happy – and if he is knowingly and willingly contributing to that unhappiness through violence or greed or reckless consumption or abuse of his and others’ talents (to give a few examples), then he is not happy with himself. And he takes steps to contribute to his happiness and the world’s in ways that are balanced and compassionate – for example, exercising moderately, eating moderately with a healthy diet, contributing positively to some of the communities around him, speaking honestly, using his talents for the betterment of himself and those around him. The syndividual does not recklessly overstep his bounds: he recognizes that he must share his freedom (and will thereby find that freedom more meaningful) with all living beings. He conditions and limits his freedoms in the context of his total environment. So if he knows that Chilean Sea Bass is near extinction and they are a valuable part of the world’s ecosystem – then he does not selfishly eat them when there are plenty of other available food sources. I am not speaking of a commune, since I am not speaking of a political or social structure – but an internalized attitude towards life and the goals one makes for oneself in life. The syndividual seeks to create a synergistic environment through his lifestyle and actions (get it, synergy plus the individual – the syndividual!). To do so, the syndividual should be aware that he is only part of a whole, that the human species is only one part of a vast complex system. He doesn’t need to know everything – but he does need to be open to learning how he can better fit into the improvement of the whole .
The Two Hurdles to Change
Now I am going to return to the two ‘hurdles’ I mentioned in the first section, and I will connect them here to the concept and praxis of the syndividual: 1) positive imagination, and 2) the syndividual’s general role in changing our external conditions. I will begin with the positive imagination, which ties directly into my discussion above on conditioning our desires and being open to learning how we can better fit into the improvement of our whole society. As I discussed in the section on compassion, the first step and the first hurdle to creating real and total change is to recognize the quality of our imagining and to learn to choose and control the nature and quality of our imagining. To be honest, this first hurdle deserves its own extensive discussion, but for the purposes of this essay, I will limit myself to a few paragraphs to flesh out the concept of the positive imagination.This first hurdle is almost purely subjective, and does not require a significant or consistent reaching out to other people in a coordinated effort to improve the world – but it will lead to that. My contention (and it is not an original one, but instead derives much from thinkers such the Dalai Lama, Chuang Tzu, and the Buddha) is that our society, from the level of the family and education to our media forms and advertising, conditions us to imagine and construe our world in primarily closed and negative terms. We are encouraged to see ourselves as closed entities, independent beings who must answer solely to and for ourselves the questions of meaning, money-making, happiness, and the good life in general. Social and spiritual meaning and happiness is ‘out there,’ and we have to take the meaning and happiness out there and bring it inside us. We are also encouraged to see ourselves and those around us in petty, overly judgmental, and, for lack of a better word, selfish terms. So my happiness is my happiness; my job is mine, no one else’s. My house is mine, no one else’s. I choose an outfit and am encouraged to think, to say to myself “what will others think of this?” with a negative response in mind, a negative critique of my clothing, my thoughts, my hair the thing to be worried about and feared. Everywhere around us we imagine and see threats and suspicions, criticisms and judgments, limitations to our happiness that we must either topple or avoid. Everywhere we seek legitimation of our acts as ego acts, everywhere we seek to meet approval, everywhere we seek to triumph over others in an endless and remarkably petty competition for superiority, as if happiness and beauty can’t be shared. Everywhere we search for the external hallmarks of our superficially defined standards of happiness, rendered jealous if we see others happier than we, rendered lonely if we see others with families and us alone. This perspective is endlessly legitimated and endorsed by our consumerist culture, our government, many of our family members, by the media that surrounds us. This is the closed and negative imagination. It is a perspective; it is an optional way of construing the world around us. And it doesn’t work. No wonder we are where we are. We are social and spiritual beings at our core. Compassion is in the very grain of our being, as I have been arguing, and when it is twisted through negative imagining, when we isolate our search for meaning and happiness and leave our imaginations twisting in the darkened and neurotic corners of our lonely minds, no wonder we see and experience the world as a dark and vicious rat race.
So the opposite of the closed and negative imagination is the open and positive imagination. That too is an optional perspective. We want happiness either way; we want meaning either way; we want beauty either way. So we can choose to see them as something to be fought over, a precious and rare commodity to be gathered up by the fortunate and the strong – or we can see happiness and meaning and beauty as open resources, increased and made deeper and more universal and more ubiquitous by our willingness to share it – the universal resources of every one. The open imagination sees the world this way: my happiness is yours, yours is mine. I am happy to see you happy; I rejoice to see your fortune, because it is mine as well. You have a car, I do not – do I even want a car? If I do, perhaps you can help me figure out how to get one; or you can show me what are the reasons to not want a car. Or we can car pool and I will throw you some gas money. The world is wide open! I have just published a best-selling book, you just lost your job and have become quite depressed – come to me and ask for recommendations, ideas, energy, compassion, and you will receive them, and be replenished, ready for the next step in your life. And I will learn your sadness can balance my joy, can remind me it is not all about me, that my joys can be shared without me losing my balance and my hope in this world. I buy the shirt I want because I like it, not because you or anyone else likes it – if you do like it, great! If you don’t, well that is your opinion, have fun with it. The positive and open imagination does not imply a loss of personhood or identity; it implies a willingness to recognize and share identities, goods, ideas, happiness. It implies a willingness to let go of the negative perspectives of others and to give them space to grow, to leave you alone, and to let time and the world and even perhaps your own actions heal their hurt. Furthermore, with the open and positive imagination, we view our responsibilities as not simply to ourselves, or to an exclusively defined collection of responsibilities to family, friend, and country, but as dynamic and open, awaiting still greater and greater illumination. You are responsible to yourself, but you are also equally responsible for discovering and sharing a universal and sharable happiness and meaning. This in itself is not a burden but a joy – a joy of discovering and living, growing and sharing. Living with an open imagination, you do not fear condemnation – you acknowledge it if legitimate and work to be a better person, or ignore it if illegitimate, and hope for the betterment of that person or group. You do not fear; you understand or seek to do so.
As noted, the path to living with an open imagination, the first step in becoming a syndividual, begins by simply recognizing the quality of our current personal imagining. How do you think? What kinds of thoughts do you have on a day-to-day basis? If you truly want to be happy (and most people I have ever met truly want to be happy, but have various blockages to the pursuit of that happiness, whether they be psychological, material, or both), then you need to recognize that the quality of your thinking determines how you will be happy and how far you will get in that search. Real happiness is universal and not limited to singular subjective experiences, but occurs in situations and places and can always be shared; it is not the exclusive property of particular individuals. Let your thinking reflect that as much as possible, and do not be upset if it does not happen right away; simply start with being aware of how you think, which is very much the product of habit and environment, and recognize that not all your thinking and feeling deserves or merits legitimation. Legitimate and encourage positive imagining, and discourage and delegitimize negative and closed imagining. And you will have begun the process of engaging in open and positive imagining.
The first hurdle is the most personally difficult. But it is my belief that many of us are capable of thinking this way and consequently jumping over the first hurdle of becoming a syndividual and changing the world around us. It is a question of will and desire, not potential. We can be happier and more compassionate – do we will it, do we want it? I believe that given time and the appropriate amount and kind of discussion, the answers to these questions are positive for a great many of us. The second hurdle is not as personally difficult, but is doubtless more socially challenging, since it will involve the willful, consistent, and coherent change (and possibly the creation) of many institutions, including political, economic, educational, social, media-oriented, and military institutions, to mention a few. I have, after all, called for total change, so this last should be no surprise.
Now as for the second hurdle, there are two major aspects to clearing this hurdle: 1) altered communication within the various creative systems I briefly mentioned in my discussion of our creative potential; and 2) altered participation in (and use of) those same creative systems that surround us. To be philosophically fair here, I need to note that communication constitutes a form of participation and use in the sense I have outlined above, but for common-sense purposes it deserves to be singled out as a salient and distinct topic. So let us discuss the question of communication first.
I will break down the question of communication into two aspects, as perceived from the perspective of the subject (you, me, the individual perceivers and actors in the systems of communication): active and passive communication. The world around us communicates to us in various ways, and we communicate to the world around us in various ways. In many pivotal senses, these two aspects of communication determine a great deal of what constitutes the external conditions that shape and condition the actualizing of our potentials. For it is through our communicative processes that we share and receive our visions of the good life, and reinforce or alter those visions and perceptions of reality. And as I discussed earlier, it is our visions of our potentials and goals that will enable us or prevent us from achieving total change. So we face four choices regarding both our active and passive communication: 1) what forms of communication and messages do we choose to receive; 2) how do we choose to view and internalize these forms of communication and messages; 3) what forms of communication do we wish to employ in communicating ourselves, our visions, and our goals; and 4) Within those given forms, how do we wish to communicate ourselves, our visions, and our goals?
The concerns and ideas that allow us to answer those questions are isolatable, but they mutually affect one another and are (this should be no surprise at this point) interdependent and relative concepts, habits, and traditions. So it will be difficult for many of us to make quick, coherent, syndividualistic, and sustainable decisions regarding these choices, especially since the answers require sorting through a dense maze of causes, effects, habits, conditioned negative thinking, and traditions that is probably quite hazy to many of us. But I am hoping that by providing here (and hopefully in later essays) a general framework of communicative values I can aid in the decision-making process. I think it is safe to say that many of us do not look at communication this way, and indeed, many of us take much of our communicative environment and our own communicative habits for granted – that is, we forego the process of rationally examining those four choices and making rationally informed decisions, and instead allow our habits, local traditions, and our impulses to inform our decisions (if in this case they can be said to be decisions at all). To be fair, there is a vast range in this continuum between 1) not rationally deciding on any of the four choices, and allowing impulse and habit to dictate all of our communicative actions; and 2) rationally reflecting and then making decisions on every aspect of all four choices. I am advocating a measured and disciplined movement over time towards making rational decisions about each of these choices – rational decisions with total change and syndividual behavior as the guiding principles. I do recognize that we cannot all be hyper-rational (and am indeed inclined to think that rational thought has a limited scope to what it can provide for us in leading a spiritually balanced and meaningful life). But I also believe that between conditioning ourselves to imagine our world positively and openly, trusting and embracing our concordive potentials as I discussed in the first section, and using our rational powers in limited amounts over time, we can convert much of our individualistic and discordive communicative tendencies to concordive ones.
Having discussed the general nature and feasibility of rationally and syndividualistically assessing these four choices, I am going to provide a very brief and general framework of syndividualistic communicative values, which I will elaborate upon in later essays and upon which I hope others help me debate, enlarge, further discuss, and put into action.
1) The forms and messages of communication we choose to receive and/or participate in ought to be assessed in terms of their contributions to our positive and open imagination and our concordive potentials in general. From these criteria, we can more soundly assess the general likelihood of a particular form or system of communication and its messages guiding and/or motivating us and others in becoming more syndividualistic and achieving total change. For example, is my watching True Blood encouraging me to behave more syndividualistically and prompting reflection, positive imagining, compassion, creativity, and a growing sense of courage, etc.? Or is it distracting, discouraging, mind-numbing, and likely to make me valorize and praise unnecessary and unrealistic forms of conflict and violence, among other problems? Or is it simply a neutrally pleasant and distracting form of entertainment? I am not going to go so far here as to specifically condemn this or that television show, radio talk show, computer game (yes, there is much communication occurring in games, especially video and computer games), chat room, radio station, type of music, etc., or to pull a Plato and say that poetry and plays and all the entertainment and media that surrounds us is ‘bad’ or to be straight-out avoided. That is too reductivist and antagonistic an attitude to take if I am to appeal to enough people to make my theory convincing, and to respect the genuine and legitimate differences that exist between all of us. I would instead say that each person ought to ask themselves the question I asked of all the forms of communication they passively partake in, and when they have their answers, decide in favor of our concordive potentials, the open imagination, syndividualism, and total change. If the answers are predominantly negative or even neutral for you personally, it is probably wisest to dispense with engaging in that form of communication. After all, your time, life, and consciousness are precious, so why waste any of them on activities that do not positively affect your ability to actualize your concordive potentials and help the world become a better place?
2) While you are deciding which forms and messages of communication to reject or ignore outright, you must also be deciding, with the same criteria as before, how you view and internalize those forms and messages you are receiving/participating in. This second kind of choice can help you to make the first kind of choice, which, once made, is rather easy to stick to. This second kind of choice is a bit more difficult, since it is a choice we constantly have to make – if we are to be alert to how we imagine the world and to how we help to shape the world. Having already discussed the criteria for assessing communication, I will simply say here that the same criteria of the open imagination, the concordive potentials, the syndividual, and total change ought to be applied to how we accept or reject the claims and messages of any communicative system or form, whether it be the daily news, a novel, a poem, or a deeply moving film. The whole of a film, television show, etc., may prove to meet our syndividualistic criteria, but do all the messages within them? And can those messages be used or appreciated syndividualistically in ways not prescribed by the systems or forms themselves? The answers to these questions are once again up to us personally – but when we have our answers, I argue that the internalization and direction of use ought to be syndividualistic ones.
3) What forms of communication do we wish to employ in communicating ourselves, our visions, and our goals to the larger world, debating, discovering greater commonalities, persuading, organizing, giving counsel, etc.? Blogs, protests, essays, tweets, photography, art, film, radio, music videos, personal conversations, among other things, are all possible methods of communication; all of them seem to present excellent possible syndividualistic uses. For example, Nas and Damian Marley made a song called “Patience,” and a music video to accompany it , that discusses many of the issues this essay addresses. Nas and Marley made the album, Distant Relatives, in order to “build some schools in Africa, and … to build empowerment [and] to show love and stuff”; in addition, all proceeds from the sale of the album are dedicated to charity projects in Africa. This is the kind of syndividualistic communication I personally aspire to, but there are so many other (perhaps less dramatic) means to communicate. It comes down to the criteria I established before, but it also comes down to whether those communicative acts fit your lifestyle: we can’t all produce music videos and record rap/reggae charity albums, but many of us can write a blog or contribute to discussions in syndividualistic ways or tweet positive messages daily, or paint pictures that are designed to inspire and express happiness and joy, etc. And if we have been engaging in negative and discordive communication, angry rants, lies, abuse, or perhaps producing distracting and empty pieces of entertainment, perhaps it is time we look to the criteria of positive imagination, the concordive potentials, the syndividual, and total change, and re-evaluate our priorities. For as discussed, the dissemination of such negative communication can have extremely deleterious effects on the well-being of the community at large in addition to oneself. So here, as well, discretion is required, but so too is syndividualistic activism, either small or large and suited to your personal tastes, skills, and time.
4) How do we wish to communicate with one another? Once again, this choice informs our considerations of the third kind of choice, since we may not yet have settled upon the general forms of communication we are committed to engaging in and are still sorting out our options, but a consideration of how our communicative interests and skills most instinctively rise to the level of compassion and syndividualistic creativity can inform our decision to use comedy or sarcasm or silliness, for example, to express ourselves in various forms. We also should consider what styles of communication are best for us to steer clear of, since we may find ourselves typically becoming negative or demeaning in those forms of communication, whether it be gangsta rap, prank calling, or speaking to a person who typically sets us on edge and provokes us to say hurtful things. As before, the criteria of open and positive imagination, the concordive potentials, the syndividual and total change should be the guiding visions of how and when (and where) we choose to engage in communication.
Now I will turn briefly to the second aspect of the second hurdle, altering our participation in and our use of the creative systems that surround us. Now this topic is so vast, vaster even than the topic of changing our communicative patterns (which I definitely feel I have shortchanged you on) that I cannot even reasonably offer a brief categorical discussion of the subject. That will have to wait for later essays. Instead I will have to offer a few notes on the nature of our current creative systems, and how one can generally approach them in a syndividualistic fashion. Now you may recall that when I was discussing creativity in the first section I mentioned that we have a general tendency as individuals and groups to accept or reject the value claims of our various creative systems and of their products on their own terms. I also mentioned that we need to moderate and adapt our creative systems and their products to everything else we value and seek in life. I will go further here and say that our status quo participation in these spheres empowers and legitimates their current forms and the current ways in which we use their products. And we have already established that the status quo kind of blows. Now while reactionary views of this dilemma frequently call for the destruction of the most palpably discordive of these systems, such as the finance industry or the military, and isolationist and escapist views often call for a stepping away from the total society, I call instead for a middle approach: a flexible, multi-approach vetting and critique of our various creative systems, whether they be the sports industry, the finance industry, genetic engineering, robotics, the film industry, the government, and so on. There is no single general answer on how to change these systems, but instead each of us must examine our relationship to these institutions and their products using for criteria the open and positive imagination, the concordive potentials, total change, and the syndividual. How much time and money should we be spending on watching professional sports? Do we need to join an anti-war organization to diminish America’s massive military presence? Do we need to go into politics to help regulate the finance industry? These and thousands upon thousands of other questions press, and we must try to sort our way through, gradually, determining where we can best take primary active roles in change, and other times take supporting roles in changing various institutions. Discussion doubtless can also assist and has assisted in helping many of us to find more syndividualistic ways to make a change in the way the world works, but we have already discussed this and will hopefully discuss again in my own writings and those of others. Presenting a system for sorting through these questions and discovering answers is beyond the scope of this essay, since such a system would take up at least as many pages as this essay has so far. So rather than present the system I am working on developing with others, I will simply note that the questions and answers we must formulate in order to begin reorienting ourselves towards all the creative systems and their products can be clustered around six central lenses through which our society currently views the individual and thereby arranges its systematic claims on our attention. These six lenses are: man as 1) thinker 2) feeler 3) consumer 4) communicator 5) perceiver, and 6) doer-in-general. Because all systematic claims for validity and use are centered around these six lenses, we can cluster our questions around these lenses ourselves and use them plus the aforementioned criteria to derive answers as to how to use and participate in the various creative systems that surround us.
Conclusion!
All these concepts radically challenge the standard sense of individual ethical obligation (recall our discussion of compassion): as a syndividual, basic compassion is no longer personal, and personal compassion is no longer enough (it never really was) to satisfy the basic ethical standards we should be setting for one another and for ourselves. Compassion in the absence of witnesses is possible, meaningful, and even necessary. Compassion in the absence of inquisitors counts the most if we are to erect together this sea change in our species. The radical difference this spells out is that we can no longer look primarily to particular individuals who have taken on particular social and vocational roles to satisfy the ethical burdens of our society. No longer can we simply look to the monks and Red Cross volunteers to handle the problem of global poverty, or to radicals to effect real change, while the rest of us do ‘real work’. Those roles will indeed still exist, of course; and the burdens of ethical behavior and erecting real change will still be unequally and heterogeneously distributed. But the culture of specializations and micro-specializations that we have seen rise in the last 100 years, the culture that has increasingly encouraged us to become more and more narrow-minded in our life perspectives in addition to our careers, must give way. It must give way to a culture in which specializations of vocation do not cloud or narrow our moral compasses, but rather orient and enrich them. We certainly cannot all spend our days feeding the malnourished or educating the poor in Africa. However, each and every one of us can have a sense (more or less accurate, depending on our abilities to reflect and to be aware of the larger horizons of connection that surround us) of the problems that beset our species, and a sense of our proximities and roles in the perpetuation and ending of those problems. So for some examples, while most of us do not willfully support the erosion of local businesses or the wide-spread levels of pollution created by our use of personal automobiles, we do frequently support the growth of massive corporations that are not fundamentally accountable to their local clientele (Stop & Shop, Walmart, McDonalds, etc.) and many of us continue to contribute to the rising pollution problems created by ubiquitous automobile use. These are, of course, just small examples of myriad ways in which all too many of us perpetuate the problems of our society without even taking an active and knowing role in the destruction. The syndividual continually looks to see what roles, major and minor, he can convert from passive destructive participation to deliberate mitigation and even assistance in solving the world’s problems, all while attending to the intimate contours of his own life. Indeed, by deliberately acting in such a way as to help bring about total change, he enriches his own life, just as the Dalai Lama informs us that this is one of the inherent values of compassion.
This all might sound potentially quite neurotic. My rejoinder to this comes in two parts. First, most of us are quite neurotic as it is – a true neurosis that much of our society shares but is not able to recognize as such. Erich Fromm described this scenario when he wrote:
Today we come across a person who acts and feels like an automaton; who
never experiences anything which is really his; who experiences himself
entirely as the person he thinks he is supposed to be; whose artificial smile
has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless chatter has taken the
place of communicative speech; whose dulled despair has taken the place
of genuine pain. (The Sane Society, 24)
This description comes frighteningly close to describing the majority of ‘individuals’ we meet today – it is the description of a socially accepted state of neurosis. Second, the state of existence I am proposing is the exact opposite of neurosis: there is an intense attention to detail and a radical search for patterns, but it is a search that constitutes a life meaning, a movement forward. Instead of taking that mental energy, as many of us do, and fantasizing or daydreaming or worrying, we would be connecting to one another in pivotal, oft-unspoken, and profound ways. We would be being alive in a way that so often eludes the majority of us.
To cap all this off, the great irony of the myth of permanence is that it conceals the significance of the enormous positive (or at least potentially positive) changes we have wrought in the world. Indeed, it makes our world seem as if it sings the same old destructive tune no matter what new cures (the Flu vaccine), irenic organizations (the UN, UNESCO), positive and life-changing technologies (the internet, nanotechnologies) we devise. Indeed, as I have been hinting, we have not realized it as a species yet, but we are on the very cusp of either catastrophic failure or brilliant success as a species. On the dark side, in the next hundred years we may well suffer from a combination of a population explosion, a consequent civilization-ending dwindling of our usable natural resources, the destruction of huge swaths of our global ecosystem, widespread violence, disease, and famine, to mention the most salient issues. On the bright side, we have innovated in almost all the right ways we need to step forward into our brave new world except the one: we have not yet grasped that sense of total, holistic, positive change. After all, we now have technologies that enable us to prolong our lives significantly, produce more and healthier foods than ever before, control our population growth in a variety of ethically appropriate ways, spread mass communication and information with ease, ensure the quality of our lives through well-defined exercise and diet regimens. The list of our potentially salubrious innovations is insanely long – and we even have computers and software programs that can help us to index and sort out all our innovations if we want to! So if we find our configuration point, if we find our unity, whether it be through the syndividualism model I have briefly laid out or some other one, we succeed. But if we continue to spin out of control, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” till we ask with urgency far outshadowing the poetry that gave us the question, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 91) – then we fail.
So tremendous change is upon us, whether we will it or not. It can engulf us in ruin, or it can be the first steps on a staircase spiraling towards the kind of society where the world does indeed seem like home and heaven all at once.
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