Not Arriving
One who knows
that he is ignorant
is not entirely ignorant.
One who knows
that he is deluded
is not entirely deluded.
One who is severely deluded
will not become free of delusion.
One who is steeped in ignorance
will not become discerning.
If three men are walking together
and only one of them is disoriented,
they will arrive at their destination
(since the disoriented man is in the minority.)
But if two of them are disoriented,
they will not,
(since the majority are disoriented.)
At the present moment
the whole world is disoriented.
I can implore men/women to go in the right direction
But I will not prevail.
Is this not dismal?
Zhuangzi, by Zhuang Zhou, trans. Hyun Hochmann and Yang Guorong, Heaven and Earth
The Human Condition, three words which point to a distinctive feature of our species. We humans are particularly vulnerable to public opinion. Another way of putting it: peer pressure. Our instincts are minimal, almost non-existent compared to other mammal species. A new born will search for the breast, and that’s instinct. Beyond that I cannot think of anything.
Sight, sound, touch become conduits for the sense experience bearing lessons which must be mastered if one is to survive, (or hold a job as an adult). Learn in order to live. We learn by mimicry, by following the lead of others around us. I learned to read, I learned to write by following the examples of pubic school teachers. I still remember their names. Everything about each of us is a credit to countless lessons learned, to the hand-off of “culture” by others who assisted to dissipate my ignorance.
This solid, invariable feature has its dark underside.
I do not believe that “we” Americans have any prospect of arriving at a future state of society which is agreeable, capacious, sustaining for any of us. We are lost in a dark wood, and the majority have no idea how lost they in fact are. Since we have no innate sense (instinct) of our direction, of the way home, we are thrown back upon learning from our fellows…
In accord with the parable in the Zhuangzi if two of three are disoriented, – arrival will not be in store.
“Happy” holidays!
2 thoughts on “Not Arriving”
Hmmm . . . . As we sometimes do, I’m going to disagree with the crux of today’s offering. I believe that humans are ruled by their instinctual motivations to a greater degree than anything learned during the course of their lives. There is a growing area of study called Evolutionary Psychology which delved into the way we bring the behaviors of our ancient ancestors into modern day behavior. And because this behavior is, for the most part, unconscious and buried deep within our brain’s emotional center (the amygdala) we are not even aware of how this impacts our day to day life.
Of course, how we have been raised and the damage that can be inflicted on our psyches by environmental impacts such as family, school, traumatic events, etc can be equally important factors as to how we interact with the world in general and how we feel about ourselves. But the crap we are born with means that we are well behind the eight ball as we slide out from the uterus to begin with.
In fact a healthy upbringing is part of what can mitigate those hardwired patterns that are instinctual. If one looks closely into the dysfunctional nature of the current person in the White House and his lunatic minions, they are almost all basing reactions on their deep seated emotional fears that have little or nothing to do with rational thought. Yes, Donny’s dad Fred was a monster and that explains a portion of his constant gibberish, but other people have grown up in distressed households and have turned out pretty well, embracing reason, pragmatism, and kindness. Trump’s unfiltered garbage emanates directly from his emotional center and this is why we are all in trouble.
Anyway, them’s my two cents (which won’t be worth much in the future since we have deep-sixed the penny).
Tobin your point is well made. The fight-flight response is certainly inscribed into our “lizard brains”. Seems to me that reality has been maximally leveraged by the rightist, testosterone infused, Jesus-wrapped Trump party using the social media megaphone. Plenty of us have learned what and whom to fear. That is dragging everyone into a dark future.