Scaffold Builders Inc.
…the despairing and
salvation-thirsty heart
to which the madness whispers:
‘Behold thou art the lamb that beareth the sins of God.’
–the error lies not only in the feeling ‘I am accountable’,
but equally in that antithesis
‘I am not, but somebody has to be.’
—This is, in fact, not true:
The philosopher has to say, as Christ did,
‘judge not!’
And the ultimate distinction between philosophical heads
and the others would be
that the former desire to be just,
the others to be a judge.
Assorted Opinions and Maxims by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. G. Collingwood, supplement to Human All Too Human, aphorism 33
In the aftermath of crossing the continental divide, on one side rivers flow in this direction, and on the other, the opposite direction. One awakes up and observes the majority of one’s fellows. Almost everyone operates in a world, the axis of which tilts at a different angle than my world. Usually the difference does not intrude, is of minor notice.
But not always. I am a recovering Christian fundamentalist. A residue of that infection remains. I mean that ground tone of guilt, that I am accountable for all manner of failed experiments with my life. The failings must be paid for! Failure’s burden is not just my idiosyncrasy. The identical assumption seems to have spread in every direction as far as I have been able to see.
Ok, now I “get” that we’ve all been “thrown” into this world, as Sartre so aptly wrote. No one stands outside of the exigencies of ‘survival’ which one’s entire being approves as the moral good. And when one simply “get’s-it-wrong?” A kick in the ass incentivizes a better decision, doesn’t it? Not at all.
We all muck-along doing what we can to survive. All of us, enclosed inside of our place and time, we live – buzzing around as a fly within a transparent glass bottle. I suppose that I, and the few who recognize this ‘unconditional unfreedom’, might “see” the wall of our bottle, fate, — but there is no outside of this brazen wall.
What is the nub of difference in the mindset of which I am now possessed, and that of those who are looking for someone to blame? Nietzsche’s description: the ‘difference between philosophical heads, and the others.’
One holds membership in the smaller community who look to be just, to take note of the sad, sweet tragedy of our attempts to get-it-right, failing in order to fail better the next time around. Or one holds membership in the more numerous population of those who look to be a judge, building scaffolds, keeping watch over the dreary line of those who are waiting to pay.
Someone has to be sacrificed!
Enough. How about a song? This one, John Prine’s tune, Angel From Montgomery by Bonnie Raitt hits the bullseye.
2 thoughts on “Scaffold Builders Inc.”
The true difficulty, at least for me, is clearly seeing and understanding my own motivations, my own truths, my own agendas. The people who believe that alien lizard people control the government, or that the Elders of Zion have unlimited power in manipulating the world, or that a cabal of cannibal pedophiles are led by Hillary Clinton, or that Donald Trump is sent by God to rid the world of liberals are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that their point of view is THE point of view. How can I then say that my beliefs are rooted in fact while theirs is a bunch of nonsense? We are all human beings assessing the world around us through our limited means of input and doing our best to make sense out of chaos. It all comes down to perspective. I am just as certain that my abilities to brush away the noise and see life in as clear a view as possible are much more rational than a conspiracy theorists, but can I possibly know for certain or is it all guesswork? Truth is so goddamn malleable, we just can’t know for sure. We are all that fly in the bottle you mentioned, unable to move past our glass prison. So we must assume we are correct and move forward, just as the white supremacist assumes his/her superiority and moves forward to prove their position. Not very uplifting today.
True, to be human is to have a bias for certainty. Our minds are fine tuned to promote our survival. Thus certainty, is what we feel, permission to take action, even if the illusion proves to be mistaken. There is no fallback to reason, as a safeguard against self delusion. Reason often in retrospect is only a rationalization of what we wanted, and nothing more.
All of us, every human that has ever lived, now living, or will live is involuntarily driven to survive, to adapt to a local context. Some of us by happenstance make acquaintance with a shaman-charlatan shilling for a semi-divine short cut to survival (Jesus), or perhaps a mad politico, Trump draped in the accoutrements of a capitalist demi-god. It feels great to worship, and believe that ‘salvation’ is at hand.
Certainty is always strictly an illusion. That feel-for-truth is what this species of mammal needs to trigger action. That’s all. The question keeps hanging around, whether it is possible on any grounds to see life as it is, naked of any bias? I doubt it. And I suspect that I’ll never know.