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A voluntary death-and-rebirth transformation—the change necessary to adapt when terrible things emerge—is therefore a solution to the potentially fatal rigidity of erroneous certainty, excessive order, and stultification.
The undying pattern that hero embodies, in turn—upon whose actions the individual and society both depend—is the highest of all Gods.
But it is important to remember, as we discussed in Rule I: Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
The soul willing to transform, as deeply as necessary, is the most effective enemy of the demonic serpents of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms. The healthy, dynamic, and above all else truthful personality will admit to error. It will voluntarily shed—let die—outdated perceptions, thoughts, and habits, as impediments to its further success and growth.
Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up.
Failing to look under the bed when you strongly suspect a monster is lurking there is not an advisable strategy.
A bad mood signifies something. A state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, and not likely something that will please you to discover.
First, noting, much less communicating, feelings of (petty) anger or pain due to lonesomeness, or anxiety about something that might be trivial, or jealousy that is likely unwarranted is embarrassing. The admission of such feelings is a revelation of ignorance, insufficiency, and vulnerability.
Extracting useful information from experience is difficult. It requires the purest of motivations (“things should be made better, not worse”) to perform it properly. It requires the willingness to confront error, forthrightly, and to determine at what point and why departure from the proper path occurred.
After all, the pathway to the Holy Grail has its beginnings in the darkest part of the forest, and what you need remains hidden where you least want to look.
If you knocked, truly wanting to enter, perhaps the door would open. But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.
If you want to become invaluable in a workplace—in any community—just do the useful things no one else is doing.
Work, when you are working, instead of looking like you are working. And finally, learn more about the business—or your competitors—than you already know. Doing so will make you invaluable—a veritable lynchpin. People will notice that and begin to appreciate your hard-earned merits.
It is impossible to hit a target, after all, unless you aim at it. In keeping with this: People are more commonly upset by what they did not even try to do than by the errors they actively committed while engaging with the world.2 At least if you misstep while doing something, you can learn from doing it wrong.
As the great blues musician Tom Waits insists (in his song “A Little Rain”): “You must risk something that matters.”
To look upon evil with eyes unshielded is dangerous beyond belief, regardless of how necessary it is to look.
It is a maxim of clinical intervention—a consequence of observation of improvement in mental health across many schools of practical psychological thought—that voluntary confrontation with a feared, hated, or despised obstacle is curative.
That is responsibility. Constrain evil. Reduce suffering. Confront the possibility that manifests in front of you every second of your life with the desire to make things better, regardless of the burden you bear, regardless of life’s often apparently arbitrary unfairness and cruelty.
But for a time evil can be overcome, banished, and defeated. Then peace and harmony can prevail for as long as people do not forget what brought them both about.
What would a human being who was completely turned on, so to speak, be like? How would someone who determined to take full responsibility for the tragedy and malevolence of the world manifest himself? The ultimate question of Man is not who we are, but who we could be.
And it is in the nature of mankind not to cower and freeze as helpless prey animals, nor to become a turncoat and serve evil itself, but to confront the lions in their lairs. That is the nature of our ancestors: immensely courageous hunters, defenders, shepherds, voyagers, inventors, warriors, and founders of cities and states.
But now is by no means everything, and unfortunately, everything must be considered, at least insofar as you are able. In consequence, it is unlikely that whatever optimizes your life across time is happiness.
If happiness comes to you, welcome it with gratitude and open arms (but be careful, because it does make you impetuous).
The wise and ancient parts of you, seriously concerned with your survival, are neither easy to deceive nor to set aside. But you take aim at a trivial goal anyway, and develop a rather shallow strategy to attain it, only to find it is not satisfying because you do not care enough. It does not matter to you—not deeply.
What works across multiple time frames and multiple places for multiple people (including yourself)—that is the goal. It is an emergent ethic, hard to formulate explicitly, but inescapable in its existence and its consequences, and an ineradicably deep part of the game of Being.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder.
What calls you out into the world, however—to your destiny—is not ease. It is struggle and strife. It is bitter contention and the deadly play of the opposites.
The sovereign individual, awake and attending to his or her conscience, is the force that prevents the group, as the necessary structure guiding normative social relations, from becoming blind and deadly.
When culture disintegrates—because it refuses to be aware of its own pathology; because the visionary hero is absent—it descends into the chaos that underlies everything.
If you wish instead to be engaged in a great enterprise—even if you regard yourself as a mere cog—you are required not to do things you hate. You must fortify your position, regardless of its meanness and littleness, confront the organizational mendacity undermining your spirit, face the chaos that ensues, rescue your near-dead father from the depths, and live a genuine and truthful life.
This left him with a single remaining escape from nihilism and totalitarianism: the emergence of the individual strong enough to create his own values, project them onto valueless reality, and then abide by them.
We all axiomatically assume the reality of our individual existences and conscious experiences, and we extend the same courtesy to others (or else). It is by no means unreasonable to suggest that such existence and experience has a deep underlying biological and physical structure.
It may well be, therefore, that the true meaning of life is not to be found in what is objective, but in what is subjective (but still universal).
It is probable that your own imperfections are evident and plentiful, and could profitably be addressed, as step one in your Redeemer’s quest to improve the world.
By contrast, sophisticated writers put the divide inside the characters they create, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness.
It is much more psychologically appropriate (and much less dangerous socially) to assume that you are the enemy—that it is your weaknesses and insufficiencies that are damaging the world—than to assume saintlike goodness on the part of you and your party, and to pursue the enemy you will then be inclined to see everywhere.
Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it.
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
They move the unknown closer to the conscious, social, and articulated world. And then people gaze at those artworks, watch the dramas, and listen to the stories, and they start to become informed by them, but they do not know how or why.
There is good reason that the most expensive artifacts in the world—those that are literally, or close to literally, priceless—are great works of art.
The unknown shines through the productions of great artists in partially articulated form.
Artists teach people to see. It is very hard to perceive the world, and we are so fortunate to have geniuses to teach us how to do it, to reconnect us with what we have lost, and to enlighten us to the world.
Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism. Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value. Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these.
It can be prohibitively difficult for abused children, for example, to generate a worldview philosophically sophisticated enough to span the full spectrum of human motivation.
It is a psychological truism that anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.
To orient ourselves in the world, we need to know where we are and where we are going.
We must recollect ourselves or suffer in direct proportion to our ignorance and avoidance.
We are not allowed, it seems, to avoid the responsibility of actualizing potential.
We face a multitude of prospects—of manifold realities, each almost tangible—and by choosing one pathway rather than another, reduce that multitude to the singular actuality of reality. In doing so, we bring the world from becoming into Being. This is the most profound of mysteries. What is that potential that confronts us? And what constitutes our strange ability to shape that possibility, and to make what is real and concrete from what begins, in some sense, as the merely imaginary?
We value such stories particularly if they have attained the pinnacle of generalizability, representing heroic battles with the unknown, as such, or the dissolution of tyrannical order into revivifying chaos and the (re)establishment of benevolent society.
