The Rule We Follow.

And a response, of sorts.

If the rule you followed brought you to this. Of what use was the rule?¹

—Anton Chigurh. No Country for Old Men. by Cormac Mccarthy.

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I don’t follow the news much at this point. Yet the state of the world still filters itself to me in various ways—both virtual and secondhand. This is in stark contrast to how I was living my life even a year ago—heck, even six months ago. In retrospect, I was quite obsessed with the news and keeping myself up to date. Breaks at work were filled with passionate conversations about current events—and, alas, not a few rants, by none other than yours truly. After these extended rants against our current madness, an older coworker who after patiently listening would often add only one thing. Given that what you say is true, he would offer, what do we do now? To that, I didn’t have much of an answer or really any answer at all. But that did little to prevent me from cueing up the next rant for the next break. We repeated this pattern for over ten years.²

With that in mind, I must admit I greatly prefer to live in my current semi-blackout of the news. I might even like to try a full blackout at some point, truth be told³. After all my efforts at news gathering, what did being so well-informed actually gain me? Ignorance, while perhaps not always blissful, is certainly far less stressful than the alternative. But that isn’t quite right either.

I can’t say for all my former obsession with keeping up with events—via books, news reports, commentary, youtube videos, commentary on commentary…upon commentary, on and on and on—that I ever actually did poke my head above the deep waters of ignorance⁴. The ignorance of being well-informed by the news was perhaps an even greater ignorance than of not paying it any attention at all⁵. And in not paying attention I am far less likely to be manipulated, which is not nothing.

Is it just me, or is it a slightly ominous word—informed? Who, if anyone, is doing this informing? And what is all this formation doing to my mind and heart let alone all the stress it⁶ inflicts on my body? It isn't simply a function of monetizing our attention and selling it back to us as advertising, which is certainly troubling enough. I take it as fundamental that there are highly organized entities out there⁷ striving very hard to shape the way we think. If for nothing else than to keep us buying things⁸. But it is surely more than that, isn’t it?⁹

In being informed we are formed to achieve their shadowy and nefarious goals and not those of our own choosing. To what degree does this perpetual informing prevent us from the perennial goal of simply living a basic, decent human life?¹⁰ Wouldn't it be something if we could just do that? Simplicity seems much more difficult to achieve these days, for some reason. Do I even know what a simple, decent life means, beyond some fantasy picked up from books and movies?¹¹

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Please correct me if I am wrong, but things don't seem to be going well out there—that is if the news is to be believed at all anymore. If true, this certainly doesn't surprise me.¹² What does surprise me, however, is that I am still so attached, despite myself, to the worldview that is perpetuating the whole mess. But what is the alternative? This would also be something worth answering for myself. And not in some abstract-conceptually-utopian-what-if-I-won-the-lottery sense of an answer, but concretely and given the actual conditions of my current life. Still, the current mess is quite the drama and sort of entertaining in a toxic, soul-destroying kind of way.¹³ It has also been the only way of doing things, of living life, with which most of us are more or less familiar.

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Of course, I will live in some isolating housing unit in some pleasant but soul-killing subdivision! Of course, I will drive alone in my car to a job I despise! Of course, I will learn to live in circumstances that increasingly cut me off from any meaningful human connection let alone basic human affection! Of course, I will trust the ruling class and never question what the news tells me! Of course, I will slowly drown in the meaninglessness of it all! O course the whole thing is legit, it couldn’t possibly be a scam! Of course, decades will fly by as if nothing! Of course, I’m not angry about it!

Why would I be angry?

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But there is a very good way to live other than the way we’ve been sold.¹⁴ The alternative is actually a fairly well-laid-out path. This problem isn't new, and people have been thinking about how to escape toxic civilization since about five minutes after the founding of the first ancient city. It turns out that it is far more achievable than I, for one, have told myself. The real question—the only question—is whether we actually want to live differently. Not whether we want to talk about living differently, or hope someday to live differently, but will we actually choose to so live right here and now? For a very long time, and even as the status quo quickly drained me of the will to live, I wasn’t so sure that I did. Funny that.

So I realize it is a simple question but one that isn’t always so easy to answer. It hasn’t been easy for me and it still isn’t, though it is becoming less so. What would I have to give up to live differently? Probably, for one, a lot of stuff…actually a whole lot of stuff.¹⁵ For the record I do like stuff.¹⁶ Who doesn’t like stuff? We have built our whole current civilization on the idea that trading our lives and energy for stuff is a good thing. Don't worry if you're depressed, we have unending trainloads of stuff! Yet the vast majority of this stuff hasn’t really ever made me happy and believe me I have tried. It hasn’t even freed me from anxiety as I was promised.¹⁷ To the contrary, the more stuff I had the quicker I was ushered into the all-embracing arms of despair.

Okay, okay, maybe it isn’t the fault of the stuff. That's a good point. Maybe a life dedicated to material accumulation¹⁸ and empty pleasures works quite well and is, in fact, the real goal of human life, but it just hasn't worked out, say, for you and me.¹⁹ There's no need to be so bitter about it, sir. Okay, again, fair point. Maybe it is just my own damn fault, my lack of gratitude, or, I know, a poor allotment of genetic dispositions or some such. It’s entirely possible. It isn’t, however, very likely²⁰.

Either way, there is a different and I think a better way to live. It means living far more simply than what we have grown accustomed to, at least in the “developed” world²¹. Has it made us happy, all these things, all this stuff? Has it even made those who benefit most from it happy? Especially them? I don’t know and can’t know, but I suspect not. Because what we have been told to seek is not what can possibly bring happiness²². It never has and it never will. I think this unhappiness shows in the increasingly unhinged way they run things. Just one more billion dollars or two in the bank account and happiness is mine!²³ Mine, I tell you! ²⁴

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For one, I have few resources to extricate myself from the comforts of our destructive civilization. I am not rich. I don't have a large social group ready to light out for the territories. More importantly, I never bothered to learn to do much of anything practical. I can't grow anything, build anything, or fix much of anything.²⁵ I don’t think I am alone in this. Am I? Instead, I followed my bliss, which turns out to be terrible advice.²⁶ What that turns out to mean, practically speaking, is being led around by your nose every time someone holds up a way out of confusion. Which never works and only leads to more confusion. I have a decent-sized list of achievements I was once proud of, but they matter little to me now. In fact, if I could get a message back to my younger self I would tell him to be far more practical.²⁷ Learning to build (rather than to deconstruct) is the best way to not be so dependent on the current rule of life.²⁸

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We can live by a different rule than the one we have been given. It should be a fairly simple one, no matter how difficult it is to start putting it into practice.²⁹ I don't think merely wanting to escape from the catastrophe is enough, though for many it might be. I want to be able to go towards something, to a more fully lived life. To a more human life³⁰, and to find out what that means.

I start with the fundamentals: silence, solitude, and simplicity. But not just that. Rather: silence, solitude, and simplicity in a community. I imagine small gatherings of people who want to live in silence and have already cultivated a stable practice of silence. In other words, people already living a contemplative life, as best they can. Hopefully, before heading out for the new frontier—whatever that means— we will have matured, and we have more or less achieved a broad and stable mind and heart. This is key. If we have not yet faced our dragons, the dragons in us will destroy all we attempt to build. There is no way around that, I suspect.

We may have lost somewhat the thread of our own wisdom tradition, or rather have arrogantly stomped it flat and thrown it away as nonsense.³¹ But it isn’t out of our reach to find it again, or rather let it find us. It won't fully look like what it looked like in the past, but it won't be so different either. It will be something new/old and is now yet to be born. It will take some effort--but the first step is to quit our allegiance to a way of life that is killing us.

To be sure, this new/old way isn’t a technical problem to be fixed by having the correct blueprint or in calculating the correct algorithm.³² It means living on an entirely different basis than how we have over our lifetime and collectively over the past few centuries.³³ It will take waking up in ourselves more than we are used to giving and from depths that have been forgotten and may seem nearly atrophied. It's worth finding out what all that is. If for no other reason then we may not have an alternative.

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So what is this rule we follow, the one which actually now directs our lives? Not the one we believe we follow or wish we did, but the real one we follow whether we fully know it not or like it or not. The rule have we internalized and carried with us no matter how strenuously we say or believe otherwise? That would be good to know. Otherwise, how can we ever escape it? I have now lived many years under its half-submerged reign. I have frequently been dead certain I was doing something quite different than what I was being told.³⁴ After all that, I am still unable to fully say what this rule is. Do you know?

And, while we are at it, what would a new, and altogether different rule of life look like? What should we aspire to?

Maybe that’s a discussion worth having.³⁵

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What is this Joy [of the contemplative life] like? It keeps your mind from worrying. Nothing will upset you. You would run a thousand miles just to talk with someone else who’s felt this longing, only to discover once there that you’ve got nothing to say to each other because no matter what you want to say, you can’t say this Nothing.³⁶ It’s ironic that the topic you most want to discuss leaves you speechless. This joy teaches you an economy of words. Though you are a person of few words, each is deep and warm. Your speech is so mature and full of life that even your shortest sentence will contain a world of wisdom, but anything you say will seem stupid to those who ignore their souls and live only in their intellects. Your silence will be gentle, your speech constructive, your prayers private, your self-esteem pure, your behavior humble, your humor kind, and your joys as simple as a child at play.

—The Book of Privy Counsel³⁷. Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

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1. For context, here is the scene from the movie. As a warning, it is violent, but not graphic.

2. A testament to my powers of ranting and, more importantly, to my coworker’s deep well of patience.

3. I think the rest of my life schedule is wide open for such a blackout.

4. I will, for now, make the distinction between what might be called informed ignorance and what Nicholas of Cusa called learned ignorance. It is probably worth going into the difference at some point. The distinction matters.

5. This brings to mind a quote attributed to Mark Twain, “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed”.

6. Yes, “it” inflicted stress. But I chose to engage “it” day after day and hour after hour. I kept letting “it” win. Mea culpa.

7. If you think it is primarily the “Russians” and not those, closer to home, the very ones who are supposed to make our lives better, I don’t know what to tell you. It probably isn’t the Russians.

8. If we ever truly scaled back the whole pyramid scheme would collapse in a week and a half, if not sooner.

9. I realize one must tread carefully here. It is easy to fall into paranoia. But a classic text on public relations, entitled, Crystallizing Public Opinion, by Edward Bernays was published in 1923. A lot of very smart people have been thinking deeply about how to change our view of things for a long time. This kind of pressure has been made considerably more powerful via electronic media. One more reason to radically limit what we participate in and to whom we listen. Stay off social media for one.

10. Whatever that is at this point.

11. Brought to us by humungous multinational corporations!

12. No, not one bit.

13. Loathe as we might be to admit it, we all know that dramas and soap operas are very titillating and therefore addicting.

14. We’ve been sold this way of life to make it far easier for us to be sold everything and anything. Even things we used to get for free.

15. And after I get all this stuff, I lose my soul and don’t ever gain the world. I just have a bunch of useless crap I can’t use and don’t know what to do with. We lose our souls and lack closet space. Not good.

16. I have a problem with buying too many books. There, I said it.

17. It wasn’t a legal contract, this promise. But look at all the happy people with their stuff on the TV!

18. aka “stuff”.

19. What a loser!

20. Even if all that is true about me. I don’t think it explains our situation.

21. Developed as in how one might develop a bad cough or a suspicious rash

22. If you ever have the chance to read The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius I highly recommend it. All that I am saying here—a tad sarcastically, I admit—he said far better there, more eloquently and long, long ago. Up until modernity, Boethius was widely read. That he is no longer widely read explains, at least in part, our predicament.

23. Of course, yes, I am not advocating indigence and extreme poverty. But is it so far-fetched to think we could live far more simply than we do? And in doing so free up our lives for what is more important and hopefully more fulfilling. People have done it and are doing it right now despite the high risk of failure. What’s stopping me?

24. Or as the great Anatidaen philosopher, Daffy Duck once put it, “mine, mine, mine…all mine. I’m filthy rich. I’m a happy miser.” And again, “consequences, shmonsequences…as long as I am rich.” Though to be fair, this attitude isn’t limited to billionaires or just to money. Humans—all of us-- are really quite brilliant in this regard. As is our even more spectacular ability to completely hide this from ourselves.

25. Lloyd Dobbler, ladies and gentlemen.

26. I am probably not alone in this, either. Though maybe few were as diligent in following this bad advice as I was. Though who knows I may be quite average. A slightly terrifying thought.

27. Of course, I can’t send a message to him. But maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes. There is a two-year Catholic College that teaches the great books and teaches practical skills, e.g., woodworking or auto repair. There needs to be more of this.

28. I could go on and on about all the things I lack, but it would be beside the point. The only thing that matters is whether I am willing to take the leap into something new.

29. Simple, but not easy. But come to think of it why wouldn’t the practice of it be simple as well?

30. Maybe it’s time to reread Thoreau.

31. This is where I slowly and sheepishly raise my hand.

32. We see where that is going.

33. I think we are coming to the end of a certain historical cycle, i.e., modernity and its collapse into postmodernity. It may be that larger cycles and trajectories are now concluding. I believe we are late in the Anthropocene, i.e., the era where human activity has the largest impact on the planet—which likely won’t last in anything resembling its current form. There is a shift to something post-anthropocentric. We shall see what, if anything, that could mean. It’s difficult to see that clearly.

34. Step One: they convince us we are rugged individualists whom nobody can tell how to live their lives. Step Two: they tell us how to live our lives. It works. It really, really does.

35. N.B. I originally intended to write something far more abstract and sober. This is what came out instead. My apologies. Thank you for your patience.

36. Nothing = the love of God in the luminous darkness of unknowing.

37. A work by the 14th-century English and Anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. The very same. This is a translation from Middle English to Modern English.