"...provability is a weaker notion than truth."
Douglas R. Hofstadter
In his famous talk “This Is Water” the late, great David Foster Wallace spoke of what he called the ‘default setting’ for our minds. He argued our default setting is chronic obsession with ourselves and our own petty struggles with life. I agree with this assessment, but I think we need to take it further. Our default setting includes much more than simple selfishness.
I think the default setting for most of us involves seeking flaws in the world, and in ourselves. We search for imperfection. We label things up and down, good or bad, on and on and on. And this is not necessarily bad itself. It’s part of being human. But we must investigate how and why we do it, largely because we live in a world of messaging. We are constantly being told what to think, what is right, who to listen to, etc… If we’re not careful, we will end up with a system of right/wrong judgment that does not serve us. Our morality can easily become a product of culture, not consideration. What’s more, our own sense of morality can start to work against our well being.
WHAT'S A HIGHER PURPOSE?
I should be clear that “higher purpose” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with religion or God or spirituality. It just means something that you consciously choose to serve as the foundation for your belief system. It could be a religious code, a purpose, a method, a faith, a community, a motto, etc… And it doesn’t necessarily have to be permanent, either. It can change and evolve with you as you grow. The key point is that you choose it, actively, after sincere consideration and reflection.
Your higher purpose has the final say in your ethical and moral decisions. It doesn’t have caveats.* You might violate it at times, we all make mistakes, but there are no loopholes. In the personal conversation of whether your behavior is ethical, the buck stops with your higher purpose.
A simple example of a higher purpose might be compassion (or, to clarify with some clunky language, “my higher purpose is to actualize true compassion.”) In the framework of a higher purpose, compassion is not something that's good in specific circumstances. It is good and right and true in all circumstances. It is the final answer, Regis.
Let’s imagine you’re walking through a city and you see a homeless person on the street asking for change. You have an internal deliberation about whether or not to give that person money. If your higher purpose is compassion, then your internal dialogue is framed in terms of “is it compassionate to give this homeless person change?” You might answer yes, you might answer no (I would personally argue the intellectual gymnastics required for a “no” answer in this situation are so complex as to be self-defeating, but that’s a different topic altogether…) the real point is whether you’re using compassion as the standard for your actions. If you choose the higher purpose of “justice” or “social darwinism” or “counting frowns” you might have a different response.
A CULTURE OF RIGHTNESS
So what does all this have to do with the felt emotional life of a human being in the 21st century? Well, a gajillion things, but one of the more pressing ones, I find, has to do with our desire to be right. Because this is a real condition in our society; we all want to be right. In good old Modern USA, our cultural higher purpose is not “I want status” or “make lots of money”, it’s “I will be right at all times.” Money and status are just tools we use to prove rightness. Those who have money and status claim they are right because they have it. Those who do not have money and status claim they are right because they don’t have it. What’s at stake is not really money and status, it’s whether or not we’re right.
And this gets very dangerous very fast, because we start wading into the waters of “right according to whom?” So we look around for authorities to validate our rightness, we insulate ourselves in bubbles of rightness with other like-minded people, and we vilify those who challenge our rightness. We build massive, complex intellectual frameworks to protect our rightness. We build entire industries dedicated to our desire to be right.** Indeed, there is nothing more fashionable to us today than a right opinion.
FACEBOOK RIGHTNESS
There are stages in the struggle to be right. The first stage is what I call “Facebook Rightness.” It isn’t exclusive to Facebook of course, and Facebook didn't invent it, it’s just totally apparent there. When we are lost in our desire to be right, at the basest level, we simply bludgeon those who disagree. We try to overwhelm our adversaries with information, or shame them, or insult their intelligence or maybe even their very humanity. Our desire to be right manifests as righteousness - as if all questions of merit had been answered already - and we make the opposing view inherently wrong, full stop.
There is no discussion in Facebook Rightness, because there is no real desire to solve the problem. The problem is not something to be solved at all, it is simply the playing field on which we stage our game of “who is right?” We take the game very seriously, while pretending to take the problem seriously.
To use an example from national politics, liberal progressives (a group I count myself a part of) didn’t solve racism by electing a black president, we just shamed the people who voted against him. We will not solve the problem of divisive anger by voting against Trump, either. From all appearances, we will simply continue to shame his supporters, and perpetuate the problem. Shaming people has never once in the history of mankind made people change their perspective, but that doesn’t stop us. This is because we like the problem. We like being right, and Trump and his supporters make it deliciously easy to be completely, undeniably right. Right?
When lost in Facebook Rightness, we are not sincerely interested in solutions, we are interested in winning.
SELF LOATHING RIGHTNESS
This is a big one, largely because we can get really stuck here. I know I have. Self Loathing Rightness is what happens when we make our own fallibility the subject of judgmental thinking. In this condition, our desire to be right overwhelms our need for self care, and we begin to tear ourselves apart.
This can happen in many forms. Sometimes we attack humanity as a whole (“we’re destroying the planet” or “we are inherently violent and evil” or just “people suck”), sometimes we attack a social group that we ourselves are part of (see: the penultimate paragraph of the previous section), and sometimes - you could even say very often - we attack ourselves as individuals (“I’m worthless/fat/stupid/a fraud/a failure…”).
This is a real conundrum, especially for people with very active minds. Because, see, if our higher purpose is to be right all the time, we will be constantly on the lookout for things to judge. And it doesn’t matter if we ourselves are the target, we would rather be right than happy. Or maybe, we would rather be correct about reality than at peace with our place in it.
A great many of us have been through this. We look in a mirror and see something we don’t like. Immediately we start judging that thing. Then we stop and remember that we shouldn’t judge, that self love is important, and so we begin beating ourselves up for judging. Which, of course, is another form of judgment and self loathing, which we realize immediately. Then we’re judging for judging the judging, and we are stuck in a loop. Then we feel that the very fact that we are stuck in a loop means something must be broken in us. How could we be so selfish? We’re so self obsessed, that’s pitiful. There are people suffering all over the world and here we are worrying endlessly about superficial things like appearance and social status and caloric intake and all the while the climate is changing and species are failing and refugees are homeless. Can’t we see the bigger picture? We must have some kind of design flaw, stuck in this selfish loop, navel gazing. We must be a failed version of a person. And on and on and on…
What’s important here is not that the thought process is painful - it is - but that it has a motive. It wants to figure things out. It wants to be right about itself, even if that means self hatred. When the higher purpose of the self is to be right, it will sacrifice everything else on that altar. It’s also important to notice that very rarely does this thought process actually lead to anything like personal change or development, it just makes us feel like shit. (And then we feel like shit for feeling like shit and oh no here we go again…)
SPIRITUAL/PHILOSOPHICAL RIGHTNESS
There is in all of us, whether hidden or on the surface, an intense desire to have our chosen path be right. We want to have found “the thing,” and the temptation to believe that we have done so is powerful. We see this in Yoga, Mindfulness, Televangelical Christianity, New Age Spirituality, Corporate Buddhism, Scientism, Democratic Socialists, and all kinds of other systems of thinking that assure us they’ve got things figured out. And when we join a group with a common purpose, like a yoga studio or a church, there is often an initial rush of satisfaction or elation. We feel we have really figured life out and will never again be in danger of wrongness. But the rush fades in time. It always does. Then the world becomes unpredictable and chaotic again.
And this is OK.
It’s essential that we acknowledge that our systems of thinking are not final answers. The are not, in the end, right. They are methods living, not life's solutions. As the Zen masters would say, ‘don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.’ In the spiritual path the pursuit of rightness manifests as the desire to be done, to be complete, to have it figured out. And this desire simply gets in the way of the deep work of discovery.***
Those of us who choose to live on a spiritual or philosophical path must be honest with ourselves. Unyielding humility, sincerity, and honesty have the power to deeply alter our consciousness and bring harmony to our lives. But too often we use great ideas and spiritual traditions to reinforce our pre-existing patterns. We make ourselves right because of our diets or our physical practices, our bodies or our clothes. Or, a step further, we make ourselves right by being those enlightened ones who rise above corporatism and vanity and say things like “yoga is not about looking good” or “mindfulness has nothing to do with Whole Foods.”
It is essential that we ask ourselves, “am I doing this to be right?” If we are, then we’re missing the point and exacerbating the problem at hand; namely, that in this culture we prize rightness above peace, harmony, happiness, generosity, compassion, understanding, and all other virtues.
MAKING A CHOICE
The first verse of the Dao De Jing is “The Dao that can be named is not the true Dao.” This is usually understood to mean that words cannot ever fully describe reality. I say it goes further; there is no way to be right about reality. Systems, be they spiritual, logical, scientific, philosophical, whatever, will take you only so far. Eventually they all disintegrate because reality is not a system, or at least not one that we can comprehend. Rules only apply so far. Eventually, we have to acknowledge their and our limitations.
But this does not mean we can surrender to nihilism. We must participate in the shaping our experience, or it will be shaped for us. There is no stopping the mental process of judgment. We must choose something as our higher purpose to ground our judgments, to give them meaning, or we will be sucked into our culture’s default mode of thinking. Then our higher purpose will be personal rightness, which manifests as greed, anger, and self loathing.
The value of spiritual systems is that they help inform our thinking, they give us practices and stories and themes and traditions that have proved effective to others. But in the end we must choose our own way. And when we choose, we accept that we may be labeled as wrong. We accept that there are powerful arguments and logical structures that can be presented against our higher purpose. We accept that we may one day feel compelled to revise our choices and find a new higher purpose. And we still make the choice.
NOTES
*It might, however, make you feel weird or strange or bad sometimes. Personally, I see this is as sign that I might want to investigate my higher purpose and see about redefining it.
**What is the whole body-image industry based on if not “right beauty”? What are the thousands of diet fads if not “right food”? What is religion if not “right belief”?
***In the yoga community this can be especially tricky because there are many of us out here who are trying to make a living as teachers. It’s very difficult to persuade the modern American consumer to practice by saying, ‘hey, I don’t have the answer, but this is an effective method, though I can’t really tell you where the method is going because there is no "arriving" per se, so I’ve not arrived myself, and in the end you’ll never really 'get’ anywhere, or at least you don’t want to think about it like that… but you should totally come try it out.’ That’s just bad marketing. Good marketing involves convincing people you’re right. But, see, most yoga teachers value authenticity and humanity, so “good” marketing can feel really icky to those of us who have been humbled by the spiritual path… so we say things like “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” which is of course true, but oversimplified and cliche to the point of near meaninglessness… needless to say, this whole process can turn into a loop of it’s own.