For all humanity, unique in the entire animal kingdom, everything begins and ends with “self.” We are born with it and we die in it. In between, we breathe, work and kill for it. Virtually all known human conflicts (from world wars to lawsuits) and all known social pleasures (wealth and power) originate from the dictates of the self, as the “self” moves easily to “selfish” and to “self as everything.” Whenever we do something we shouldn’t do, it’s the self in triumph over our better angel.
It is so universally powerful that we memorialize the few who overcame the self: Most famously, we can name Jesus of Nazareth, Sophie Scholl of Nazi Germany, Henry David Thoreau of Massachusetts, among the handful remembered by the world as its heroes and saints who overcame self. The rest of humanity is commanded, dominated and enslaved by the self at all times.
In Old-World nations, they resist the forces of the self with a device called “society” (or “community”). Depending on how strong “society” is in each case, the self and society co-exist in varying degrees of harmony and tension. These nations have learned that if society (or community) does not intervene, their citizens’ self-assertion would naturally make them all childish, even insane and criminal, threatening their very social structure. So, children eventually grow up into their compromised adulthood, and the insane and criminals are isolated from others to minimize their harm to its collective peace.
In America, the world’s first new nation, the process has been in reverse: America itself was born as a “natural” society (the only “animal-nation” among all nations) which molded its generations into “natural animals.” The early generations who had come from well-tamed societies in Europe thus returned to the animal-self in the new natural-frontier “society.” In these unprecedented circumstances, so-called “Americans” were humanity’s first and only “animal citizens” innately under-socialized, all in defense of “freedom,” “individualism,” “natural right,” and later “consumer choice.”
As an entirely new species in the story of humanity, we built a nation totally devoted to self (called liberal democracy) and an economic system wholly based on self-interest (called capitalism). Combine these three factors — the self, the new nation and capitalism — and we witness the perfect dystopia whose 340 million citizens are actually 340-million separate entities who happen to occupy the same time and space. There, these American animals fight each other if something is at stake, but stay indifferent and uninterested if no self-interest is at stake — just like the beasts in nature.
When we call ourselves “American,” it is quite different from two men from France calling themselves “French,” or two Japanese women calling themselves “Japanese.” Since the designation “American” is made up only of “self,” so-called “Americans” have no real substance to tie them together as fellow tribesmen. It’s just Self A and Self B, essentially strangers, who happen to occupy the same neighborhood. If no self-interest is served, no interest is shown: A good neighbor minds his own business.
As Americans we now live for one goal only: How to maximize my own pleasure. My food, my TV, my social media, and whatever else I choose, must be most pleasing to myself. No other society has had our kind of pure self-interest with virtually no social restraint or communal shame with their choice and lived happily ever after.
The food, entertainment, or political choice, whatever else we are free enough to choose — like all opioids — is always something that is likely to come back to haunt us. The choice we make — not by “society” of generations and their “community” wisdom — is almost always destructive. Like Newton’s law of action and reaction, our freely chosen pleasures always extract their pound of flesh in the end.
Good parents recognize this and protect their children from making bad choices. Indifferent ones allow their children to make their free choices that are bad to their own well-being (like junk food and smartphones). As citizens and society in America, that’s the ultimate destination that we have chosen to pursue. If you leave everything to the dictates of (your free) self, without restraints from generations past to balance it, your own self-ruination is preordained. As a nation built on self and self-interest, everything in America has come to its own self-destruction: The food we eat, entertainment we enjoy, political choices we make have all come to their predestined ends as they are all killing us now. (Junk food, trash TV, drugs, distrust, fascism, anyone?)
In America today, everyone is in the process of self-destruction. As free consumers, we go through our daily routines predictably consuming ourselves. When we are free to choose, we cannot possibly choose anything that’s good for us. Ironically, the term “consumption” used to refer to TB-caused deaths that slowly devoured the body from within, as we are presently doing to ourselves: As “consumers,” we naturally consume ourselves, body and soul.
Likewise, people preoccupied with the self cannot do well with other equally self-occupied people as neighbors or fellow citizens. Hence we are in constant conflict with one another in “war of all against all” as in Thomas Hobbes’ immortal words for our nature. Most other nations form community to resist nature. But, we in America destroy community to live in nature as untamed animals, calling it “freedom.”
Without mutual trust that only community can give us, we cannot attain peace, neither within ourselves nor with one another. Just witness the extent of America’s mental illness, lawsuits and the number of locks on each door and guns in each home.
End of meditation on the self.
Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.