About the deep sadness that animals and plants suffer and are murdered, that habitats are destroyed, that life is a constant confrontation with suffering over the fact that I live in a world in which coldness, injustice, destruction, ignorance, greed, envy and aggression, structural violence, mental narrowness, carelessness, advantage thinking, capped barbarism & bestiality, conformity and indifference are the objective, generally dominant patterns of human behavior.
Has the world improved just a little in recent years? Are not only old, pre-formulated slogans, opinions and behavioral patterns being replaced by somewhat prettified versions of the same old thing?
The principle of conformity in the claimed progress seems to remain completely untouched.
Then the suffering of many of those closest to me. Then the thought of the meaning of being in the world and the thought of death. The despair of not being able to improve the world, but of being entangled in it.
Despairing of the world as it is.
And yet always carry on.
The desire for redemption. The naive wish to merge after death into a united soul sea of goodness and beauty. The desire for heavenly unity, the overcoming of material division.
II
You have to find ways of coping with and in this terribly incomplete and unideal world.
It occurs to me that – in the worst-case scenario, when there is no more vitality left because you finally despair of the world – you have to radically divide yourself between your (own) life and the outside world.
Perhaps it helps, in the final analysis, to pretend that this world is none of your business, that it is a mere backdrop, an artificial projection; that the two spheres exist completely independently of each other and that touching and meshing would only be pure illusion, deception, a pretense of false facts.
Perhaps it is really just deception … in any case, the world would lose its power if we were not impressed by it, if we were to ignore it. When I say “ignore it”, I don’t mean “suppress it” or pretend it doesn’t exist. Of course it exists, the outside world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to have power over my life in every case.
If you repress something, you drag it around with you, you eat it into yourself, the repressed thing then works from the unconscious depths. In my view, “leaving it to the left” means paying only the attention to this world that is absolutely necessary to keep its worst manifestations and effects at bay.
So you have a choice: to fight with it, submit to it, work your way through it, capitulate to it, or not take it too seriously, keep your distance, create a gap between your own life and the world in which you live.
Escapism?
Overconfidence?
Sophism?
Carelessness?
Insanity?
Weakness?
Capitulation?
When it comes to saving your own life, every thought must be allowed, every (inner) reproach – whether it is justified or unjustified – must be shot down. It can no longer be about vanity. Perhaps ethical vanity, which is first and foremost a reflection of the norms of the outer world in connection with my inner self, can be seen through as a means of the world to control and impair my own life. In this sense, the world could then be understood as the antagonist of one’s own being, as the instance, so to speak, that works to prevent one’s own self from really growing freely.