Life is not fair. And we suffer for it.
These are not the best of times. Further, intelligence, talent, opportunity, energy, sex appeal and luck are not equally distributed. Millions live in conditions too impoverished to pretend that they have access to any of life’s bounty. Even efforts to level the playing field are unfair, subject to shifting circumstances, partisan politics and the cold hard facts of recession and unemployment.
Destiny is also determined by the character or substance of our autonomy. This character is a crucial asset and its absence painfully felt, yet the need to acquire it is often overlooked. However, if our goals for a personally rewarding life remain out of reach, it is to this character we should look. The good news: even if nothing else about life is equal, we do have a fair shot at acquiring character. Better still, this substance fuels a powerful momentum-generating engine and provides a GPS for direction.
Think about it. The people we admire and take seriously possess this substance. They’re in control of their hearts, their minds, their words and their deeds. A model of stability, they lead by example and can sustain their commitments, responsibilities and spirits through our troubling times. They are disciplined. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Conscionable. Their confidence is based not on a ballooned ego, but on real intellectual and moral resource. In popular parlance, they get over themselves, over the petty, the stingy, the small, over immature emotional dependencies and failures of nerve. They walk their talk.
How they got this way is not a mystery. What they have in common is a never-quit, tough-it-out responsibility for their condition and circumstance. They recognize, accept and respond creatively and effectively to the pragmatic and moral demands of autonomy.
Where did these so-called demands of autonomy come from? Who says we have to meet them? Good questions. Experts estimate that in an eons-long moment of originality culminating about 35,000 years ago, random selection favored capacities that permit language, grammar and vocabulary. In this very long moment the dynamics of subjectivity, together with the sense of “I” that we refer to as ego, came into existence.
At first, this embryonic glimmer of self-awareness was probably just exploited. Alpha humans would say, “Hey you, get over yourself. React to what I am saying. Do what I say.” So be it; the long march from creature to culture had begun. And over time, these humble beginnings were turned upside down by the subjugated subject and became the personal authority of autonomy.
So here we are today. In the fast lane. And the demand made on us to produce results, the demand for innovation, flexibility, accommodation and adaptation, for effectiveness, productivity and expedience never ends.
Yet even as we’re perfecting our competence, for example, in the competitive marketplace or in the business of running a home, indeed, in running a life, we recognize another demand. The call on contribution, on conscience, on affinity and compassion, on integrity and fair play, on hope, good faith and love. The call on what we can offer another that is not surface business but rather a deeply humane way of being, something too often missing in the currency of business, politics and everyday life. We can hear these calls as moral obligations, which they are. But we also recognize them as the means to a profound presence of mind, to intellectual happiness and to the affinity and emotional expansiveness that leads to genuine care, concern and generosity.
Evident to all, the demands of the marketplace and finance, the drive to be successful, to thrive on expedience and to produce results have taken up the lion’s share of our time and attention. Absorbed, pressured and stressed, we left to chance the development of a core bedrock of personal inner strength or character resting on a discipline of autonomy.
However, the bubble has burst. And many of us realize that it is time to get over this herd-like subservience to Machiavellian-inspired excess and respond to the demands of autonomy.
In the previous post, I discussed the reasons why meeting the demands made on us by autonomy is so difficult. I characterized one of these reasons as autonomy’s demand that we “exit” the ego protection program. This is because the program, like a corrupt CEO, cooks the books, so to speak, on our intellectual, moral and ready-to-hand competitive skills. The manipulated, inflated or bogus data it provides, dishonestly concocted, generates an unrealistic sense of worth and preparedness and a way too complacent evaluation of our marketable competence and moral resource.
Now let’s address a second demand of autonomy, that is, that we traverse the distance from immediacy to transcendence.
Beasts without language, including the pre-linguistic animals we were those thousands of years ago, have no subjective referential capacity, no linguistic ability to get over their impulses and primal instincts. They are what they are. Everything about an animal’s behavior is determined by do-or-die immediacy, by impulse, by appetite and ultimately by pattern and habit. Over this ruled-by-nature system of stored responses awaiting stimulus, they have no subjective, narrative or descriptive control.
Of course, the modern human being is also host to this reflexive, seething mass of drives. We must deal constantly with the living system that we are, eons-old simple-reflex wiring that is not a natural fit for a complex life in the fast lane.
What distinguishes us from other animals is our subjective capacity to transcend, rise above or get over this unexamined visceral immediacy in favor of practices that we might recognize as rational, decent, noble, meaningful or civilized.
At first, these transcendent practices were not prompted by substance or intellectual conviction, but forced on us. Fear of punishment or the promise that we’ll be given good stuff is usually what drives our early learning, and in fact we may still be at the effect of this stimulus/response version of authority.
Now, however, we recognize that transcendence itself is a powerful determining choice, perspective and standpoint enabling us to begin anew, to recreate and to leverage our ways and means of being in the world. Certainly we enjoy a much more personally rewarding life when we’ve taken responsibility for and can transcend the brute fact of immediacy. And certainly, the manner in which we articulate, frame and address our problems has a good deal to do with whether or not we solve them.
The decisive stand-up character of those we admire is erected upon this insight and resource. Think about it. Doesn’t the desperate feeling that we live in a world gone out of control and to shallow purpose reflect an immediacy-driven mindset more than it reflects a static circumstance for which there is little hope of reform?
The immediate gut reaction to uncertainty, fears and appetites is only an age-old piece of the many intelligences that inform the modern human being. Yes, raw feelings are a first-order core-shaking experience. But the human-made desire to see a bigger picture, be a bigger person and make a bigger contribution is also authentic and can be the backbone of our existence.
However, if we’ve not spent enough time perfecting a stand-up personhood that can resist not only its own internal primal immediacy but also the immediate temptation of its conditioned habits, this resource is largely unavailable. And we suffer for it.