Facing the abyss collectively

We are all living in the moment. If only we could glimpse through the obstructions of our daily life, at the cold void of the universe and the obtrusive meaninglessness around, we would have seized to function in a society that we have built. We wake up, do yoga, have coffee, start work... fight, grind, grit our teeth, and brood and exhaust ourselves for 12 hours each day. Then we treat our bruised selves with more and more "in the moment" stuffs like shopping, Netflix or Facebook or whatever that catches our fancy to give us a 'quickie' dopamine drive while cluttering our surroundings with our wastes and excrement. They all help us keep to the moment and not see the larger picture. Because probably there is no larger picture to look at. The absurdity of the universe is terrifying. The most disturbing factor is that the nature of the universe, as little as we have explored, is incompatible with the activities of our daily lives. From the philosophical standpoint, metaphysics, ethics, politics, or aesthetics, for that matter, do not fall into one cohesive board. None of our social value systems of should-be can survive beyond the flimsy bubble of our perceptions, which is protected by our cognitive dissonance, otherwise known as "double-think."

From the early dawn of human history, we are trying to legitimize our human-made laws as universal laws while continuously collapsing each universal high-grounds in a subsequent era with a more zealous conviction in a newer still universal law. Take, for example, the argument for the higher precedence of universal law over royal decree from the ancient Greek play Antigone by Sophocles. The protagonist Antigone disobeys the royal decree to secure the burial for her brother Polynices and consequently falls under the wrath of Theban ruler Creon. Antigone questions the credibility of Creon's royal decree of denying Polynices a burial. She claims that the rite to proper burial is a universal rite bestowed by the god(s) to every mortal; hence hierarchically, it precedes any royal decree, which is at best a human-made law. But does the burial of a dead body have any meaning from the universal perspective? Different cultures in the existing society have vastly varied ways of offering funeral rites to their departed fellows.

Take the example of the Tibetan sky burial by the Buddhists, who cut the bodies of the departed and leave them on the hilltops for the scavenger bird's feast. How is that process different from a fallen soldier's dead body that is denied burial? The difference is not in the process the body decomposes or gets scavenged or decimates into the various biological processes in the ground, but in what meaning or narrative we associate with it. And that narrative is a human imposed value not imported or defined by the objective laws of the universe. The point is that we cannot perceive the universe objectively, devoid of any anthropocentric lens. We cannot assimilate the unimaginable absurdity found in the universe's immensity and make a cohesive social order where politics, ethics, or aesthetics are in line with metaphysics. The communist tried to do it with their reductionist materialism because they failed to see the big picture. The Nazis wanted to do it with Darwinian natural selection by hijacking the theory and fitting their nationalist narrative. We know how it ended.

We often fail to understand the obvious fact: what keeps us grounded is the human connection, the human bonding. Because for two million years, we lived in a close-knit society. We are evolutionarily predisposed to be social, not individual. We find meaning in social acceptance, not in social isolation. The purpose found in social isolation, that romanticism accentuated and glamorized beyond repair, is an exceptional phenomenon that proves the rule. Anthropologically we are community-driven, and we need social assurance. Today if you talk to your friend nicely but, tomorrow, you ignore him, for your reasons, no matter how deeply s/he values individual right to feel whatever one feels, s/he will feel upset. That's because for two million years we lived in a supportive community structure where individuation of human being didn't alienate ourselves. If you treat your friend well in such a setting, you would know for sure that that your friends will treat you well. You will not prioritize your mood swings over how you should treat others. This is where lies the root of today's great disconnect. We are not sure about one another, of what to expect. In the wake of worshiping ourselves, we have gradually walked into the quicksand of social uncertainty and lost touch with the very thread of collective self that glued us together for so long.

We need to get back... find our way to the community. But in turn, we mustn't forget about the global reach we have attained at the expense of bleeding proximity and warmth with one another. We have expanded at a dire cost. Let that be an investment in our path to understanding how futile the individual is in an extensive system. Let's now consolidate and find a sweet spot. Let's make humans less of an individual and more of a community with personal awareness of responsibility and not just the rites. Let's make humanity a kaleidoscope of microcosms within a microcosm. In the vastness of unbearable indifference of the objective universe, inter-subjectivity with an awareness of our infinitude is what we have to face the experience known as existence.