I woke up this morning thinking about an email from someone a couple of months ago and in their typical fashion I won’t hear from them for another six months. But its contents led me down a string of thought pertaining to how I’ve changed. Everything in America is built on selling the idea that we will all live until we’re a 100 years old, that everything will be ok. From the food we eat, to insurance, to retirement investments. We live each day like we have a million more of them. We even treat others like they will be around for a hundred more years. We take things for granted, we abuse our most basic human connections because we believe there is a tomorrow and everything will be alright. I too fall under this group. I took a lot of things and a lot of people for granted. I had this false sense of immortality, which is disturbing.
Being here, the world outside, the third world, your ideas change quickly. In the past few weeks there have been almost two funerals a week. See enough people die and you start living like there is no tomorrow because there isn’t one. You strip away everything to its bare bones and you see life in its raw form; you see people in their natural state. I’m forming my own philosophy because I realized that the current state is much too complex to be sensible.
Wind the clock back in time, remove the husks of civilization and what do we have? We are animals at our core, granted more intelligent, but animals nonetheless. We are driven by incentives and self-interest, it is our very nature. However, we also have moments of selflessness, as Adam Smith wrote, “How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” Even optimistically I think that split is 90-10. This is what we are, how we are, yet we are ashamed of it, forced to embarrassment by centuries of moral correction. We are Adam and Eve, after all, forever deviating from Eden because original sin is the natural state. Religion, like a metal brace, has “corrected” the growth of civilization, “saved” it from utter deformity.
To a certain extent, religion has prevented the world from falling into absolute chaos. It has lead to our great civilizations of today; consider what we have achieved from our humble ancestry. Do I believe in God? Yes, I believe in a greater power, an invisible hand, be it a being with wisdom and foresight, or simply a massive source of energy or even the force of nature itself, there is something greater. There are too many patterns and coincidences in life for it to be random. Look at us, every cell in our body, the intricate system of the universe, and most still beyond our understanding. The smallest electrons revolve around a nucleus, planets revolve around the Sun. Perhaps it’s our nature to detect patterns, to find meaning where it doesn’t exist; another mechanism to promote civility. It’s stifling and frightening.
Strip it all away, and despite our words and actions, we live and die by an order of two priorities:
Yourself
Everyone else
It’s bare, but consider everything we do and it falls in this order. It sounds terrible to say, to admit, but why is that? Because of a lifetime of lessons in morality? Social constraints and obligations? Fear of being outcast from the herd, outcast from this complicated world we have created for ourselves?
There are nuances to this order, details created by the complexity of human behavior caused by our own intelligence, our ability to think forward and plan. There is an interesting scene in the Dark Knight; two boats, one filled with prisoners, the other ordinary citizens, each rigged to blow the other boat should the passengers turn the key and save themselves. By midnight both boats would blow if neither turned the key. The film argues that people at their core are good, that they do the right things and not turn the key, even when faced with death. Even lowly prisoners, the scum of the city, would not turn the key; they too are good and simply misunderstood victims of circumstance.
However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. What does it mean to be good? Who defined good? What if good meant something entirely different? I’m not saying we should turn the key but at least admit and accept why we truly don’t turn it. One of the curses of our extraordinary intelligence is we strive for purpose, a meaning to our existence. We have children, strive for greatness, and yearn to be remembered because in a way it immortalizes us. If we die being remembered, then our entire existence is justified. Hence the presence of martyrs; the ability of one person to sacrifice life for a cause, but in reality it is for themselves, to be remembered, to become immortal.
Man’s greatest fear is loneliness. Even the most heartless criminal and the bravest hero all fear being alone. The Joker, the Stranger. This is why we have God, why we yearn to be in groups (work, family, clubs) and even why we marry, so that we may never be alone, even in death. It must stem from an evolutionary instinct of survival. Perhaps long ago we could only survive in packs, death falling on anyone who was alone. So consider the boat scenario again bearing this in mind and the fact that we are driven by incentives and self-interest. The decision with greater personal benefit is the one we will make. If we turn the key, kill an entire boat of people, we will forever be remembered as immoral killers. We will be outcast from society, alone, and left to fend for ourselves, like Cain. Secondly, we will continue to live, suffer the continuation of an existence in solitude, in rejection, and shame. If we don’t turn the key, we die, but we die as heroes, as the beacons of morality. People will remember us foever as good, as the valiant beings that did not fear death in the face of the absurd.
In light of this point of view, which of us would turn the key? It’s in our self interest not to turn it, to die, as logically it has the most positive outcomes. This order has many other such nuances, for example when you consider family and the idea of love. But in essence, I believe it can all be applied to the simple order of yourself first and everyone else second. Selfish, yes, but there is no denying its weight. We choose the most profitable route and thus we help others only when:
Benefit to self from helping someone else > Benefit to self from helping yourself
Many people would be outraged by this hypothesis. I am not arguing that we abandon our way of life but just be aware of this driver, consider life from this perspective. To what extent do we fear loneliness? Do we fear it enough to cause us to help others, to be accepted and welcomed into society? Things to ponder, things we are privileged to ponder. Life is short, our existence in essence is meaningless, solitude is the natural state and death is the only guarantee in life. A morbid list of realities that we drown in living, ignore, run away from. Even I don’t want to believe these pursuing specters exist, to my very core, but I know they do.
I feel liberated, even if it’s false, I wake up every morning and work because I want to work, eat what I want to eat, do what I want to do. If I choose to eat healthy, it’s because at that moment I simply want to and for no other reason than that. There is no tomorrow and what I can do to enjoy my life today, I will. I don’t want to go to bed with regret because if I don’t wake up it will be with regret. I will maintain order, fall in line, pray, eat, greet in the manners dictated by society because it prevents chaos. I am not going to cast a stone in the machinery of the system because I see no self benefit in it. We are animals, clever ones, but animals nonetheless. Anytime we claim we don’t know why we did something it’s simply because of this fact.
This falls into my philosophy about my work here. Development doesn’t work in the aid form. Non-profit is a silly idea because selflessness is a silly idea. For any kind of development to work, for poverty to be eradicated, all parties need the right incentives. In this case, these incentives are monetary. Profit is the single most powerful driver as it is the key to many other doors. In all the business classes I have been teaching here, people are responsive to the idea of doing what makes them the most money. All these practices of saving the environment, planting trees, don’t work unless people see the direct monetary benefit which is, in short, my job here. Linking the environment to profit; turn tree hugging into a scalable business and convince the community that it is in their best monetary interest.
For now I feel love, or at least I feel something I have been taught my whole life is supposed to be love. Did Meursault feel love? Was his logic so far from the realm of comprehension? What if the whole world was filled with Meursaults? It would be chaos. So is it a stretch to claim that to be good is to conduct ourselves in a manner that best prevents chaos?
