Awareness and the Minds of the Masses: Looking Ahead

Excuse my use of the term “masses” in the title. It was temptingly Marxist and even more temptingly alliterative. Now on to the real story. Over the last few days something remarkable has occurred to me: most people are not aware of themselves and their place on this rickety wooden stage with 70s curtains we call existence. I know scientists (or students, or quacks, or whatever one calls a biology student without a degree) who write off free will as impossible (something to do with Prophylactics and brain states or something; I usually fall asleep when I hear them say anything remotely Latinate-sounding). I know other people who know for a fact that God doesn’t exist because why should he. I’ve even met a few people who think the government is chlorinating our water for our health (heh, sheeple). But I run into very few people who actually bother to answer these questions without using science to explain them away. I say “explain them away” because while a Physicalist answer might suit some, it essentially tries to dismiss the problem out of hand. No physical presence? No God. Protons? No free will. I’m talking about something more (dare I use the word?) existential.

When I do bother to descend my gilded, spiral staircase to traffic with the hoi polloi, I really do feel a crushing sense of existential un-awareness surrounding me. A recent trip to Wal-Mart drove me into a deeper state of existential angst than Søren Kierkegaard at a party full of university bureaucrats and Danish National Clergy. I was faced with the fact that I was watching many people exacerbate what were clearly extant health problems by ravenously consuming that which was patently unhealthy for them and yet incredibly affordable.

Now clearly I’m poking some fun at myself. This entire article presupposes some kind of sick sense of superiority. “I get existence and you don’t! Neeeeener Neeeener Neeeener.” But in reality, that is not what I’m trying to get at in the slightest. That we will all meet some kind of bodily, physical death is a fact. Whether a partisan of Dawkins or Pope Francis, we can all accept that we will cease to be in the physical sense at some point in time (now there’s a buzzword. Did somebody say Hegel or Schelling?) Why don’t we live like it? Or at least think about it?

On a fundamental level, human beings do seem to like to lie to themselves (she loves me or, even better, I’ll win the lottery this time). And so that might account for part of it. But the answer may lie a little deeper in our consciousness than we want to admit. Death is scary. It’s the ultimate darkness, the unknowable, the un-seeable, the abyss. Stare too long into it and you’ll waste a solid portion of your finite existence. We don’t like what we can’t rationally observe and understand. And in a world where we are turning more and more to the physical sciences for answers, we are only more perplexed by something so rationally incomprehensible. It is the anti-rational itself. It cannot be reasoned because it cannot be tested. It exists outside of the empirical. So some scientists now deign to write it off. You die. That’s it. No fireworks. No balloons. Blackness, eternal, unknown, blackness.

But now we’re back at square one. We’re back to the Physicalist answer. For those of us who do consider these questions important, I think we need to peer a little deeper into that abyss. We can hypothesize all we want, but perhaps Camus put it best when he said that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That is to say, even if the Physicalists are right (Spoiler alert: I don’t think they are) we need to be conscious of our state and find happiness within our toil. Qoheleth asked it first: “What profit have we from all the toil which we toil at under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:3). And the answer is…drum roll please…………………………………………………………………….) we’ll find out later. For now, work toward a greater consciousness of your actions. Know that you only have so much time to help and love those around you. Constantly examine yourself, becoming a better person, becoming more Christ-like (or Dawkins-like, don’t want to forget that camp). And most importantly: happy belated Mothers’ Day. This article is in honor of those who’ve gone before, especially my mother.