I watched Tucker Carlson’s one hour interview with Johann Hari concerning his book “Stolen Focus”. It was interesting, in that specific context, contrasting his interview style–which he had created in order to be able to go into greater depth–with the five minutes of Bill Maher I was able to watch, in which Maher interrupted Hari every five seconds, making any sustained point or focus impossible.
We obviously have a huge problem with focus and attention. And here is what I would suggest: the capacity for attention and focus is more or less equal to emotional maturity. It is a basic building block. If you cannot focus, you cannot “adult”. You are functionally retarded. Stupid.
And we see this every day on the internet, don’t we? Social media posts are greeted with what could be called an Ideological Scan, which is basic pattern matching, and which can be done in ten seconds. If there is a match, you agree. If a mismatch, people become angry and combative. And they may go back and forth in thirty second sound bites for hours, without ever taking five minutes to develop anything like a deeper understanding.
Self evidently, this dynamic does not bode well for the future.
I merely record what I see. You and I do not need to participate in this dissipation of our dignity. That is the minimum we can offer as our payment for the privilege and miracle of human life. Not being willfully stupid is a service too. It starts by realizing you ARE being willfully stupid. And no matter your beliefs, if they consist in thirty second cartoons, you ARE being willfully stupid. This holds even if I would find your ideas congenial.
And I will suggest this: what free will we have originates in attention. If you think about it, you have ZERO free will about your emotional reactions. A rubber mallet hits your knee, and you react. Something happens in your life and you feel sad, happy, angry.
Now, obviously you can SUPPRESS that reaction. You can control what your body does. An insult does not force you into violence, even if that is your first impulse. You can CHOOSE, first, to not feel, then to THINK. This requires will, though. You choose the will, but not the reaction.
And will is finite and expendable. So, in a long series of emotional reactions, sooner or later the involuntary reaction will win out.
The way to control all this in the long run is staying present with your emotions, with your body, and gradually and patiently denuding them of their power. The long term goal is to so calm your tension and fear that you begin to feel this ocean of joy in which we all swim without realizing it. You then allow that water to slowly permeate your consciousness, such that little or nothing can divert you from feeling good. This is how you “win” at life, in my view.
But this winning requires attention. Sustained attention. The ability to sit quietly, ultimately, for hours, without distraction.
What we are raising is an Earth filled with arrogant morons, who are physically weak and soft, utterly contemptuous of cultural and moral difference, and empowered by technology to acts of violence. Indeed, many of them practice very realistic violence daily in video games which are slowly becoming difficult to distinguish from real life.
But I liked the basic spirit Eric Baret, as the recipient of a long tradition of certain kinds of words, and a certain sort of energy, conveyed in saying that if we needed to be alive in another time, we would be. If we needed to be somewhere else, we would be.
You are I are right where we need to be, right now. There is nothing that HAS to be done, but what will be done is what you do. Do it without believing you can perfect the universe. Do it with awareness, with breath, with intention freed of compulsion.
As many have said, it takes a life to learn how to live. But if the point of life is learning how to live, then then makes sense. You graduate from this school when you die.