At times, my life seems difficult. I work until every muscle in my body aches, then work some more. Sometimes, when it seems I am my limit (in reality, I don’t doubt I am nowhere close), I think about pain and Sade.
My interest is this: in all my explorations, I look for the purest, best expressed forms of whatever it is I am studying. Sade is the template of human evil. He is the template of engorged, long lasting rage, and the rejection of the possibility of transcendental human experience–of love, of innocence, of genuine goodness and decency. He rejects, in the end, the possibility of happiness. Since happiness is the goal I aim at, it is worth understanding those who attack it. One must understand one’s enemies, even if such understanding is unpleasant.
Justine is Sade’s attack on the notion that Goodness leads to happiness. She always does the right thing, but the people she trusts–people whose social position would seem to imply decency–always betray her. Her decency leads to one horror after another. She is raped and tortured by monks. She is raped and tortured by a nobleman she helped. And so it goes. Bonaparte–a rapist and de facto mass murderer himself–banned the book and imprisoned Sade for the rest of his life.
It seems to me that people often equate Theism in some form with the notion that the religiously pious suffer less pain than others, because God protects them. Logically, if we present religion in any form as the hypothesis that members of that religion suffer less difficulty than the non-religious, then that hypothesis appears falsified by observable reality. Do Christians get less cancer? Do less bad things happen to them? Possibly, but bad things quite clearly happen to good people, and the idea is that they are protected in some way. Those who reject this claim appear to me to be on solid ground.
Yet, this only applies when we are talking about PHYSICAL pain. The point of any meaning system–of which all religions are subsets–is to enable the transmutation of physical pain and difficulty into either a nullity or actual happiness. It seems to me most all people have experienced some physical difficulty which led to some deep sense of satisfaction and happiness and joy that could not have happened any other way. For example, the team that wins the Super Bowl feels deep satisfaction, but that follows many years of hard work.
Is the Super Bowl important in any objective sense? Of course not. It is a game. It is an invention of the human imagination, of no intrinsic importance whatever, EXCEPT as a symbol of the power of determination in transmuting work into happiness. I will add that if the losing teams follow a John Wooden-ish philosophy, of focusing on preparation and not outcome, even they feel the satisfaction of knowing they did their best to become the best they were capable of becoming.
If we are speaking of Karma, do we need to assume that the person given an enormously difficult task is the cursed one and the person who can lounge about indolently for a lifetime the blessed one? I would argue, in fact, it is the opposite.
We all need to understand that work is a type of liberation, in that we become freer (we are never, in my view, “free”, in this world, since it is so thick and the limitations of our brains make us so stupid) through new insights and expressions.
Think to the happiest moments of your life. For most of us, they are some uncontrolled event when we were still innocent–for example a first love, or a trip to the lake, or perhaps even membership in (communion with) a sport team. Maybe it is the first time your baby walked, or talked, or played the flute.
All of these things involve qualitative change. They involve openness to risk, to work, and to becoming someone new.
As I have argued in my version of the Grand Inquisitor, evil is based on a notion of qualitative stasis. It is based on the idea that no growth is possible, that “happiness” is only possible in a condition of self delusion, and that hatred and the quest for power are the only real forces in human life. Evil is a nihilism which seeks the destruction of all traces of the qualitative transformations meaning systems enable. It is not passive, but aggressive. It is not sedentary, but in constant motion.
Yet, it leads nowhere. All that can be destroyed is life itself. No one can destroy the universe. For serious adherents of this philosophy, though, they will accept the end of humanity as a good beginning. In this sense, Marx–as I have often argued–was a Sadeist. I have a link on this somewhere further down. Marx only created a (now falsified) critique of Capitalism; he created no alternative, and seems to have longed to see the world on fire.
The point that needs to be made with regard to meaning systems is that they work as long as people continue believing in doing what they believe to be right, in the common good. They work as long as people believe in love, and helping others. They work as long as we keep going, without giving in to pessimism.
We have control over this. In the end, the question is not if God protects us. If He does so, it is largely–if not entirely–in another world(one does read of miracles, and I believe they happen, but not often and not daily). The question is if our own meaning systems protect us from the horror and anomie and darkness of nihilistic pessimism. They do do that. They do more: they permit happiness in this world, and sincere joy.
It is for this reason that we cannot ever abandon hope. All of us will leave this world one day. Some of us will die on the way to work one day, or of a slow wasting disease, or maybe get hit by lightning. None of that matters.
What matters is how we live. If you have a code you live by which is not inconsistent with sincerity and human connection, then you must honor it, or you abandon a safe home for the wolves howling out in the night.