Lessons Learned

When there were hundreds of millions of people who lost everything in all the horrific wars of the last century, why do we in the present day lay complacent? Why do we continue to perpetuate hate, intolerance, and violence in our world when they are the indisputable root cause of such catastrophes and atrocities? Why do we persist in this ambivalence about the nature of right and wrong, when, for those that have actually endured such tragedies, there is not an inkling of doubt? 

Humanity’s collective internalization of lessons learned is akin to a glacier—a gigantic heterogeneous mass of ice, snow, water, rock, and sediment—inching along month after month, week by week, and day by day, moving so slowly that its progress is virtually imperceptible. On the other hand, if we were to visualize the lessons learned of individuals, it might resemble an avalanche—a torrent of snow tumbling down a mountainside at staggering volume and dizzying speeds. Neil Peart, in the song Mission, wrote:

In the grip

Of a nameless possession 

A slave to the drive of obsession

A spirit with a vision

Is a dream with a mission

For a singular consciousness, doubt seldom holds back the most determined of individuals; they become entranced by the very profundity and imperativeness of the task that lay ahead of them. No matter what obstacles may come their way and no matter what radical changes they must make, they will inevitably find their way, whereas a collective consciousness—any form of group, tribe, or society—is bogged down by such obstacles. By nature’s design, every human will be different—different circumstances, and thus different formation of characterological traits and idiosyncrasies that determine the design of each individual’s decision-making faculties, and thus the conception of right and wrong, of what is significant and insignificant, of what is worth changing and what isn’t worth changing. And considering what we understand about human psychology, there is far more likely to be a paucity of humility than there would be pride and intractability in the average individual. For the vast majority of human history, the individual has seldom had the means to overturn the status quo, only able to inch it along. 

However, it’s not as though many of those lessons are simply lost generation after generation. It may be that the vast majority of lessons are indeed simply lost in time, but what few remain are those resilient enough to impart some miniscule degree of knowledge or imbue some form of wisdom into our collective consciousness. From a certain perspective, we’ve made immense progress—the gaining cultural traction of the repudiation of racism, sexism, and arbitrary forms of discrimination in society, the rejection of unnecessary violence, or the growing awareness of environmental and sustainability of our existence on this planet. Despite this, we must ask: Are we no longer waging wars and murdering one another on a daily basis? Are there no more victims of corporate or governmental corruption, greed, and negligence? Are we still not on the brink of world war or nuclear war at any given moment? 

Within the context of modern society, the aforementioned power play between the individual and the group has been inverted in some sense; the individual—now with equipped with tools capable of mass destruction whether in the form of a firearm, the bomb, or the computer—has the means of inflicting irreversible damage upon humanity, potentially even reversing all the progress made after millennia. It begs the question—have we actually progressed? And if we have, what difference does that progress make when we’re now far more capable of wreaking havoc and undertaking more forms of malevolence than we ever have? 

It is also another conundrum entirely—and a conundrum certainly worth bringing up—if we question the value of collective progress; we already seldom ask ourselves what specifically needs progressing, let alone whether or not we need to progress in the first place. After all, to nature, it makes no difference; what are an avalanche and a glacier but water molecules shifting around from place to place? Everything that happens on Earth is an unceasing, inexorable, and self-sustaining cycle of cause and effect, and all is one and the same. Perhaps everything is already in balance. In the same way nature needs predators as it does prey, death as it does life, famine and drought as it does abundance and prosperity, storms and gusts of wind as it does sunlight and gentle breezes, it could be that we need antagonists just as much as we need protagonists, chaos just as much as we need peace, anger just as much as we need kindness, urgency just as much as we need patience, laziness just as much as we need industriousness, deceit just as much as we need truth, evil just as much as we need good, and suffering just as much as we need joy. 

Perhaps the question is not whether we can win this battle against suffering—not whether or not we should suffer—but it is rather a question of how and why we suffer at all. The question merely becomes what battles we choose to fight and what sides we choose to take. Yes—the specific act of exhorting the people around us to be just slightly less evil and a little more kind may indeed be what is necessary to maintain this balance, but there is a world of difference between demanding that others be a certain way versus demanding that the universe be a certain way. The former is diligence, and the latter is insanity. 

But it may be that in the end, it makes no difference to us. Perhaps the pathway towards change and towards a meaningful and purposeful life, whether at the individual or group level, is in this ceaseless battle to eradicate evil, hate, and any form of malevolence; it is this paradoxically futile, yet valiant, endeavor to achieve the unachievable, to win the unwinnable, to make possible the impossible. 

If we go back to this paradoxical notion of suffering, perhaps that is the point of it all—to suffer, even if not collectively advancing humanity as a whole, even if we repeat the mistakes of the past, for it is all that gives us meaning in the end. 

Why—why fight a battle is both unending and without victory? 

Because—what else is there to do?