"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind."
- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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If you could bring any deceased writer back to comment on this moment in our history, who it would be? I would probably choose Kurt Vonnegut. One of my favorite novels of his is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The protagonist, Eliot Rosewater, is the scion of an exorbitantly wealthy American family. His "Sum of Money," Vonnegut writes, "is the leading character in this tale about people." It is appropriate that Vonnegut identifies an inanimate object as the central character, as Vonnegut saw the blind pursuit of money and status as "sterilizing" and "dehumanizing." Rosewater's solution to this sterilization and dehumanization was to give away all of his money, albeit in Vonnegut-esque eccentric and hilarious fashion.
In somewhat cruder language, Medium's Erik Rittenberry claims that the "status chasing, security-obsessed, hurried American lifestyle is draining you of your life energy." He elaborates:
He proffers this solution:The reason you don’t feel alive is because you aren’t alive. You’re merely going through the motions in a fast-paced, consumer-centered culture that has transformed our once beautiful land into an asphalt wasteland strewed with digital billboards, fast food joints, soulless malls, and complete carnage.Your constant craving for objects and status (the American way) has robbed your life of its freedom and creative zest. You live routine and stressed and you’re chained to a sluggish and predictable way of living.The less you are inwardly the more you feel the need to buy buy buy. And the more you buy the more hours you need to put in at a useless job that has your stomach riddled with ulcers. Or you go deeper into debt. Or likely both.The less-developed you are as a mindful person the more susceptible you are to the psychological conditioning of the cultural engineers. The less you’re able to express yourself as a vitally alive human being the deeper the need is for you to hide behind luxuries and status.You’ve become what they needed you to become. And you’re sick because of it.
You have to unplug from the machine and take back your life and learn to live with less and sit under trees and read the great minds and create art and listen to music and sound your “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”Quit doing things you hate to impress the faceless people among us.Decondition yourself from culture, quit suppressing your uniqueness, travel to places that frighten you a bit, learn to embrace silence and solitude a few times a week. And most importantly — you must awaken from your culturally-induced slumber and try to find simple joy among the sacred.
With his typical insight (and more peaceful rhetoric), Jack Kornfield preaches that outer (economic, technological) development, although important, is inadequate to deal with the direst issues our world is facing. He calls upon the inner development of "compassion and equanimity" through mindfulness as the way forward for each of us. In that way, says Kornfield, we may be fully present for each other and whatever in the world requires our attention - and, just as important, recognize and accept what does not require it.
Though Vonnegut's diagnosis of humanity's plight echoes the grimness of Rittenberry's, his prescription was not entirely different than his protagonist, Rosewater's. In the December 2008 volume of Midwest Quarterly, Brian McCammack writes that Vonnegut's answer lies in "a concern for the poor and criticism of those who participate in the system of their exploitation," as opposed to a broader, more systemic form of socialism. "The key to this salvation is an emphasis on the individual, private sphere aspects of social humanitarianism rather than mass, public sphere manifestations," writes McCammack. In other words, Vonnegut's solution lies in good people, with means, utilizing those means to help other people.
I would love to hear your thoughts. If you could bring back any writer in history to provide the definitive commentary on our collective moment, who would it be? Feel free to comment below.
Thank you for reading.
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"The full humanization of man requires the breakthrough from the possession-centered to the activity-centered orientation, from selfishness and egotism to solidarity and altruism."
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
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References
Heart Wisdom - Ep. 77 – Path of Inner Development. (2018, July 7). Retrieved from https://jackkornfield.com/ep-77-path-of-inner-development/
Rittenberry, E. (2020, February 1). The American Life Is Killing You. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@erikrittenberry/the-american-life-is-killing-you-9e7e68135f4a
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