Auckland Clip 6: On Crippling Guilt

And I met lots of people who were suicidal because of that, but also unwilling to take care of themselves, you know, because they were so guilty about who they were, and their mode of being in the world, that they just felt that they weren't worth the damn trouble. You know, and, well, they all had their own particular reasons for believing that their own failures, their own improper sacrifices, let's say, their own acts of individual malevolence; but they're summed up in a lovely metaphorical manner, a horrifying metaphorical manner, in those ancient stories.

And those stories explain to us, too— why, as well, that our consciences don't sit well with us, and why we always feel that there's something undone that we should be doing in the world, which is a much better pathway to take, by the way, than to degenerate into nihilism and catastrophe, and so on. And that's really cool too—it's like, well, you should treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping, and the first question is, "Well, why don't you?"

And the answer is— well, there's a lot wrong with you, you know, and it's hard to exercise enough love and care in a deep and non-naive way to care properly for something like that. But, you know, you do it for people that you love, despite their inadequacies.

And there is this idea that there is a spark of divinity within us, and it is possible that the fact that you have that spark of divinity within you also means that you have the capability to withstand that terrible vulnerability. That's what I was trying to get at in Chapter 1—which was to stand up straight with your shoulders back, that you could actually voluntarily accept the onslaught of the tragedy of being, and that you can constrain the proclivity for malevolence that's part of you and that's part of the world.

And in that, you can discover your own value, your own intrinsic value in your own nobility, and all of that might be more powerful than the forces of vulnerability and malevolence themselves, which I also happen to believe. I think that that is, in some sense, the fundamental hallmark of faith.

And so, Chapter 2, and to some degree, Chapter 3 wishes to surround yourself with people who want the best for you. It’s an encouragement to assume, to act out the proposition that even if life is as difficult as it seems to be, and if you're as vulnerable and weak in a fundamental sense as you definitely are, characterized by this terrible propensity for the infliction of voluntary suffering on yourself and others and that destructive tendency—there's still something within you that's so remarkable and so aligned with order and being in the proper manner that you can climb above that, let's say like Abel.

And that you can make the proper sacrifices, and that you can set yourself right, and you can set your family right, and you can set the world right. And that the mere possibility that that might occur, that that might be within the realm of potential, means that you have a moral obligation to exercise the responsibility to take care of yourself as if you're something that matters.

And that if you did that properly, it might turn out that what you did would matter, that it would matter to you, that it would be meaningful in the way that things that matter are meaningful, and that it would matter to everyone around you.