Endangered, Violated, Destroyed Human rights... Calm Down? Everything is in Your Head? Part no. 3

A human rights violation is?the disallowance of the freedom of thought and movement to which all humans legally have a right. While individuals can violate these rights, the leadership or government of civilization most often belittles marginalized persons.

The Way to do is to be.

~LAO-TSE

People should not consider so much what they are to do, as what they are.

~MASTER ECKHART

The less you are and the less you express of your life—the more you have and the greater is your alienated life.

~KARL MARX?

Introduction: The Great Promise, Its Failure, and New Alternatives The End of an Illusion?

THE GREAT PROMISE OF UNLIMITED PROGRESS—the promise of domination of nature, of material abundance, of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and of unimpeded personal freedom—has sustained the hopes and faith of the generations since the beginning of the industrial age.

To be sure, our civilization began when the human race started taking active control of nature; but that control remained limited until the advent of the industrial age.

With industrial progress, from the substitution of mechanical and then nuclear energy for animal and human energy to the substitution of the computer for the human mind, we could feel that we were on our way to unlimited production and, hence, unlimited consumption; that technique made us omnipotent; that science made us omniscient.

We were on our way to becoming gods, supreme beings who could create a second world, using the natural world only as building blocks for our new creation.

Men and, increasingly, women experienced a new sense of freedom; they became masters of their own lives: feudal chains had been broken and one could do what one wished, free from all shackles. Or so people felt.

Socialism and communism quickly changed from a movement whose aim was a new society and a new man into one, whose ideal was a bourgeois life for all, the universalized bourgeois as the men and women of the future. The achievement of wealth and comfort for all was supposed to result in unrestricted happiness for all.

The trinity of unlimited production, absolute freedom, and unrestricted happiness formed the nucleus of a new religion, Progress, and a new Earthly City of Progress was to replace the City of God. It is not at all astonishing that this new religion provided its believers with energy, vitality, and hope.??

Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure.

• The dream of being independent masters of our lives ended when we began awakening to the fact that we have all become cogs in the bureaucratic machine, with our thoughts, feelings, and tastes manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications that they control.
• Economic progress has remained restricted to the rich nations, and the gap between rich and poor nations has ever widened.
• Technical progress itself has created ecological dangers and the dangers of nuclear war, either or both of which may put an end to all civilization and possibly to all life.

Theoretical considerations demonstrate that radical hedonism cannot lead to happiness as well as why it cannot do so, given human nature.

But even without theoretical analysis, the observable data show most clearly that our kind of “pursuit of happiness” does not produce well-being.

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent —people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

Ours is the greatest social experiment ever made to solve the question of whether pleasure (as a passive effect in contrast to the active affect, well-being, and joy) can be a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

For the first time in history, the satisfaction of the pleasure drive is not only the privilege of a minority but is possible for more than half the population in industrialized countries. The experiment has already answered the question in the negative.?

The second psychological premise of the industrial age, that the pursuit of individual egoism leads to harmony and peace, growth in everyone’s welfare, is equally erroneous on theoretical grounds, and again its fallacy is proven by the observable data.?

Through a number of steps eighteenth-century capitalism underwent a radical change: economic behavior became separate from ethics and human values.

Indeed, the economic machine was supposed to be an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and human will. It was a system that ran by itself and according to its own laws. The suffering of the workers as well as the destruction of an ever-increasing number of smaller enterprises for the sake of the growth of ever-larger corporations was an economic necessity that one might regret, but that one had to accept as if it were the outcome of natural law.

The development of this economic system was no longer determined by the question: What is good for Man? but by the question: What is good for the growth of the system? One tried to hide the sharpness of this conflict by making the assumption that what was good for the growth of the system (or even for a single big corporation) was also good for the people.

The Economic Necessity for Human Change

The need for profound human change emerges not only as an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival of the human race. Right living is no longer only the fulfillment of an ethical or religious demand.

For the first time in history, the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart.

However, a change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic and social changes occur that give the human heart the chance for change and the courage and the vision to achieve it.

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING AND BEING?

THE ALTERNATIVE OF having versus being does not appeal to common sense.

To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our life: in order to live, we must have things. Moreover, we must have things in order to enjoy them.

In a culture in which the supreme goal is to have—and to have more and more—and in which one can speak of someone as “being worth a million dollars,” how can there be an alternative between having and being?

On the contrary, it would seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, one is nothing.

...having and being are two fundamental modes of experience, the respective strengths of which determine the differences between the characters of individuals and various types of social character.?

Conclusions:

1. By being or having I do not refer to certain separate qualities of a subject as illustrated in such statements as “I have a car” or “I am white” or “I am happy.” I refer to two fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of orientation toward self and the world, to two different kinds of character structure the respective predominance of which determines the totality of a person’s thinking, feeling, and acting.

1. In the having mode of existence, my relationship to the world is one of possessing and owning, one in which I want to make everybody and everything, including myself, my property.?

Being:

Nothing is real but processes.

Having and Consuming:

Incorporating a thing, for instance by eating or drinking, is an archaic form of possessing it.

There are many other forms of incorporation that are not connected with physiological needs and, hence, are not limited.

...to consume is one form of having, and perhaps the most important one for today’s affluent industrial societies.

Consuming has ambiguous qualities: It relieves anxiety because what one has cannot be taken away; but it also requires one to consume evermore, because previous consumption soon loses its satisfactory character.

Modern consumers may identify themselves by the formula:

I am = what I have and what I consume.?

BECAUSE THE SOCIETY WE live in is devoted to acquiring property and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of the being mode of existence and most people see the having mode as the most natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life.

All of which makes it especially difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand that having is only one possible orientation. Nevertheless, the concepts are rooted in the human experience.?

Learning?

Remembering

Conversing

Reading?

Exercising Authority

Faith?

Having Knowledge and Knowing

Loving

Having and Being in the Old and New Testaments and in the Writings of Master Eckhart?

ONE OF THE MAIN THEMES of the Old Testament is: leave what you have; free yourself from all fetters; be!

The New Testament continues the Old Testament’s protest against the having structure of existence. Its protest is even more radical than the earlier Jewish protest had been.

Master Eckhart (1260-c. 1327)

Eckhart has described and analyzed the difference between the having and being modes of existence with penetration and clarity not surpassed by any teacher.

A major figure of the Dominican Order in Germany, Eckhart was a scholarly theologian and the greatest representative and deepest and most radical thinker of German mysticism. His greatest influence radiated from his German sermons, which affected not only his contemporaries and disciples but also German mystics after him and, today, those seeking authentic guidance to a nontheistic, rational, yet religious, philosophy of life.?

Eckhart’s Concept of Having

The classic source for Eckhart’s views on the mode of having is his sermon on poverty, based on the text of Matthew 5:13: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” In this sermon, Eckhart discusses the question: What is spiritual poverty? He begins by saying that he does not speak of external poverty, a poverty of things, although that kind of poverty is good and commendable. He wants to speak of inner poverty, the poverty referred to in the gospel verse, which he defines by saying: “He is a poor man who wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing” (Blakney, 28; Quint D.W., 52; Quint D.P.T., 32).?

Who is the person who wants nothing?

The person who wants nothing is the person who is not greedy for anything: this is the essence of Eckhart’s concept of non-attachment.?

Who is the person who knows nothing?

Eckhart’s concept of not knowing anything is concerned with the difference between having knowledge and the act of knowing, i.e., penetrating to the roots and, hence, to the causes of a thing. Eckhart distinguishes very clearly between a particular thought and the process of thinking.

Eckhart’s Concept of Being

Eckhart uses being in two different, though related, meanings. In a narrower, psychological sense, being denotes the real and often unconscious motivations that impel human beings, in contrast to deeds and opinions as such and separated from the acting and thinking person.

ANALYZING THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO MODES OF EXISTENCE?

?What Is the Having Mode?

The Acquisitive Society—Basis for the Having Mode

OUR JUDGMENTS ARE EXTREMELY biased because we live in a society that rests on private property, profit, and power as the pillars of its existence. To acquire, to own, and to make a profit are the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual in the industrial society.

This kind of property may be called a private property (from Latin privare, “to deprive of”), because the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to deprive others of its use or enjoyment.

While private ownership is supposed to be a natural and universal category, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history (including prehistory), and particularly the cultures outside Europe in which the economy was not life’s main concern. Aside from private property, there are: self-created property, which is exclusively the result of one’s own work; restricted property, which is restricted by the obligation to help one’s fellow beings; functional, or personal, property, which consists either of tools for work or of objects for enjoyment; common property, which a group shares in the spirit of a common bond, such as the Israeli kibbutzim

What Is the Being Mode?

MOST OF US KNOW more about the mode of having than we do about the mode of being because having is by far the more frequently experienced mode in our culture. But something more important than that makes defining the mode of being so much more difficult than defining the mode of having, namely the very nature of the difference between these two modes of existence.?

Having refers to things and things are fixed and describable. Being refers to experience, and human experience is in principle not describable.?

Being Active

The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental characteristic is that of being active,?not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers.

To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which—though in varying degrees—every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested, to “list,” to give.

The words point to an experience; they are not the experience.

The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. In the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the structure of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules.

Activity and Passivity

Being, in the sense we have described it, implies the faculty of being active; passivity excludes being.

Activity in the modern sense refers only to behavior, not to the person behind the behavior.?

Productiveness is a character orientation all human beings are capable of, to the extent that they are not emotionally crippled. Productive persons animate whatever they touch. They give birth to their own faculties and bring life to other persons and to things.?

“Activity” and “passivity” can each have two entirely different meanings. Alienated activity, in the sense of mere busyness, is actually “passivity,” in the sense of productivity; while passivity, in terms of non-busyness, may be non-alienated activity. This is so difficult to understand today because the most activity is alienated “passivity,” while productive passivity is rarely experienced.?

The Will to Give, to Share, to Sacrifice?

In contemporary society, the having mode of existing is assumed to be rooted in human nature and, hence, virtually unchangeable.

The same idea is expressed in the dogma that people are basically lazy, passive by nature, and that they do not want to work or to do anything else unless they are driven by the incentive of material gain … or hunger … or the fear of punishment.

This dogma is doubted by hardly anybody, and it determines our methods of education and of work. But it is little more than an expression of the wish to prove the value of our social arrangements by imputing to them that they follow the needs of human nature. To the members of many different societies of both past and present, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness would appear as fantastic as the reverse sounds to us.

The truth is that both the having and the being modes of existence are potentialities of human nature, that our biological urge for survival tends to further the having mode, but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities inherent in human beings.

We human beings have an inherent and deeply rooted desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be related to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness.

Further Aspects of Having and Being

Security—Insecurity

Solidarity—Antagonism

Joy—Pleasure

?

Sin and Forgiveness

Fear of Dying—Affirmation of Living

Here, Now—Past, Future

THE NEW MAN AND THE NEW SOCIETY?

Religion, Character, and Society

Social change interacts with a change in the social character; that “religious” impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, and hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart.

... the marketing character, because it is based on experiencing oneself as a commodity, and one’s value not as “use value” but as “exchange value.”: The living being become a commodity on the “personality market.”

The principle of evaluation is the same on both the personality and the commodity markets: on the one, personalities are offered for sale; on the other, commodities. Value in both cases is their exchange value, for which “use value” is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

Although the proportion of skill and human qualities on the one hand and personality on the other hand as prerequisites for success varies, the “personality factor” always plays a decisive role.

Success depends largely on how well persons sell themselves on the market, how well they get their “personality” across, how nice a “package” they are; whether they are “cheerful,” “sound,” “aggressive,” “reliable,” “ambitious”; furthermore, what their family backgrounds are, what clubs they belong to, and whether they know the “right” people.

The type of personality required depends to some degree on the special field in which a person may choose to work. A stockbroker, a salesperson, a secretary, a railroad executive, a college professor, or a hotel manager must each offer a different kind of personality that, regardless of their differences, must fulfill one condition: to be in demand.?

What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a given task are not sufficient; one must win in competition with many others in order to have success.

Conditions for Human Change and the Features of the New Man

1. We are suffering and are aware that we are.
2. We recognize the origin of our ill-being.
3. We recognize that there is a way of overcoming our ill-being.
4. We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life.?

These four points correspond to the Four Noble Truths that form the basis of the Buddha’s teaching dealing with the general condition of human existence, though not with cases of human ill-being due to specific individual or social circumstances.?

The same principle of change that characterizes the methods of the Buddha also underlies Marx’s idea of salvation.