The Fear of Insignificance (Kindle highlights)

The point is to live lives that are our own creation rather than adapting to the demands of the global marketplace. Existentialism developed this idea by showing that we live with the tension between our cultural heritage and the ability to criticize it; between our desires and our possibilities; and the need to turn the base materials of our lives, which we did not choose, into a life that is truly ours. (p. 2)
In-depth interviews with intercepted suicide bombers by psychologically trained researchers did not find any psychopathology that would allow predicting who will turn into a suicide bomber. If anything, suicide bombing, though extreme, is a manifestation of the depth of the human need for meaning. More than anything, we humans need to feel that we live lives that matter. (p. 10)
The human species at some point in its evolution made a momentous transition, possibly the most dramatic step in the evolution from being merely a more intelligent animal to being distinctly human: our species acquired the notion of death and the realization that each of us will die. (p. 10)
By this Heidegger denoted two related aspects of Dasein: First, humans, whether consciously or not, constantly make choices, and each choice we make prevents other courses of action or life options from being actualized. Second, human existence is characterized by the awareness that it is finite. We know that our time is limited, and that we will die. This immensely heightens the impact of the terminal nature of our choices. Not only did we not actualize some possibilities by choosing to act as we did, but also the finite amount of time we have to live means that we did not have the option of rewinding our lives, so to speak, and trying other options as well. It was one of Heidegger’s seminal insights that awareness of finitude and freedom inevitably generates existential anxiety, which is so difficult to bear that we most of the time fend off this awareness. (p. 10)
The ideas of anthropologist Ernest Becker, particularly his last two books—The Denial of Death (1974) and the posthumously published Escape from Evil (1975)—reformulated some of the core ideas of existentialism in a way closer to evolutionary biology. He argues that evolution has created an impossible situation for the human species. Like all other animals, we are terrified of anything that could lead to our death. But unlike other animal species, we as humans know of our death. (p. 11)
The central tenet of existential psychology is that only an animal that knows time is limited can ask, “Do I live a life worth living?” Only such an animal is preoccupied with the question whether life as a whole is good, valiant, and successful. And this question camouflages the unbearable terror, which is awareness of the passage of time and the reality of death. (p. 11)
Worldviews provide us with what Ernest Becker has called symbolic immortality. Each worldview states that the group and its mission on earth are there to stay beyond our individual death. By contributing to the larger group, its task on earth and its continuity, we feel that something of us will survive our physical death. It also lowers the looming threat of the feeling of being an insignificant speck in a universe that is indifferent to us. (p. 12)
The denial of death is responsible for humankind’s greatest achievements and for some of its most abominable traits. Behavior as diverse as building cathedrals, writing literature, and creating art, but also the initiation of wars and suicide bombings, are all linked to our need to defend ourselves against mortality. (p. 12)
In advanced civilizations self-esteem is mostly no longer a function of beating somebody in direct competition. It is rather that we measure our achievement vis-à-vis a whole culture. The question now arises: What is your field of comparison? What are the criteria according to which you assess your value? What is the group within which you strive for status? To whom do you compare yourself? (p. 13)
But soon global consciousness became a reality for anyone with cable television. Operation Desert Storm, the first invasion of Iraq in 1991, with its embedded reporters, allowed viewers around the globe to share the experience of the troops that moved into Kuwait and Iraq in real time. It also made clear to everybody that what happens at a point on the globe that many couldn’t even find on the map had powerful implications everywhere. September 11, 2001, brought this to new heights. (p. 14)
With the efficient help of Karl Rove, Bush managed to get himself reelected, because his constituency no longer cared about the truth value of his ideas. The age of the golden calf had come to its pinnacle: Ideas and belief systems had become commodities whose value was determined by supply and demand, like any other. (p. 19)
Here we come to the dark secret of Homo globalis: the same computer monitor that makes creative work so much easier also provides an endless stream of information about the feats of the global world-class, information that invariably impacts Homo globalis’s self-esteem. The mechanism that helped our ancestors not to fight to the death in the struggle for status, giving up and experiencing a mild depression, now becomes the basis of an epidemic. In the global I-Commodity Market each of us is beaten by some spectacular achievement somewhere in the globe thousands of times, daily. (p. 20)
Existential psychology has shown the depth of the human need to matter, make a difference, and feel a significant purpose in this world. We all need to feel that we do something that matters within the frame of reference that defines our experiential world. The question is, what is this frame of reference? (p. 31)
Our fear of death, insignificance, and vanishing into nothingness is so tremendous that there are many who are willing to die for the symbolic immortality that heroism bestows on us. (p. 35)
Our long-term self-evaluation is a function of being valued in our cultural framework; knowing that who we are and what we do are appreciated; that our work as lawyers, designers, journalists, or physicians is good; that our clients appreciate us; and that we are producing value is a state that becomes part of our self-conception. (p. 36)
One of the experiments of existential psychology shows that when we feel we are being valued within our cultural framework, we are less afraid of dying. The reason is that we feel that, like the Greek heroes, our contribution to the larger whole to which we belong, our culture, is leaving a mark—a mark that could possibly outlast our physical lives. (p. 36)
If everybody could be famous, fame would cease to have any value; and by implication, we know that the vast majority of us will not make it into human consciousness at large. (p. 37)
The celebrity per se, the social role of those who are primarily famous for being famous, only became possible with mass media—the movie industry and even more through television. (p. 39)
There are three factors that help us overcome the terror of mortality: emotionally significant attachments to spouses, parents, children, and friends (a factor not dealt with in this book); a worldview that provides us with an understanding of the world and our place in it, and provides us with meaning; and finally, self-esteem, which is derived from the feedback of our close attachments, our sense that we are living valuable lives as defined in our worldview, and our perception of our place in the world at large. (p. 40)
Knowing about people whose physique is not remarkable requires us to remember a lot of information about what they have done and why those things are significant. Knowing the significance of a person’s deed requires the effort of acquiring knowledge as opposed to that recognizing a beautiful face relies on an inborn capacity. (p. 40)
The result follows almost inevitably. The infotainment system, by its inner logic, is driven to seek out and develop celebrities standing out through their physical beauty and attractiveness, because this is what will keep the consumers interested. (p. 40)
Evolution has programmed adults to love babies just for their being, and it is part of the painful losses of growing up that we need to earn love and esteem and that the guaranteed love of infancy can no longer be taken for granted. (p. 40)
Romanticism was obsessed with the process of artistic creation. Nothing seemed more magical, more special, and almost sanctified than the creation of a great work of art. The artist was endowed with the quality that had been exclusively God’s for millennia of theology: the ability to create something out of nothing, the miracle of creation ex nihilo. (p. 41)
The success of reality television is based on its symbolic significance: its focus is on the process of the magical transformation of a human being from the status of ordinary mortal to the status of demigod. Followed by countless cameras, we can watch the process of transubstantiation—the moment in which a human being is touched by grace. (p. 42)
Malcolm Gladwell has shown in detail to what extent circumstances of birth, parent’s connections, the coincidence of meeting the right person at the right time, and sheer luck are the ultimate determinants of who will make it to the top and who won’t. (p. 44)
The model of the authority of ancient knowledge is problematic nowadays for a number of reasons. For most of human history there was indeed very little well-grounded knowledge of the universe and there was even less systematic knowledge about history and about other cultures. Hence it was much easier for a religion to claim that it was based on the one, true prophet or seer who had received divine revelation. The difficulty of this model became insuperable in the nineteenth century with the advent of modern philology and history. (p. 53)
Modernity presented a powerful alternative to the model of ancient knowledge: the story of human history as progress—at least in the domains of knowledge and technology. (p. 53)
Quantum physics is one of the New Age gurus’ favorite ploys to undermine the unsuspecting reader’s belief in science. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is invoked to justify anything from the idea that “there is no objective reality” to the claim that “science undermines its own foundations.” (p. 54)
The argument that rapture and analytic thought do not mix, which I have heard many times, doesn’t hold water. If this were true, authentic connoisseurs of art would enjoy it less than those who don’t have a clue about art history. Those who have the ability to understand classical music in depth and understand the complex compositional techniques used by the great composers would pay the price of never enjoying Bach, Beethoven, or Mahler as deeply as they did when they understood very little about music. In both cases the opposite is true. The more you know about the history of art or music, the more you can enjoy its greatest achievements. (p. 58)
A body of ideas that loses its power when it is analyzed in depth has something to hide: it is mostly incoherence, with a lack of logic, and lack of evidence. (p. 58)
The phenomenal success of the flat, uninteresting, and morally repugnant The Secret is only the newest edition of the human tendency to fall for those who promise us that we can have everything we want quite simply if we just get this one thing right. (p. 62)
In fact it may precisely be the penchant for tolerance that gets members of Homo globalis caught up in a facile relativism. They would like a world in which everybody gets along with everybody and people don’t kill and don’t die for questions of belief. (p. 63)
While it is “in” for liberals and conservatives to accuse each other of the current ills of society and culture, I think that current anti-intellectualism has its sources in both camps, which interacted with each other in a strange dance of synergy that has led our culture to its current level of intellectual shallowness. (p. 64)
Between the conservative emphasis on unadulterated faith and the liberal attack on rational thought as an invention of white Western males, the ground for the ideology of political correctness was set. (p. 66)
The process of going through illusions and disillusionment, building hopes and revaluing them, acquiring beliefs and discarding them in the light of criticism, and thus acquiring self-knowledge must be an intrinsic value if a liberal society is to flourish. (p. 72)
The essence of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was that modern natural science no longer made use of symbolic relations to explain the world. In the sixteenth century an explanation of the sort “there are seven planets because the human body has seven orifices” was perfectly acceptable. The macrocosm and the microcosm were correlated through a nexus of meaning and the human species had a special place in the fabric of the cosmos (literally “order”). (p. 72)
The Copernican revolution and the advent of mathematical physics destroyed the fabric of the anthropocentric cosmos forever. Modern humanity no longer had a privileged place in the world and the meaning of our lives could no longer be derived from the symbolic network that connected the universe’s creator, the structure of the cosmos and human nature. The existential question that arose became: if the universe is indifferent to us, how can we know that we are leading lives of significance? How can we still feel that we have a vocation in this world now that the literal meaning of “vocation” (being called on by God) could no longer be grounded in the new cosmology? (p. 73)
While existentialism is certainly not a light-hearted and optimistic view of human existence, it is not nihilist. Its great claim was that meaning is generated in the attempt to face the tragic structure of our existence: knowing that we will die, we can find our freedom by assuming responsibility for our lives and identities without denying the tension generated between our biological nature and the self-awareness that forces us to ask what it means to live a meaningful life. (p. 74)
Thus the theological notion of vocation is given a new interpretation: when the solutions we find to our personal conflicts and tragedies become valuable for others, we can feel that our lives are truly meaningful. (p. 74)
Romanticism turned all of us into artists. Living a life worth living now meant to be the author of one’s life. Nietzsche formulated the criterion for judging this creation: it had to be a life with inner, aesthetic coherence. Like all artistic creation, this required judicious use of our aesthetic faculties. Yet there is one central difference between the creation of other works of art and that of living a life. An artist can choose his theme, his motif, and his technique. He can pick from a variety of genres and apply his creativity to this. As opposed to that, in living our lives we cannot choose our base materials. (p. 75)
We are not self-created. Our physical existence is the result of an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman whom we did not choose to be our parents. Our minds are the result of a multiplicity of influences none of which we control. Our genetic inheritance evolves into mental abilities, temperamental traits, and an emotional disposition that is the biological basis of all we will ever think, feel, and experience. Our perspective onto the world is invariably shaped by the language that constitutes the base materials of our minds, the culture that determines our basic outlook on life, and the social class into which we are born. Our character is indelibly shaped by the impact of the personalities of our parents and educators. (p. 76)
This is where the drama of individuality begins. Even though, metaphysically and logically, we could not be the offspring of someone other than our parents, 11 we can feel that we were born into an environment that is recalcitrant rather than nourishing to the development of our personal idiom. (p. 76)
The project of becoming the authors of our lives is an attempt to recreate the aspects of reality that are unbearably fateful, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes in reality. Some people approach this project consciously and deliberately. The self and its life course are shaped in the fashion of a work of art. More often, though, the forces of fate; the desire for authorship; and the multiple layers of pain, desire, anxiety, and rage interact in ways the individual cannot fully decipher. (p. 76)
We are the only known animal that has self-consciousness. We do not just exist, but we have a relationship to our selves and our lives. Our identity is not simply a given; it is also the result of our decisions, and thus, to some extent of our making. (p. 77)
This sets the stage for the drama of human existence and human individuality. Humans are endowed with two abilities that, to the best of our knowledge, are unique in the animal kingdom. The first is that we have self-consciousness. We know that we exist, we have a conception of ourselves, and we have an attitude toward who we are. The second is that we are endowed with an imagination fertile and active enough to be able to imagine that things could have been different. (p. 77)
Our existential equation is who we are . The fulfilled life is not one in which the existential equation is solved, but a life in which the existential equation is lived out fruitfully and creatively. The resolution of this equation can only mean death. (p. 80)
An existentialist view of life suggests something very different. A life well lived is a life in which an individual’s existential equation is most fully lived. Of course we hope that people learn from their mistakes; we hope that they find ways to live the conflicts and tensions that define them in ways that are creative rather than destructive, and that such creativity enhances both their well-being and their contribution to the world. (p. 84)
Hence a person’s relation to her Sosein can be the source of both endless suffering and a sense of achievement and meaning. (p. 90)
The crucial step is to accept that to become the author of our lives, we need to accept that we haven’t chosen the base materials of who we are. We can only choose to shape them with clear view of our strength and weaknesses, as Nietzsche says. This process, like stretching, involves pain and requires discipline. (p. 102)
As I have argued in the past, the human psyche is endowed with an imaginative core that refuses to accept that the world does not suit our deepest needs and desires. (p. 106)
There is indeed a certain change to be observed when, at midlife, mortality becomes more salient. Yet along with Becker we need to refrain from saying that this simply means that death becomes an accepted fact. The ontological protest of subjectivity never quite lets us acquiesce in mortality. (p. 107)
This difference is not just semantic; it implies that mortality acceptance is not an either-or affair but moves on a continuum between manic denial and the ability of calm contemplation. (p. 107)
In fact it may not be unreasonable to hypothesize that at midlife the need to create something that will create a lasting legacy acquires urgency, because the reality of death becomes more tangible. As a result, life as a whole, in many cases, becomes more focused. Anything that detracts from the central goal of creating a lasting legacy is called into question. (p. 108)
Handy began to sculpt his life in the way Michelangelo describes the process of sculpture: chipping away the superfluous pieces. He pared it down to the essentials. (p. 114)
Becker’s theory leads to the following interpretation: the event that increases mortality awareness leads to an increased need for some type of defense that strengthens the human denial of death. For a particular group of people the most effective defense is immersion in a process of creation that is fed by the hope that its result will outlive its creator. (p. 115)
Through ongoing research for more than thirty years, Csikszentmihalyi has come to the conclusion that flow is the state that is most highly correlated with a general feeling of happiness. (p. 116)
Paring life down to the essentials and focusing on creation serves two functions: it liberates us from awareness of self and time and it allows us to be immersed in an activity that we experience as intrinsically meaningful. (p. 117)
Most of all, we need to drop the mistaken notion that freedom consists of a lack of limitations. Paring life down to the essentials requires the commitment to a few central themes that will be the major source of meaning in our lives. Such commitment means that we accept that there will be many things we won’t do in our lives. (p. 117)
We cannot center our lives around a theme without having a worldview that tells us what is important, truly valuable, and what is nothing but a distraction that must not tie up our energies. (p. 117)
In a way quite rare in the social sciences that generally need to cope with rather ambiguous experimental results, the predictions of EEP work like a Swiss precision watch. Invariably, the group exposed to death thoughts becomes more judgmental, more stereotypical, and less accepting of otherness. (p. 123)
Minds fed on intellectual junk, incapable of judging ideas on intellectual merit rather than popularity, are no more resistant to infection by noxious memes than a body fed on junk food and untrained by exercise is capable of dealing with physical exertion. (p. 126)
But pluralism does not entail relativism. Relativism asserts that contradictory positions can be equally true. A somewhat weaker version of relativism maintains that there is no way to argue for or against a thesis, a worldview, or a theory and that all worldviews are therefore equal in value. (p. 135)
Berlin’s value pluralism claims that there is no perfect solution for how to live because we will always have to make choices between competing values. But yet again, this does not mean that ethical and political worldviews cannot be discussed reasonably and that there are no better or worse social and political arrangements; value pluralism does not entail relativism. (p. 135)
We are not condemned to live within the bounds of worldviews that we didn’t choose but were implanted in our minds through early education. (p. 136)
These philosophical parables emphasize that humans are prone to live in error, because the circumstances of our birth may not have given us the type of education that gives us access to the best thinking that humanity has produced. All philosophical traditions exhort us not to acquiesce to the limitations imposed on us by accident of birth and to make the painful effort of acquiring the knowledge necessary to live in a worldview as close to the truth as possible. (p. 137)
My personal experience therefore is that escaping the Platonic cave is a process that never ends and that we must always be prepared to rethink and possibly abandon beliefs no matter how cherished they may be. And while this process can, at times, be painful, it is also one of the most sustaining and nourishing activities that humans can engage in—as philosophers from Plato to Michel Foucault have argued for millennia. (p. 139)
Atheists and agnostics account for about 12 to 15 percent, but this is a problematic estimate because it is difficult to get data about the real situation in China; the actual number may be smaller. Only Europe has a well-documented substantial proportion of agnostics and atheists. (p. 149)
From the point of view of existential psychology, it is not surprising that religion has remained so enormously powerful. Given that defending against death anxiety is, psychologically speaking, the most important function of worldviews, religion has a huge advantage on secular meaning-systems. Most religions, particularly the great monotheistic religions, promise the believer that our individual, physical death is not truly our end: we will survive one way or another. (p. 149)
Religions are, in any case, the most efficient forms of the denial of death. (p. 150)
Existential psychology provides a strong rationale for the assumption that the European Enlightenment’s prediction during the nineteenth century that the rule of religion would one day be replaced by secular ideologies based on science is unlikely to come true. The human need to deny death is too powerful. (p. 150)
This ideology failed because it was a profoundly inauthentic prescription: it is humanly impossible to genuinely respect beliefs no matter how irrational, immoral, or absurd. The resulting culture was emotionally frozen and often did not lead to fruitful discussion between worldviews in general, and between secularism and religion in particular. (p. 150)
The difference between civilized disdain and political correctness is that the former allows one to feel disdain for a person’s or group’s views or beliefs while maintaining respect for the human beings that hold them. (p. 150)
The findings of existential psychology are pertinent to the question of how to deal with the conflict between science and religion. As we have seen when people’s belief systems are attacked, the result is inevitably that they dig more deeply into the trenches of their worldview. Even if you agree with Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens that liberalism should no longer tolerate attacks while being sensitive toward the feelings of the religiously inclined; no rational person can expect that their polemic will convince the religious to leave their creed, certainly not after the data produced by existential psychology. (p. 153)
But let us not delude ourselves: the value of these books is to raise the spirits of liberal atheists who had been made to feel that they had no right to fight for their views. These spirited counterattacks certainly succeeded in reestablishing some esprit de corps of those committed to Enlightenment values and the scientific worldview. But the primary effect of such aggressive rhetoric is primarily to rally our side. We should not think that all-out attacks on religion will convert anybody. The scientific evidence shows that the opposite is likely to be true. Hence the frontal attack on religion may have the positive effect of lifting the spirits of secularists who have felt on the defensive for years, but it certainly is not a fruitful strategy to solve the world’s problems, as they will only reach the converted at best and outrage those criticized at worst. (p. 154)
We should be able to marvel at the variety of collectively created fictions invented to provide meaning to human life rather than thundering at those we like least. Of course anti-theists and religious believers will continue to disdain each other’s worldviews, which is fine as long as it doesn’t turn into a matter of life and death. Civilized and cheerful disdain could provide a model for all ideologies—religious and secular—by replacing bilious self-righteousness with laughter; and it could make us see human history as something more akin to a contest for best collective work of fiction than to a mortal clash of civilizations. (p. 156)
Tolerance is full-fledged acceptance of a point of view, group, or ideology. Toleration is the state of affairs in which we say that we are willing to tolerate a point of view, religion, or political attitude even though we condemn it. Toleration demands nothing more from us than to feel that we can live with a certain form of life or worldview in our society, even though we find it primitive, immoral, and reprehensible. (p. 157)
Instead of faking mutual respect, why don’t we settle for civilized disdain? (p. 158)
To feel anger, hurt, and disdain without violence and to maintain communication with those whose views we do not respect and who do not respect ours are the basis for the type of world citizenship that has become a vital necessity in a globally interconnected world. (p. 160)
Freedom of the mind is not a religious principle; it is a principle of various Enlightenment movements from India through Greece to eighteenth-century Europe, and this principle historically and philosophically clashes with the principle of the superiority of faith. (p. 164)
The evolutionary psychology of religion, based on a wealth of anthropological and experimental data, is based on two major findings. One is that we humans are hardwired to overdetect intentional agents. We see a shadow in the woods and tend to overinterpret it as either animal or human. This is often called the “hyperactive agent detector device” or HADD, because it leads to many false positives. The reason the hardwired HADD was advantageous in an evolutionary sense is simple: under jungle conditions, false positives are better than false negatives because they alert us to the possibility of dangerous predators, and a single false negative can be lethal. (p. 166)
In other words, our brain is biologically programmed not for science but for religion. (p. 166)
As opposed to human agents, the gods can know whether we really live according to our society’s rules or not. Hence belief in gods binds the members of a society together with very strong ties indeed. (p. 166)
This is the source of the age-old conflict between religion and science. Science, the open-minded investigation of laws of nature, invariably leads to naturalistic explanations of human events. There were good reasons, therefore, why religions have been hostile to science, because it undermines the cognitive and ethical foundations of religion. (p. 167)
Epicurus was part of the Greek Enlightenment. He believed that true freedom was not possible as long as humans are afraid of the gods. Only when we understand that the world is ruled by blind natural law can we finally begin to live our lives rationally and be free or experience eudaemonia (“human flourishing,” often misleadingly translated as “happiness”). (p. 167)
The Epicurean tradition points to a deep logical mistake engrained in human psychology. We tend to try to imagine what it would be like to be dead. We do so even if we don’t believe in an afterlife. In doing so we imagine being dead and what it would feel like. But this involves a contradiction in terms: when we are dead (assuming that there is no afterlife and this is not the issue) there is no thinking or feeling subject that can feel anything. (p. 167)
Lucretius argues that none of us is saddened by the fact that there was an infinite time span before we were born in which we didn’t exist. Why should it sadden us that there will be an infinite time span after we die in which we will not exist? Why should the infinity of time before we were born be less of a reason to mourn than the infinity of time after we die? (p. 168)
I don’t think that anybody today truly expects the Epicurean arguments to completely abolish the human fear of death. Most of this fear is not rationally based. It is part of our evolutionary heritage that like all animals we are terrorized by anything that threatens our lives. This terror of death is an evolutionary necessity since no animal that doesn’t try avoiding death would survive long enough to reproduce. (p. 168)
The most destructive manifestations of fanaticism in recent history (i.e., suicide and terror attacks) are to be explained by the denial of death. Even physical death, to the fanatic, is preferable to accepting our mortality, paradoxical as this may sound. (p. 168)
It is, I think, utterly impossible to be Epicurean and to be a fanatic, for the deepest root of fanaticism is the denial of death. (p. 169)
The world citizenship I am talking about is of a very different sort. It is based on the realization that globalization has led to the point where there is no longer a space on earth that is outside civilization and that political consciousness can no longer be restricted to one country, culture, or religion and thus needs to address the fate of humanity as a whole. (p. 172)
The Temple Mount is the epicenter of a murderous fanaticism that is keeping the world on its toes. It is the embodiment of all the deleterious effects of worldview defense against death awareness. It shows the catastrophic impact of the need to cling to a worldview that provides symbolic immortality to its most extreme manifestations: the willingness to kill and, even more paradoxically, to die for it. (p. 179)
The history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century makes clear beyond any doubt that the line between open and closed worldviews does not run along the boundary between religious and secular worldviews. (p. 180)
Berlin showed the possibility of accepting the historical contingency of one’s own position without falling into cynicism. His ability to stick to his beliefs without being dogmatic about them may indeed be one of the marks of the civilized mind and “the ultimate test of character for the individual.” (p. 182)
As infants we did not know about the world’s vastness or its dangers. We were protected from it by humans whose powers seemed unlimited. Our caretakers provided us with all that we needed and we had no idea about what it took for them to do so. It seemed to depend on nothing but their will on whether we would receive food, shelter, and comfort. Freud’s argument was that this experience, while not consciously remembered, leaves an indelible mark on our unconscious and we are left with a lifelong yearning for unbounded protection. (p. 183)
Well-meaning liberals who believe that any worldview that is too different from theirs is a pathological reaction to Western misdeeds are empirically wrong and ideologically misguided. Reducing such belief systems to psychopathology is a form of naiveté, as it assumes that any worldview that doesn’t correspond can be brushed aside as nothing but a reaction to some grievances and fails to realize that the human mind is prone to the seduction of closed worldviews. (p. 185)
And we will continue our disagreement about these questions in trenchant argument and enjoy the civilized disdain we feel toward each other because between open worldviews there is, in principle, never a need to resort to violence, because dialogue remains a possibility. (p. 185)
Humankind seems to be at a fascinating, exhilarating, and totally frightening crossroads. We are the onlookers to a race between the sheer inertia of humanity’s destroying the planet’s resources, and the emergence of sufficient collective understanding of the fact that we need to change course to survive. (p. 188)
And yet the temptation to write, “Members of Homo globalis of all nations, unite!” is too great to resist. Maybe the pooled creativity of those who understand that humankind has been united by fate, if not by design and intelligence, will carry the day once more; not by competing with other species and erasing them, but by creating a new form of solidarity of the human species that, by blind chance, has reached both the abysses of genocide and environmental havoc and the heights of individual and collective creation that surpass anything our scarred globe has ever seen. (p. 191)