A Challenged Hubris

Who does not at one time or another in his life imagine himself to be the center of all existence? Who has not shut his or her eyes to pretend at being invisible? Who has not shut themselves away from the world hoping it would change - or stay as it is? Who has not deemed him or herself the most fortunate or unfortunate, happiest or most wretched of creatures on the face of the earth?

It is an unavoidable result of having to interact with the world at large through the lens of one's own consciousness. The one who is proud and exalts in himself will view himself as a hero; the one who is not will view himself as a victim. The vast majority will oscillate between one and the other, and to a multitude of degrees. Funnily enough, in their own place their myriad beliefs will be justified... For what heroic deed will the proud man know better than one he himself performs? And what misery will be more intimate to the ever-suffering man than the misery he feels in his own heart?

And thus all of us live the life of those condemned to cycle through their essentialy solitary lives, forever lying in wait for those fleeting moments of glory, or dreading the next moment of injustice!

The universe seems to contain a few keys that help us understand it - or at least appreciate it - a little better... One is contradiction, another is chaos (these two may be recognized by even the casually observant reader as central laments in my ever-murky thoughts); yet another is scale...

Consider, for instance, the psychology of a mob intent on lynching this person or burning that bus. To try to understand it as a single entity is futile. But understanding dawns upon us once we look at it as a sum of constituents... this man's frustration with his own life, or that man's pretension to glory, and that other's lust for blood and fire as a diversion from the mundane, all rallying around some conveniently moral seeming justification, perhaps led from the front by a zealot or stoked from behind the scenes by a macchiavelian presence.

Just as we begin to appreciate the emergence of the mob from the sum of all the tiny wills and passions, we are defeated by scale and chaos... it is impossible to quantify all the forces at work, and difficult to comprehend or control all the variables in the situation. All action then, to direct or to defeat the phenomenon is reduced to intelligent guesswork!

And it is now that the true defeat becomes apparent, for though it would seem that the one who understands the mob would control it best... as a matter of fact the mob becomes a living thing, controlled by someone or something entirely different, and blind to the nuances of the situation. The tendency to contradiction is ever intellect's nemesis!

Scale. Chaos. Contradiction.

To muddy up these waters with another metaphor, imagine for a moment the life of an Ant. Forever busy, from the humble worker up to the Queen, each ant is a slave to function. It seems a boring life to any human being worth their salt. To toil, fight, eat, rest, procreate and die.

The irony lies in scale, for with perhaps a few more or few less adjectives and nouns and verbs, the same sentence can describe the life of any human being, any animal, any living organism on the planet! From life at its simplest to life at its most deludedly grandiose, everything seems to boil down to a few fundamental self-sustaining processes.

But does that mean we can understand (or much less direct and control) the individual chaotic elements that make up our own lives? A dark laughter inevitably fills the vaccum that is the answer to that question.

A matter of scale you see... the man is no different from the ant, the man is no different from the mob (only his constituents may be billions of thoughts, emotions, and physical elements and processes), and the ant is no different from the ant-hill. Each utterly simple from one point of view, and yet utterly unpredictable or controllable.

Thus the final hubris filled joke: I am my own riddle, my own challenge. I understand myself and the more I do, the less I seem to be in control. How then could mastering this, that, or the world itself be a concern to me, when I am yet to master myself?

From a denial of the self as the center of the universe to an explication of the self as the sole concern... the circle seems complete. And I am none the wiser...

A minion breathlessly waiting at the feet of the Three.

Scale. Contradiction. Chaos.