The Profane World

There's a segment from Lily Alexandre's essay about certifiably odd tech person Bryan Johnson that I've been thinking about very frequently since I've heard it. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Bryan's work is defined by a really strong sense of the sacred and profane... Most belief systems, while they put the sacred on a pedestal, nonetheless respect that the profane world is the one all of us exist in, and try to give us tools to move through it.

My understanding of how I should act within the profane world is experiencing a bit of a shake-up. However, an opinion that's been with me for a while is how thoroughly inadequate the secular capitalist-christian-inspired cultural milieu is at what I think would be the only legitimate purpose of a faith or ideology. What tools does it give someone for "moving through" the profane world?

There is a fundamental hubris to the idea of Individualism and the way Humanity is constructed through it. An example - a company forcing someone to move across the country because of the whims of senior executives. There's an underlying set of assumptions here, which include:

• You can boil down a person to a single physical entity.
• That entity will perform the same regardless of their social or physical environment.
• You have the right to do so as their employer.

I think all of these are wrong, but let's focus on #1. What sense does it make to consider someone as a single person? Even the most introverted among us depend on a social web to meet their needs. Rare few throughout history are voluntary hermits, but I would say even those are reliant - reliant on others, if nothing else, to not ruin a shared environment and their peace and quiet. Even those people would not be reducible to a single entity - they are in a physical environment which affects them and which they affect.

For the vast majority, the social and physical environments in which we live is a massive component of our capability and well-being. Many of my favored activities require the presence of others to bring about their full enjoyment, an endless frustration for someone with a limited social battery, but a limitation I accept because there is no alternative. To believe I could achieve the fulfillment of my personhood in isolation is a pure escapist fantasy, and not even a fun one - I can dream much bigger in my escapist fantasies!

All of the above is the profane reality. It is messy, complicated, sometimes inconvenient - but it is real. It exists and so it must be reckoned with!

... Or does it? Let's go back to that particular brand of secularism I mentioned. Part of the atomization it contains is of course a denial of humanity's animal nature, and an attempt to place us "above" the world in which we live. We are not part of the environment; we live atop it. We do not act in the ways our mammalian brethren do; we are above them. You are not traffic, you're stuck in traffic. I consider all of this an escape hatch, an attempt to abandon the profane world and subsist entirely in the realm of the sacred. A man says I am no animal, I am no social creature, I have no need for these things, I could exist in a vacuum, I am above and not with.

Where does that get you? There are people who, functionally, have attained as close to this as can be reasonably achieved as physical and embodied beings, individuals who can act with total disregard for others and continue to eat, sleep, and live in physical health. They are accountable to no one and can freely impose their will upon others. Rarely do we get a peek behind that curtain, because the smart ones understand that they are operating in an utterly alien way and deliberately avoid the spotlight. Some are even able to find a modicum of happiness in this life.

I think it's very telling that you are probably thinking of some of these people and how observably miserable they are. The escape hatch to impunity and a rejection of the profane does not get you closer to divinity. Indeed, by doing so you begin dancing on the edge of Hell itself, and are liable to fall in.

After reflection, it is clear to me that any implementation of the Sacred must acknowledge the many, many things that are excluded from the contemporary conception of the Human - a single individual, whom can be isolated and said to meaningfully exist in a vacuum, interchangeable like a machine part. What is even the point of imagining such a place? What a depressing thing to reify.

I'm not going to pretend I can conjure up a vision of the sacred place that will speak to every reader because it's a kind of intensely personal thing. However, I can say for sure that I am very happy to leave behind the constructed Modern Human. Certainly I still have human qualities, given I am sitting here writing an essay; however, I am utterly sick and tired of the social box that's trying to squeeze all of us into identical, atomized, contextless shapes, non-animal, non-communal, a fundamentally unliving thing that draws only empty breaths.

We all live in the profane world and inhabit the bodies of animals. I think we'd be much happier acting like that.