There are many people who will tell you that what they desire for themselves, you, and others is peace.
The expressed desire for peace is understandable, as the opposite of peace, war, offers unspeakable dangers and horrors. And yet how many of us are truly content in a state of peace? Another question we might reasonably ask ourselves: have we ever truly been in a state of peace?
Most of us are born onto the world's stage in a time of war or imminent war. For example, when I was born, the Cold War was on. The Soviets were our adversaries, a threat to our freedoms, our way of life, a threat to humanity itself. After the Soviet Union fell, or perhaps after our first war with Iraq, there was a period of ten years or so which could be described as generally peaceful.
This era of peace coincided with the Clinton administration. What happened to us during this time? We watched Seinfeld and to a large extent became ourselves a show about nothing. There was no more great adversary, no global ideological struggle. We became complacent and self-centered; many of us sought out pleasures to numb the boredom. As a nation, we went from being a pillar of freedom standing up against global tyranny to a nation focused on whether its President had received a blowjob from a White House Intern. We lost our sense of dignity.
The expressed desire for peace is understandable, as the opposite of peace, war, offers unspeakable dangers and horrors. And yet how many of us are truly content in a state of peace? Another question we might reasonably ask ourselves: have we ever truly been in a state of peace?
Most of us are born onto the world's stage in a time of war or imminent war. For example, when I was born, the Cold War was on. The Soviets were our adversaries, a threat to our freedoms, our way of life, a threat to humanity itself. After the Soviet Union fell, or perhaps after our first war with Iraq, there was a period of ten years or so which could be described as generally peaceful.
This era of peace coincided with the Clinton administration. What happened to us during this time? We watched Seinfeld and to a large extent became ourselves a show about nothing. There was no more great adversary, no global ideological struggle. We became complacent and self-centered; many of us sought out pleasures to numb the boredom. As a nation, we went from being a pillar of freedom standing up against global tyranny to a nation focused on whether its President had received a blowjob from a White House Intern. We lost our sense of dignity.
During that time, I wrote a play, Oldies on the Rock, which was about my generation--Generation X--and how we lived then, during a period of relative peace. In fact, we were lost, overcome wth a sense a sense of overall purposeless, drifting through life, searching for but not finding meaning, following or rebelling against cultural rules that were themselves disintegrating, and falling into traps of substance abuse, perhaps merely to escape the dullness of it all. (If you are interested in reading Oldies on the Rocks, you can find it available for purchase on Kindle or in paperback form here.) |
Then the events of September 11, 2001 occurred, and everything changed. We had to stand for something again. We regained a sense of meaning and purpose. We were back in the struggle.
I think that we truly thrive only in struggle.
Struggle is central to human existence, to life itself. Struggle is at the core of existence. If we believe in the theories of Darwinian evolution, then the progression of life, the changing of species across time, is defined by the principle of the survival of the fittest. Thus, a kind of cosmic battle among life forms for survival produced the self-awareness and consciousness that make us unique among the species of the planet. This struggle for survival also made us the dominant life form of planet. As such, we are a species produced in struggle yet somehow deluded that we prefer peace to the fight.
When we go to the movies, do we ever really want to see a movie about peace?
No. Peace is the end of the movie. Peace is when the credits roll. We go to see movies about struggle, because deep in our hearts we know that it is our truest nature to be always in struggle, always in the fight. And we know that the fight is central to existence, to the generation of new and better ways of living. We do not fight just for the sake of venting anger. We fight because struggle is itself the engine of change. It is the way our cultural systems, our technologies, and our minds change (evolve) for the better.
Struggle is the driving force of the universe and it our responsibility to be in the fight.
In my opinion, the only way to achieve happiness and engagement in life, is to engage with life--and life, by nature, is struggle. To live is to fight. When we go to the movies, we go to see films like Star Wars. These films depict the epic struggle between light and dark forces which is central to the progression of the universe. We are by nature warriors, and, paradoxically, we are most at peace, internally, when we are engaged in a metaphorical lightsaber battle with our adversary. A world without adversaries is not a world in which we can be truly engaged, and, what's more, there is no such thing as such a utopian world. We always have been and always will be in struggle. We each have different roles to play, surely, in this cosmic struggle, but in our hearts, at our core, we are all Fighting Sullivans.
I think that we truly thrive only in struggle.
Struggle is central to human existence, to life itself. Struggle is at the core of existence. If we believe in the theories of Darwinian evolution, then the progression of life, the changing of species across time, is defined by the principle of the survival of the fittest. Thus, a kind of cosmic battle among life forms for survival produced the self-awareness and consciousness that make us unique among the species of the planet. This struggle for survival also made us the dominant life form of planet. As such, we are a species produced in struggle yet somehow deluded that we prefer peace to the fight.
When we go to the movies, do we ever really want to see a movie about peace?
No. Peace is the end of the movie. Peace is when the credits roll. We go to see movies about struggle, because deep in our hearts we know that it is our truest nature to be always in struggle, always in the fight. And we know that the fight is central to existence, to the generation of new and better ways of living. We do not fight just for the sake of venting anger. We fight because struggle is itself the engine of change. It is the way our cultural systems, our technologies, and our minds change (evolve) for the better.
Struggle is the driving force of the universe and it our responsibility to be in the fight.
In my opinion, the only way to achieve happiness and engagement in life, is to engage with life--and life, by nature, is struggle. To live is to fight. When we go to the movies, we go to see films like Star Wars. These films depict the epic struggle between light and dark forces which is central to the progression of the universe. We are by nature warriors, and, paradoxically, we are most at peace, internally, when we are engaged in a metaphorical lightsaber battle with our adversary. A world without adversaries is not a world in which we can be truly engaged, and, what's more, there is no such thing as such a utopian world. We always have been and always will be in struggle. We each have different roles to play, surely, in this cosmic struggle, but in our hearts, at our core, we are all Fighting Sullivans.