I'll be uploading this series between now and the end of the year. Each episode will examine how a particular mental block or spiritual failure leads to the wreckage we see all around us. In this first episode, we'll consider how fear of death turns us into zombies.
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Why the World Is Broken Part 1 Fear of Death This World is broken.
Doesn't take any great scholar to tell you that.
Just open up your eyes and look around.
Fifty years ago, you could go and buy a coffee maker, and it would last you the rest of your life.
These days, you're lucky if you get six months out of it before it has problems.
Look at our political movements.
As Jim Goad said, wherever the crowd is, they got there too late and for the wrong reasons.
How many more of these political movements, of these subcultures do you need to see start out with all this promise, all of this hope, and just get flooded by people that just want to fight, that just want destruction.
And soon enough you have two sides fighting over garbage and completely ignoring the reason the fight was happening in the first place.
Look at our pop culture.
Look at our entertainment.
It's nothing but these stories that are so foundationally unfulfilling.
We go and we watch the movie or we play the video game and there's all this excitement, there's all of these special effects, but there's no catharsis.
There's no true psychodrama at the core of it, and we're left afterwards feeling cold and inadequate and desperate for more.
This world is broken, and one of the reasons for it being so broken is because we fear death.
Now I'm going to tell you three stories, three examples of what the fear of death does.
And the connection might not be obvious at first, but it will become apparent.
The first is the story of modern economics and about how we think we are above nature.
Now what have we been doing for the past really for the past eighty years, but it's become increasingly evident in the current era.
What do we do whenever there's an economic downturn?
Whenever people are getting laid off, whenever they can't afford to pay their mortgages well, we say what we need to do is increase spending.
Because if we increase spending, that's going to increase the number of jobs out there and those people will be hired again.
So we lower the interest rate, we make credit a lot cheaper, we give everybody a credit card so that they rush out and start buying brand new tech gadgets that they don't really need in the first place.
And the theory is that will give everybody a job.
But here's what happens when you make credit cheap for the consumer.
You also make credit cheap for the producer.
So you have all of these consumers with a bunch of cheap credit to go buy stuff.
If you're a producer, you borrow some money, you expand your operations, and you start producing more junk.
So none of the companies go out of business.
All of the companies have access to this cheap credit, they start producing more junk, and the consumers are buying more junk, and what happens because of this?
What happens is that quality drops.
The good companies to remain competitive with all the cheap companies, the shoddy companies, the flyby night operations that should have gone out of business, but don't because they've got cheap credit, to remain competitive with these companies that will not go bankrupt no matter how much they deserve to, the good companies need to lower their standards as well.
So it really doesn't matter if you buy a general electric coffee maker or if you buy some cheap knockoff from China.
They are both built to the lowest common denominator because this flooding of cheap credit denies.
It denies the forces of nature.
Sunrises, sunsets.
You have a bull economy, and you have a bear economy.
The forest grows and becomes dry, and a lightning strike starts a forest fire, clearing the way for the forest to grow anew.
Man, however, man thinks he is above such things.
That we don't need a forest fire, that we don't need a nighttime, that we don't need a bear market.
We are going to keep the economy in a perpetual bull market.
We are going to hop it up on uppers and keep it going.
And a brain dead zombie is what we have.
Let's talk about our psychodramas for a moment.
Let's talk about our subcultures.
Let's talk about sports ball.
With the understanding that we're not just talking about sports ball, we're talking about every single political movement out there.
We're talking about the recent election.
We're talking about all of it.
And it's perfectly summed up in sports ball.
So let's say you're a big fan of this.
You go and you go and watch the sports ball game, and you're sitting there in front of your TV wearing the jersey, and you're jumping up and cheering every time they score a goal, and you're getting angry whenever the ref makes a judgment that you don't like, and you are so invested in this event that has nothing to do with you.
And at the end of the game, maybe you're cheering because your team won, maybe you're crying because your team didn't.
But at the end of the day, you have lost and you have benefited nothing.
Maybe you made a $50 side bet on the game, but that doesn't matter to you.
You spent a hundred bucks on all the accoutrements to watch the game in the first place.
The $50 is nothing.
You've already wasted $100 on it.
You just had this huge psychodrama that meant absolutely nothing whatsoever.
There were no consequences to this psychodrama.
And this is all politics has become now.
Politics has devolved into two camps yelling at each other, calling the other ones villains, and calling themselves virtuous with no consequences, no real consequences for either group.
There are real consequences, but we don't talk about those.
The consequences that the two groups talk about are mostly illusory in nature.
You've got these debates happening between atheists and evolutionists and Christians and creationists and feminists and MRAs, and you've got all of these debates.
And yet neither side could exist without each other.
Both sides thrive on outrage.
Both of them perpetuate the cycle.
There is no ultimate purpose.
There is no ultimate end to the sports ball game.
It doesn't matter who wins the Stanley Cup.
It doesn't matter who wins whatever yearly event it is.
There's going to be more sports ball games next year.
There is no end state, there is no purpose.
the purpose is the existence of the debate itself.
These are false psychodramas.
That's all they are.
And this spills in to our culture as well.
The false psychodrama, the false hero's journey.
Now the hero's journey is it's a journey from the regular world into the dark realm, into the spirit world, into the psyche, and it's a return from it.
It's the monomyth.
And all of our myths stop halfway through.
Star Wars, Episode four.
This is generally held up as a perfect version of the hero's journey.
Except it's not.
It's a stunted hero's journey.
But let's run through it as if it is the real hero's journey.
So the journey starts off.
Step one is the ordinary world.
This is where you're introduced to the hero.
You understand their environment, where they come from, their family, their history.
But there's something pulling at the world, at the hero, leading to step two, the call to adventure.
This is where this is where Luke Skywalker learns about the princess that needs rescuing, and he learns about the Jedi.
He learns about the lightsaber.
But next you have the refusal of the call.
I can't do it.
I have farming to take care of.
I need to do all of this.
This refusal is met with events that cannot be ignored.
They refuse the call but are forced into it, at which point they get to meet the mentor.
Luke Skywalker finds Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Obi-Wan Kenobi teaches him how to leave his regular world and go across the threshold into the dark world.
At the end of Act 1, this is where Luke Skywalker goes to the hive of scum and villainy under the tutelage of Obi-Wan, and he meets with a pirate and a smuggler and escapes Tatooine while running from the law.
He's gone from the regular world where he is a good farm boy into the dark world of being an outlaw.
Next, in the dark world, he starts to challenge himself.
This is step six, tests, allies, and enemies.
He is tested, he is challenged, and he passes the test.
He passes the challenge he overcomes.
He figures out who his allies are and who his enemies are.
And once he is ready, once he is ready through these tests, comes step seven, the approach.
This is where we are at the end of episode four, a new hope.
The approach.
We are on Yavin.
The Death Star is coming.
We know what the Death Star is.
We know who Darth Vader is.
And Darth Vader knows who Luke Skywalker is.
He knows who the Rebellion is, who they are.
These lines have been drawn in the sand now: good guys and bad guys.
So there's the approach, the Death Star approaches, and the X-Wings and the Y-Wings, they approach the Death Star.
And finally, the Ordeal.
Ordeal, Death, and Rebirth.
This is supposed to be the middle of the story.
But in Star Wars, this is the end of the story.
And after it, there's a very, very short denouement, which is step nine: reward.
This is where the hero grasps the treasure that they're supposed to have.
And this is where our movies end.
It's very clearly played out like that in Star Wars.
But you go and see any Marvel film, and it's the exact same thing.
There's a big bad guy out there, and he's the bad guy because he's the bad guy, and the hero needs to go fight the bad guy because he's the hero.
end of story.
In a real story, this isn't where it ends.
No, after defeating the bad guy, there's the road back.
This is where the hero reflects on what they paid for this thing they acquired.
They begin to understand what this thing is that they acquired through the price they paid for it.
They begin to understand that the villain wasn't truly a villain.
It's just another person.
It was just another force in the universe like they're a force in the universe.
And thus, going through that darkest quadrant of eight to ten, from the ordeal, which is their death and rebirth, to the road back, they have gone fully through the dark world.
They are now part of the dark world, leading to step eleven, the resurrection.
Mario, in the resurrection, Mario has been through the ordeal.
He has fought off Bowser, he has rescued Princess Peach, and now he comes to realize that his enemy was never Bowser.
Bowser is just another man.
That Princess Peach was not a reward.
Princess Peach is just another human being on her own journey.
This is where Mario achieves enlightenment, and he realizes what it means to be a hero and what it means to be a villain, and that we all have both these elements inside of ourselves.
And so finally, twelve, he returns with the elixir.
He returns to the regular world, he returns to his home.
And now he can be a force of wisdom within his own home.
He can become the mentor to the next young man that needs to go on the hero's journey.
That's the true catharsis that comes from it all.
It's the realization that every single one of us, we might be the hero of our story, but we're the villain of somebody else's.
When you go to church, if you go to church, the Christian psychodrama, we in the pews, we're not the protagonists.
We are the villains.
We are the ones that crucified Christ on his hero's journey, and yet he came back with the elixir.
And so we return to him as penitents, as petitioners, asking for this wisdom.
If you study the Begabod Gita, Arjuna eventually comes to realize that he himself must also be the villain when he fights his old family members because that's the only path forward.
The hero's journey is painful.
It's self-examinatory.
It's self-revelatory.
You learn about yourself.
You learn things that hurt about yourself, but that's not what we have nowadays.
That's not what we want.
We want to stop the hero's journey at point eight.
Right on the brink of the darkest moment, we want to pretend that everything is fine.
Everything's happy.
And so we see these perfected idols of the hero who never learn anything about themselves.
They never learn anything about the villains.
All they learn is that they deserve success.
And we walk away angry and bitter that we don't have that same sort of opportunity, that same sort of success in life.
We're angry that we don't have an Iron Man suit, that we don't have a lightsaber, that the closest we can get is to pretending to be Luke Skywalker in the movie, pretending to be Iron Man.
And so instead of returning with the elixir, instead of examining ourselves and coming away with wisdom, we turn away from death and pretend that everything's just fine as we seethe with bitterness.
So what is death?
What is death?
Well, it's the end, but it's more than just the end.
Death is the final judgment.
Now, whether you believe that you are going to encounter the book of life and be held accountable for all of your deeds, or if you believe that consciousness ceases, there's that eternal nothingness.
Either way, it's a judgment.
Your body is going to be lying there in that casket, as all the friends and family, those that are left, those that you still have, stand around.
And they'll say kind words, but the fact is your life is over.
There's no more there's no more hope.
There's no more opportunity.
The final chapter has been written.
The work is completed.
There is nothing more to be added to it.
Whatever it was, it stands for whatever it was.
Death is that judgment.
And whenever we are judged, we fall short.
Whenever you take a test, very seldom do you get 100% on that test.
If you get 100%, then the test was far too easy, wasn't it?
What's the point of taking a course, of doing a test where you get 100%?
Any test worth taking is going to be a failure.
And that ultimate test of life, you are going to fail on it.
And so death isn't just death itself, the final arbiter.
Death is something that happens to us every single day.
Every single day when we go to sleep, that day is completed, that day is finished.
Everything that could have been done, all those possibilities, they no longer exist.
Instead, what was done is all that exists.
And there's going to be failure in that.
Most days of your life, there is going to be failure.
And failure.
Well, failure leads to suffering.
The business that made bad investments is a cockamame idea.
That business, during the bull market, that everybody was so eager to invest in this business.
This sounds like an idea.
Maybe we can make a million dollars.
Some of those businesses go on to make money, but a lot of them fail.
And this creates suffering.
The adventures we make in our own lives, the relationships we build, the friendships we create, some of these dissolve.
All things eventually dissolve.
Everything falls apart if it's allowed to.
But you see, we fear death.
We fear the suffering.
We fear the business closing and being laid off.
We fear the broken heart that if we're actually honest and open with somebody is a distinct result.
We fear the suffering of realizing that we ourselves have been villains in some other hero's story.
We fear that suffering, we fear that death, and so we turn away from it.
We create the economic stimulus to keep all of these companies going so that nobody ever gets laid off, none of these companies ever die, and the economy turns into a zombie economy.
We fear failure within our own lives, so we turn to sports ball.
We turn to these stories that are truncated halfway through so that we never have to pay the consequences.
We can live vicariously through these heroes.
Always be winners as we're living through these heroes, never be losers, never suffer.
And so we never learn.
We never actually take the test.
We never fail, we never suffer, and we never grow.
Failure and suffering is necessary for growth, and we shy away from it.
We deaden ourselves with heroin.
We deaden ourselves with other psychoactive substances.
We deaden the economy with stimulus.
We are terrified of falling asleep, of entering the dark world because we do not want to admit what sort of monsters lie beneath the surface.
And because we are afraid of these monsters, because we are afraid of death, we are afraid of the darkness, because we do not enter it.
Those monsters chase us for our entire lives.
They run us ragged.
And that energy that we started with in youth is bled from us.
We are bled dry like the victim of a vampire, and we become that vampire's willing servant.
We ourselves become undead because we fear death.
The solution is to stare death in the face.
The solution is to accept suffering.
The solution is to pursue virtue.
When you are suffering, there's often nothing you can do about it.
If you are working for a company, you are going to get laid off eventually.
Could be through your fault, or could be through no fault of your own, you are going to be laid off.
That part's inevitable.
But while you're there, you can work, you can accomplish, you can show virtue.
You are going to have a broken heart.
And you can ignore this.
You can never trust.
You can never open your heart.
And you can run roughshod over everybody else.
You can run from the pain.
And then you'll have nothing.
And then you'll have created more pain in the process.
Or you can trust.
You can open yourself.
You can accept the darkness, the pain, the monsters.
You can take the risk, and you will pay for it.
But you can practice virtue so that when that final examination comes, that final judgment, you know you're going to fall short.
That judgment will come for you, and there will be failure.
But by confronting death, confronting failure throughout your life, and reacting with virtue, finding that pearl of wisdom, and returning with the elixir, even though it costs you, you can confront death with a peaceful heart.
I'm going to leave you with a short poem by the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, which some of you might recognize from the Ian Fleming novel.
