How To Find Self-Command In An Age Of Anxiety
And the threat of never knowing ourselves
I believe we are savages built for nature who become decadent in domestication. When society eliminates hardship, it opens a void of emptiness. Filling this void with meaning in the absence of natures “must” is the art of living in the modern world.
I am struck that anticipatory anxiety can be a greater plague in the world of safety than in the world of hardship. It seems when concrete threats are removed, abstract threats fill the void.
Why do we find so much self-destruction in safety and yet so little among men and women a millisecond away from pain and death? What can this paradox reveal about one of the greatest threats at present? What, too, can we do about it?
Anticipatory anxiety is an overwhelming sense of fear before the thing we are anxious about arises. We can be afraid before the threat even exists. We can be afraid over an if.
The modern man is anxious he will mumble while public speaking—and then he mumbles. The modern woman is stressed she will not be able to complete the diet—and then she does not attempt it. He is terrified he will fail the test, and in his terror he cannot think clearly—and fails the test.
The anxious suffer twice: first in imagination, then in reality.
We find a counter in an ancient mode of life. Let us join Sitting Bull, a chief and medicine man of the Hunkpapa, a tribe of Lakota Sioux.
He tempered his recklessness in combat not due to cowardice but due to the demands of an authority he could not disobey—his mother. His fellow fighters did not fail to taunt him. In 1872, the Lakota and the U.S. Army got into a battle over the construction of a railroad. Young warriors eager to count coup took turns demonstrating their courage against Custer’s force during the standoff.
Suddenly, Sitting Bull placed his rifle on the ground, grabbed his pipe, and calmly walked into the golden field between Lakota and Army rifles barrels. Bullets cut the green grass at his side and kicked up flecks of dirt. He sat down, packed his bowl with tobacco, and lit it with flint and steel. I can see his puffs of tobacco smoke turning into tiny tornadoes as bullets pass through them, missing his face by inches. At last, smoking to his satisfaction, he tapped out the ashes, cleaned the bowl, and calmly walked back to his lines. White Bull, his nephew, said afterwards that it was the “most brave deed possible.” Not even counting coup could compare.1
The warrior smoking his pipe in a hail of bullets demonstrates that true freedom does not come from avoiding hardship but from mastering our relationship to it.
Getting shot at sucks. The crack of an invisible bullet lingering in your ear drum is uncomfortable. Your mind puts images of your delicate sack of skin and bones taking damage from this unseen yet audible threat: a throat torn open or an ulna snapped in two as others look on with horror in their eyes. It is even more strange when considering bullet impacts often do not produce pain at first. Your mind and eyes will have time to study the wound while your body has not yet registered the damage done to it at two-thousand feet per second.
My point is this sort of cognitive command takes an extraordinary amount of reflection beforehand. Sitting Bull had done his homework. It is significant that before he was christened Sitting Bull, his name was Slow due to his mastery of the slow, silent, and sacred act of contemplation. This is a clue in our reckoning of the ancestral mind.
I imagine they sat cross-legged near fires, eyes lit red with flame, their minds taking hold of thoughts and cradling them in their palms to see what they are made of. Maybe their minds played if-then scenarios. If I anticipate anxiety over what I cannot control—a snapped scapula and the vibrating numbness of a bullet wound slowly morphing into violent pain—then I may lose my nerve and put myself and my tribe beneath the blade. If I anticipate command over what I can control—dominating the field like an American Buddha with one foot in the River Styx—then I increase our odds of living and set an example for others how die as master of oneself.
For my part, I have found that by visualizing maximum pain, terror, and damage, when reality is finally encountered all I can say is, “So, this is it? This is what I was so anxious about? This is less difficult than my preparation for it.”
What then? Anxiety is not so much an enemy as an ally. We catastrophize over something before it exists and we do this for a reason—to hone our attention on deadly threats so we can train for them. Catastrophizing done well is a virtue. But what happens now? In danger, our ancestors were forced to master concretes; in safety, the anxious fall victim to abstractions, ideas, whims, and worries. The anxious treat a mental image of an if as if it can kill them.
In other words, they never have to convert their anxiety to command. Our environment no longer punishes us for stopping at “I am anxious” because tests, diets, and public speaking do not kill us. Our world of safety no longer violently yanks us out of our skulls and into the forests of our ancestors—claw, famine, and screaming faces painted ochre.
It strikes me that the psychological and philosophical tools for curing the ills of the soft modern world merely replicate what a lethal state of nature once freely provided. What else is the technique of gradually exposing ourselves to more difficult situations than Sitting Bull’s childhood? What else is rewiring negative thoughts than contemplation beside a fire while wolves prowl on the edge of the firelight? What else is visualizing worst case scenarios than seeing oneself calmly smoking a pipe while Custer—the epitome of a human-hunter—aligns the front site of his rifle with his eager eye?
Some might judge Sitting Bull for risking his life to prove a point. But for Sitting Bull and many of his tribesmen, life without self-command was not worth living. This judgment is cut short when we ask: How many who judge this man of perfect composure under fire are racked with anxiety? How many have forgotten that self-command without trial is not possible? How many might watch their anxiety vanish if they traded their pills for a controlled exposure to the ancestral forms of hardship we have eliminated? What then?
Bitter is our irony: we banished hardship to pursue happiness only to discover a more crippling affliction—anxiety born of safety. Pain, risk, suffering, wolves, and pre-dawn raids were not only threats to our survival but, paradoxically, the anvil on which self-command was hammered.
Our minds and bodies are warning us but neither nature nor culture force a command-or-die mode of mind on us any longer.
It is now up to us.
We must redefine what threatens us. Neither thunder nor war created self-command—they only revealed it. And neither flood nor tomahawk taught self-command—but deeply reflecting on them did. The true threat, then, does not lie outside of us but within. Without contemplation, we cannot truly understand risk. Without understanding risk, we cannot develop self-command. And without self-command, we will remain strangers to ourselves.
The threat of our age is not death but a life unlived.
What, then, is left but a relentless pursuit of self-command? Why surrender to a whirl of anxiety when we can choose to master—like Sitting Bull—the small slab of our own being on this beautiful blue orb in the cosmos? This is the bridge between us and Sitting Bull. This is the reminder that we are neither first nor last, but one steel link in the ancient chain of humanity in which it is a gift to belong.
What then? is a passion project.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Viking, 2010.
“Freedom” is a very relative term these days. After 9/11, Americans redefine it into a timid, fear-based concept whose highest values are subjective (and individual) definitions of “comfort” and “safety.” This ersatz “freedom” is what novelist Mary McCarthy best described as “the lamb’s freedom.” According to McCarthy, the lambs’ fear of being eaten by predators relegates them to a life of submission—getting nipped at by dogs, eating when the shepherd says so, and making the most of the numbered days until the inevitable pre-Easter slaughter. The lion, McCarthy pointed out, has a much more robust definition of freedom that works off the assumption that true freedom is inherently dangerous. Even the biggest, baddest male lion gets ripped limb from limb by the hyenas if he breaks a leg. Sadly, most Americans traded what remained of the lion’s freedom for the perceived comfort and safety of the lamb’s freedom. In the end, we got neither. Instead, we got a Techno/Pharma Authoritarian future and this is our bitter harvest.
We are meant to do hard things and find joy at the end of them. To laugh perhaps even in the face of death, or suffering that we survive. There are times to enjoy the fruits of the labor, and times to do the labor, and you have really described the labor; it is to work on ourselves as we confront the bullets, or a mountain, or some other hard problem. I accept that most people will seek 'self-care' rather than self-growth, as you wrote the other day. They will stop early on the journey of growth. When a friend of mine who was a kind of academic and life 'battle buddy' passed away a couple of years ago, my epitaph to him came from the Epic of Gilgamesh: "We entered the mountain gates, we slew lions"