What then? Update

With Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

The Departure. Thomas Cole. 1838

First, I was on a podcast with

Mark McGrath

and

Brian “Ponch” Rivera

. You can check it out here. We covered a lot of ground: philosophy, war, flow, death, pre-state peoples, existential isolation, psychedelics, writing, Boyd, Musashi, J.R.R Tolkien, and dogs. I had a great time.

Second, this is not a standard post. It is more of an update. I hope you enjoy.

---

I usually swan dive into a hard-hitting essay and go from there. But I want to take a different approach in this piece. I have never zoomed out and given a bit of the why behind What then? That is my goal here.

I am struck how rereading the same book several decades later can reveal the differential between who we were and who we are.

The first time I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, my young knuckle-dragger mind was disgusted. When I reread it two decades later, the notes I had made in the margins were my same script, but from a different mind, and I was flooded with memories of the younger me I had long forgotten. Back then I was so focused on devoting my life to my mission that I stiff-armed all I intuitively knew would hold me back. But once I got what I was fighting for and started putting words to paper, I wanted more and more to understand the thing — which we will get to — I was once disgusted by.

Why? Because I believe it is the most pressing issue we face at present.

Let us step into Dostoevsky’s dark and brilliant mind.

The main character of the novel is the Underground Man. He breaks modern men and women into two categories: the fools and the intelligent.

Fools pursue prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace, and reason. They want to boil down all human life into 1’s and 0’s, a “law, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index.”¹ The fools are “predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering — that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.”

At the same time, fools are always ready — without reason and without knowing why — to pour gas on the perfectly predictable life and light it on fire. They love destruction and chaos. But why can we not just break the cycle and be at peace? Why not stop building and breaking only to build again? Because, the Underground Man says, we must avoid idleness. My sense is that this idleness takes the form of self-destruction when, in stopping, the busy realize the fictions they have woven around them are just that — fictions. Idleness becomes hell, it becomes the enemy — it is what I have been calling in my previous essays the Void, and think of as an inevitable aspect of the modern State.

But what do the intelligent do? The Underground Man understands the Void exists, sits back, and watches the spectacle of the fools and the absurdity of existence “through a crack under the floor” — and then he stews, gnaws, despises, mocks, and despairs. He is cursed by a question he dances around and never asks, a question we hear too often today: what is the point of my existence?

It is here that Notes from Underground stops. It leads us no further. The Underground Man leaves us with two options: busyness or the Void; hiding from the truth of existence or moaning in the painful awareness of it. My sense is that Dostoevsky is warning us what will happen in the modern world if we do not determine a better path forward.

What then? Why does any of this matter to us today?

I was disgusted because I did not want to become a 1 or a 0 and sit by an assembly line doing the kind of work a machine should be doing. I despised even more the thought of being the plastic widget on the line itself, sitting on the rubber conveyer belt, molded to specification, my life pre-ordained, predictable, flat, sterile, safe, and then over in a whirl of terror once I realized none of it pumped blood and was awake and conscious and real.

I was disgusted because I already knew the Void existed. My earliest memories were of wondering what the Void was, of turning it about in my hands. I had dug so deep and peeled back so many layers that I found myself playing with big questions — why are we here? what is the point of life? what is the point of my life? But instead of the Underground Man’s path of clawing at the air in despair, I realized life was nothing but pure creation. The Void, as wretched as it might seem, is a gift. Freedom, as difficult as it might be to bear, is a gift, in that we can make of our lives whatever we want in a way never before seen in human history.

What then? Dostoevsky performed a service to mankind when he puts words to the struggle of the ancient mind interacting with the modern world.

But I believe we should pick up where he left off, not only exploring the problem by looking backwards and unpacking the Void, but by charging forward and proposing solutions.

That is why I write these essays.

The modern State set a bulk of its inhabitants up for a diabolical dilemma: neither the busyness nor the Void are conducive to flourishing. The State frowned upon relying on a knife for daily acts, building fires for heat and meat, stamping bare-footed on grapes while singing in rhythm, rituals for the young, walking ten miles per day, huddling around a fire and telling stories of heroes and gods and animals and ancestors — the State thought this was all backwards, when in reality this was passionately, violently, beautifully human. So the State, in a sense, and in what was probably two parts ignorance and one part malevolence, invented the Void.

And it is the emptiness of this Void — the silence of the universe — that stares back at us, so that neither spiral galaxies nor singing cicadas tell us why we exist and how we should live, doubly more so as individuals in States that merely want a herd.

This is not an ungrateful tirade against modernity. Far from it. I like my heated steering wheel. I love my barrel sauna.

But I believe we should learn what sort of animal we are and the novel freedom we now have in the State. I believe we should not listen to Nietzsche who warned us against peering “too deeply into the abyss,” especially when it is clear he never took his own advice. Instead, I believe we should repel into this abyss like archaeologists of the mind and soul because it is here that we will, at last, unearth the human condition.

This is why I put words to the remarkable modes of mind used by men and women in the extremes of human experience — the ancestral world, the world of war, and the world of philosophy — and then use these modes to pressure test the modern madness of anxiety, dread, depression, boredom, meaninglessness, isolation, ingratitude, nihilism, and escapism found in the Void.

Recognizing and accepting the Void is the starting point for change — for re-learning what it is to be a human animal, a Rational Animal, a Passionate Animal, merging the best of the ancient world with the modern.

It is a good fight.

As always, more to come next week.

---

What then? is a passion project.

To support my mission, please share this essay with a friend and share your thoughts below.

See you for the next essay on Tuesday.

1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004