2020’s Gift of 20/20 Vision Has Unveiled a Society in Search of a Soul
Yet Finding our Soul — Solving Our Meaning Crisis — Is Crucial to Social Salvation
It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption.
— Carl Gustav Jung
The unrelenting crises of 2020 — economic, environmental, political,biological — reveal we are lost. Proof of our purposelessness is plentiful, apparent in rising rates of mental illness and especially in skyrocketing numbers of suicides, which occur both through the slow degradation of substance abuse and quicker, messier methods.
Clearly, we’ve strayed off some path. It is a path we cannot name but used to feel — a road that once promised our purpose and our meaning, our will to not only live but to thrive, to self-actualize, and — ultimately— to individuate.
To regain our life force, we must re-discover our souls; we must recover our purpose and therefore our meaning. This will be difficult, for there is no birth — physical, social, or biological — without pain. Creation always entails sacrifice.
Discovering our unique path is only the first problem; the second involves traveling it, meeting and facing the unique challenges life throws us and therefore re-discovering — re-integrating — our deepest meaning and highest soul. (I use “re” for a reason: We were less deluded as children.)
The journey is difficult, yet it is also life-affirming, not only for individuals but also civilizations. For our societal health is completely dependent on our willingness to re-discover our idiosyncratic natures. Why? Put simply, society is sick because its values are sick; how better to heal than to re-discover what is truly worth pursuing?
Thus, let us begin the journey back to fundamental truth through the medium of Medium — together.
In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, the psychiatrist and kind soul wrapped in a bundle of skin known as Carl G. Jung wrote of the crises shaking a Europe at war. He linked them not to economics or geopolitics or biology. He ignored every conventional explanation. Instead — having explored the depths of his psyche — Jung linked the collective suicide of Europe to a crisis of meaning.
Jung’s lessons apply today. The contemporary West is undergoing crises that, though different in form, share the same source as those that shook Jung’s time. We’ve lost our way; we’ve lost any recognition that there is a way, or that to travel upon that way — closing the gap between our ideal self and our current self — is the noblest and most essential task of any human life.
It is not difficult to discern the causes of our meaning crisis, but it is all too easy to discern the consequences. Leaving aside political consequences — which I cannot ethically discuss due to my current position in the federal judiciary — we are now witnessing more societal chaos than most of us have ever seen.
As Beatrice Hinkle writes:
That humanity is seeking a new message, a new light upon the meaning of life, and something tangible, as it were, with which it can work towards a larger understanding of itself and its relation to the universe, is a fact I think none will gainsay.
As Hinkle’s quote acknowledges, and as I once noticed when exploring my own crisis of meaning, in order to do anything, we must first know why we are doing it. We must discover the answer to two words: “Why bother?”
As I wrote:
Walking home after work, glimpsing at an array of purposeful men and women striding resolutely to some goal or other, the apt truth of Albert Camus’s observation would hit me: “At any street corner, the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” When confronted with ambitious friends pining constantly for this external goal or that, I’d nod along agreeably, but in my mind’s recess I’d think: Why bother? Why indeed live anything but an Epicurean life, if all meaning were fantasy? More morbidly, why not, as Camus asked, commit suicide and get the whole thing over with right now?
Put simply, without meaning, life is absurd. For there is no apparent reason to continue. To trudge on. If I asked you to meet me at the intersection of X street and Y avenue, you’d demand a reason before coming, right? You’d demand a “why.”
Too few of us hold our own lives up to that simple standard. In the midst of the isolation and societal dysfunction that COVID-19 exacerbates, however, the necessity of asking “why bother?” is more apparent than ever. We must gaze at the entirety of our temporal life, grasp onto it, and stare it right in the face. Rather than numbing our minds with compulsive busyness or alcohol or Netflix, we must demand of our lives: “To what end?”
For it is only through answering that question that we can find that spirit which allows us to feel pain without embracing it and to transcend suffering without succumbing to it.
Earlier, I said that answering our meaning crisis is fundamentally necessary for our society to solve any of our problems, from the biological and pathogenic to the economic and political. This is because re-discovering our purpose and meaning — our soul — allows us to care. It allows us to recognize that the quality of our doing is dependent on the quality of our being, thereby re-balancing what have classically been called the masculine (or “active”) and feminine (or “receptive”) principles. Our hyper-masculine society has lost any notion of that latter principle’s transcendent value. We must re-discover it. For there is more value in experiencing reality than in imposing our will over it. Creation and the will to power are worthless in the absence of experience and receptivity.
The discovery entails that we willingly embrace life’s challenges. That — instead of resisting life’s demands — we embrace them. That we honestly examine our problems’ causes. That we learn to respond consciously instead of reacting unconsciously.
For this quest, we, like Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter, will need a fellowship — social support of some kind, whether via romance, friendship, or even long-dead authors like Carl Gustav Jung. None of us can do this alone. Life is far too big for that, and humans are far too small.
So: Get up. Discover your individual path. And then — not despite the difficulty but because of it — begin the journey.
Our world depends on your willingness to take that first step.
Michael Elias Shammas is a lawyer, former journalist, and aspiring legal academic. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2016, he briefly worked at a corporate law firm before realizing there are higher motives than the profit motive. He recently completed an academic fellowship at the New York University School of Law. You can read his preliminary scholarship here and should feel free to follow him on Twitter or email him at mshammas6367@gmail.com.
