The More Beautiful World

Author: Charles Eisenstein

Photo by Trevor Hartman

The full title of the book is The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. The author is Charles Eisenstein. Most of what follows are Eisenstein’s ideas presented using his own language. I’ve dispensed with quotation marks for the sake of simplicity. I’ve organized my notes under topical headings, and added my own commentary as italicized bullet points.

This book explores two modes of understanding our world. The author calls these “The Story of Separation” and “The Story of Inter-being.”

The Story of Separation: This view of the world says that we must overcome adversarial forces through greater force. In order to protect ourselves in this impersonal, hostile, competitive universe, we must exercise as much control as possible.

The Story of Inter-being: This view of the world sees creation as a connected whole; that what’s good for one is a blessing for all. We are to receive life as a gift, gratefully growing through our circumstances rather than attempting to exercise direct control over outcomes.

The mindset of Separation holds that humans are, at bottom, ruthless maximizers of self-interest: that is, evil.

Ascension into the rational is to the sensitive secular person what ascension into the spiritual is to the religious person.

• Eisenstein’s thesis is that we need a new mythos, a new “story of the people.” Does he think such a story will change our nature?

Substitutes

Our so-called wealth is a veil for our poverty, a substitute for what is missing.

• “Earthly riches are full of poverty.” Augustine

We are often mired by substitutes in pursuit of the things we really want. Advertisers play on this all the time, selling sports cars as a substitute for freedom, junk food and soda as a substitute for excitement, brands as a substitute for social identity, and pretty much everything else as a substitute for sex — itself a proxy for the intimacy that is so lacking in modern life.

We might also see sports hero worship as a substitute for one’s own greatness, amusement parks as a substitute for the transcending of boundaries, pornography as a substitute for self-love, and overeating as a substitute for connection or the feeling of being present.

• Once we are conditioned to respond to approval and disapproval, we are susceptible to being manipulated by anyone who can supply or withhold these things from us.

The interest of each is the interest of all… If love is the expansion of self to include another, then whatever reveals our connections has the potential to foster love.

Science

The ideology of science: only the measurable is real. Phenomena that did not fit into the scientific orthodoxy were declared not to exist.

Matter has properties which could not exist in the view of classical physics.

Many have turned to spirituality to remedy an egregious shortcoming of the scientific worldview.

Is science a COMPLETE description of the natural world? If not, doesn’t that imply the existence of things it cannot measure or perceive?

• Eisenstein dispenses with a Creator as a needful hypothesis in intelligent design. He does this by positing intelligence — movement toward order — as a property inherent in matter. This is a fine conjecture; one might also account for these properties in matter by suggestion that a spiritual Creator is the source of all life, and is “holding all things together.”
• Eisenstein asserts that there is no reason for the observed behavior of photons at the individual level — that they behave randomly. Why does he not consider the possibility that their behavior is effected by causes that we do not understand and cannot observe?

Physics has tried and failed to preserve determinism for 90 years.

• I suspect this is not because determinism is mistaken in principle, but because we don’t have anything like comprehensive access to all relevant causes, and probably wouldn’t be able to parse them if we did.

War

“He who fights dragons too long will become a dragon himself, and if thou gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.” Nietzsche

Hate and the story of evil are a cover for the wound of Separation.

• Is this separation what the Judeo-Christian tradition means by “sin”?

Underneath the desire to conquer the evil world is an absence of self-approval.

• I see some truth in this statement, in that we may lash out at others because we are not at peace with ourselves, but is it also true that one who adequately approved of himself would not desire to see less evil in himself and in the world? (Lao Tzu speaks to this in sections 29 and 22)
• The story of binary conflict has been pulled into places where it misleads rather than enlightens. It is the story in which the “others” must be our enemies. Eisenstein notes that the mentality of desiring to conquer evil is the same on both sides of the line of “the other.” Both sides believe they are fighting for good and against evil. Children are trained to embrace this mentality through the same plot-line present in adult movies: the irredeemably evil person must be utterly destroyed.
• Even if there is some truth to the idea of irredeemability, we seem far too quick to slap this label to those who disagree with us. Do we even try to “win them over” anymore?
• As long as we believe that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found in destroying something, our attempts to solve the problems will instead perpetuate them.

When both sides revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other, they are really on the same side: the side of War.

The mentality of War subordinates all small, local considerations to a single cause for which all must be sacrificed.

• We seem to be addicted to the mentality of war, in which a single overriding goal justifies any means. But this is also close to the self-sacrificial mentality of love.

The logic of control tells us that by shaming the perpetrators we can change them, but actually we only drive them deeper into their story.

“The best victory is one in which the losers don’t realize they have lost.” Sun Shu

Changing Beliefs

Can you believe that changing an old woman’s bedpan can change the world? If you do it to change the world, it won’t. But if you do it because it needs to be done, then it can.

• Self-conscious attempts to set an example can be self-defeating; they are a kind of bodily sermonizing that not only tends to smack of self-aggrandizement, but also clogs up the soul of the sermonizer, preventing the needed interior development by diverting energy and attention to the management of appearances and away from more essential things.

We cannot change a belief through an act of will, for a state of belief is a state of being… When the state of being that corresponds to a given belief has run its course, then the belief changes with just a little nudge. Our beliefs can changes when we:

1. Receive a vision.
2. Heal the wounds and doubts illuminated by that vision.
3. Bring into being that which wants to be born.

Usually the vision becomes clearer as we heal the wounds that kept us from seeing it before.

Attempting anything new is both arrogant and humble: arrogant because our confidence is unwarranted, humble because we’re placing ourselves at the mercy of the unknown.

It takes more courage to believe what we know is true than to disbelieve what we know is false.

To give attention to a habit weakens its compulsion. Attend to your habits. Pay nonjudgmental attention to them. Then let yourself push over the undesirable ones, and walk in a better way.

Look for the unmet need that drives the behavior. Address the need, not the behavior.

The normal person tries to avoid consequences. The wise person avoids causes. Why? The wise person knows that the consequences will be waiting there in the end.

• “No one has ever gotten away with anything.” Jordan Peterson

Scarcity

A culture of scarcity immerses us so completely that we mistake it for reality.

• The fundamental assumption of scarcity is this: there is not enough okayness in the world to go around. Whatever amount of this scarce resource is absorbed by others is then not available to me. Since I must compete with others for this essential commodity, others are my enemies.
• This mindset is the source of our jealousy when we encounter someone who clearly possesses a disproportionate measure of okayness. Without fully articulating the thought, we are seized by a sense of injustice: it’s simply wrong for that person to have so much when I have so little.

“From our immersion in the age of artificial scarcity arises the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of money, the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention, the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor, the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance, the habit of manipulation.”

• A belief in scarcity is essential to seeing people as ruthless maximizers of self-interest. This identity also hinges on loneliness — which may well be a result of living in a transactional system in which money often obviates relationship. This system satisfies consumer demands with extreme efficiency, but we enjoy this convenience at the price of lost connection to others.

How much of the ugly does it take to substitute for a lack of the beautiful? How many adventure films does it take to compensate for a lack of adventure? How many superhero movies must one watch to compensate for the atrophied expression of one’s greatness? How much pornography to meet the need of intimacy? How much entertainment to compensate for missing play? It takes an infinite amount. This is good news for economic growth.

• Maintaining a mindset of scarcity may be a great boon for economic growth. But maybe the appetite of our economic god is insatiable, and maybe, having fed it everything else, we have resorted to feeding it our souls — our time, our affection, our devotion.

If we lived in a sharing economy that rewarded generosity, then greed would be senseless.

Situationism & Dispositionism

Situationism and Dispositionism are different ways of accounting for individual character, motives, behavior, and choices.

Situationism: the totality of our situation determines our choices and beliefs. In other words, our individual character is entirely a product of our total situation in life, both past and present, physical and spiritual.

Dispositionism: we make free-will choices based on an innate disposition. In other words, we are each born with an individual character and our choices spring from that character.

• Situationism offers needed, important, and useful insights. But we’ll fool ourselves if we let this lead us to believe that we have no nature — that instead it’s Situation all the way down. To suggest that we would be different if only we had a different situation is, to some degree, an argument from ignorance: we don’t really know what a given person would be like in any situation until he or she is actually in it.
• Just as we’re all Keynesians in a sense, so we are all Dispositionists: we see the world as being populated by some people who are good, and some people who are bad. If individual (dissimilar) spirits are included in the totality of our individual situations, the distinction between these two camps collapses — because then it would be the case that prior to any situational experience, we are unique entities — but then each of us also goes on to be shaped by a unique situation. Yes, this is just another take on the old Nature vs Nurture debate.
• The “Good” Samaritan is a title loaded with Dispositionist assumptions. The parable might be more defensibly titled The Neighborly Samaritan; after all, Jesus said that God alone is good. Seen through the lens of Dispositionism, we think the Samaritan stopped to help BECAUSE he was good, but Jesus was simply describing what it’s like to love one’s neighbor. The man who was good enough to stop along the road may have later violated a contract or yelled at his wife. If so, would he still be “good”?
• It may be true that given the totality of another’s situation, we would do as they do, but only if we regard one’s total situation as including his or her unique individual . As humans, we all have a similar nature, but as individuals, we each have a unique spirit. (Studies of identical twins are instructive here.) If the spirit is more fundamental and more formative than one’s circumstance, then swapping out one spirit for another would mean that even with identical circumstances, this one change would produce different outcomes. Even if our uniqueness is deeper than circumstance, however, that is not something for which we can take credit, elevating ourselves for something in which we played no active role.
• We need to be able to say with the Situationists, “If I were in the totality of your circumstances, I would do just as you.” As mentioned above, the sticking point here is the question of whether any aspect of who we are is not circumstantially determined — even genetic makeup is part of one’s circumstance. Still, it seems possible that the spirit within each body might have been different, and that if it had been different, otherwise identical circumstances would not have produced identical outcomes. (This seems consistent with the parable of the Wheat and the Tares.) This, however, does not keep us from uttering the nonjudgmental truth that “If I were you, I would do just as you have done.”

This is the mentality behind the Story of Separation: If I were in the totality of your circumstances, I would do differently than you.

• Self-righteousness judgment of others is separation, the mentality Jesus rebuked in the Pharisees.

“The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.” Goethe

Stories & Evidence

I have found that when I react emotionally to an idea that contradicts my beliefs, it is usually because it threatens my story of the world or my story of self. Most of us would like to believe that we come to our beliefs through evidence and logic. In truth, however, we often choose our beliefs, and then use evidence and logic to justify those beliefs. Evidence, rather than being the basis of belief, is filtered BY belief to maintain the integrity of a cherished story.

• This is a huge insight on our inner-workings as individuals, for those who are ready to understand it. We may want to protest this claim, imagining that we ourselves are an exception to the rule. “When I encounter disconfirming evidence, I change my beliefs.” That is probably true of everyone on occasion. But aren’t there some beliefs that you have chosen that are speculative (that is, NOT derived directly from evidence) which new ideas must confirm in order to be accepted and assimilated? As Eisenstein suggests, beliefs filter evidence.

Myths and fairytales represent a very sophisticated psychic technology… You can recognize a true story by the way it lingers in your mind.

Young stories have strong immune systems — they are able to easily overcome disconfirming artifacts, experiences, and findings that don’t fit into the preferred story.

• Eisenstein says we don’t really know what life would be like in an environment embodying the Story of Inter-being. But we do: Eden. And still, this is what has come of it. A new story, therefore, may be a necessary part of salvation, but is not in itself sufficient for salvation. It seems to me that the maintenance of any such paradise would depend upon every person forever resisting the belief that others are trying to get the better of him, and that if he just plays his cards right, he can come out on top. In Eden, this was the spirit of the temptation that brought about the Fall.

To be the change that we want to see in the world, we have to learn to stand firmly enough in a different story that we can hold open the way for others to enter that story — even when they strike us on their way in.

“This isn’t who you really are. Your soul is too beautiful to be doing this.”

How do you choose which story to stand in? Choose the story that best embodies who you really are, who you wish to be, and who you are becoming.

Truth

• Eisenstein concludes, as Buechner does, that the truth is what is — BEFORE it is put into words. The articulation of the truth is always like a map, describing the features of a territory, but is never itself the territory.
• Running with this insight, postmodern thinkers questioned whether there is any territory at all — or if each map merely describes another map. A fascinating question, but also one that may invalidate questions as such.
• Language is the philosopher’s toolkit. Language, however, necessarily maps the limitations and assumptions of its creators. Any given language will only be equipped to describe phenomena intelligible to its creators. If something exists that is of a non-intelligible character, it will not appear on the map, despite its presence in the territory. Or, in some cases, a partially understood thing will be on the map, but in a manner that obscures, rather than illuminates, its true nature. The partially understood thing will be more of a smudge mark than a landmark.

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in an embrace, in silence, in a child’s face, in birth, in death.

When we’re young, the feeling of magnificent origins and a magnificent destination is strong. Any career or way of life lived in betrayal of that knowing is painful and can be maintained only through an inner struggle that shuts down a part of one’s being. For a time, we can keep ourselves functioning through addictions or various kinds of trivial pleasures that consume the life-force and dull the pain. In earlier times, we might have kept our sense of mission and destiny buried for a lifetime and called that condition “maturity.”

It is western civilization that is now taking over the world; its science, technology, medicine, agriculture, political forms, and economics, pushing all alternatives to the margins…Do not imagine, though, that it will be the West that will rescue humanity from the very civilization it has perpetrated… Our healing will come from the margins — from peoples who have not forgotten how to be human — from people and places that were excluded from full participation in the old story of the people, and who have thus preserved some piece of the knowledge of how to live as Inter-beings.

• John 17:21 makes it sound as if followers of Jesus are to play this very role: “… that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us…” Having been in the world but not of it, our ministry is that of reconciliation.

The road to reunion has many twists and turns… the territory is unfamiliar to us, there are few maps, and we have not yet learned to see the trail. As we learn to see its subtle markings, the path becomes visible. Absent a map, and in the beginnings of a new story, we can only follow our intuitions at each choice-point, guided by our heart compass…Frequently our feet stray onto the old paths that we can see. We have to develop new vision, to see the faint traces of ancient footsteps that lead out of the maze.