Adequacy

A thought’s been echoing in my head:

The best among us aren’t good enough.

The elites denouncing the rise of Trump are largely every bit as racist. They simply hide it better. Those lamenting the rise of demagoguery are the very ones who turned a blind eye to the real suffering that sparked it. The decline of an empire precipitates the very rage which fuels its degeneration. And so on. Inadequacy.

It cripples us. Undeserving, incapable, powerless, helpless. Something’s missing in us and from us. We were born less than whole, so we must spend our lives empty and hollow. Inadequate.

That is what I’m meditating on today. Adequacy. And inadequacy. Can we inoculate ourselves against this annihilating disease of the spirit?

When I say “the best among us aren’t good enough”, we don’t need a word more complicated than “corruption” to describe this most simple kind of inadequacy. Corruption isn’t just greed. Corruption is a triple violence. It poison not just our actions, but our intentions. So it ruins meaning from within just as surely as it crumbles societies from without. Thus it destroys our promise. And that is what true inadequacy is.

Corruption is a bitter harvest. But who or what sowed its seeds?

Above all, we are realists, pragmatists, technocrats, engineers. Even the best among us. Whether left or right, faith in a machine is what truly defines us. We see societies and economies — possibilities, being, our very selves — as machines, to be optimized, fixed, turned on, run. They are just identities to be chosen, components to be assembled, switches to flick on and off. We are acolytes of a religion called the real. Our great creed is realism. We don’t believe in childish fantasies like higher selves, possibility, us. We are seeking a spark of light, while the stars wonder why.

Difference is division. We see ourselves as so irreconcilably different from one another. The truth is we’re precisely the same: little pseudo-scientists of human possibility. We hold the very same beliefs, that worthy lives can be engineered, manufactured, produced, assembled, distributed, and they guide our every intention and action. The only difference is that the leftist believes the government can engineer them best, the rightist that the individual can. Left and right, ever bitterly fighting. Over nothing. They are the very same. Tribes warring over totems, while the gods laugh.

Intention is action. Action is intention. As engineers and scientists of possibilities, selves, lives, how can we ever be anything more than predictable, rational, sensible? Predictable, rational, sensible, we have extinguished the best in us: rebellion, defiance, imagination, mercy, grace, faith, truth. Dust. And we become something like walking calculators, numbers in bodies, ghosts of human possibility. To believe in the machine is to become the machine. The leftist runs a different program than the rightist. So what? Both are programmed. We think we are running the algorithms, the equations, the formulas, but they are running us. Further and further away from all that’s great and noble and endless.

And that is why.

Inadequacy. We are ever crippled by a ravaging sense of inadequacy. Everything — from society, to growth, to life, to our own selves — as objects to be possessed to win games we think we must play. Not improbable miracles we must cultivate to create lives worth living. Hence, the best among us aren’t good enough. To rise to the great challenges that imperil all humanity has worked and sweated and fought for. They, like we, have already given up on the whole of us.

Me? I inhabit a body so fragile it’s shattered by the light. It is inadequate. And yet. I write my books and publish my essays. I know it’s a futile effort. And still, despite the futility, the certainty of defeat, I go on. Why do I do it? Not to change the world. Perhaps, by now, just to find, or even to touch, the best in me. In the brief moment of a life, that is the shore all must reach. It is by reaching that shore that we know we are at last adequate. Deserving, worthy, privileged. Not just of power, fortune, payoff — but of being. That our journey has led us somewhere worth being is all that will ease our fear of inadequacy — which is just our anger at the mocking certainty of death, disguised.

So let me put it thus.

Great challenges, if we are to overcome them, not be overwhelmed by them, demand not just the best among us. They are never good enough unless. Each and every one of us searches ever for the best in us. It is there. But it cannot be produced and calculated. It must be cultivated and sowed and harvested. It is not an equation to solve, a graph to plot. It is an intention to spark, soar, give, live.

Karma, Arête, grace. We are used to thinking of adequacy as a product, a consequence, a feeling. It is not. It is a process. The process of love justifying the impossibility of one’s brief existence. These are all words for this great and timeless idea. From Rumi to Buddha to Camus to Kierkegaard. The minds that understood it, felt it, lived it, expressed it not just in words but in intention, action, consequence, were, each and every one, damned by the world.

Come, then. Let us be. And so find our ways home.

Umair
London
March 2016