Consider this quote from Hanna Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism…
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.
Now ask yourself: Why are the facts on my side of the aisle so diametrically opposed to the facts on my opponent’s side of the aisle? Perhaps the answer is found in this quote from Man’s Search for Meaning by Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl…
It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Perhaps our facts are irreconcilable because we have lost our spiritual freedom. We have lost meaning and purpose. But how can we lose our spiritual freedom if it cannot be taken away? The answer is almost too unbearable to contemplate: Our spiritual freedom can only be surrendered. It can only be given away. Taken away or given away, the results are the same: In the absence of the sacred, arrogance and false pride rush in to fill the space once occupied by meaning and purpose. All that remains is the incoherent ruin of Babel.
Well before we lose the ability to distinguish between true and false in the often long march to totalitarianism, we lose the ability or desire to distinguish right from wrong. We sacrifice our moral and ethical compass to expedience: socio-economic, cultural, political or otherwise. Without the ability to distinguish right from wrong we cannot hope to distinguish true from false. We lose the ability to find direction and meaning in our individual and collective lives. The resulting alienation and isolation from each other is what eventually sets the stage for mass formation psychosis and the grassroots rise of totalitarianism.
The Demise of Meaningful Ritual
The mechanics of the above process, the loss of meaning, typically unfurl slowly over time, over years or even — in the case of Western democracies like America — over generations. We lose direction and meaning when the relationships in our lives break down, and the breakdown begins with the mindless erosion of the meaningful rituals that preserve and protect our families and communities.
Consider that all of our time is spent in relationships with other people and things: family, friends, lovers, work, hobbies, worship, community, our bodies, art, our obsessions and addictions, etc. Each relationship in our lives will contribute to or detract from one or more of four basic needs: spiritual, social, emotional and physical.
The rituals we build around each of the relationships in our lives dictate precisely how, where and with whom we spend our time and money — and how, where and with whom we invest our faith. Those relationships we value most will receive the lion’s share of resources courtesy of the rituals we build around each of them. Those we value less will — eventually — be consigned to table scraps or utter neglect.
The rituals in our lives arbitrage the satisfaction of our basic spiritual, social, emotional and physical needs by simple virtue of the fact that they dictate how, where and with whom we spend almost every waking minute of every day, from when we open our eyes in the morning until we close them again at night. Breakfast, lunch and dinner — all are ritualized. Entertainment and social gatherings, worship and reverence, work, holidays and vacations — all managed and choreographed by an intricate and easily disturbed ritual ecosystem.
In short, rituals are living roadmaps. We unfold and consult them many times each day as we navigate the relationships that weave the fabric of our daily lives. They also change as the things we assign value to — the things we deem worthy of our time and resources — change over the years with circumstance and intent. Functionally, the meaningful rituals in our lives operate as our spiritual, social, emotional and physical auto-immune systems.
Just as we build meaningful rituals to promote and protect our four basic needs, however, we also build mindless rituals to promote our obsessions and addictions. We become addicts when our mindless rituals replace and supplant the meaningful rituals that defend the quality of our lives. If our addictions don’t plateau, if they are not somehow modified or reversed, they may overwhelm our lives and threaten to destroy our spiritual, social, emotional and physical wellbeing altogether.
Back in the 1940s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced his Hierarchy of Needs, a psychological classification system often portrayed as ascending tiers in a pyramid (although it could just as easily be portrayed in a linear chart)…
Maslow’s hierarchy is entirely consistent with the mechanically Cartesian worldview and scientific methodology that emerged from the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. According to Maslow, self-actualization and ultimate transcendence are attainable only by satisfying the needs on the lower tiers — starting with physiology — one at a time. Almost all of Western medicine and science reflects the same basic mechanical philosophy, as do our approaches to social problems like addiction and crime.
But like much of the scientific and technocratic advance that characterized and shaped the entire 20th century, Maslow’s vision is spiritually bereft. Consequently, it reflects the spiritual and scientific worldview of secularized Western democracies: that we are essentially physical beings with occasional spiritual manifestations. But what if the opposite is true? What if we are essentially spiritual beings, born spiritually free, with occasional physical manifestations?
If so, we would need to redefine and redraw a new hierarchy of needs, one whose first step begins not with physiology but with spirituality. The revised hierarchy of needs might look more like this…
In the Revised Hierarchy of Needs, spirituality is like the sun in our solar system: inviolate, self-aware and discrete from the social, emotional and physical needs that orbit like planets around it. Like the sun, it precedes them and will survive them. The light it exudes and the gravitational pull it exerts illuminates, permeates, informs and directs them.
When we close our eyes to the light, however, when we resist the natural pull of our spiritual freedom, our social, emotional and physical selves are cut loose in the darkness to drift mindlessly like the Titanic in the North Sea — victims of the next wandering iceberg. Without spiritual purpose and direction, our social, emotional and physical needs often conflict and collide. We find ourselves reacting to crisis after crisis — most entirely manufactured by our own hands.
In the Revised Hierarchy of Needs the only hierarchal rule is spirituality first. The order with which we address the other basic needs at any given moment is necessarily fluid — subject to circumstance, exigency, the quality of the decisions we make and the rigor of the rituals we devise to protect and defend them. Regardless of what transpires, however, our spiritual freedom remains the anchor tenant, the only critical constituent and the only one of our four basic needs that cannot be broken down or destroyed. Always shining bright within us, we cannot destroy it, no matter how hard we try. It can only be forsaken or surrendered.
The modern historical record is clear: the quality of life in post-industrial society suffers in the absence of the sacred. When churches, synagogues and mosques fail — even in the 21st century — families and communities suffer dire consequences, spiritual and material. In the end, the meaningful rituals we build to promote and maintain our spiritual wellbeing constitute our best defense against the accelerating decay in the quality of our social, emotional and physical lives as well. The rest of Part I is about what happened to us, to our families and to our communities in the second half of the 20th century when we decided to forsake and neglect just two of them…
