Transpersonal integrity , in turn, builds upon not only how well the different parts of our inner selves are integrated, but how well all of us jive with one another, and how all of us jive with society around us. And all of this involves some pretty uncompromising soul-searching on the behalf of everyone. With a transpersonal perspective, it is clear that you can often see unconscious motives and drives in me and affect my actions outside of my own awareness—and vice versa. We are not autonomous, sealed containers, each with a God-given will of our own, but open and multilayered systems. Hence, in the last instance, what counts is not personal integrity (because that will always only be a surface phenomenon) but transpersonal integrity: our shared and intersecting inner depths.
Point being: we’ll never have a harmonious, kind and functional society without extensive inner work being done by many or most of us on a regular basis . And this is where the neo-monastic institutions would be of help: At major transit stations and periods of crisis in life, people would be supported to do the hard work that inner integration requires.
Seriously. It’s hard work. It takes time, effort and resources. I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago. There was a terrifying emptiness in my heart that had somehow snuck up upon me during sleep. There was a kind of inner storm cloud, a chaos I couldn’t grasp or even see the beginning or the end of. In my mind lingered the memory of a strangely violent dream in which I had been stopped from calling an ambulance after somebody had been struck down. I felt deeply disoriented; drifting in an imageless field. Everything around me felt unreal somehow, and I feared that madness might creep up on me, as it has on others in my family. Yet, the experience was eerily familiar. I sensed how this confusion had made itself known earlier, in waking states, as a subtle tinge on the fringe of my awareness. I spent a good portion of the following day away from writing and studies, meditating and exploring what appeared to be an old wound that had opened in my mind. Today, a few days later, my mind is clear and open as a cloudless sky, the love of life resting softly in my chest. I cherish these peaceful moments, as I know they too will pass, sooner or later.
How does one reel in such chaotic states of mind and integrate them with one’s everyday self? Daniel Siegel has argued that a healthy mind is an “integrated” mind (and shown plenty of evidence to back this fundamental principle up). In his vocabulary, that means a balance between successfully “differentiating” mental phenomena from each other and then “linking” them together in more organized ways, seeing their interrelations. This line of thinking of course has a lot in common with the developmental perspective proposed in this book and its prequel.
To have integrity, one’s different inner drives, beliefs and habits must harmonize with each other without causing mental turmoil due to inner contradictions as one impulse must be repressed because it happens to be on a crash course with another. They must be successfully “integrated” in Siegel’s sense of the word.
This, again, requires time and effort. On a societal level, it requires resources. Money. It needs to be taken very seriously. It’s either that or bad bosses until the end of days, because good leadership is well integrated leadership and poor leadership is a lack of development and/or integration.
Some of us are fortunate to have relatively few such inner contradictions and thus need less inner work to maintain our mental health. Others have many, and thereby “less integrity”. But note that the person of “lesser integrity” can still be more empathic, more concerned with others, have more stringent morality, be more unwilling to tell lies, and so forth. The point is that the latter person’s behavior will be less reliable and predictable for herself and others because there are greater inner contradictions to reconcile.
As we go up in “effective value meme”, the demands on our integrity increase proportionally for us to be socially functional and have good mental health. If you’re a nazi (low effective value meme), it is relatively simple to be consequential about your values and actions: you are pro this group and against that one, etc. If you try to live up to the ideal of solidarity with all sentient beings and a corresponding solidarity with their perspectives (high effective value meme), you are more likely to run into performative self-contradictions.
More complex societies need higher effective value memes in their population to sustain themselves. So if people are supported to do extensive inner work within a neo-monastic structure, we are—all taken together—much more likely to successfully maintain the transpersonal integrity necessary to uphold higher effective value memes. The failures of higher value memes to be backed up by a corresponding integrity in people—on a deep, transpersonal level—lead to these often being recognized as hollow and hypocritical, which turns many people away from caring about high-minded and idealistic purposes. And that’s a tragedy.
Death, Truth and Discourse
Hypocrisy. Let’s stay there for a moment.
Just as the value of money can be deflated [99] in the material economy, so can the honest search for truth in the public domain of ideas and morals . The truth, or the signaled truth-seeking of people, can be viewed as increasingly hollow and cheap when their claims aren’t matched by actual behaviors and sacrifices made. In a society where people use idealistic claims and truth-seeking to boost their own identities, idealism always appears to reek of hypocrisy.
If we don’t deal with our deeper existential issues and our underlying fear of death, we tend to invest more emotions in, and cling more eagerly to, our “ego”; our sense of being a separate and righteous “self”. Because a lot of our ego identity is built on having the right opinions, being on the right side of moral struggles and being righteous, we thus have profound inner stakes set against any proposition that could seriously challenge our moral or political standpoints.
As mentioned earlier, it has been shown by students of the psychology of death that even a subtle reminder of our mortality can make us more selective and prone to confirmation biases and less receptive to information which would disprove the positions we currently identify with. [100] In other words: Our underlying fear of death makes us clasp to our ego, which in turn makes us resistant to truth and to honest conversations about central topics.
I should mention that there are empirical findings suggesting that people who develop higher “emotional complexity” (a personality measure closely related to higher stages of self-development) tend to have much lesser anxieties in relation to death and aging. [101] This suggests we can support inner peace by supporting personal development, and that this in turn supports truth in society—or rather, its truthfulness.
Hence, the inner insecurities we all bear with us deflate the perceived value of truth-seeking on a massive scale. Given that society is becoming more complex and people are required to have more coordinated, abstract and correct opinions about more matters than ever, this is nothing short of catastrophic for the self-organization of society. The discourse becomes poisoned as we are all limited by our own identifications and hopes.
Of course, we can’t just “get rid of the ego” and be done with it. Everybody needs to have a sense of self and maintain a reasonably positive self-image to feel okay as they go about their day. But we are staring at a very crucial correlation here, one that is possibly instrumental to the very survival of our civilization. It goes something like this:
The average underlying fear of death in society is proportional to the identification with the ego, refusing the stiff procession to the grave.
The identification with the ego is proportional to our tendency to identify with certain moral and political conclusions, which curtails any attempts to challenge these notions.
Forms of inner work that let us deal with the fear of death and help us to disidentify with the ego, such as serious meditation practice, will—on ave
rage, over time and as a collective—help us maintain a more functional and sane discourse in which people more honestly seek to know the truth. [102]
Can you see it, dear reader? It’s the deflation of truth.
Can you see how cheap the truth has become since we all prefer being right over being wrong (and enjoy proving others wrong, never giving them space to save face) just a little too much? Can you see how this is linked to an underlying insecurity we all share? Can you see that this deflation of the truth is a deeply transpersonal phenomenon (meaning that it resides both deep inside each of us and in our relations), as any conversation you will ever be in can and will have its very parameters set by the willingness of all parties involved to entertain the possibility that they’re wrong about something? Can you see how “the ego” has hijacked truth-seeking in all aspects of politics and society, even within yourself?
Again, the point isn’t to “transcend the ego” so that we “can all see the truth”. That would be silly. The point is that society—and its members—can be more or less emotionally and existentially mature, more or less invested in identities, political or otherwise.
This hijacking of our strivings, this massive devaluation of all the most precious gems of existence, does not stop at the search for truth. Take any other of the central human endeavors: moral struggle, the creation and expression of beauty, spiritual attainment, the cultivation of love—all of these are hijacked in a corresponding manner. You see a bunch of kids struggling against injustice, and you just know deep down and instinctively that their moral outrage is likely to be more about self-inflating identity-seeking than about genuine moral concerns; their less-than-exemplary behaviors, intellectual inconsistencies and eagerness to accept simple and judgmental ideas all belie that morality is being remote-controlled by the ego and its struggle to place itself at the center of the universe and above others. Beauty becomes pretentious “artsy art” or the impulse to possess and display the beautiful as something indicative of our own splendor. Spiritual seeking becomes a smokescreen for the display of the superiority of our pure soul—a claim that conveniently enough cannot be disproven and takes no effort on our behalf. Even love becomes reduced to a grim game of exchange and power relations.
And what a loss all of this is; what a ubiquitous tragedy! The deflation of truth and of all the greatest values in life.
The cynics of the world are proven right again and again: don’t trust idealism to save the environment and moral conviction in the face of injustice (it’s “virtue signaling”), don’t believe the sensitive heart of the artist (it’s all posturing), don’t believe the people who claim that spiritual goals are more important than worldly ones (it’s just a strategy to score points without making an effort), and don’t even live for love. All of it always turns out to be a lie, at least in part. And as things stand, the cynics, for all their crudeness and stupidity, often turn out to be right.
But the point is that—even as these things are indeed often based on lies, even if they are conceited and steeped in falsehood—they are still the greatest values of existence: the true, the good and the beautiful. Due to our collective existential immaturity, however, we perpetuate a situation in which people’s strivings for these noble ends cannot be trusted. This existential immaturity is not an eternal or necessary quality, however; it is something that can and must be challenged and outgrown. And it’s not binary; through contemplative practice, self-knowledge and self-acceptance we can reduce the grip that ego identification has on all of us. It’s a scale — and together we can climb the scale towards higher collective freedom.
That’s the ultimate goal of Existential Politics: to see that ego identification can be rolled back, that the fear of death can be eased at the deepest level. Thus the genuine striving for the good, the true and the beautiful can be unleashed in our lives and beyond—to see that truth and idealism can be sought with the metamodern rebel wisdom we have called informed naivety.
Many can handle the truth, but how many of us can handle the truth about the truth? With Existential Politics, we can build a bridge across our fears.
Madness and Civilization
There have been many versions and nuances of the idea that there may in fact be an intimate relationship between madness and civilization; that civilization itself is bound to growing existential challenges and an escalating inner chaos: Marx’s alienation ; Durkheim’s anomie ; Weber’s iron cage and disenchantment ; Freud’s idea that civilization forces us to lock up sexual and aggressive urges, which leads us to lives of perpetual neurosis and discontent ; Fromm’s idea that technological progress makes the sane society increasingly difficult to achieve, which results in an escape from freedom ; Foucault’s idea that “madness” is itself an invention of the modern mind, the purpose of which is to sweep its own dark side under the rug (hence his 1964 book title Madness and Civilization ); Habermas’ fragmentation of life and colonization of the lifeworld by the “system” ; Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization ; Sennett’s corrosion of character —and many others. In recent years it has become abundantly clear that there is a rising problem of mental health issues among adolescents and young adults in the most advanced economies of the world—even as crime and alcohol use generally have decreased. We become civilized and we subtly go batshit crazy.
Of course, there are many aspects of this intimate connection between madness and civilization. I would suggest that the role of Existential Politics is to grapple this complex relationship, not only as a matter of “psychiatric care” and “mental health”, but as a fundamental issue involving all of us—so as to curb the lingering madness of everyday life itself. And what a daunting task that is.
We’re not looking only at the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, but at the entirety of a mostly subsumed mountain of ice. Our relatively innocent little neuroses, our innocuous inner grueling, our bitter silent comparisons with the fortunes of others—all of these realities are continuous not only with the prevalence of serious psychiatric illness and cases of social drudgery, but also with the games of everyday life and the workings of the economy and politics.
What is it that puts more and more of us, and increasingly often, face to face with madness? On a more general level of analysis, I would argue, it is not so much “civilization” or “modernity”, as the classics suggest, nor “the postmodern condition” or a variety thereof, as the analysts of today assert. Rather, it is the staggering increase of complexity itself. As society becomes so much more complex, so quickly, it simply becomes more difficult for the mind to reach a somewhat stable “local maximum” or “equilibrium”. It’s just more difficult to know who I am, what’s right and wrong, and what’s really real in the first place. Even as we are richer and more secure than earlier generations, there are also countless social and psychological adaptations that have to be made, and the problems we do have are less tangible and direct. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We’re not built for this kind of complexity. The rewards are too great, the immediate gratifications too readily available, the threats too nebulous, the world and its horizons too vast. The mysterious relationship between madness and civilization has a name: increasing complexity. Late at night we wake up and face the creeping horror: that life itself as we know it is a social construction, one that ultimately cannot be real, only a fragment on top of an infinite abyss.
And handling greater complexity in the world requires not only new ideas; it requires a kind of spiritual development of the average person. It should hence be a societal goal to develop not only higher subjective states in each of us, but also to help more of us develop and integrate greater inner depths, and—if possible—to develop our ability to think more abstract thoughts, to cognitively grasp and relate to more complex realities. This can be des
cribed in the following graph:
Graph: Effective value meme versus psychological health. High value meme people often have less stable mental health and functionality, as they are more often in “far from equilibrium states”.
The graph may need some further explanation. It is a summary of the developmental traits of a general population, with higher value meme (the intersection of cognitive complexity, code, state and depth) on the vertical axis and “better psychological health” on the horizontal axis. “Psychological health” can here be understood not only as the absence of psychiatric diagnoses and mental illness but also one’s general wellbeing and the freshness and integrity of one’s mind overall. If you like, you can imagine one axis as one’s “stage” and the other as an agglomerate of how well you have managed to pass through the Eriksonian life phases you have thus far been through (did your mother treat you kindly, did you make friends as a six-year-old, did you form an identity as a teenager and so forth).
As you can see, in this admittedly schematic graph, many or most children have low effective value meme but relatively “good” psychological health. Of course, children also have mental health problems, but at least infants have less of them and young children have much lower rates than e.g. young adults. In childhood, there’s often that directness or freshness of experience that in some primary sense is “healthy”.
Between the two grey lines on the graph you find most adults. The greatest number of people develop to “conventional adulthood”, which means some loss in mental health as compared to the aliveness and simplicity of childhood, but the achievement of an average value meme and stage of development (e.g. the Modern value meme). A minority have their development stunted and remain at low value memes while their mental health deteriorates—and that’s where you find many or most dysfunctional and criminal people. Up until the development of conventional stages, people’s value memes seem to largely follow the psychological health and functionality of a person: it’s just difficult to become a reasonable person who internalizes the norms of society if you feel too bitter, confused or miserable and your social relations and habits are a mess.
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