The day started at 3 a.m. today with a comforting message from my bluetooth headset: "You're connected. Battery full." Next came a message from Hillel the Elder, with a summary of the entire Torah, echoed from a post I published months ago.
That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.
Before even a sip of coffee, I decided to whisper a tweet thread into the wilderness of the attention economy. My main point was that it doesn't matter how laconically great teachers express principles of nonviolence. The human race seems resistant to the message.
The first thing I’d like to highlight about Hillel's famous teaching is that the teacher never lived in the 'global village' where the quest for identity makes violence inescapable; people do to each other precisely what is hateful to them. In the global village, Hillel's teaching isn't ignored; it's inverted. Ours is the Age of Inversion.
In The Great Affirmation, I wrote about self-perpetuating violence.
"Like fish oblivious to the water they inhabit, we don't notice the violence in our day-to-day communications. Hiding behind the choreographed normalcy of daily life, this unseen violence drains us as it perpetuates itself. This violence is parasitic."
Countless teachers have pointed to the possibility that we can end cycles of violence by replacing normalized nuclear events of daily life with nonviolent resistance. This way, we can at least move toward a peaceful co-existence with our neighbors. Or, so the teachers tell us.
These teachings have never seemed more incomplete, at least to me. I'm optimistic about my study of the more recent generation of teachers (e.g., Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, Rene Girard), but this is the work of a lifetime. What are we to do with 'them' — the dangerous neighbors — tomorrow morning?
Here's one idea: To the extent possible, don't do anything with 'them'. Find what you seek in solitude.
This idea, too, is incomplete. But if you don't like it, I've got others. Here are three more.
1. Make peace with being an Outsider and face-to-face with eternity.
2. Militantly avoid people addicted to certainty.
3. Avoid saviors for they know not what they do.
That's it for now. Time for coffee. For more ideas, subscribe.