To adapt a line from the literature of Narcotics Anonymous: One is not to blame for one’s selfishness, but one is responsible for one’s recovery from it.
Selfishness is forced upon us by the entire social-economic system in which we live—one that depends upon fostering and then enforcing consumption. All consumers as such are made selfish by the ubiquitous devices of advertisement and diversion that I addressed in my preceding post, “Advertising Diversions and Diverting Advertisements.”
If consumers are not made to be selfish, then kept that way, they will soon find that they have consumed as much as they need or wish to consume, at least for the time being At that point of satiation, they will cease further consumption—at least until they grow hungry or thirsty or in some other way in need again of goods to consume in order to satisfy their need, so they can then once again stop consuming, and just live.
That, however, would ruin our whole global consumption-based economy. Accordingly, our global social-economic system perpetually invents, promotes, and advertises new items to be consumed, and sets about convincing all of us that we just absolutely must have those same items. Engendering felt need and never letting that feeling be stilled is essential to the continuation of the entire system.
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Too bad such a consumption-addicted society as our global one is today no longer leaves any place where God might come to presence.
Furthermore, since such a society no longer has any room for God, it also has no room for the development of selfhood, the rooting of the self in itself—which rooting has sometimes been called ipseity as distinct from identity: the first word deriving from Latin ipse, “self,” the second from Latin idem, “the same.”
Two people of the same ethnic background, for example, share an identity. Let it be a Swedish identity, since my maternal grandmother was of pure Swedish background. As Swedes, all Swedes are the same. They are interchangeable instances of the ethnic type—in effect, if you’ve seen one Swede, you’ve seen them all. In contrast, however, in their ipseity, each individual Swede is a singular, unique self, interchangeable with no other.
One can cling selfishly to one’s identity as though it were some sort of possession that needed protecting. One’s ipseity, in contrast, can only be taken up or flown from. It can never be assumed as some sort of property. Ipseity is one’s very being a self, one’s selfhood: not something one “has,” but what one “is.”
Selfhood and selfishness are inversely proportional: The greater the selfhood, the less the selfishness; and the greater the selfishness, the less the selfhood. So selfhood, or ipseity, is also inversely proportional to concern with establishing and protecting one’s identity, a concern that belongs to selfishness.
The less secure one is in oneself, the more selfish one becomes; and where selfishness is, there is nowhere left for the self to be.
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Every self is alone with the alone.* All selves are alone there together.
Indeed, it is only when each of us is truly alone that we can truly be together, and only when we are truly together that we can be truly alone.
To be truly alone is to be together will all others who are truly alone—to be alone together with them all before the alone, which is to say God. God, the self, and the community of all: None of the three can be without the other, and each of the three is wholly different from each of the others. They stand alone together.
None of the three—God, the self, or the universal human community—is a “thing,” an “entity.” That is, not one of them is what Thomas Merton in his journals calls an “object,”+ or Martin Heidegger in all his thought calls a “being” (ein Seiendes).
God, the self, and the universal human community of each and all, do not share any sort of identity. They have no features or properties in common. However, they are not three different sorts or kinds of things either. None has an identity of its own, to separate it from the other two, that it might seek to cling to selfishly. Each is absolutely incomparable, not to be replaced—any more than there is ever a replacement for a dead loved one.
