Forms of Worship and Freedom
“...If you worship money and things — if they are where you
tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have
enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and
you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a
million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this
stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides,
epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the
truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and
afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a
fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is ... they
are unconscious. They are
default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day
after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you
measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And
the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings,
because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the
fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded
extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords
of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of creation. This kind
of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds
of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked
about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The
really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline,
and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice
for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is
real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ‘rat
race’ — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
~David Foster Wallace (from “This is Water”)
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