The life of a great and strange individual can be seen as some kind of an experiment.
Each individual who follows may absorb the lessons of these lives, build on their successes and avoid their failures–in short, do better. What may have taken decades to learn may be had, as an axiom, for free.
Not that we don’t make the same mistakes as our forbears. But, on the whole, I feel we probably waste less time on them. The more testimony, the quicker the process, the less likely we are to fall into certain traps and the easier we may escape them.
We may take any example of banal, everyday sin, by way of illustration. One night, I was at my girlfriend’s house where in the fridge there was some nice potato salad from the fancy restaurant where she worked at the time. Fancy potato salad is something you’d love to sample, if you’re me, but I wasn’t hungry, I’d already brushed my teeth, and I know that eating late at night is bad for you. My intuition and my body both decisively indicated that I should not eat the potato salad. But I had just a taste, and then some more, and then just a taste of like four other things. I felt like crap and slept terribly.
One is tempted to wallow in sin-shame at making such an obviously wrong choice. But the better part goes–ok, now we know, for next time. And in the long run this really does work. I don’t think I’ve made that same potato salad blunder since.
It works much the same on the level of the species. The dream of the individual allows a whole ton of different strategies to be tried. The collective organism is figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
It’s a bit like Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance
In the song Are You Serious, Andrew Bird sings of his personal journey towards marriage. He “used to have just one foot out the door,” chronically transient and commitment-averse. But he came around, and found that grounding himself in one of all the infinite possibilities that could be lived is the only way to actually build a life. “Are you serious, when it really comes down to it?”
This is a very common pattern: hedonic treadmill-to-traditional values. And of course to some extent every generation must discover it afresh. Having lost our connection to religion and community, we young people in the modern west probably waste more time on it. However, the fact is, we don’t need to. Our past lives are available to us. Chesterton, Péguy, Day, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard–countless lives exemplify the lesson, naturally in an infinite variety of ways.
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Christopher McCandless was a young man who, disillusioned with civilized life, set off for Alaska to live in perfect freedom and harmony with the wild. He made a pretty good go of it but ultimately died of some combination of poisonous berries and starvation, after only a few months.
Shortly before his death, Chris took this picture of himself:
The note in his hand reads: I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!
Jon Krakauer wrote a book about Chris’ story, which was made into a movie, in which a remark from Chris’ diary, written a few weeks before his death, is portrayed as a sort of climactic epiphany: “Happiness is only real when shared.”
I consider this a perfect example. Those tempted to swear off civilization and live alone in the bush may have for free, through Chris’ story, what he needed to die in Alaska to learn. Happiness is only real when shared. You don’t need to die in Alaska. Through watching the movie, you may as well have.
Or Nietzsche walking haggard and wired up on mountains, eyes terrifically intense, hungry for meaning and vitality. Going crazy and bedbound and useless for over a decade, the antithesis of all he had idolized. This man scoped out a dead end with abandon! And we are the lucky beneficiaries. Now we know that mountains and strength alone go nowhere.
The life of the individual, relatively unbound to tradition or responsibility, can be extreme in any direction, scope out lots of freaky terrain. If we understand these guys, we can avoid certain pitfalls that they struggled with, and take on as axioms the epiphanies it took them a lifetime of experimentation to discover.
Chris McCandless ripped going to Alaska to die, so you don’t have to. Now everyone who heard of him can go off the axiom “happiness is only real when shared.” It is as good as if you’d actually lived his life, and learned the lesson yourself. You inherit it in its fullness, undiminished, like a diamond.
The failure of Robert Owen’s New Harmony commune, or Alcott’s Fruitlands, are very instructive to those of us interested in sustainable and realistic commune-building.
Hell, even Charles Manson and Jim Jones made themselves useful scoping out dangerous territory, and serve as examples of what not to do. Cautionary tales can be just as valuable as exemplars. We can learn as much from Mussolini’s failure as from Mandela’s success.
To live fully and boldly in whatever direction calls you, is a service to all humanity.