Radical Friendship: The fundamentals

Descartes was terrified that an entity might exist that would be capable of deceiving us to such a degree that our sensory inputs could not be trusted.

This fear strikes not merely at the collective ego of humankind, blowing apart the idea that we are in control of our lives, but invokes the terrifying prospect that drives The Matrix, that we are enslaved in someone else’s reality, a prison we cannot see, taste or touch.

In Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave, humanity is forced to stare at the cave wall where the puppet masters project flickering shadows in place of reality itself (one of the earliest ever descriptions of propaganda). But for Plato both prisoners and puppet masters are imprisoned in the cave of their own ignorance, only by ascending the spiral staircase of cognitive development can they escape into the blinding light of truth.

The word Philosophy can be traced to two Greek words, philein sophia, meaning lover of wisdom or truth. Whether one values the quest for truth or not, all human’s have a guiding philosophy, an ideological pivot around which to organise their lives.

It may be, that our modus operandi consists of ideas absorbed via osmosis from our upbringing and culture, we may be entirely unaware of the co-created ideological Matrix that runs our days, but some form of philosophy guides our lives whether we are aware of it or not.

This may seem like an odd starting point for my thoughts about Radical Friendship (RF), but human fears and human values form the cornerstone of my thoughts about RF and no fear is more meddlesome in the affairs of human friendship than the fear that we don’t fundamentally know what is going on.

The trouble is, at a fundamental level, we really don’t know what is going on.

While the physical sciences can produce ever more detailed theories about the nature of this reality that we inhabit, there has as yet been no progress in defining (or even developing a plausible theory) as to what the human consciousness that produces those theories even is – much less validating that consciousness as a reliable guide to fundamental reality (rather than the world we observe) .

Those minded to point towards empirical scientific enquiry as evidence of our knowledge of fundamental reality may be right, but Descartes fear remains extant, for as we cannot get behind the consciousness that makes material observations we are left with the possibility that material science merely maps out the rules and consequential realities (for us) within a simulacrum created by a higher power.

Ironically, given the almost universal human denial about our lack of fundamental knowledge, two of the very few things we can be reasonably sure about (a) that we exist as thinking beings and (b) that we have almost no access to fundamental knowledge, are discarded as the ultimate of inconvenient truths.

Most of contemporary humanity in my eyes lives in a co-created cult of denial and hubris, an over-arching set of assumptions that I call ‘faux certainties’. We embrace these faux certainties to chase away the underlying terror of the human condition, to banish Descartes fear that we do indeed live in The Matrix.

All human material swagger and its attendant oppression, wars, environmental destruction and injustice is built atop of faux certainties .All religious and racial intolerance flows from faux certainties. The modern epidemics of mental illness, addiction, affluenza and consumerism have their roots in faux certainties. That we cannot even honestly address these issues much less fix them is easy to explain once one realises that to address them would require questioning the faux certainties upon which they are based and then the underlying terror that their existence chases away.

Radical Friendship is an attempt to place human values and concerns at the heart of human life, but it is almost impossible to do that while indulging the faux certainties that set us against each other. Rather than running from the main existential terror of the human condition, RF suggests embracing it as the foundation stone of a new humanism, one that acknowledges the truly humble place of humans in the universe and the profoundly mysterious journey we are all on.

I think its is useful at this point to reflect on the difference between consequential reality and fundamental reality as I see it.

Consequential reality is that which has consequences for us. If we jump off a cliff we will fall on to the rocks below, no amount of pontificating about fundamental reality will change that, this is a truth of the human condition, something that is true enough for us that we are obliged to accept it. Consequential reality though, is no guide to fundamental reality.

Bereft of a way of validating the relationship between fundamental reality and human consciousness (or indeed if there even is a relationship), the reality of consequences that we are obliged to accept as humans may be no more real in fundamental terms than the rules of any computer game.

Even death (which most humans regard as a cornerstone of consequential reality) may not be what we think it is and may in a very real sense not be a thing a all – we may exit this human reality and ‘awake’ into something entirely different, it might be heaven, a game lobby or the exit station of an alien thrill ride – we just don’t know.

When I talk to people about this, a common reaction is to ask ‘well why bother with this kind of thinking if we can’t know about these things?’. The real problem is the reverse, it is precisely because:

( a ) Many people muddle consequential reality with fundamental reality.

( b ) Many people think they know about fundamental reality.

( c ) People have clashing ideas about fundamental reality that lead to confusion, dysfunction and conflict.

( d ) Many human have ideas about fundamental reality that have disastrous conflicts with consequential reality.

that we really ought to consider the human relationship to fundamental reality very carefully indeed, because it shapes utterly our internal relationship with ourselves, our relations with others, our relationship to the rest of the natural world and indeed reality itself.

Now it surely becomes obvious why any vision for a new Radical Friendship must begin by examining the sources of the relational human rivers, not the storm tossed seas we make of them – it is my hope that if we an change the sources of the rivers we can bring a new sense and calm to the sea.

[this article will be part of a ongoing series about Radical Friendship that I will be posting in the weeks and months ahead]