Humanity's saving grace

I am learning, from personal experience and just watching the world, that people will do anything to rationalize and make excuses for the pain and bitterness and fear in their hearts. They will make up all kinds of excuses for why they are such pricks to one another. They are more plentiful than not, really.

But you know what humanity's saving grace is despite all of our bullshitting of ourselves and one another about what we are really thinking and really feeling?

Down deep, we know it's bullshit.

And so we have to give up the bullshit, eventually, to embrace more genuine virtues like love and compassion and forgiveness and decency.

Because we know, in our hearts, that everything else is bullshit. We're just too afraid to admit it. Until we have no other choice, that is.

You know what the catch-22 for young people is? As long as they are sweet and innocent, their older, more jaded brethren will always call them naive. And then when they taste the forbidden fruits of life and understand, better, what their more jaded brethren mean, the jaded among us will use that as further validation that people are inherently corrupt and untrustworthy and they won't change and there's nothing you can do about that anyway.

Even though it is often their suspicion and haranguing that tempts people out of their innocence in the first place.

We're so ugly. The truth is that we don't give a shit about the decency and innocence of young people. We are just perpetually lamenting our own romanticized image of our own innocence. And we mistake our jadedness, rather than making peace in our hearts, with reality. When, in reality, our jadedness is this long distorted notion of reality. It's like a lens or a mirror with a long gash in it that we mistake for a reality with a big break down the middle. When reality doesn't have the gash. The gash is our distorted perspective from the hurt we feel that we've never resolved. Reality just is. But our jadedness leaves us perpetually disappointed with that reality rather than making peace with it. And that is what leads to all of the denial that it is reality that is so ugly and pained and hard-edged, rather than our perspective distorted by all the pain in our hearts that we will not make peace with. It distorts our view of the world and leaves us repeating the same foolish cynical mistakes.

The irony is that our cynical maneuvering, ultimately, is generally meant to create some peace in our hearts. And yet, sadly, all too tragically, all of our jaded efforts, in contrast to our more genuine efforts, maintain the pain and the disappointment with a reality that only love and forgiveness and compassion and understanding and decency can offer.

Money, power, sex, drugs, prestige. All of our vices are part of a long, futile effort to substitute resolution of the unresolved pain in our hearts with less substantial alternatives. And yet they never really substitute. Because the pain can only be resolved by feeling it, not defending against it, and letting it go and moving on. And human beings will now and forever cause each other pain and heartache and frustration. And human beings will now and forever only learn to avoid causing pain to one another by trial and error, by hurting or disappointing others and by learning how to end the disappointment or hurt.

Progress is not now, has never been, and never will be people not hurting or disappointing one another. That's actually quite plain from any honest study of our history, frankly. Progress is making the mistakes, hurting and disappointing others, and learning how to stop hurting and disappointing others so much in the future.

Progress, as that really sweet kid in my freshman world history course said, is making mistakes and learning from them.

And humanity's saving grace is that while it can bullshit itself on this one, for awhile, it can't bullshit itself about it forever. Eventually we all, generally, with some exceptions, need and want to face and be responsible for our bullshit. Because our lives are too dishonest and painful without doing so.

And that is humanity's saving grace despite its' own worst instincts.

Love,
Ben