Overcoming the Terrible Master

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.” – Confucius

When author David Foster Wallace gave his now-famous 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College, he suggested that “the real value of an education has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness.”

In nutshell, he was telling those graduates to use their shiny new brains to analyze themselves and the world around them lest they – like their parents and virtually everyone who came before – live out “a comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to the head.”

Unlike most commencement addresses, filled as they are with great litanies of rah-rah, go-get-em-tiger, destiny-seizing maxims, Wallaces’s speech truly resonated with me, probably because it’s the same advice I’ve been giving my own kids: Question everything, always.

It’s not a terribly popular message, primarily because it calls into question the ‘reality’ toward which 99.99% of humanity pays allegiance –  a reality, mind you, utterly dependent on each of us continuing with that blind allegiance to the thoughts in our heads. Which helps to explain why, when a ‘rebel’ like Jesus shows up and says, “this world you believe in is bullshit; every answer you need lies within yourself,” all of the mental automatons race out and nail the bastard to a tree before he convinces others to start questioning things.

Brains don’t like dissenting brains. It’s why we argue and divorce and make war and shove other humans into ovens and smack the dog when it pisses on the carpet.

Wallace was well-aware of the enormous challenge those young people faced in going out into a world not of their making; dependent on mental lesson plans not of their making; yet tasked with finding happiness and meaning in a world clearly lacking both. It was as if the world – in the form of their parents, peers, teachers, culture, etc. – was saying, “I just invested 20-plus years into your conditioning and I’ll be damned if you’re going to call any of it into question. Now get out there and keep this thing going.”

Mind you, this is not about “thinking for oneself.” Plenty of commencement addresses are filled with such admonitions: Be your own man/woman, blaze your own trail, etc. The problem is that such ‘free thinkers’ are still at play in the same conceptual sandbox, their ‘independent’ thoughts no less ephemeral than those engaged in more traditional mental pursuits. The ‘anarchist’ who dyes his hair purple and tosses trash cans through shop windows fundamentally is no different than the startup capitalist looking to make her first million before 30; the Republican no different than the Democrat; the Christian the same as the Muslim; and so on. Different expressions to the same mental masturbation, filled with sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing.

Instead, this is an argument for using the brain not merely to question the world but its authorship of that world and, ultimately, itself. Anything less is to fall into line with the rest of humanity and become a slave to what Wallace and others rightly coined “the terrible master.” (That only a few short years later Wallace fired a bullet through his own brain suggests he knew more than a little about such risks.)

Living in India as a child, I was amazed how children my age were able – with the aid of a small stick – to manage adult elephants. As I came to learn, baby elephants are tied to strong trees with very large ropes. Try as they might, the little elephants cannot pull themselves free. As the animal grows, the handlers use smaller ropes and sticks until, by adulthood, the massive creatures have become convinced they are impotent against the puniest of sticks and ropes.

So too, it seems, do we unsuspectingly surrender to that terrible master in our heads, rarely considering that the thoughts through which we define ourselves and the world may have nothing to do with who we truly are.