Is anything wrong?
One could also ask: what is evil?
I tend to think about what needs correction in the world in terms of the totality of suffering: what can we do to eliminate needless suffering of conscious creatures? It is easy and careless to answer nihilistically. Remove consciousness from the world and you're done, right? As I write, I am sincerely wondering how much effort you really need me to put into spelling the absurdity of this out.
Let's do just a little. One doesn't consider a question like this in isolation. It is brought to the foreground of attention amid a larger backdrop of theory of existence, or purpose of existence, if you like. This isn't purpose in the sense of “utility”. When people get lost in the ultimate pointlessness of existence, I think it's because they're looking for utility. Or, if you're persuaded by literal interpretations of, say, Christianity or Islam, the purpose just becomes, “do what I have to do to save myself and people I love from suffering eternally.”
So purpose as utility, absent fear of eternal punishment, can leave one with mere pointlessness.
Here is the kind of purpose I mean: I reject the notion of the world/the universe/all existence as less than sacred, that whatever the source of being is is something outside of or away from the field of existence. If you are committed to any of mainstream Christianity, believe in a personal god or gods, or are an atheist, there's a good chance the meaning of the prior sentence was lost on you. You might struggle with reconciling the appearance of evil in the world with this notion of the unbound sacred. Atrocities may come to mind. I don't, for a moment, deny the existence of the reality of all of the terror that humans have inflicted upon each other.
Instead, I regard concept of self as separate from the universe as incorrect, a mistake, or an illusion; I view this mistake as a driver for what is wrong. We act according to our concepts, and when we mis-conceptualize self as separate, we act accordingly. Artificial boundaries create resource management anxieties that drive behaviors to collect and hoard. Maybe for our million-years-ago ancestors, this was necessary. I don't have an answer on-hand as to whether it had been necessary, but this is an exploration I will save for a different conversation.
What this doesn't mean is that there aren't separate entities. There is a discrete body sitting here right now typing these words. But ordinarily, that body appears to have volition, even to me, the very person suggesting these ideas. That feeling of volition might be the thing to practice noticing more often.
For now, and for this entry, I only want to suggest this to you: it is possible to experience reality in the way I am describing, and it might be worth our trouble to orient to the world in this way.
Here is an attempted account of what changes in me when I can hold this perspective: physically, very little changes. Needs and desires are present, but anxieties about fulfilling them fall away. I orient toward concern for what is best. I don't automatically have an answer for what is best, but I become curious and passionate about finding the answer.
What's really curious is that something like religion or spirituality can come back online for me in this state. I continue to reject the belief systems entirely, and yet understand a possible deeper meaning in Christian Communion as an invitation to oneness with God. See Matthew 16:25, paraphrasing, whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. I'd love to dive deeply into “for me”, but this too will have to wait for another time. The reverence for the name of God in Jewish tradition, YHWY as the unpronounceable whisper, the unknowable and unsayable, is fascinating. It is not out of the question that all of the cruft of rules and admonitions that appear in these texts hide the deeper, more important truth, and the real corruption of the true message is by people using the power of religion as a tool for control.
For what it's worth, I don't put any particular texts on a pedestal. If there is any truth to these ideas, I would expect similar patterns to emerge from multiple sources. And I think they do. For certainty about how to operate in our shared reality, (good) science is the best answer. But certainty appears in narrow bands. It is good for us to have the humility to recognize what we can be reasonably certain about, and to admit when something is not knowable, or at least not certain.
I haven't exactly landed on “this is the true, final nature of reality”, but I find this perspective at least useful, and I do think it carries some larger truth, and can help us have insight when we wonder what is wrong in the world.
This topic isn’t finished, but the post is. Thanks for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts!