I am locked inside an irrational skull. I suppose we all are. You know why I think Karl Marx has always held such an appeal to intellectuals, in spite of the manifest failure of his ideas? Because everything in life is essentially a market; people with a surplus of some resource trade it to receive some resource that they normally lack access to.
For anybody other than a hard-core Ayn Rand groupie, this seems deeply unjust. Surely the fruits of this life ought to be divvied up by some more humane, compassionate scheme than simple supply and demand? Faith offers one alternative, claiming that in the fullness of time, all great rewards shall flow to the righteous. But faith is dead to most intellectuals. Indeed, I consider myself a firm Christian, and even in the darkest nights of my soul, I cannot really accept atheism. But even I am forced to admit that my faith is largely just a philosophical position with no feeling of force behind it.
Marxism provides intellectuals with a pseudo-rational basis for the comforts of religion. Like the Gospels or the Koran or the Book of Mormon, it proclaims an end to the tyranny of the market. But if the 20th century taught us anything, it taught us that the market is the cold, Scrooge-like master of us all.
Forgive my meandering, but I do have a point to make here. The market, unfortunately, mixes uneasily with human happiness, because the logic of the market teaches us that scarcity affects value. In human relationships, we are all mostly interchangeable commodities. The dull fact is that very few of us have any deep things of value to offer. We are mostly not good looking or charismatic or entertaining or immensely talented or wealthy. Most of us are stuck in the dull, gray mass that accumulates in the center of the bell curve. We are boring. We are the background noise in the universe of the mighty and the gifted.
But do YOU feel like a commodity? Do YOU feel like an insignificant piece of grain inside a towering silo? Do you see yourself as an interchangeable worker bee in a hive, where somebody else is the queen? I know we all feel that way to some extent in modern society, but do you feel that in the deepest part of your soul?
No, you don’t, and neither do I. You feel yourself to be utterly unique, as beautiful and rare as a diamond. Oh, perhaps the mirror forces you to admit that the particular vessel of flesh you are wrapped in is not particularly special, or even repulsive. But the only mind, the only soul you are truly able to see is your own.
And that makes you feel special. That is why you feel in some sense that the world really does revolve around you. You feel it, I feel it, everybody who has ever lived feels it. You feel that the dreams you have are bigger and more real than other people’s. The love you have for others is deeper and more authentic than anybody else’s. You think deeper, you feel more, your soul is more shining and beautiful than anybody else in the world. You feel that in some essential fashion, everybody around you lives a life much more shallow and limited than your own. Because all you can see is the skin, it seems natural to think that this is the limit of the person. You are the only one with a colorful, churning, rich interior life. Everybody else is surface, hollow on the inside.
We’re supposed to see this as a deep flaw: “Narcissism,” we call it. But in reality, it is the only natural way we have of thinking. Seeing ourselves in any other way requires us to make a mental effort, and it always feels unreal. Buddhist enlightenment or Christian compassion are things you have to work at and they will never become second nature. No matter how much effort you put into it, no matter how much you meditate or how much you pray, it will never be like riding a bicycle. The people we call “narcissists” are in reality just the folks who feel no compulsion to camoflage their own self-image for public consumption. They embrace and flaunt the feelings that the rest of us try to deny.
Here, then, is the problem: Life is a market economy, and in a market economy, the special and beautiful is supposed to command a high price. Each of us, individually, feels he or she is a thing of great value, and thus we feel intuitively that in giving of ourselves, we should receive great value in return. I am a scarce, precious resource. Am I not justified in putting a very dear price on that?
But the steely reality, again, is that objectively, none of us are very special. We are worker bees in a hive, ants in a colony. In the pages of history, we are statistics; the lives and deaths of millions of us are a notation in a dusty ledger. We’re the fuel and feedstock for the ambitions of that God-kissed golden race: The swift and the strong, the clever and the comely, the kings and generals and all the Swan-like princesses.
And for that, we are condemned to want what we cannot have. You cannot desire something which you know nothing of. If you felt yourself to be nothing but a worker bee — if you really believed that — you would never wish for more. Example: You don’t have the desires and lusts of a cat, or a dog, or a fish, because those things are alien to you: You are not and never will be a cat or a dog or a fish.
But you KNOW what it is to feel special. You feel that in your bones. You feel that you are a special treasure. The wide chasm between the way you feel in your head and the way the world sees you and treats you is, I think, the root of much of our anxiety. You feel valuable and special, but the world treats you as cheap and common. I am no Buddhist, but I believe Buddhism has hit upon a deep truth when it declares that the essence of life is suffering, and the path to enlightenment is to eliminate desire.
I think intellectuals are more acutely aware of this dilemma than most people. They spend so much time in their heads that they are more intensely aware than most people of the gulf between their mental self-image and the image seen by the rest of the world. And because they’re so damn smart, they have a greater capacity to analyze the problem than the average person, for whom this dilemma is probably just a bewildering, unfathomable fact of life.
Ordinary people are still able to find comfort in faith, but we intellectuals are supposedly beyond all that hooey. We want facts, we want rationality, and for many intellectuals, Marxism (and more generally, socialism) provides the healing balm that God no longer can. Although I doubt most intellectuals think of it in these terms, I think they’re attracted to the idea of a world that awards bookish thinkers a value more commensurate with their own self-image, or that at least denies those rewards to others in the name of justice.
