There is no virtue in suffering; the virtue is in recognizing suffering as wholly normal.
Don’t make the mistake that has confused the entire course of Western Civilization in thinking that truth is an objective quality. Truth is a quality of persons, in particular a quality of commitment. Even if truth were an objective reality, no human could grasp it on those terms. Truth is a personal quality, a human trait, something we inject into our jumbled reality. It is entirely a matter of perception and should never be assumed a quality of the world in which we exist. You don’t find truth, nor recognize it when you hear it. You recognize things that work for you, things that resonate and give you a comfortable vibe on some level, nothing more.
Pursuing truth in that sense is the summum bonum of human existence. From a Christian Mystical point of view, I can always trust God for whatever internal thirst drives you. My only real concern is getting you to pursue it with full ardor. Where that takes you is none of my business in the sense that I have no business choosing it for you. Where it takes you is God’s concern, though it could surely be instructive and entertaining to me.
Thus, I merely restate once again what I’ve written here repeatedly.
As we move into the Networked Civilization, some things won’t change at all. One of those things is the underlying moral fabric of the universe. The manifestation will drift with the context, but the underlying and indefinable meaning of it remains eternally the same. More bluntly, what brings shalom tomorrow is substantially the same as what brought it yesterday. In a certain sense of application, what prospers you in the Networked Age is no different from what prospered men in the ancient past. It may pay off well to understand the mechanism, but if you invest all your energy in that, you’ll miss the point. The ultimate failure of Western Civilization is mistaking contextual mechanism for fundamental nature.
Human needs don’t change. What changes is the perception of need, typically as a thick crust over the juicy truth that’s harder to hold in your hands. We see the dying business model of controlling access to the product as the primary means of profit. A vast range of what people consume can no longer be kept behind a gate. What can be digitized will be, and by the nature of existence itself, that stuff must be freely accessible or it might as well not exist. We will see a return to ancient times in one sense: There will be profit in greatness itself.
In ancient times, it didn’t matter much how someone became great. Virtuosity and talent may or may not be a factor; sheer random chance might be the major reason. But holding power and attention was itself profitable simply because people paid to be in your shadow. People brought tribute voluntarily as a fundamental human instinct. For a time this was hidden behind the apparent gate-keeping model, but that’s coming apart. Folks might not pay directly for access to your performance and presence, but they will offer tribute to keep your performance and presence alive because they’ll want a fresh sample of it tomorrow. Tribute is a way of sharing in greatness. We need only seek new kinds of tribute that would translate into usable resources.
I’m not in a position to work out the mechanism for this shift. It may well be something that awaits discovery by those not yet ready to do the work. What I know is what I can see with moral vision, what I know in the depth of my soul.
This is a fundamental feature of human nature; this is ultimate truth. Seize upon that business of tribute and act upon it, and you’ll tend to prosper. That’s how the moral imperative works. It was never meant to be measurable with any precision; it’s not an ATM with precise accounting. It’s a broad moral tendency. Those who received much tribute tended also to be the most generous in giving it away. They understood instinctively the necessity of passing great amounts of resources as the best way of being in a position to scrape off what you could use.
If you believe in the truth itself and desire it more fervently than mere material consequences, you’ll understand how it works on that super-conscious level of ultimate truth. Yes, you individually could still suffer and die young from poverty, but if that’s all you can see, you will never understand truth in the first place. In the broad scheme of things, you play the moral fabric and take what comes.
A single loss is not losing any more than a single gain is gaining. Don’t get lost in the details, because the details of human experience have no meaning without the moral frame of reference.
