Page 94 - Liberating Liberals V2

The God-shaped Hole in the Soul
we can keep the wolf of meaninglessness from haunting us subconsciously. Now we can fight it consciously. Yet fighting it, achieving passionate meaning, is one of the most difficult things to accomplish. And even if accomplished, sometimes it can crumble in quickly, or in a slow inexorable collapse.
Thus, to be comfortable with meaninglessness is
a last safe haven. Instead of being shocked that “My life has been meaningless!” you can say: “Well I was passionate about that meaning for a long a while and though it didn’t last, it served me well while it did last.” This was certainly the case with Confederate Civil
War veterans who risked all in a horrible wrong cause, saw the error of their ways, and became morally- reconstructed Southerners. Or evolution deniers.
Or like anyone whose cause is lost after decades
of following it, and who later finds out it was a boneheaded choice in the first place.
To have passionate meanings sometimes means you have to go against the community. It is the struggle between individual and community that is ever present in humanity. How much of yourself do you give to yourself, how much to community? Nietzsche claimed that if you aren’t alone at least two-thirds of the day then you aren’t a self. “Hell is other people,” agreed Sartre.71 “We are all one,” is
a cherished liberal belief, but we are also all alone, individual, private minds.
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