Letter #85: The Great Reset

Lord, have mercy.

Mmmmm, Pralines ’n Cream.

I was once in Stratford-upon-Avon, visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace with some actor friends. At breakfast, one of them complained that his family was always giving him a hard time about drinking too much. I made the mistake of pointing out that he was telling me this at 10 in the morning, over a Bloody Mary so stiff the celery was standing straight up in the glass. Might that sort of thing have anything to do with his relatives’ concern, I asked innocently? He looked at me aghast, as though I had missed the point entirely and violated a deep unspoken law of gentlemanly conduct. Probably I had.

I wish I could say I embellished that story for comedic effect. But unfortunately that’s exactly how it happened, and how it always does. We camp out in a casino and then are shocked, shocked to find ourselves developing a gambling habit. As you point out, we get the lives we build for ourselves online, just like in reality.

What makes our choices so hard to assess rationally is that we’re already living in the world we’ve built with them. Faith in her winsome Victorian confab, you and I in our hard-charging public arena, my English friend in his woozy haze of companionable drunkenness. We act as if our environment leaves us no choice except the one we’re making. But of course our choices helped construct the environment to make it look that way.

And, as Aristotle points out, choices like that are easier made than unmade. Really dedicated alcoholics lose the willpower to avoid getting hammered—but only after choosing, again and again, to grind down their own resistance. The saddest thing is, no one is above driving himself into that kind of cul-de-sac. None of us is born completely free, and all of us make at least one or two colossally stupid unforced errors that might, if we’re particularly unlucky, spiral out to become a compulsion or a lifestyle.

I see these heartbreaking videos now of kids who liquified their brains with porn at age 13 or spent years ducking and weaving their way through a meaningless corporate gauntlet when they should have been raising a family. Yes, technically they chose careerist feminism or some other 3D misery printer over the good life. But who among us can be sure we would have chosen differently in their position—so sure that we’re happy to consign them to a lifetime of ugly crying between video conference calls?

What I’m getting at is: if it’s true that we’re being challenged as never before to shape the world with our choices, then maybe it’s also true that no era of our history has ever stood so badly in need of mercy. It’s mercy, by definition, that pierces the otherwise closed cycle of choice and consequence. When the alcoholic hits rock bottom, why does he show up at his oldest friend’s house to ask for help? Because he knows that’s where mercy lives. And if we’ve locked the doors to our own manmade hell from the inside, it’s mercy that’ll have to break us out.

Love,
Spencer

Image: Raimonsocial, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.