In his 1967 interview with the CBC, media and communications theorist and devout Catholic Marshall McLuhan said: “I think a great deal of the confusion and misery of our time is related to the fact that people are still trying to find goals in a world that is moving so fast that no possible goal can remain in focus for 10 seconds.”
He’s even more right now than he was then.
And from our vantage, it’s now clear the solution to McLuhan’s conundrum is to pick a goal, make it deep, and never let go.
But how and at what cost?
Right up front: As our technological society’s hyper-speed intimates danger, violence, even annihilation, one must redirect the urgency, the anxiety to one goal. Pick one with heart measured against timeless wisdom. Pick the goal, re-evaluate in a year, refine the focus.
Let go of the idea that they know something you don’t.
What’s not going to work is mere adjustment in program or technique. Technique is proving to be difficult to control. Psychological technique is not spiritual athleticism. Sorting out your dopaminergic addiction may be helpful, but withdrawing from addiction is not an affirmative act, certainly not one of prayer, pilgrimage, or liturgy.
Fortunately, anything we do can become a form a prayer. Castaneda called this the act of power. Prayer is going to help you refine, flex, and adapt for the long haul.
Yes, it’s a spiritual problem: The mass, scale, and terrifying velocity of the technologized world have reduced whole populations to amnesia, abulia, and apathy.
Surprised? Why? AI creators have no idea how their creation works, but the whole of our social organizations are nonetheless committed to it, and its data centers are positioned to terraform our very living environment. Let go of the idea that they know something you don’t.
Tongue planted in cheek, Cormac McCarthy once said, “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Gallows humor is appropriate to the odds involved in securing your orienting goal. Pick one you might never reach but toward which you can certainly make steady progress.
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Like the stone carver, chip away. Let the chipping away become prayer. McCarthy chose art, McLuhan held it together with his religion. This nexus holds all the good goals. Raising the goal to art directs the energies toward God.
There’s a model here. The same center-pivot of our contested civilization — the cross — holds the key to never letting go of your chosen goal. The crucifixion, while itself a tremendous sacred mystery, is also the single most defiant act in all history. Earthly rulers defied divine law. Divine law repossesses earthly rule. Christ, the God-Man, defies our fallen condition by submitting to the whole ordeal. The cosmic order is remade. Perhaps the selection and perseverance toward a goal is not so far from martyrdom. It’s better than being someone else’s human resource.
The initial costs are extensive, levied mostly against self-delusion. But social and financial frictions will also require renegotiation against the value of your goal, your commitment. Clarity gained in defiance compounds, however, and on the back end, there is genuine value: something measured in blood, spiritual weight.
Everything shed as cost is related to pride and external validation. We’re emerging (hopefully) from about 70 years of mind-control operations — our validation metrics are guaranteed to be garbage.
Your soul is required in this process, no doubt. Yet here again, inner value arises in relation to integrity and trust. Let it never be said that the prescription here (grab a goal and hold on for dear life) is easy, or should be. The claim is only that it works. Noetic value is mined or generated via consistency. It reforms human experience at depth. You exist as a living example for others to seek their own contribution of value.
In the end, choose your fighter, or choose both and remix. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” William Blake said that “if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” OK, so pick a worthy goal with heart, and accept the terms. The costs will be heavy up front but light on the back end, and you’ll go out with full awareness of your life’s work. The alternative is rolling over to die and/or living your life in constant anxiety — and potentially, in service of evil.
You make the call.
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