Third World America - Arianna Huffington [82]
So how can we protect ourselves and those close to us? How can we re-create the sense of “unshakable meaning” and “necessariness” Junger describes? How can we create our own bands of brothers—and sisters—in communities all across the country that will give us that sense of purpose and necessariness, and allow us to face down these threats?
The truth is, we are hardwired to seek out unshakable meaning. The longing for necessariness is in our DNA. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book—The Fourth Instinct—about the part of ourselves that compels us all to go beyond our impulses for survival, sex, and power, and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring beyond our solitary selves to include the world around us: “The call to community is not a hollow protestation of universal brotherhood.123 It is the call of our Fourth Instinct to make another’s pain our own, to expand into our true self through giving. This is not the cold, abstract giving to humanity in general and to no human being in particular. It is concrete, intimate, tangible.”
This is what the soldiers Junger wrote about were missing when they left the battlefield. And we can create it in our own lives … if we choose to. We must, because it’s difficult to face the perils of our new economic landscape alone. Those of us who are under less of a threat need to reach out to those who have already been ensnared. When soldiers talk about being in a foxhole, it’s always about who they are in the foxhole with—it’s not a place you want to be by yourself. There’s not just strength in numbers—there’s purpose and meaning if we reach out and connect.
As Pablo Neruda said, “To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.124 But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON WASN’T SUGGESTING WE PURSUE HAPPY HOURS OR HAPPY MEALS
From the beginning, America has been dedicated to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the signers of the Declaration of Independence assumed that some truths did not have to be proven; they were, to borrow a phrase, self-evident. It was self-evident, for example, that the happiness that was to be pursued was not the buzz of a shopping spree high. It was the happiness of the book of Proverbs: “Happy is he that has mercy on the poor.”125 It was the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.
But, in a spiritual fire sale, too often over the past fifty years, happiness has been reduced to instant gratification. We search for “happy hours” that leave us stumbling through life; we devour “Happy Meals” that barely nourish the body. We buy into ads that tell us that there is a pill for every ill and that happiness is just a tablet away.
Faced with hard times, more and more Americans are now choosing to redefine the pursuit of happiness in ways much closer to the original Jeffersonian concept. The widening holes in America’s social safety net make a commitment to service even more urgent. We’ve seen the American people rise to the call of service time and again in times of national tragedy—witness the outpouring of money and volunteerism in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, or the