So I read a statistic the other day apparently from the United Nations that every year 800,000 people commit suicide on a global scale. That is a larger number than the amount of people that die in armed conflict and natural disasters combined.
So what that means is that the horrors of war and the horrors of climate change, while horrific no doubt, do not compare in number to the amount of people that choose to commit suicide every year. That through an act of volition and agency sentence themselves to death.
What is wrong with this picture? What kind of cancer has hijacked consciousness, has hijacked our amygdala to make people's very selves be their biggest threat, biggest risk factor? I mean the implications are horrific, I mean we've already been told that depression and anxiety are being diagnosed at epidemic levels. That there is a fundamental fracture in our collective psyche. That our hunger for meaning, our desire for cosmic heroism what Tolstoy said is: “Man's inability to live without a way to bridge the finite with the infinite is severely under threat”.
We don't have faith anymore in large numbers. We don't have a connection with something larger than ourselves. Most of us are failing to have any meaningful mystical experiences. We are starved for deeper meaning and significance. We are seekers hungry for something else. And yet we can't seem to find what we're looking for.
There's a great line from the book “The Moviegoer” that says “The search is what anyone would undertake if they were not sunk in the everydayness of their own lives. To merely become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair”.
And so I think today this is our crisis. Our societies, our cities, our social structures are organized in a way that is oppressive to way too many of us. It does not allow for acts of cosmic heroism, does not allow for symbolic slaying of the dragon. Some people are so poor all they have is money.
So I think we need to rethink this whole picture of how we organize our lives. Come out with better kind of symbolic structures that allow our psyches to merge with some higher meaning, so that our lives can stand for something.
This, I think, could be our cure.