Each of us is born to a group. Humans live in groups because we are physically vulnerable creatures. So that we can functionally live in a group, we were designed with language, empathy, trust, and love. If we didn’t possess these traits, there would be no way to build trust between us–––we’d have no means of displaying our reliability, thus no means of earning dignity. Simply put, without language, empathy, trust, and love, we’d have no interest in one another.
The human body is a disposable raft.
The raft’s function is for transporting precious human DNA.
For a small tribe/group whose DNA continues to survive through the millennia, that group is held together with a story. Not only held together with or by a story but held together for the story itself. The DNA and the story are the precious cargo while our disposable bodies are the transporters. The story that holds the group together from one generation to the next, is a story that best satisfies man’s desire to experience himself as a hero. We are designed for this story!!! The hero’s life is a life of purpose. By purpose I mean: to protect ––at all costs–– something sacred. Yet, if our sacred holy grail has been lost or forgotten, the hero will set forth to reclaim it. A man who has been deprived of such a story is a man who lives a meaningless life: a slave/robot who becomes easily ensnared by tyrants; a man duped into a story-less life of servitude.
Man’s emotional desire for beauty, goodness, purpose, balance, justice, and context, is a desire that functions like a natural inner compass, and that compass is as old as our human DNA. (By the word, context I mean the hierarchy of values and principles in the cosmology of a worldview–––like a puzzle that fits together elegantly: When the pieces of Creation’sparts, fit perfectly to Creation as a whole. A well-constructed worldview offers us a feeling of awe. We feel this when we see how all of life’s pieces fit together. We feel this when the veil is lifted, hence when we see The Creation-itself through its own eyes, and by doing, we recognize that there is an “I” to experience itself experiencing Creation).
Where there is awe, gratitude is sure to follow. This gratitude leaves man feeling he owes something monumental for the feelings of beauty he’s received. Such joyous feelings affirm life-itself and thus become the motivation for life-participation. Participation in a cultural worldview-story produces the jubilee of peak emotion that sparks a heroic journey. The people who have given us this experience have thereby earned our care and loyalty. We can think of no greater life-purpose than to devote ourselves to the group’s survival. And this group’s survival is entirely dependent upon the bonds built between the group, by the story they’ve given us. The story is as important as our human DNA.
Once the story has activated the inner hero, our love rises to whichever sacrifices are necessary, and when we take action on behalf of our group, we earn dignity from the group. This earned-dignity (or value) is our measure of human-meaning; this is the meaning of meaning itself! If we remove man’s ability to sacrifice for his people and if we remove his ability to willingly give toward his group’s greater story, then both meaning-itself and romance have died. By our love and respect for the group, our protagonist lives to serve the group’s safe transport of DNA, and that DNA can only be transported if the group has a shared story. If the story has died, then the generations that follow will wither.
While our modern generations, defined by their alienation and meaninglessness, live out their non-human lives, they do so as though it were a prison-sentence, feeling no reason to bear discomfort. They will die having looked back with no story, no cohesion, having delivered nothing––– loveless, without dignity, drawing their last breath in the arms of no one and nothingness. Their lives will have been strung together by moments of pleasure, pain, and grasping at vanity, safety, and comfort.
When the initiation-story has died, the culture’s destiny dies with it. Where human life is blind to its future, our humanness drains from each moment, leaving only a shell of a person, a slave.
He who neither lives for a worthy story nor lives for the generous souls who’ve delivered such a story, is a person deprived of his birthright, deprived of his humanness. In the era of industry and technology, slaves are made by depriving a person of their birthright story. Human seeds are scattered throughout modernity; they grow without purpose as to merely survive, hoping to find a meaningful path. When no story is handed down from their elders, the youth will certainly not find what they seek. To live in possession of one’s humanness requires that the story first be reclaimed, and once reclaimed, we may transport our humanness down the river of time… to the next port where the reins will be handed to our children. Meaning is born in relationships; relationships live in the stories shared between us. For life and liberty to mean anything whatsoever, the initiation story needs to be primary, which means it first needs to be reclaimed from the wreckage.