Costica Bradatan: The Gifts of Humility

Iris Murdoch defined humility, memorably, as “selfless respect for reality” 

WHAT IF KNOWLEDGE - the real, redeeming variety - is not power, but the opposite of it? If, for instance, to become properly human we need to run away from power as much as we can? Indeed, what if our highest accomplishment in this world came from radical self-effacement, the lowest existential station we could possibly reach?

If there is one trait that all forms of life share, it must be self-assertion. From the simplest to the most complex, all living entities seek to persist in their state and reproduce. And doing so requires pushing relentlessly against other entities, often to the point of annihilating them. That makes life a scene of cruelty of cosmic proportions. But “cruel” may be the wrong word, for it applies human judgment to something that, by definition, is anything but human. The process of life unfolds beyond any human concerns — spontaneously, blindly, tyrannically. Humans are caught up in it just like any other species. Far from having a say in the process, we are used and abused by it — brought into being, instrumentalized, and discarded. We think we fall in love, but that’s just one of the tricks life uses to reproduce itself; we devise some better tool and think ourselves smart, blissfully ignorant that we are just playing life’s game of self-assertion. We live in a comic farce and call it happiness.

When it reaches Homo sapiens self-assertion takes a specific form: power. Being especially sophisticated creatures, we are rarely content just to satisfy our primary needs and impulses. We also need others to submit to us; we know we’ve got power only when we can see it in the lowered eyes of the other. There are many ways to size up power, yet the best one is based on the extent of the other’s humiliation. A brutal epiphany of self-assertion, power is intrinsically erotic: it is nothing unless it’s manifested and felt, showed off and taken in. Power doesn’t truly exist until it leaves a mark on the minds and bodies of others.

The fascinating thing about power is that its exertion, however intense, never exhausts it - on the contrary, the more you spend, the more you have. In our chronic hunger for power, we instrumentalize others, we manipulate, humiliate, and degrade them, but that only increases our appetite. We stop not when we “have had enough” (that rarely happens), only when we can sense that the other is positively crushed. Then we have won: we have asserted ourselves. And the more thorough the others’ crushing, the more satisfying our self-assertion. What fuels our pursuit of power is precisely its subtle eroticism. To make others bend to your will, to know that you can make and unmake them, that they are at your disposal, can transport you in a way the most intense of orgasms cannot. This hunger and the things we do to satisfy it shapes every detail of the human story. It rules over all human affairs, big and small — spontaneously, blindly, tyrannically... read more:

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