The Gentle Art of Selfishness

Realistic anxiety strikes us as something very rational and intelligible. We may say of it that it is a reaction to the perception of an external danger—that is, of an injury which is expected and foreseen. It is connected with the flight reflex and it may be regarded as a manifestation of the self-preservative instinct. On what occasions anxiety appears—that is to say, in the face of what objects and in what situations—will of course depend to a large extent on the state of a person’s knowledge and on his sense of power vis-à-vis the external world. We can quite understand how a savage is afraid of a cannon and frightened by an eclipse of the sun, while a white man, who knows how to handle the instrument and can foretell the eclipse, remains without anxiety in these circumstances. On other occasions it is actually superior knowledge that promotes anxiety, because it makes an early recognition of the danger possible. Thus the savage will be terrified at a trail in the jungle that tells an uninformed person nothing, because it warns him of the proximity of a wild animal; and an experienced sailor will look with terror at a small cloud in the sky that seems trivial to a passenger, because it tells him of an approaching hurricane.

-Sigmund Freud.

Consider the tiny cloud.

Consider the storm in its infancy.

Consider that those who have seen and recognized the nascent storm have a compelling anxiety for its inevitable landfall. Superior knowledge, then, means superior burden, depression; oppression; forces too potent for any human to resist and overcome.

“Take therefore not a thought for tomorrow; for tomorrow will look upon itself.”

Mattew 6:34

To totally decontextualize the above is to reiterate a cliché that had been, up until this point, swimming around in the minds of many, many humans. The cliché still swims; knowledge has the capacity to overturn exponentially overstated “truths,” but we’ve eaten that fruit already and thus learned that knowledge is cruel, for it can undo the most stoic of individuals. I look to the clouds and I see water vapor in multiform. My mind shapes the clouds into recognizable objects depending upon what mood I’m in, what anxieties I have.

We gaze upon that oncoming storm and if we haven’t any anxiety, then we haven’t any idea what moves towards us. If we do know, and we choose to ignore it, then we lie to ourselves. We listen as the waves begin to crash. We hear the thunder begin its low, unearthly growl, and we can feel ourselves moved by potential, yet all we see are clouds.

If we are honest, truly, truly honest, then all we can do is make ourselves comfortable and brace for impact. There is only a certain amount of comfort one can achieve, and often such comfort is short-lived and fleeting. This is anxiety, and sometimes it looks like selfishness.