Well, there’s no easy way around it: The world is scary. The problems we’re facing now are complex, and our future is uncertain. We are bound up with many strange people we don’t necessarily trust or like. What’s more, our brains are hardwired to want simplicity and familiarity.
Our leaders and the media are all super incentivized to take advantage of how we think. They want to give us simple answers to complex problems, and they benefit from stoking fear, so they win votes and gain our attention.
As I covered in the last essay, we can choose to act against our biology and embrace our interdependence. We can upgrade our tribalist predispositions and embrace our whole country, all of humanity, or even our whole planetary biosphere as a team.
In a certain way, we’ve already made that choice. E Pluribus Unum is the motto of the United States, and it means “out of many, one.” Whatever way we think about it, it is up to us: You, me, and everyone else. We must choose to be united as an interdependent team over and over again.
This isn’t easy
What do we do about the mind-boggling complexity and uncertainty we face?
How can we let go of certainty and actively live our lives in an ambiguous world?
What if there aren’t any fixed truths or answers, and things aren’t that simple?
I want to acknowledge that it’s not easy to embrace the complexity, nuance, and ambiguity of the world around us.
It’s risky to open up to the possibility that you don’t have all the right answers, and maybe there aren’t any perfect answers. It also means we have to change how we see the world. And that’s scary, especially when our beliefs are hard-earned. Our belief systems and views came through a lot of experience, and it’s not easy to let those go.
To deal with this, I want to turn to the 20th-century author, existentialist philosopher, and the mother of modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote a book, Ethics of Ambiguity, in response to John Paul Sartre’s existential philosophy. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre said, “Man is condemned to be free because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything that he does.”
He made the point that once we become self-aware, we have to make choices that define our essence and give life meaning. There aren’t any fixed designs because life is ambiguous. That means we must choose our path and discover who we want to be. Everyone carries that responsibility.
Ambiguity
Let’s look at ambiguity first. Especially in this existentialist sense, ambiguity arises from a paradox (or an interdependent polarity if you’re following the thread here).
Between that is facticity and transcendence: What is real and what is possible. We’re objects and subjects in this world, bound by physical limitations, social barriers, and powerful people controlling our lives.
We’re free to think, dream, and act in ways that impact each other, but we’re stuck between freedom and powerlessness. While we can have amazing goals and dreams, we all know death is inevitable. There’s a tension between the insignificance and the importance that each of us has as sovereign human beings. Everyone’s significant and insignificant. We’re just specks on a tiny planet in a giant universe.
When we become self-aware, we realize there are multitudes of values, cultures, beliefs, and perspectives. Maybe we’ll even recognize that there is no right way to do anything.
In a certain way, life has no fixed meaning. Now, this isn’t absurd. As some philosophers have said, we can create meaning. Each of us decides what meaning looks like depending on our commitments, actions, and predilections.
The hardest part of being condemned to freedom is taking responsibility for our actions. We all choose how we behave, even if we are undertaking our actions in a world we haven’t chosen for ourselves.
This reminds me of a favorite quote of mine: “If you can’t admit or realize that you are part of the problem, you can’t engage in being part of the solution.”
You are free to act the way you want, and that’s your gateway to building the world you want. That’s a lot of responsibility. Simone de Beauvoir’s insights can orient us with ethical guidelines on how to do this.
A hierarchy of freedom
Simone came up with a hierarchy of freedom that goes from least free to most free. She explains how we try to avoid ambiguity, the difficulty of wicked problems, and the responsibility of being condemned to freedom.
Freedom is a massive part of Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics. It becomes the fundamental justification and goal of our actions. Even under oppression, we have freedom as we can choose how to move forward in any particular moment of action. We are free to determine our values, and each choice we make in our life defines what we become.
So, who is the least free on the hierarchy?
The child
As a child, our choices don’t usually have real consequences. We also don’t necessarily choose our values or understanding of the world. Children look to adults to decide what is good and evil. As a child, we take this really seriously. We imagine these values and belief systems are real, definite things, and we don’t realize someone just created these.
When we step into self-awareness, the lowest form of response is what Simone calls the sub-man. (There’s a lot of “man” here, but as a feminist icon, let’s give her a break.)
The sub-man
The sub-man rejects their freedom and tries to hide from the world. They deny they’re free because they fear the consequences and responsibility of action.
They ignore the ambiguity of life by striving not to participate, but they don’t have a choice. Still, they don’t want to be responsible for their actions. The next level up in this hierarchy is what she calls the serious man.
The serious man
The serious man denies their freedom, like the sub-man. They try to ignore that they can choose their values and take comfort in letting external value systems dominate their way of thinking. The serious man dedicates his life and energies to some cause, structure, or idol he considers absolutely good in the hope of some ultimate truth.
They are willing to sacrifice just about anything for this. Here’s the thing: That’s the vast majority of us, and we’ve all been there in a certain way.
These belief systems that we can dedicate ourselves to range from different religions, political parties, or movements that we’re involved in. Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes have worked on memetic tribes. They compiled a list of the different value systems, ranging from Black Lives Matter to QAnon and everything in between. They wrote a great piece about Culture War 2.0.
Someone can even have science or utilitarianism as the guiding value they follow. Nonetheless, it’s basically, “I don’t need to develop my own value system or make my own choices. I will do whatever someone else tells me to do.”
We’re jumping back into this hierarchy of freedom in the next essay, stepping into the next phase. This is when we recognize there is ambiguity, which means we are free.
Here are two awesome Philosophize This! podcast episodes on Simone de Beauvoir:
Episode #106 ... Simone De Beauvoir pt. 2 - The Ethics of Ambiguity
Episode #107 ... Simone De Beauvoir pt .3 - Responsibility
If you prefer to watch your content, here’s a video on the topic of this essay:
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