Surrounded by Accidental Humans

Life can be a tricksy business when you're not like the Others, because it's difficult to know whether one is better or worse, superior or inferior, sane or crazy. 

There's always a vertical scale, even -- or especially -- for those who deny it, for example, woke relativists who are the fastest to cancel those who differ from them. They never explain why My Truth can't be that men aren't women, or that two men playing house is not the same as "marriage," or that perverts who like to talk about sex to children is called a red flag.

I don't even like to use the word "superior," because it contradicts the very humility that is a prerequisite and marker of superiority. Claims to superiority are also often the result of reaction formation, the latter but a defense mechanism that transforms inferiority to superiority via projection. 

For example, think of the countless journalists and other Democrats who maintain a rigid denial of the Biden Lumber Company and project it into Trump, transforming his splinters into beams.  

To say that no one is better or worse than anyone else is among the Greatest Lies Ever Told, but thinking otherwise is also among the greatest temptations, so in judging others one must exercise the strictest objectivity and self-awareness.

When I was younger I used to assume my own inferiority. Later in life I covered this with an obnoxious mask of superiority. But this frankly adolescent phase only lasted until I was in my 40s.   

Speaking of masks, Schuon devotes an essay to just this subject in The Play of Masks. In fact, skimming the first paragraph is what prompted the above reflections. Let's reread it and consider it a little more closely.

By way of preface, when we look at man, we have to do so at the intersection of vertical and horizontal. If one man is superior to another, we mean in the sense of objective values, not, say, in wealth or physical strength. Nor can the former have only to do with intelligence, for we are surrounded and ruled by intelligent cretins (notwithstanding the multitude of merely cretinous cretins).

Here's how Schuon puts it: it is necessary for us 

to distinguish a priori between the man-center, who is determined by the intellect and is therefore rooted in the Immutable, and the man-periphery, who is more or less an accident.

You've no doubt never thought of it this way, but we all know Accidental and Necessary humans, and there are many more of the former than the latter. Moreover, one of the points of life -- if not the point -- is to transition from Accidental to Necessary. 

I don't known if "Necessary" is the best word.

Essential?

That's good.

Substantial?

Also good. I'm thinking too of how Washington is called the "indispensable man," because he is the Man Without Whom. But he couldn't have been the Man Without Whom in the absence of certain immutable traits that made him the Man With Whom, or Through Which.  

I keep this imposing photo of Schuon on my desk. I just now glanced at his eyes, and he communicated in so many words that I am correct in suspecting that he might be one of those necessary men of whom he speaks. He has certainly been necessary for me -- a Man Without Whom -- but let's stay on track.

Who are the Necessary Men of history? There aren't that many; or, on the other hand, perhaps there are many who fly under the radar of history. 

For that matter, the majority of men who make history are the peripheral type, for example Karl Marx: no substance whatsoever, since falsehood is not a substance, nor is envy. But not only did he regard himself as superior, but superior to every previous philosopher, especially those who were superior to him.  

Schuon almost never writes in the first person, but here and there he will present something that I suspect refers to himself. The following is an example: he speaks of the "pneumatic" or "central" man, who

is detached because he does not identify with the accidents; and he is good-willed because, for that very reason, he could be neither egoistic nor petty.

Superior humility. Just like me!

LOL.

Okay, humble brag. In any event,

his very superiority poses for him problems of adaptation, for on the one hand he must form part of the human ambiance, and on the other he cannot grasp immediately all its absurdity.

That's me in the spotlight, losing my irreligion, and it's been me for as long as I can remember. I've always thought the world is absurd, which, now that I think about it, is why I couldn't be seduced by the accidents. Everything was so stupid beyond belief that I just couldn't care less about it.

Perhaps if you had been more talented...

That's actually a good point. Given my mediocre gifts, I was never marked out for Most Likely to Succeed. It's not as if I had to narrow down my choices between neurosurgeon and Supreme Court justice. Rather, it came down to the choice between days or graveyard shift in the supermarket.    

This is not to say I ever fit into that ambiance either, because that is when my brain (or whatever it was) suddenly activated after about 23 years of slumber, which initially prompted the defensive superiority referenced above. It took a number of years to sort that out and try to figure out where I do fit in.

Based upon the number of comments, it would seem that I still don't fit in anywhere. Either that, or the world is so filled with members of the Man-Periphery that there's just no audience to or from Man Central:

The man-center is necessarily situated in an isolation from which he cannot but suffer "externally": feeling that every man is in a certain way like himself, he sincerely puts himself in their place, but it is far from the case that others put themselves in his. 

Well boo hoo.

You misunderstand. I'm not complaining. I like being weird, and I like to think that the blog helps other weirdos feel good about not being peripheral humans.