Field Work

You are a field intersecting with other fields. You are inscribed with fields, such as your parents' fields, and your culture's field -- these are waves of ideas and feelings. You are as much a wave as a thing. Suffering is a theme in the Abrahamic religions. In Christianity it is heightened to a fetish. And in Puritanism it becomes the whole cloth.

American culture exists in a field of Puritan ideas. Puritans were fervid thinkers and they came up at the same time as slavery. The mistreatment of non-Christians was allowed precisely because they were not Christians. When slaves later began to adopt Christianity, only then did the northern Puritans begin to doubt the practice. Never did they imagine black Africans as equals, but as humans able to worship a Christian God slaves were, in the minds of Northern Puritans, granted a special status above the indians who remained non-Christians.

The thought field of Puritanism is the dominant strain in America. This is because the Puritans were great writers and speakers. Puritans created the popular culture of their time. Puritan speakers traveled from town to town telling a story of God's mission on earth realized by the hard work of Christians. Entertainment was scarce at the time so people would turn out to hear the Puritan speak just for diversion. But the story stuck.

Hard work -- as a parallel to the suffering of Christ -- became the crux of the American story. It is why immigrants to America who have never set foot in a Christian church will begin to reflect Puritan ideas. Cultural fields are powerful. And yet, as a field manager, you can control your interactions with them. You could, for instance, create a barrier between your personal field and the more generalized cultural Puritan field.

Suffering is the core idea of Puritanism. Suffering to prove your worth to God (and others). And that suffering was primarily enacted by work. Hard work. Thrift. Not showing off. Well -- not too much. In time a certain amount of vulgarity became endemic, but the idea of suffering, of "minding God's law," and being upright and pure, that never waned. Even on the cultural left, the power of Puritan thought is profound. It is a kind of intolerant intensity quick to blame others for not hewing to an idealized social norm.

You can separate from this Puritan field. To renounce suffering is the core change.

The modern zeal for suffering can be laid at the feet of Christianity, as your Friederich Nietzsche understood. There was Christ and then there were Christians. Some early Christians got it. And then came the horde who didn't. There is, in all groups, the one who would use his fists to enforce "the good." The most Christian of all sacraments is a long ride on the Spanish Donkey finished off with a bubbling end hitched to a post of fire.

Think of your life as a "narrative universe," as if you inhabit your own private novel. That narrative universe is related to the metaphysics of life and death; for in time all people come to understand that they will die, usually after their parents and culture have killed off the zeal they once possessed as children. And then they make their way into this long game of being an adult and trying to do something "worthwhile." Let's break that down: According to Webster's dictionary, the primary meaning of "worth" is monetary value and the primary meaning of "while" is a period of time especially when short and marked by the occurrence of an action or a condition. "Worthwhile," therefore, means worth the money.

Your primary purpose in this world is to do something worth the money.

This is a great "hermeneutic." Hermeneutic just means "a way of interpreting things." If you see that the primary purpose of your life is to do something that gets you money you have more or less solved the puzzle in your culture.