We are not what we think we are.

I've been thinking about the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. They both are credited with the formation of utilitarianism as a legitimate philosophy, but I've never taken utilitarianism all that seriously. Bentham would have us all hunched over computers our entire lives, trying to model and predict what consequences our actions will have. Mill reduced utilitarianism to heuristics, a more viable option, but he also assigned qualitative (in addition to Bentham's quantitative) values to pleasure and pain, thus introducing a criterion aside from pleasure or pain for standards of right and wrong. Mill's philosophy is closer to what people actually do, of course. Recall the first law of humanity: people act in what we perceive as someone's best interest.

This is how so many of us wind up in Hell.

Perhaps my favorite of C.S. Lewis's books is The Great Divorce, in which he describes why so many people choose Hell. It is a disturbing book, to my mind, for it depicts, with merciless precision and astounding accuracy, the mental and emotional hoops people will leap through to protect our paradigms. Every single condemned soul in the book acts based on what they think will best serve their interests. The artist refuses Heaven because of the loss of "recognition." The philosopher returns to Hell to continue "free inquiry." These examples illustrate how ill-equipped we really are to identify what our best interest is. I think every Ghost in The Great Divorce commits the same underlying error: they all insist on viewing the world through their own biases, ideas, and mental constructs. The purpose of all these abstracts is to distort the universe around them to enhance their own importance. The inability to even identify our best interest lies in our molding the entire world around ourselves.

This peculiar lensing results in an equally peculiar view of the world. Suddenly all that matters is me and the rest of the world is merely some external motion picture I participate in or have to deal with from time to time. Well, guess what? Within seventy years I'll be dead. Odds are, so will you. The world, second coming notwithstanding, will still be here. I suspect that we could avoid many of the problems we experience if we acknowledge that cold and corrosive truth: as individuals we don't actually matter all that much.

One maxim I am thoroughly sick of hearing is the claim that it doesn't matter how much money you make or what car you drive but rather what relationships you form. Friends, family, these are the demigods of secular culture and the true meaning of Christmas. Horse hockey, as Colonel Potter would say. The relationships we form matter no more than the money we earn. What counts is what we do with our relationships and other resources. The attitude that the relationship itself is somehow of value reflects a deep-seated egocentrism. It's one of two expressions: "Look how lucky that person is to know me," or "Look how lucky I am to know that person." Either way, the focus is on "me." Focus upon what the relationship accomplishes, on the other hand, is actually quite selfless (or can be). Inherent is the acknowledgement that it is not "I" that matter but what I accomplish, how I change the world around me. Suddenly the focus is external.

Applying this concept to Christianity, we need to stop focusing so intensely on how we feel or how we are victimized by popular culture or even how "special" we are. Let us focus on an external. How about God? When we focus on ourselves we are building our lives around nothing of consequence. Do we matter to God? Sure. Does that give us value? Yes, but it is not a value to be proud of for our sakes, but it is instead a testimony to the grace of God. Christian existentialism is as deadly a trap as any other, for it folds us inward and implodes the soul to a spiritual singularity, so very nearly nothing that it cannot love or change or grow. Who we are is of little consequence, what matters is what we do and in whose name. What matters is to whom we surrender ourselves for salvation. What matters is our assimilation into the body of Christ. What matters is our reconciliation to our true purpose. When we simply act in "our best interest" we can never see beyond our collective nose. The impact we have the world around us and our eternal condition is a matter of how well we can turn our attention to God and, eventually, to those around us.