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THE TEST OF DISCONTENT
Social position and participation as a productive person in the "work of the world" constitute the zenith of the cycle of individual experience. All zeniths are symbols of consummation and achievement; the past experiences of the individual are consummated, and as this summing up becomes a creative synthesis, there is achievement — the individual becomes, to however small a degree, a "chief" and leader.
"Chief" means etymologically head (caput). In the achievements of any human person the whole of humanity and of its social processes comes indeed to a head. For every man's success is predicated upon, even while adding to, the achievements of his civilization; and every individual is thrust to his life-zenith by the power of all the relationships in which, consciously or not, he has participated, even while giving by his very attainment a new meaning to those relationships and to society as a whole.
Attainment is no end in itself. Yet, for society and for men completely bound by social horizons, the effective discharge of the responsibility of office by the official (or officiant) usually can be considered a satisfactory conclusion to a cycle of individual experience. From the collectivist's point of view, the individual, having reached the position in which he can best serve his community, becomes thereafter completely identified with this position. Absorbed in and by his work, the fully socialized person should have no concern save to bring society, through his daily performance, to a condition of ever greater fulfillment and happiness. He becomes literally a "cell" in a vaster organism, and is lost as a characteristic individual. As a perfectly efficient productive unit — a unit of work — he is collectively fulfilled in the communal happiness of his society.
In this collectivistic paradise the value of the individual self is dissolved into the vast tide of human evolution. One pole of human existence has seen its activity reduced to a minimum; just as the other pole — man's collective being — is almost entirely repudiated or forgotten in the individualistic paradise of the successful millionaire who lives in splendid and self-contented isolation while thousands of men slave to pay his dividends. Both extremes lead to automatism and to crystallization of all values; and at long last, to rebellion.Among the many over-socialized persons, some arise who challenge the set social order and its empty forms — even though the challenge may mean a martyr's death. In the other instance, among the children of the wealthy individualists, men are born whose feelings revolt at the sight of the oppressed masses. They lead the slaves against their individualistic tyrants whose selfhood has become an egocentric vacuum sucking in all social values toward senseless waste and destruction.
Creative progress for humanity and for every man means the constant expansion of values; not the expansion of either social mechanisms or individualistic egos. Values and meanings must grow in scope, extension, depth and height. They must forever increase in inclusiveness, if life is to repeat again and again its triumph over death, and spirit to renew itself cyclically through ever vaster integrations of being. The growth of value and meaning requires the gradual transformation of all the forms which held the sense of value and the search for significance focused within set patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.
What is the transforming power? Who is it that makes little of social happiness or individual comfort, and starts with feverish heart on the quest for beyonds that spell pain, anguish and revolution?
He is the individual in whom have surged new forces and a new vision, which collective forms and social traditions could not contain; and, not being able to contain, had repressed or insulated themselves against. He is the individual whose openness to the unceasing creative flow of life made it impossible for him to be insulated against anything that is living and surging, and satisfied with the acknowledged and collectively authorized contents of a respectable social personality. He is the individual who would rather be eternally empty and searching, than bounded by rigid recipes for plentitude and contentment.
That which is absolutely full can contain no more. He who is satisfied has enough (satis). Happiness will refuse risks. The Good cannot realize the Better until life has smitten it with the fire of unexpressed depths and un-envisioned heights. All marching forward is based on a denial — the denial that a particular place contains all space. All growth is energized by dis-content.There must come at the very zenith of an era individuals who refuse to be bounded by the social limits of a standardized attainment and satisfied with the official contents of the human type bred by their society and culture. In them burns the fire of "divine discontent". From discontent to rebellion, these great iconoclasts — breakers of rules and destroyers of idols — pursue relentlessly, or perhaps subtly, their crusades against a stultified sense of plentitude and surface social harmony. They shatter the crust of respectability. They pierce all fortified walls and tear through the smug contentment of souls that contain nothing but dying or dead memories. They are bursts of emotional disgust or passionate fervor. They make themselves tragically empty, that a new sense of fullness might rise from psychic and mental depths wide open to the great drives that impel souls to endless adventures, be it toward gold or toward God.
These men are eternally dissatisfied. They officiate in the revolutionary ritual whose god is Discontent, and whose sacred host is the reformer's death. They are the Luciferian Spirits; literally, the Bringers of Light. They are the enemies of paternalistic gods whose commands fill with content the souls of contented men. Churches and Parties persecute them who refuse to conform. For them, there can be no fulfillment where so many must live empty lives in the shadow-side of society and culture. How can they know satisfaction where millions hunger?
They too hunger with terrible, unappeasable hunger — hunger for love, perhaps, beyond the niceties of socialized emotions; hunger for God, beyond religions self-satisfied in their all too conscious virtues and their patented Revelations; hunger for "Man" — the ever- receding goal of civilization always stumbling under the weight of "good" men that hate the "better" far more than evil.
To these individuals who have felt the pangs of essential discontent, there comes also a great test: To what use can they put this discontent? They have achieved, and in achievement found emptiness. They have proven their social worth as individuals; yet it has seemed to them worthless, because fictitious — dead, because insulated against all new life. What then? Shall they dramatize their dissatisfaction and relentlessly poison all and sundry with their hunger? Shall they gesticulate and shout their revolt, hammer away all restraint and, like Romantic poets and "accursed souls", force their society to behold in them the very shadow of its respectability, the festering sores it masks with morals and with cosmetics? Or else, shall they use the power and authority or whatever social position is theirs to push outward ever so little the vicious circles of tradition, so that these circles, ever-repeated in dull automatism by good men, may become spirals, gradually more open to creative spirit?
In many cases there appears to be no choice for the born rebel. Because of family, class or temperament — because of dire experiences in youth and perhaps of thwarting sickness — the individual may fight, from his very adolescence, against a conventional participation in society. He senses himself, as he faces the earliest stage of maturity, an outcast. Has he, therefore, any choice, except to conform to what he hates and live a miserable and senseless life within stifling frames of social respectability, or to make of his very pain, his hunger, his iconoclasm a pedestal from which to harangue the people and .to draw to himself those than, more mildly, feel unsatisfied?
He might, however, make a determined attempt to conform, put on a mask, learn stubbornly all the tricks of culture and society, and sooner or later reach attainment, perhaps fame. Then — he might think — he could use the prestige his performance brought to him in order to lead his community away from traditional ruts and toward creative freedom. But, having thus "played the game" and attained, will he be able to lead others toward freedom of the spirit? Or will he not rather have carried his mask so well, that underneath it his own discontent will have died and he too will conform and bask in respectability, even though he might occasionally utter grand words about spiritual values and individual creativeness in order to sooth his numbly aching soul and hide the tragic, perhaps unconscious, emptiness of "success"!
How often history has dramatized such a pattern of life! How many potentially creative persons, who might have become guiding lights to a renewal of civilization, have been enclosed into rigidity by their attempts to reach fame first, then... . ! But there is often no "then". Success is a greedy and jealous mistress. The successful personage remains a "producer": he may cease to be as "transformer". Real creativeness is based upon the power to transform — oneself, as well as the materials of culture and society.
To produce successfully what society is accustomed to accept, with enough original variations to stimulate interest and meet competition, gives a man friends, honors and all the overtones of social comfort and contentment. To transform and regenerate the patterns of custom and tradition is a thankless task, even for the most able and most careful. And to renew oneself through the performance of a life of social responsibility and leadership is a work that requires the utmost watchfulness and the most unflinching determination, as well as resilient strength of character and mind.
For these reasons the youthful and uncompromising rebel finds it, in many cases, far easier to dramatize his rebelliousness and his dissatisfaction. He takes on a pose. He glories in his emptiness and his hunger, as in his "openness to the universe" which often is little more than passivity to spiritual dreams still in the limbo of subjective feelings. Either he drapes himself in the dark robes of the poete maudit — the over-tragic hero cursed by fate and birth in an alien culture — or he exacerbates his sufferings and his loneliness in masochistic self-indulgence. He keeps his wounds bleeding dreadfully, that all men may witness the tortures a heartless and rigid society inflicts upon the halcyon soul filled with great dreams.
In this tragic spectacle and in the sympathy it arouses in a few, the rebel's ego can also find some sustainment, however somber. Does it, however, assist human growth in the individual or in society? It does so only in the sense that discontent can be contagious, that the smugness of the bourgeois type or the self-righteousness of the religious devotee must be somehow dissolved, that there can be no transformation and self-renewal without the denial of the sanctity of traditional form and of the "complex'' -bound ego.
The essential problem, however, must be met at another level. To transform a circle into a spiral a constant centrifugal force must be applied. The inertia of momentum will ever pull any activity back to its source, unless there is a power that constantly bends the "karmic" sequence of cause and effect away from center and toward all-inclusive space. This is the great principle of transformation, the law of spiritual performance. Cause-and-effect must be overcome unceasingly by creativeness; karma, by compassion. At every point, space must overcome center; the pull of the Galaxy (the Companionship of the stars) must ever so little triumph over the gravitational power of the sun; the will to inclusiveness must bring new (and at first unwelcome) contents into the set structures of society and personality.
These structures must let go of that which is obsolete in order to admit the disturbing and frightening newness of ex-centric spaces. Letting go of old contents is literally to experience discontent. To open oneself to new substance in an act of inclusive creativeness and positive openness to space is to experience joy. Joy is born of discontent; happiness is the essence of fulfillment within form.
Here again the correct balance between space and center, between discontent that fathers forth creativeness and stability-in-form that gives birth to happiness, is the only key to harmonious growth. An emphasis upon individualism leads to increasing discontent among men; the rigid, collective stability of a planned society — for instance that of Brahmanical India before the sixth century B.C. — leads to greater social happiness, but as well to spiritual stagnation. Centripetal collectivism and formalistic classicism must be constantly challenged and bent outward by the centrifugal energy of the individualist, the non- conformist, the rebel — if human evolution is to proceed. Wherever there is actually growth, in a personality or in a society, this creative challenge has been effective. Without it, there can only be ossification, automatism and the vicious circle of habit.
There are, nevertheless, two alternatives. If the circle of social performance has great vitality it may bend outward into a spiral without losing form and harmonious proportion; otherwise it may zigzag in distorted jerks, as explosive individuals or group-revolutions overcome violently the momentum of a life encased in unyielding patterns and frightened formalism. In the first case, the element of meaning is kept alive throughout periodical renewals; in the second, frozen meanings and oppressive symbols or social categories, having become brittle with the automatic worship of an enslaved people, have also lost the capacity for internal transformation. They must be shattered, or at least, ruthlessly renovated.
Wherever form remains, there can also be meaning. The destruction or temporary obliteration of form results unavoidably in the loss of meaning. But form is not formalism; consistency does not imply rigidity; communal harmony does not necessarily require the denial of individual freedom and the suppression of the rebel spirits that incorporate the will to vaster spaces and greater inclusiveness. The spiral is the perfect form, not the circle; and a spiral results from the integration of an outward release of spirit and a circular motion. This integration is Life, in universal evolution and in cosmic meaning.
In man, the integration of happiness and of discontent, of one's "social circle" and of one's ideals which impel ever onward and beyond, can and should be conscious, purposeful and significant. Elsewhere, in the various life-kingdoms, one sees only an unconscious effort of the species to adjust its individual specimen to changing surroundings while retaining the unquestionable rule of instincts. These adjustments, when deep enough to alter constructively the structural characteristics of the species, are known to us as "mutations". Every valid mutation is a triumph of the creative life over the automatism of instincts. In the human kingdom they are the successful revolutions, the great crises of spiritual transformation, which give to generic and as yet un-individualized mankind the proof of its growth.
The conscious responsibility for such changes rests with relatively few individuals. Most men reap with society the harvest of productive social processes; only a very few, impelled by an inner discontent, are ready to set aflame this harvest so that power be released for new adventures. Their lives are perpetual Advents; their minds, funeral pyres whence surges anew the Phoenix, symbol of immortality. They are the "shakers and movers" of human destiny, the Promethean Spirits who bring "fire" to men enamoured of "seed" and solely bent upon the cultivation of seeds. Theirs is the rhythm of fire, the flame's eternal hunger. Society chains them, tortures them — as the vulture of greed ceaselessly feasts upon the powers they released and the wealth they created — leaves them empty and bleeding.
Yet, they are the Victorious. Illumined by their light, new generations grow wider minds. New societies are born. Dreaming of them, young men go forth toward great spaces filled with stars.
