"The Tao which can be named is not the eternal Tao."
The opening line of the Tao Te Ching reflects the nature of ineffable ideas quite nicely. Ineffable ideas, by definition, cannot be expressed through language directly; however, there are still methods of expressing them through language indirectly. The Tao Te Ching goes about providing an understanding of its ineffable idea through poetic verse and proverb—I want to take a different approach that leans on my strengths: history and philosophy.
History has been told to us as a saga of great individuals whose stories we remember because they're the ones who shaped the world. Yes, some people shape the systems of the world more than others, but you and I—in an existential sense—face the same situation as someone like Albert Einstein. We all confront the same forces of life, the same inescapable questions. The figures we remember as "great" are not great because they faced something we do not face; they are great because of how they responded to what we all face. Their responses were dramatic, visible, world-shaping. But the situation was ordinary—the most ordinary thing there is. The human condition. My goal here is to codify this condition into a comprehensible framework so that we can all confidently embrace our humanity and feel like the great individuals history remembers.
To learn how to confront our condition well, we ought to understand how the remembered people of history did. So, let's take a pass over the biographies of some of these great individuals and see if we can parse out any existential lessons and connections that can bring us closer to our common humanity.
In 1952, a twenty-three-year-old Argentinian medical student named Ernesto Guevara set out on a motorcycle journey across South America with his friend Alberto Granado. Guevara was comfortable, educated, and on the conventional track toward a respectable career in medicine. His family was solidly upper middle-class. His future was legible. He had no particular reason to question the world he had inherited or his place within it. But he did anyways and decided to depart on his journey.
The journey fundamentally changed him.
Not all at once—transformation rarely works that way—but through an accumulation of encounters that made it impossible for him to continue living as he had lived before. In the leper colonies of Peru, he saw human beings abandoned by the society that had produced them, their suffering invisible to the world that went on turning without them. In the copper mines of Chile, he met workers whose labor extracted the wealth that built comfortable lives for people like his family, while they themselves lived and died in conditions that could only be described as slow violence. In the dispossessed indigenous communities scattered across the continent, he encountered the aftermath of centuries of imperial plunder dressed up in the language of civilization and progress.
What happened to Guevara in those months was not primarily intellectual, though it would later find intellectual expression in his book The Motorcycle Diaries. No, something cracked open at a level deeper than thought. He would later write that the abstract idea of "the people"—that comfortable category that allows those with privilege to speak of those without it from a safe distance—dissolved in the face of actual people. Individual faces. Individual sufferings. Individual dignities that persisted despite everything designed to crush them. The young man who had left Buenos Aires full of adventure and medical ambition was not the man who returned. He came back carrying questions that would not let him rest: What do I owe to others? What is my life for? Who am I becoming? What kind of world is this, and what am I doing about it?
We all (should) know how the rest of his story unfolded—the revolution in Cuba, Castro, and the Che Guevara who became a revolutionary hero—only to have his face slapped on a million t-shirts worn by performative men and his name slandered by the CIA for decades. But that is not why I tell this story. I tell it because of what happened before all of that, in the moment when existence forced itself upon a young man who had been successfully avoiding it. The questions that had always been there—that are always there, for all of us, waiting—suddenly stood directly in front of him. He could no longer pretend they were not asking themselves. He could no longer defer them until later. He had to face them or spend the rest of his life in flight. He chose to face them, and that is why he became great.
Consider Leo Tolstoy, who at the height of his fame—a veritable success under capitalism—found himself unable to continue living as he had lived. He was fifty years old. He had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He was celebrated throughout Europe as one of the greatest novelists who had ever lived. He was wealthy, married, the father of many children, the master of a great estate. By every external measure, he had succeeded at life beyond what most people could dream.
And yet he fell into a crisis so severe that he hid ropes from himself for fear he would use them. He could not shake a single question: What is life for? Not his life in particular—he could have answered that easily enough with the standard responses about family and legacy and art. But life as such. What was the point of any of it, given that it would end? What was the meaning of this brief eruption of consciousness in an infinite universe that did not know his name and would not remember it? He had spent decades producing works of literature that would outlast him, but even that seemed hollow when he followed the thought far enough. Outlast him for how long? Until no one could read Russian, until no one could read at all, until the sun expanded and swallowed the earth and everything human beings had ever done or made or loved disappeared as if it had never been.
Fortunately, Tolstoy did not kill himself. Instead, he let the question remake him entirely. The man who emerged from that crisis was almost unrecognizable—a vegetarian, a pacifist, an anarchist of sorts, a person who renounced his property and copyright and spent the remainder of his life trying to live according to principles that his earlier self—and society at large—would have found absurd. You do not have to agree with the conclusions he reached to recognize what happened to him. He was courageous enough to actually face the questions that most people spend their lives avoiding, and the encounter changed him.
Thomas Sankara was an army captain in, what was then, Upper Volta—a country whose very name was an artifact of colonial cartography—when he, driven by his love for his suffering people, chose to begin asking questions that would make him dangerous. Why did his country remain poor when it had been independent for over two decades? Who benefited from the structures of debt and aid that kept African nations dependent on their former colonizers? What would it mean to build something genuinely new, rather than administering institutions designed for extraction?
When he came to power at the age of thirty-three, Sankara renamed the country Burkina Faso—"Land of Upright People"—and launched the most ambitious program of decolonization the continent had seen. He refused the structural adjustment programs that the IMF and World Bank imposed on developing nations. He vaccinated millions of children against diseases that had killed them for generations. He built schools and health clinics in villages that had never had them. He appointed women to positions of power and outlawed forced marriage and female genital mutilation. He reminded us that "women hold up the other half of the sky." He sold the government's fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and made the ministers drive Renaults. He asked, over and over, the question that made him intolerable to the forces that would eventually have him killed: Who is development for? His answer was the people.
Sankara was assassinated in 1987, almost certainly with the complicity of France and the United States, almost certainly because he had become too dangerous an example of what was possible when a people refused to accept the terms they had been given. What he got done before his assassination, though, is still one of the most remarkable testaments to one man's love for his people.
There is one more person I need to mention before I can explain why I am telling you all of this, and that person is Carl Jung—not because he fits neatly into the pattern of political awakening that connects the others, but because he understood something about the pattern itself that no one else has articulated as clearly.
Jung was approaching forty when he broke with Sigmund Freud, the mentor whose approval had defined his professional life for years. The break was both intellectual and personal, and it precipitated what Jung would later call his "confrontation with the unconscious"—a period of profound psychological crisis that lasted, in its most intense form, for nearly six years.
During this time, Jung experienced visions, heard voices, felt himself losing his grip on the reality that most people take for granted. He questioned whether he was going insane. He considered abandoning his work entirely. The comfortable identity he had constructed—the successful psychiatrist, the heir apparent to Freud, the respectable bourgeois professional—collapsed, and he found himself facing something he had spent his life studying from a safe distance: the raw material of the psyche, the depths beneath the surface of civilized life, the questions that arise when all the answers you had accepted reveal themselves as inadequate. But he did not hide—he wrote The Red Book.
What Jung discovered in that confrontation—what he spent the rest of his life trying to articulate—was that the human being is not a stable entity but a process. We do not simply have a self; we are called to become a self, and this becoming is never complete. He called this process "individuation," and he believed it was the central task of human existence: to integrate the disparate elements of the psyche, to withdraw the projections we cast upon the world, to face the shadow we would rather deny, to become, as fully as possible, what we have the potential to be—human.
But here is what matters for our purposes: Jung recognized that most people never undertake this work. They live their entire lives identified with a persona—a mask, a role, an image of themselves that was constructed in childhood and never fundamentally questioned. They marry, they work, they raise children, they grow old and die, and they never once confront the questions that would reveal how much of what they take to be themselves is actually borrowed, inherited, assembled from materials they did not choose. They are not evil. They are not even particularly unhappy. But they are, in a sense that Jung spent his career trying to articulate, not yet fully alive.
"The privilege of a lifetime," Jung wrote, "is to become who you truly are." But this privilege is also a burden. To become who you truly are, you must first face everything you have been pretending to be. You must let the old structures collapse. You must endure the disorientation of not knowing who you are, what you want, what any of it means. This is fucking terrifying. Most people would rather do literally anything than face it. And so they don't. They find ways to avoid the confrontation—busyness, entertainment, ideology, substances, anything that fills the space where the questions would otherwise arise.
I have told you these stories because I want you to see the pattern in action before I name it—not just to indulge in my fantasy of being a history professor.
Guevara, Tolstoy, Sankara, Jung—these are people from different centuries, different cultures, different political positions, different domains of human endeavor. What unites them is not their conclusions. Guevara became a Marxist revolutionary; Tolstoy became a Christian anarchist; Sankara, also, became a Marxist revolutionary; Jung became a depth psychologist whose politics, such as they were, fit no convenient category. What truly unites them is what happened before the conclusions: a confrontation with existence that they chose not to avoid, a moment when the questions that are always there forced themselves into consciousness and demanded response—and they sat there and answered.
And here I must add my own small story, not because it belongs in this company—I have done nothing to merit such placement—but because I want you to understand that I am not speaking to you from outside this pattern but instead from within it.
I was thirteen when I was diagnosed with a form of arthritis that would be with me for the rest of my life. It is not fatal. It is not, in the great scheme of suffering, particularly dramatic—nowadays, when I'm medicated, it hardly impairs me at all. But it is chronic, incurable, and—at thirteen—these words were frightening. The life I had imagined for myself, built on unconscious assumptions about what my body would be able to do indefinitely, no longer seemed available—I had to either face some uncomfortable questions, or keep hiding.
I'm not looking for sympathy, but I am seeking honesty. The questions I am asking in this treatise are not questions I encountered in books first and then decided to write about. They are questions that were forced upon me when something I had taken for granted was taken away. What is life for, when the body you had assumed would carry you through it reveals itself as fragile? What matters, when so much of what you thought mattered turns out to depend on conditions you do not control? Who are you, when you can no longer be who you thought you were?
(Okay, as I write this I feel terribly dramatic. I truly am bad at taking myself seriously, but for the sake of the writing I will power through my embarrassment.)
These were not comfortable questions. I did not want to ask them—let alone figure out an answer to them. I spent a long time trying to avoid them through every mechanism available—denial, distraction, anger, despair. Eventually, I got tired of hiding and decided to face them. And in facing them—not once, but over and over, because this is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing practice—I began to discover something that had been there all along, waiting for me to stop running long enough to notice it.
What all these stories point toward is a single, simple observation that is also the most difficult thing to accept about human existence.
You are aware that you exist. This is the one thing that cannot be doubted, the bedrock upon which everything else is built. You might be wrong about your beliefs—political, religious, metaphysical. You might be deceived about the nature of reality. Your memories might be distorted, your perceptions unreliable, your sense of who you are an elaborate construction built from materials you did not choose. Philosophers have doubted all of these things, and their doubts cannot be easily dismissed. But one thing holds: the awareness reading these words right now is real. The doubting itself confirms the doubter. You cannot get beneath or behind this fact; so, it is where we must begin.
Descartes—who I may not be the biggest fan of, for reasons I will explain—captured something real with his famous cogito: I think, therefore I am. The attempt to doubt everything confirms at least one thing: that there is a doubter. The skeptic who tries to deny their own existence performs the existence they are denying in the very act of denial. This much is right.
But Descartes made a mistake that has haunted Western philosophy ever since. Having established the one certainty—that awareness exists—he felt compelled to explain it. He encountered the mystery of embodiment: How does awareness exist in a body? How does mind relate to matter? These are genuine questions. What was not genuine was his demand for certain answers. He constructed an elaborate metaphysics of two substances—thinking stuff and extended stuff, mind and body—and then had to invoke God to explain how they interact. The dualism he bequeathed to us has generated problems we are still trying to solve three centuries later: the "mind-body problem," the "hard problem of consciousness," endless debates about how subjective experience can arise from objective matter.
Here is what I want to suggest: the demand for this kind of explanation is itself a mistake. It arises from a refusal to accept uncertainty as a fundamental feature of our situation.
One of the things that comes with being aware—as I will explore in more detail later—is that we cannot achieve certainty on ultimate matters. The breadth of existence exceeds our grasp. We do not know, and may never know, how—or if—consciousness arises from matter, why there is something rather than nothing, what the ultimate nature of reality might be. These are not problems to be solved and filed away; they are mysteries to be inhabited for a lifetime. Descartes wanted certainty. What he got was an ingenious system that falls apart the moment you examine its foundations too closely. What he should have done—what we must do—is accept that certain questions will not yield to our demand for answers, and learn to live within that uncertainty without collapsing into either despair or false certainty.
Sartre put it well: existence precedes essence—which is a fancy way of saying you weren't born with an instruction manual. We do not come into the world with a pre-given nature that defines who we are and what we should do. We exist first—thrown into a world we did not make, bearing a body we did not choose, facing circumstances we cannot fully control—and then we must determine, through how we live, what we will become. The task is not to explain existence away but to meet it. You aren't Scooby Doo solving a grand mystery, you're just a dude.
There is a moment I like in Guillermo Del Toro's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein when the creature—rejected by his creator, despised by everyone who sees him, denied even the consolation of companionship—catches a dying Victor Frankenstein and they have a final conversation. Victor, after asking for forgiveness, says: "If death is not to be, then consider this my son, while you are alive, what recourse would you have but to live? Live." The creature exists. He did not ask to exist. His existence is painful in ways that most human beings will never have to experience. And yet, while he is alive, what can he do but live? What can any of us do?
Look, I'm no nihilist. This is not resignation. It's not a counsel of passive acceptance. It is, I think, the beginning of everything—the recognition that we find ourselves here, aware, facing a world that makes demands on us, and that the only question that matters is how we will respond. And this may seem like a ridiculously common sense realization, but to feel its full gravity is choice many of us do not make.
Finally! Now I can say what I have been building toward.
Human is not a species. It is a condition.
Being born Homo sapiens does not make you human in the sense that matters. Biology is not destiny. The human condition is not something you inherit when you emerge from your mother's womb; it is something you achieve—or fail to achieve—through how you engage with what existence places before you.
This may sound strange to some. We are accustomed to thinking of humanity as a biological category: if you have the right DNA, you are human; if you do not, you are not. This is true enough if we are speaking of taxonomy, of scientific classification, of the categories that biologists use to organize the living world. But I am not speaking of that. I am speaking of something else—something our language already knows, even if our common conception hasn't yet caught up.
We speak of people "losing their humanity" or "finding their humanity." We speak of acts or crimes that are "inhuman." We speak of people who seem "more alive" than others, who are "really living" rather than just going through the motions. We recognize, without quite articulating it, that there is a difference between merely existing as a member of the species Homo sapiens and actually inhabiting the condition that that existence makes possible.
The human condition is the condition of existential awareness. It is the condition of being aware that you exist, that you will cease to exist, that others who are also aware exist alongside you, that you must navigate a world you did not make with a freedom you did not request. It is the condition of being burdened with questions—about meaning, about death, about love, about truth, about what to do with this brief eruption of consciousness that is your life—that will not go away no matter how much you wish they would. It is the condition of being thrown into existence and having to figure out, with no manual and no guarantee of success, what to do with it.
This condition is not automatically fulfilled by those who inhabit it. You can be born into the species, live your entire life within it, and die without ever having genuinely faced what it demands of you. You can go through all the motions—working, consuming, reproducing, aging—while avoiding the confrontation that Guevara, Tolstoy, Sankara, Jung, and countless others chose to face. You can be, in the strict biological sense, fully human, while remaining, in the sense that matters, asleep.
Don't get it twisted, this is not a judgment about worth or dignity. Every human being, by virtue of being capable of the human condition, deserves respect and moral consideration. But capability is not achievement. The potential is there in everyone; the actualization is another matter.
Existential awareness—this awareness that knows itself, knows it exists, knows it will end, and must figure out what to do with that knowledge—does not come empty. It comes bearing what I call the essential qualities: inescapable features that are not optional add-ons or cultural constructions but structural necessities of the human condition. If you are aware in the way that human beings are aware, you will confront these. There is no path that avoids them.
Let me take a moment to be clear about what kind of claim I'm making here. I'm not deducing these qualities from first principles or proving them like a theorem. I'm describing what I have found when I attend carefully to my own experience—and what every wisdom tradition I've encountered, across every culture, seems to grapple with in its own way. These are the conversations that arise when you stop running long enough to notice what's actually happening. This is phenomenology.
You may find that I've missed something essential. You may discover qualities of existence that I haven't named. If so, good—that means you're doing the work. What I'm offering is a map, not the landscape itself. The map is based on my own exploration and the reports of others who have explored before me. Use it as a starting point, not a final word. Anyways…
Some of these qualities concern what awareness discovers—the context you find yourself in, the given conditions of your existence that you did not choose and cannot escape.
You will die. This is the most obvious one, and the one we spend the most energy avoiding. I cannot prove to you that awareness ends—perhaps it doesn't; perhaps the mystics and the hopeful are right and something continues. But I can point to what you already know in your experience: you live under the shadow of anticipated death. Whether or not awareness truly ends, you experience yourself as mortal. You feel time running out. You sense the fragility of everything you love. This shadow shapes everything you do, whether you acknowledge it or not.
Others exist. You are not alone. Other centers of awareness populate the world—people who are not you, who have their own interiors, their own stakes, their own claims on existence. You encounter them everywhere. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent his career trying to articulate this: the face of the Other confronts you with a call you did not choose, an obligation that precedes any decision you might make about whether to respond. What you owe to them, how you relate to them, whether you see them as subjects like yourself or as objects to be used—these questions will not leave you alone.
You cannot know everything. The limits of knowledge are real. You will never achieve certainty on the questions that matter most. You do not know what happens after death. You do not know if your beliefs are correct. You do not know how this story ends. And yet you must act anyway—must make choices, must commit to paths, must live as if your decisions matter even though you cannot prove they do.
Reality is real. This sounds obvious until you notice how much of life is spent pretending otherwise. Reality makes claims on you whether you like it or not. You can align with what is true or flee into illusion, but you cannot make truth bend to your preferences. The world is not infinitely malleable to your wishes. Something is, independent of what you want to be the case.
Time passes. You exist across past, present, and future. You are not a static thing but a process—shaped by what happened before, reaching toward what comes next, acting in a present that is already slipping away. You inherit. You anticipate. You age. The person you were at fifteen is not the person you are now, and neither will be the person you become.
Other qualities concern what awareness does—the activities that arise simply from being the kind of being that knows it exists.
You seek meaning. You cannot help it. Awareness cares. This is not something you chose; it is what awareness is. Things matter to you—some more than others—and you cannot make them stop mattering. Even the nihilist who claims nothing matters is making a claim about what matters—and the idea of nothing mattering matters to them. The question is not whether you will care but what you will care about.
You suffer. To be aware is to be vulnerable. You can be hurt—physically, emotionally, in ways you did not know were possible until they happened. This is the cost of being open to experience at all. If you could not suffer, you could not feel anything. Pain is the price of admission to a life that can also contain joy.
You are free (and responsible). You make choices. Even when you feel trapped, even when your options are constrained, some sliver of choice remains—if only in how you respond to what you cannot control. And with choice comes responsibility. You cannot offload it. You cannot blame circumstances forever. Even the determinist experiences free will. At some point, you must own what you do.
You ask who you are. Your identity is not settled. It is a question you carry, whether you examine it or not. Who am I? Who am I becoming? These questions do not resolve themselves once and stay resolved. They return, in different forms, at different stages of life, demanding attention.
You seek belonging. You know yourself as part of something larger—a family, a community, a people, a species, a cosmos. You did not make yourself. You are embedded in contexts that exceed you. The question of where you fit, what you are part of, how you connect to what is beyond you—this question will find you.
You love (and need to be loved). This is not optional. You can refuse it, suppress it, armor yourself against it—but the need does not disappear. Love is what connection looks like for beings like us. Its presence sustains; its absence wounds. You will spend your life navigating this whether you want to or not.
You create. Awareness does not only receive the world; it adds to it. You make things—objects, relationships, meanings, futures that would not exist without your action. Imagination lets you bring forth what was not there before. You are not merely shaped by circumstances; you shape them back.
You are embodied. You are not a ghost. You are aware in a body—this strange situation of being conscious matter, mind and flesh somehow woven together. Your body is you and not-you at the same time. It carries you, limits you, situates you in space and time. You cannot think your way out of it.
You inherit. You did not begin from nothing. You were born into a language, a culture, a family, a history. You absorbed influences before you could choose which ones to accept. You are shaped by forces you did not select. Part of becoming yourself is reckoning with what was given to you—deciding what to keep, what to refuse, what to transform.
You play. You discover beauty. You laugh. This one is strange—it doesn't fit neatly alongside the others, because it's less a quality you possess than a mode of engaging with all the other qualities. Play is activity for its own sake, without instrumental purpose. Beauty is the experience of encountering what is harmonious, fitting, alive. Humor is the response to incongruity—the crack in the serious surface of things. These experiences point toward something very, very important: that existence is not only a burden to be borne but also, somehow, its own justification. The capacity for play, beauty, and laughter suggests that engagement with the human condition is not only duty but also—when we're lucky, when we're open—joy. I will have much more to say about this later; for now, note that it exists, and that any framework that leaves it out has missed something essential.
These qualities form a web. Pull on any thread and the whole thing moves. Death gives meaning its urgency—if you had forever, nothing would need to matter now. Freedom requires uncertainty—if you knew for certain what would happen, choice would be an illusion. Suffering and love are counterparts—to open yourself to connection is to open yourself to loss; the capacity for love is the same capacity that allows for grief. Identity unfolds across time—you become yourself through the accumulation of choices, inheriting who you were yesterday, reaching toward who you might be tomorrow. The encounter with others reveals you to yourself—you learn who you are partly through how you show up in relationship, through the mirror of faces that are not your own. I could keep going—every pair has a relationship—but you get the idea. Each quality shapes and is shaped by the others. You cannot isolate them. You cannot deal with one and ignore the rest.
And every single inescapable quality of experience generates questions. Not academic questions you answer once and file away, but living questions you carry for a lifetime. How do I live knowing I will die? What do I owe to others? How do I act when I cannot be certain? What actually matters? Who am I becoming?
This is what I mean by the human condition. Not a biological category but a situation—a situation defined by awareness burdened with these inescapable qualities, facing questions it did not ask for, having to figure out how to respond.
Which brings me to the central claim of everything that follows.
Humanity itself—genuine humanity, again, not mere species membership—is constituted by engagement with these questions.
The essential qualities are the structure. The questions they generate are the invitations. Engagement is the response that makes us what we are—it is Jung's act of individuation.
To engage is to hold the conversations that existence demands—to RSVP "yes" to their invitations. To meet the questions with openness rather than closure, with curiosity rather than fear, with willingness to be changed by what you discover rather than grasping for certainty that would protect you from transformation. It means taking the questions seriously, letting them live in you, returning to them again and again over the course of a lifetime rather than settling for answers that foreclose further inquiry.
This is what happened to Guevara when he encountered the suffering of others and chose to no longer pretend it wasn't his concern. This is what happened to Tolstoy when the question of meaning reared its head in the face of his success and he chose to answer it for himself—on his own terms. This is what happened to Sankara when he looked at his country, his people, and asked who development was actually for. This is what happened to Jung when he embraced his confrontation with the unconscious which put him to face everything he had been avoiding about himself.
And this is what happened to me—in my own small, undramatic way—when a diagnosis I didn't want forced questions I had been successfully ignoring.
Engagement is not a one-time achievement. It is an ongoing orientation, a way of being in the world, a commitment that must be renewed continuously because the pressure to flee is always there. The questions are uncomfortable. They demand things of us. They threaten the stability of the selves we have constructed. And so there is a constant temptation to turn away—to distract ourselves, to numb ourselves, to accept answers that are not really answers but merely escapes from the difficulty of genuine inquiry.
Humanity, then, exists on a spectrum. This is not binary—human or not human—but a matter of degree. The more conversations you hold, the more deeply and honestly you hold them, the more consistently you return to them, the more fully human you become. The fewer you engage, the shallower and more dishonest your engagement, the more you flee them, the more your humanity diminishes. You do not lose your membership in the species. You do not forfeit your moral standing or your right to dignity. But you do become less of what you could be, less alive to your own existence, less present to the reality you inhabit.
This is a high bar. I know. I am not claiming to have met it myself—I spend more time than I'd like to admit doomscrolling instead of sitting with the questions that actually matter. What I am claiming is that this is the standard against which we ought to measure ourselves—not to outright condemn those who fall short without opportunity for recourse, but to understand what we are reaching for, what is at stake, and why it matters that we try.
I know this might sound harsh. We've been taught in recent days that all ways of living are equally valid, that judgment is violence, that tolerance means accepting everything. I understand why—these ideas emerged as a defense against genuine horrors, against regimes that imposed their vision of the good life through force and terror. But blind tolerance has not saved us from those horrors. It has, in fact, left us defenseless against them. Fascism is rising again, and part of what enabled its return is our refusal to say clearly that some ways of living are better than others—more fully human, more aligned with what we actually are and what we actually need.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying we need a totalitarian state to enforce correct living. That response to this recognition has been tried, is being tried again, and produces horrors every time. What I am saying is that we need communities that care enough about their members to actually support them—to notice when someone is struggling, to intervene before desperation drives them toward destruction, to hold standards while also holding people. The difference between fascism and humanism is not that one accepts hierarchy and the other doesn't. Both accept that some ways of living are better than others. The difference is in the response: one dominates and punishes; the other supports and transforms. One tries to impose separation in hierarchy; the other tries to bring everyone up on the same tide. Do not confuse agreement in recognition with agreement in conclusion.
Before we go further, I need to address something that might be bothering you—because it bothered me when I first started thinking this way.
If humanity is constituted by engagement with the essential questions, what about those whose capacity for such engagement is limited? What about children, who are still developing? What about people with cognitive impairments? What about those so crushed by circumstance—by poverty, by trauma, by systemic violence—that they have no space in which the questions could even arise? Is this framework just another way of creating hierarchies, of measuring some people against others and finding them wanting?
The answer is no. But with an asterisk.
What I am describing is not measured by achievement but by orientation. A child engaging at their developmental capacity is fully human. A person with cognitive impairment engaging within their capacity is fully human. A person overwhelmed by trauma, engaging as much as their wounded state allows, is fully human. What matters is not how much engagement someone achieves but whether they are oriented toward engagement given their circumstances.
The spectrum is not about comparing one person to another. It is about the direction of movement within a single life. Are you, given your situation, moving toward the questions or away from them? Are you, within the constraints you face, opening or closing? This is what matters—not whether you have achieved some abstract standard of enlightenment, but whether you are honest with yourself about where you are and willing to take the next step available to you.
The question of how much is condition versus choice is precisely the question each person must ask themselves honestly—and the answer may shift over time. What was genuine incapacity last year might be chosen avoidance this year, now that circumstances have changed. What feels like choice might actually be the weight of conditioning so deep you don't recognize it as external. There is no clear formula (sorry). There is only the ongoing practice of honesty with yourself about where you actually are—not where you wish you were, not where you think you should be, but where you are. And then: taking the next step available to you, whatever that is.
Anti-humanism—and I will have much more to say about this later—is the choice to flee when engagement is possible. It is not the same as incapacity. Someone who cannot engage is not anti-humanist; someone who will not engage is. And the distinction matters enormously, because most of what prevents engagement is not natural incapacity but manufactured incapacity—systems that exhaust us, atomize us, distract us, imprison our imaginations, make flight seem like the only viable option. This framework is not about blaming individuals for their non-engagement; it is about developing a way of understanding the systems that produce the conditions in which engagement becomes almost impossible, so that we might change those conditions for everyone.
This essay has been dense and long—thanks for sticking with me. Let me close with a preview of where we are going.
I have established what I hope is a foundation: that existential awareness is the bedrock, that the human condition is this condition of awareness burdened with essential qualities that generate unavoidable questions, and that humanity—in the sense that matters—is constituted by engagement with these questions.
What comes next is the dark side of this picture. If engagement constitutes humanity, then flight from engagement constitutes its opposite—anti-humanism. And the most important fact about anti-humanism is that it is, for the most part, not chosen. No child wakes up in the morning and decides to flee their humanity—some adults do, and the line between manufactured flight and chosen evil is one of the hardest questions this framework must face. We'll return to it. For now, note the distinction: most anti-humanism is produced, not chosen. It is manufactured—by systems, by conditions, by forces that profit from keeping human beings in a state of perpetual flight.
We live in a world that is designed—whether by the evil of a few, the cumulative logic of systems that have escaped anyone's control, or the combination of the two—to prevent human beings from engaging with what matters most. The exhaustion that keeps you too tired to think. The distraction that fills every moment so the questions cannot arise. The atomization that separates you from the others who might support your engagement. The cynicism that teaches you that sincerity is naive, that everyone has an angle, that there is no point in trying. All of this is produced. All of this serves purposes. All of this can be understood, named, and resisted.
Really, this framework is about inspiring hope. The essential qualities cannot be fully suppressed. Death still comes for us. Love still stirs. The questions still arise in the gaps. The manufacturing is imperfect because the human condition is too stubborn to be entirely eliminated. And this means that the return is always possible—for those of us willing to grasp it. The door to engagement remains open.
This is the beginning of a longer journey. I have tried to establish the ground on which everything else will be built. In the essays that follow, we will explore the polarity between humanism and anti-humanism, the mechanisms by which flight is manufactured, the possibility of return and transformation, the nature of active evil, the depths of the essential conversations, and finally, what it might look like to build a world in which engagement is supported rather than suppressed—a humanistic revolution that is both personal and political, both spiritual and material, both a transformation of consciousness and a transformation of conditions.
For now, I leave you with the question that I cannot answer for you, the question that each of us must face in the privacy of our own awareness, the question that the stories I have told are meant to illuminate:
You are aware. You exist. You face questions you did not ask for, concerning a situation you did not choose, with a freedom you may not want. What are you going to do about it?
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst