The Center of the Circle, or the Future of Civilization in the 21st Century

I feel sad these days. A great wave of sorrow lingers in me. I wake up to it. I half-sleep through it.

Today we are going to talk about many things. I will teach you about the place that civilization comes from. Why we must honor it. What it really means. We are going to speak about civilization, existence, and annihilation. What went wrong with America. Where the world is going. 

And in the end, you will arrive with me somewhere you didn’t know you were, but have always been standing.

The most ancient and beautiful place of all, the center of the circle. 

Because it is where everything was born.

Sit with me, around the fire.

Let me tell you why I am sad.

Part of my sadness is understanding where America is. What it teaches us. Why it is not going to make it.

People have been waiting decades for America to do one thing. Grow.

I don’t mean economically. That’s just an effect. 

I mean mature.

And I think that by now, it’s wrong to wait any longer. America isn’t going to mature. Can it? This isn’t my point. Stay here with me. This isn’t about America. This is about existence, time, dust, history. Your life and mine. Those which came before. What does a life mean? Do ours matter? 

Let me take you to the center of the circle, where all things began.

I think that we all know, too, precisely what I mean by mature. 

Why won’t Americans just…give each other healthcare? Etcetera. Why do they want to live in this way? This crude, brutal, and selfish way?

Americans cannot mature. 

They’ve accepted, or internalized, a certain model of existence. 

Life is a line.

The beautiful thing about social democracies, and I mean that in the way of a thing of miraculous beauty, is that life is not a line. It is a circle.

By line, what do I mean? Americans devour each other. They consume each other. There is a kind of ritualistic cannibalism at the heart of it all. It’s a predatory society. But lions are not eating other lions. They eat gazelles. American devour each other.

Life is organized in lines. Hierachies of status, power, and above all, money. Americans celebrate these lines. They do not know how to, or want to, live beyond these lines.

They go to work, on the front lines, of this technological revolution, or that one. They drive home, in lines, in cars, stretching for miles. They sit alone at home, instead of being together, connected in invisible lines right back to the institutions which have separated them.

What are we in lines? We are reduced. Either we are above or below. We climb or we fall. Line are relations of “vertical power,” if you want me to get technical.

Circles are different. To stand on the street in Barcelona or to be in the cafe in Paris is to know the feeling of a circle. Social democracies are circles, not lines. 

They are circles of moral concern. Circles of care. Circles of fairness and circles of respect.

What do we have in circles that we don’t have in lines? Dignity, because in circles, we are not above or below. Through dignity, we have togetherness. In togetherness, we have relationship. And in all this, we experience liberation.

In circles, we are not just trying to rip one another apart. 

If I say to you, “life is a struggle for survival,” many will agree with me. Especially Americans, because that is what they have reduced it to. 

But that is not the question. The more interesting question is: from what? 

Life is a struggle for survival. Against the elements, said primitive humankind. Against the beasts. Against the wind and the rain and the snow, said the winter. The beasts said: against it all. 

Life is a struggle. Survival comes to us merely in these ways. One breath at a time. A loved one is gone. Grief shatters us. Our world is never the same again. The next breath is forever touched with sorrow. Here I am, in mine.

Life is a struggle for survival. From existence itself. This is the human condition. It is the truest tragedy of all. It needs no further pain. In every moment, we become dust. We are something, always becoming nothing. The gods themselves grieve for us. Death watches over us, gently.

America is different. It’s great error is that it has made life a struggle for survival from each other.

Can you imagine? In this, it has negated and denied the point and purpose of human civilization. What is, was, human civilization? It was just fragile things, like you and I, realizing, at last, that there was no place for humankind alone. Under the stars, we could only breathe together. Or we would perish apart. 

That is it. That is all civilization is, or ever was. From that one single, beautiful truth come all the rest. Art. Literature. Science. Truth, reason, justice, all of them. 

And equally so, war, slavery, hatred, and so on, are all the antitheses of civilization.

In America, life is a struggle for survival. From each other. Not from existence. Not from the jaws of time and dust. The jaws just of human things, desperate, blind, hungry.

To me, this is something greater than a tragedy. It is a stupidity. A folly. It is a kind of crime against existence. If society is to be a struggle for survival from each other, why bother having one at all? Surely, we would all be more liberated without this deceit, this fools’ game, this prison made of teeth.

If society is to be a struggle for survival from each other, what is it? It isn’t a society in any proper sense of the word, which is why the world is so baffled by America, and why America is so baffled by what it is, too. It isn’t just that America is different, it’s that America today is an existential negation. 

By that, I mean, it is something that doesn’t exist, pretending to be something that does. It’s a struggle for survival from each other, which is a diminished condition of existence, and there is no sense to be made of that at all. It is something that people survive, not something that enables people to survive.

And I mean that formally, by the way. If we chose a child to be born at random in any wealthy nation, we’d shudder when in the end the broken straw chose America, because that child would live fewer years, poorer, unhappier, and so on, than anywhere else. And in that sense, they would be less alive.

So America is an existential negation in the sense that it is always trying to negate existence itself. You cannot live. Here, let me take “money” away from you. So you can barely afford food, water, shelter. Books, art, science. Time to live. Relationships. Anything, really, that makes life worth living. This is not just a sentence pronounced on the “poor” anymore, which a rich society shouldn’t have, anyways. It is now something even those who once imagined themselves rich now face.

When negation becomes a condition of existence, this is how things end.

But by now, we must confront the truth of it all. This negation isn’t something imposed from outside on America. It’s something Americans choose. They choose it over and over again, and they choose it so repeatedly and predictably that neither of their political sides cares to offer them anything else at all. 

Universal healthcare, for example, is something that Americans will never have, because they do not want it. I know they say they do, but they don’t vote for it, never have, and never will. And by now democracy is a memory, anyways. 

The question then becomes: why do American choose negation as a mode of existence, as its primary condition, over and over again?

This question has no real answers. It is not a real question. Because it is not made of real things. If I say to you, I would like to negate your existence, that is not a real thing to say. It is just an expression of violence. It is not real in the sense that it denies your existence, too. You are more than just jaws and teeth. You are more than mere violence.

So to say that this question is real is to misunderstand the human condition itself. 

The only thing that can be said about this question goes like this. Americans keep choosing negation as a mode of existence, as its primary condition, over and over again, because something is missing. 

What is that something? Many answers have been offered. History. Intellect. Decency, truth, facts, knowledge, and so on. They are all answers, and any of them will serve the purpose, but again, in an existential context, they all miss the point equally, too.

Let me rephrase the question in a way that illuminates it better now.

Why do Americans want existence to be a mode of negation, over and over again, to the point that their society can’t mature, and hasn’t, for half a century now? The answer is hidden inside the question, I think. 

They don’t want to mature. They don’t want society to mature. Because to accept this step, maturity, is a terrible and difficult one in moral development. It is the difference, in truth, between the child and the adult.

To accept maturity means to understand that existence is something more than just the mode of negation. Must be. Can be. If only the adult will make wiser choices. To the child, existence is tinged with, overwhelmed by, negation. Will Mommy give me my cookies? I hate her. I want to annihilate her. Will Daddy take me to the show? I hate him. I will annhilate him. My brother and sister take all the love and attention I deserve, and I deserve all of it. I hate them. I will…

The mode of negation in existence is an infantile mode. And in infants, it is forgivable. It is childish, and it’s funny. When kids throw tantrums, we find it funny, sometimes, and when they demand our undivided attention, with flamboyant jokes and stunts, that, too is “cute.” 

But in adults, existence as the mode of negation is something incredibly dangerous. Incredibly foolish. And incredibly sad. 

No adult should say: I must negate you in order to exist. This is the stuff of children, and when in adults we see this moral logic arise, we have sterner words for it. Sociopathy, narcissism, self-centeredness, abusiveness. The words don’t matter. Here, I’m speaking about a breakdown, a fracture, in moral development.

There is Stone Age humankind. Even they understood that existence must be more than a mode of negation. If they hadn’t, how would…anything…have ever become of them? How would they have survived their first winter, if all they had ever done was beat one another’s brains in? The creation of the first cities, of agriculture, of the first letters—all these are breakthroughs only made possible by the Mother Insight.

Existence must never be diminished, lessened, assaulted, dishonored, into being the mode of negation.

Life must never just be: I annihilate you, before you annihilate me, because that is all we are allowed. 

From this Mother Insight came everything, and I want you to see it now. Feel it with me. 

Think of the moment of the creation of the first letters. Imagine the first days and nights in the first cities. See the creation of the first laws, speeches, reasons, truths. 

It takes my breath away, thinking of that. I wish that I had been there. But I understand, as time turns me to dust, what made it all possible, and perhaps that is enough. 

Life cannot just be existence as the mode of negation. That way lies no life at all.

So what is it to be, if we honor it, if we respect it, if we grant it dignity, if we marvel at its beauty, and give thanks to life itself for the privilege of these few breaths? 

Existence as the mode of creation, of course. 

That is what circles are. When we stand in circles, we are creating something. I don’t mean this in the trivial American way—we’re coding, etcetera, that is not creation at all, really. I mean it in the existential way.

When we stand in a circle, we are creating things that weren’t there before. These things are profound. They are the most important, beautiful, noble, and true things of all. They are existential primaries.

We create one another. We see each other. We grant each other dignity. We keep our distance, which is made of respect, but there, too, we are close enough to hold one another. We link hands, and sense one another. We ward off the outside, and in that way, protect one another, from the jaws and teeth of the seasons and the winter.

And we protect what is in the center. What is that absence? What is in the center between us when we stand in a circle? The thing that we are together, which only exists in the condition of creation, not the condition of negation. We say: this is a place where annihilation cannot be. 

And in that space, the center of the circle, is where all things truly began. Art, science, literature, reason, truth, the alphabets, justice, all of them.

The center of the circle is the absence that is the presence. It is the absence of annihilation, which becomes the presence of civilization.

To me, this is the greatest human accomplishment of them all. It is the most startling discovery of them all. That only in a place where there is nothing at all, can something be, and that something flourishes, given enough time, enough care, into all the projects of civilization. 

Everything we have come from the place in the center of the circle. And it cannot exist at all unless we stand in a circle.

America is not a circle. That is why there is nothing in it anymore. It is a line, and lines cannot create, hold, keep a center from which all things grow. Lines are just lines. 

What happened in the beginning? 

We stood in a circle. 

The rest became the thing only millennia later we would call history.

Here you are with me. I have brought you to the place that you have always been, but never knew. You are in a circle. An old and beautiful and timeless one. 

Standing in this circle with us are history’s great minds. It’s first thinkers. It’s poets, artists, intellectuals, scientists. The unnamed one who spoke the first words, and his distant brother or sister or son or daughter who wrote down the first alphabet. They are all here with us, and we are all standing in a circle.

Soon, I will launch Havens. That is for people who want to be in circles, not lines. And perhaps now you see that you are in the place that all things began. 

Now, perhaps, you can see the center of the circle. And how in it is a thing we don’t have a word for, which is everything. Civilization itself, but more than that. The sum total of all our civilizations. The love and laugher and illumination. The lives and triumphs and discoveries and revelations. They are all there, in the center of the circle, pulsing and glowing and burning bright.

That is why I brought you here.

We keep this circle to honor their truths. Which are the greatest ones. This is the place from which all things came. We stand in this circle to create the one thing that makes existence worthwhile. Possibility. The possibility to be more than just annihilation.

This is the most ancient place of all. 

That is why we honor it. 

Existence must never be reduced to the mode of negation.

My sorrow is too much for me these days. I feel the ache of winter deep in my bones. Night after night, the stars whisper to me. They hold me close. They sing me to sleep. My heart is broken, for all things that will never be.

You must remember my words now. I don’t know how many more I have. Existence asks us to choose, between the modes of negation, and the modes of creation. And we choose not just for ourselves, but for those who will come after us, and those who came before us, in the way that we stand. 

Do we have the courage to stand in the right way? Or will we fall to our knees, and slither towards each other? I see you. I link hands with you. You have a place here, in existence. It is in the circle of being with me, with us, with life itself. I will not break it. I cast annihilation out. 

You are standing here with me in the most ancient place of all. Look up and see the stars. What do they say?

In the center of the circle, we hold more than each other. We hold all that ever was, between all of us, from the most ancient, to the most distant, from the first to the last. In the center of the circle we hold possibility itself.

We must never let the circle break, my friends. This is our job and our challenge. Especially in seasons like these.

This is the lesson of now. I carry it with me, everywhere, and its weight and grief, too. 

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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