The phone rings. (Should I answer? I am in the middle of writing, on a roll, and it will be hard to get back). Reluctantly picking up the phone, I find a good friend on the other end of the line, calling to ask me to do something that I do not want to do. Do I agree, because it is a friend who is asking, even though I do not want to do it? Or do I say no, respecting my own inclination, but hurting my friend's feelings, letting him down, perhaps even harming our friendship?

I am filling out my taxes, and realize that I could save several thousand dollars if I do not report interest I have received from a personal loan. There is no way the government will ever know about this income. Shall I report it?

I am traveling, and find myself strongly attracted to another man's wife. She is alone on this trip, and clearly interested in me. Should I follow my natural, strong urges, or should I restrain them in support of the "idea" of marriage?

From some mysterious place this "I" arose, and it finds itself adrift in a world that is equally mysterious. Yet there are hundreds of decisions to be made every day, decisions that will define the kind of person I will be and how well my life will work. Adding to the dilemma, there are many different currents within that propel me in quite different directions. So how will I go about making decisions between these competing currents as I "spend" the moments of my days?

There are basically four ways to make our life decisions:
1. Follow our whims
2. Obey our birth culture, or another cultural group we have joined
3. Use reason
4. Follow our intuition

There is value in each of these, and we will be moved and guided by all of them at various times in our lives. This chapter will explore how the first two, whim and culture, play out and interact in the course of our lives. The following chapters will explore reason, intuition, and the murky terrain beyond all four, the possibility of a ground in which they all exist. Let us begin with:

1. Whim
Whim sometimes gets a bad name among the very serious, but there is much to be said for its value. It breaks us free from overly rigid rules and regulations, from the stultifying embrace of too many “shoulds” and “should nots” that can deaden our lives. Whim – our basic urges and desires – can give us a fresh glimpse of the direction our energy is flowing, can provide a motivating spark for us to move and to act.

However, because one whim usually replaces another in rapid succession, trying to follow each would be impossible: not only would it be thoroughly exhausting, but it would be crazy-making for the “whimee,” as well as for everyone else around. And if everyone followed each new whim that arose, there would be no direction or coherence to life, rendering human culture and human civilization impossible.

But whim is no laughing matter: it can, and sometimes should, be understood quite seriously as the mostly instinctual urges that arise to take care of ourselves and to snatch the momentary pleasures that are presented each day. In one of its grandest roles, it emerges as the “id” of Freud, those primal urges – mostly sexual – that drive us to undertake our life actions and activities. (In the Freudian model, these urges are sometimes sublimated – directed toward substitute objects, as when a person directs his or her energy toward winning a contest rather than directly winning a lover. And they are sometimes repressed – hidden from our own conscious awareness, as when we fail to admit our attraction, even to ourselves, for someone who is forbidden to us by society).

The idea of basic, primitive drives within us did not begin with Freud, however. Almost 2500 years earlier Plato divided the human psyche into three levels, the first being that of desire (instinct and impulse). Schopenhauer defined the primal energy within us as the “Will,” by which he meant those blind, insatiable drives that arise out of living in a body. Nietzsche picked up this theme and spoke of the Dionysian energies that flow through us, the instinctual energies that should be given a central place in our lives, rather than letting socializing voices talk us out of following these primary forces. This Nietzschean idea was then picked up by Freud, and became a central tenant of his structure of the psyche – the inner workings of our minds and hearts. (There has been a great deal of controversy about Nietzsche’s influence on Freud, but clearly Freud knew a lot about Nietzsche and his ideas, and several major Freudian themes first appeared in Nietzsche’s work.1 And in a biography of Freud by his childhood friend Ernest Jones, it is reported that Freud said of Nietzsche, “He had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.”)2

Not only is whim the starting point of Freud’s theory, but the superego, another crucial part, arose specifically to control our whims, and civilization itself arose primarily to curb the dangers of an unrestrained expression of these basic urges and desires. Another great thinker, Immanuel Kant, maintained that the most important value in life was to follow one’s duty, his bulwark and defense against being led astray by the urge to pursue each passing whim. Many others have argued that both culture and religion arose as attempts to manage the destabilizing effects of whims running free.

Aside from Nietzsche, few have argued that we can let whim totally guide our lives (he made an interesting run at this idea). But most who have considered the role of whims have concluded that they must be moderated and curbed in some way if we are to live healthy and fulfilling lives. The trick is to curb whim’s excesses without destroying our energy and vitality.

All this points to the fact that in its serious form, whim is extremely important, and has even been seen as having the highest value in deciding how we should live. It is in fact because of its power and importance that countless rules, laws, and moral teachings have been promulgated through the centuries in an attempt to contain it, and to mitigate the dangers imagined if it were allowed to run amok in the populace.

For our discussion, let us disagree a bit with Kant, and acknowledge the burst of fresh air that whim and whimsy can bring to our lives, the energy and vitality our drives and urges and instincts can bring to living. On the other end of the scale, let us break somewhat with Nietzsche (to be discussed more fully later), and assume that these energies cannot, by themselves, be the main source for our life decisions. Temporarily adopting these assumptions, let us turn our attention to the second way that can provide guidance for deciding how to live: human culture.

2. Culture
Starting again with Freud (and to understand our own lives in the modern world, we must continually take into account the power and influence of his ideas), we find in his work the belief that culture arose to prevent unrestrained whims from creating chaos in human life, and to restrain and guide our “id” energies so we could live together without constant conflict and strife. And Freud was almost certainly right, at least in part, though it is quite possible that he also missed part of the picture. Looking at culture in a somewhat different way, its purpose seems to be to provide ready-made answers to life’s questions, so that each new human being does not have to answer a limitless number of questions from the beginning of life for themselves. This is not about limiting the “id,” but about building patterns that allow for greater complexity of human functioning, individually and collectively. From this angle, a culture is simply a set of answers to the important questions of life: the best way to do things, how to avoid problems, what is right and wrong, and ultimately, the best way to live a fulfilled life.3

For each new human being, having answers given by one’s culture as a starting point is essential, for if each of us had to answer all life’s questions for ourselves each day, human life as we know it would be impossible. All of our time would be spent “reinventing the wheel” of culture, so to speak. In a very real sense, we live our lives riding on the crest of the wave of our culture. Or to give a different twist to an old saying, we are able to reach so high because we stand on the shoulders of the accumulated wisdom gathered and stored in our cultural systems by those who have gone before.

To be specific, every child who comes into life is immediately thrust into an answer system that provides guidance concerning:

Practical questions:
What is safe to eat?
What clothes shall I wear?
How do I organize my day?
How do I keep from getting hurt?
How do I protect myself from danger?
How do I make my life easier and more comfortable?

Questions about relationships:
What is a safe and acceptable way to fulfill my sexual and emotional needs?
How do I show love and affection appropriately without causing problems?
How do I act toward parents, children, the opposite sex, strangers, enemies?

Questions about living in society:
What will get me in trouble with the authorities?
What is the behavior I can expect from others?
What rules can I insist that others follow?
What can I expect the government to do – and not do?
How are our leaders chosen, and changed?

Questions about values:
What values should I live by?
What is meant by these values such as honesty, integrity, courage, loyalty, etc?
When do these values apply? All the time, or does it vary with circumstances?
Must I live by these values even if it requires a sacrifice?
What is my obligation to those who are suffering?

And of central importance, questions about meaning:
Why am I here?
How should I spend my time?
Does life have a purpose?
What is a meaningful life?
What will bring me happiness?

As discussed in Chapter 3, every child spends his or her formative years being enculturated into some answer system, a culture (sometimes a coherent system, sometimes a confusing and chaotic one), about what is real, what is true, what is right – leading to the formation of the child’s “worldview reality.”

Moving toward adulthood, the child begins to internalize these answers into a basic belief system on which he or she can rely, without having to think through each question every time it arises, sometimes without even needing to become conscious that there is a question to be answered. Relying on these internalized answers, most people through the ages (especially those who always lived in the place they were born, and who had infrequent interaction with other cultures) did not spend much time struggling with most of life’s questions. They simply lived out their lives within the system everybody around them accepted as “right” – functioning on a kind of automatic pilot with respect to the questions of life, an automatic pilot created and maintained by the culture in which they were embedded.

Calamities (wars, famine, drought, epidemics, etc.) sometimes caused migrations of cultural groups to new locales. Other dispersions arose simply from the wanderlust of our race – the urge for a new start, a better life, an adventure. But if a family or group was disrupted from their home ground, they usually carried their culture with them to the new place. Or if an individual or a small group migrated to a new land, they would usually adopt the culture of their new home.4

But for most humans in most places throughout history, answer systems were given by the culture, and people simply “knew” what life was about, what was expected of them, and what they could expect from others. There was a shared reference system, accepted by most everyone you met through the day, and sometimes shared with everyone you encountered during an entire lifetime.

Cultures Create the Framework for Communities,
Communities Are the Living Carriers of Culture

Communities begat cultures. The best evidence suggests that we humans have always lived in communities, and communities inexorably develop patterns of living for their members: ducks gotta swim, communities gotta have cultural patterns.

Therefore, every community, no matter how large or small, has a cultural pattern. When the cultures of today were developing many thousands of years ago, they did so among small communities separated by vast expanses, with differing climates and varying terrains. Thus many different answer systems emerged in these far-flung locales. Sometimes the answers were similar, but these distant communities often developed very different answers to the important questions of life.

As they developed, some of these answer systems worked better than others. Some worked best in a particular region, while others adapted and changed through the centuries, spreading over large territories. A few gradually became broad-based cultural systems, covering large parts of the globe, and continuing (with changes and adaptations) for thousands of years. Today, perhaps half of the people of the earth live within just three of these ancient cultural systems: the Chinese, the Indian, and the Western European – all of which developed their main tenets thousands of years ago.

Yet within these broad frameworks, every person is part of a specific, living community, and individual communities remain the implementation device for cultures. In their living daily-ness, communities are very specific groups of people who interact with one another in highly personal ways. Each exists within a broad cultural framework, but within that overall framework they vary enormously from one to another, with each community developing its own unique way, sometimes incorporating elements from other cultures, and sometimes including elements from cultures that flourished in that locale in earlier times.5

So as a handful of cultures became more and more dominant around the globe, a countervailing force developed, especially in large, crowded cultures: the breakdown of cultural hegemony, and the emergence of more and more subgroups within expansive cultures. As David Brooks writes concerning the United States:

It’s more accurate to say that the country has simply drifted apart into different subcultures . . . Americans have a fuzzy sense of where the boundaries lie . . .

People in different niches have developed different unconscious maps of reality. They have developed different communal understandings of what constitutes a good leader, of what sort of world they live in. They have developed different communal definitions, which they can’t even articulate . . . Demographic groups have begun to function like tribes or cultures.

The mental maps people in different cultures (the subgroups within the broad U.S. culture) form are infinitely complex and poorly understood even by those who hold them.6

In modern times, this countervailing force has been dramatically enhanced by the astounding development and availability of transportation and communication systems, so that communities are less and less defined by geography, and more and more defined by individual interests and inclinations. Thus the community with which a person identifies might range from a broad-ranging racial group to an extended family; from a religious group to a street gang; from the local country club set to a group of soul-mates connected through a web site, Facebook, or text-messaging network. Each of these and thousands more communities are creating their own frameworks for living and being.

Everyone is Part of Some Community

The choices are mind-boggling, but the one choice not available is to be free of community, for everyone – always and everywhere – is part of some community. We humans are communal creatures, always have been, always will be. Even the solitary souls among us, such as the lone cowboy on the range, the Buddhist monk high in the Himalayas, or an adventurer out on an individual trek are all very much part of some community. The cowboy shares a worldview with all those who have gone before, and the cowboy’s life is lived by a code that has been passed down for generations, and is being continuously shared and re-enforced during cattle drives, business transactions, and barroom storytelling and brawls. The monk in the mountains went there because of ideas absorbed through a community, ideas about what was important in life, and how best to achieve these culturally defined goals. Further, each monk sits in his or her cave in relation to a teacher and a teaching, and a pattern of behavior established over thousands of years. The adventurer is attempting feats defined by a community, using tools and techniques perfected through the centuries by a culture. And part of the adventurer’s motivation concerns accomplishing things that have never been done, or rarely done, as defined by his or her community. Would adventurers set off on a quest if they did not have an image of bringing back the story of their adventure to the community that molded their images of its intent and meaning?

Even the most solitary figures are embedded in community and culture in another way: they are reliant on food systems, clothing systems, and value systems established and maintained by others. These systems provide essential logistical support and guidance as to how to go about the role one has chosen to live. The solitary thinker is equally enmeshed. Descartes asserted that the only thing he could know for sure was that there was thinking going on in his mind, and therefore he existed. But the background to the “solitary thinker” Descartes was a human community that provided him with a place to sleep, food to eat, ideas for his thoughts to grow out of, books to read, a monetary system to purchase the necessities of life, a security system to protect him from harm, and a mistress down the hall to satisfy his sexual desires and need for connection to another.7 Would he have been able to recognize his “I Am” without the existence of any of the above?

To emphasize these points: If those we see as individualists are this embedded in community and culture, it is probably truer still for the rest of us. Cultures develop a set of answers to life’s questions, and then enculturate their young into this shared worldview. Communities adapt and implement these answer systems, becoming central threads in our lives, providing on-going, interactive systems of support for our daily living. Mostly we take all this for granted, and this is crucial for a smooth-functioning life. Just imagine what it would be like if the people around you held no common beliefs with regard to values, meanings, or the appropriate way to interact with each other. (A lot of modern literature has to do with young people who feel they share little with their families or communities, giving rise to a sense that they simply do not belong.)

The Rebels

Of course, growing up in stable and established cultures did not keep a few individuals from wrestling with life’s questions for themselves, for humans have always differed from each other, and some individuals have always rebelled, have questioned the “given” order. There have been a few mavericks and outsiders in every culture, no matter how stable. This is in fact one of the main ways cultures change: rebels break the rules and the boundaries, bringing change and innovation.

A few even give rise to new cultural systems.

However, most of us are not full-fledged rebels – and for very good reason: the great majority of rebels have had very difficult lives. They have often been ostracized, banished, ridiculed, and even killed. Because of this, as Dostoyevsky suggested in The Brothers Karamazov, most people don’t want very much freedom – they want to know what the rules and customs are, and they will then mostly try to fit into the system as it is given to them. Thus most of us live out our lives in the cultural systems that spawned us. Recently, brain studies have found one reason for the truth of Dostoyevsky’s insight: the pain of not being included in the in-crowd seems to be experienced in the same way as physical pain, and is registered in exactly the same areas of the brain as physical pain.8

But even the rebels are not free from the effects of culture and community. To be a rebel is to rebel against something, so the rebel is still very much in relation to the thing he or she is rebelling against. Even in rebellion, our communities are still defining us: the relationship is simply one of opposition rather than acquiescence. Further, the form a rebellion takes is often culturally determined, based on stories of previous rebels and their actions. At a deeper level still, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, what the rebel can and cannot see with regard to reality is greatly determined by the culture and the community in which he or she was raised.

To get a true sense of our communal instinct, it is crucial to see that even those who do rebel must have community. Rebels almost never do so alone – they join (or create) a community of rebels. To rebel against one system almost always leads to membership in another. And for those of us who choose to step outside our birth communities without major rebellion, we do not do so in isolation. Instead, we find a new community – an organized group, or at least a group of friends – to help us define our new consensual reality, and to support us in our new beliefs.

Culture and Community – Hard to Live With Them, Impossible to Live Without

So I get up in the morning, and I begin making decisions that will shape the nature of my life, and the person I will become. Do I spend the day doing pleasurable things, or work on a project that might bring achievement? How much of my time will I spend helping others, versus trying to make money? Will I make the effort required to “be somebody” at another level in my community? How much will I let my sexual urges be the center of my attention? What will I do to further my spiritual life?

And of utmost importance, how will I decide these things? I can go with my whims, following my urges and desires one after another. But past experience and observation of others suggests that this, by itself, is a problematic approach, leading to many difficulties and unintended consequences.

Fortunately, therefore, when I was growing up I was given a set of answers to many questions, or at least a framework by which to deal with them. Maybe I will just follow that guidance, and everything will work out fine. Yet as I look around, a lot of the people I know who are following this path aren’t very happy. Some would easily fit into Thoreau’s image of living “lives of quiet desperation.” Still, to even think about stepping outside my culture’s framework is pretty scary. What will people think of me? What if this new path is a total failure, and there is no way back? And isn’t it pretty presumptuous to think I know better than everybody else around?

Yet a lot of wise men and women have advised, and demonstrated by the example of their lives, that only by stepping outside the conditioning of our “given” world will we ever find freedom, or peace, or salvation. Isn’t that what Jesus said: to leave worldly things behind, that only the few who choose the narrow gate will discover true life, and that “the many” (all those choosing the broad gate of the everyday world, following the motivations and guidance of the broader culture) find only destruction?

The Buddha taught something very similar: that you have to leave behind the old ways in order to “wake up” to what is real and true – that the masses are living in illusion, are not awake. Thus he left the idyllic life he had been given as the son of a worldly ruler, and set off to find the truth for himself. Twenty-three hundred years later, in the newness of the fledging United States of America, Henry David Thoreau undertook a similar experiment, and came back from his sojourn with suggestions for living that made him a literary landmark, and an inspiration around the world for millions of people. Many, many other examples could be given. In India, leaving the worldly life to find one’s own answers has become a central tenet of what it means to follow a spiritual life.

In studying these teachings and many others, Joseph Campbell concluded that the story of every hero and heroine in every culture is a story of negotiating one’s escape from the consensual reality of community and culture to pursue the universal quest: breaking free of the conditioning that prevents a direct experience of the deepest truth for oneself. This does not necessarily mean that the truth one discovers is new, although it may be. But any truth accepted without a personal realization of it at the deepest level means that its essence remains unknown, and therefore cannot serve as the basis for a renewed and fulfilled life.

And paradoxically, only after this complete break from the things one was taught can the hero be of real service to the community. It is only then that he can bring back the boon needed to heal the tribe, for it is only in breaking free of the blinders of one’s culture and community that the heroine develops the wisdom to see the true nature of the communal wounds – the ways in which the community and the culture have become stuck, or dysfunctional, or unhealthy. Only then will the new truth, or perhaps the old truth in a new form, burst forth and flower in the land.

In my own life, then, I arrive at this paradox. I was raised to believe that I should not follow my whims, but should instead follow the rules and guidance of my community and my culture – and that this path would lead to a happy and fulfilled life. This teaching is re-enforced by the fact that most people through the ages have followed this path, for as it is expressed in Proverbs, “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Seems a valid path, and it has probably led to many good lives.

Additionally, each of us must live in relation to some community. Only by making the effort to fit into some community, only by making the adjustments and compromises necessary to be a part of some group will the fulfillment of our human lives be found. (To emphasize again, even the solitary pursuit of otherworldly goals always and only occurs within the teachings, guidance, and support of a community of like-minded seekers and teachers. No one goes off to sit in a cave without having the example of mystics and seekers before them, nor without a communal teaching that has defined for them why such a path might be worthwhile.)

On the other side of the paradox, however, many of the wisest among us have counseled that following the rules of the culture in which we live does not lead to wisdom or truth, salvation or freedom. Further, as considered in Chapter 3, some cultures and communities are dysfunctional and unhealthy, and following their rules will not lead to a fulfilled and happy life. Yet if I am embedded in a culture, there is no way for me to know if it is healthy or not, whether it is leading me in a fulfilling direction or not – until and unless I step outside of it far enough and long enough to make a clear decision for myself.

To say all this in a slightly different way: We are each moved from the earliest age by what I have whimsically labeled whim – the raw material of our urges and desires. As we grow up, these whims, and our very natures, are molded and shaped by two overlapping forces, the broad culture of our heritage, and the specific communities in which we live. If we wish to understand ourselves, our lives, and the true nature of the decisions we are making, we must develop an awareness of how these three forces are continuously affecting everything we do. We must learn to recognize our whims, and gain the power to choose or reject as they fit with the person we wish to be, and the life we wish to live. And if we are to consciously participate in the outcome of our lives, we must come to know at a very deep level how our cultures and our communities are asserting their influence – developing the wisdom and courage to choose those things that lead to fulfillment, while rejecting at least some of those that would lead us astray. And we must do all of this while making the compromises and sacrifices necessary to be part of some community.

A tall order! How do we do this? One way, the way we will now explore, is by using a truly amazing faculty: Human Reason.

1 AH Chapman and M Chapman-Santana, "The influence of Nietzsche on Freud's ideas," The British Journal of Psychiatry 166: 251-253 (1995)

2 Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, II, p. 344, 1955.,

3 Where Freud might have been wrong is his insistence that culture arose in response to the id. That is speculation, and other good alternatives exist, which we will consider in future chapters.

4 The first generation of those adopting a new culture do not necessarily have an easy time of it. They can have feelings of not being "at home," or knowing where "home" really is, of not completely trusting their instincts, of not being sure whether the instincts come from the old or the new culture.

5 Imagine for a moment the differences between three communities based on Western European culture but located in rural Montana, the British royal household, and a working-class neighborhood in Rome. They would be quite different, but would share many values as opposed to the vast differences that would be discovered if each were compared to an isolated tribe in New Guinea.

6 David Brooks, New York Times, April, 2008

7 I am indebted to Howard Bloom's writings for re-enforcing my own ideas in this regard, such as his article, The Ghosts of Millions in the Lonely Mind, What Is Enlightenment, August-October, 2008

8 Neuropsychologists Naomi Eisenberger and Matt Lieberman (2005) "Why it hurts to be left out: The neurocognitive overlap between physical and social pain," in Williams, Forgas and Von Hippel (2005) The Social Outcast: Ostracism, Social Exclusion, Rejection and Bullying, Cambridge University Press)