Robert Greene argues that humans have a deep drive to transcend our insignificance, rooted in awareness of mortality. This hunger for the sublime can channel into religion and meaning, or into what he calls the false sublime: substance abuse, extremism, and other destructive escapes. Without healthy outlets, the need turns toxic.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Scott. Barry Kaufman was on the show recently and he said, I've read everything that Maslow didn't publish. And his final phase was transcendence. That's something that's necessary for humans. And here you are getting to the same place with, you know, the law of the sublime. Very similar territory there. Do you think that's a necessary part of being a human? Is that part of our hierarchy of needs?
I think so, and I very much delved into it. I want to find out the origin and my sense of it is, the way I write about it, and of course I could be wrong, is that it has roots that go back hundreds of thousands of years to the point where humans first became conscious of their world, right? So other animals are obviously aware of space and space around their environment. We're the only animals that are conscious of time, right? We're aware of the passage of time in a way, because we're aware of our own mortality. And whenever that moment happened, I don't know how many thousands of years ago was a turning point in our evolution. And so we looked up in the sky and we began to imagine something like eternity, like endless space and endless time. And we were kind of awestruck by it. And we were, we felt very small in relationship to everything around us. And so we had to kind of find a way to tame, to sort of deal with our insignificance in some way. And that's sort of, in some sense the origins of religion. Although I am truncating things horrifically right now. But anyway, so embedded in us is the knowledge of our essential insignificance, right? In the sense of, yes spatially, but also time wise, that our meager little 80 years of existence, if we live that long, compared to 13 billion years of the existence of our universe, as far as we know is the proportions are just impossible for us to even begin to measure, to gauge. It's beyond our comprehension. And so that sense of awe and kind of insignificance at the same time is to me the essence of the sublime. And the idea that we want to somehow transcend the limits of our own life, the banality of our own life, that we only have this short time to live, that our childhood and our youth passes, and that we're continually just taking one step closer to death, is deeply, deeply embedded in human nature. And so where I take this a step further is I talk about the false sublime. It's so embedded in our nature to want to transcend our circumstances, that if you can't find your way to do that in some. I hate to use the word healthy, but I will go ahead and use that word healthy way. You'll find it in other ways, inevitably, because you can't avoid this need. You will take drugs in a bad way, because there is take drugs in a good way. You will become an alcoholic. You will become addicted to online porn. You will join some political cause where you'll be able to vent all your spleen and anger and hatred about people without ever having to look at yourself. You will find your way to transcend yourself in a false way, like through the group, you know, like in a kind of a fascist way or whatever. So you can't avoid this dynamic, this desire for transcendence. It will find you in some way.
