Mind and Body

The inventor, as Tesla points to; the creative, as Becker names; the spiritual, as religions refer to; and the masses, as they are looked down upon.
None is the true human. None is the epitome of the human condition. Each one is the human. Each one is part of what it means to be human.

I read The Tyranny of Merit by Sandel and started thinking about the feeling of not being valued as a member of society. A feeling that many blue-collar workers now experience, probably leading them to despair and worse.
I got to experience this fear myself, firsthand. I realized that I have been programmed to fear slipping into being a non-productive member of society in some stereotypical sense. I felt the need to make sure that I am useful in one way or another.

This is something that I am actively trying to reprogram myself from. I try to avoid seeing my value only through the lenses of society, and to be confident in my being as a value in itself. I need not perform to be absolved.
I believe that every human being has intrinsic value that no one should ever doubt, question, or demand to see proven on the spot.

And this got me thinking: the definition of value in our age, which Sandel calls “merit”, is an illusion. It’s a shared illusion that requires the participation of its members to hold.
And this meaning of value is ever shifting. In another place in the world, one’s value is in social generosity. In another time and place, it was being a Samurai. In another time, it was being a craftsman. In another time, it was being a farmer. And I think now my thought is clear.

So, if merit is an illusion that can be changed, and blue-collar workers are hurt by it, why not change the meaning of value themselves as well? The illusion holds because they are also participating in it.
So why wouldn’t those who are hurt the most by merit drop this illusion and make up their own? What is it that these people need but cannot make for themselves?

Then Tesla’s words hit me. Tesla, in his book My Inventions, saw himself as an inventor. His mother and father were also inventors in his eyes. He attributed invention to the most important core of a human being — the core that helps the human race evolve and survive.

But what was Tesla’s definition of invention? From what I gathered from his book, it was mainly engineering.

Tesla spent his life designing and creating tools. He praised his mother for being an inventor by planting her seeds, weaving her wool, and mending her house.
For Tesla, the human was an inventor (i.e., an engineer).

Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, looked at the human condition from the creative angle. A philosopher and psychologist whose task was to dismantle the human condition and make it explainable.

Becker did not mention a single engineer in his book, just as Tesla did not bother to think that thinking itself could be the end goal of invention.

Tesla and Becker made me think of two highly valuable and esteemed kinds of people in our current era who missed seeing each other as indispensable to one another.
The thinker cannot survive without the inventor inventing tools for survival and exploration. And the inventor could not invent those tools without others who decided to only think without doing.

Then this thought came to me. If these — the people who can manoeuvre the systems we create — missed this important entanglement, how could blue-collar workers do so?

Blue-collar workers do not rely on their thinking or inventive faculties in the current stereotypical sense, but rather on their hard work and emotions.
Two aspects that I often see neglected in our rhetoric, or even looked down upon as belonging to the material world that “the creative human always tries to dominate.”

But what is a creative or an inventor without a body? What are they without emotions? What are they without lived experience?

I have this thought that maybe blue-collar workers cannot escape the current illusion and make their own simply because this is not their job.

Just as a thinker’s job is not to engineer, and an engineer’s job is not to sit in silence and think.

Blue-collar workers need the creatives to change the narrative for them, because it is the creatives who make narratives in the first place. Just as the creatives need the blue-collar workers to echo the feeling and create the lived experience that the creative thought of — to see whether it ever had truth in it.

I found myself circling the blue-collar dilemma when I faced an unsettling feeling while reading Tesla’s book. I esteemed Tesla as a great thinker, and I could recognize a great thinker because I consider myself a thinker.

But in Tesla’s book, it felt like Tesla might not have recognized me. I can end my work at thinking, but what Tesla valued more was invention — moving thought into the material world through engineering.

I found solace in remembering Becker’s book, which focuses solely on the human as a thinker. But this is when I noticed the trap. The trap of seeing one side and dismissing the other. The trap that the people I considered valuable for their cognitive faculties had fallen into.

And this got me thinking about how blue-collar workers, who do not pay heed to these complicated cognitive realms, could ever free themselves from such intricate narratives.

I draw my metaphors from my currently lived experience of trying very hard to integrate both my mind and body. I have relied heavily on my mind throughout my life, and only recently came to realize how much I neglected my body.

My body does not speak in words or thoughts as my brain does. My body only speaks in emotions and sensations. My body is often much wiser than my brain when it comes to dealing with life and handling it. Yet it was pushed to the sideline only because it lacks expression in words.

My body cannot change my narrative, because narratives are the work of the brain. And my body cannot survive without my brain just as my brain cannot survive without my body. So my body does whatever it can with the limited resources it has. It can be destructive. It can fall into despair. It can be a pain in my brain’s a**.

But with all this, it has been steadily doing one magnificent thing.
It stayed with me.

If humanity as a whole resembles anything within each single human, it might be this.
Humanity is a mind and a body, just as a single human is a mind and a body.
One cannot survive without the other. And both speak in different languages and actions.
If the mind believes that its task is to dominate the body, then the situation will crumble. For I believe that harmony and value come from integration, not domination.