The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety.
By Alan Watts. (1915-1973)
Vintage, 1951, 153 pages.
I first read this short collection of essays in 1962, then in 2000, and again in 2020. His ideas and recommendations in this short book, and many other books and recorded lectures by Alan Watts, influenced me greatly in high school, college, and my adult life. I heard him lecture while in college and I remember just laughing a lot with the young audience, and somehow being lifted up into intellectual sophistication. His use of metaphors, analogies, examples, and humor is quite clever. He is full of pithy, wise, and accurate observations; and, his thoughts are relevant in 2022. His popular explanation of various philosophical and religious views sometimes wavers, falters, and misses the mark; however, he hits the mark more often than not.
The main thrust of the book is that our lived experience, always in the present, does not provide us with evidence for an enduring self or soul. That ideas and concepts are useful, but are not to be confused with the reality of our current experience. That thinking and language can separate us from our existential body-mind. That memories of past experiences or anticipation of future experiences may be misleading us about our true identity. That since we cannot loose what we never had (an eternal, enduring, essential self/soul); our anxiety and insecurity should be dissolved by awareness of our actual experiences. That science and technology are indeed useful, but may condition us in ways that cause more stress and anxiety. That the fact that uncertainty and death are real, and how we should abandon hope in life being otherwise and being fundamentally insecure. That American society is stumbling towards insecurity and unhappiness.
His critiques of American social views and practices are very insightful, and still quite relevant:
"Thus the "brainy" [over-emphasis of thinking over immediate direct experience] economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse- providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect "subject" [viewer, customer] for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kinds which can go with him at all hours and in all places [smartphones in 2020]. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, [to Internet], to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity - shock treatments - as "human interest" shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.
For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays - to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all which will conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more."
The Wisdom of Insecurity, p. 62.
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