Well, Govardhan is Govardhan. Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a mathematician and domestic terrorist. The Twilight Zone was a science fiction television series that was popular during my youth.
How could you possibly put them together?
Just watch me!
Govardhan
On my twice-weekly walk around Govardhan, just past Jatipura, on the path hugging the hill, a row of shanty-like brick houses sits on my left, facing the hill. I usually pass them at the hour when a pipe running along the ground in front of the houses carries sweet water. It flows for only one hour per day.
Each family has a primitive hand pump attached to that pipe, and they scurry to fill a motley collection of containers, from aluminum cooking pots to large industrial blue plastic barrels, gathering as much water as they can for the day. Each family seems to have its own method, and you can’t live without sweet water.
Yet in this daily ritual I saw a joy that many of us lack — the fulfillment of working directly for one’s own sustenance.
In my mind, I contrasted this with my new ashram, where high-pressured water, hot if I prefer, flows effortlessly twenty-four hours a day. I’m not knocking the convenience. But there is something in connecting directly with your own needs that touches your inner being.
I had a glimpse of this years ago, as a Brooklyn-born city boy in college away from home. For a time, I lived in a small farmhouse and grew my own vegetables. There was a particular satisfaction in tending the soil, watching things grow, and finally eating what I had cultivated. It was a connection to life that was hard to articulate but unmistakable.
I still can’t quite put my finger on it. But watching those families gather their daily water in front of their homes, I felt I was witnessing something more than practical necessity. I saw a simple integrity and meaning that comes from working directly to sustain oneself. Perhaps there is a fulfillment that doesn’t come from having what we need, but rather from taking part in obtaining it. And perhaps that is one of the subtle things modernity, for all its comforts, has caused us to lose.
Ted Kaczynski[1]
Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a gifted mathematics professor who abandoned his academic career to pursue a reclusive, primitive lifestyle. He had become frustrated with what he saw as the pernicious effects of industrialization on society, and the destruction of the wilderness around his secluded cabin only deepened his rage.
In a sense, he had a right to be upset, but his response was inexcusable. The mad genius lost his mind and waged a lone-wolf bombing campaign that lasted seventeen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three. Yet his writings are brilliant. Below are some impressions I took from his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.”[2]
Kaczynski argues that human beings have a basic psychological need to set goals, make a real effort to achieve them, and succeed in reaching at least some of them. To illustrate his point, he describes the opposite — a man robbed of that need because he can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. At first such a man has a lot of fun, but “by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized,” and eventually he may become clinically depressed.
His point is that possessing things is not enough. A person needs goals whose attainment requires real effort, and for most of human history those goals were tied directly to survival. One of his criticisms of industrial society, therefore, is that once the natural struggle to survive has been removed, people invent artificial goals, such as hobbies, status-climbing, and consumption, that leave them “never satisfied, never at rest.” The result is a society plagued by “boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility.”
In his view, a life in which effort is unnecessary and every need is met, the very goal of industrial society, would not be a paradise but a slow torment. For it is the simple struggles of life, he opined, directly connected to our sustenance, that produce satisfaction, self-esteem, and a sense of purpose.
And that’s what I saw today.
The Twilight Zone
When I was growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, one of the most popular shows on television was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a science fiction anthology series in which ordinary people find themselves in strange or disturbing circumstances. Each story ends with a surprising twist and a moral. The stories were gripping, brilliantly done, and thought-provoking. Today’s walk brought one of them to mind.
The man Kaczynski described, who could have anything he wanted simply by wishing for it, had already been brought to life decades earlier in an episode of The Twilight Zone.[3]
Rocky Valentine, a petty thief, is killed in a shoot-out with the police. He wakes up to find a portly guardian angel in a white three-piece suit who introduces himself as Pip. Pip takes him to a luxury suite in a five-star hotel and fulfills his every desire. Rocky gambles and never loses, and he gets any girl he wants. He assumes he is in heaven and is quite shocked to realize that he, a petty thief, achieved that.
To make a long story short, after a while he becomes utterly bored and begs Pip for some challenge. But when Pip offers to arrange one, it only enrages him, for a challenge arranged in advance is no challenge at all, he argues. Finally, he tells Pip that he doesn’t belong in heaven and begs to be sent to “the other place.” Pip turns serious, looks him in the eye, and says with a touch of cruelty, “Whatever gave you the idea you were in heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!” Then Pip breaks into sadistic laughter. Rocky is in hell: a place without challenge, where nothing he does carries any sense of dignity or accomplishment.
Yes, there is a certain dignity and sense of accomplishment that comes not merely from having what we need, but from taking part in obtaining it. That is the message conveyed by the life of a petty thief in television hell, the reflections of a mad genius in his cabin, and, most importantly, what I witnessed today on my Govardhan walk in the faces of those families gathering their daily supply of sweet water!
In one sense, my post logically ends here. But I can’t help sharing one more thought that came to me as I reflected on all this — a word of caution that seems more relevant today than ever.
A life in which technology promises to provide us with everything, while asking so little of us, may look like heaven. But it can quietly become something else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
[2] “Industrial Society and Its Future,” appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, September 19, 1995. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Industrial%20Society%20and%20Its%20Future.pdf.
[3] The Twilight Zone | Man Discovers He’s Not Actually in Heaven (S1, E28) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcxfuUVOvZU.