Wishing It So (Meghan O’Gieblyn)

“When Schopenhauer wrote of the blind man carrying the lame, sighted man on his back, he was describing the will of nature. But it seemed to me that this metaphor aptly described our position as humans in the twenty-first century: conscious beings who are increasingly helpless against the unconscious forces that are carrying us to some uncertain destination. Weil believed that the complexity of modern life had birthed a second blind will—a global system of economic and political incentives that moved us like puppets and whose motives were not always aligned with our own. “It came to be realized,” she wrote, “that society itself is a force of nature, as blind as the others, as dangerous for man if he does not succeed in mastering it,” and which prevents us “from stamping the world with the seal of our will.” In one of her most striking metaphors, she writes, “On the whole, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travelers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across a broken country.””