Talking with the Elite

 

 

In 1965 I began to attend university at UC Berkeley. In my second year, I shared an old house with two upper classmen who both esteemed themselves to be exemplars of the best that philosophy had to offer. Now such arrogance would be a turn-off to me, but then I felt privileged to be living with such “great” philosophers even as I observed them doing morally troubling things.

 

However, I was quick to believe that everything I had previously learned was even more corrupt, the product of a fascist state. I was asked to address a class at the high school from which I had graduated. I told these students that everything that they were learned was wrong, and surprisingly no one corrected me.

 

How had we become so primed to believe the new narrative? Why did I? During my last year at Berkeley, my roommate Phil (not his real name) brought back to our apartment, a stranger he had met on campus. Charlie needed a place to “crash,” and we had a couch in our living room. If I had met Charlie today, I would have described him as a genuine nut-case. He talked about “dropping acid” and dancing with the energy waves emitted by trees. Once while dancing with a tree in someone’s back yard, he was arrested.

 

For the week that Charlie stayed with us. He did all the talking, and Phil and I didn’t mind since we regarded him as cool, even “evolved.” Phil even asked me one evening who Charlie reminded me of. I couldn’t think of anyone. So Phil offered, “Doesn’t he remind you of Jesus?” It didn’t seem to matter that Charlie talked about his desire to kill cops. After all, they were the supporters of this oppressive society, right! However, that was cool in our way of thinking. We both smoked weed and therefore regarded cops as an evil threat. They stood as proof that this was a cruel and oppressive society maintained by thugs. But why didn’t we see that we were thug-sympathizers and potential thugs ourselves!

 

Years later I was able to put two and two together and realized that our house-guest was Charlie Manson, thug par-excellence! How had we been taken in by him? How had the radical profs at the university been able to mold us according to their worldview?

 

The university community provided a highly compelling environment, at least once you learned who to avoid the narrow-minded frat-rats who were too interested in drinking, sports, and girls to bother with questioning their lives. Despite priding ourselves that we were members of the awake elite, we were insecure and quite vulnerable to wondering whether we have what it takes to realize our dreams. So we rejected our materialistic dreams as part of the self-destructive rat-race, which everyone was requiring us to run. Instead, we became convinced that it was weed that would enable us to transcend the “maya” so that we could see what life was all about. We were the idealistic and “awake.”

Early on, I joined the West Oakland Project that enlisted Berkeley students to become teachers’ assistants in slum schools, but I was always troubled by the fact that it was all about me and what I could get out of the experience instead of the students. But if it was about me, why was I maintaining this charade, especially if there wasn’t any transcendent and objective moral truths? If I was to live in a genuine manner, I should quit the Project and live for my own pleasures, and this was what I that unsuccessfully to do.

 

Shouldn’t my experience have enabled me to talk persuasively to university students? It didn’t seem to. Even though they seem determined to live according to their ideals, these ideals are without the foundation of an unchanging right and wrong, just and unjust—a pie in the sky—and perhaps they might even realize this.

 

I engaged two young ladies carrying  “No Justice, No Peace” placards. I asked them, “Is there something intrinsically real about the concept of justice or is it merely a concept we invented to give our lives meaning?” Would they capitalize on this opportunity to convert an old-soul into a follower?  Instead, they walked on. Did they realize that they had no adequate answer or did they realize that their idealism was merely an act of desperation to live meaningfully in a meaningless world? In any event, they had also taken a bite out of postmodernism where there existed no common moral or spiritual truth. Instead, each had to find his own “truth.” If it worked for you, then it was your truth, but how could this be a matter of truth? I would ask NYU students, “Is it wrong to torture babies?” However, they were unable to answer. Why? Their heart was telling them one thing while their university-trained minds told a different story. After a couple years of this, I found that no one wanted to talk.