26 beyond wishful thinking
ourselves. In failing to confront them, we cease to awaken to a greater
life from the sleepwalking of compromise, conformity, and the petri-
fi ed self. We seize upon devices and stratagems that divide and enslave
us under the pretext of empowering us.
Our susceptibility to belittlement is a per sis tent and pervasive fea-
ture of our experience. However, it is not, like mortality, groundless-
ness, and insatiability, an irreparable defect in human life. It allows for
a range of response, both individual and collective, in biographical as
well as historical time. It is, consequently, not to be mistaken for a
fourth incurable defi ciency in the human condition.
Just what we can and should do about our susceptibility to belittle-
ment, as individuals and as societies, is crucial to the course of life and
to the advance of humanity. Our struggle with the threat of belittle-
ment can easily be misdirected. One such false direction seeks to avoid
or overcome belittlement by holding before us false hope of escaping
our mortality, our groundlessness, or our insatiability. Another mistaken
path accepts a par tic u lar established, or proposed, regime of society or
of thought as the defi nitive template for our triumph over belittlement.
Th e most important disorientation of all fails to see how the conduct of
life may preserve us from the evils of belittlement, so long as we are not
overwhelmed by the frailties of the body and the cruelties of society. It
regards belittlement as no more avoidable than death.
What we are to do about our susceptibility to belittlement has al-
ways been a theme in the religious consciousness of humanity. For the
more than twenty- fi ve hundred years that witnessed the emergence,
spread, and infl uence of the present world religions, it has, however,
remained largely a subterranean theme. An argument of this book is
that it should now become a central and guiding concern.
Th e generic antidote to belittlement is empowerment, collective or in-
dividual. Th ere are principal false forms of individual and collective
empowerment: a species of each that now exercises commanding infl u-
ence. Th ey are not false in the sense that they fail to increase the power
of the species or of the individual. Th ey are false in the sense that, de-
spite their contribution to our empowerment, they cannot keep their
promises; they fail to repair our susceptibility to belittlement, as it must
be faced by each man and woman in the course of life. I call the chief