396. False Necessity

When certain ideas have been codified into systems that form the foundation of our society, we feel obligated to act in ways that align with those ideas. These actions feel necessary to us — we feel we must take them in order to survive. We must, for example, align our actions with the demands of our economic system in order to obtain the resources we need to go on living.

This narrow sense of necessity often expands into a more general form. We start to think that it is not just particular actions that are necessitated by the system, but that the system itself is necessary. We start to believe that there is no alternative to the way we’re already doing things and that we must carry on in this way.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Any system made out of rules and norms is one that human beings have created, and its further existence is conditional on our agreement to continue using it. All of the ideas and beliefs that underlie such a system are also contingent in the same way. We could at any time choose to create an entirely different system, which means the perceived necessity of any human-created system is always an illusion.

At the same time, there is something truly necessary. It is the necessity of meeting our many needs. When we are distracted by the false necessities of our created systems, we’re unable to give our attention to the needs present in ourselves and others. The result is that we produce incredible suffering not just for ourselves but for everyone else too.

By systematizing our actions we have also systematized suffering. We have come to see suffering as something we must necessarily endure because our systems compel us to produce endless amounts of it. They do this by distracting us from actual need, and when need goes unmet, suffering always follows.

While we must sometimes take harmful actions just to survive within our existing systems, we must also try to bring this harm to an end. We must free our attention as much as we can, so that we can better see need and the true necessity of responding to it.