As I thought about yesterday's post on self destructive cycles of world civilizations, it reminded me of an amazing 2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College given by David Foster Wallace. The quote below is an interesting insight into worship that comes from his speech. Sadly, David Foster Wallace was plagued by depression for many years which culminated in his suicide in 2008. Before his death he was a professor at Ponoma college and a gifted writer.
"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.
The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it Jesus Christ or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. It's the truth.
Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.
Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over the others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on." -David Foster Wallace
