Divertissement

Nothing new under the sun... Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.

- Ecclesiates 1

Nothing is so onerous to people as to be completely at peace...no passions, no business, no diversions, no study. Their nothingness is felt; falseness, insufficiency, dependence, weakness...

- Pascal

According to Pascal a society is made up of the diversions it creates. Social diversions function to quiet personal angst. Useless businesses invent artificial needs, creating unnecessary competition for contrived markets, bidding on limited sources of raw materials, while contributing no real production, in order that citizens may escape from their own lack of substance...and to cater to their desire to differentiate...and to allay their own potential boredom. These inventions may pretend to exalt human ingenuity, but in fact they only enthral people to greater dependency. However, in the end the people themselves who are enrolled in this sham likewise become objects. Society shames those who are unfaithful to what society supposedly better-knows. In all of this society pretends to exalt humanity’s liberties but in fact only enslaves people to those things upon which they have come to depend. Citizens become dependent upon their own ever-increasing needs and restlessness and dissatisfaction and anxiety and fear. This is what Pascal sees as the function of divertissement. And it is insidious. However, it is not only secular societies that run this way, because most sacred societies in the West have learned to function in this manner as well, creating false markets which are designed to fulfill the contrived needs of their adherents.

The actual reign of God, however, is manifest on earth by a sacred society of people who are not unified by a socially contrived, divinely-enlightened, self-justified self-interest. Instead, these are identified and united by their tangible sacrificial love (i.e. the unqualified regard for all others) lived out through compassion (i.e. having their guts moved in response to another’s plight, setting oneself on hold, and meeting these others’ needs on their terms). These liberate themselves from diversions, which are obviously meaningless in this light. These renounce immediate satisfactions in order to relieve the needs of others, witnessing to this alternate source of truth. This is that with which we are left when we genuinely refuse to recoil from our own finitude and mortality. The way to discover this is not by talent or education or insight, but by sorrow and humility and reflection and dying to ourselves. In other words, it is essentially contemplative in nature. This does not mean that we cannot be active in living out life, but that activity itself must be carefully meted out only inasmuch as it contributes to our true self.