Survival is Insufficient

T S Eliot once wrote: “Where is the Life that we have lost in living”?

Many people, in their pursuit of materialism, comfort and approval, have lost awareness of why they are here, and are wasting their precious lives.

Do we desire liberty, freedom and individuality, or do we prefer to be part of a “hive mind”, a “collective”? There is no doubt that it is hard to be alone, to think differently from the collective mind.

Dedicated followers of Star Trek will be familiar with the expression “Survival is Insufficient”. It derives from an episode where several members of the “Borg Collective” cease to be “assimilated”, and manage to recover their former pre-collective “self”, and become individuals again.

Their “return to individuality” had a glitch however: It could only be short-lived, as the human body was unable to live for long anymore without the Borg implants.

For these newly-freed individuals, the question therefore was: does the individual desire a short period of freedom before an early death, or a longer life of mere survival, controlled and without freedom, by returning to the Collective?

The decision taken by these newly-freed individuals was that “survival is insufficient”. Mere survival is not a life. They chose short-lived freedom rather than the controlled collective life.

In his short novel Klingsor’s Last Summer, Hermann Hesse expressed the need not to waste time through pandering to human traits such as fearing failure, seeking approval, and preferring to be part of a collective. He wrote:

Life passes like a flash of lightning

Whose blaze barely lasts long enough to see.

While Earth and Sky stand still forever

How swiftly changing time flies across man’s face.

O you who sit over your full cup and do not drink

Tell me whom are you waiting for?

In the excellent 2016 film Arrival about communicating with an alien species, the leading character in the movie asks her husband: “If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things”?

To put the question another way, if we knew that down the timeline we would experience pain and loss, would we change or curtail that existence, or our time shared with a person?

The answer should be “no”, as otherwise (in the words of TS Eliot), we have lost the Life in living.

We must live, and have no regrets about failure, loss, endings. If we can always see the road ahead, it probably isn’t worth the trip.

Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 wonderful post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven borrows the phrase “survival is insufficient” from Star Trek.

In the book, after most of the world die in a flu epidemic, some survivors decide to form a travelling group to perform Shakespeare, accompanied by musicians, even though the roads they travel on are dangerous. The travelling group’s motto is “survival is insufficient”, because even post-apocalypse, where survival is an all-consuming activity, life must be more than this.

Incidentally, post-apocalyptic living is a frightening prospect, and Station Eleven portrays the horror even better than (say) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Neville Shute’s On the Beach, or Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. It is a world of loss, where the all-pervading pettiness of pre-apocalypse living can be seen as a luxury. Pettiness was no longer possible.

Yet society today is losing its soul, its individuality. This move to a “collective mind” can be traced back to the start of the digital revolution in the 90s, when military and intelligence agencies realised that the worldwide web could be utilised to capture what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations.

It transpires that people can make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns, just like birds do.  So two monster technocratic corporations were created, Google and Facebook, to enable people to be tracked in an organised way, and uncover extensive hidden data on potentially every person on the planet. Human “birds of a feather” programming is now essentially complete, with the authorities now able to predict, and change, human thoughts and actions.

But there should still be room on the planet for individuality.

We should keep reminding ourselves in these difficult times of the Star Trek mantra: Survival is Insufficient.

4 August 2022

[Book review: Emily St John Mandel – “Station Eleven”]