Episode #170 -Transcript

So one of the things people have requested the MOST over the years on this podcast are more episodes on Albert Camus. He was a French, Algerien, Absurdist philosopher KNOWN for his fiction, nominated for the nobel prize in literature I think 11 different times. And I thought it might be interesting to think about WHAT he would possibly have to say to this hypothetical, protagonist we’ve been talking about in our ongoing, creation of meaning series. For anyone who’s unaware or for anyone who’s listening to the podcast for the first time…the premise of this series goes a little something like this:

Imagine someone who DOESN’T believe in a God, DOESN’T believe there is any sort of intrinsic meaning or moral code WRITTEN into the universe. How does that person not only start CREATING a system of values… but how do you GROUND it in something that is on ONE hand…open ended enough for you to REVISE your values with the new circumstances you FIND yourself in…but on the OTHER hand have it be ENDURING enough, that your FEELINGS in a given moment don’t DICTATE everything that you do? What mistakes…do we gotta look out for if we’re trying to manufacture stability in an unstable universe? 

That’s the premise here…and it should be said Camus is NOT the guy that’s gonna think the SOLUTION to existential dread, is for someone to just CREATE a system of meaning out of thin air…however that’s NOT to say that he wouldn’t have a LOT of good advice to give someone that was EMBARKING out on that sort of quest. 

In fact, the main character in one of his FINAL books called The Fall…a book released just a couple years before he died in a car accident when he was CLEARLY about to head into a new direction with his work…the main character of The Fall in MANY ways can be seen as a GREAT example of what NOT to do, as someone creating a system of meaning.

Because it might be tempting at first… to think that the biggest obstacle in your way when it comes to finding meaning in life is the fact that you live in a disinterested universe that doesn’t care about you… and that’s certainly something...we've considered this we've talked about beauvoir, nietzsche, kierkegaard, becker, cioran and all the rest of them. But something Camus in PARTICULAR is going to warn us about in this book dare I say BETTER than all the others, are the pitfalls… of self-deception. In other words, you can have the greatest plan in the world, right…you can come up with a dynamic, pluralistic value system that represents EXACTLY who you want to be and you can be RELIGIOUSLY committed to carrying it out…but if at the end of that process you’re just kidding yourself…if you’re just playing some psychological game that allows you to never take responsibility for your values for more than just a couple days…the biggest obstacle to their being lasting MEANING in your life could actually be, YOU.

So with that said…The Fall is the book we’re going to be talking about today. The actual TITLE of the book, the Fall, is a reference to the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden, we all know the story, Adam and Eve, God tells em, “better not eat that fruit over there!”...they have a conversation with the nice snake gentleman in the garden, they take a bite from the apple, and now we are all implicated in the doctrine of original sin. 

Camus, of course, doesn’t believe in ANY of this. He doesn’t believe in a God or any sort of moral commands handed down that we could be disobedient against in the FIRST place. What he DOES believe though…is that this is a powerful metaphor for the fall of MODERN humanity, that’s us!  

A SIMILAR fall… in the way we OFTEN see ourselves in our lives, from a high place of a delusional, self-perceived INNOCENCE…to a more self-aware, humbled place where we recognize how implicated and responsible we are for our own actions…and ALL THE GAMES we try to play along the way to AVOID that guilt, that judgment, that responsibility. 

The book is at its core a critique of modern people and modern society…the main CHARACTER of the book is the sort of poster child for all this. And the hope is that by LISTENING to such an extreme example of the hypocrisy of modern society that we might be able to see PIECES of this hypocrisy in ourselves and come out the other side of this book with a little LESS self-deception about how we fit into things in the world. 

Now…the last thing that I ever wanna do here is have this episode sound like a book report. Stand up in front of the class…the central theme of chapters 2 and 3 is to believe in yourself… No, I wanna talk about the philosophical themes here, some of which can get a little dark and unstructured given the absurdist philosophy of Camus not restricted to chapters. But in order to do that, I’m gonna have to explain the main character of the book, so bear with me during the couple moments I gotta DO that on this podcast, like right now:

The story begins in a bar in Amsterdam, of all places. The main character is a guy named Jean Baptiste Clamence…obvious biblical reference to John the Baptist. 

Clamence is sitting at the bar talking to the person that’s sitting next to him ordering a drink. Now, the person he’s talking to… you QUICKLY realize…that it doesn’t really matter… WHO they are. This person barely speaks over the course of the entire book. They could be anyone. They could even be… YOU. And that’s KIND of the effect Camus is going for here. 99% of the book… is just Clamence, more or less talking AT this person, ABOUT himself. Anecdotes from his life, his thoughts about other people, his thoughts about HIS…thoughts …like if you’ve ever known anyone in your life that’s prone to going on long narcissistic dramatic monologues about themselves…they’d probably be a big fan of Jean Baptist Clamence and his work I mean it truly is a glorious display of narcissism……and without question some of the first shots fired by Camus at a type of person that is RAMPANT within modern society. 

Now what becomes obvious as Clamence starts talking about himself is that he is not a very happy person. I mean not only is he sitting in the middle of a bar in Amsterdam…not ONLY is he drinking…but then you find out he’s drinking gin. I mean that’s just nasty. This man clearly doesn’t love himself anymore…and as a reader you can’t HELP but start to wonder what happened to this man that got him down to such a lowly place? And as he goes on what you discover is that WHAT happened to him…is that he had a bit of what you could call…a fall, in his life. That he used to be ONE version of himself before…some events played out in his life that LED to his fall… and now he finds himself in a bar in Amsterdam talking to strangers. He starts out by telling the person next to him about the man that he used to be. 

He tells him that before the fall… not too long ago… Clamence used to live in the city of Paris. He was a successful trial lawyer. He was SO successful at being a lawyer that he CHOSE all the cases that he took on because there was some sort of charitable angle to them, he would defend widows… he would defend orphans… he would defend people accused of crimes that couldn’t otherwise afford a good criminal defense. Seems like a nice enough guy. 

Outside of his job… he was seemingly an even BETTER person. He lived in a high rise loft. He dressed well. He was charming. He was successful in his love life given his own interpretation of that. He was the kind of guy that would offer up his seat on the bus if someone was standing. He was the kind of guy that would stop and give people directions if they were lost. He helped blind people and old ladies cross the street. This is the kind of stuff he would DO with his free time throughout the day. 

He didn’t believe in God, whatsoever, but nonetheless he says when he takes a second and he just stops and thinks about just how great of a guy he is…he can’t HELP but think that he was CHOSEN in some way by the universe. And he doesn’t even BELIEVE in stuff like that but it just FEELS that way to him sometimes. Like he’s special. Yes…Clamence was a pretty great guy. People couldn’t seem to get enough of him. Or… was ALL of this…some sort of elaborate, multi level deception that was going on? 

Something Camus would want us to consider at this point is that FROM the outside…not knowing ANYTHING else about Clamence and the kind of stuff that’s going on inside of his head…this charitable, successful lawyer, is the KIND of person that other people might look up to. This SEEMS like someone who may have done something similar to this creation of meaning series…doesn’t believe in God, and yet still finds a way to BRING what SEEMS like a solid moral foundation to his work and to his small role in society at large. 

But there is so much more… to BEING a strong person with a moral foundation than just keeping up outward appearances. 

Because AS CLAMENCE says later on in the book…looking BACK on the way he acted everyday as a lawyer in Paris…in retrospect he was a TOTAL FRAUD. He says one way he KNOWS that is this one time he was helping a blind dude across the street…and then after the blind guy was safe on the other side, as Clamence is walking away, he TIPS his hat to the man as a token of respect. But I mean…the MAN’S BLIND! WHY would I do that he says? Why would I tip my hat if it wasn’t some sort of PERFORMANCE I was putting on for all the other people watching? 

And this goes with giving up his seat on the bus…this goes with the cases he chooses as a lawyer…ALL of this has NOTHING to do with some moral code he’s living by and EVERYTHING to do with feeling superior to others around him. This is the kind of guy in modern society that has a conversation with someone who clearly knows less than HE does about something…and he feels the need to subtly make them AWARE of how just how INFERIOR they are to him in that area…NEEDING that validation from everyone. 

On top of that…he’s a smart guy…so he understands perfectly well which values the society around him appreciates and expects of people… and if ASKED for the values that mean the most to him…he could EASILY come up with a LIST of the values that he’s emulating.

But the truth is…if ANYTHING… were to EVER come along in his life and TEST any one of these values…he would absolutely crumble. None of these values people SEE in him from the outside would hold up…because he doesn’t really CARE about any one of them, he’s just putting on a performance so that he LOOKS superior to others. And it is THIS moral BANKRUPTCY that would lead to his eventual fall.

Camus uses symbolism in the book to accent this fall…it’s a fall from way up high…the high rise lofts of Paris with this over inflated idea of how great he is…falling, tumbling all the way down to amsterdam, below sea level where clamence compares the various canals in the city to the seven circles of hell in dante’s inferno. Clamence sits, in a bar, in the deepest circle of hell, telling strangers the story of his fall…and here is that story.

Three events, in his life took him from thinking he is God’s gift to humanity…to some random guy in a bar, drinking a juniper bush, confessing his sins to all the people around him. The first event is something similar to a road rage incident in today’s world. One day as Clamence is walking around town, there’s a guy whose motorcycle stalls in the middle of the road…Clamence starts talking to him, it escalates somehow, now they’re screaming at each other, there’s a crowd that’s forming on the side of the street watching this all go down, and someone from the crowd sneaks up behind him, sucker punches him and knocks him on the ground.

Now this moment…was a traumatizing moment for Clamence and his ego. Keep in mind the kind of modern person we’re talking about here: this is the kind of guy whose values have never REALLY  been tested in his life. This is a guy that goes throughout his day and TRULY believes that NOBODY talks bad about him behind his back. That he’s ALWAYS on the right side of the argument. That NO one sees through his charm. This is the kind of guy that would probably sit around and FANTASIZE about road rage situations like this and what he would do. 

Imagining all the things, the dude on the bike would say to him… and then he’d be Socrates just dressing him down in front of the crowd, everyone’s laughing. Imagining someone sneaking up behind him about to hit him…that classic “what I woulda done if I was there mentality…” I woulda seen the guy coming up behind me, I got GREAT peripheral vision on my grandfather’s side I woulda seen that guy coming… slipped his punch… and then gave him the old tiger paw to the kneecap or something. Put that man on the ground. That’s what I woulda done.

And in reality it’s like…no…no you WOULDN’T have. What would happen is you would get sucker punched just like anybody else would. One of the things Camus is alluding to here is the fact that it’s VERY EASY to live in a safe bubble you’ve created for yourself in modern society, come up with all the values that MATTER to you, practically NEVER have your values tested…and then like Clamence…have an extremely over-inflated idea of what you would do in some hypothetical scenario, all the while JUDGING other people for how THEY mishandled it in your eyes.

You hear people SAY stuff like this sometimes…they’ll say if I lived in 1930s Germany I would’ve been one of the brave ones standing UP to Hitler…or if I lived in the mid 1800’s I would’ve been one of the people on the underground railroad trying to liberate people. But the fact is there’s no shortage in TODAY’S world of horrible things going on to innocent people within your reach, and you have to ask yourself… how often am I CURRENTLY putting my own safety and my family’s safety in danger for the sake of correcting some grave injustice in the world? The reality is… you’d probably be putting in a similar amount of effort if you lived during THOSE times as well. It’s just FROM this privileged position within modern society we always have the ability to TALK about how great we WOULD be if only we were given the chance to be. People love doing this so much they even do it with fictional characters in TV shows. 

This is the kind of fantasy that Clamence was indulging in about himself that leads to his eventual fall. For a lot of people…getting sucker punched in the street, having people laugh at you…no doubt it would be embarrassing…but it’s not something that would typically RUIN someone’s life. But for Clamence it’s different, for Clamence this is a tragedy. When something embarrassing happens to someone who is THIS morally baseless and untested…it SHATTERS the illusion that he builds his entire identity around…the effect it has on him can BEST be described as a sort of REVERSE baptism. 

See in a TYPICAL baptism… the ritual of it all is supposed to cleanse you, it’s supposed to forgive you for the sins or the evil that you’ve already committed. It’s actually a neat trick…I mean, you can actually be one of the most detestable people in the history of the world… and then someone dunks you into six inches of water in an above ground pool in the attic of a baptist church somewhere…and low and behold…you’re good now buddy. You’re in. You found the loophole in the system. 

But in the case of Clamence…once again, he’s living in a DELUSIONAL place of innocence…HE thinks he’s the greatest person ever…so when he gets SUCKER punched and quite literally is smacked across the face with the reality of who he truly is…it ILLUMINATES weakness, evil, sin, a LACK of integrity. These events act as a REVERSE BAPTISM for someone like this. 

And you can see this just as clearly in the SECOND event that leads to his fall. Because after the motorcycle incident Clamence TRIES to go on with his life until one evening when he’s walking across a bridge alone…he sees a woman leaning over the side of the bridge looking at the water…and then a few steps later he hears a scream, a splash in the water and then the woman screaming getting further and further away as she’s carried downstream. 

Clamence is left with a choice at this point. He can risk his OWN life and jump in and try to SAVE the woman. Or he can just keep on walking, try to forget about it and not read the paper for a couple days so he never really knows what the outcome is. The second option, is EXACTLY what he decides to do. And again, it MESSES with him and his ego. This is the kind of guy that BEFORE these things happened would probably wax poetic about how, if I were there what I woulda done…I would hear the scream and the splash, and without question I would dive into the water and SAVE the day for everyone. But presented with the actual MOMENT in his life…he realizes who he TRULY is. This moment again, ILLUMINATES weakness in him rather than absolves him of it. 

The last event that really sends him over the edge into his downward spiral ALSO happens on a bridge. He’s walking, just like the second event… but this time he hears behind him coming from the darkness, someone just…laughing. Just hacklin and cacklin to themselves, like a witch flying away on a broom. And to someone as insecure as Clamence…the assumption… is that this laughter is directed at…HIM. 

Now, this laughter on the bridge that Camus uses in the story is symbolic. It represents the fact that we are ALWAYS on trial…we’re ALWAYS being judged by other people around us. Clamence for the first time in his life, after these events, after the illusion of who he is has been shattered…clamence is for the first time feeling the WEIGHT of this omnipresent judgment coming from everyone around him all the time. And it DOESN’T feel good. 

He’s once again, smacked across the face with the cold backhand of reality. This is just what… people, do. They judge other people. And NOBODIES DOING this because they’re a mean person or something…this is how people keep their family safe. This is how people decide who they DO or DON’T want to associate with. This is PART of what keeps society together. But for Clamence…this is something he’s never really had to consider in the safe bubble that he lives in. 

Remember, as a lawyer in Paris he was NEVER the judge OR the one accused of the crime, he was ALWAYS able to play the middle ground there…and in the everyday world he figured everyone just agreed that he was this remarkable, exceptional person just like HE THOUGHT he was. Once he realizes though that he is NOT in fact God’s gift to humanity…and how VULNERABLE he IS to the constant judgment of others, this leads to a paradigm shifting moment in Clamence’s life.

The BIGGEST priority for him, from HERE on out…was going to be to FIND A WAY… to avoid being JUDGED at all costs… and thus to avoid the feeling of responsibility or guilt for his actions. 

For Clamence, there is nothing more important for your survival IN THIS MODERN WORLD than to find a way to DO that…in fact he thinks you’re downright STUPID if you DON’T try to find a way to avoid the judgment of other people. I mean, why wouldn’t you? 

He says if you’re someone living in modern society… and you have NO strategy at all to AVOID the judgment of others, that’s kinda like being an animal tamer, that cut themselves shaving that morning, you have blood all over you and your clothes, and then you show up to work and get into the lion’s den taming some lions…they’re all looking at you like you’re a pizza roll that just got came our of the oven…that’s how YOU look to society when you go out in public with no defense mechanism against what everyone thinks about you. 

Now Camus might want to ask us at this point: does ANY of this resonate with you? Do YOU as a modern person have ANY tactics you use to be able to soften the judgments of the people around you…and before you say no…before you say I’m the most open minded person ever and I just start convulsing with joy every time somebody proves me wrong about something, the Clamence talking to you in a bar MIGHT want you to CONSIDER the ways you avoid judgment that are DISGUISED to you as something you doing that’s entirely different. 

Friends…for example. Why do we choose the friends that we have, he asks. I mean you’d think it’s Aristotelian…that it comes down to the mutual inspiration that two people GIVE to each other… but in reality he says we choose the friends we do because we want SYMPATHY…not inspiration. 

That’s why we HANG OUT with people, who AGREE with us on stuff. We don’t ACTUALLY want to be told that we’re wrong and inspired to be better, we may put up with disagreements about INSIGNIFICANT things from our friends, but REALLY what we want is for them to REINFORCE the foundational bias that we already have, almost like our own personal cable news network. 

Say you’re out grocery shopping one day and some stranger comes up to you and says hey, you’re being inconsiderate right now, your cart is blocking the entire aisle for everyone and no one can get through here. What are you doing?

And you call them rude and you boil in your own soup a bit and then you tell your FRIEND later about it and they say look, don’t worry about that person…they’re a loser, let’s be honest they’re probably criminally insane, they’re gonna go home to their miserable life and complain all day to their mother who they STILL live with...DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

This is the SERVICE that friends provide, in the eyes of Clamence. Regardless of the fact, that your friend WASN’T there, has only heard YOUR side of the story, and isn’t EXACTLY an impartial jury rendering verdict here, DESPITE all this, you still for some reason WANT them to tell you that YOU were right, this OTHER person is wrong, and that EVEN IF this random stranger JUDGED you…the jury of your peers finds you innocent. 

And if you EXPAND this example… to EVERYTHING you tell your friends about…relationships, career choices, fears, dreams…you can see how if you indulge in this sympathy service that friends provide for you TOO MUCH…your friends will allow you to keep yourself the same person, making the SAME mistakes over and over and over again. 

Clamence says despite what THEY say this service is ACTUALLY what your friends WANT from you. Camus says this is symptomatic of what he calls a sort of modern amnesia…where we’re able to conveniently FORGET about the mistakes we make in our lives and just, move ON as though NOTHING has really happened. We’ve all MET somebody like this before. 

You know, a person who has NO PROBLEM judging everybody ELSE for what THEY’RE doing wrong…they’ll define a person’s entire character based on a single moment…they’ll hold a grudge against people for years because someone mistreated THEM…BUT when something goes wrong in THEIR life…they’ll go to their friends, their friends will tell them it was all the OTHER people’s fault, and they’ll just continue on being the exact same person thinking no, RATIONAL person ever has a problem with ME. If anybody thinks I SHOULD be judged…wellll, that person’s just irrationally holding on to the past…they need to get over it. 

Make no mistake: this is a defense mechanism against that feeling of guilt and responsibility that comes with ALWAYS being judged by others.

And Clamence, always, found a way, to conveniently forget about all the mistakes he made in the past…that is, until after the motorcycle incident, after the woman on the bridge, after hearing the laughter of others. 

At that point he says…there came a time in his life where he just COULDN’T forget about the person he WAS anymore. For the first time he was FORCED to LOOK at himself in the mirror honestly… and what he sees SENDS him into a total panic. Remember, finding a way to avoid the judgment of other people was the main goal of his LIFE now. 

ONCE these events make his OLD strategies impossible…he tries like five other approaches. ALL of which fail, miserably…and this is obviously Camus as an author laying out several examples of ways people in modern society avoid judgment as well, but CLAMENCE in the story tries all of them out back to back.  

He tries drinking himself to SLEEP every day, until he runs into liver problems…that doesn’t work. He tried to…well in a very PG Muppet Treasure Island way of putting it…he had random encounters with people trying to fall in love, that didn’t work out either. 

He tries to sabotage his own character…this is an interesting one! The thinking is: if I just become a caricature of a person, RATHER than a REAL person…if I just say a bunch of inflammatory things and troll everyone all the time and am never really myself…then when other people judge me…they aren’t really judging ME…they’re judging this CHARACTER I came up with…and you’re SUPPOSED to hate this character! Now I never have to find out if they don’t like my REAL personality, it’s a way of avoiding judgment but when Clamence does this…that laughter, that he heard on the bridge, which at THIS point in the story has started to haunt him…the laughter just gets louder and louder the MORE he trolls people because at the end of the day…the people whose judgment he’s trying to avoid are not MORONS…they KNOW he’s just trolling…no serious person would EVER say the kind of stuff that he’s saying…so instead of AVOIDING the laughter he ends up becoming even MORE of a joke to them. 

So after all THESE strategies end up not WORKING for him…eventually Clamence comes up with a new strategy…the reason he’s sitting in a bar confessing his sins to strangers…is because his ROLE in the world is to be what HE calls a judge-penitent. And this judge-penitent was one of the most important things Camus wanted to introduce in this book, so let’s take it apart a bit. 

The term judge-penitent, if you just look at the words that it’s made up by, IS in itself a contradictory thing. On one hand you are a judge… which is obviously someone judging others for what THEY do wrong…but on the other hand for Camus you are a penitent…which is the root of the word penitentiary, or someone that feels EXTREMELY remorseful for all the things that THEY have done wrong. 

Now couple questions immediately come up: WHY would Clamence, be using CONTRADICTION as a psychological strategy…and HOW in ANY way does this help him AVOID the judgment of others?

The simple way to describe it is that if I can judge myself…before OTHERS can judge ME…then I never have to feel the GUILT that comes along when somebody points out something that I’m doing wrong… AND it puts me in a great position to criticize others while ALWAYS swinging UPWARD. Let’s talk about an example of this:

Based on letters Camus wrote to his friends, he CLEARLY saw this, EXACT strategy… being used VERY EFFECTIVELY in the political realm of his time and saw the potential of it being used as a political TACTIC more and more going into the future. Think of ANY privileged group you want thats out there…and think of how capable ANY one member of that group is of engaging in a kind of self hatred that makes attacking them, almost pointless. Here’s the kind of things a judge-penitent will say…

Hello! Here I am…I’m a member of, WHATEVER group…I am here to say on behalf of the group…that we, are horrible. SHAME ON US for how horrible we have been for so long…and there are of course members of my group that are STILL doing these horrible things… but at least when it comes to ME…I’M one of the ones that RECOGNIZES, how horrible I am. I don’t even deserve to be talking to you right now. I am scum between the toes of humanity. That’s the penitent, REMORSEFUL side of this…and then what gets SMUGGLED IN…is the JUDGING side of it…because now that I’ve POSITIONED myself, as the lowest rung on the ladder of society, once I’ve confessed all of MY sins…now I can launch attacks at ANY group I want, because what’s the point of you coming back and REITERATING what I just said about MYSELF?…and even if you DO come back at me…whoa whoa whoa…look I’m the FIRST one to admit that I’m a piece of trash. I’m the worst, we AGREE ON THIS. But AS a piece of human garbage can I NOT point out how OTHER people are pieces of garbage as well? Can we not MAKE the world a better place? THAT seems counterproductive.

Camus saw this strategy in the French intellectual elite of his time, no doubt SPECIFICALLY in the work of Jean Paul Sarte. Sarte WAS a member of the rich, bourgeois class who centered his critiques around ATTACKING the bourgeois class. 

Point is: revealing EVERYTHING bad about yourself makes it impossible for anyone to criticize you in a way that fully stings like it SHOULD…this is a DEFENSE mechanism and it’s a psychological game you can play in your PERSONAL life as well.  

Clamence reveals this on his deathbed to the person from the bar, that, THIS HAS BEEN his strategy all along after the fall. As he sits in this bar in Amsterdam, confessing his sins to the people around him, telling them about ALL the horrible things he’s DONE in his life…he’s ONLY telling people this stuff because it allows him to JUDGE THEM, to take away THEIR illusion that they are moral people just as HIS was, and leave them feeling a little LESS GOOD about themselves than at the START of the conversation. 

And if over the course of this podcast you feel a little bummed out by some of the negative takes that Clamence is rambling about in a bar…well, then I’ve done my job as a podcaster here today conveying the character that Camus was going for. This is Clamence and his entire twisted strategy. He wants to TRANSFER…HIS miserable discontent about his own personal struggles…ON TO everyone he meets. He wants to do this…because if he can judge people while being impervious to a counter attack…if he can make people in his immediate proximity LEAVE the conversation just a little more depressed about their place in the world…then HE can leave the conversation…STILL feeling that sense of SUPERIORITY over others. Clamence is NOT the voice of WISDOM in this book. There may be little nuggets of wisdom sprinkled in here and there because to Camus people are complex things… but at the end of his life Clamence is a TORTURED man, so CONSUMED by needing to be BETTER than the people around him…that he doesn’t actually DO the work of being a better person…he just plays a game that allows him to FEEL one step ahead SHOWING people how messed up THEY are.

Now, again, despite the fact that Clamence is a cartoon of a person…Camus would want us to ask ourselves…do I see any piece of Clamence and this modern hypocrisy, present in my OWN approach to life? Seems OBVIOUS Camus saw it in HIMSELF towards the end of his. 

But in KEEPING with the creation of meaning series I think Camus would have some words of caution that he’d want to give…that if you think you’re going to arrive at some ultimate system of values and then you’re just gonna live by those values day after day regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in…maybe it will work out that way…but HIS prediction is that it’s going to be a lot more complicated than that. 

We live in a completely, tragically absurd universe. Nothing out there in the world really makes sense until we DECIDE that it does. And that CONTRAST…between the true uncertainty of it all…and our PROPENSITY to steer our thinking IN TO certainty as much as we can…THAT’S, a DANGEROUS place that can lead to crusades and nuclear wars and all the rest of it. 

This URGE that someone might have…to come up with a perfectly crafted system of values, and then to try their hardest to NEVER DEVIATE from it…THAT’S an expectation of yourself that MAY BE impossible to ever live up to…you may be INVITING these different modes of self deception into your life just so that it doesn’t FEEL like you’re constantly FAILING.

Because he’d say understand your TENDENCIES as the TYPE of creature that you are…UNDERSTAND, that as people… especially given the structures of modern society, as modern people… we have gotten REALLY GOOD…at PLAYING both sides of the fence when it comes to morality…MUCH LIKE the judge-penitent strategy of Clamence…we have gotten really good at holding two, SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY beliefs, having them MANIFEST in the exact same moment, and then somehow, NOT FEELING RIDICULOUS at ALL…as we DO THAT. To Camus there is a fundamental DUPLICITY that’s written into the way modern people often approach how to behave. 

Example in the book: Clamence talks about a Nazi soldier who approaches a mother who has two sons and he says in the most polite way he POSSIBLY can think up…Ma’am, sorry to bother you, don’t want to be disrespectful of your time, but one of your sons HAS to die right now, please, graciously tell me which of them it should be, I want you to be able to choose. 

Simultaneously, holding the belief that it’s very important to be polite to people, give them the respect they deserve…but then ALSO holding the belief that its important for you to kill their family because they’re on the wrong side of the political line in the sand. 

Thousands of examples OF this sort of duplicity all around us in modern society, some we’ve already seen in Clamence as a character in the book. He doesn’t believe in God, and yet feels SPECIAL and CHOSEN in some way. He talks to you the entire time like he’s part of some elaborate marketing campaign to CONVINCE you that he’s humble, all the while constantly, low key telling you how amazing he thinks he is. 

There are the people we talked about that have no problem judging others for a mistake they made, but when it comes to THEIR mistakes, well anyone that can’t get over it is just being unreasonable. Another example at an epistemological level: people in MODERN society OFTEN, SIMULTANEOUSLY believe…that you know… I feel like I am better than most AVERAGE people at figuring out what’s REALLY going on out there in the world, seeing the facts, reasoning about it…I’m pretty good at separating the wheat from the chaff…I’m better than most people around me at being right about things. 

But then again, I’m EXTREMELY humble as well…I’m better than practically anybody else I know at admitting that I was wrong about something. In fact, I’m wrong about stuff ALL THE TIME, I’m the FIRST to admit that. Don’t feel ridiculous at ALL saying that I not only have the best strategy for being right all the time…but ALSO the best strategy for being WRONG all the time. In fact, I take PRIDE in that contradiction, I actually think it makes me a balanced person.

Something I want to make SUPER clear here about what Camus is saying. He is NOT saying that you are a WEAK person if you sometimes embody contradictory values at different moments. To Camus, this is a part of living in an absurd universe. This is a part of being a human being. The WEAK person is the person who can’t see, or WON’T see, the built in duplicity and contradiction in their OWN thinking. The person that’s PLAYING some variation of a psychological game that allows them to believe, that they’re just LIVING universally by a set of values every day of their life.

Like if you never find yourself speaking passionately about something you believe in…and then catching yourself and saying, oh but then again there’s that OTHER area in my life that I do almost the OPPOSITE of what I’m preaching about now…then you’re PROBABLY not looking at yourself as thoroughly or as honestly as you COULD be.

And maybe it’s impossible for us to ever totally escape contradictions in our values…but one thing we CAN do Camus thinks…is to be more self-aware of them. What Clamence wants MORE THAN ANYTHING in this book…is the dream of innocence. Like many others in modern society what he wants is to be INNOCENT of any moral wrongdoing. What he REALIZES though is that NOBODY out there is innocent. If you believe in free will, which for the record Camus is probably just taking a shot at Sarte here and how similar his ethics is to Christianity…but if you believe in free will…then NOBODY is perfect. EVERYBODY is GUILTY, for something. At the very least for Camus, under even a deterministic view, everybody is at least RESPONSIBLE for something. 

That’s just part of being a person living a life out with all the variables on this planet. Take the woman on the bridge for instance. Was Clamence doing anything WRONG, that LED to him being faced with the choice that night to save the woman? 

No, sometimes life throws you situations that are GOING to test your values. You didn’t ask for these moments. You didn’t EARN these moments…and you can go for YEARS with everything going great never HAVING your values tested…but EVENTUALLY, INEVITABLY you’re going to be shown exactly who you are. Clamence was not GUILTY for what happened to the woman on the bridge that night but he WAS a part of it…he was in SOME way partially, RESPONSIBLE. 

There is NO ONE OUT THERE that lives in a state of total innocence like Adam and Eve under the grace of God BEFORE taking the bite from the apple. We are ALL fallen and implicated in modern society. And this is Camus’ point: the only way you could EVER, EVEN FOR A MOMENT, BELIEVE that you ARE innocent, ABSOLVED of your guilt, ABSOLVED of your responsibility…is if you essentially do what a Christian does, repent for your sins, become SAVED by God’s grace and then accept a moral doctrine GIVEN to you from above. Our MODERN version of that would be to surrender to any one of these strategies that Clamence has used throughout the episode to escape the omnipresent judgment of other people. 

One way to think about this as Clamence would confess to the reader in the very late stages of the book…is that there is INNOCENCE…in slavery. What does he MEAN by that? He says:  

"For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style."

Clamence is a morally weak person. Being responsible for his actions, being judged by other people, the “weight of days” as he calls it…is TOO MUCH for him. For someone as weak as him that can’t find ANY WAY to LIVE with the feelings of being judged sometimes…there really is NO OTHER OPTION in his eyes than to find SOME MASTER to serve that TURNS him into a foot soldier. He says at one point that he longs for the day that an authoritarian leader will ride into town, take things over and TELL him how to act. The thinking is if ALL I’M DOING is carrying out someone ELSE’S moral vision…then I am not really making any moral decisions here that can be judged. YOU, sir, have a problem with my MASTER…NOT WITH ME, I am BUT A slave here. Once again to Camus, there is INNOCENCE in slavery, just as there is INNOCENCE for Adam and Eve as long as they’re BLINDLY accepting that they shouldn’t eat the apple. 

So in many ways…the protagonist of the creation of meaning series, the people LISTENING to this right now…ARE the fallen people of modernity. They ARE the ONES who TOOK a bite from the apple. They are the ones who are trying to find a way to LIVE with responsibility and judgment for their OWN decisions. Clamence says at one point in the book: “irresponsibility is grace.” So to fall OUT of grace, would be to FALL INTO a life of responsibility for ourselves. Responsibility IS the fallen state of modern humanity, and the only way to be RESTORED to innocence is to commit what Camus calls philosophical suicide. 

Can’t help but think of earlier this year when we talked about Karl Popper and the open society and its enemies…and Popper talks about the responsibility that citizens have in a democracy to DO THE WORK to STAY educated and STAY active for the good of society OVERALL. And one of the CRITICISMS to that idea has been that people LOVE the idea of having freedom ON PAPER…but that staying politically active and informed is hard work, takes up a lot of time…and whenever it comes down to it people are much more willing to NOT necessarily have much control over the political process, as long as they have cheap food to eat and teams of people on apps curating the next video for them to watch enabling their distraction.

To create a system of values and then to try to maintain it…I think ON PAPER people LOVE the idea of morals ala cart. Where THEY get to choose the direction of how they live their lives. But to live with the WEIGHT of the responsibility of your choices, to live with guilt and the judgment of others…I think Camus thought when writing this book that if we can see the character of Clamence in ourselves even just a little bit…then maybe by being SELF AWARE of that fact it can make us a little less susceptible, to FALLING into the delusional innocence…of feeling CERTAIN.

Maybe he wanted us to consider that it’s possible to accept the fact, that we’re gonna be judged by other people, sometimes unfairly, but that maybe that’s not TOO MUCH to BEAR. 

Maybe that was just too much for Clamence to bear, and maybe his cynical worldview is just another defense mechanism for him so he can DENY the reality of the world around him. 

You know in ANOTHER episode of this creation of meaning series we talked about Nietzsche and his concept of Amor Fati. Well IF that feeling of judgment and guilt and responsibility for our choices is a NECESSARY part of living without some DENIAL game that you’re otherwise playing. Then instead of NEGATING that reality you could ALSO just say Amor Fati. Accept THAT which is necessary. Make the BEST of the fact you’re going to be judged. Why agonize over it? USE the judgments of others as a RESOURCE to become more self aware, more self actualized. Don’t trade your integrity as a person for just a few sweet moments of denial. But maybe Camus says it best. He says you have two choices in this life when it comes to how you’re going to deal with the inevitable judgments of other people. 

You can be happy and judged. 

Or you can be absolved and wretched. 

Take your pick I guess. Hope you loved the episode. Try to never ask for anything, try to just give, but if you enjoy the show and haven’t left a review on your respective app. Thank you just trying to stay in business. Going to try to do more episode updates on Twitter @iamstephenwest. This AI art stuff is ridiculous by the way people. Try typing in Albert Camus eating a pizza. It’s mind blowing. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.