A note before the excerpt

In this blog, I often use the word meaning, but I do not use it in the narrow sense of “the meaning of a word” or “the purpose of life.”

When I speak of meaning, I am referring to the framework through which human beings understand the world, judge what is right, and sustain a sense of who they are.

A nation, a religion, a political belief, a moral principle, a family role, a professional identity, even an idea such as freedom, justice, veganism, or tradition—these are not merely external concepts. Human beings internalize them, live through them, and often defend them as if they were defending themselves.

This is the central theme of my book Buddhism: 2,500 Years of Misunderstanding.

The following passage is an excerpt from that book. It explains why I believe that human beings do not simply use meaning; they make meaning part of themselves. And once meaning becomes part of the self, an attack on meaning is experienced as an attack on one’s world, one’s identity, and sometimes one’s very reason for living.

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People Make Meaning Their Own
Human beings make meaning, understand the world by meaning, and endure suffering by
meaning. But they do not stop at making meaning. They defend it. There is nothing exceptional
about this; it is utterly ordinary. Burn a flag and someone is enraged. Insult a religion and
someone is enraged. Deny a political conviction, speak ill of a family, and someone is enraged.
Why? The flag itself is cloth; a religion or a political idea is only a way of thinking. No physical
damage has been done. Yet people are wounded, sometimes furious, and sometimes there is
violence.
It is because meaning allows human beings to feel that they are right. The sociologist Peter
Berger called the process by which people take society’s meanings into themselves
“internalization.” But this is not simply a matter of being indoctrinated with values. By making
social values their own, human beings reinforce their own sense of rightness. A person wants to
believe he is a good person. That his actions have worth. That he is not living wrongly. To that
end he takes in the values his society deems right and lives them as his own.
When we obey traffic laws, for instance, we mostly do not experience it as coercion. We stop at
red lights. We yield to pedestrians. We keep to the speed limit. Not merely because it is the law,
but because we believe it is right. And by doing what is right, we can feel that we are right. Ethics
and morality work the same way. Do not harm others. Help the weak. Keep your promises. We
internalize such values and, by following them, confirm our own rightness. In other words,
human beings feel their rightness by making social values their own. That is why social norms
endure. Not merely because people are made to obey, but because people themselves find their
own rightness inside those values.
The content of values changes greatly with the times. There was an age when the belief that a
woman’s place was the home was widely shared, and by internalizing that belief, people could
feel they stood in the socially correct position. A good husband. A good wife. A good mother.
Such self-understandings were supported by the rightness society conferred. Today,
discrimination against women is understood to be wrong, and the belief that roles should not be
fixed by sex is widely shared. And men and women alike, by internalizing that belief, feel their
own rightness.
What matters here is not which set of values is correct. It is that although the content of the two
is opposite, their structure is astonishingly alike. Society gives human beings rightness. Human
beings uphold society by that rightness. The values change; the structure does not.
That is why human beings defend meaning. This is not a story about particular religions or
ideologies. It happens to everyone. The structure is easy to observe in the present day. Open any
social network and you will find it overflowing with people defending the values they believe to
be right. Political arguments, arguments over gender, over religion, over the environment,
animal rights, immigration. People clash violently, day after day. Some of these questions matter
greatly. But what is striking is that in many cases, people seem to argue not to persuade the
other side but to protect their own rightness. I am right. You are wrong. The stronger the
conviction, the more emotional the person becomes. Anger. Denunciation. Ridicule. And by
binding themselves to others who share their values, their own rightness is reinforced still
further.
People defend meaning because they have internalized it. Because their sense of their own
rightness has been formed by it. Human beings receive an attack on meaning as an attack on
themselves. Your credentials are not you. The company is not you. The nation is not you.
Tradition is not you. Democracy is not you. Feminism is not you. Veganism is not you. Rock and
roll is not you. But human beings do not treat these things as merely external. They make
meaning part of the self. A person accepts the values he believes right, accepts the group he
belongs to, accepts the worldview he lives inside. And he lays that meaning over himself. So
when the meaning is denied, he grows anxious. Not because the meaning itself was wounded.
Because the self bound to that meaning was wounded.
People often think they are defending their opinions. In fact, they are defending their world.
Hard work pays off. Life has meaning. People act by free will. Take any belief you like. What
would happen if it were proved wrong? You would not merely lose one opinion. The world as
you had understood it would shake. You would no longer know what to believe. You would no
longer know what to live for. You might no longer know who you are. So people defend meaning.
Not necessarily because it is right. Because it holds up their world.
The problem of religious cults makes this easy to see. Outsiders wonder. Why do they not leave,
when they are so plainly being exploited? Why sacrifice their lives for the organization? But for
the believer, the religion is not merely a religion. It is the world itself. What is right. Why we live.
Why we suffer. What is good and what is evil. Who I am. The religion explains all of it. So the
person clings. Not because he does not want to lose it. Because he cannot lose it. Because to lose
that meaning would be to no longer know who he is.
And of course, this is not only about cults. To one degree or another, every human being lives
defending his own meanings. Political convictions, religious values, national belonging, ideas of
family, ideas of life. Through these, a person understands the world. That is why people argue
back, grow angry, are wounded. What looks like debate is, often enough, the defense of meaning.
Human beings need meaning. By meaning they understand the world. When that meaning
shakes, they grow anxious. So they defend it. To defend meaning is to defend a world. To defend
a self. To defend a life. It is not weakness. It is simply the nature of the kind of being a human is.
And human beings can also die by meaning.
There were men who cut open their bellies to preserve their honor as samurai. Better death than
disgrace: that death was not defeat but the fulfillment of what it meant to be a samurai. There
were young men who flew their Zero fighters into enemy ships to defend the nation, believing
that to die was service to the country, loyalty to the emperor, love for their families. There were
men who strapped bombs to their bodies for God, believing martyrdom was not death but the
doorway to eternal life. There were those who worked past midnight, night after night, for the
company, until their bodies broke and they died—fulfilling responsibility, meeting expectations,
never being a burden. That meaning permitted them neither sleep nor rest.
Different cultures, different eras, different circumstances. But the structure is the same. When
meaning becomes heavier than life, human beings can die. They do not choose death. They
choose meaning, and death follows.
Human beings can live by meaning. And human beings can die by meaning. Unless we see both
faces, we have not understood the power meaning holds. Religious values that wield this kind of
absolute power are called dogma.