Art involves a message and its delivery. Artists endeavor to infuse the two, and might focus more on one or the other but at some level each is important to the art, and the best artists are those who adeptly express the most profound ideas using alternative means of cognition (sound, colors, word synthesis, performance). A profound message isn’t required for art to be good or worth creating; some art merely expresses a “sense of life” – a means to capture and communicate the artist’s general experience.
Some years ago I took the time to listen closely to what John Lennon was saying in his song “Imagine”, and by that I don’t just mean that I memorized the lyrics or even the theme… I mean that I listened closely to what he was saying. I sought to undertand exactly what he was trying to tell us. This song isn’t the only one I’ve done this with. In fact, I do it a lot – with songs, books, poems, and even stand-up comedy routines. I try to get to the heart of what the artist is attempting to communicate.
Ever since taking the time to give it a listen, I’ve been convinced it could be the most important song ever written, given the quality of its content and delivery. I would like to offer up my reasons, and perhaps provide my readers with an incentive to go back and listen to this song with a fresh perspective on what Lennon might have hoped to tell us when he recorded this masterpiece in 1971.
Lennon didn’t intend the message in this song to be cryptic or open to any random, flowery interpretation. He said that he heisted the idea of ‘imagining” from something Yoko Ono had written, and pulled the subject matter from a religious tract someone had handed him. His comments are referenced in the Wiki article on the song. He said, “‘Imagine’, which says: ‘Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics,’ is virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement. There is no real Communist state in the world; you must realize that. The Socialism I speak about … [is] not the way some daft Russian might do it, or the Chinese might do it. That might suit them. Us, we should have a nice … British Socialism.”
His own explanation of what he was saying notwithstanding, the theme turns out to very closely reflect what sociologists call the “civilizing process”, the long, slow process in which humans develop the knowledge and skillsets needed to coexist and flourish. Lennon offers up three level of civil development not yet achieved by humankind, assesses his level of confidence that it will be achieved, and explains the basic obstacle that much be overcome for each to be realized.
Carpe Diem
Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us; above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today.
When I was young I interpreted this this an endorsement of hedonism. To me, he was offering up the worst possible advice – enjoy the moment and don’t worry about tomorrow. To a young kid raised in a religious environment, what he was saying seemed obvious enough. Sadly, it was many years before I reexamined my interpretation, but when I finally did it was through the eyes of someone who had lost loved ones, seen lives cut short, and come to full grips with the fragility of the human experience. I had seen entire lives spent believing that this reality is a mere aberration; a mere trial run for the life that will really matter – the one beyond the grave. I had witnessed good people forfeiting any chance at a truly fufilling life because they were concerned only with one that came later.
The writer Sam Harris has spilled a good amount of ink on this topic, both literally and figuratively. A strong advocate of focused attention and meditation practice, Harris routinely emphasizes the idea that all we really have is this moment. “The past is a memory. It’s a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment.” says Harris.
… if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. It’s like watching a bad movie for the fourth time or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity—there better be a heaven if we’re gonna waste our time like that. There are ways to really live in the present moment. It is always now, however much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate the risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite but it’s the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of physics … but as a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. And I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind. In fact, I think there’s probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that—if you want to be happy.
The past is a memory. It’s a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this—and this—and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it, fleeing it, overlooking it, and the horror is that we succeed. We’ve managed to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future. And the future never arrives.”
Sam Harris
This is not just lofty brain-talk from a stuffy intellectual – I’ve personally know people whose entire lives are spent oblivious to the present moment, convinced that the only reality worth concerning themselves with lies in some distant future, whether here on Earth or in some otherworldly place. And that isn’t a shot at religion – I’m talking about people to whom it would never occur to find joy in this moment, as though happiness is something that exists only in fairy tales but the real world is a place where misery is the default and the best we should hope for are temporary moments of respite.
It’s difficult to determine whether this line from Lennon is a repudiation of mysticism in toto. Many religious traditions exist that do not involve an afterlife, and many of Lennon’s writings involve mystical elements. But in this line, Lennon artfully expresses what so many gurus and meditation enthusiats have spent lifetimes attempting to fully understand – the full value in every moment, and the tragedy of squandering any of it, for any reason whatever. He sums it up beautifully, and expresses optimism that this is attainable to just about everyone.
Please listen to the video below for a glimpse of what this is really about.
Social Harmony
Imagine there’s no country. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.
This is the line that earned him all sorts of criticism from those whose sensitivities preclude any sort of challenge to their cherished beliefs, but Lennon’s point here had little to do with religion and everything to do with toxic tribalism and artificially induced hostilities. His references to country and religion were opportunistic – the syllables and syntax fit, they sufficiently conveyed his intent, and they enabled him to make his point. He could just as well have used other words (Imagine no racism, imagine no “otherism”, Imagine no politics, etc) were he not putting them to music, and his point would have been just as well made. Indeed, when he performed this song during his final TV appearance, he substituted the word “immigraton” for the word “religion”.
Tribalism, however damaging it might be, is not an inherently vicious construct. In a world filled with predators, our evolutionary ancestors adapted a survival strategy of cooperation which required a measure of trust, which only works if not doled out indiscriminately. Immediately available information was the only information, thus bonds were formed based on obvious similarities; You’re a chimp. I’m a chimp. We both like the same kinds of food and we both fear the same kinds of predators… let’s both look for the food and whoever finds it first shares with the other. Let’s both keep an eye out for the predators and alert the other. If we keep this up, we increase our chances of survival. If we can find a way to involve more chimps, even better.
But these obvious similarities begin to break down the more members get involved – a feature of genetics. The larger the group, the more variety and diversity there will be. If you limit membership to only those whose face structure and skin/hair color are exactly like yours, you will lose the competative edge to more inclusive tribes. So you expand your membership slightly, to include those with different hair color. Eventually, you begin to include members with different skin color. Maybe members of the opposite sex. Maybe some with disabilities. Maybe even some from other places – as long as they pledge fealty (you can even raise a colored cloth to symbolize your solidarity!). Maybe even some who communicate using different words. As competition becomes more sophisticated, so must your selection criteria.
Accordingly, as we evolved the capacity for language and communicaton, and our ability to communicate expanded, these bonds developed into tribes, which eventually developed into societies, which eventually developed into nations, which will eventually develop into…
And this is the next stage of the civilizing process Lennon alludes to – the stage where humanity recognizes that the person-to-person trust our ancestors relied on for survival can and must ultimately extend to everyone. That the ultimate destination for inclusivity in the group is the whole. In an world that is growing in population while shrinking in size (metaphorically – we can speak to anyone on the planet in real time and traverse geographical distance with increasing speed) the bonds formed by familiarity must extend to all human beings. He uses “country” and “religion” as merely two example of the artificial boundaries that must ultimately be shed in pursuit of our long-term survival and prosperity. It is not the substance of religious traditions that he recommends relinquishing, but their exclusivity. And although he expresses guarded optimism that this might one day be attained, his words concede that this next step will not necessarily be easy. Not hard… but not necessarily easy, and thus a more ambitious target than the first.
Provision
Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can. No need for greed; no hunger. A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
Finally Lennon confronts one of the hard realities of the human condition – our survival requires material resources. This last verse is another that I so badly misinterpreted in my younger years – an apparent suggestion that the solution to our problems is to simply give away all that we have, embrace nomadic lives of living off the land, and sing kumbaya in the forests for the rest of our days.
Again, I had missed the point. Lennon was not oblivious to the material needs we all have. Instead, he seemed to understand something that would take me many more years to get my head around – the limits of the human capacity for pleasure, and the potential abundance of resources.
Understanding this point it vital to the progress of civilization – the recognition that our ability to produce has finally exceeded our capacity to consume. Economic models such as capitalism are based on the fact that survival requires the effort and resources of individuals, and that what an individual produces, they have the right to keep and consume. This seems obvious enough when stripped down to its primal roots: If I scavenge a bunch of wood and build a hut, I should be able to decide who lives in it. If I grow some corn, I should be able to decide who eats it. And I don’t think anyone, even Lennon, would argue with these sorts of “first principles”.
However, principles that apply in one context don’t necssarily apply in others, and as our ability to produe wealth increased, the most industrious producers began to amass wealth that surpassed the human capacity for need; they possessed resources in such abundance that neither they nor anyone they cared about would ever want for material provisions so long as they lived.
But it didn’t stop there. It is possible to want more than you need, and it’s difficult to argue that one loses their right to the fruits of their labor once their base needs are met – particularly because the concept of “need” is subject to interpretation (do you really need your hair cut? Do you really need the latest model car? Do you really need a solid gold umbrella stand?). And if defining how much any one individual needs is dubious, deliberating the limits of what a person might want is an exercise in futility. Thus, we don’t draw a line demarcating how much of a person’s production they’re entitled to keep – they are entitled to keep all of it. They produced it. It’s theirs.
Here is the missing part of that formulation: The human capacity for joy, purpose, and fufillment is not infinite, nor can it be mapped on a straight trajectory that mirrors material resources. This might seem counterintuative to those of us who have spent our lives in a perpetual cycle of pleasure-seeking, resource gathering, provision allocating, time-trading, and efficiency maximizng (i.e. most of humanity). For most of human history, people’s needs and desires (however you might quantify them) exceeded their ability to produce, thus allocating, conserving, and reserving was a survival function. The idea of having everything we will ever need is so foreign to us that even if the resources were handed to us, we would reflexively respond by finding more things to need. The idea of having everything we want is so alien that even if the resources were handed to us we would reflexively respond by finding more things to want. The result of this exercise is not an eventual meeting of all these needs, but a perpetual cycle of pursuit for the sake of pursuit – another example of happiness being simewhere else… anywhere but here… just around the next corner, never right here right now.
Consider for a moment how happy you would be if someone were to give you a car, free of charge. It’s yours now and you can do anything you want with it. Would that make you happy? Most of us would say yes.
What if someone gave you a house? Would that make you happier than the car? Most of us would say yes.
What if someone gave you an entire estate, complete with numerous houses, waitstaff, electrical grid, natural resources, raw materials, and a population to run that economy. It’s all yours now – you control it all. You own it. You are the lord of this estate. And on top of that, they bestow vast wealth upon you such that you will never want for anything again. Would that make you even happier? Most of us would say yes.
What if someone then gave you a continent? You now own this, and every resource on it. You rule this continent. You own and control everything on it. Would that make you happier?
At this point, you might begin to see where this leads. You can enjoy an estate. You can familiarize yourself with it, care for it, tend to it… but a continent? There is only so much of it you could even visit within a lifetime. Even if every demand you had was immediately granted, there is only so much you do with a continent.
What if someone made you ruler of the world? What if someone said it was all yours to do with as you please?
What about the solar system? What if that was given to you? What about the galaxy? What if it was all yours?
Now, I can’t say for certain at which point you said to yourself “okay, I really don’t need any more than this.” but I can be reasonably certain that at some point between “car” and “galaxy” your capacity for happiness found its limits. At some point, every need and desire you had was met, and anything more is simply excess that cannot possibly any possibly meaning to you. (Can you really be emotionally invested with what’s going on at Alpha Centauri, even if you owned it?) If you can recognize that a line exists somewhere “car” and “galaxy”, it is not difficult to imagine that perhaps the line is much closer to “car” than “galaxy”. In fact, the line might be somewhere between $1 and $100,000,000,000. It might even be closer to $1 than $100,000,000,000.
According to the Forbes list of Jan 2021, the ten most wealthiest people in the world and their value are as follows:
1. Elon Musk – $189.7 billion
2. Jeff Bezos – $185.7 billion
3. Bernard Arnault & Family – $155.4 billion
4. Bill Gates – $122.0 billion
5. Mark Zuckerberg – $97.9 billion
6. Zhong Shanshan – $94.4 billion
7. Larry Ellison – $89.4 billion
8. Warren Buffet – $88.6 billion
9. Larry Page – $79.2 billion
10. Sergey Brin – $77.0 billion
Wherever you drew your line, it is a near certainty that all 10 of the people listed here have exceeded it by many orders of magnitude. It is not unreasonable to assess that the resources available to the people listed here exceed their capacity for usefulness many times over – maybe hundreds of thousands of times over.
Lennon recognized the futility of the rat race – the abject empiness in a constant need for more, more, more, more… “Imagine no possessions” is not a suggestion that we should eschew material provisions – he is asking the listener to imagine how liberating it would be to be freed from a constant state of needing more. He is pointing out that happiness is found not in the endless pursuit of resources, but in the payoff for those resources – the prosperity of humankind, which is a much more promising investment. He asks us to imagine focusing on the purpose of our presence here rather than our furtive efforts to secure it. He asks us to visualize a world in which this dream is realized for everyone, and what that might mean for each of us. He takes a basic principle of civilization – the idea that it is preferable to be a ordinary member of a happy sociey than to be the most prosperous member of a miserable society – and apply this principle on a global scale.
Lennon also recognizes how far beyond the scope of most people’s vision this idea is. Of the three ambitious for social development he describes, this is the only one about which he expresses doubts that it will be achieved. “I wonder if you can” – he knew that our intuitions have not developed at the same rate as our capacity for production, and that it may take several generations before people begin to realize that “more things” does not translate to “more happiness”. We are only human, after all.
At the end of it all, he acknowledges that what he’s suggesting is ambitious beyond the imagination of most people alive right now. But he assures us that he’s not the only one with this vision, and welcomes everyone to peer into his looking glass, confident that anyone who does will recognize that this is the destiny of humankind.
The reason I feel this song is the most important one ever written is because I believe the development of civilization is the most consequential development within the human experience, and Lennon offers a road map down that path. He describes the relative difficulty of each milestone to achieve. He acknowledges that it is difficult, and that he might be perceived as naive, indulging in idealistic dreams and unattainable fantasies. But he insists that this dream is not only attainable in the abstrct future, but available right now to everyone who wants it.
Give it another listen. A real listen. The roadmap is there – a gift from John Lennon.
The Mischievous Unknown 