THE FACTS ANSWER

AN INFINITE ENERGY THAT
COULD DESTROY ITSELF
HUMAN DESIRE IS NOT SOMETHING WE INVENTED AND THAT BELONGS TO OUR TIME. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN PROJECT ITSELF TOWARD SOMETHING BEYOND.

BY JOHN WATERS

The 2010 CENSIS report on the state of Italy reveals something that, when we think of it, is true of possibly every country calling itself "modern." The description of a nation less willing to grow, to build, to look for happiness is one that echoes loudly in other European societies right now.
Still, what a strange idea, on the face of it: that the reason for this may be that our societies have been misunderstanding human desire. It is strange because desire is perhaps the thing our societies pride themselves on understanding better than anything else, on catering and pandering to absolutely. Desire is the driving agent of our markets, consumer culture, media, our individual "mechanisms" as "components" of society.
The idea that desire has gone out of control is not difficult to understand or accept: the human being in Western societies has become insatiable, so accustomed to having his desires satisfied that he can no longer get enough, cannot even decide what he wants, doesn't know what to do with himself, has "lost the run of herself," etc.
But even more sensational is the idea that we haven't thought it through–that this cannot be the end of the matter. Desire has to go somewhere, to find some true path forward, or it will turn its infinite energy on itself. It is logical that when this happens, desire can begin to destroy itself. We think desire is something that belongs to our time, almost as if we invented it. We are prepared to accept, in an abstract kind of way, that, for example, our grandparents came together out of some kind of desire, but we don't tend to dwell on this. We think of them as having been too easily satisfied. And here we encounter what for us may be the most sensational possibility of all: that they desired far more than we do.
We think of the religious demeanor that seems to have defined our societies until relatively recently as simplistic and deferential, an instrument of social control. We do not often think of the trajectory of human desire under the influence of a religious culture. But our condescension now reveals itself as misplaced. For what we see when we imagine such a phenomenon is a near-perfect arc of desire.
Liberated from distraction and misdirection, human desire is led out from its point of origin into a flight-path where it can project itself toward something beyond, and thus is enabled to avoid collision with things which, not being the equal of our desire, would inevitably tend to sap its energy.
This is the ultimate shocking conclusion for our societies: that the pursuit of a religious idea is ultimately the only way of freeing human desire to fully realize itself. Religious-minded people understand this implicitly, but even they often seem to understand it in a different way: that the religious idea is a kind of contract not to give human desire full rein. The opposite is true: only by pursuing what is beyond does human desire become really free.