A Full Universe

Global algorithmic social media’s most devastating consequence is that it destroyed people’s sense of impact on local scales.

There’s an early rabbinic principle (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5) that Adam, the Primordial Earthling, was created alone to demonstrate that a single individual’s life is an עולם מלא — a full universe — from the perspective of another. Save one life, save the universe. Destroy one life, destroy the universe.

I find this resonant with the Zen understanding — the fully realized nature of all particular expressions — and the bodhisattva ideal it implies.

Your whole job is right in front of you.

This is the kind of thing that really gets to me when I see how much moral energy people put into dissolving their particularity into an indistinguishable mass of algorithm food. It makes me wonder how much moral energy they have left for the next individual person — the next full universe — they encounter in their next brief moment of putting their phone in their pocket.

From what I observe around me, and from what I read in the few places that still report facts on the ground, it’s not much.

I am small-community-oriented in my work because the most important learning of my life has been that a human being’s moral impact happens through chain reactions of face-to-face encounters.

I’ve also found the converse of that to be true: that it’s fallacious to draw an equivalence between the scale of many one-to-one encounters and a few one-to-many encounters.

That’s because, to the one in a one-to-many encounter, there is no room for each one of the many to be an עולם מלא.

This is where it gets trippy/woo-woo, but it has been my experience that the operation of this Mishnaic/Dharmic principle requires awareness of its activity to matter. If you aren’t consciously facing an עולם מלא, you can’t save one. If you are, you can.

But the real force of this teaching is that an individual human being is a full universe. An abstract idea of “the whole world” — such as one might imagine they’re talking to when posting their rage for an algorithm — is nothing at all.