American Soul -Part Two
Dualism, Unsolvable Problems, and The Elevated
In the previous post, I wrote about being overwhelmed as the beginning of weltschmerz. What follows looks more closely at the conditions that make that overwhelm unavoidable.
There is a fatigue many feel but struggle to name. Not despair, and not indifference—something quieter and heavier. It comes from living inside conditions that never quite resolve, no matter how much effort is applied.
The following reflections are not an attempt to explain America as an idea, but to describe it as a lived condition—three overlapping realities that shape how we move through the world and why rest often feels elusive.
Dualism
During a recent visit with a research oncologist, I suggested that perhaps another force had been at work in my cancer journey—that I had connected with the benevolent choreography that guides the universe. The idea held no appeal for him. Scientists are bound to the world of cause and effect; they must be. Their tools cannot justify a reality beyond that boundary. Truth be told, I felt a quiet sadness—not for myself, but that his scope was confined to a dualistic worldview, one in which mystery has no language.
Much of our unease comes from trying to live inside that split.
We are taught—implicitly and explicitly—that reality is either material or spiritual, mechanism or meaning, science or mystery. One must be chosen. One must be trusted. The other quietly set aside. Over time, this division hardens, and what began as a method becomes a worldview.
What the ancient Chinese called Yin and Yang was not an external force acting upon the world, but a simple description of this lived condition—the tension that appears the moment one thing is chosen and another is left behind.
But this division itself is the ache.
Here, Lao Tzu begins by naming the whole before naming the parts:
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth;
the named is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
The whole is not denied when the parts appear—but it is easily forgotten.
Later, Lao Tzu describes the place where they meet:
“The spirit of the valley never dies…
The gateway of the mysterious female
is the root of heaven and earth.”
The valley does not choose between heaven and earth. It receives both.
Jesus teaches the same posture before asking anything of the world:
“Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.”
Only after alignment does he say:
“Give us this day…”
Provision follows posture.
Science is not the problem. It is a gift. It describes how things move within the world of form. But it was never meant to be the whole story. When asked to explain meaning, purpose, or being itself, it grows silent—not because it has failed, but because it has reached its proper boundary.
The problem was never dualism itself.
It was forgetting that dualism is only part of the whole.
Unsolvable Problems
Some problems are unsolvable because they are not actually problems. They are conditions of being alive. Modern systems, however, promise a remedy for every discomfort, a fix for every tension, and an explanation for every sorrow. When a solution cannot appear, effort intensifies rather than pauses.
We attempt to solve fear with control, uncertainty with prediction, mortality with permanence. We try to eliminate suffering through policy, technology, or belief, rarely stopping to ask whether suffering belongs to the structure of life itself. What cannot be solved is managed, deferred, or hidden—and it returns with greater force.
The trouble is not that these conditions resist solution, but that our insistence on solving them prevents understanding. The Tao does not promise resolution; it promises alignment. It does not remove tension; it teaches how to stand within it. When we mistake alignment for a solution, we exhaust ourselves chasing an end that never arrives.
Here, Lao Tzu pleads with clarity:
“Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.
Do not cling to loss or gain.
Accept being unimportant.”
He urges us to surrender ourselves to reality with humility. Only by accepting life as it is can we care sincerely and love abundantly.
My physicians hold no curative intent for cancer as advanced as mine. Their approach is neither palliative nor maintenance-driven. It is search and destroy. When my PSA rises, they hunt the cancer down and radiate it. That is my life. Accepting this has given me urgency—not despair—but the urgency to share my thoughts and to love my family and neighbors while I can.
We should not think of the world as broken. We should accept it as it is. When we refuse, the unsolvable accumulates in the mind—each disappointment layering upon the last, each hope deferred adding weight.
A neurologist once told me that in my state people tend toward bitterness or toward God.
I don’t know about God. But through many trials, I have come to trust that a choreography of benevolence is at work in my life, making me expectant that, no matter what befalls me, good things are going to happen.
The Elevated
We live in an age of elevation.
Elevated people. Elevated brands. Elevated homes, food, experiences.
Nothing is simply good anymore. Everything is measured against a higher version of itself—always just out of reach. In a transactional society, there is always a better. And because “better” never arrives, rest never does either.
Here, Lao Tzu warned long ago:
“Not exalting the gifted prevents quarreling.”
He was not opposing excellence. He was naming what exaltation does. When difference is elevated, comparison becomes constant, and sufficiency disappears from view.
The ache beneath modern life emerges when everything is lived under measures that never allow us to arrive.
Elevation surrounds us. It is embedded in markets, language, aspiration, and identity. It is not something we can simply step outside of.
But difficulty does not mean helplessness.
We may not be able to remove elevation from the world, but we can decide whether it governs our sense of enough.
Lao Tzu offers no strategy—only recognition:
“He who has enough knows he has enough.”
Perhaps relief begins not when the world lowers its standards, but when we remember how to recognize sufficiency when it is already present.
A Closing Word
These three conditions—dualism, unsolvable problems, and elevation—are not failures of effort or intelligence. They are the environment we have learned to inhabit.
What changes things is not solving them, escaping them, or defeating them, but recognizing them clearly and choosing how we stand within them.
Alignment does not announce itself loudly.
It returns quietly.
And it begins closer than we think.