There is a traditional Japanese Buddhist ritual called Segaki in which ghosts and monsters are offered food and drink to address their insatiable hunger and reduce their restless wandering. The ghosts, unfortunately, are unable to get any relief because, being ghosts, they have no way to ingest the offerings presented to them. One might think that being a ghost would also prevent them from feeling hunger in the first place, but hunger, like other forms of deficiency-based craving, is not an entirely physical experience, and the presence of the food is apparently enough to calm them for a while.
I don’t know to what extent the human participants in Segaki believe in the veracity of the hungry residents of the spirit world or, if they do believe in such implausible creatures, whether their ceremonial offerings have any actual impact. For the residents of science-saturated Western civilization, however, the whole idea is clearly ridiculous.
The modern scientific world view deals in objective testable facts—a.k.a., reality—and has long ago dismissed such notions as primitive fantasies from a bygone era, silly myths concocted by uneducated minds. One of the hallmark conceits of modernity is its anti-mythic posture, its successful demythologizing of the world. Scientifically grounded understanding leaves no space for myth, and has soundly dispelled the childish fantasies of yore. Science deals with what is real.
Or, rather, that’s how science is typically portrayed by its most vocal promoters. But the truth of the matter is something quite otherwise. The world that science constructs is a mythical world of its own, stocked with a panoply of mystical beings. And those same science-informed residents of modern civilization who would be quick to dismiss the Segaki as ridiculous, spend the lion’s share of their waking hours feeding the hungry ghosts that populate their own phantastic imaginations, what Max Stirner referred to as “spooks” and “wheels in the head.”
Stirner, a mid-nineteenth century German philosopher, championed a perspective known as egoism. The name is unfortunate in its lexical proximity to egotistic, but the two terms do not share the same set of connotations. Stirner’s egoism is centered on the notion that everything anyone ever thinks or does is always ultimately for themselves. Many people have probably come to the same realization at some point. I remember the specific moment as an adolescent sitting at the kitchen table with my mother one day after school, when I had the moral epiphany that altruism in its pure form was logically impossible. No one can ever do anything that isn’t at some level directed at their own benefit. Even acts of “selfless” bravery on the battlefield are not at their core actually selfless, but driven to satisfy a personal compulsion in the moment.
Stirner takes this realization quite a bit further, however, and talks about how it is that we could possibly imagine things to be otherwise. How is it that we think that our motives could be directed at something other than our own personal needs? In order for this to occur, it is necessary for us to invent transcendent fictions, generalized abstractions that somehow magically possess power over us. Some examples of these that Stirner offers include such things as law, marriage, a good cause, family, the common good. To this list of fabricated entities I would add such things as financial obligation, tradition, reputation, property, and any form of authority.
Civilized life forces us to spend the majority of our time and energy engaging with these abstract fictions, feeding these ghosts, and we end up neglecting what is real and truly important. One notable result of this is that our relationships with each other have become degraded relative to what they could be otherwise. By adopting egoism, Stirner claims—and in direct contradiction to what might be expected of such a self-focused perspective—our connections with each other take on an authenticity that would be impossible otherwise: “If I cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence, whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my holding you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure: you yourself with your essence are valuable to me, for your essence is not a higher one, is not higher and more general than you, is unique like you yourself, because it is you.”
All civilized activity is feeding hungry ghosts, providing succor to phantastic entities whose pangs must be continuously assuaged. We spend our days trying to satisfy the unreal privations of empty fictions, attempting to placate their imagined needs through ritual offerings. And somehow we fail to notice that all of our pious compliance is in vain because, like the spiritual targets of the Segaki ritual, the monsters of civilization are insatiable.
