Congruence

I just watched the new Netflix film about Ted Kaczynski, and I came away thinking about something I didn't expect:

Congruence.

Ted Kaczynski was a murderer. He committed acts of terrorism that killed and injured innocent people. Nothing about what follows excuses that, and conviction doesn't make evil less evil.

But separating the man from the morality of his actions for a moment, there is one characteristic of his that I find strangely compelling.

He was extraordinarily congruent.

He believed modern technological society was making human beings increasingly dependent on systems they couldn't control.

So he left.

He believed consumer culture created artificial needs.

So he attempted to live with almost nothing.

He believed technological progress was changing the relationship between human beings, nature, work and autonomy.

So rather than merely writing about it from the comfort of modern society, he tried to construct a life outside of it.

And eventually, disastrously, he carried his convictions somewhere no moral principle could justify.

That's what makes him such an interesting study in congruence.

Because congruence is not goodness.

A person can be completely aligned between belief and action and still be profoundly wrong.

But the opposite problem seems far more common.

Most of us live with enormous distances between what we believe and how we actually live.

We value health but neglect our bodies.

We value freedom but construct lives requiring increasingly more income just to maintain them.

We value presence but struggle to sit through ten quiet minutes without reaching for stimulation.

We value nature while spending most of our lives inside climate-controlled boxes.

We value independence while becoming dependent on systems we barely understand.

We say time is our most precious resource, then casually trade decades of it for things that don't particularly matter to us.

There is always a gap between ideals and reality. That's part of being human.

But I've started wondering how large that gap can become before something inside us notices.

Maybe that's part of what people mean when they talk about feeling lost.

Not necessarily that we don't know who we are.

Maybe we know exactly who we are, or at least who we want to be, and our lives simply stopped resembling it.

That makes congruence a useful question:

If I claim to believe something, where is the evidence of that belief in my life?

Not in what I post.

Not in what I intend.

Not in what I tell myself.

In how I actually spend my time, money, attention and energy.

Kaczynski represents an extreme warning at the other end of that spectrum.

Congruence without humility can become fanaticism.

The fact that you're willing to sacrifice for an idea doesn't prove the idea deserves the sacrifice.

So perhaps the goal isn't perfect ideological consistency.

It's something quieter:

Believe carefully.
Question yourself honestly.
Live increasingly in accordance with what survives the questioning.

There should always be enough humility left to say:

I might be wrong.

But there should also be enough courage left to ask:

If I really believe this, why doesn't my life look like it?

That's what stayed with me after the film.

Not Ted Kaczynski's ideology.

Certainly not his violence.

Just the uncomfortable power of a person whose life and convictions, however terribly misguided they ultimately became, had remarkably little distance between them.

And maybe that's the part worth examining in ourselves:

the distance between what we profess and what we practice.