To Have Or To Be? summary

Name some of your possessions: watch, sunglasses. Check. What about your job or your spouse? 

Wait—are those possessions? Hardly, but that doesn’t mean we don’t see them that way. That explains why, when we lack these things, we’re prone to perceive ourselves—and others who also lack them – as incomplete. However, if we exchange the “having” mode for the “being” mode, we recognize that we’re complete regardless of how much we accumulate.

Getting everything we want seems like it would be fulfilling. But would it? When everyone assumes this objective, those in power only consider themselves instead of acting in the interest of others, as we’d like them to. Citizens, meanwhile, sit idly by when societal conflicts don’t directly affect their personal concerns. 

Let’s start by looking at those in power. Glorifying selfishness produces selfishly motivated leaders. 

Until the Industrial Revolution, humanity worked within the confines of nature. We respected it, recognizing that if earth couldn’t flourish, neither could we. However, fueled by greed, our environmental exploitation now endangers not only the earth’s survival, but also our own. 

Gone are the days when we viewed ourselves as a part of nature and prioritized its wellbeing. Now, we seek to conquer it for our benefit.

Two thousand years ago, Siddhartha Gautama abandoned a life of power and opulence when he realized that having everything he wanted hadn’t eliminated suffering from his life. Recognizing that a religion of poverty and love provided the enlightenment and meaning he sought, he became the Buddha. While we needn’t abandon everything as he did, we must experience a seismic shift in thinking to find the life we truly crave.

The first step toward this kind of change is awareness of the problem, which is that the “having” mode leads to suffering. 

Though we may not like to admit it, most of us are products of our environment. So to free ourselves from the suffering born of consumerist culture, we need to reconstruct our collective foundation. As the author suggests, we can only establish a new society if we first establish new priorities. 

We’re all in this together. If we’re going to achieve solidarity, we must together identify a shared ideal or a conviction on which to model our “being” society.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler, a British correspondent, took refuge in the city of Málaga. Though he was aware that General Franco’s Spanish nationalist forces wanted to arrest him, and though most of the city’s inhabitants had fled, Koestler was unwilling to relinquish the comfort of his warm villa and venture out into the cold and rainy night. He stayed, and this inability to act led to his capture. Koestler’s arrest illustrates how the fear of discomfort and the unknown can enable our downfall.

When considering the changes society needs to make, we get uncomfortable, so much so that we’re willing to risk tomorrow’s calamities as long as we don’t have to sacrifice today.