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In War and Peace, Tolstoy makes a profound statement:
“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent.”
Tolstoy is presenting the formula for greatness, which can also be applied as the formula on how to live a great life.
- greatness = simplicity + goodness + truth
You must have simplicity, goodness, and truth in order to live a great life. But what does each piece really mean?
In this part the concept of “simplicity ” will be discussed. “Goodness” and “truth” will each be addressed in their own subsequent parts.
Simplicity
What exactly is simplicity? Earlier in the book Tolstoy defines simplicity as “submission to God”. But what is God? For some, it is the creator of the universe. For others, it is existence itself. There are many ways to view God but that’s besides the point, afterall, many people don’t believe in God at all or at least not in any traditional sense. The question we must ask is what does God represent? Whether you’re an atheist or a believer God represents the same thing: the ideal.
God as the Ideal
God is an abstracted ideal created to disassociate the ideal from any particular king or ruler, as Jordan Peterson says in his 2017 YouTube series “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories”. But God isn’t just an abstracted ideal of the king, rather God is THE ideal. God represents THE highest being and the highest point anyone can aim at, beyond any king or ruler. But there are some people who don’t believe in God… If God is simply an abstracted ideal, is that really the case? Is it really a matter of “belief” to begin with? Everyone has an ideal whether they know it or not. In other words an ideal is anyone or anything you look up to, that you aim for, that you wish you could achieve.
Submission to the Ideal
Going back to Tolstoy, he said that simplicity is “submission to God” or in other words submission to the ideal. The question we now face is why must we submit to the ideal? Well, the easy answer is that by definition the ideal is something that we MUST submit to. That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t be an ideal if we weren’t submitting to it or not holding ourselves accountable to it. Submitting to the ideal is just as natural as submitting to your king. But we can dig a little bit deeper than that.
Motivation and Ambition
The ideal is what we all aim for. It’s what drives and motivates us. As I said earlier, the ideal is the highest point anyone can aim at. When we see a successful businessman, we wish we could be at that level of success financially. When we see a polymath, we wish we could have that level of intellect. When we see an attractive person… you get the point. These are all ideals for us. We aim for them and hope we can reach them.
Shame
The ideal also shames us because achieving it is incredibly difficult and most will fall short. Strength shames the weak. Wisdom shames the stupid. Beauty shames the ugly. But shame is not a bad thing. Shame is the small price we pay for ambition and achievement.
This is also the reason why people fear the ideal and refuse to adopt or accept one. No one likes to fail and when you fall short of the ideal that you’re aiming for, you may feel like a failure. But rather than becoming fearful of the ideal due to this experience of failing, you should instead become humble in relation to the ideal. Afterall, we are naturally humbled by greatness and of course we’re going to appear as failures in front of absolute greatness. Don’t be scared and run away, instead, embrace and be humbled.
Shame ultimately provides us with the opportunity to be humbled which prevents arrogance from creeping into us. You can’t live a great life with arrogance, for arrogance leads to the complete opposite of greatness.
“the triad of resentment, deceit, and arrogance is as good a decomposition of what constitutes evil as I have been able to formulate.” — Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order
Conclusion
“Submission to God” means to humble yourself before the ideal. It means a willingness to pay the price of shame. It also means a promise to aim for the ideal. If you’re not aiming for the ideal then unfortunately you’re aiming down, and your life isn’t going to get any better if you’re aiming down.
We must submit to the ideal because the ideal provides us with two critical components that lead to a great life:
- motivation and ambition
- shame and a defense against arrogance
What you choose as your ideal is up to you; it’s not for me to decide. What’s crucial is that you anchor yourself to something much greater than yourself.
In conclusion, to live a great life you must submit yourself to a higher ideal. You must have something you’re aiming for, something much greater than yourself. You must understand that you are a speck in the vastness of the cosmos that is the ideal and that is a humbling feeling. Through humble ambition you can achieve great things and live a truly great life.