The Perfect Illusion

I just had my second friend this month announce her cancer diagnosis, and I haven’t figured out how to process this development. It possibly seems small-beer in a social climate where many people are watching friends die in manners reminiscent of the Plague. But knowing two people who will have to fight to preserve their lives, in a medical environment overloaded by sudden, violent contagion, feels personal.

As I write this, America’s COVID-19 numbers are nearly 190,000 cases. That’s an increase of over 100,000 diagnoses since we slipped into Number One for diagnosed cases… five days ago. Yet having two friends diagnosed with cancer feels different. COVID-19 is random, comparable to influenza. But cancer suggests something. Smoking? Radioactive spiders? It isn’t airborne, anyway, so what happened to bring it about?

Knowing my friends have struggles ahead of them, that they have treatments that will sometimes feel worse than the disease, hurts my soul. I’ve struggled, in the weeks and days and hours since learning of my friends’ diagnoses, to understand why this bothers me so. I think I’ve finally come to some kind of conclusion: because despite everything, I’ve managed to maintain my illusions of control. Cancer is the opposite of that.

Much of modern life has cultivated the belief that we control the circumstances of our lives. We need to believe our choices matter in order to participate in a winner-take-all economic system, or the kind of democracy we have in America and Britain. If we didn’t have the mental impression that our decisions matter in our own lives, we couldn’t participate in industrial capitalism or a free-press marketplace of ideas.

We need to believe we have control. Only when our decisions matter, do we actually have power to decide anything. More important, we need to believe our choices matter to maintain the belief that we exist as individuals. If we perceive our options as circumscribed by social conditions, and limited by factors outside our ken, then we become members of a collective, swept along like the tide.

This isn’t necessarily bad; membership in the collective is mandatory for mass movements and social change. The entire underlying principle of labor unions, political parties, and Chambers of Commerce holds that we get more done, and better, when we act collectively. But some people, stripped of the illusion of control, find themselves bobbing along like dead fish. If life is beyond our control, they think, our choices don’t matter.

That certainly happened to me when, in my middle twenties, I surrendered the conservative individualist principles I’d grown up believing. Faced with the realization that, not only did I no longer believe my father’s individualist ideals, but also the ideals of my community, I felt powerless. I believed nothing I did could matter. I held passionate monologues for my college girlfriend about my newfound beliefs, but I didn’t actually do anything useful.

Years later, I’ve passed through that nihilistic phase and recognized the need for action. I participate in civic action, rally with fellow true believers, and lend myself to creating the numbers necessary for long-overdue change. No, I don’t always uphold this necessity, just as I don’t always follow my religious beliefs as I should; but who does? Action is more important than perfection.

Yet, learning my friends have cancer, that they may be beginning a predictable march toward mortality, makes me realize: I’ve moved into another illusion of control. As a conservative, I once believed I could, übermensch-like, control my destiny through brazen will. As a progressive, I substituted belief in community and fellow-feeling. I now realize for the first time, that I’ve replaced one illusion of control for another.

Would things be different if I had the cancer, instead of them? Maybe. I’d have to wrack my soul to find peace with my own mortality. Instead, I find myself stuck outside, watching, helpless. I’m too broke to offer financial support, and too scientifically illiterate to offer medical support. Since one of my friends is agnostic (I haven’t talked religion with the other), my prayers would mainly comfort me.

Having this happen amid the COVID-19 outbreak only underscores my smallness. Reality, let’s admit, isn’t your friend. My belief in God doesn’t influence His existence, or absence, one whit. Our entire social, political, and economic system depends on the expectation that our choices mean something. Cancer, and mortality more generally, rips that expectation away. We’ve couched ourselves inside the perfect illusion; now we face the reality of our own essential insignificance.