If we can at all begin to understand a different relationship between pleasure and anxiety and move towards the resolution of the psychological pattern which we often trap ourselves into sustaining, we might be able to philosophize about a different kind of civilization or a different kind of living or meaning to life.
Such understanding is able to alter our accepted concept of time and our implementation of our core beliefs on (psychological) time.
Furthermore a different relationship between the individual and collective begins to come about when this new pattern (or lack of pattern) begins to strengthen in our mental awareness.
When anxiety is seen not as a product of the past or an impending future, but rather as a disorder of the mind that is obsessed with something that does not actual exist there is a different emphasis given on what our perception of the past or the future is and what their relationship to the present is.
This change affects what it means to say “MY anxiety” as opposed to observing such disorder simply as “anxiety”. The implications of the individual become less (or not) important.
From another perspective we can suggest that the concept of the individual, that each of us holds dearly, is itself a bi-product of our mistaken emphasis on causality. The individual is a construct of all its past (and perhaps its impending future), and so if we take a new perspective on time the meaning and definition of the “individual” also changes.
We might ask...
What are the effects of such psychological change on a society?
What would a society look like that has wholeheartedly adopted this change in perspective?
We are asking about a society that is no longer controlled by anxiety or fear or driven by escape to seek pleasure.
It seems, such a mind, being free from the enslavement of such disorder would now be able to function fully rationally and freely.