Man Has No Bottom

Friday, 21 November 2025, 9:32 am
Article: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

There’s a line from a Matthew McConaughey movie — I don’t remember which one — that pretty much sums up the self-made situation of humans at present.

The McConaughey character is in a bar with a woman that’s had a troubled life. Trouble with men, beginning with her father; trouble with drugs and alcohol. Some guys in the bar are running her down, and the McConaughey character shuts them up with a single line: “She’s got bottom.”

We’ve all known people who don’t have a bottom, who drink until they’re dead, or sink until they can’t get out of bed, or so caught in darkness they never see the light. In my 20’s I was one of them, suffering through cycles of deepening depression so severe that if I hadn’t found bottom in myself, I wouldn’t have lived beyond 40.

That realization enabled me to turn my life around without anti-depressants. It’s the reason I advocate methodless meditation in nature so much — because it’s the single most important thing that saved me.

As things stand, America has no bottom.

As long as Democrats and fallen-away Republicans keep viewing America’s slide into authoritarianism in terms of “Trump and his MAGA base,” rather than as a nation that’s lost its soul (or intactness as a people if you prefer), they will contribute to the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that underwrites tyranny.

There’s an old saying, “I thought they had hit bottom, but they just went and dug a new one.” People don’t “hit bottom,” they find and build a bottom within themselves. A bottom doesn’t preexist the irreducible intent to not sink any further.

The immediate future of the United States is secondary however. Nationalism remains the biggest obstacle to effective action on reducing burning of fossil fuels. Catastrophe looms, as man is raising the temperature of the air and oceans beyond anything that Homo sapiens has seen in our 100,000-year history.

Yet as one commentator aptly put it, “In the age of extreme weather and climate agreements, the world tabulates ecological guilt nation by nation — cutting responsibility for the current crisis into so many slices of pie.”

Thus nationalism is both a symptom and a cause of the fragmentation that is ripping the Earth and humanity apart.

As the writer John Vaillant points out, “Humans have always moved at a different pace than the natural world. But suddenly there’s a syncing up, with the natural world now moving as fast or faster than we are — faster than humans, faster than technology, faster than history.”

What does that mean, “faster than history?” It means the opposite of what Teilhard de Chardin predicted for humankind.

Teilhard was a Jesuit priest and respected paleontologist in the 20th century that took part in the discovery of Peking Man. De Chardin has become a touchstone for New Agers, and is the author of the treacly saying so often heard in the retreat industry: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

A writer for a mediocre organization called “Humans and Nature” described de Chardin’s philosophy this way: “Teilhard called the human-created world the ‘noosphere,’ which slowly spread like a skin over the planet, like the biological skin (the biosphere) that preceded it.”

So the ‘noosphere’ preceded the equally inane idea of the ‘Anthropocene.’ Both are attempts to lend scientific credibility and emotional detachment to man’s decimation of the Earth.

Teilhard went further than the current crop of geologists and paleontologists labeling this the Anthropocene Age. Chardin “imagined “grains of thought” coalescing at ever-larger scales until they became a single global consciousness that he called the Omega Point.”

Many people today have made such a notion the cornerstone of their worldview. Some spew nonsense like, “Call it social engineering or stewardship, it is up to us to turn the earth into the super-organism that Teilhard had in mind.” One hears less of such blather in the last few years, since many people now believe man is doomed.

The hard truth is that rather than an upward spiral to an imagined “Omega Point,” the arc of the human species is a downward spiral to either a slow extinction or an explosion of insight.

Teilhard tried to philosophically unite science and spirituality, the human world and the natural world in “The Phenomenon of Man.” But he failed to see and foresee the actual trajectory of man. His upwardly spiraling Omega Point has become a mockery of the vortex if man’s collective, cumulative consciousness, which is sucking the individual and humanity into a black hole-like singularity.

So does man have a bottom? By ‘man’ I mean the rapacious primate wrongheadedly using the Promethean gift of symbolic thought to fragment the earth and humanity to the breaking point, or in the vernacular, tipping point.

A prognosis is only as good as the diagnosis that precedes it. An explosion of insight that changes the disastrous course of humankind is still possible, but only if enough of us face and take total responsibility for the darkness within us, which is the darkness of man in some measure.

Will future generations say they found bottom within them, thereby allowing a future for humanity? Or will they say, they knew where things were headed, but didn’t care?

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail