Becker, Ernest. Angel
in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on
the Nature of
> Everyman as Pervert: On the Pathology of Normalcy
What makes life “meaningful” to the acting organism? Simply, that which secures and guarantees the forward momentum of its action. Meaning, in other words, must be understood behaviorally. Only in this way can we make sense of the sometimes peculiar efforts and contortions by means of which man strives for meaning. An object has meaning for me, the acting organism, if I can predict the consequences of my behavior toward it – if I can predict its effect on me, or my effect on it. The subject creates a cause-and-effect world by assessing his powers in relation to the many different objects in his field. He builds up a framework of meaning, which is nothing more than a framework of confident expectation in relation to action and objects. (7)
What makes an object meaningful? Simply, our ability to behave toward it. It has meaning if it rallies us to act. Thus, when we say that we “lack meaning” we are actually saying that we lack dependable behavior patterns. Our intricate framework of expected cause-and-effect sequences may be sparse, or it may be shattered and unsound. But whatever the trouble, this trouble translates itself directly into an inhibition of our power to act. The meaning-framework in which we imbibe is composed of external objects and internal symbol objects. It is an ideational world inextricably woven into our neural networks. Nerve impulses, images, muscular tensions, real objects – it is these that form a tidy, self-consistent framework that composes our meaning world. But the important thing to note here is that if we lack the dependable responses to the objects, this is just another way of saying that we lack the objects, or that we lack the meaning-framework. The circle is self reinforcing: the more objects we have, the more behavior we have, the more meaning we have (the more “life” we have). Meaning, behavior, and objects form the inseparable constitution of our world. (9)
The point we have to remember, then, is that self-esteem is inseparable from one’s acts and one’s power to act. If we are limited in executive behavior toward the object world, we are ipso facto low in self-esteem. We then have to contrive it somehow: and the record of that contriving is what we mean, largely, by perversions like fetishism. (13)
And if we often see fetishism merging with homosexuality and transvestitism, we know that this triad has one basic feature: “the fear of the male social role in its entirety in the face of an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and a low self-esteem.” Becker quoting Nagler (13)
The more our powers are limited, and the more some special commitment is wanted, the more we become alert to fetishistic cues to action. They give us a quick defnition, an easy commitment, a rapid summing-up of just what power and how much care we need to bring to bear in a particular situation. Thus we are all more or less prone to fetishistic definitions in our sex life when we show a preference for a particular portion of our partner’s body.(14)
But our culture teaches us to become committed in some way to the body of the opposite sex, and we are eager for cues which give us a passport to permissive excitation. When we learn such a cue, we invest it with rich significance. (14-15)
Each culture heightens the meaning of certain qualities of objects so that its members can easily bring into play the approved response behavior: lace underwear and steatopygia for sex objects, tailfins and chrome for cars. The easy mark of “beauty” that serves as a perceptual counter is a promise that socially approved satisfaction will be forthcoming. (15)
In extreme schizophrenia we see such a ludicrous narrowing down of the schizophrenic’s hold on the world: he seems to be making last-ditch efforts to relate to whatever objects his powers can muster a response to – bits of debris to stuff into body crevices – ultimately his own excrement, anything tangible with which to come into safe manipulatory contact.
This represents a degradation of his executive powers to the near-zero level, rather than any peculiarly “mental” aberration (see Becker, 1964).
Is the child “compulsive” in his arrangement of his toys, in replacing the soap and towel in the bathroom, closing down the toilet seat? But what a simple formula for making the world safe again, for feeling “good” about himself in the face of all the complex and threatening “do’s” and “don’t’s” that refer to his own well-being. One proceeds the “correct” way in little things, and the big things are appeased and ordered. The child is a natural ritualist, a Confucian. (20)
After all, for the adult or the child, the object is a fearsome thing if one’s powers to relate to it are limited. And where the world is fearsome, it has a seniority over the self, and one is devalued no matter how old he is. The adult masochist, like the child, cannot imagine that he has rights or powers to treat the world on his own. (21)
> Kafka on the Oedipus Complex
As I have discussed it elsewhere, guilt means that one’s action is bound, that one is inhibited by an object without knowing why. And the most direct and unfathomable source of such inhibition is the existential priority and awesomeness of the concrete parental organism. It is the superordinacy of the parent that takes root well before the child learns symbols: hence it is not subject to conscious scrutiny (therefore it is “unconscious”). Furthermore – and this is important – even if the miraculousness of the parental organism were subject to symbolic scrutiny, there would still be nor way of explaining the primary miracle of the created organism. Hence, this is a natural and symbolically unresolvable guilt, that is, a deep feeling that one’s own existence is hopelessly transcended by the priority of all of creation: If we open our sensitivities to the majesty and miracle of creation, then we must “truly” crumble to our knees in palpitating fear and smallness, and in some kind of gratitude for having been given the transient “privilege” of just being a spectator. This is what the existential phenomenologists mean by “ontological” or “real” guilt, as opposed to “existential” or “circumstantial” guilt – the guilt that springs from our life history. But we can see that the two are inseparable: the transcendence of the parent’s inhibiting commands are rooted in the ontological transcendence of his concrete organism. There is no way for the child, even growing into the most mature and reflective adult, to live down the injustice of the decay and death of the marvelous parental organism – because it is ontologically unjust. Even if the child could absolve himself of any part in the causing of this decay and death, still its injustive transcends and humbles him. It is this that gives him the irreducible feeling of being bound and beholden, that makes his surrender “natural.” (49-50)
This is one basic dimension of the Oedipus, and it suggests a necessary complementary dimension: I mean that if the child fails to get a true estimate of his powers, it must be because they are somehow curtailed and interfered with by other powers in the form of commands, prohibitions, forcible constraint, willful trickery, or even routine and innocuous cajoling and bribery. But the result is ineluctable: in some variety of ways, the child abrogates the full aegis over his own individuality, and comes to rely on outside powers and rules, in order to sustain and justify his very existence and his right to act. The result of this dependence on outside powers is at the root of most tyranny by man over men. People get the very mandate of their lives from power sources outside of them, from other concrete organisms who embody authority, from codes of conduct, from networks of symbols, from intricate proprieties of all types. So that these outside sources come to assume a sanctity for which the individual would willingly give his life since without them he feels and believes that he could not sustain his life anyway. Hence, he feels dread at precisely that point where superordinate authority risks fading away, being replaced, overthrown, or even outgrown. (55-56)
Alas, the thing that the masses of men must one day learn, if Homo sapiens is to survive, is that the pure heart in which they base their trust is itself the first thing sullied by the ways and personages of the world into which they are born. (56)
Character armor, as we know, refers literally to arming of the personality so that it can maneuver in a threatening world. It refers to the shoring-up or damning-up of the individual’s fragile sense of self-value, in order to keep that self-value safe from undermining by events and persons. In other words, character armor really refers to the whole life style that a person assumes, in order to live and act with a certain security. We all have some, because we all need to organize our personality. This organization is a process whereby some things have to be valued more than others, some acts have to be permitted, others forbidden, some lines of conduct have to be closed, some kinds of thought can be entertained, others are taboo – and so on. (83)
Each person literally closes off his world, fences himself around, in the very process of his own growth and organization. In order to have some kind of centered control over his acts, the individual sets limits on his range of action, on the spectrum of his thought and feeling: it must all somehow be marshaled and harbored within his aegis. And this centered control is what we call the “ego”: as Freud so unmistakably taught us, the ego grows partly by controlling, but also partly by constraining itself, partly by limiting its freedom of perception and action. Otherwise it would be swamped from the start. (83)
Fetishization means the organization of perception and action, by the personality, around a very striking and compelling – but narrow – theme. It follows from what we have said, that if everybody has some character armor, everyone is also somewhat on a restrained area of things; and, if you cannot freely value everything, nor freely weigh all things against all other things, then, you must give disproportionate weight to some things which do not deserve this weight. You artificially inflate a small area of the world, give it a higher value in the horizon of your perception and action. And you do this because it represents an area that you can firmly hold on to, that you can skillfully manipulate, that you can use easily to justify yourself – your actions, your sense of self, your option in the world. The fetish, in a word, is an arbitrary focus for your derivation of self-value. (85)
As Marx and Simmel taught us, money is focused power, a point of orientation for the whole self-feeling of the personality, a locus around which one can justify an entire way of life. It is true power because it liberates us from the constraints of family, community, and friendship: with it we can go anywhere, do anything. And it is false power because it cuts off several dimensions of our lives and puts only one in their place: it cuts off community and the appeal of man; it cuts off God and self-transcending duty; and it replaces them with the narrow infallibility of material calculation. It is true power because one’s vital sense of self is no longer immersed in a network of obligations, some of which are truly constricting and even negating. It is false power because it encapsulates one’s sense of self in a chest of gold coins, or in a bank book with numbered pages. In a word, the fetish of money is a real organizing point for the personality – as all striking fetishes are; and at the same time, it is a false god, because it throws us back on ourselves and cuts off the richness of the world. (86)
If indeed he was weak and not strong, fetishized and not broad, then he will be unable to stand in the face of the buffetings to which he is subject in the story. And this is another lesson of basic psychology: namely, that the person who is armored, and who is fetishized, will be able to maneuver well only so long as his world is not too threatened. If has been able to organize his personality around narrow themes, and adapt to his world, this is partly accomplished by giving up the one really great strength that man needs in a crisis: I mean the ability to adapt to continually new kinds of stimuli, the ability to change, and grow, shed old armor, and broaden away from fetishes. (87)
First of all, let us be clear about what we mean by The Demonic. When man talks about the eruption of evil into the human realm, he is not pretending to describe what is working in the background forces of nature; he cannot know this. But what he can know is what is peculiarly defeating human life, as this defeat manifests itself in the realm of human action. To talk about The Demonic, then, as the peculiar manifestation of evil in the affairs of men, is to talk about something that can be described, seen, and understood. It is a way of coming to grips with the defeat of life on the surface of life, and not in the bowels of nature. I say this to quiet those modern philosophers who object to all loose talk, and who remind us that after Kant and Sir William Hamilton no one can pretend to know what is working behind things. (110-111)
In the realm of human affairs The Demonic is real…Specifically, it comes into being when men fail to act individually and willfully, on the basis of their own personal, responsible powers. The Demonic refers specifically to the creation of power by groups of men who blindly follow authority and convention, power which then engulfs them and defeats them. Let us also note that The Demonic has a naturalistic basis. It comes into being on the basis of a real evolutionary development: man is the animal in nature who, par excellence, can create vast structures of power by means of his symbolic manipulation of the world of energy. (111)
The irony is that in the realm of aspiringly free creatures, structures of power become enslaving over the very individuals who contribute to their creation: the group dominates the individual, and the leaders manipulate the groups. (111)
So we can see that evolution has presented a veritable paradox in the emergence of man: here is an animal whose means of creating power are such that they check his own free development….The way out of the paradox is that man is the one animal created by evolution who can use power for the further liberation of individuals, from the continuing constraint of groups. (111-112)
This liberation would theoretically come about as the disposition over power is made a matter of increasingly responsible individual decision. Instead of blindly following the leader and creating power for a world that he cannot control and has no say in, man would at all times question the leadership and disposition of power, the ends for which it is used. In this way he would not offer limitless power to isolated individuals who lead men, or to the automatic functioning of institutions into which men submissively fit; rather, he would spread power for the fullest liberation of the subjectivities of masses of individuals, would continually review the ends of the institutions that dispose of power, and make these institutions responsible to new human motives, new human needs. In a word, he would use his unique capacity to symbolize, to control the power unleashed uniquely by that capacity. The paradox of evolution would be overcome. (112)
Put this way, we need no reminding that this is the authentic and basic meaning of the promise of democracy: that it would be the one form of government most in accord with the promise of evolution itself, and that it would seek to turn the paradox of evolution to the fullest development of man’s subjectivity. Democracy is the form of government that has taken upon itself the task of combating The Demonic, by making each person an end in himself and a responsible, self-reliant point of authority to which power leaders and power institutions are beholden. (113)
If the promise of democracy cannot be realized, then evolution itself will be defeated in its highest creation, and The Demonic will enslave man and then destroy him. Yet we see just this happening in our time…Power has become free-floating, precisely because there are no self-reliant men; instead, there are masses led by demagogues, masses who create the power that the demagogues use, and who pass on the decisions over that power to those demagogues. (113)
“The Great Leader knows best. Let the experts decide, they have the intimate knowledge. We cannot make the decisions in areas outside our competence.” From what we have said, it is obvious that these are not merely the words of slavish and helpless masses: they are the death groan of evolution itself. The fact is that the Great Leaders may not know best. They have made empires crumble and caused untold sufferings among their own peoples since biblical times, as history attests. The fact is that experts cannot decide since they see only a small segment of the whole picture, and cannot weight the ends of action in their totality. The terrible blundering wars of modern times, fought with the weapons the experts created, are testimony enough to this. The promise of democracy knew these things, which is why it was anti-expert and anti-leader. It knew that the leader had to be controlled by responsible and willful masses of men, precisely because he will be corrupted by power into making decisions that are self-defeating. (113)
Whether he knows it or not, or admits it or not, the leader needs to be curbed, needs the broadest base of self-limiting decisions. The power created by vast institutions has to be literally anchored down into the individualities who man the institutions, otherwise it will engulf them as well as the leaders. (114)
As Tillich already saw in pre-World War II Europe, and as we are seeing today, once the vast powers of institutions become free-floating, subject only to the decisions of leaders who are themselves out of control, The Demonic takes over in full force. The structure of power descends over men, and has its way with them. The institutions literally run under their own weight, pulled ahead by the ominous overhanging cloud of power. Nothing that any one individual, or any small group, can do, seems to be of any avail – matters only seem to get worse. (114)
This is the hard choice before us: accept The Demonic and negate the promise of democracy; fight The Demonic, and assume a Quixotic posture for the realization of a hopeless ideal. Many of our brightest minds are today doing just the former thing: watering down the ideal of democracy to make it accord more with a managerial elite philosophy and a fatalistic acceptance of the structure of things. The point is that in matters of ideal visions, man has a choice: he can choose to work for them or not. (117)
If modern man has recognized The Demonic as the problem of his own further development, this gives him some purchase for eventually triumphing over the problem. (118)
The paranoid fantasy builds on one’s insecure power base, his helplessness in the world, his inability to take command of his experience, to get on top of the evil in the world. Here is the nub of the matter. One feels overwhelmed and has to make sense out of his precarious position. And the way to do this is to attribute definite motives to definite people. (126)
The simple fact is that we live in an impersonal world, but the more sensitive among us do not like it. After all, what bothers us most about our strange career on this planet is that our lives are subject to complete catastrophe by the simplest accident, the merest chance occurrence. This is the thing we can’t stand. The undoing of years of work, effort, good will, morality, patience, sacrifice – by one tiny random event: the prick by a dirty needle in a simple hospital check-up; one moment of inattention on a routine drive that we have made a thousand times’ a leaky gas jet in a brand-new heater – the examples are a thousandfold, and each one more disgusting than the next. Disgusting is the apt word for randomness, for meaningless mechanical accident that takes such a heavy toll of beautifully live and pulsating, complex natural organisms. (139)
The depersonalization of causality and of man’s fate might do for the academic intellectuals who hire our their abstracted intellects to the war machines, and for our Secretaries of Defense who calculate human deaths in numbers of “only one hundred million” dead. No primitive could think this way, and neither can the sensitive person today. (139)
And this is the heart of much paranoia for the sensitive soul: he can’t stand the impersonality of life. He wants motives and living power behind the fateful events. (140)
The final dimension that we have to consider in order to get a complete spectrum on the problem of paranoia is more subtle and perhaps more interesting than the first two. It is the Esthetic or Dramatistic Dimension in the strict sense of the word. It reflects the discrepancy between one’s feelings of his own worth and the picture that the world reflects of that worth. Man is the animal who lives on images; his whole life is a dramatistic performance, a symbolic edifice that gives him his sense of value. In a word, his value is staged. And so his very life blood is caught up in the symbolic staging. When the world reflects a lesser image than he has worked toward and thinks he has created or otherwise deserves deep down, then there is a need for esthetic reordering. Paranoid fantasy is a principal device for righting the imbalance, for warding off the invasion of meaninglessness into a life that feels it has achieved so much that ought to be meaningful. (142)
The one who has the most trouble with this problem is, as we might expect, the creative genius. He is caught in the terrible bind of presenting to the world a magnificent edifice testifying to his true greatness – only to have the world turn its back on him in incomprehension, fear, or derision. The thing is so usual with real works of genius that it almost represents a law of history, and even the popular mind is familiar with it, and knows it to be an injustice. (142)
Take the average man who has to stage in his own way the life drama of his own worth and significance. As a youth he, like everyone else, feels that deep down he as a special talent, an indefinable but real something to contribute to the richness and success of Life in the Universe. But, like almost everyone else, he doesn’t seem to hit on the unfolding of his special something; his life takes on the character of a series of accidents and encounters that carry hum along, willy-nilly, into new experiences and responsibilities. Career, marriage, family, approaching old age – all these happen to him, he doesn’t command them. Instead of his staging a drama of his own significance, he himself is staged, programmed by the standard scenario laid down by his society. He is carried through the production by the accidents of fate and fortune, and only inserts his will into it by accepting to sweat with his brow and assume responsibility for the situations he moves into. I am not implying that this is ugly or undignified: it is probably the highest heroism. The only thing is that it is not his drama. As often happens a man or woman may live to see the best of their efforts to salvage some kind of decent performance go to naught. In middle age one might see his children go to jail or die pointlessly in an auto accident or fraternity house fire; his wife become an alcoholic, an adulteress, or just a mindless, nagging hag. And to cap it all, it might gradually become plain to him that the company to which he has given his best talents and energies in the job into which he stumbled in his youth, could always have gotten along really without him. In other words, he gradually comes to feel that he has made no contribution to world life. (143)
In a sense all of our lives “fail” to be what we once felt they might be; and even if we succeed by worldly standards, our real success is never sure: there is always something unconvincing and unsubstantial about event he most exemplary life drama. We may be led to compare it to the panorama of evolution, the rise and fall of whole civilizations, the countless numbers of human bones and skills that make the a graveyard of this planet – the imminence of absolute and complete catastrophe that could wipe away in a minute the whole career of evolution – and seemingly, the whole worth and value of the destiny of humanity. (143)
If we do not or cannot make some fortunate and heroic reconceptualization of the meaning of human life, then we have to try, in some way, to make sense out of a drama that has been botched. Those who are the most desperate and the most helpless are forced to invent paranoid languages to justify their failure: languages of jealousy delusions that accuse their spouses; languages of guilt delusions that accuse themselves; languages o hate that accuse their children, their friends, and their employers. (144-145)
These are desperate intellectual devices that attempt to make sense out of lives that have bogged down and failed. More usually, and for most of us, the reaction is to tighten up, insist on how right we have always been anyway, how good our efforts have been, how correct the old models and the old standards – standards to which people “nowadays” no longer adhere, and so on.
The point is that man is a dramatistic animal, and he himself gets caught up in the staging. The performance acquires its own esthetic integrity and begins to use for its own purposes its own central character. He is put in the position of not being able to stand any esthetic discrepancies between his own feeling of worth and the image that the drama reflects of him. He has to balance and to juggle, and perform and direct all the harder. He has to be as great and infallible as the plot shows him to be. This is the fatal circularity in which he is caught: the fact that he can make the world reflect the image of his greatness obliges him to do so, since the one thing that man cannot stand, as we said, is the discordancy between what he feels is true, and what the world reflects as true. As the world exaggerates his feelings of unusual worth, he then has to further support and stage the exaggeration. He ends up caught in his own fictional staging, and may be forced to try to prove it real in more and more of its discordant details. And so we have the “natural” unfolding of megalomanic paranoia that has taken such a monstrous toll through human history. The ruler literally feeds human life into the drama of his own importance. The average subject is at best only a potential prop for the ruler’s dramatistic needs; at worst, he is a potential hindrance or interference with the image the ruler has to maintain. (147)
All the gods have to do is to give a man an exaggerated idea of his own importance, and the power and means to stage that idea – and he will accomplish the necessary self-destruction. (149)
Paranoia is truly a kind of poetics, a weaving of images around the limitations of the human situation, the plight of a peculiarly limited organism. And so we can understand the difference between rich poetics and poor ones. Rich poetics take in a totality of experience that includes pulsating organisms and airy symbols. They are based on a depth of physical feeling and they draw on a richness of total experience. Poor poetics draw on shallow emotions and thin feeling, on impoverished organisms – in a word, on symbolic superstructures without sure foundations. (150)
If you are at east, comfortable, feel you belong, sense the plenitude of your powers – then your thoughts are generous, warm, broad, rich, tentative, and open. If you are cramped, trapped, weak, overwhelmed, underneath your experience – then your thoughts are mean, chilly, poor, humorless, dogmatic, and closed. (150)
To aim for sanity is to aim for the long slow growth of one’s powers and sensitivities in the real world of experience. (151)
In sum, then, to talk about a sane society is to talk about a world that loves and respects the noise and laughter of swarming children and galloping adolescents, a world that values pulsating life over mechanical things, whole organisms – minds in bodies – over part truths, new birth over old interests. (152)
Most of all, our brief survey of the problem of paranoia reveals that no amount of frenzied thought or logic can give us these wholesome values. They can only come about by a broad, comprehensive effort by modern man to refind himself in the universe, to triumph over the modern dilemma of his strangeness on this earth. He has to rewin his sense of trust, his mellowness of mood, his relaxedness and belongingness. He must overcome the feeling that throws such a dismal shadow over him: that he is an accident, his life a whim, his face alien, his efforts unwanted and unneeded. (152)
The choice of whether man is basically good or bad is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: man can be aggressive when he seeks to maximize his sense of being at the expense of flies, dogs, and sparrows, or at that of weaker playmates in competition for toys. As an adult he can ply these behaviors in more serious matters, at the expense of large groups of his fellow man. On the other hand, if suitable social channels and arrangements are made available, in competitions in the arts, crafts, and social service. William James knew these things when he called for a peaceful “moral equivalent” of war” men had energy to burn in their to self-enhancement. It was up to society to provide life-ways that make this self-enhancement creative rather than socially destructive. (175-176)
When society does not make such provision, then we can actually say that it is responsible for man’s aggressive and destructive outbursts. (176)
Choose than man must be curved by law, because of his innate destructiveness. Choose that man is potentially good if we adapt our institutions to the expression of free creativity, and we will bring about a better type of person…Take your pick, your world will be molded accordingly. (176)
On the Hobbesian hand, we have people who stand for perpetuation. These are the institutionalists, the men who seek the rule of law, the perpetuation of order, the continuity and durability of the proven forms of social arrangements. They believe that the forms of things have to be maintained, even over and against the wishes of segments of people. People to their mind, are in some ways dangerous, and must be protected against themselves. People need orderly institutions, whether they acknowledge it or not, and when they run afoul of these institutions, it is the people who must bend. Innovation is dangerous, and hard to control; it has unforeseeable effects, and cannot be left to the whims of men. Institutional process is the thing, the best guide for social life: it levels and absorbs, and blunts potential destruction. Utopias are unreal as well as dangerous, impractical as well as upsetting. So deep is this option on the part of some of these men that…they would trust in the institutions and work against abrupt changes, even in a post-atomic-holocaust world. (177)
On the other or Rousseauian hand, we have the charismatics, who are opposed to the institutional perpetuators. These men believe that hope lies in the new, in innovations. They believe that the center of truthfulness lies in individual subjectivities rather than in the objective network institutions. They see quality in the new and untried, more than in the habitual. They trust individuals, favor the experimentation by minorities, are willing to risk unorganized success. They believe that the few may be able to save the many, even from themselves. In sameness and continuity they see and feel the forebodings of real disaster; in innovation they sense rebirth and the promise of victory. Where their opponents might invoke the Koran and the Talmud, the rule of law over the passions of men, they might invoke Christ and the new birth, the innocence and saving grace of the untried. (178)
The juxtaposition of these two viewpoints may be trite, but it represents a dichotomy which is very real and deep-going. And it invites judgment: Who is right? Obviously the answer can exclude neither side. The perpetuators are right: society needs institutions, and the main task of man is to stand fast, to carry on. Nature herself perpetuates; it is the only sure thing that we know. But the perpetuators are wrong to imagine that institutions cannot be their own undoing; they forget that outmoded lifeways can be more dangerous than wishful innovation. History is strewn with examples of the failure of whole civilizations because of incrusted habitual ways. If nature endures, she endures in order to change. Innovation is a fact of the natural world; the generations last in order to give birth to new generations, to unknown energies. The institutionalists want only to “last out”; the charismatics want to “foresee in order to forestall.” (178-179)
Here is the crux of the matter: the science of man is an active, innovative, interventionist science. It is founded on the belief that man must continually modify cherished lifeways to accord with future goals and continuing historical changes. If this science is to be a central fact of modern life, then the balance must swing to the innovators. If this science is to be peripheral and impotent, then, of course, all we can do is to “endure” and preserve our institutions as best we can (179).
The great contradiction at the heart of the institutionalist position is that they want their scientific cake and the sameness of their institutions too. And it is this timidity and self-negating compromise which makes them increasingly pathetic, amoral, and villainous to the young social scientists. (180)
The Oedipus complex really shows one fundamental thing, and it is a general thing, not the specific thing that Freud wanted to show. Oedipus means simply that all members of Homo sapiens undergo a childhood training in which is implanted an automatic style of behavior guided by symbols – an uncritical world view inculcated by the parent trainers of the young. (183)
…this world view is uncritical, it is unreflective: we do not know why we have the sense of right and wrong that we have – we act on it, feel it, live it, and believe it. We are the prisoners of our early-implanted sense of conscience. And this is what we mean by the Unconscious. The Unconscious is not a reservoir of animal drives; rather, it is the unexamined residue of our early training and feeling about ourselves and the world. Since the Unconscious represents our basic organismic conditioning about the kind of world we are comfortable in, the kind that is “right and true” for us, we must understand that it comprises the gross and deep-going motives of our behavior – motives which are not amenable to reflective, symbolic scrutiny. Since our Unconscious is our basic emotional identification with the kinds of feelings and acts which make us comfortable, we can say that it contains the motives that determine our behavior, whether we consciously will it or not. (183-184)
One related and crucial aspect of this early training is that by means of it, the individual earns his sense of self and his right to live and act in society. In other words, each individual earns his right to exist as a social-cultural animal from others of his kind – others who are for many years in a position of superior power to himself, and who usher him into a superordinate symbolic action world. (184)
We must emphasize, too, how deep-going this process is: it helps us to understand the difficulty of real growth and the anguish of conversion to a new world view. The fundamental fact about each human being is that his early growth is in large part a denial and masking of his anxiety, his powerlessness, his felt finitude. (195)
Do we have to state the obvious, and say that we have long known what causes armies of men to march to slaughter and genocide? It is not man’s aggressiveness, but rather his fearfulness and automatic submissiveness to authority. This is the sickness at the heart of the creature, that makes him so terrible in the animal kingdom: he spills blood out of weakness. (188)
Human evil, we may finally conclude, is self-created, not animal inspired. It springs from the ground of restless striving that characterizes all organisms. The uniqueness of man is that, with reason and thought, he might have a different destiny if he could but see through his Oedipus or early training, and come to identify the unconscious rooting of his own sense of self. (188-189)