[Paper] Prejudice or progress?

[paigetheoracle]

Prejudice is the refusal to view things from any but one angle (monomania). It leads to verbal and physical conflict through the wish to be seen as ‘hero’, implying that the ‘other’ is always a ‘villain’ as the author explains in his book (Black and white thinking): Experiment, the basis of science, is a disavowing ourselves of assumptions and illusions we may unknowingly be under, by looking at things from several different angles. In ‘The Denial of Death’ by Ernest Becker, we find a work which challenges our perceptions and prejudices of the world, forcing us to face where we stand with regards to reality, fairly and squarely but not without compassion because it brings insight and understanding with it.

(All words in brackets are added by me for clarification or to add a point without disturbing the rest of the text too much and to make it clear that it is an interjection by me and not the author). See also the paper ‘Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals’ by James T. Webb, quoted in INTJ forum, in Philosophy and Ethics section, under ‘Higher Intelligence & Existential Depression Anyone?’ This gives another angle to it of equal but more modern bias.

 

Basically what is behind neurosis and psychosis is what Paul Tillich calls ‘the fear to be’ or existential angst. Maslow said much the same thing in ‘The Need to Know’, p.118-119 ‘We tend to be afraid of any knowledge which would cause us to despise ourselves. we protect ourselves and our ideal image of ourselves by repression and similar defences’. This is the cult of perfectionism by any other name (We all fall short in comparison with God). Perfectionism causes stress through avoidance (The lie/ Keeping up appearances).

 

‘If the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience, he would not be able to act with...equanimity. This despair (of the human condition) he avoids by building defences. They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a wilful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that he is somebody - not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet that Carlyle for a time called a hall of doom.’(p.55 Denial of Death). This powerful tract tells us what we are all having to deal with on a day-to-day basis as human beings.

 

To quote Kierkegaard ‘(He) does not dare to believe in himself... far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cypher in the crowd’ (Sickness p. 166-167).

 

‘In the prison of one’s character, one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is reason for one’s life...-what we might call ‘prison heroism’: The smugness of the insiders who ‘know’.’ (p.87 Denial of Death). To be ‘foolish’, is to move on. To fear being thought a fool by others, is to hang in where you are (defending the castle against all comers, rather than venture outside it).

 

 

‘He (Fromm) has kept alive Freud’s basic insight into narcissism as the primary characteristic of man: How it inflates one with the importance of his own life and makes for the devaluation of others’ lives.’ This is shown in the action of overtly attacking others as a covert way of praising oneself. It also shows itself in the attempt to provoke others into acting, so that you can maintain the moral high ground through claiming the ‘enemy’ / opponent struck first. (‘I wouldn’t do it but they would,’ sinners) (Fromm calls this) ‘incestuous symbiosis’: The fear of emerging out of the family and into the world on one’s own responsibility and powers: The prison of the motherly racial-national-religious fixation. The mystique of (the) ‘group’. (p.134 ibid.).

 

‘Generally speaking, we call neurotic any lifestyle that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices and growth that a person may want or need.’ (p 179 ibid.). The truth (is) that he (man) is an inner symbolic self...bound by a finite body. The attempt to ignore either aspect of man’s situation, to repress possibility or to deny necessity, means that man will live a lie (Have an unbalanced life). If the lie that he attempts to live is too flaunting of reality, a man can lose everything during his lifetime - this is precisely what we mean by psychosis: The complete and utter breakdown of the character structure.’ (p. 75 ibid.).

 

‘There is none more logical than the lunatic, more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. What is the thing they lack that sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances, to relax and laugh at the world. They can’t unbend.’ (p. 201 ibid.).

 

‘It is, rather, the fear of the reality of the intense focalization of natural wonder and power; the fear of being overwhelmed by the truth of the universe as it exists*. (p.148 ibid.).

‘The neurotic type...makes the reality surrounding him, a part of his ego, which explains his painful relation to it. For all outside processes, however unmeaningful they may be in themselves, finally concern him...he is bound up in a kind of magic unity with the wholeness of life around him, much more than the adjusted type, who can be satisfied with the role of a part within the whole. The neurotic type has taken into himself, potentially the whole of reality’ (p. 182 ) The key to (this) creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it’ (p. 171). As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it (take a leap of faith, then digest it). All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.’ (p. 199). The Enlightenment view of immortality is “Living in the esteem of men yet unborn, for the works that have contributed to their life and betterment.” This fits here as the motive which drives the creative on.

 

As Becker says, we cannot avoid neurosis - this is because we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t . We want the old way of life to continue because we fear a new one and having to readjust. We are comfortable in our old ways because they are ‘safe’ (Repetition breeds certainty). We know we can handle them and how but the new frightens us because it reduces us all to novices (children) again. That which stimulates change is boredom with the old or as the I-Ching so eloquently puts it ‘People do not change, until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain to alter’. The two types of neuroses Becker mentions are awareness of our own mortality/ existence (separation anxiety) and The confident ‘God’ stance (World behind you) or facing the enormity of creation in front of you (the world to come and feeling separate from it): The mouse and the elephant.

 

Existential angst kicks in as extreme self-awareness or standing out as volunteer in life (Nakedly aware, like Adam and Eve after partaking of the fruit, of The Tree of Knowledge. The other side of it is the question ‘Will this situation last?’ (We’re kings of the castle now but will it last forever).

 

‘Inner sustainment (from a good upbringing) that allows the child to develop a ‘lofty’ shut-upness, or reserve: That is, an ego ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the world by a personality that can open up more easily to experience (change). “Mistaken’ shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort (driven) to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls; it means, therefore, more automatic repression by an essentially closed personality. For Kierkegaard, the ‘good’ is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety: The closed is the evil, which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences. The closed shuts out revelation, obtrudes a veil between the person and his own situation in the world.’ (p. 72).

 

What is the neurotic most scared of? Giving into the temptation to change (alter his personality/ lose his identity/ change his lifestyle/ give up his treasured beliefs about who and what he is). It is this nightmare he guards his very life against and that frightens him into defensive wakefulness against all comers. Panic (neurosis) is running away from life and the naked enormity of existence. To get into a meditative state, is to calm down and take control of your life, your ‘raw’ emotions and look at that reality you’re avoiding. From this position of ‘presence’, you can observe what is real and what is not, moving on from one illusion to another as you seek ultimate truth, glimpsing it in deeper and deeper detail, like peeling back the layers of an onion, to finally reveal that there is in fact ‘nothing’ to be scared of - not even death because it is the biggest nothing there is. Most people are really frightened of life or what they fear it to be because they don’t want to take ‘response-ability for it; not so much denial of death but the broader concept of resistance to change. When it boils down to it nobody wants to be thought of as a child, an amateur - imperfect, undeveloped, a fake as opposed to adult, complete, professional. However life is a conveyor belt, leading us all to the edge of reason, through the unexpected - certainty lulls us to sleep as the unknown wakes us up, to that which awes us by its newness but can exasperate us because we don’t know how to react to it/ interact with it (There is no handbook for the unrecognised and unrecognisable: It is change and how we learn to deal with it, that leads to personal evolution).

 

‘Kierkegaard understood that the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents and to his own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and thus character defences are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in his own character armour, unable to freely beyond his own prison or into himself, into the defences he is using, that are determining his unfreedom’ (p.73). Philistinism knows its real enemy: Freedom is dangerous (p. 74)

 

‘Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules. The Philistine (as Kierkagaard calls the neurotic) trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity, he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience’(p. 81). Devoid of imagination as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain...province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs...Philistinism tranquillises itself in the trivial (Celebrity Culture)(p.81). The immediate man does not recognise his self, he recognises himself only by his dress, he recognises that he has a self only by externals (No internal life/ no insight i.e. no connection to his thoughts and memories) (p. 74). They are the one dimensional men, totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning -man everywhere who doesn’t understand what it means to think for himself (p. 73). Better to have someone to blame than be self-responsible. Better to blame the authorities/ parents / ancestors. and pass the buck - anything rather than praise those who came before us and laid the foundations for our lives/ society. Blame is dumping personal response-ability (I don’t exist/ have no personal power - it was all done by somebody else who does have it i.e. the other (God/ fate etc.). Are we to abandon the neurotic (frightened) and psychotic (terrified out of their mind) then? No because both these need reassurance that the world is safe place. The core workers of society are to be found in both groups, when they tame their fears through repetition of effect (daily routine that proves to them that ‘all this’, won’t be snatched from them). They make up the body and mind of society as the creative make up the spirit of progress (Stability is not what they need but challenge - an exciting future as opposed to a calming present or certain past). The way I see it, the neurotic care, the psychotic care too much and the apathetic (depressed) don’t care at all ( having given up all hope they need encouragement to try to put effort into their lives again).

 

The author also covers leadership and how people use those those that rule them as an excuse for their actions and failures(p. 137 & 138) as well as using them with to fulfil their own needs, with scant regards to the effect upon that ruler(p. 136). This common bond between them, binds both leader and follower, so that neither is ever totally free to be themselves. The leader is always the initiator of an act, that rebels against the common order (p. 135). He fulfils Freud’s description of the primal father: Authoritarian, demanding, a great believer in discipline (p. 137).

 

We do things under licence that we’d be too scared to do without the sanction of authority - hence blame and projection as denial of responsibility. Fear restricts our area of independent action as courage expands it - hence we become followers (children) seeking the guidance of authority figures or give birth to ourselves as independent adults, leading ourselves into new territory (‘The Undiscovered Country’ as Shakespeare called it).

 

Becker mentions transference, which is the clinical equivalent of this kind of hero worship because it gives birth to the reformed individual. It is giving into the new as death is really holding onto onto the old and certain (leap of faith into the unknown). It is like any task viewed from the outside - it seems overwhelmingly huge but taken as small, individual separate steps, done one after the other in sequence, it becomes manageable. Why do we give into transference? Because we are bored with the limits, total control over the self brings. Why resist it? Because we want to retain these borders and hate the attraction it brings out in us or tries to, had we not suppressed it. Becker calls transference fear of death - I’d go further and say it is death i.e. that is death of the ego, death of the old way of life, giving up what you consider your identity (character armour/ beliefs/ personal or cultural history). The fundamental question of human life is do we hold on or offload? (stagnate/ constipate/ drown or dump). The parental, ancestral or other guiding authority gives us permission or not, through friendly or hostile reactions to our communication (It can even be part of ourselves as commanding, internal voices).

 

We all bounce between being angry, frustrated, depressed monsters, who feel small, insignificant and helpless, so acting larger than life and more violent, to scare away ‘competition’ that might see how useless and vulnerable we feel and therefore are; and all seeing, all knowing, all powerful Gods+ that are cool, content, stable and that others rely on because we have the answers and skills they need and in our generosity give to them, to relieve them of their misery and pain (parents or adults, to their children or ‘Strangers in a strange land’). We calm and settle the nerves of the frightened, to stabilise them. Fear sets the neurotic and psychotic off (but the former has at least doubt, which eventually leads to insight), chasing imagined enemies as courage stays centred because it sees reason to remain and build (optimistic as opposed to pessimistic ): We do not so much deny death as the existence of that which defeated us (the problem we could not solve/ the opportunity for growth we missed). It is this that makes us monsters (psychotic/ detached from the world and therefore showing it no loyalty/ wish to join it). I personally believe that death is actively sought when we are in this psychotic monster state because of the shame we feel at our helplessness in this adult world. We want to run and hide, destroying our links to life. We want to bury our failure/ destroy all witnesses and evidence to our crime. we don’t want to live - that is the last thought on our mind. If we think we can put right the situation on our own, it isn’t such a big deal but if we feel it is insoluble, that is when we lose it big time (psychotic as opposed to neurotic reaction). Success is bountiful. It shares its life with others (resources/ time).

 

Failure is mean and meagre because it has no projects (projections into the future). It pulls down everything inside and out (ideas/ relationships/ material objects) because it doesn’t want to hope anymore (try). Failure snags itself on a small part of reality and can’t get away from it, in its mind - success can (negativity sees only negativity in the world (lack/ failure/ evil) as positivism sees only good (opportunity)).

 

Hypnosis/ transference/ fan worship etc. are all ways we give up individual independence for dependency as a child does an adult and necessarily does. Adulthood is about trusting yourself and testing others/ other things, yourself (the scientific method as opposed to religious trust in the other: We need both though to consolidate and move society on or as a snake needs to reach its head forward, to drag its body after). The purpose of science is to see thing as they are - neutral, unbiased reality, free of fearful (past) or hopeful (future) illusions. This is the basis of intelligence and learning. It is to be a free mind, unbound by censorship or false humility because it will allow nothing to get in its way, on its ruthless journey to the truth. It is honest and feels no guilt, in its urge to get to the bottom of things, It knows that stupidity has limits but not intelligence. It knows suppression and repression (prejudice) stop learning and therefore progress. It has its eye on the future but its feet planted firmly planted on the ground in the present: Freud wanted to create a science of being or modern form of religion, more appropriate to the age of progress he found himself in - a way of removing all obstacles to creativity and sanity in the individual, thereby making a saner society.

 

The only reason we censor what we say is to promote an acceptable image to others, whose support and acceptance we want. This is the true basis of ‘suppressed’ neurosis (or hiding) - expressed neurosis is the opposite (expecting repercussions for our honesty). This is the relationship between censorship and truth, the growth of intelligence and honesty. We would not act if we did not fear the results of not acting (the omnipotent ‘God’ part of us sees all (the mind) but it is the finite part of us (our mortal body) that acts at a particular time and in a particular place). Servitude is allegiance to the past (what was/ materialism/ certainty) as rebellion’s master is the future (Spirit/ what will or could be). To yield is to admit that support comes from outside the self (Becker). When we rebut this, we end up with what the author calls massive denial (p. 107) or fainting (the inability/ conscious refusal to stay present in the face of what is seen as a threat. According to Adler Neurosis and psychosis are modes of expression for those who have lost courage (p.125). Freud for instance attempted to transcend death through personal ambition or striving as opposed to trust or yielding to others/ a greater power and twice collapsed into unconsciousness when he felt challenged. Life is spent attracting or being attracted to things or repulsing/ being repulsed by them. This is our relationship to life and death as passive or active states and reactions to them.

 

In conclusion, we must not forget that life is a communal organism - whether it is external society or internal mind/ body continuum. To observe and learn, we must stand back from the world and eschew all involvement to see what is really going on in it. To act, the opposite is called for i.e. belief, control, discipline and choice. Action alters things. It changes reality as simple viewing is learning what they are and leaving them alone as self-perpetuating entities. Action is us giving birth to ourselves - launching ourselves into the world and interacting with it as passivity and distance is simply trying to understand it as it exists, in its entirety.

 

While I agree with the author that neurosis is caused in part at least by the denial of death, I personally believe depression and suicide are both affirmations of death or withdrawal from life. I also believe that logically, if there is denial of life, there must also be denial of death and affirmation of life - the first leading to true heroism, where someone risks their life to save another and the second stance, to actually wanting to live yourself, despite any barriers, any negativity encountered in life. A calm, centred, grounded life is free of neurosis and generates the message that it is safe, even in the midst of danger - that is, that we can return to normality, despite personal trauma’s and natural or man-made disasters (It is our fears that make the world ‘appear’ and ‘be’ dangerous because we destabilise it: Peace is settling and accepting things as they are (realism) in the way that idealism never does (On a positive front, it can improve life but only if it’s stable in the first place - wanting the return of what was, isn’t realistic). When we wake up to the positive things in life, then the negative that holds us back, disappears. To quote Marianne Williamson, in a speech used by Nelson Mandela ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others’. If Freud had sought a more positive side to humanity, then perhaps he could have created a religion for the scientific age as he’d hoped. Instead he based it on the sick and frightened, which meant he only covered abnormal psychology and lost out to the self-help community that came after him with their positive thinking and basic shallowness that now exist. The depth of personality that existed in his time and was so mentally tortured, came from a repressed society - ours is shallower because everything is expressed, even if it is not worth saying or hearing: Becker has been dead 35 years, so would have missed this point too but was closer than Freud or his associates, through evolution of thought.

 

 

 

 

* See Douglas Adams ‘Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ scene where Zaphod Beeblebrox is exposed to such an experience, in the equivalent of an Orwellian ‘Room 101’. This awareness is I think what pushes everyone over the edge - stepping into the light, out of the dark - which has allowed us to hide in the background, blaming all and sundry for our state and status in life. At base it is freedom to be your true self with all the terrible responsibility that entails (nobody’s fault but your own that you are, the way you are as captain of your own destiny, not an oppressed slave at the mercy of others/ fate: You can’t control everything but responsibility means accepting that you put yourself where you are and that it is your sense and senses that move you (or not as the case may be)).

 

+ God is anything that knows and can control some aspect of life we can’t - be it a car, a plane, a computer or even the universe itself. It is what was here previously with an idea we never had and therefore never developed but potentially could, if we’d put our attention upon it and spent the time upon it.