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We all axiomatically assume the reality of our individual existences and conscious experiences, and we extend the same courtesy to others (or else). It is by no means unreasonable to suggest that such existence and experience has a deep underlying biological and physical structure.
It might be that the true meaning of life is available for discovery, if it can be discovered at all, by each individual, alone—although in communication with others, past and present. It may well be, therefore, that the true meaning of life is not to be found in what is objective, but in what is subjective (but still universal).
Why do we so easily assume that nothing about that is real, given its apparent commonality and necessity—given, as well, the near certainty that the capacity for valuing is an ancient evolved function, selected for by the very reality we are attempting to define and understand?
The communists produced a worldview that was attractive to fair-minded people, as well as those who were envious and cruel.
When the frenzy of dekulakization swept through the newly established Soviet Union, it was vengeful and jealous murderers who were redistributing property, while it was competent and reliable farmers, for the most part, from whom it was violently taken. One unintended consequence of that “redistribution” of good fortune was the starvation of six million Ukrainians in the 1930s, in the midst of some of the most fertile land in the world.
The other major villains of the twentieth century, Germany’s National Socialists, were, of course, also powerful and dangerous ideologues. It has been suggested that Hitler’s acolytes were inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy. This claim may hold some truth in a perverse manner, as they were certainly trying to create their own values, although not as the individuals whose development the philosopher promoted. It is more reasonable to say that Nietzsche identified the cultural and historical conditions that made the rise to influence of ideas akin to those promoted by the Nazis extremely likely.
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Consider those who have not gone so far as to adopt the discredited ideologies of the Marxist-Leninists and the Nazis, but who still maintain faith in the commonplace isms characterizing the modern world: conservatism, socialism, feminism (and all manner of ethnic- and gender-study isms), postmodernism, and environmentalism, among others. They are all monotheists, practically speaking—or polytheistic worshippers of a very small number of gods.
The ideologue begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representations hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world. Some examples include “the economy,” “the nation,” “the environment,” “the patriarchy,” “the people,” “the rich,” “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the oppressors.” The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena (that masked complexity is part of the reason that the terms come to carry so much emotional weight).
Nor are the villains hiding behind each putative and differentiable cause the same villains (assuming that there are even villains to be found).
All such problems require careful, particularized analysis, followed by the generation of multiple potential solutions, followed by the careful assessment of those solutions to ensure that they are having their desired effect.
Since the ideologue can place him or herself on the morally correct side of the equation without the genuine effort necessary to do so validly, it is much easier and more immediately gratifying to reduce the problem to something simple and accompany it with an evildoer, who can then be morally opposed.
Then he or she grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance. It is most effective to utilize a major motivational system or large-scale sociological fact or conjecture for such purposes.
It is also good to select those explanatory principles for an unstated negative, resentful, and destructive reason, and then make discussion of the latter and the reason for their existence taboo for the ideologue and his or her followers (to say nothing of the critics).
Incompetent and corrupt intellectuals thrive on such activity, such games. The first players of a given game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity.
The originator(s), gratified by the emergence of followers, start to shift their story in that direction as well. Or they object, but it does not matter. The cult has already begun.
Freud, as we noted, attempted to reduce motivation to sexuality, to libido. The same can be done quite effectively by anyone sufficiently literate, intelligent, and verbally fluent. This is because “sexuality” (like any multifaceted single term) can be defined as tightly or as loosely as necessary by those who use it for comprehensively explanatory purposes. No matter how defined, sex is a crucially important biological phenomenon—key to complex life itself—and its influence may therefore be genuinely detected or plausibly invented in any important field of endeavor and then exaggerated (while
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Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm.
Regardless of its hypothetical virtues, however, the implementation of Marxism was a disaster everywhere it was attempted—and that has motivated attempts by its unrepentant would-be present-day adherents to clothe its ideas in new garb and continue forward, as if nothing of significance has changed.
Ideological reduction of that form is the hallmark of the most dangerous of pseudo-intellectuals. Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid. Their self-righteousness and moral claim to social engineering is every bit as deep and dangerous. It might even be worse: ideologues lay claim to rationality itself. So, they try to justify their claims as logical and thoughtful.
At least the fundamentalists admit devotion to something they just believe arbitrarily. They are a lot more honest. Furthermore, fundamentalists are bound by a relationship with the transcendent. What this means is that God, the center of their moral universe, remains outside and above complete understanding, according to the fundamentalist’s own creed.
For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery. An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future.
Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation. Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems.
Ressentiment8—hostile resentment—occurs when individual failure or insufficient status is blamed both on the system within which that failure or lowly status occurs and then, most particularly, on the people who have achieved success and high status within that system. The former, the system, is deemed by fiat to be unjust.
There is another typical feature of ideological pursuit: the victims supported by ideologues are always innocent (and it is sometimes true that victims are innocent), and the perpetrators are always evil (evil perpetrators are also not in short supply). But the fact that there exist genuine victims and perpetrators provides no excuse to make low-resolution, blanket statements about the global locale of blameless victimization and evil perpetration—particularly of the type that does not take the presumed innocence of the accused firmly into account.
No group guilt should be assumed—and certainly not of the multigenerational kind.
To take the path of ressentiment is to risk tremendous bitterness. This is in no small part a consequence of identifying the enemy without rather than within. If wealth is the problem at issue, for example, and the wealthy perceived as the reason for poverty and all the other problems of the world, then the wealthy become the enemy—indistinguishable, in some profound sense, from a degree of evil positively demonic in its psychological and social significance.
Such division of the world into the devil without and the saint within justifies self-righteous hatred—necessitated by the morality of the ideological system itself. This is a terrible trap: Once the source of evil has been identified, it becomes the duty of the righteous to eradicate it.
It is much safer morally to look to yourself for the errors of the world, at least to the degree to which someone honest and free of willful blindness might consider.
It is probable that your own imperfections are evident and plentiful, and could profitably be addressed, as step one in your Redeemer’s quest to improve the world. To take the world’s sins onto yourself—to assume responsibility for the fact that things have not been set right in your own life and elsewhere—is part of the messianic path: part of the imitation of the hero, in the most profound of senses.
It is much more psychologically appropriate (and much less dangerous socially) to assume that you are the enemy—that it is your weaknesses and insufficiencies that are damaging the world—than to assume saintlike goodness on the part of you and your party, and to pursue the enemy you will then be inclined to see everywhere.
It is impossible to fight patriarchy, reduce oppression, promote equality, transform capitalism, save the environment, eliminate competitiveness, reduce government, or to run every organization like a business. Such concepts are simply too low-resolution.
The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.
WORK AS HARD AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN ON AT LEAST ONE THING AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS
That which is valuable is pure, properly aligned, and glitters with light—and this is true for the person just as it is for the gem.
Heat and pressure transform the base matter of common coal into the crystalline perfection and rare value of the diamond. The same can be said of a person. We know that the multiple forces operating in the human soul are often not aligned with one another.
It was for such reasons that archaic people found it easy to believe that the human soul was haunted by ghosts—possessed by ancestral spirits, demons, and gods—none of whom necessarily had the best interests of the person at heart. Since the time of the psychoanalysts, these contrary forces, these obsessive and sometimes malevolent spirits, have been conceptualized psychologically as impulses, emotions, or motivational states—or as complexes, which act like partial personalities united within the person by memory but not by intent.
A house divided against itself, proverbially, cannot stand. Likewise, a poorly integrated person cannot hold himself together when challenged. He loses union at the highest level of psychological organization.
Before he picks up the pieces and rearranges them, such a person is likely to fall prey to domination by one or more partial personalities. This might be a spirit of rage, or anxiety, or pain, leaping in to occupy the person when his temper is lost.
The archaic motivational systems governing anger merely push the toddler’s developing personality aside, and have their way with his mind and actions. This is a true and unfortunate defeat for the still-fragile centralizing ego, struggling against powerful forces toward psychological and social integration.
Lack of internal union also makes itself known in the increased suffering, magnification of anxiety, absence of motivation, and lack of pleasure that accompany indecision and uncertainty.
The physical consequences of depression, often preceded by excess secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, are essentially indistinguishable from rapid aging (weight gain, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s).1
A person who is not well put together overreacts to the slightest hint of frustration or failure. He cannot enter into productive negotiations, even with himself, because he cannot tolerate the uncertainty of discussing potential alternative futures.
He cannot be pleased, because he cannot get what he wants, and he cannot get what he wants because he will not choose one thing instead of another. He can also be brought to a halt by the weakest of arguments.
Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher.
When I was in graduate school at McGill University in Montreal studying for my clinical PhD, I noticed a pronounced improvement in character in everyone who continued in the progressively more difficult five- to six-year program. Their social skills improved. They became more articulate. They found a profound sense of personal purpose. They served a useful function in relation to others. They became more disciplined and organized. They had more fun. This was all despite the facts that the graduate courses were often of lower quality than they might have been, the clinical placements unpaid and
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When I became a professor and started mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, I observed the same thing. The undergrad psychology students who allied themselves with a lab (and therefore took on additional work) obtained better grades than those who burdened themselves less.
This sometimes meant tolerating at least a temporary decrease in ambition, or in pride, but had the advantage of substituting something real for something available only in fantasy. Improvements in mental health almost invariably followed.
Cynicism about such things, or mere indecision or doubt, finds an easy but truly adversarial ally in the mindlessly nihilistic rationality that undermines everything: Why bother? What difference is it going to make in a thousand years? What makes one pathway preferable to another—or to none—anyway?
It is possible to be content, or even happy, with one partner or another, or with one group of friends or another, or with one career or another. In some sense, the satisfaction that these arrangements bring could have been generated by different choices.
We could conclude from that lack of specific or ideal value that nothing matters more than anything else—or to draw the even more hopeless allied conclusion that nothing therefore matters at all. But those who draw such conclusions, no matter how well armed they are with rationally coherent arguments, pay a high price.
