Sein-zum-Tode: Trafalgar 41098

“I don’t know why but I’m frightened, a fear just about as vague as its object. Maybe it really isn’t a fear just a sense of… disquiet. A feeling that things are a little wrong. It’s vague because that’s what that hitchhiker is… vague.” -Nan in The Hitchhiker

The Hitchhiker, a screen adaptation of the Lucile Fletcher story, was aired as an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1960. Characteristic of writer and producer Rod Serling, we find the story of a woman who is desperately trying to escape the unknown fate that pursues her. Whereas ambiguous loss of control is a common Serling theme in The Twilight Zone anthology, the narrative of  the human fear of unknown despair, and struggle against an anonymous adversary who turns out to be redeemer, is a timeless existential lesson.

But this is not only a bromidic story of the knowing psychopomp who escorts the naive mortal into the afterlife. This is a story of the living; of a woman who is a corpse until she welcomes death and begins living towards it.

When the scene opens we find Nan Adams, a young, New York, socialite whose cross-country trip to California is interrupted by a punctured tire. We learn from the repairman that Nan should be dead, judging from the skid marks and loose gravel road. However, Nan appears to be fine as she admires the handsome attendant that repairs the damaged tire.

As Nan is about to drive away she catches the gaze of a tall, thin, man in a dark suit; A hitchhiker with an enigmatic and uncanny stare. This is the first of a series of encounters that Nan will have with the hitchhiker, a figure that only Nan seems to see. In fact, the station attendant is the first of a number of men who are confused by Nan’s reports of seeing the hitchhiker. But Nan is not alone in seeing the hitchhiker’s gaze.

Director Alvin Ganzer breaks the fourth wall in the conclusion of the first scene when the hitchhiker engages the audience, directly, with a portent grimace. From this moment forward we know that Nan is not alone, that the hitchhiker is, in fact, beckoning us a well.

As Nan continues on her cross-country trip she repeatedly encounters the hitchhiker. The event of the hitchhiker is in itself paradoxical. This is a man who is not a man, a passenger who is the driver, a questioner who knows the answer. His intention is to be accepted, and shows signs of frustration when he is ignored.

There is a sense that underlying his assuredness, of whence he comes from, is a certain obstruction in his efforts. Nan not only refuses his advances, but also, is fearful of acknowledging him.

This brings us to the question of what, precisely, Nan is fearful of. The man is not particularly aggressive, not physically imposing, and does not seem to be asking for more than a ride. To further the absurdity, Nan begs a rather cavalier sailor to join her on her journey, offering her body to him in exchange for his protection.

Having run out of gas in the middle of the night, a service station owner refuses to assist Nan, leaving us with an emotional residue not unlike the familiar dream of being impotent in the escape or fight against a foe. A Navy man appears as symbolic father, protector, potent hero, and savior. The Navy man himself, like most of the men Nan encounters, is increasingly dubious. A blend of rescuer and persecutor, the sailor gazes at Nan with sexual desire and hints at romantic passes. Nan is caught between feeling protected by the sailor and being pursued by him. This is the symbolic Oedipal betrayal of the father who is at once protector and exploiter.

Later, when Nan offers herself up to her only protector in return for sexual pleasure, we are left baffled by the act of self-sacrifice -Nan is clearly inviting a stranger to violate her in exchange for the protection against violation. What does this mean? How can we understand a woman who is willing to giver her body to the sailor -an exchange that brings about the very thing she fears from the hitchhiker?

The fear that Nan feels from the hitchhiker is not physical harm and not sexual attack. It is a fear that is much stronger, one which she is willing to sacrifice even life to avoid. The hitchhiker is the knowledge of something, something that Nan refuses to know. This something is beyond physical threat and even beyond physical death. Although Nan comes to believe that she fears for her life, she is truly fearing something greater -something that once she embraces brings her to living.

Through the hitchhiker’s persistence, Nan begins to approach the fear; the acknowledgement of the first step towards life. Just as Nan’s car stalls at the tracks of an oncoming train, she sees the hitchhiker beckoning her. She narrowly escapes the physical death of the train collision only to find that the hitchhiker is no longer there.

“Now the fear is no longer vague, the terror isn’t formless, it has a form. He was beckoning me, that thin grey man in the cheap, shabby suit, he was beckoning me. He wanted me to start across, he wanted me to die, I know that now I am … unspeakingly, nightmarishly alone… I don’t know what to do now!”“Route 80 isn’t a road anymore, it’s an escape route! I’ve got to get where I’m going and I can’t let that hitchhiker close in on me.”

But what Nan convinces herself of is that the hitchhiker’s threat is something to be avoided. Her road, Route 80, now becomes an escape and her destination a purpose. The hitchhiker has become something of a purpose to fight against. But in so doing, Nan becomes increasingly removed from living. Paralyzed by fear she avoids life and becomes a sort of living corpse that can only seek frantic escape.

In a final act of desperation Nan resorts to the one sense of protection she can still hope for -maternal love. Pulling off at a diner somewhere in the Tucson night, Nan Calls her mother in an attempt to bring “back reality” through “love”. It is only when Nan learns that her mother has suffered a nervous breakdown at the news of her daughter’s death that Nan realizes that she is not living.  Nan finally comes to terms with the position she is in. The news of her death has freed her. She is now free from the limitations of her own identity -and the identity against which her mother has defined her. Nan concludes:

“Very odd. The fear has left me now. I’m numb. I have no feeling. It’s as if someone had pulled out some kind of a plug in me and everything—emotion, feeling, fear—has drained out. And now I’m a cold shell. I’m conscious of things around me now. The vast night of Arizona. The stars that look down from the darkness. Ahead of me stretch a thousand miles of empty mesa, mountains, prairies, desert. Somewhere among them he’s waiting for me. Somewhere I’ll find out who he is. I’ll find out. I’ll find out what he wants. But just now, for the first time, looking out at the night, I think I know.”

A superficial understanding of this tale is that of a soul that has not accepted its own death and is being led to the afterlife by a guide. We reject this interpretation not only because it is an uninteresting explanation, but also, because the emotional impact of the story is far greater than that of a persistent psychopomp and a resistant soul. The story we have here is not of a dead woman who comes to realize that she has died, but rather, of a dead woman who comes to accept her life. It is not until Nan integrates her own mortality into her being, and allows herself to live towards death, that she becomes alive. The peaceful calm that Nan experiences, for the first time, is a sign of life -not death. Nan has been freed not only from her own thrownness but from the defining fallenness from which she is released with the acknowledgement of her own mortality. What we find in The Hitchhiker is a tale that describes Heidegger’s conviction of Being-toward-Death (Sein-zum-Tode).

If we consider the hitchhiker not as psychopomp between life and death but, rather, as the psychopomp between unconscious and conscious, then we find Nan’s event as a  lichtungen through which she becomes a more authentic Being.

In the Jungian sense the psychopomp guides Nan between her conscious and unconscious which results in an integration, or what Heidegger would call authentic Being. The hitchhiker has always followed Nan, yet it is not until the event of the road trip, and the brokenness of her tire (and life) that brings her world into Vorhandenheit. We do not know from what Nan escapes, and to what she flees, all that we know is that she is in transition -going from here to there- without a clear sense of why. It is only in this event that Nan is forced to confront her life as Vorhandenheit, a life outside of its symbolic structure. It is only when Nan comes integrate the symbolic world of the unconscious as reality that Nan finds gelassenheit or what Heidegger describes as ”the spirit of availability before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.” Nan finds authentic Being through the integration of death that has always been beckoning, but never heard. It is only at this realization that Nan can be free to Be-towards-Death in what Heidegger calls Sein-sum-Tode.

The American Unconscious

The cultural split in America has been at the foreground of many elections, legislative votes, and media controversies of the past decade. The fifty-fifty Conservative/Liberal, Republican/Democrat, Right/Left split are dichotomies that have become more like competing sports teams, complete with fan clubs, pep rallies, and team jerseys. Political ideology is strongly correlated with personality. But what of the ideology that underlies both the conservative and liberal American Weltanschauung?

Dr. John Jost, psychologist at NYU, has established the powerful correlations between personality styles (orientations towards life) and political affiliation.

“Compared with liberals and moderates, conservatives score significantly higher on psychological instruments designed to measure epistemic needs for order, structure, simplicity, certainty, and closure, and they score significantly higher on instruments designed to measure the intensity of existential concerns such as fear of death and perceptions of a dangerous world. In terms of basic personality dimensions, liberals (and leftists) score significantly higher on Openness to New Experiences, and their greater open-mindedness manifests itself in terms of creativity, curiosity, novelty, diversity, and interest in travel. By contrast, conservatives (and rightists) score higher on Conscientiousness, and they are generally more orderly, organized, duty-bound, conventional, and more likely to follow rules. The evidence strongly contradicts the commonly held assumption that political orientation is “consistently and strikingly unrelated to personality and temperament factors.” (Jost)

Jost has written extensively on the personality differences between those with a conservative versus liberal orientations towards life. Not surprisingly, conservatives score higher on “Big 5″ traits including neuroticism and conscientiousness, and lower on dimensions including openness, extroversion, and agreeableness. Those holding a liberal political ideology tend to score higher in openness, extroversion, and agreeableness. The correlation between personality and political identification is evident from multiple research methodologies.

As a depth psychologist and media critic, the position is taken that personality is an orientation towards life, a Weltanschauung that is both a way of functioning in the environment as well as a way of understanding the world. This point of view insists that an individual’s Weltanschauung not only shapes their view of the world, but is rather, their reality.  In other words, this is not simply a matter of personality type but an individual’s understanding of what reality is. The conservative not only views the world differently from the liberal, the world is different for these two world views.

Gestalt and cognitive psychologists have shown us that our experience of the world is shaped by our Weltanschauung -our cognitive framing and beliefs about the world. We each hold our experience to be the experience (incidentally conservatives tend to be less aware of this than liberals) of our environment. When this occurs in its most blatant form, as in the young child, we call it egocentrism.

In other words, this is not simply a matter of personality type but an individual’s understanding of what reality is.

But what of the ideology that underlies both the conservative and liberal Weltanschauung? Despite the quantitative and qualitative differences between the conservative and liberal experience of the world, I argue that there is an underlying American ideology -a collective American unconscious, that links the seemingly disparate island chains of the liberal and conservative.

Take as an example the simple experience of two cars parked side by side at a local shopping center. The one, a Dodge Caravan, complete with Bush/Cheney sticker and the Jesus fish symbol pridefully fixed on the rear bumper. The neighboring car, a Volkswagen (or early model Volvo) sporting the Darwin fish and the various array of other liberal symbols. On the surface we might assume that these two car-owners are completely opposite in their political orientation, Weltanschauung, and orientation towards life. However, more critical analysis reveals a blatant similarity -these are both individuals who choose to express their ideology on the bumper of their car! (Choo & Mokhtarian)

However, more critical analyses reveal a blatant similarity -these are both individuals who choose to express their ideology on the bumper of their car.

This is the level we seek to reach regarding the conservative/liberal dichotomy, the ideology that underlies the seemingly opposed world views -the foundation that makes possible the interdependent existence or both positions. I believe that this underlying collective unconscious of the American conservative and liberal can be summarized in three qualities. These are the underlying, ideological, unconscious forces that shape the American identity. These are:

1. Protestant Ethic: hard work results in financial “success” -which also infers that lack of financial “success” is due to a lack of hard work (Weber).

2. Spencerian/ Darwinian economic “survival of the fittest”: those who are not aggressive enough will be weeded-out of the capitalist structure, leaving a higher performing, more efficient, and most fit society. Also leaving a sick, alienated, society (Spencer).

3. There is some absolute moral “right” versus “wrong” (usually stemming from a metaphysics). Any discussion of nuance or context is dismissed as “liberal, socialist, communist, or atheist” -which have all taken-on a pejorative tone from the language game of the right (Lyotard).

The Protestant work ethic, as described by Fromm in Escape From Freedom, is the belief that hard work, discipline, and dedication is smiled upon by god, and justly awarded. The ideology here is that one who works hard, does good and lives right will reap the rewards of a benevolent  heavenly father. It was not long after the reformation that this dogma became enmeshed with the political and economic structures of 16th century Europe. By the late 19th century and the industrial revolution this credo had become integrated into the American psyche (mostly from Herbert Spencer’s best-selling books and lectures). The ideology, still present in the American unconscious, is “if you are financially successful you worked hard, lived right, and were disciplined. If you are poor, indigent, or unfortunate you are doing something wrong, work harder!” This tenet is present in the background of the American psyche and shapes every opinion -as well as the very reality- of those raised in the American culture. In the famous words of Karl Marx “they do it but they do not know it”. This is the predominant position of the conservative right.

The Spencerian ideology melds into  the concept Darwinian economics (survival of the fittest as Spencer coined the phrase). This ideology, ever-present in the American way of being, is realized in the concept that there is some kind of natural process that weeds-out the economically weak, the poor, who are ultimately a drag on society and the economy. Laissez-faire economics is the contemporary term for this ideology -let it take care of itself. This is the predominant position of the conservative right.

The final aspect of the American unconscious is absolutist morality. This position disregards the fact that morality is culturally determined and instead views morality as something that is found with some acceptance of belief as fact. It rests on the intention -if I believe in it strongly enough it will be true (the Tinkerbell Effect). In other words, if a culture violates some (typically christian) taboo, that culture is viewed as primitive or needing to be saved. This is the project of missionary colonialism that flourishes today in areas of poverty and natural disaster -a Faustian exchange of food and shelter for the soul.

These three tenets affect, in different ways, each and every individual who has been raised in the American culture machine. Regardless of political orientation, the specter of the Protestant ethic, Spencerian social theory, and Moral absolutism shapes the way we view the world.

L’Homme Moyen: How the Industrial Revolution Influenced the Social Sciences

“The average human has one breast and one testicle.”

                                                            -Des McHale

When the French positivist Auguste Comte received word about a Belgian statistician’s use of the term “social physics“(in the book Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale, 1835) he quickly distanced himself from his origination of the word. In fact he began using a replacement term, one that would come to bring him recognition as the first “sociologist”.

What was new about the sociology of Comte and the social physics of Adolphe Quetelet was the implementation of the science of statistics to the human being. Statistics had come to greatly influence astronomy and physics (in Europe Quetelet was the leading voice) and was becoming a standard of industrialized production of goods (developer of the t-distribution, William Sealy Gosset , employed by the Guinness Brewing Co. in Dublin, developed mathematical models for standardized production of stout).

Quetelet and Comte both envisioned a scientific study of human beings that could be possible through the quantitative methodology of statistics. The field of scientific (quantifiable) sociology had been born, and it would not be long until German psychophysicists Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt were applying statistics to the study of sensation and consciousness. The quantitative movement, having merged with Darwinian natural selection, became the rage in Britain and the United States. Psychometrician Francis Galton, social theorist Herbert Spencer, and statistician Karl Pearson (all supporters of human eugenics) promoted the quantitative method in the new social sciences of sociology and psychology celebrating it as the elevation of these disciplines to empirical sciences.

Today the research fields of sociology and psychology are dominated by quantitative, statistical methods. The American education system has been greatly influenced by educational psychology, a field which defines itself by the quantitative approach. The American schwarmerei with quantifiable, statistical research has not diminished since the industrial revolution and Herbert Spencer’s Darwinian capitalism. Quantifiable statistical research made workers more productive, factories more efficient, and capitalists more profit; why wouldn’t it be a way of making education more effective?

Knowledge and thinking is not a commodity. It can be bought and sold (like those of us who prostitute our minds for university positions) and probably is most conspicuous in the term human resources reducing a person to a commodity. Have the concepts of salary and hourly pay not become the mechanism by which the business-owner alleviates their guilt? In this way, the mercantile system is in place, rules established by those who have the resources of power, and obedient “citizens” (the herd) raised and schooled to be good little workers.

Assessment in American education has nothing to do with thinking. Through curriculum designed around what can be quantifiably measured, aassessment focuses the educational process on producing obedient, automaton, employees. Skills such as creative thinking, novel problem solving, stressing of argument over fact (multi-perspectivism), and synthesis (combining ideas in new ways) are threatening to a system that relies on slave labor (1/4 of Americans with jobs make $25,000 per year or less, at least 10% of Americans are  unemploymed).

The Inevitability of Oppression

“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”  -Edward Bernays in Propaganda (1928)

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After the fascist experiments in both Italy and Germany were dismantled with the Second World War, the youth of the West became hypersensitive to any form of government and corporate control. The mood of the time was captured brilliantly by author Stefan Aust in his best-selling, nonfiction book  Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. The story, later made into a compelling film of the same title, describes the sensitivity and commitment with which the youth of 1960s  Europe took in ensuring that a fascist police state would not reemerge. Paradoxically, the movement itself became a tyrannical threat to personal freedom.

During and after the Nazi sentiment was gripping Germany, exiled intellectuals were attempting to crack the nut that held together just what it was that had brought about such an outrageous situation. Most of these intellectuals were from Jewish lineage, however, nearly none of them considered themselves believing Jews, and most of them were atheists. Their interest and commitment was primarily of a human empathy for the marginalized, the oppressed, and the victims of brutal atrocity. Amongst those who took up, in exile, the task of understanding just what was happening in Europe included Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Emmanuel Levinas, and Walter Benjamin. In fact, most of lifephilosophy in the continental tradition -from existentialism to postmodernism- is an outgrowth of the events of the 1930s and 1940s.

One of those exiled intellectuals, Kurt Lewin, followed the initial fascination with how the form of government, namely autocratic fascism, shaped the events that were unfolding in Europe. In 1939 Lewin began a series of leadership style experiments that examined the behavior of children under the structures of either laissez-faire, democratic, or fascist classroom structure. What Lewin found was that students who were instructed in a fascist structure performed the most efficiently and produced the best products, but were also more likely to demonstrate resentfulness, paranoia, and automaton conformity -loss of a sense of individuality and following the crowd.

Some thirty years later Diana Baumrind proposed a parenting theory that is curiously similar to Lewin’s leadership style studies -a model that every psychology student in America learns, and nearly all family therapist profess. This parenting styles model examined three parenting methods (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive). What Baumrind’s research found was that middle class children, of European-American descent, are best adjusted when raised in the authoritative model (the democratic style in Lewin’s study). However, who are those that are praised in American culture as the accomplished academics, scientists, musicians, and engineers? American children of Asian and Indian families consistently lead the pack in all areas of academic performance. The parenting style of these families, as is pointed out by Judith Rich Harris in her book The Nurture Assumption, is authoritarian. What we find is that a governing, teaching, or parenting style that is highly directive, rigidly structured, and favors conservative life practices produces the highest performing human beings. Whether we look at test scores in math and science, automobile quality, or technological superiority, we find that the celebrated cultures are nearly always structured in an authoritarian model.

 This character is seen most often today in the self-righteous hybrid driver, or the punitive religious authority who lives behind the mask of false humility -the true taking in vain of a god’s name.

This kind of personality research soon took over as the primary way of understanding how fascism gripped Europe. It began with Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism which described a direct link between sexual repression and sadomasochistic personality style (one in which weakness is viewed as inferiority that deserves punishment). This form of sadomasochism, Reich, Fromm, and many others described, is not the fetishized sexual sadomasochism, but rather the moral sadomasochism that we find today in the attitude of religious, political, and ecological fanatics. This character is seen most often today in the self-righteous hybrid driver, or the punitive religious authority who lives behind the mask of false humility -the true taking in vain of a god’s name.

The link is this; there are some very human emotional needs that are common to us all. These needs can be denied, hidden, or renounced by the individual (for many defensive reasons) but science, philosophy, spirituality, art, and sociology all tell us the same thing -there are basic human emotional needs. Erich Fromm outlined six of these needs, which I feel all serve one basic need. This need is of basic security, safety, and control.

The opening text of the Pentateuch delivers a wisdom that can be seen as the most important lesson for humanity. This lesson, found in the story of the fall from grace in the garden, is that of constant awareness of the human tendency for power, control, and safety. As the story goes, humans rebelled against a power structure that imposed a rule. The rule is irrelevant, the lesson is clear: comfort and safety at the price of autonomy leads to a desire for power. Power is a mechanism for achieving a basic sense of safety, autonomy, and control.

Alice Miller, the Polish born, Swiss psychoanalyst has shown us how resentment towards our parents is inevitable, and that we are shackled to an unavoidable guilt that will always manifest at our actions towards autonomy. In this way, the dual feelings of safety and resentment exist not only towards our parents, but also our employer, government, and our belief system. The issue is what Freud referred to as ambivalence.

In the 1960s folks gained hypersensitivity to the potential control of dominant power structures: the capitalists, the imperialists, the communists, the socialists each saw the other as a threat to their autonomy and freedom.

Political, academic, and parental authoritarianism is easy to spot. The first few generations out of the political totalitarianism of 20th century Europe had sensitivity and an awareness that limited freedom in its own way. The interesting quality of power and tyranny is that it is not a product of any one form of government or economic system; it is, rather, a human quality that will appear in any system. In fact the very act of attempting to set rules to control it, becomes, ultimately, an act of oppression.

It was not long before the awareness of this striving for control, became popularized by writers of the time including Marcuse and Fromm, Foucault, Chomsky, Zinn, as well as, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This thinking extended beyond the idea that authoritarianism was a quality of a political or economic system, or a social or parenting style, to the understanding that it is, in fact, a human condition. Every ideology has the potential, no, the destiny, of becoming tyrannical.

It is an unfortunate truth that there is no system, ideology, belief, or lebensphilosphie that is immune tyranny. Political, religious, social scientific, and artists argue their own beliefs. Those who fight against oppression and fascism become oppressive fascist in doing so. Those who propose a clearly stated fascism or rigidly conservative code of morality, education, economy, or politics are oppressive.

Some systems glorify the idea of voluntary submission. This is true for of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic  systems and of  political fascist parties. These are both systems of belief that prize and celebrate submission to an authority. Both of these theories profess that it is an adherent’s duty to submit; one can be fulfilled only through, spiritual or political submission (the first to the will of god, the second to the will of the leader). It is also the case, at least in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions that one can submit to an authoritative god because one understands and wishes to control the human tendency towards power. When an individual, either through doctrine or personal conviction, acts on the belief that it is their duty to teach others the benefits of their submission, or they feel a sense of entitlement or superiority to others because of their submission, they become oppressive tyrants. The moment that voluntary submission, as found in both of these systems, becomes tyranny is when the submission is no longer voluntary -when someone makes the decision to force their will upon another.

There is a certain comfort that is acquired in submission. Erich Fromm has described a type of person whose tendency it is to achieve a sense of belongingness (one of the six basic emotional needs) and safety through submission to others and to a culture. When one loses oneself in social life, dressing as one should, acting as one should, and following the social norms as one should, one gains not only a sense of belongingness, but also a sense of safety. Like the chameleon, Fromm says, the automaton conformist becomes just like everyone else and, in this way, does not stand out as a target.

Similarly, the sadistic personality achieves a sense of safety by controlling others, whereas the masochistic personality gets a sense of safety from being controlled or parented by others. “Submissiveness,” says Fromm, “assuages their feelings of aloneness.” Psychoanalyst David Shapiro tells us that even self-criticism is a form of control,  an “I’ll hit me before you can,” type of defense.

The inevitability of tyranny is found in all human action and is not limited to those most obvious instances in religion and politics. In fact, it is most obvious and expected when speaking of political fascism and religious zealotry. What the thinkers of the twentieth century described is a fascism that is unseen, or as the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, described the invisible government.

The necessary tendency towards tyranny is not as obvious in other systems as it is in the fascist system of government or the fundamentalist systems of religion. Its inevitable manifestation is, though, present in every structure. The system (or lack of) might serve as a rapid incubator or an antiseptic forestaller that prolongs the onset, but, nevertheless, it is an unavoidable outcome. The ambivalence of the sadomasochistic drive, that Sigmund Freud found so essential to the human experience, is its simultaneous desire to submit and dominate.

There are certain situations in which a frequent and continuous change of government can forestall certain kinds of oppression, as we find in the modern Italian system of the parliamentary constitutional republic. Even in the most democratic of constitutional systems, however, the constitution can itself become a demagogic ideology to which its worshipers submit. This type of submission is found to today in American political movements like the Tea Party. Even a dogmatically rigid worship of a constitution will inevitably become rotten with the stench of oppression.

French Dissertation Style: An Education Reform for America?

When I arrived to study the trombone at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, now some thirteen years ago, I  was notified that I was required to take an academic course in world cultures. This would be my first academic classroom

experience in Europe. Something that struck me was the way in which students answered the professor’s questions. At the time I assumed that it was simply part of the “old world” style of the European conservatory (I had been told that in some universities it was still customary for the students to rise to answer). In time I came to adopt this style, which I learned not formally, but rather as an attempt to fit in.

     It was not until years later, while studying towards the doctorate in Switzerland, that I learned that this way of answering was, in fact, a highly structured and formulaic, European tradition. It was introduced to me as the “French dissertation style” in a class with Dr. Christopher Fynsk.

     When answering a question in the French classroom (I understand that this is true in both school and university) one answers in three distinct parts. The first segment states the question and offers a brief history and contextualization of the question. The second focuses, in more detail on one aspect of the historical contextualization of the question. The final, third part, allows the student to put forth their thought and argument about the question.

     I distinctly recall the impression that it later made when I answered questions this way in the American classroom. I had returned to the US from Belgium and took up psychology studies at a small university in Pennsylvania. Students and professors there were not accustomed to the format and comprehensiveness of this answering style. It made an impression. I also found that my assignment writing began to change. When given an essay in the class, I was disposed to write in the tertiary form (broad history, focus on one historical argument, and give my argument).

     When I began teaching I decided to make my students familiar with this style. The result was spectacular. Students not only improved in their essay writing, but also found that the format offered them an advantage over students in other classes. With satisfaction and self-confidence, students proudly reported the reactions from classmates and professors to their thorough argument style. They also found that their essay grades increased, because answering (orally or written) in this way requires not only a very accurate understanding, but also a hesitation in giving one’s opinion. One student likened it to proving that you have the right to make the argument, that you’ve “done your homework”. I agree.

     In preparing to teach this to my students, I did some research into the French dissertation style. I would like to share these formal guidelines so that, maybe, some students can make use of it.

     The written aspect of the dissertation style is somewhat different from the oral response structure that I experienced in Belgium. The three-part format follows a Hegelian Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis format.

     The problem or question (the French call this the problématique) is stated. One can state the question in one of three different styles: thematic type, interrogative type, or implicit subject type. I have always liked the implicit subject type best because one can explore paradoxical connections that are typically unnoticed.

     The next part is the presentation of the thesis or argument. Typically this argument is supported by three examples. An opposing argument or antithesis is then presented with supporting examples. Finally, the synthesis or presentation of the new idea, birthed from the thesis and antithesis, is given. This is where one gets to state their own ideas.

     Lastly, an introduction (say what you are going to say) and a conclusion (say what you’ve said) is written. I have always told students that the introduction and conclusion should be the final thing written -how could you know what you are going to say before you’ve said it (before writing it through)?

     The written dissertation can be as brief as five paragraphs (one paragraph for each: the introduction, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and conclusion) or book-length. Much of Nietzsche’s writings took on this format, as did many Nineteenth and Twentieth Century writers.

The Marketing Character

When Jean-Paul Sartre described a life lived etre de mauvaise foi he was not speaking so much of dishonesty or destructiveness to others, but rather, a dishonesty to oneself. The bad faith examined by Sartre is the life lived in what Heidegger called  fallenness. Heidegger described the person who has become lost in culture, buried so deeply in the layers of the social that the authentic self is concealed. Heidegger does not isolate the self from culture; however, he does describe authenticity as a remembering or awareness of the identification with culture. This is the soul of Sartre’s bad faith -a life completely forgotten in the isolated spectacle of the manufactured desire.

Nearly seventy years ago Eric Fromm described a panorama of bad faith found in contemporary, American society. Whereas Sartre spoke of bad faith in a general way, Fromm identified and described taxonomy of social personality patterns. Although these descriptions were made in the postwar heyday of consumer America, they are more prevalent now than ever before. The character orientations of American society clearly illustrate our cultural evolution from Homo sapiens to Homo consumens.

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.” -Eric Fromm

The Ways of Being in Society: Ethics of Adaptiveness

In Man for Himself Fromm describes five character styles that are of bad faith. In speaking of these five ways of being, Fromm uses the term character. Although this term has become demonized in contemporary, objective trait theory, the term necessarily includes ethics as a core of who we are. Fromm’s 1947 text is subtitled: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. The point here is a vital one -a personality theory that is value-free is, necessarily, free of value. Purging ethics from the human removes the distinction between the species, the thing that makes Homo sapiens, sapiens.

Character is an adaptive quality or orientation that arises from a specific environment. Evolutionary psychology calls this the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA). Personality, however, must be considered not only in terms of the environment but also in terms of the attitude one takes towards the EEA. In this way we have a very complex interaction between the EEA, attitude, and style of being. Some of this, of course, is deliberate, calculated, and intentional, but most of who we are is completely habitual and unconscious.

As both a product and producer of our social and political environment, we can see the traits of individual character in the political and social milieu of the EEA. There is no better archetype of culture manifested as character than that of contemporary, America and what Fromm called the marketing character.

The Industrial Revolution introduced the ability to produce massive surplus. Unlike the artisan who would be individually employed to produce a particular table or chair for a specific patron, the mechanized factory can mass-produce replicated, identical goods in such quantity that no wait is necessary for the consumer. However, this changed the dynamic between producer and consumer, from an individually produced article for a unique customer, to a mass produced product for an abstract consumer. When supply exceeded demand, demand itself needed to be manufactured. This was the birth of marketing -the manufacturing of desire.

It was not long until human beings, categorized as either blue or white-collared, became commodities themselves. The Industrial Revolution and mass marketing of products cultivated an EEA in which human beings, themselves, became commoditized products with a market value. This is most evident today in the corporate human resources departments. In contemporary America we cease to be people and instead become brands, commodities, or resources to be bought, sold, and consumed.

Growing up in this EEA makes one oblivious to it. This is known as captivation-in-an-acceptedness, the state of not considering to question the taken for granted conditions of existence. The contemporary Zeitgeist of American culture is that of the marketing orientation. The objective of the American education system is not to encourage innovative, dynamic, and radical thinking, but rather to produce marketable job candidates. We have come to value ourselves in terms of marketability.

The objective of the American education system is not to encourage innovative, dynamic, and radical thinking, but rather to produce marketable job candidates.

The result of this shift, from I am what I do to I am what will sell, is evident in the advertising and media images that are used as icons of success. The celebrated image of the survival of the fittest businessperson, like Donald Trump, or the vacuously hollow indifference of the fashion model, is imitated on the street and in the office. Although we do not personally know these celebrities we rely on their image to teach us how to be (or appear to be) successful.

A basic need of human being is a sense of identity. The marketing character comes to understand herself not by what she is, but rather, by what others think of her.  Fromm proposed that prestige, status, success, and notability are the basis of the marketing character’s sense of self. I will argue that today it is not merely success, status, and notability that is important, but rather, it is the appearance of these qualities that makes the marketable self.

It is also noticeable of this way of being that as one regards himself as a commodity he will come to regard others as commodities to be bought and sold as well. Others cease to be people, for the marketing character, and are instead a means to an end. The marketing character does not have a human exchange with others, but uses others as she uses products.

The marketing character style is a phenomenon of contemporary, American, culture. This life orientation is unique to the social and political climate of Post-World War II, America. It is a way of being that orients itself not on what one is, but rather, what one appears to be.

Fromm's Taxonomy of Bad Faith

“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”

-Erich Fromm

I was recently asked to address a group of students on this question: what is the single most important issue facing America today? As expected my fellow guests, a philosopher, a sociologist, and a psychologist, seemed to situate themselves around a predictable hub of economic, ecological, and national security issues. Instead I proposed that the greatest threat to America today was the American attitude itself. It is not an external threat, but rather, an internal locus, a sort of pathological way of being that has come to be a hallmark of success. I want to outline what I had to say in that discussion. It centers on the ideas of two thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and is nicely articulated by a third, Erich Fromm.

Character and Styles of Being

There is a certain, rather pervasive, personality style that is encountered on a daily basis. This individual can be found in all walks of life, but is mostly encountered in what is called the professions. By professional  I mean those areas of practice in which one exercises the role of the expert, or plays the role of the authority on a certain topic or set of issues. These are the learned folks of our culture: the medical, scientific, academic, and business establishment. This is a tribe that often present not as practitioners of a profession, but rather, as the profession itself, not a person who does business as much as a businessperson.

Erich Fromm

There is a salient feature amongst professionals  in a certain way of being. This way of being is a sort of culturally expected personality style that one adopts, through their training, and then lives up to after graduation. This is the physician who plays the role of physician, the businessman who acts as one should act when one is a businessman, and the professor who becomes the expert  -presenting herself accordingly. Most often it is observed as affected or contrived. It can be experienced as professionalism, authority, arrogance, or inferiority depending on whom it is that is encountering it.

Jean-Paul Sartre described Heidegger's concept of falleness as bad faith.

There is something unconvincing about this style of being. Typically, those who do it cannot seem to be aware of it, seemingly it is only apparent to those outside of the performance. This performance is described by Jean-Paul Sartre as living in bad faith; when one hides from authenticity and instead chooses the safer position of a cultural role called facticity.

Facticity is like an object. One is not a person who is doctoring, but rather is a doctor. One is not someone who dwells with others in thought, but is a professor. Facticity is the objectification of a role; it is where an action becomes an object, almost like transposing a verb into a noun. One is no longer what one does, but rather, what one is titled. It is when one acts-out that title that we find a life in bad faith.

Jean Paul Sartre

Erich Fromm described personality styles that exemplified bad faith.

Erich Fromm described Sartre’s bad faith in five character types. These character types are not diagnosable personality disorders or even inherited personality structures. Fromm’s character types are adaptive ways of being in an evolutionary sense; they are methods of survival within an environment. Over a series of articles I am going to discuss these five character types, which I propose as Fromm’s taxonomy of bad faith. First, though, we must understand the function of personality and its operation in society and culture.

What Makes Human?

We begin from the position that it is society and culture that makes a person who they are and not biology. Although we are biological beings, a function of evolutionary unfolding, we are also transcended beings. Human Being is the activity of dealing with our biological drives in a social way. We are not primarily interested in physical survival, but rather in social survival. We do not strive for our life, but rather for living with others. Although biological drive is a part of being human it is not the dominant force. Homo sapien is influenced less by biological drives and more by cultural forces.

We call this cultural force desire. The social animal is a transcended Being that is not governed by cause-and-effect chains of logic, but rather, by an integrated being-in-the-world in which an individual’s environment is not an objective situation that they are in, but rather, an active interpretation that they are participating in making. We find here a main point in Fromm’s thinking, that we are not confronted with culture, but that we are a vital, shaping agent of culture. This is a sort of feedback-feedforward loop that is experienced as the world we live in. In fact, it is less a world we live in and more a world that lives within us.