Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

Ernest Becker Escape From Evil (1975)

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Prefatory Note

Approaching death, Ernest Becker requested that the original manuscript of this, his final book, rest private and unpublished in a desk drawer, no energy remaining in him for any further barter with the gods. Believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his scientific literary career, Robert Wallace and I (with some initial anguish over the risk of irreverence) firmly decided upon publication realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus. ...

Marie Becker

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Preface

... In The Denial of Death I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil . ...

In my previous writings... I thought it was enough to use the unifying "principle of self-esteem maintenance." But... it was too abstract, it lacked body, a universal, energetic content in the form of specific, inflexible motives. These motives I found in the work of Rank,...

My previous writings did not take sufficient account of truly vicious human behavior. This is a dilemma that I have been caught in, along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the Enlightenment tradition of a science of man:... If man is as bad as he seems, then either we have to behaviorally coerce him into the good life or else we have to abandon the hope of a science of man

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entirely. This is how the alternatives have appeared. Obviously it is an enormous problem:... to move beyond this to... some kind of third alternative beyond bureaucratic science and despair.

...if I have changed my views on many things, this change leaves intact, I believe, the basic premise of the Enlightenment which I feel we cannot abandon and continue to be working scientists—namely, that there is nothing in man or nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our destiny and making the world a saner place for our children. ... There is a distinct difference between pessimism, which does not exclude hope, and cynicism, which does. I see no need, therefore, to apologize for the relative grimness of much of the thought contained in this book; it seems to me to be starkly empirical. Since I have been fighting against admitting the dark side of human nature for a dozen years, this thought can hardly be a simple reflex of my own temperament,... Nor is it a simple function of our uneasy epoch, since it was gathered by the best human minds of many dispositions and epochs,...

Finally, it goes without saying that this is a large project for one mind to try to put between two covers;...

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... But... I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. ...

...

Vancouver, 1972

E.B.

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INTRODUCTION

The Human Condition:
Between Appetite and Ingenuity

What could we say in the simplest possible way that would "reveal" man to us—show what he was, what he was trying to do, and what it all added up to? I now see that we must make a clear distinction between man's creatureliness—his appetite—on the one hand and his ingenuity on the other.

... The upshot of the modern body of work called ethology... is that it reminds us... that man is first and and foremost an animal moving about on a planet shining in the sun. ... The only certain thing we know about this planet is that it is a theater for crawling life, organismic life, and at least we know what organisms are and what they are trying to do.

... Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed—a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. ...

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... Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet,... If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. ...

Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist—... This absolute dedication to Eros , to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth, and because we are mystified by it we call it the instinct for self-preservation. ...in the words of the anthropologist A. M. Hocart, this organismic craving takes the form of the search for "prosperity" —... ...in man the search for appetitive satisfaction has become conscious: he is an organism who knows that he wants food and who knows what will happen if he doesn't get it,... And so we understand how man has come, universally, to identify disease and death as the two principal evils of the human organis-

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mic condition. Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly.

Extinction: The Dread of Insignificance

...the unique paradox of the human condition: that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive organism;... But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die.

Wanting nothing less than eternal prosperity, man from the very beginning could not live with the prospect of death. ... His culture gives man an alter-organism which is more durable and powerful than the one nature endowed him with. ...

... Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life,... ...spirituality is not a simple reflex of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived,...

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... what man really fears is not so much extinction , but extinction with insignifcance . ...

... As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, "not so much from . . . fear of natural death as of final destruction ." But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not. ... For a long time students of society liked to think in terms of "sacred" versus "profane" aspects of social life. But... there is really no basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of men . ...

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... The reader has surely already seen the rub, and objected in his own mind that the symbolic denial of mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood organisms, that if man seeks to avoid evil and assure his eternal prosperity, he is living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far. To which I would add that this would be all right if the fantasy were a harmless one. The fact is that self-transcendence via culture does not give man a simple and straightforward solution to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression ... What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created . And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity , rather than his animal nature , that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man's impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Primitive World:
Ritual as Practical Technics

The object of ritual is to secure full life and to
escape from evil. . . .
A. M. Hocart

... Even the voluminous brilliance of a Lévi-Strauss never really tells us why primitives are doing such complex and ingenious intellectual work. I have read only one anthropologist who has given us the larger view of the primitive world—A. M. Hocart. ...

Hocart... saw the universal human ambition as the achievement of prosperity—... To satisfy this craving, only man could create that most powerful concept which has both made him heroic and brought him utter tragedy—the invention and practice of ritual,... ...ritual is a technique for giving life. ...throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could control life! We scoff at the idea because we do not believe life can be controlled by charms, spells, and magic. But... just that we do not believe in the efficacy of the technique is no

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reason for overlooking the momentous place that ritual has had...

The fact is that primitive man imagined he could transfer life from one thing to another,... ...ritual could generate not only bears or yams, or the life of the whole universe, but the individual soul as well. This is the meaning of the "rites of passage"... Life was not a curve as we see it,... ...very often death was considered the final promotion of the soul to a state of superhuman power and indefinite durability.

...by means of the techniques of ritual men imagined that they took firm control of the material world, and at the same time transcended that world by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them supernatural,... In the world of ritual there aren't even any accidents,... ...if life can be so subject to

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chance, it mustn't have too much meaning. But how can that be, since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive man takes care of this problem by imagining that his control over nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens unless somebody wants it to happen. ...

As I see it, the history of mankind divides into two great periods: the first one existed from time immemorial until roughly the Renaissance or Enlightenment,... The second period began with the efflorescence of the modern machine age and the domination of the scientific method and world view. In both periods men wanted to control life and death, but in the first period they had to rely on a nonmachine technology to do it: ritual is actually a preindustrial technique of manufacture; it doesn't exactly create new things, Hocart says, but it transfers the power of life and it renovates nature. ... there is no need to postulate a mind differently constituted from our own. Man controls nature by whatever he can invent , and primitive man invented the ritual altar and the magical paraphernalia to make it work. ...

We call it magic because we don't believe it worked, and we call our technology scientific because we believe it works. I am not pretending that primitive magic is as efficacious for the control of nature as is our science, but in our time we are beginning to live

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with some strange and uncomfortable realizations. Primitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. ... Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machine control of nature has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are supposed to work, ... ...when they fail to work our whole world view begins to crumble just as the primitives world view did when they found their rituals were not working in the face of western culture and weaponry. ...

...

...passion for splitting things into two polar opposites that were complementary was a most striking and widespread feature of primitive man's social organization. ... A person belonged either to one half or the other, traced his descent from a common ancestor, often identified with a particular animal totem representing his half, usually married someone in the other half, and had rigorously specified types of relationship with people in the other half,...

...

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...the primitive mind was just as intelligent as ours, just as intent on examining the minute facts of existence and putting order into them. ... Did we wonder at the complexity of primitive symbolism and social organization? Well, it was because primitive man tried to organize his society to reflect his theory of nature.

... Technically we call it "moiety" organization—a dry and forbidding anthropological term that makes the study of primitives so dull, until we give the term life... Lévi-Strauss too was taken with what he regarded as a natural tendency of the human mind to split things into contrasts and complementarities ,... It has given a great boost to the computer freaks, this binary tendency of the primitive mind, because it seems to show that man functions naturally just like the computer—and so the computer can be championed as the logical fulfillment of basic human nature,...

But Hocart did not get carried away into abstractions as many did. ...

Perhaps it is a law of nature, but that is not sufficient to explain the dual organization. . . . Nor does it explain the curious interaction of the

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moieties; in fact it is this interaction which must explain the dual division ; for men divide themselves into two groups in order that they may impart life to one another, that they may intermarry, compete with one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another whatever is required by their theory of prosperity.

... The reason for the dual organization is so foreign to us that we may not at first see it: it was necessary for ritual. The fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone; man cannot impart life to himself but must get it from his fellow man. ...

The deeper level of explanation for the dual organization is so simple we may not see it: it is phenomenological. Man needs to work his magic with the materials of this world, and human beings are the primary materials for the magic wrought by social life. ... Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of his own excellence. ... Anything that reduces the other organisms and adds to one's own size and importance is a direct way to gain self-feeling;...

By the time we get to man we find that he is in an almost constant struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance. But as he is also and especially a symbolic organism, this struggle against being diminished is carried on on the most minute levels of symbolic complexity. ...

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...

This explains too the ubiquitousness of envy. Envy is the signal of danger that the organism sends to itself when a shadow is being cast over it , when it is threatened with being diminished. ...

...only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand how it is only in society that man can get the symbolic measures for the degrees of his importance,... ...it is only by contrasting and comparing himself to like organisms... that he can judge if he has some extra claim to importance. ...

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...

...why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for "joking relationships" and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor... Sociologists have very nicely described the dynamics of "status forcing" and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in... But you cannot force your status vis-à-vis someone else unless there is a someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions for playing around with status ,... If Hocart says that man cannot impart life to himself but must get it via ritual from his fellow man, then we can say even further that man cannot impart importance to himself ; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life:...

However, I don't want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-aggrandizement, or that men can only expand their sense of self at the expense of others. This would not be true, even though it is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. ...

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...men in society manage to give to each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outshine rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings...

But now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked—how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get "inside" primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to play in the generative rituals. ... Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think

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that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid causal affair, but the primitive feels the effect of his ability to generate life, he is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. ...our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. As Hocart pointed out so succinctly, magic is religion we don't believe in, and religion is magic we believe in . Voilà tout.

What Huizinga did in Homo Ludens was to show that primitive life was basically a rich and playful dramatization of life; primitive man acted out his significance as a living creature and as a lord over other creatures. It seems to me like genius, this remarkable intuition of what man needs and wants; and primitive man not only had this uncanny intuition but actually acted on it, set up his social life to give himself what he needed and wanted. ... He staged the dance of life, with himself at the center. And to think that when western man first crashed uninvited into these spectacular dramas, he was scornful of what he saw. That was because, as Huizinga so well argued, western man was already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play, how to impart to life high style and significance. Western man was being given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what he doesn't understand, he proceeded to smash everything in sight.

Many people have scoffed at Goffman's delineation of the everyday modern rituals of face-work and status forcing; they have

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argued that these types of petty self-promotion might be true of modern organization men hopelessly set adrift in bureaucratic society but these kinds of shallow oneupmanship behaviors couldn't possibly be true of man everywhere. ...I think these critics of Goffman are very wrong,... When you set up society to do creation rituals, then you obviously increase geometrically the magnitude of importance that organisms can impart to one another. It is only in modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work;... Our own everyday rituals seem shallow precisely because they lack the cosmic connection. ... I think it is safe to say that primitive organization for ritual is the paradigm and ancestor of all face-work, and that archaic ritual was nothing other than in-depth face-work; it related the person to the mysterious forces of the cosmos, gave him an intimate share in them. This is why the primitive seems multidimensional to many present-day anthropologists who are critical of modern mass society.

...

As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity—...

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... If you are going to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate the things that embody them. ... Very early man seems to have isolated the principles of fecundity and fertilization and tried to promote them by impersonating them. And so men identified with the sky or the heavens, and the earth, and divided themselves into heavenly people and earthly ones. ... The moieties stood for these opposing yet complementary principles. ... The point was that reality in the round had to be represented in order for it to be controlled. ...

Modern man has long since abandoned the ritual renewal theory of nature, and reality for us is simply refusing to acknowledge that evil and death are constantly with us. ... We are shocked by the vulgarity of symbols of death and the devil and sexual intercourse in primitive ruins. But if your theory is to control by representation and imitation, then you have to include all sides of life, not only the side that makes you comfortable or that seems purest.

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...: "'microcosmization" and "macrocosmization." ... In macrocosmization man simply takes himself or parts of himself and blows them up to cosmic importance. Thus the popular ancient pastime of entrail reading or liver reading: it was thought that the fate of the individual, or a whole army or a country, could be discerned in the liver, which was conceived as a small-scale cosmos. ...

Microcosmization of the heavens is merely a reverse, complementary movement. Man humanizes the cosmos by projecting all imaginable earthly things onto the heavens, in this way again intertwining his own destiny with the immortal stars. So, for example, animals were projected onto the sky, star formations were given animal shapes, and the zodiac was conceived. ...

...

...by means of micro- and macrocosmization man humanized the heavens and spiritualized the earth and so melted sky and earth together in an inextricable unity. By opposing culture to nature in these ways, man allotted to himself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend

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his animal condition and assume a special status in nature. ...

... I said that primitive society was organized for contests and games, as Huizinga showed, but these were not games as we now think of them. They were games as children play them: they actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they wanted them. Ritual contests between moieties were a play of life against death, forces of light against forces of darkness. One side tried to thwart the ritual activities of the other and defeat it. But of course the side of life always contrived to win because by this victory primitive man kept nature going in the grooves he needed and wanted. If death and disease were overtaking a people, then

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a ritually enacted reversal of death by a triumph of the life faction would, hopefully, set things right again.*

The Logic of Sacrifice

At the center of the primitive technics of nature stands the act of sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual;... The sacrificer goes through the motions of performing in miniature the kind of arrangement of nature that he wants. ... If he does things exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning of time, then he gets control over the earth and creation. ...

... The ritual triumph is thus the winning of a contest with evil. ...dice and chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the king really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness.

... Hocart comes back again and again to this point, that our notions of what is possible are not the same as those of archaic men. ...

*We will see later, when we consider the historical evolution of evil, how fateful these ritual enactments were for the future of mankind. By opposing the forces of light and darkness, and by needing to make light triumph over dark, primitive man was obliged to give the ascendancy to the actors representing light and life. In this way, as we shall see, a natural inequality was built into social organization , and as Hocart so superbly speculates, this gave rise to the evolution of privileged "pure" groups and outcast "evil" ones.

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... The whole thing seemed ridiculous to us because we looked only at the surface of it and did not see the logic behind it, the forces that were really at work according to the primitive's understanding of them. ... The key idea underlying the whole thing is that as the sacrificer manipulates the altar and the victim, he becomes identified with them—not with them as things, but with the essences behind them,... The primitive had a conceptualization of the insides of nature just as we do in our atomic theory. He saw that things were animated by invisible forces,... All he wanted to do, with the technique of sacrifice, was to take possession of these invisible forces and use them for the benefit of the community. ...

In a word, the act of sacrifice established a footing in the invisible dimension of reality;... Hocart warns us that if we think this is so foreign to our own traditional ways of thinking, we should look closely at the Christian communion. ...

I think here of an important passage from The Birth and Death of Meaning: "We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from." (120) "the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it" (121)

Less exaltedly but equally to the point, I recall a podcast guest, somewhere, who marshaled more or less the same points against "materialism." Materialism per se can't really ever say where babies come from. It can progress through a series of ever more detailed and predictive proximate causes but without ever getting all the way to something that could be considered an ultimate cause. Or something like that.

There seems to be more agreement that there is an "invisible dimension." But I'm not sure I buy the line that "materialism" or "western science" are also "religious" efforts to control this force. They may be that, but they do not need to be, because there is plenty that can be done (most of the worthwhile stuff!) without total control or understanding. "I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers." (121) Indeed. But this has not precluded the building of bridges or the flying of planes.

Conclusion

...

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... Man used his ingenuity to fill his stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of his organism; this is only logical and natural. But this stomach-centered characteristic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. ... All of man's higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. Nietzsche was one of the first to state this blatantly, and he shocked the world with it: that all morality is fundamentally a matter of power ... It is all right for man to talk about spiritual aims; what he really means is aims for merits that qualify him for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions.

...

No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that man is capable of. ...

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... But the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as Hocart would seem to make out. ... For most men faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organismic stomach project.

There is a small debate being aired in certain circles of anthropology today about the many ways in which primitive life was superior to our own. ... I don't want to go into the pros and cons of it... But it does help us to understand the primitive world if we agree to the old anthropological tenet about "the psychic unity of mankind"—that is, that man everywhere, no matter how exotic a particular culture, is basically standard vintage Homo sapiens,... ...having agreed that the primitive is no worse than we are, it might be in order to add that he is no better. Otherwise, as we shall see, we cannot really understand what happened in history,...

...

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...I think that if primitive man was kinder to nature, it was not because he was innately different in his emotional sensitivity nor more altruistic toward other living forms than we are. I think, rather, that it was because his technics of manipulation was less destructive. ... If we talk about a certain primitive quality of "reverence" for life, we must be very careful. The primitives' attitude toward animals considered sacred was sometimes more cruel than our own is. They did not hesitate to sacrifice those whom they considered their benefactors or their gods, or even hesitate to kill their chiefs and kings. The main value was whether this brought life to the community and whether the ritual demanded it. ...

Probably more to the point, man has always treated with consideration and respect those parts of the natural world over which he has had no control . As soon as he was sure of his powers , his respect for the mystery of what he faced diminished . Hocart makes a telling point about the evolution of man's attitude toward animals:

... There is no objection to an animal's being the object of a cult when this does not imply respect but is merely a procedure for causing the animal to multiply. It is a very different thing when ritual becomes worship; man is loath to abase himself before an animal.

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Hocart attributes this to "the growing conceit of man." But we could just as well see it as a result of natural narcissism. Each organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs within it, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continuation. Man was always conceited; he only began to show his destructive side to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technologies. The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession of new and different ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation—and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical man. Let us turn to this.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Primitive World:
Economics as Expiation and Power

Now that we have talked about how primitive man created or helped create natural bounty, we have to look at what he did with this bounty, how he applied his concept of the natural order of things in daily life in addition to performing it in ritual. ...

The whole burden of [Norman O.] Brown's argument is to show that economic activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time, is sacred to the core. It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs. Or, better, it is not only that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain man's drive to create a surplus, from the very beginning of society to the present? How explain man's willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny himself, in order to produce beyond his capacity to consume? ... We know that many of

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their choicest trade items, such as bits of amber, were entirely superfluous;... And finally we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand...

Economics as Expiation

What was the "economic" activity most characteristic of primitive society? Marcel Mauss revealed it a half century ago... On the primitive level we see compellingly that social life is a continual dialogue of gift giving and counter gift giving.

To the anthropological observer the thing was simply marvelous: goods were shared and freely given; men observed the principle of social reciprocity and respected social obligations to the letter. ...the hunter who killed the game distributed it with pride and often took the least desirable part of the animal for himself. But often this continuous gift giving and taking seemed to the western observer to be perverse; a native would work very hard at the trading post to earn a shirt, and when he came back a week later someone else would be wearing it. ... Or more alarmingly, missionaries would find that na-

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tives came to their hut and simply took valuable knives, guns, clothes, etc., without so much as a "thank you,"...

How could traders, missionaries, and administrators understand something that often eluded anthropologists themselves: that primitive man did not act out of economic principles,... Unlike us, primitives knew the truth of man's relation to nature:... Whatever one received was already a gift, and so to keep things in balance one had to give in return—to one another and, by offerings, to the spirits. ...

...why weren't natives content to live in the primitive "paradise," why couldn't man simply relax and consume nature's bounty, why was he driven from the very beginning to develop a surplus beyond basic human needs? The answer is that primitive man created an economic surplus so that he would have something to give to the gods;...

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... When man gives, "the stream of life continues to flow," as Van der Leeuw so beautifully summed it up... In order to understand this, we have to abandon our own notions of what a gift is. It is not a bribe by one who is a stranger to you and simply wants to "get in good" with you, or by a loved one who wants to draw close to you...

Economics as Power

... Many people today think that the primitive saw the world more under the aspect of miracle and awe than we do,... But we don't need to romanticize about the primitive (whether truly or not) in order to understand his valuation of nature's bounty. We saw that the main organismic motive was self-perpetuation; it is logical that when self-perpetuation became a conscious problem at the level of man he naturally tended to value those things that gave him the power to endure,... Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life. ...

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... The gifts had mana power, the strength of supernatural life.

...to give and then to counter-give kept the motion going, preserved the cycle of power. ...everyone participated in the powers that were opened up—the giver, the community, the gods. ... The more you give, the more everyone gets.

This feeling of expenditure as power is not strange to us moderns either. We want to keep our goods moving with the same obsessive dedication... We feel that there is health and strength in the world if the economy moves,... Like the primitive, modern man feels that he can prosper only if he shows that he already has power. Yet of course in its one-dimensionality this is a caricature on the primitive potlatch, as most of modern power ideology is; it has no anchor in the invisible world, in the deference to the gods. ...

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... The exchange of offerings was always a kind of contest—who could give the most to the gods of their kinsmen. We can see what this did for a person: it gave him a contest in which he could be victorious... ...it gave him cosmic heroism,... He was a hero in the eyes not only of the gods but also of men;... Roheim very aptly called this state of things "narcissistic capitalism": the equation of wealth with magic power. ...all this seemingly useless surplus, dangerously and painstakingly wrought, yields the highest usage of all in terms of power. ...

...in the strict utilitarian sense in which we understand the term, primitive "work" cannot be economic;... Primitive man worked so that he could win a contest in which the offering was made to the gods; he got spiritual merit for his labors. ... Sometimes a chief would even offer his own life to appease an injured party in a quarrel; his role was often nothing else than

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to be a vehicle for the smooth flow of life in the tribe. ...primitive man immersed himself in a network of social obligations for psychological reasons. Just as Rank said, man has to have a core psychological motive for being in the group in the first place, otherwise he would not be a group-living animal . Or as Brown, who likes to call a spade a spade, put it, "man entered social, organization in order to share guilt. Social organization . . . is a structure of shared guilt . . . a symbolic mutual confession of guilt." ...

The Nature of Guilt

But this kind of picture risks putting primitive man even further beyond our comprehension, even though it seems logically to explain what he was doing. The problem is in the key motive, guilt. Unless we have a correct feeling for what guilt is,... the sacred nature of primitive economics may escape us. ...[Brown] draws partly on Nietzsche and Freud, and some of their scorn of guilt as a weakness seems to have rubbed off on him. Even more seriously, by his own admission he does not have any theory of the nature of guilt... even though he bases his whole argument on it. ...

This is one explanation of guilt that comes from psychoanalysis:

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the child in his boundless desires for gratification can't help feeling love for those who respond to him; at the same time, when they inevitably frustrate him for his own good, he can't help feeling hate and destructive impulses toward them, which puts him in an impossible bind. ...

One of the reasons guilt is so difficult to analyze is that it is itself "dumb." It is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why. ... Man experiences this uniquely... ...the world of men is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature. Also, subordinacy [to one's culture] comes naturally from man's basic experiences of being nourished and cared for; it is a logical response to social altruism . ... An attitude of humble gratitude is a logical one to assume toward the forces that sustain one's life;...

Another reason that guilt is so diffuse is that it is many different things: there are many different binds in life. ... Man also experiences guilt because he takes up space and has unintended effects on others—...

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... To use Rank's happy phrase, this is guilt we feel for being a "fate-creating" object. ...our wives and children are a burden of guilt because we cannot possibly foresee and handle all the accidents, sicknesses, etc., that can happen to them;... the world is too much with us.

If we feel guilt when we have not developed our potential, we also are put into a bind by developing too much. Our own uniqueness becomes a burden to us; we "stick out" more than we can safely manage. ... Man is... the animal whose development is not prefigured by instincts, and so he is open to becoming what he can. This means literally that each person is already somewhat "ahead of himself" simply by virtue of being human and not animal . ...even the average person in any society is already more of an individual than any animal can be;... We might say that the development of life is life's own burden.

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I linger on these ontological thoughts for a very good reason: they tell us what is bothering us deep down. ... I believe Levin is right when he says that "it is a crime to own a head" in society; historically societies have not tolerated too much individuation , especially on primitive levels. ...probably the underlying thing that the various forms of head-taking have in common is that the head is prized as a trophy precisely because it is the most personal part, the one that juts most prominently out of nature. ...a destruction of individuality at its most intensive point,... If we extend these thoughts one logical step, we can understand a basic psychoanalytic idea that otherwise seems ridiculous: "in the eyes of culture, to live is a crime." ...

If we take all this into view, we should find more palatable to our understanding what Brown meant when he said that social organization was a structure of shared guilt, a symbolic mutual confession of it. Mankind has so many things that put it into a bind that it simply cannot stand them unless it expiates them in some way. ...

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...the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared: man cannot stand alone. ... We can conclude that primitives were more honest about these things—about guilt and debt—because they were more realistic about man's desperate situation vis-à-vis nature. Primitive man embedded social life in a sacred matrix not necessarily because he was more fearful or masochistic than men in later epochs, but because he saw reality more clearly in some basic ways.

Once we acknowledge this, we have to be careful not to make too much of it; I mean that group living through the motive of guilt is not all humble and self-effacing. ... If guilt is the experience of fear and powerlessness, then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it:... From the beginning of time the group has represented big power, big victory, much life.

Heroism and Repentance: The Two Sides of Man

...primitive man allocated to himself the two things that man needs most: the experience of prestige and power that constitutes

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man a hero, and the experience of expiation that relieves him of the guilt of being human. ... Man worked for economic surplus of some kind in order to have something to give. ...he achieved heroism and expiation at the same time, like the dutiful son who brings home his paper-route earnings and puts them in the family coffer. ...he wants to be a cosmic hero, contributing with his energies to nothing less than the greatness and pleasure of the gods themselves. At the same time this risks inflating him to proportions he cannot stand; he becomes too much like the gods themselves, and he must renounce this dangerous power. ... Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Origin of Inequality

If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its
chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed,
sacred obligations which appear as objective
realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion.
Norman O. Brown

The origin of inequality among men! This was the question that excited thinkers of the eighteenth century as they combed the globe trying to find humanity in an uncorrupted state. ...

Nobody was very happy with the way history and civilization had turned out, and many thinkers of that time supposed that if the first steps in the process of the oppression of man by man could be pinpointed, then the decay of civilization might be arrested and even reversed. ...

...Rousseau, with his uncanny intuition of what was significant, began it all with his famous "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men" (1755). ...

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...Rousseau failed to bring about what he hoped for, and so too did the whole tradition which followed him; and I want to sum up why it failed.

The Marxist tradition seized on Rousseau's work because it was exactly what the Marxists needed: the accusation that the state acted tyrannically to hold men in bondage, deprived them of the fruits of their labors, and distributed these fruits mostly among the elite. ...

But the great disillusionment of our time is that none of this has led to the liberation of man. ...the great revolutions of our time... have not led to the disappearance of the state, and so they have not led to human equality and freedom.

... We have had to conclude that the question of the origin of inequality among men was not answered by the Marxist tradition. This... is what prompted the work of... the Frankfurt school... , "the union of Marx and Freud."

...the state is not man's first and only enemy,

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but he himself harbors an "enemy within." Brown...

...if force did not establish the domination of the master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with his own chains . . . a deeper psychological malady.

...

... Rousseau himself gave one of the very first psychological explanations in his famous essay. ...

The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

...the point is that Rousseau doesn't say that the person took the land by force, but rather because of something in the minds of those around him . ...he places wealth at the last stage and "personal qualities" at the first stage:...

The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality. . . .

...

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... Shortly after Rousseau wrote, Adam Ferguson came out with his famous work on social history where he too argued that social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent. ... Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities:...

Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. ... The elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make him beautiful, but to show off his skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. ...

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...

... Remember that as children we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neighborhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most—wives. They got them more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe. And so on.

...there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. ... The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and

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stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just "happened," gradually and ineluctably. The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen , what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process.

The answer to this question seems to me remarkably straightforward. I have said that primitive man recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat, granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. ... If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history: he is the one who gambles with his very life and successfully defies death,...

...we can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the "state of nature" man is free and only becomes unfree later on. Man never was free and cannot be free from his own nature. ... As Rank so well taught us, Rousseau simply did not understand human nature in the round: he "was not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison. . . . " ... We have to say, with Rank, that primitive religion "starts the first class distinction." ...

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... The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings.

...

Power Figures and Power Sources

...in a spiritual cosmology power is relatively undisguised: it comes from the pool of ancestors and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thoughtlessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power—until, as said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator, a telephone line. Then you see our "religious" anxiety come out.

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...

...for the primitive it was often the dead who had the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a helper of life. For many primitives death is the final promotion to the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible world of the spirits and the ability to use and manipulate the visible world from their new abode.* ...

...

One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power

*... Some tribes fear the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then they are thought to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits who represent unfinished and unfulfilled life,... Radin offers a frankly interactionist point of view by saying that the dead are feared because they cannot be controlled as well as when they were alive. ...

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he has and how much exists in others and in the world. ...power becomes the basic category of being for which he has, so to speak, a natural respect: if you are wrong about power, you don't get a chance to be right about anything else;... Anthropology discovered that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana and taboo, which we can translate simply as "power" and "danger"...

But power is an invisible mystery . It erupts out of nature in storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and it returns into nature in ashes, winter, and death. The only way we know it is there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the supernatural, can only be spotted in the unusual, the surpassing, the excellent,... ...the most immediate place to look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power...

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The most unashamed pretender to supernatural powers was, on the primitive level, the medicine man, or shaman. He invented the specialty of entering into the world of the dead and coming back from it unharmed;... The shaman was the hero who "died" and was reborn unfailingly, who thus regularly acted out man's triumph over death and evil,... Nothing strikes greater terror into man's heart than to witness an eruption of power from the depths of nature that he cannot understand or control—whether it is lava erupting from a volcano or the foam and convulsions of an epileptic. ... The shaman was the mystifier par excellence , and it was only logical that he should often be more powerful than chiefs,...

Radin's writings on the origins of inequality are the most sensitively probing and ruthless that I know. In his view primitive society was from the very beginning a struggle by individuals and groups for special privileges—... The elders always tried to arrange these for their own benefit, and so did the shamans. ... How does one get maximum power in a cosmology where ritual is the technics that manufactures life? Ob-

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viously by getting control of the formulas for the technics. ... In his brilliant chapter "The Crises of Life and Their Rituals" Radin argues that the religious systematizer built his symbolic interpretations around the crises of life,... where everything had to go smoothly in order for a flowering out or birth into a new status to take place. And so the puberty and the death rituals came to be surrounded by the greatest importance, wherein lay the greatest possibilities of bungling. ... Talking about puberty rites of the Australian aborigines he says:

. . . over and above all other reasons is the somewhat cynically expressed purpose of the old men of having novices supply them, for many years, with regular presents in the form of animal food, of reserving the choice dishes for themselves by the utilization of the numerous food taboos imposed on the younger people, and, finally, of keeping the young women for themselves.

And again, with another tribe,...

Rather . . . specific individuals banded together formally or informally, individuals who possess a marked capacity for articulating their ideas and for organizing them into coherent systems, which, naturally, would be of profit to them and to those with whom they are allied.

...Radin's views ...put closure on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive world had to break up because of man's burning ambition to improve himself to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection.

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Ferguson's was a very straightforward and unburdened view of man. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change his position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance;... ...the most immediate way to do this is in one's immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this isn't true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. But this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in the ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the world around it . Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is "neutral" in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful.

What Radin did was to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. ... Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others . What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a "social contract" forged in desire and fear . The central question of such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, and how does he keep it? We can see how naive the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it doesn't begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. ...

And so Brown could offer his own biting criticism of Rousseau:

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If the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from "primitive communism" to "private property" but in the transition from ape to man .

That is, from a type of animal that had no notion of the sacred to one that did . And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell , not by physical coercion . As Brown puts it, "Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment." Thus Brown could conclude—in the epigraph we have borrowed for this chapter—that the chains that bind men are self-imposed.

If we left this idea unadorned, it would still need explaining: why are men so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in chains? The bind is explained by one idea,... : the phenomenon of transference.*

People take the overwhelmingness of creation and their own fears and desires and project them in the form of intense mana onto certain figures to which they then defer. They follow these figures with passion and with a trembling heart. ...—it is all lived truth, an animal's reaction to the majesty of creation. If anything is false about it, it is the fact that thousands of human forms feel inferior and beholden to an identical, single human form.

In all this I am not negating the pure Marxian side of historical

*For a more detailed examination of the nature of transference please see my extensive summary in chap. 7 of The Denial of Death ...

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domination;... But there can never be a way of relieving or eliminating the domination of structures of power without coming to grips with the spell of power, a spell that explains voluntary self-alienation whether it deals with spirits or with Soviets. ...Marxism has to come to grips with the conservative argument: that there is something in human nature that invites inequality no matter what we do. ...as I would say with Rank, men are "fate-creating" agents: they coerce by simply existing ;... We can sum all this up in one sentence that presents to narrow Marxism the most fundamental challenge it has faced: men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation . What is the shape of a revolutionary philosophy of history that would begin to take full account of that?

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Evolution of Inequality

Radin's view of how shamans and elders gained control of ritual is full of volition, scheming, competitiveness ;... At the level of equalitarian society—simple hunting and gathering tribes—Radin's scheme... is compelling. But what I like about Hocart's view of the growth of privilege at a later stage of social evolution is that it accents the other side: the common accord with which men reach for their own subjection.

In Radin's equalitarian society organismic well-being is achieved by an economy of reciprocal exchange;... In Hocart's rank society there is a new economic process: the flow of goods funnels to a center of power... he takes the surplus, pools it, and then gives it out as needed.

Immediately the question arises, Why did people go from an economy of simple sharing among equals to one of pooling via an authority figure who has a high rank and absolute power? The answer is that man wanted a visible god always present to receive his offerings, and for this he was willing to pay the price of his own subjection. In Hocart's words:

The Fijians had invisible gods, sometimes present in the priest or in an animal; they preferred a god always present, one they could see and speak to, and the chief was such a god. That is the true reason for a Fijian chief's existence: he receives the offerings of his people, and in consequence they prosper.

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That is, they prosper because there is a god right on the spot that visibly accepts their offerings; thus there is no doubt about their favor in his eyes.

... Prosperity and chiefs were associated because the tribes with great chiefs were actually more prosperous. Hocart explains this as a circular process : the wealthier tribes were more energetic, and so they rose among their neighbors. But part of the reason that they were more energetic was that "there is no doubt that present divinity evoked an enthusiasm which acted as a tonic, and braced men to greater efforts." "A Fijian will put his back into his work when striving to shine in the eyes of the great man." Imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts today if we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits of our labors. ...

... Besides, says Hocart, if you are without a king you are in a position of inferiority in relation to your neighbors ; when others parade their visible god, and their favor in his eyes, how can you stand being shown up as having no god of your own? The Jews were mocked in the ancient world because they had no image of their god, he seemed like a mere figment of their imagination;... ... one always knew how one stood with the visible god , but the Israelis were never sure how they stood with their invisible one —the whole thing must have seemed sick.

To speak of the Pharaoh is to sum up the whole process: once you have a visible ritual principal in the form of a chief or a king,

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a visible god, by definition you already have divine kingship—the great emergent tyranny of the ancient world. ... Divine kingship sums up the double process of macro- and microcosmization: it represents a "solarization of man, and a humanizing of the sun."

For early man the emanations of light and heat from the sun were the archetypes of all miraculous power:... Hocart asks whether ancient man was altogether wrong in his main conception "that animal or vegetable energy on this earth is after all little else than bottled sunshine?" ... And when they had made that most wonderful invention of all, a living em-

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bodiment of prosperity, a Sun-Man, how expect them not to fall into eager thralldom? ...

At this point we might be tempted to get up on our high horse and proclaim that the simple fact is that the atomic theory of power is true, and the Sun-Man theory false. But we have to remind ourselves, soberly, that we haven't quite abandoned the earlier theory; it still holds a fascination for us and we still live in large measure by its compellingness. We know about the genuine mana that surrounds presidents and prime ministers:... As the ancients believed that the kingdom would perish if the king's mana ebbed, so do we feel uncomfortable and anxious if the figure "at the top" doesn't show real excellence, some kind of "magic."

:... just as in traditional society, we tend to vote for the person who already represents health, wealth, and success so that some of it will rub off on us . Whence the old adage "Nothing succeeds like success." ...a direct continuation of the tradition of weighing the Aga Khan in diamonds.

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The Centralization of Ritual

Once men consented to live by the redistribution of life's goods through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their fate. ... The king of ritual principal was in charge of the sacred objects of the group and had to hold the prescribed ceremonies by a strict observance of the customs of the ancestors. This made him a repository of custom, an authority on custom. "Custom" is a weak word in English to convey something really momentous,... It is the physics, medicine, and mechanics of primitive society. Imagine our trying to fight a plague with faulty chemicals, and you can understand that custom equals life. ...this regulation is so useful to the tribe... that it naturally comes to be extended to all departments. ...if you are going to be supreme regulator of the world, it is only logical that you should gradually encompass the whole world. If your invisible mechanics works in one area, there is no reason why it should not work in another , you have only to try it. ... It seems like a benign and harmless enough process,... —but what is happening is the complete entrenchment of social inequality . Hocart... :

Fijian chiefs were great sticklers for etiquette. They were quick to resent offences against their dignity and unseemly behaviour in their

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precincts. . . . These may seem petty matters; but they are fraught with great possibilities. The Fijian chief has only to extend his precincts and interpret widely the traditional rules of ceremonial behaviour in order to acquire a criminal jurisdiction, and increase his interference with the life of his subjects. . . . By sanctifying anything they [the chiefs in Polynesia] brought it within the sphere of ritual, that is their own sphere. This was certainly not done suddenly, but by persistently extending the applications of taboo [sacred power], as we shall see our English kings extend their peace.

You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall behind the king to protect his definitions of social custom and his ritual prerogatives;... We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny ...

Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish. Another large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed up here. ... In simple egalitarian societies there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so yourself, family against family. ... A police force is usually drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded. Among the Plains Indians, for example, these special occasions were the buffalo hunt, mass migrations, war parties, and major festivals;... At these times the police force enjoyed absolute authority,... and yet among the Plains Indians this foundation for autocracy never hardened into permanent form.

Theorists of social evolution have given much attention to the police function in egalitarian societies and have speculated on why

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it didn't develop into a permanent coercive structure,... The answer seems to be that the entrenchment of a police force or even a military organization is not all by itself the road to institutionalized inequality . Offhand you might think that blatant power would exercise its own fascination and its own irresistible coercion, but in the affairs of men things don't seem to work that way: men will not give in to power unless it is accompanied by mystification , as in the service of something that has a grander aura of legitimacy,...

...

Once you went from an economy of simple sharing to one of redistribution, goods gradually ceased to be your natural right. Again a logical, almost forced development. ...we can't trace it except for hints here and there, but we can empirically compare tribal life

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with later stages of social evolution. What we see is that private interests became more and more separated from public interests—until today we hardly know what a public interest is.

Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. ... It embraced the twin urges... , heroism and expiation. ... Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. But this classic social ceremonial had to change with the gradual development of hereditary privilege, so that the chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. ...

Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see it as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible world of the gods to a flaunting of the visible world of things. ...

This represents a basic change in man's whole stance toward the world,... Hocart calls it the "growing conceit" of man, and we know that this hubris comes directly from a belief that one's own powers are more important than anything else. In the old totemic world picture individuals did not stand out as much. There was belief in the fusion of human

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and animal spirits, a kind of spiritual unification of the life of the tribe with a sector of nature. ... The individual got a sense of organismic durability by identifying with the fund of ancestral spirits. What also seems certain is that the entire community functioned as a kind of regenerative priesthood, as each member had a share in the ritual.*

... The "conceit" comes in when he [the chief or king] himself becomes the guarantee of life and it is no longer the group as a whole. ...in the classic potlatch the accumulation of visible power was certainly there in the piles of goods,... , but it had not yet taken the ascendancy over the group,... But with the historical detachment

*This step in social evolution raises some fascinating questions about the basic nature of man and his attitudes toward the world around him. Often these days we tend to romanticize about how primitives "naturally" respected nature and animal life and handled them gently and reverently. Certainly this was often true, but we also know that primitives could be very casual and even cruel with animals. Hocart throws an interesting light on this by pointing out that once man got enough power over the world to forgo the old totemic ritual identifications, he became more and more eager to disclaim any relationship with animals . Hence the eclipse of animal identification historically. We know that primitives used animals in the ritual technics, but Hocart says this doesn't mean that they always revered them or that respect was the primary thing: the primary thing was identification for use . This would explain why, once man got more secure control over the visible world, he found it easy to dissociate himself entirely from animals. Otto Rank has discussed brilliantly the change from Egyptian to Greek art as the gradual defeat of the animal by the spiritual principle, the climax of a long struggle by man to liberate himself from his animal nature. ...

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of power figures into feudal structures, the generation of wealth as moral power for the community became a caricature. ... The [Roman] emperors "gave" huge public entertainments in the arenas, public buildings, and monuments,... But we know that these givers amassed and passed on more than they gave;... more public relations than expiation; they gave to the eyes of men and not to the gods. We see the final evolution of this empty potlatch practiced in the western world, our cities, parks, and universities carrying buildings with the names Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hearst, Macmillan-Bloedel—... ...the flaunting of power with very little mixture of repentance.

Conclusion: The Eclipse of Communal Ritual

... It would take volumes to talk about the many dimensions of historical alienation,... But there is a suggestive way of looking at the problem that cuts right to the heart of it, and that is from the two angles we have been using here: first, to say that man changed from a privileged

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sharer of goods to someone who was dependent on the redistribution of goods; and second, to say that he was gradually dispossessed of the most intimate creative role he had ever invented, that of a practitioner of ritual.

The family or clan is a ritual unit, which makes each person a member of a priesthood. ... It is easy enough for us to talk about a household that has its own cult and sacred fire, but can we imagine what it means to step into a hut that has a sacred fire, a hut filled with technologists who know the secret ways of rejuvenating earthly life? ... Family ritual was absorbed into state ritual. Hocart... :

The great difference between our society and most non-European societies is that the national ritual, of which the Pope or the sovereign [president, chairman, prime minister, etc.] is the head, has swallowed up all others. Hence the clan and all other ritual organizations have disappeared. . . . The disappearance of the intermediate groupings has left the married couple face to face with the state.

... ...it is face to face with the state but with no real powers of its own . ...one of the great lessons historical psychology can teach is what new ways man has had to invent for the pursuit of life after the disappearance of the primitive world picture.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The New Historical Forms of
Immortality Power

History in itself is nothing but applied psychology.
Hence we must look to theoretical psychology to
give us the clew to its true interpretation.
Karl Lamprecht

...

...

...Otto Rank and Norman O. Brown. Their work gave us a grip on the manifold of historical fact from an intimate psychological point of view—something scholars had been seeking since the nineteenth century without success. ...

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... Rank pulled it all together with a single principle, what we might call the principle of immortality striving. ... Beliefs were not fixed and final realities; they varied from period to period,... What was fixed was the principle of a "dominant immortality-ideology." ..."Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over . . . immortality." If anyone doubts this, let him try to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological disputes. ...if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. ...all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life. ... Culture means that which is supernatural; all culture has the basic mandate to transcend the physical, to permanently transcend it. ...

... As both Rank and Brown saw it, what characterized "archaic" man was that he

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attained immortality "by assimilation into the fund of ancestral souls, out of which comes each generation and into which they return." ... The group alone conferred immortality—which is why the individual immersed himself so completely in its ideology , and why duty took precedence over everything else. Only in this way can we understand the willing self-denials of man in society;...

And so Rank and Brown could argue that from the beginning of society and prehistory man has repressed himself, tamed himself, in a barter for greater power and durability. And the record of the taming of man is found in the "immortality symbols" that men have used and discarded across the face of history. ... men seek to preserve their immortality rather than their lives . ... Freud said that man gives these [erotic] drives up only grudgingly to society, and then only because he is forced to by superior authority and power. Rank, on the other hand, said that sexual restrictions "from the first" were "voluntary, spontaneous" acts, not the result of external authority. ...the body was the first thing that one abandoned for the project of cultural immortality, and it

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was abandoned, not because of fear of the fathers, but ironically because of love of life. ...

...

The Family and the State, or the "Sexual Era"

With the discovery of agriculture began the breakup of the primitive world, the rise of the early states; and now social organization came to be focused in the patriarchal family under the state's legal protection. It was at this time that biological fatherhood became of dominant importance because it became the universal way of assuring personal immortality. Rank called this the "sexual era" because physical paternity was fully recognized as the royal road to self-perpetuation via one's children—in fact, it was one's bounden duty. ... Under Roman law the father had tyrannical rights over his family; he ruled over it legally; as Rank was quick to observe, famulus equals servat, slave. ...

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...

Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of spirits from the ancestral world. But this is now the only spiritual lineage in which the son can perpetuate himself in turn. This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children:...

What is of great interest in this development is the intimate unity of patriarchal family ideology with that of kingship. The king represented the new fountainhead of spiritual power in which the subjects were nourished. ...with the gradual development of specialized ritualists and priests, the power to create power often fell to a special class and was no longer the possession of the whole collectivity. Where this happened it helped to turn the average man into an impotent subject. ... Without the priests' calendar, how would the farmer know the auspicious days for planting? ... Often the kings and priests were solidly allied in a structure of domination that monopolized all sacred power; this completed the development from the tribal level where the shaman would sometimes ally with the chief. ...

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...

All this took place in the divine cities, which themselves were eternal, connected to heaven (Babylon equals Gate of the Gods), and protected and regenerated by the priestly rituals. ... One of the strong impetuses to the triumph of Christianity was the increasing sackings of Rome by the barbarians, which showed everyone that something was wrong with the old powers and some new magical sources had to be tapped.

... We can see that this represents a new kind of unification experience, with a focal point of power, that in its own way tries to recapture the intense unity of primitive society,... The emperors and kings who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere megalomania, but out of a real need for a unification of experience, a simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure source of power. ...

By proclaiming themselves gods of empire, Sargon and Rameses wished to realize in their own persons that mystic or religious unity which once

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constituted the strength of the clan, which still maintained the unity of the kingdom, and which could alone form the tie between all the peoples of an empire. Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars, will, in their turn, impose upon their subjects the worship of the sovereign, not so much out of vanity as to consolidate moral unity. . . . And so through its mystic principle the clan has survived in the empire.

...

The New Promise of the "Era of the Son"

Christianity actually entered the confusion of the Roman world in order to simplify it and to lighten the terrible burdens of the miscarried "sexual era," as Rank so well understood. He saw Christianity as the "era of the son" in revolt against the oppressions and inequalities of the era of the family. ... Christ posed a totally new and radical question: "Who are my mother and my brothers?" The son was now completely independent; he could freely choose his own spiritual father and was no longer bound by the fatalities of heredity. ... Christianity was a great democratization that put spiritual power right back into the hands of the single individual... As many historical scholars have pointed out, Christianity in this sense dipped back into paganism, into primitive communalism, and extended it beyond the tribe. ...

But as in all things human, the whole picture is ambiguous and confused, far different from the ideal promise. Actually Christianity

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was harnessed by the state , and its power was infused into the institution of kingship to keep its authority;... ...this failure of Christianity was intimately tied up with the general problem of class, slavery, real economic inequality. These were simply too massive and ingrained in the whole fabric of ancient society to be abolished by a new ideology. This had been the tragedy that Rome herself was unable to resolve. ... The crucial characteristic of the state, and the hallmark of its genuine power and tyranny, was that it could compel its subjects to go to war. And this was because the power of each family was given over to the state; the idea was that this would prevent the social misuse of power. This made the state a kind of "power-bank," as Rank put it but the state never used this power to abolish economic inequalities; as a result it actually

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misused the social power entrusted to it by the families and held them in unequal bondage.

Christianity, too, perpetuated this economic inequality... The Reformation was a late attempt to reassert the promise of early Christianity—true individual power and equality—but it too failed by being absorbed in the unequal state scramble. It was not until World War I that the whole structure finally crumbled, after the rumbling blow given by the French Revolution:... We are struggling today in the mire of this very discredit of all overlapping traditional immortality symbols. ... We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen... And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust .

Not that the promise of the ancient world and of Christianity failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out of them: what Rank called the "era of psychological man." ...a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. ...a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one's own acts, his own works, his own discovery of truth. This was a kind of secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual.

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Instead of having one hero chieftain... , society would now be come the breeding ground for the development of as many heroes as possible, individual geniuses in great number who would enrich mankind. This was the explicit program of Enlightenment thinkers and of the ideology of modern Jeffersonian democracy.

But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific Faustian man too has failed—in two resounding ways, just as Rank understood. ... For one thing, modern democratic ideology simply repeated the failure of Rome and of Christianity: it did not eliminate economic inequality. ... Second, the hope of Faustian man was that he would discover Truth, obtain the secret to the workings of nature,... ...but he is actually ruining the very theater of his own immortality with his own poisonous and madly driven works;...

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CHAPTER SIX

Money: The New Universal
Immortality Ideology

The adult flight from death—the immortality
promised in all religions, the immortality of
familial corporations, the immortality of cultural
achievements—perpetuates the Oedipal project
of becoming father of oneself: adult sublimation
continues the Oedipal project. . . . Thus man
acquires a soul distinct from his body, and a
superorganic culture which perpetuates the revolt
against organic dependence on the mother. The
soul and the superorganic culture perpetuate both
the Oedipal causa sui project and that horror of
biological fact which is the essence of the
castration complex.
Norman O. Brown

...

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... Let me just give a sketch of Brown's thesis on money, to see how it supports and confirms Rank's and how it adds its own vital insight into the evolution of new structures of power.

...what did kings pursue besides immortality in the royal family? Why of course: silks, courtesans, fine swords,... —all the things that can be bought with gold. ... And so the pursuit of money was also opened up to the average man; gold became the new immortality symbol. ... As Brown so succinctly put it:

In monumental form, as money or as the city itself, each generation inherits the ascetic achievements of its ancestors. . . . as a debt to be paid by further accumulation of monuments. Through the city the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, every city has a history and a rate of interest.

In other words, the new patriarchy passes not only family immortality to the son, but also accumulated gold, property, and interest—and the duty to accumulate these in turn. The son assures his own self-perpetuation by being "greater" than the father: by leaving behind a larger mark. Immortality comes to reside no longer in the invisible world of power, but in the very visible one,...

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...

Brown gave us a more incisive picture than Rank, then, by fixing firmly on the mechanism of the corruption of the primitive. ...if Rank showed the heartbeat of history, Brown exposed the material that flowed in the veins, and that material was gold. ...

This equation of money and totemic spirits is not meant to be frivolous. With the decline of tribal society, rituals were also discredited. Yet man needed new rituals because they gave order and form to society and magically tied the whole world of experience together. ... Mary Douglas... :

Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual.

...

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...the reason money is so elusive to our understanding is that it is still sacred, still a magical object on which we rely for our entrance into immortality. ... Oscar Wilde observed that "religions die when one points out their truth. Science is the history of dead religions." From this point of view, the religion of money has resisted the revelation of its truth; it has not given itself over to science because it has not wanted to die.

...

...anthropologists have long known that money existed on primitive levels of social life;... Imagine such bizarre things as dogs' teeth, sea shells, bands of feathers, and mats being used as money! ...

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... For us, motors, guns, electric circuits embody power, for the primitives, power resided in the qualities of living things and in the organs that embodied those qualities:... These forms of primitive money, then, did not have mere ornamental value or practical exchange value as we understand it; they had real spirit-power value. And when it comes to the evolution of our own money we must look to the same source, to its origin in magic amulets or tokens,...

...

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...

...the value ratio of gold and silver has remained stable from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and even into modern times as 1:13½. Brown agrees with Laum that such a stability cannot be explained in logical terms of rational supply and demand:...

... If gold had any "utility," as Hocart says, it was a supernatural utility: "a little of it was given away in exchange for quantities of stuff because a few

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ounces of divinity were worth pounds of gross matter. ... As Géza Róheim put it... , "originally people do not desire money because you can buy things for it, but you can buy things for money because people desire it."

...we can now understand—with Simmel and Hocart—how it was that the first banks were temples and the first ones to issue money were the priests. ... Forgery was sacrilege because the coins embodied the powers of the gods and only the priests could handle such powers;...

... Priests may have talents for dealing with the supernatural, but they have very human appetite (and often lots of it); and if they have the leisure to ply their trade, it is because since earliest times they have convinced their fellows that it is important to assure that leisure by bringing part of the fruit of the sweat of their brow to the priests. ... As we finger, in our pocket, the face on the silver dollar, we re-

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experience some of the quiet confidence of the ancients who left the temples with their life-securing charms. ...

We know that the priests were part of the immortality ideology of what has aptly been called "cosmic government"... ...money coinage fit beautifully into this scheme, because now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit temples:... ...the painting visible even today at the entrance of a house in the ruins of Pompeii... ...a picture of a man proudly weighing his penis in a scale of gold coins must convey a feeling that the powers of nature as exemplified in the reproductive life force have their equivalency in gold,... ...Spengler...

When . . . Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were,

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for Classical minds, one and the same operation—the transformation of corporeal objects into money.

...money seems to have represented a cosmological unification of visible and invisible powers—...

..."Custom is . . . essentially sacred"—and why should money be any exception? ... We have long known that money gives power over men, freedom from family and social obligations,... ; it abolishes one's likeness to others; it creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their claims on each other without compromising them in any direct and personal way; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind. Power is not an economic category, and neither is it simply a social category: "All power is essentially sacred power." This is perfect. All power is in essence power to deny mortality. Either that or it is not real power at all, not ultimate power, not the power that mankind is really obsessed with. ...

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...money is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature.

And here Brown takes issue with orthodox Freudian theory and makes a real improvement on it,... We have always been put off when psychoanalysts equated money with feces—it seemed so crass and unreal. ...even to children feces are ambivalent and to some degree distasteful. If as tiny infants they play with feces, it is at a time when feces can have no precise meaning to them;... ...money has been so supercharged with the yearning of ambition and hope; it could not be merely infantile smearing, not simple self-indulgence. In fact, as Brown has so well argued, money does not equal feces at all, does not represent them at all: rather, it represents the denial of feces, of physicalness, of animality, of decay and death.

To rise above the body is to equate the body with excrement. In the last analysis, the peculiar human fascination with excrement is the peculiar human fascination with death.

... As Marx so unfailingly understood, it is the perfect "fetish" for an ape-like animal who bemuses himself with striking icons. ... The only

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hint we get of the cultural repression seeping through is that even dedicated financiers wash their hands after handling money. ... If we say that "money is God," this seems like a simple and cynical observation on the corruptibility of men. But if we say that "money negotiates immortality and therefore is God," this is a scientific formula that is limpidly objective to any serious student of man.

Nor do we have to dig back into prehistory and conjecture on what money meant to the ancient Greeks or Pompeiians. We see the change from tribal modes of achieving power to money modes right before our eyes: the drama of early Athenian society is repeated in any area where detribalization is taking place. ... The rapid and utter disintegration of tribal society has always been, historically, the result of the discredit of old sources of immortalizing powers and the belief that the new ways of life brought by the foreigners contain the genuine, the stronger powers. ...

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...

... Underneath the different historical forms of immortality striving has pulsated the lifeblood of money. ... Rank didn't talk about this dualism, but he surely understood it. He spoke about the failure of the ideology of democracy to really do what it promised—to make everyone economically and socially equal. ... How explain this failure of an immortality ideology to give what it promises, except to say that at some deeper level it is all the while giving another kind of immortality? ...economic equality is "beyond the endurance of the democratic type" of man. [-Rank] ... Money gives power now—and, through accumulated property, land, and interest, power in the future. ... ...for an animal who actually lives on the level of the visible and knows nothing of the invisible, it is easy for the eyes of men to take precedence over the eyes of the gods. ...

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... The pull of the body is so strong, lived experience is so direct; the "supernatural" is so remote and problematic, so abstract and intangible. ...the traditional meaning of the symbol of the Devil: he represents physical, earthly, visible power and on this planet easily holds sway over his more ethereal competitor, spiritual power. This is what theologians have meant when they have said that on this earth God must obey the Devil . The earth runs on physical laws. ...

No wonder economic equality is beyond the endurance of modern democratic man: ... ...it is not merely that your house diminishes in real estate value, but that you diminish in fullness on the level of visible immortality—and so you die. ... modern man cannot endure economic equality because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols ; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life . No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that specialness is so much a fight to the death: man lashes out all the harder when he is cornered,... He dies when his little symbols of specialness die. ... Occasionally modern man...

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...stumbles on the great insight that "you can't take it with you." This leads him to pause and heave a sigh... , but it doesn't really touch him,... .* He might feel self-pity and bitterness about the one-dimensionality of his immortality, but in matters of eternity you take what you can get .

No wonder, either, that the other modern ideology of egalitarianism has also found real economic equality to be unendurable. Are we puzzled that the Soviets create new prestige classes,... ? They too exist only on the level of the visible, and must somehow secure their immortality here. ... This is one of the reasons, finally, that primitive Christianity is a real threat to both commercialism and communism , at least when it takes its own message seriously. Primitive Christianity is one of the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea of the invisible dimension of nature and the priority of this dimension for assuring immortality. Thus it is a threat to any one-dimensional immortality ideology,...

*I think it is along these lines, too, that the assertion that primitive societies were often paranoid makes sense. Anyone who distinguished himself by too many exploits accrued too much power, and so he was a danger to the group. Since primitives did not have the legal apparatus for protecting the group against strong individuals, they were naturally feared; and so there was a sort of built-in pressure for keeping things level and power in balance. ...

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The Demonics of History

... Primitive man lived in a world devoid of clocks, progressive calendars, once-only numbered years. Nature was seen in her imagined purity of endless cycles of sun risings and settings,... This kind of cosmology is not favorable to the accumulation of either guilt or property, since everything is wiped away with the gifts and nature is renewed... Man did not feel that he had to pile things up. ...[but] it is not quite true to say that primitive man lived in an "eternal now": he experienced the flow of time because he experienced guilt. ...primitive man lived in certain universal binds that characterize human life, and so he had to experience time flow because these binds are composed with the passage of time. Guilt and time, then, are inseparable, which is why primitive man so elaborately tried to deny them both with regenerative rituals. ... Probably the repeated sackings of Rome graphically swung the balance. It could no longer be pretended that the ancient rituals of renewal could keep regenerating the city,... ; after Augustine, time was firmly set in a linear way while waiting for that end [the Christian endtimes]. We are still today ticking off the years, but we no longer know what for,... Compounding interest is one of the few meaningful things to do in an irreversible time stream that is wholly secular and visible.

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No wonder the confusion of the ancient world was so great and tension and anxiety were so high: men had already amassed great burdens of guilt by amassing possessions, and there was no easy way to atone for this. ...how we understand the growth of the notion of "sin" historically. Theologically, sin means literally separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui. Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one's relation to the divine ground of his being; he no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. ... Modern missionaries found that the notion of sin was difficult to translate to primitives, who had no word for it; we understand now that they had little experience of isolation or separateness from the group or the ancestral pool of souls. The experience of sin still today, for simple believers , is merely one of "uncleanliness" and straightforward prohibition of specific acts . It is not the experience of one's whole life as a problem .

No wonder that early converts to Christianity could renounce everything in a decisive way that today seems strangely self-sacrificial to us. We are not in the same bind. We have completely eclipsed the tension of the invisible-visible dichotomy by simply denying the invisible world. ...we no longer have any problem with sin, since there is nothing to be separated from: everything is here, in one's possessions, in his body. ...

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...we have succeeded better than even the primitives in avoiding sin, by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related. In contrast with guilt, we don't even have to repress it, since it does not arise...

Brown points out that the secularization of the economy means that we can no longer be redeemed by work, since the creation of a surplus is no longer addressed as a gift to the gods. ...the new god Money... is not a god that gives expiation! It is perverse. We wonder how we could allow ourselves to do this to ourselves, but right away we know the answer: we didn't take command of history at some given point where civilization started. ... Rather, history took command of us in our original drivenness toward heroism; and our urge to heroism has always taken the nearest means at hand. Brown says that the result of this secularization process is that we have an economy "driven by the pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption." ...man has changed from the giving animal, the one who passes things on, to the wholly taking and keeping one. ...

If we sum it all up historically, we seem to be able to say that man became a greater victim of his drivenness when heroism pushed expiation out of the picture;... He still needs expiation for the peace

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of his life because he is stuck with his natural and universal experience of guilt. ... to repress guilt is not to "shoulder" it ;... ; rather, as Freud taught us, that which is denied must come out by some other means . ... The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, linear time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive man; it has to come out some way.

The point I am making is that most of the evil that man has visited on his world is the result precisely of the greater passion of his denials and his historical drivenness . ...what is the nature of evil in human affairs, and how can we come to grips with it as thoughtful men trying to take back some control over our own destiny,... ? The only way that seems open to reason is to continue to try to soberly sort out our own motives, those that have led to our present state.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil

All our human problems, with their intolerable
sufferings, arise from man's ceaseless attempts to
make this material world into a man-made reality.
. . . aiming to achieve on earth a "perfection"
which is only to be found in the beyond . . .
thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both
spheres.
Otto Rank

...Rank's words are not a mere commentary about an endearing, pathetic, and confused animal. They are much more than that: they are a complete scientific formula about the cause of evil in human affairs. ...

...

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...

...

...men do not actually live stretched openly on a rack of cowardice and terror; if they did, they couldn't continue on with such apparent equanimity and thoughtlessness. Men's fears are buried deeply by repression, which gives to everyday life its tranquil façade; only occasionally does the desperation show through, and only for some people. It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis,... But men also live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope, and joy which gives them a buoyancy beyond that which repression alone could give. This, as we saw with Rank, is achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture,...

At about the same time that Rank wrote, Wilhelm Reich also based his entire work on the same few basic propositions. ...

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...

In his book Reich is out to explain fascism, why men so willingly give over their destiny to the state and the great leader. ... Men tried to avoid the natural plagues of existence by giving themselves over to structures which embodied immunity power, but they only succeeded in laying waste to themselves with the new plagues unleashed by their obedience to the politicians. Reich coined the apt term "political plague-mongers" to describe all politicians. ... Once you base your whole life-striving on a desperate lie and try to implement that lie, try to make the world just the opposite of what it is, then you instrument your own undoing. ...

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Reich asks why hardly anyone knows the names of the real benefactors of mankind, whereas "every child knows the name of the generals of the political plague?" The answer is that:

Natural science is constantly drilling into man's consciousness that fundamentally he is a worm in the universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping upon the fact that man is not an animal, but a "zoon politikon," i.e. a non-animal, an upholder of values, a "moral being. How much mischief has been perpetuated by the Platonic philosophy of the state! It is quite clear why man knows the politicos better than the natural scientists: He does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is fundamentally a sexual animal. He does not want to be an animal.

...

In my view no one has summed up these complex psychic workings better than Jung did... by talking about the "shadow" in each human psyche. To speak of the shadow is another way of referring to the individual's sense of creature inferiority, the thing he wants most to deny. ...the shadow becomes a dark thing in one's own psyche, "an inferiority which none the less really exists even though only dimly suspected." The person wants to get away from this

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inferiority, naturally; he wants to "jump over his own shadow." The most direct way of doing this is by "looking for everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others."

Men are not comfortable with guilt, it chokes them, literally is the shadow that falls over their existence. [Erich] Neumann sums it up... :

The guilt-feeling is attributable . . . to the apperception of the shadow. . . . This guilt-feeling based on the existence of the shadow is discharged from the system in the same way both by the individual and the collective—that is to say, by the phenomenon of the projection of the shadow. The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values [i.e., the cultural façade over animality] cannot be accepted as a negative part of one's own psyche and is therefore projected—that is, it is transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as "the alien out there" instead of being dealt with as one's own inner problem.

... It is precisely the split-off sense of inferiority and animality which is projected onto the scapegoat and then destroyed symbolically with him. ... ...Jung could observe—even more damningly than Rank or Reich—that "the principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man."

...

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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Nature of Social Evil

Nor can we deny that we all eat and that each
of us has grown strong on the bodies of innumer-
able animals. Here each of us is a king in a field
of corpses.
Elias Canetti

We have seen with Rank that the driving force behind evil in human affairs stems from man's paradoxical nature: in the flesh and doomed with it, out of the flesh in the world of symbols and trying to continue on a heavenly flight. ...

Our great wistfulness about the world of primitive man is that he managed willy-nilly to blunt the terrible potential destructiveness of the drama of heroism and expiation. He didn't have the size, the technological means, or the world view for running amok heroically. Heroism was small scale and more easily controlled:... ...a kind of warfare that has always made military men chuckle. Among the Plains Indians it was a kind of athletic contest in which one scored points by touching the enemy; often it was a kind of disorganized, childish, almost hysterical game... Anyone was liable to be snatched out of his hut at daybreak, and on mountainous islands like those of Polynesia groups lived in continual fear of those just over the

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ridge... This is hardly the ideal of altruism, and there are very few today who have a romantic image of primitive man's peaceful nature;... Since we do not experience the terror of the occasional victims of primitive raids, we can look back nostalgically at the small numbers consumed at random, and compare them with those who died in one day at Dresden or one flash at Hiroshima.

Rousseau had already wistfully observed the comparatively low toll of life that primitive warfare took, and a whole tradition of social analysts including Marx agreed with him. ... Today we are agreed that the picture looks something like this: that once mankind got the means for large-scale manipulation of the world, the lust for power began to take devastating tolls . ...

Something was accomplished by this new organization of labor that primitive man never dreamed of, a tremendous increase in the size of human operations:... The amalgam of kingship with sacred power, human sacrifice, and military organization unleashed a nightmare megamachine on the world—...

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...power gone mad, a colossus based on the dehumanization of man that began , not with Newtonian materialism, Enlightenment rationalism, or nineteenth-century commercialism , but with the first massive exploitation of men in the great divine kingships of the ancient world . ...

From... a Marxist level of analysis, this perspective on history attacks social evil at its most obvious point. From the very beginning the ravages of large-scale warfare were partly a function of the new structure of domination called the state;... ...; it "solved" its ponderous internal problems of social justice by making justice a matter of triumph over an external enemy. ... Mumford...

Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war . . . popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.

In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the [ancient] city, directed their aggression toward a common goal—an attack on a rival city. Thus the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve."

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The Marxist argument discussed above—and it is now an agreed one—is that the new structure of the conquest state forced an increased butchery of war. ...instead of isolated and random sacrifices on behalf of a fearful tribe, ever larger numbers of people were deliberately and methodically drawn into a "dreadful ceremony" on behalf of the few. So that the "ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history." ...

Why has mankind remained locked into such a demonism of power all through history? It is not simply because the slaves have not had the power to throw off their chains;... Mumford... answers that the demonism remains because it is fed by its own irrationality. It is based on a continuation of the anxiety of primitive man in the face of his overwhelming world;... But... Once you start an arms race, you are consumed by it. This is the tragic fatality of power,... To protect himself with his megamachines, man

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is willing to sacrifice almost everything else. ...

Thus Mumford's philosophy of the obscenity of history... ; it is both Marxist and psychological, which is what gives it its explanatory power. ...it beautifully sums up and puts into focus what is already an agreed-on reading... ...[and yet] I find fault with Mumford's presentation: he leaves us a bit suspended,... ...his thesis is still too Marxian and unpsychological;...

... "Perhaps the most mysterious of all human institutions, one that has been often described but never adequately explained, is that of human sacrifice: a magical effort either to expiate guilt or promote a more abundant yield of crops." "Among the cultivated Maya, slaves were even sacrificed at an upper-class feast, merely to give it a properly genteel elegance." Or, again, "the primary motivation, in the case of human sacrifices, with its many grades from finger joints to whole bodies, [is] unexplained, and perhaps, like other irrationalities, unexplainable." Now the first of these three statements is too glib, the second superficial, and the third erroneous;...

The Mystery of Sacrifice

Alex Comfort once observed very aptly that the whole meaning of the Freudian revolution in thought was that it revealed to us

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that the irrational had structure and so we could begin to understand it. Mumford has evidently not fully integrated the psychoanalytic contribution into his thought if he claims that irrationalities are unexplanable. Furthermore, sacrifice has been adequately explained on its many levels of meaning,... Guilt is one of the serious motives of man, not to be tossed off as lightly as Mumford does in the above quotes...

...these happenings have to be seen as resulting from the composite of human motives, not simply from the aberrations of power or the elusiveness of a dream. Mumford tells us... that the oppressiveness of tyranny would not have been tolerated but for the positive goods that flowed out of the megamachines. But people bear tyranny because of its rewards not only to their stomachs but also to their souls. How else explain the parents that we read about during each war who, when told about the tragic death of their son, have expressed regret that they had not more to give? ...it is not cynical or callous: in guilt one gives with a melting heart and

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with choking tears because one is guilty, one is transcended by the unspeakable majesty and superlativeness of the natural and cultural world, against which one feels realistically humbled;...

... Mumford says that the spilling of blood, because it is a life substance, may be a magical effort to make crops grow. Of course. ... But we know by now that all these technical efforts are inseparably sacred ones,... It is true that primitives have often spilled blood in order simply to gloat and strut over an enemy; but I think the motive is more elemental than merely to give to feasts a pleasant veneer. Men spill blood because it makes their hearts glad and fills out their organisms with a sense of vital power; ceremoniously killing captives is a way of affirming power over life, and therefore over death. ...

... The sacrifice is a gift, a gift to the gods which is directed to the flow of power, to keeping the life force moving there where it has been blocked by sin. ...

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...; the more living things sacrificed, the more extravagant release of power, etc. ...

Now this idea of the flux and flow of power is hard for us to understand today—or rather would be hard if we had not had some experience with it:... Leo Alexander... points out how much the Nazis were animated by what he calls a "heathen concept": they had a whole philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life. ...the familiar archaic idea that the sacrifice of life makes life... Alexander calls the Nazi delight in death a "thanatolatry," but I would prefer to talk about a "death potlatch"... ...a few more choice examples... :

Dr. Karl Brandt, plenipotentiary in charge of all medical activities in the Reich, when asked about his attitude toward the killing of human beings in the course of medical experiments, replied, "Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives? The same goes for technologic development. You cannot build a great bridge, a gigantic building—you cannot establish a speed record without deaths!"

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In a similar vein, many SS men took a curious pride in the fact that even in peacetime they had many fatalities during "realistic" military training. Human bodies were encased in the concrete fortifications and bunkers, as though such bodies could give strength to inanimate matter.

...men staged whatever size death potlatch they were technically capable of, from Genghis Khan to Auschwitz. The general opinion is that at the most primitive level of religious organization—that of shamanism—sacrifice of war captives was a rarity; captives could be taken in small number for a variety of reasons, but usually simple sadistic ones... ...as societies increased in scale and complexity, incorporating high gods, a priesthood, and a king, the motive for sacrifice became frankly one of pleasing the gods and building power, and then mountains of war captives began to be sacrified. ...the lure of economic gain was always outweighed by the magical power of war, no matter how this was disguised. ...

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Allied to this dynamic is another one which we have trouble understanding today:... if you kill your enemy, your life is affirmed because it proves that the gods favor you. ... As Huizinga pointed out, war was a test of the will of the gods, to see if they favored you; it forced a revelation of destiny ... Whatever the outcome was, it was a decision of holy validity—the highest kind of judgment man can get—and it was in his hands to be able to force it: all he had to do was to stage a war. ...

This was the gift complex of the primitive potlatch magnified to its highest intensity:... As Canetti so well put it,... :

Fortunate and favored, the survivor stands in the midst of the fallen. For him there is one tremendous fact; while countless others have died, many of them his comrades, he is still alive. The dead lie helpless; he

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stands upright amongst them, and it is as though the battle had been fought in order for him to survive it . . . It is a feeling of being chosen from amongst the many who manifestly shared the same fate . . . The man who achieves this often is a hero. He is stronger. There is more life in him. He is the favored of the Gods.

As Winston Churchill discovered in one of his first military experiences: "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." ...

Canetti goes on to point out, and I believe truly, that the larger and more frequent the heaps of dead which attest to one's special favor, the more one needs this confirmation . It becomes a kind of addiction...

...

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... Very early in human evolution men aggressed in order to incorporate two kinds of power, physical and symbolic. This meant that trophy taking in itself was a principal motive for war raiding; the trophy was a personal power acquisition. Men took parts of the animals they killed in the hunt... In war they took back proof that they had killed an enemy,... These could be worn as badges of bravery which gave prestige... But more than that... the piece of the terrible and brave animal and the scalp of the feared enemy often contained power in themselves:... ...trophies were a major source of protective power:... In addition to this the trophy was the visible proof of survivorship in the contest and thus a demonstration of the favor of the gods. ...

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...

The Logic of Scapegoating

From all this we have to agree with an observation by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre: "Hell is other people." ... Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death. Nothing could be further from the "irrationality" that Mumford complained about. ...

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... Not only enemies but even friends and loved ones are fair fuel for our own perpetuation, said Freud: "In our unconscious we daily and hourly deport all who stand in our way, all who have offended or injured us." This is the price of our natural animal narcissism; very few of us, if pressured, would be unwilling to sacrifice someone else in our place. The exception to this is of course the hero. We admire him precisely because he is willing to give his life for others instead of taking theirs for his . Heroism is an unusual reversal of routine values , and it is another thing that makes war so uplifting, as mankind has long known:... But what we are reluctant to admit is that the admiration of the hero is a vicarious catharsis of our own fears,... ; and this is what plunges us into uncritical hero worship: what the hero does seems so superlative to us. ...

The logic of scapegoating, then, is based on animal narcissism and hidden fear. If luck, as Aristotle said, is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you , then scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path —with special alacrity if he is a stranger to you. ...

If anyone still thinks that this is merely clever phrasing in the

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minds of alienated intellectuals trying to make private sense out of the evil of their world, let him consult the daily papers. Almost every year there is a recorded sacrifice of human life in remote areas of Chile to appease the earthquake gods. There have been fifteen recent officially reported cases of human sacrifice in India—...

***sports***

The logic of killing others in order to affirm our own life unlocks much that puzzles us in history, much that with our modern minds we seem unable to comprehend, such as the Roman arena games. ...: the thumbs up or thumbs down on the gladiators. The more death you saw unfold before your eyes and the more you thrust your thumbs downward, the more you bought off your own life. And why was the crucifixion such a favorite form of execution? Because, I think, it was actually a controlled display of dying;... The longer people looked at the death of someone else, the more pleasure they could have in sensing the security and the good fortune of their own survival. ...

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...

***sports (cont.)***

The Roman arena games were, in this sense, a continued staging of victory even in the absence of a war;... If we are repulsed by the bloodthirstiness of those games, it is because we choose to banish from our consciousness what true excitement is. ...

It seems that the Nazis really began to dedicate themselves to their large-scale sacrifices of life after 1941 when they were beginning to lose and suspected at some dim level of awareness that they might. They hastened the infamous "final solution" of the Jews toward the closing days of their power, and executed their own political prisoners—like Dietrich Bonhoeffer—literally moments before the end. ...

Other things that we have found hard to understand have been hatreds and feuds between tribes and families, and continual

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butchery practiced for what seemed petty, prideful motives of personal honor and revenge. But the idea of sacrifice as self-preservation explains these very directly . ... In Ranks inspired words:

It is my opinion that this ideology offers a basis for understanding both the bitter hatreds and feuds between North American Indian tribes, and the feuds or vendettas currently practiced in many European countries. Whether it was the theft of women under exogamy, or the murder of male members of the tribe, it was always a matter of avenging serious offenses upon the spiritual economy of the community which, being robbed of one of its symbols of spiritual revenue, sought to cancel or at least avenge the shortages created in the immortality account.

This kind of action is natural to primitives especially, who believe in the balance of nature and are careful not to overly deplete the store of life-stuff. Revenge equals the freeing of life-stuff into the common reservoir "from which it can then be reassigned," as Jordan Scher very nicely put it. ...

...we no longer believe in the balance of mature;... [and] we don't often grant to others the same life quality that we have. But whether or not we believe in a steady pool of life-stuff, numbers are important to man:... In wartime, as Zilboorg put it:

We mourn our dead without undue depression because we are able to celebrate an equal if not greater number of deaths in the ranks of the enemy.

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... As Alan Harrington so well put it,... :

Cruelty can arise from the aesthetic outrage we sometimes feel in the presence of strange individuals who seem to be making out all right. . . . Have they found some secret passage to eternal life? It can't be. If those weird individuals with beards and funny hats are acceptable, then what about my claim to superiority? Can someone like that be my equal in God's eyes? Does he, that one, dare hope to live forever too—and perhaps crowd me out? I don't like it. All I know is, if he's right I'm wrong. So different and funny-looking. I think he's trying to fool the gods with his sly ways. Let's show him up. He's not very strong. For a start, see what he'll do when I poke him.

Sadism naturally absorbs the fear of death, as Zilboorg points out, because by actively manipulating and hating we keep our organism

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absorbed in the outside world; this keeps self-reflection and the fear of death in a state of low tension. ...

This is already the essence of a theory of sadism. But more than that it is the clinical proof of the natural "wisdom" of tyrannical leaders from the time of the divine kingships up to the present day. In times of peace, without an external enemy , the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society , in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide. War sucks much of this up into one fulcrum and shoots it outward to make an unknown enemy pay for our internal sins. It is as Mumford said, but—one final time—how rational this "irrationality."

The Science of Man after Hitler

...

[Kenneth] Burke recognized that guilt and expiation were fundamental categories of sociological explanation, and he proposed a simple

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formula: guilt must be canceled in society, and it is absolved by "victimage." So universal and regular is the dynamic that Burke wondered "whether human society could possibly cohere without symbolic victims which the individual members of the group share in common." He saw "the civic enactment of redemption through the sacrificial victim" as the center of man's social motivation.

Burke was led to the central idea of victimage and redemption through Greek tragedy and Christianity; he saw that this fundamentally religious notion is a basic characteristic of any social order. ... The natural mystery of birth, growth, consciousness, and death is taken over by society ; and as [Hugh Dalziel] Duncan so well says, this interweaving of social form and natural terror becomes an inextricable mystification; the individual can only gape in awe and guilt . This religious guilt, then, is also a characteristic of so-called secular societies; and anyone who would lead a society must provide for some form of sacred absolution,... In Burke's generation it was above all Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini who understood this and acted on it.

... All "wars are conducted as 'holy' wars" in a double sense then—as a revelation of fate, a testing of divine favor, and as a means of purging evil from the world at the same time. This explains why we are dedicated to war precisely in its most horrifying aspects:...

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... Since everyone feels dissatisfied with himself (dirty), victimage is a universal human need. And the highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted. The logic is terrifying. ...

From which we have to conclude that men have been the midwives of horror on this planet because this horror alone gave them peace of mind, made them "right" with the world. No wonder Nietzsche would talk about "the disease called man." It seems perverse when we put it so blatantly, yet here is an animal who needs the spectacle of death in order to open himself to love . As Duncan put it:

. . . as we wound and kill our enemy in the field and slaughter his women and children in their homes, our love for each other deepens. We become comrades in arms; our hatred of each other is being purged in the sufferings of our enemy.

And even more relentlessly:

We need to socialize in hate and death, as well as in joy and love. We do not know how to have friends without, at the same time, creating victims whom we must wound, torture, and kill. Our love rests on hate.

If we talk again and shockingly about human baseness, it is not out of cynicism ; it is only to better get some kind of factual

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purchase on our fate. We follow Freud in the belief that it is only illusions that we have to fear; and we follow Hardy—in our epigraph to this book—in holding that we have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism. ... Today we still gape in unbelief that such a holocaust was possible in our "civilized" world, refusing to see how true it was to man's nature and to his ambitions to transcend that nature. Hitler's rise to power was based on his understanding of what people wanted and needed most of all,... The rightists rally behind the convicted war criminal Lieut. William Calley because they cannot stand the burden of guilt of a nonvictorious war, so they simply deny it by insisting that he is a straightforward hero. There is no immortality without

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guiltless victory. ...

It took Stalin's purge trials to show us that the highest humanistic ideals of socialist revolutionaries also have to be played out in a religious drama of victimage and redemption—... The Russians exiled religious expiation but could not exile their own human nature, and so they had to conjure up a secular caricature of religious expiation. ...Burke had warned us to always watch for the "secular equivalents" of the theological formula of victimage and redemption;...

... [Robert Jay] Lifton's analysis reveals Maoism as still another version of age-old historical themes...

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...it seems that modern China is reliving the idea of the primitive group soul which is a sacred fount of regeneration on which the whole community can draw so long as it remains pure. ...

The Two Sides of Heroic Self-Expansion

...

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Of course militarism and the flag hardly begin to cover the various types of things that the person can expand into; human ingenuity is not so limited , which explains why rich and imaginative people often make such poor patriots . Samuel Johnson saw this clearly when he said that patriotism was the last refuge for scoundrels.

Somewhere, Borges calls Patriotism "the least acute of all the passions." I mostly slept through high school English, but this line got my attention.

In our time the young are turning to forms of what Lifton called "experiential transcendence"—the intense experience of a feeling state which, for a little while anyway, eliminates the problem of time and death. ... This explains the massive attendance at rock music festivals which the older generation has such trouble understanding. The festivals represent a joyful triumph over the flat emptiness of modern life,... This kind of communion in joy and in intensive experience is, we have to conclude, modern youth's heroic victory over human limitation. Yet it, too, is hardly a modern invention despite the new technics which mediates it. It is a replay of the basic Dionysian expansiveness, the submergence and loss of identity in the transcending power of the pulsating "now" and the frenzied group of like-minded believers.

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My point is that heroic expansiveness, joy, and wonder have an underside— finitude, guilt, and death —and we have to watch for its expression too. After you have melted your identity into transcending, pulsating power, what do you do to establish some kind of balance? What kind of forceful, instrumental attitude do you summon up to remarshal yourself and your grip on experience? One cannot live in the trembling smallness of awe, else he will melt away. Where is the object on which to focus one's new self-assertion—an object that is for most people a victim? This is what we have to be constantly on guard for. ... Every heroic victory is two-sided : it aims toward merger with an absolute "beyond" in a burst of life affirmation, but it carries within it the rotten core of death denial in a physical body here on earth. If culture is a lie about the possibilities of victory over death, then that lie must somehow take its toll of life, no matter how colorful and expansive the celebration of joyful victory may seem. ... Hannah Arendt in her brilliant and controversial analysis of Adolf Eichmann showed that he was a simple bureaucratic trimmer who followed orders because he wanted to be liked; but this can only be the surface of the story, we now see. Rubber-stampers sign orders for butchery in order to be liked ; but to be liked means to be admitted to the

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group that is elected for immortality . The ease and remoteness of modern killing by bespectacled, colorless men seem to make it a disinterested bureaucratic matter, but evil is not banal as Arendt claimed: evil rests on the passionate person motive to perpetuate oneself, and for each individual this is literally a life-and-death matter for which any sacrifice is not too great , provided it is the sacrifice of someone else and provided that the leader and the group approve of it .

Whatever side of heroism we look at, one thing is certain: it is an all-consuming activity to make the world conform to our desires. And as far as means are concerned, we are all equally insignificant and impotent animals trying to coerce the universe, trying to make the world over to our own urges. ...we can conclude that man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all. ...

I mention these things in passing only to remind the reader of the tragic aspect of human heroics and the naturalness of vicious scapegoating: somebody has to pay for the way things are. This is the meaning of the Devil in history, as many authorities have told us. The Devil represents the body, the absolute determinism of man's earthly condition,... :

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he reveals the reality of our situation,... On matters of spiritual apotheosis every leader shows his basic kinship to Martin Luther, because he has to decry the fettering of man's glorious spirit by the body, by personal appetite and selfishness. ...

Conclusion: Cultures as Styles of
Heroic Death Denial

It is fairly easy to draw the moral from all this, even though it will be shocking to some of the older styles of doing social theory. The continuity from the Enlightenment through Marx, Weber, Mannheim, Veblen, and Mills is all there plain as day. The impor-

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tant thing about the analyses of Rank, Burke, Duncan, and Lifton is that they reveal precisely those secular forms which the traditional religious dramas of redemption now take. ...

But with our greater and even more tragic historical experience which includes Hitler and Stalin, we can give the Weberian tradition even more life and critical force: we can extend it from primitive man right up to the modern revolutionary monoliths, all the while basing it on a few universal principles of human motivation. Since there is no secular way to resolve the primal mystery of life and death, all secular societies are lies . And since there is no sure human answer to such a mystery, all religious integrations are mystifications . ...it is not within man's means to triumph over evil and death. For secular societies the thing is ridiculous: what can "victory" mean secularly? And for religious societies victory is part of a blind and trusting belief in another dimension of reality. Each historical society, then, is a hopeful mystification or a determined lie.

Many religionists have lamented the great toll that the Hitlers and the Stalins have taken in order to give their followers the equivalent of religious expiation and immortality; it seemed that when man lost the frank religious dimension of experience, he became even more desperate and wild;... But when one looks at the toll of scapegoats that religious integrations have taken, one can agree with Duncan that religious mystifications have so far been as dangerous as any other. ...

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...

... We don't have to get embroiled in any abstract arguments because the shape of social theory is clear. If each historical society is in some ways a lie or a mystification, the study of society becomes the revelation of the lie. The comparative study of society becomes the assessment of how high are the costs of this lie. Or, looked at from another way, cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of heroic death denial. We can then ask empirically, it seems to me, what are the costs of such denials of death, because we know how these denials are structured into styles of life. These costs can be tallied roughly in two ways: in terms of the tyranny practiced within the society, and in terms of the victimage practiced against aliens or "enemies" outside it.

By assessing the cost of scapegoating and by trying to plan for alternative ideals that will absorb basic human fears, we seem to have brought up to date the Marxist critique of the human evasion of freedom; we seem to have finally a secure grip on the social problem of death denial. In the Marxist view death is an ideology, as the title of an essay by Marcuse has it. This means that although death is a natural fear, this fear has always been used and exploited by the established powers in order to secure their domination. ...

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...

When we phrase the problem in these terms, we can see how immense it is and how far it extends beyond our traditional ways of doing science. ...you have to find out why such heroics are practiced in a given social system: who is scapegoating whom, what social classes are excluded from heroism,... Not only that,... ; you have to begin to scheme to give to man an opportunity for heroic victory that is not a simple reflex of narcissistic scapegoating . You have to conceive of the possibility of a nondestructive yet victorious social system. It was precisely this problem that was designed by William James over two generations ago, in his famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War," but needless to say we have done nothing about it even on a conceptual level, much less on an active social level. ...

One of the reasons social scientists have been slow in getting around to such designs has been the lack of an adequate and agreed general theory of human nature. James didn't have one,... Modern Marxism still does not show man in the round and so still seems naive to mature scholars in its easy optimism. ... The Enlightenment hope for free and autonomous men was never born; and one reason is that we have not known until after Freud the precise dynamics that makes men so tragically slavish. ...

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...

Transference

Freud saw that the patient in analysis developed intense attachment to the person of the analyst. ... Seeing that this was an uncanny phenomenon, Freud explained it as transference—that is, the transference of feelings the patient once had towards his parents to the new power figure in his life, the doctor. ...

Gradually,... we have seen a shift in emphasis to a more comprehensive view of transference,... ...today we can say that transference is a reflex of the fatality of the human condition. Transference to a powerful other takes care of the overwhelmingness of the universe. ...

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CHAPTER NINE

Social Theory:
The Merger of Marx and Freud

... Rousseau, as we saw... , made an important beginning... But Rousseau's thesis, like that of traditional Marxist theory, does not take sufficient account of the psychological dimension of man's unfreedom. ...

Conservatives, who never took Rousseau seriously except as a madman, never agreed with Marxian theory either. As Edmund Burke and others who shuddered at the French Revolution understood, it still left human nature intact, and so had to again bring about a relatively deplorable and tragic state of affairs. ... The Marxists thought that man was unfree because he was coerced by the power of others; the conservatives said he was unfree because of innate differences in men. ... People needed to work together, to make and gather the fruits of uneven talents, and so society by its nature was a necessary and willing agreement to share unequally among unequals. ...the conservatives were relatively free of the moral outrage and sense of

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injustice which animated the radicals and still animates them. But they themselves were profoundly outraged by the cost in human lives and misery of the revolutions that were supposed to set things straight,... In czarist times a political prisoner might bribe a jailer, but in Soviet Russia today no dissenter can bribe the white-frocked state psychiatrist out of plugging him into the wall.

If we shudder at the thought of the total determinism of modern tyranny, we must admit that the conservative case has weight, just as it had in the nineteenth century, especially since we today know fairly accurately how historical inequality came about —at least in a theoretical way. And we know that this process started long before the rise of the state :...

...it would seem that, with its emphasis on differences in personal qualities as the largest factor in inequality among men, his [Rousseau's] "Discourse" supports the conservative argument—or would support it, rather, if the essay were not filled with errors... I will only cite two crucial points. First, the basic fallacy: that there was a time in early social evolution when men were not influenced by differences in personal qualities. ...

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...

The second point... : he saw no accumulation of goods in the primitive societies of his time, and so he thought that primitive man wanted "only to live and remain idle" and refused to work to build up an accumulation of goods. ... But we know this is the wrong conclusion: rather, hunters and gatherers cannot accumulate a surplus because of primitive technology and subsistence economy, not because they do not want the surplus. ...

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... The drive for self-expansion is there, but there are neither opportunities nor the world picture into which to fit it. ...

Since Rousseau wrote, we have learned something from the vast collections of data on primitive man: that if he was not in bondage to the authority of living persons, he was at the utter mercy of the power of spirits . ...this leads us to a completely opposite position from Rousseau,... in the state of nature the solitary individual is already unfree, even before he gets to society;... We know today that Rousseau used the idea of the "state of nature" as an exploratory hypothesis to be able to imagine how life might be in a state of freedom from social coercion. We know too what a powerful critical tool this idea has been,... But the fact is that man never was free and cannot be from his own nature... Rare individuals may achieve freedom at the end of years of experience and effort; and they can do this best under conditions of advanced civilization such as those that Rousseau scorned.

As we have seen, each human type seeks to perpetuate itself if it has the power to do so;... But on primitive levels the power figures are always suspect precisely because of their dangerous power; hence the constant anxiety about witches, etc. It was Frazer who showed that the early tribal embodiments of magical power were ready scapegoats for the people—not only witches but priest-kings too. No wonder that when kings later got real power to work their will on the helpless masses, they used that power ruthlessly;...

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...

Seen in this way, history is the saga of the working out of one's problems on others—harmlessly when one has no power (or when the "weapon" is art), viciously when one has the power and when the weapons are the arsenals of the total state . This saga continues in modern times but in forms which disguise the coercion and emphasize the social agreement ,... Each society elevates and rewards leaders who are talented at giving the masses heroic victory, expiation for guilt, relief of personal conflicts. It doesn't matter how these are achieved:... The men who have power can exercise it through many different kinds of social and economic structures, but a universal psychological hunger underpins them all;...

The Nature of Man

The question of the origins of inequality is only half of the problem of a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history. The other half is that Rousseau's argument with Hobbes has never been

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satisfactorily settled. The Marxists have said, with Rousseau, that human nature is a blank slate, neutral, even good;... Not so, say the conservatives, and they point for proof at those revolutionary societies which have abolished social class but which continue to express personal and social evil;...

... At first it seemed to me that Rousseau had already won the argument with Hobbes: had he said that evil is a robust child? Then, as Rousseau argued, children are clumsy, blustering organisms who must take some toll of their environment, who seek activity and self-expansion in an innocent way, but who cannot yet control themselves. ... Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.

Later I agreed too with the Marxists, that hate and violent aggression could be developed in man as a special kind of cultural orientation, something people learned to do in order to be big and important—... It was not, as Freud had imagined, that man had instincts of hate and aggression,

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but rather that he could easily be molded in that way by the society which rewarded them. ...

From this point of view, even scapegoating and the terrible toll it has taken historically seemed to be explainable in Rousseau's terms: the thing that man wanted most was to be part of a close and loving ingroup,... And to achieve this intimate identification it was necessary to strike at strangers, pull the group together by focusing it on an outside target. So even Hugh Duncan's analysis of the sacrificial ravages of the Nazis could be approached in terms of neutral motives or even altruistic ones:... And Hannah Arendt's famous analysis of Eichmann would also fit in with this:... We could even, as we have seen, subsume this under the Agape motive: man wants to merge with a larger whole, have something to dedicate his existence to in trustfulness and in humility; he wants to serve the cosmic powers. The most noble human motive , then, would cause the greatest damage because it would lead men to find their highest use as part of an obedient mass, to give their complete devotion and their lives to their leaders. Arthur Koestler,... ; in his opinion it is not aggressive drives that have taken the greatest toll in history, but rather "unselfish devotion," "hyper-dependence combined with suggestibility" —... ...: "Wars are fought for words...." Again, Rousseau would be vindicated.

He would also be supported by Erich Fromm's lifelong study of aggression, where he shows that much of it is due to the way children are brought up and the kind of life experiences people have. ...

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... Again, this is a pure Marxist view: changing the life-denying institutions of modern society would enable a new type of human being to take shape. The hope of the Enlightenment in its full development is represented by Fromm: to show clinically what prevents self-reliant men. ... People were always ready to yield their wills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chance for developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the great nineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky. Emerson also made this a central teaching of his whole life, holding that man was still a tool of others because he had not developed self-reliance, full and independent insides. ...

Contra Rousseau

... Now I think the matter can be pushed to a comprehensive conclusion, that we have a general theory of human evil. Evil is caused by all the things we have outlined, plus the one thing they have left out, the driving impetus that underlies them all: man's hunger for righteous self-expansion and perpetuation. ...

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... The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil. The evil that troubles man most is his vulnerability; he seems impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the cosmos. He assures a plenitude of evil, then, by trying to make closure on his cosmic heroism in this life and this world. This is exactly what Rank meant in the epigraph I have used for Chapter Seven: all the intolerable sufferings of mankind result from man's attempt to make the whole world of nature reflect his reality, his heroic victory; he thus tries to achieve a perfection on earth, a visible testimonial to his cosmic importance; but this testimonial can only be given conclusively by the beyond, by the source of creation itself which alone knows man's value because it knows his task, the meaning of his life; man has confused two spheres, the visible and whatever is beyond, and this blindness has permitted him to undertake the impossible—to extend the values of his limited visible sphere over all the rest of creation, whatever forms it may take. The tragic evils of history, then, are a commensurate result of a blindness and impossibility of such magnitude.

... Hobbes was right as well as Rousseau: man is a robustly active creature; activity alone keeps him from going crazy. If he bogs down and begins to dwell on his situation, he risks releasing the neurotic fear repressed into his unconscious—that he is really impotent and will have no effect on the world. So he frantically drives himself to see his effects, to convince himself and others that he really counts. ...man must take out his personal problems on a transference object in one way or another;...

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... The most general statement we could make is that at the very least each person "appropriates" the other in some way so as to perpetuate himself. In this sense, "styles of life" are styles of appropriation of the other to secure one's righteous self-perpetuation. We might say that there is a natural and built-in evil in social life because all interaction is mutual appropriation. ...

Historically we saw how this worked in the dialogue between masses and power figures; but we also saw how human energy and fear created evil on the simplest levels of social organization. ... Sometimes men went to war out of personal frustration in the tribe, to work off sexual jealousy and grief, or even simple boredom. ... But organismic urges are by their nature sadistic, and primitive man often wreaked evil on a captured enemy because of his desire to gloat and strut;... And so we see that even without spiritual motives, without otherworldly ambitions of any kind, man causes evil as an organism by enjoying his feeling of animal power . Again, this is what Hobbes saw, that sheer energy causes evil.

Hard to ignore that (1) this basically takes what our parents used to tell us about schoolyard bullies and uses it to understand everyone; (2) of course there are weapons and there are "weapons" , among which art has a few pages back been proffered as among the more innocuous. Certainly there has been a lot of ink spilled attempting to show that art is in fact just one more arrow in the bully's quiver. Ironically this faux-radical trope actually recapitulates the conservative position as outlined above by Becker, finding immutable evil in the human heart; or maybe it's not even ironic anymore since everyone who has thought about it seems to have realized that political space is curved and the extremes in fact meet each other at the antipode.

That said, as for the search for hero-systems which are "empirically true," by which Becker seems to mean those which do much good and little evil, how do we make an airtight case in favor of one or the other without getting bogged down in our conflicting value systems?

My point in lingering on this is to show that we can have no psychology of evil unless we stress the driving personal motives behind man's urge to heroic victory. It may seem on the surface

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that empty, passive, disinterested people are led like sheep to perform vicious acts,... —this we might call the "impressionable spectator" theory of aggression. No doubt there is considerable stimulus given to man by the size and enthusiasm of the group around him. ...; it is visible proof that nature favors man if she has made his kind multiply so;... Another thing, which as Buber saw is that man is stimulated to believe in his heroic destiny by the sight of another human face :...

So there is no argument about the fact of mass enthusiasm; the question is how important it is as a cause of aggression. Konrad Lorenz thinks it is perhaps the most important cause, but Freud had already downgraded it in his confrontation of Le Bon and Trotter,... Freud asked the question, Why the contagion from the herd? and he found the motive in the person and not in the character of the herd. We know how mobs can be stopped by stopping their leaders, or how panic breaks out when the leader is killed;... ...man brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures. ... The motives and the needs are in men and not in

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situations or surroundings . It is true, as Koestler affirms, that man's urge to self-transcendence, his devotion to a cause, has made more butchery than private aggressiveness in history, and that the devastating group hatred is fed by the love of its members , their willingness even to die in its name. We know that as soon as primitives developed identifiable gods and a large social conglomerate to give their loyalty to, their own natural sadistic appetites were translated into the large-scale sacrifices of others that we see in history:... ...the primitive already took the heads of others for his own enhancement, of whatever petty and personal kind. It is true that Eichmann felt physically sick on the one occasion when he actually watched the deadly gas at work, which proves that he was not personally a sadist — but does not prove that he had no personal stake in the killing . ...

Another way of looking at this is to say that the basic general motive of man—his need for self-esteem, for a feeling of primary value—is not a neutral vessel. ...

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... I myself have written and argued that the self-esteem motive is elastic and neutral, but I now see that this is not quite so. True, there are no instincts that absolutely determine when people should feel good about themselves. But self-esteem is equivalent to "righteousness" or feeling "right." Which means that self-esteem is based on an active passion: man cannot feel right unless he lives the heroic victory over evil, the assurance of immortality. ...the character of this causa sui project is definite and inflexible: the securing of immortality (in whichever way this is understood by the individual and the society).

Along with this we have to make an important addition to Fromm's approach to aggression. It is true that frustrated, deprived, weak, unindividuated people commit aggression very readily;... It is true too that there are mechanical people who fear life, who need to control things with a secure sense of power,... Fromm says that one explanation of the fact that the world is now bordering on nuclear destruction is the widespread prevalence of a modern Homo mechanicus. ...

From all we know. I think it would be nearer the truth to talk about a cultural type of man who earns his immortality from

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identification with the powers of machines, rather than a simple lover of death. ... The mechanical man may scorn and fear living things, but I think it is precisely because he feels that they do not have the power over life and death that machines have;...

But all this is simply a minor dilemma of clarification... There is something much more crucial at stake... ...: not only weak, or mechanical, or pathological, or "primitive and elemental" types aggress, but also fat, jolly ones —people who have had abundant childhood care and love! ... The reason is positive and simple: man aggresses not only out of frustration and fear but out of joy, plenitude, love of life . Men kill lavishly out of the sublime joy of heroic triumph over evil. Voilà tout. What are clinical classifications and niceties going to do with that?

It is true, I think, that a weak man will more easily,... , and that a strong man will be less likely to do this. It is true, too, that most men will not usually kill unless it is under the banner of some kind of fight against evil; in which case one is tempted, like Koestler, to blame the banner,... But banners don't wrap themselves around men: men invent

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banners and clutch at them ;... I think it is time for social scientists to catch up with Hitler as a psychologist, and to realize that men will do anything for heroic belonging to a victorious cause it they are persuaded about the legitimacy of that cause. And I know no psychology, and so far no conditions on this earth, which would exempt man from fulfilling his urge to cosmic heroism, which means from identifying evil and moving against it. In all cases but one this means moving also against individuals who embody evil. The one case, of course, is the teaching of the great religions, and in its modern guise pacifism, or nonviolence. This is a 2,000-year-old ideal at which descriptive psychology stops, since it is an ideal that has hardly yet made a dent in the affairs and minds of men. But we will return to this vital matter of values in the conclusion of this book.

[It was at this stage in the original manuscript that the decision was made to cut material devoted to a study of the modern approaches to Darwinism, which now appears as a unique publication elsewhere. ...

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... ]

Conclusion: The Shape of Social Theory

... Radical theorists must realize that if you give men political and economic equality, they will still welcome unfreedom in some form. Conservatives must know that the freedom to obey or not to obey, to delegate one's powers to authority, is not so free : it is coerced in the very beginning and by the very nature of man's perceptions of power and majesty. The "talents" that men use to amass wealth and social privilege may be due to some real differences in quality of mind and body; but the talent to mystify others is the queen of tyranny , and it is not all natural and neutral, but partly man-made—made by ignorance, thirst for illusion, and fear. As such, it is part of the scientific problem of human liberation, and is not destined to remain wholly in the natural order of things.

If the complexities of the psychological dimensions of inequality and the unfreedom at the heart of human nature are sure to please no one who is firmly embedded in an ideological camp, then it becomes even more difficult to know what we are going to do about them or how we are going to approach them. The pluralism of ideologies will continue to talk and act past them. But a few things seem clear: although the radicals may not like it, the science of society will have to go much more slowly and modestly than was at first realized by Rousseau and Marx. ...

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... As for the conservatives, although they may shrink back in fear, there is nothing to prevent the science of man from being the absolutely critical and meliorative science of society that was envisioned in the Enlightenment. ... It used to be thought... that if man's innate aggressiveness was a drive that had to find expression, then all societies had to have some means of "hate satisfaction." ... Many of our best minds have been tortuously struggling with the implications of this:... But if hate is not a basic drive or a quantum of instinct, but instead results from the fear of death and impotency and can be relieved by a heroic victory over a hate object, then at least we have some scientific purchase on the problem. ...

Social theory, then, is neither radical nor conservative, but scientific;

Good luck!!

... If we have an agreed image in a science, there is nothing to prevent us from moving on to the kinds of social designs that we talked about in Chapter Eight: designs for the possibility of nondestructive yet victorious types of social systems. ... A social ideal could be designed that takes into account man's basest motives, but now an ideal not directly negated by those motives. In others words, a hate

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object need not be any special class or race or even human enemy, but could be things that take impersonal but real forms, like poverty, disease, oppression, natural disasters, etc.

Compare to Randolph Bourne as quoted by Lasch.

Or, if we know that evil takes human form in oppressors and hangmen, then we could at least try to make our hatreds of men intelligent and informed: we could work against the enemies of freedom, those who thrive on slavery, on the gullibilities and weaknesses of their fellow man, as Burke so eloquently argued.

I admit in concluding that this raises more problems than it solves, since men hate and love according to their individual understandings and personal needs. But we have to try to take things one step further; the whole thrust of the science of man since the Enlightenment has been after all a promise that objectivity about evil is possible. This objectivity about evil introduces what we might call the possibility of objective hatred. This clarification of hatred would allow us, once more, to make the circle on James's timeless plea for a moral equivalent to natural sadism, to hope to translate our self-expansion into a furtherance of life instead of the destruction of it. Finally, if we know that we ourselves hate because of the same needs and urges to heroic victory over evil as those we hate, there is perhaps no better way to begin to introduce milder justice into the affairs of men. This is the great moral that Albert Camus drew from our demonic times, when he expressed the moving hope that a day would come when each person would proclaim in his own fashion the superiority of being wrong without killing others than being right in the quiet of the charnel house.

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CHAPTER TEN

Retrospect and Conclusion:
What Is the Heroic Society?

. . . if we can no longer live the great symbolisms
of the sacred in accordance with the original belief
in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second
naiveté in and through criticism.
Paul Ricoeur

...

As far as the science of man is concerned, many thinkers since the Enlightenment have believed that everything is possible for a science of society. ... All we have to do, they claim, is to change the structure of things and a new society will emerge...

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... Revolutionaries still today trumpet this philosophy of history as the fall of pure men into corrupt social structures.

The reason the philosophy is so attractive is that men need hopes and ideals to urge them on—... All truths are part-truths as far as creatures are concerned, and so there is nothing wrong with an illusion that is creative. Up to a point, of course: the point at which the illusion lies about something very important, such as human nature. If it is false to that, then it becomes oppressive, because if you try falsely to make a new beginning you fail. I know that this bit of wisdom is already stale to our epoch, but even in its staleness we can't let go of it. ... Marxism in its traditional form is simply not a correct guide for a new society. But the irony is that we simply do not know what to do with this stale truth. That is why there is such a crisis in Marxist thought, in leftist-humanist thought. ...

History

Well, for one thing—one great thing—we now see history as it really has been in terms of overall psychodynamics. ...

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... Man immunizes himself against terror by controlling his fascination, by localizing it and developing working responses toward the sources of it. The result is that he becomes a reflex of small terrors and small fascinations in place of overwhelming ones. ... From this point of view history is the career of a frightened animal who has to deaden himself against life in order to live. And it is this very deadening that takes such a toll of others' lives.

All organisms want to perpetuate themselves, continue to experience and to live. It is a great mystery that we don't understand but observe every day:... ...men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it.

The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to "fetishize evil," to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary:...

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A second result of man's animal vulnerability to death and his symbolic consciousness of it is the struggle to get power to fortify himself. Other animals must simply use those powers that nature provided them with and the neural circuits that animate those powers. But man can invent and imagine powers, and he can invent ways to protect power. This means, as Nietzsche saw and shocked his world with, that all moral categories are power categories; they are not about virtue in any abstract sense. ...

So we see that as an organism man is fated to perpetuate himself and as a conscious organism he is fated to identify evil as the threat to that perpetuation. In the same way, he is driven to individuate himself as an organism, to develop his own peculiar talents and personality. And what, then, would be the highest development and use of those talents? To contribute to the struggle against evil, of course. In other words, man is fated, as William James saw, to consider this earth as a theater for heroism, and his life as a vehicle for heroic acts which aim precisely to transcend evil. Each person wants to have his life make a difference in the life of mankind, contribute in some way toward securing and furthering that life, make it in some ways less vulnerable, more durable. To be a true hero is to triumph over disease, want, death. One knows that his life has had vital human meaning if it has been able to bring real benefits to the life of mankind. And so men have always honored their heroes, especially in religion, medicine, science, diplomacy, and war. Here is where heroism has been most easily identifiable. From Constantine and Christ to Churchill and De Gaulle, men have called their heroes "saviors" in the literal sense: those who have delivered them from the evil of the termination of life, either of their own immediate lives or of the duration of their people. Even more, by his own death the hero secures the lives of others, and so the greatest heroic sacrifice, as Frazer taught

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us, is the sacrifice of the god for his people. We see this in Oedipus at Colonus, in Christ, and today in the embalmed Lenin. The giants died to secure mankind; by their blood we are saved. It is almost pathetically logical how man the supremely vulnerable animal developed the cult of the heroic.

But if we add together the logic of the heroic with the necessary fetishization of evil, we get a formula that is no longer pathetic but terrifying. It explains almost all by itself why man, of all animals, has caused the most devastation on earth—the most real evil. He struggles extra hard to be immune to death because he alone is conscious of it; but by being able to identify and isolate evil arbitrarily, he is capable of lashing out in all directions against imagined dangers of this world. This means that in order to live he is capable of bringing a large part of the world down around his shoulders. History is just such a testimonial to the frightening costs of heroism. The hero is the one who can go out and get added powers by killing an enemy and taking his talismans or his scalp or eating his heart. He becomes a walking repository of accrued powers. Animals can only take in food for power; man can literally take in the trinkets and bodies of his whole world. Furthermore, the hero proves his power by winning in battle; he shows that he is favored by the gods. Also, he can appease the gods by offering to them the sacrifice of the stranger. The hero is, then, the one who accrues power by his acts, and who placates invisible powers by his expiations. He kills those who threaten his group, he incorporates their powers to further protect his group, he sacrifices others to gain immunity for his group. In a word, he becomes a savior through blood. From the head-hunting and charm-hunting of the primitives to the holocausts of Hitler, the dynamic is the same: the heroic victory over evil by a traffic in pure power. And the aim is the same: purity, goodness, righteousness—immunity. Hitler Youth were recruited on the basis of idealism; the nice boy next door is the one who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; the idealistic communist is the one who sided with Stalin against his former comrades: kill to protect the heroic revolution, to assure the victory over evil. As Dostoevsky saw, killing is sometimes distasteful, but the distaste is swallowed if it is necessary to true heroism: as one of the revolutionaries asked Pyotr Verhovensky in The Possessed, when they

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were about to kill one of their number, "Are other groups also doing this?" In other words, is it the socially heroic thing to do, or are we being arbitrary about identifying evil? Each person wants his life to be a marker for good as his group defines it. Men work their programs of heroism according to the standard cultural scenarios, from Pontius Pilate through Eichmann and Calley. It is as Hegel long ago said: men cause evil out of good intentions, not out of wicked ones. Men cause evil by wanting heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance, that he cannot perpetuate himself and his group forever, that no one is invulnerable no matter how much of the blood of others is spilled to try to demonstrate it.

Another way of summing up this whole matter is to contrast Hegel's view of evil out of good intentions with Freud's view, which was very specifically focused on evil motives. Freud saw evil as a fatality for man, forever locked in the human breast. This is what gave Freud such a dim view of the future of man. Many eyes looked to a man of his greatness for a prophecy on human possibilities, but he refused to pose as the magician-seer and give men the false comfort of prediction. As he put it in a late writing:

I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation.

This is a heavy confession by one of history's greatest students of men; but I am citing it not for its honesty or humility, but because of the reason for its pathos. The future of man was problematic for Freud because of the instincts that have driven man and will supposedly always drive him. As he put it, right after the above admission and at the very end of his book:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent [it] . . . will succeed in mastering . . . the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

The most that men can seem to do is to put a veneer of civilization and reason over this instinct; but the problem of evil is "born afresh

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with every child," as Freud wrote three years earlier, in 1927, and it takes the form of precise instinctual wishes—incest, lust for killing, cannibalism. This was man's repugnant heritage, a heritage that he seems forever destined to work upon the world. Kant's famous observation on man was now not merely a philosophical aphorism but a scientific judgment: "From the crooked wood of which man is made, nothing quite straight can be built."

Yet today we know that Freud was wrong about evil. Man is a crooked wood all right, but not in the way that Freud thought. This is a crucial difference because it means that we do not have to follow Freud on the exact grounds of his feelings for the problematic of the human future. If, instead, we follow Rank and the general science of man, we get a quite different picture of the oldest "instinctual wishes." Incest is an immortality motive, it symbolizes the idea of self-fertilization, as Jung has so well written—the defeat of biology and the fatality of species propagation. For the child in the family it may be an identity motive, a way of immediately becoming an individual and stepping out of the collective role of obedient child by breaking up the family ideology, as Rank so brilliantly argued. Historically, the brother-sister marriage of ancient kings like the Pharaohs must have been a way of preserviing and increasing the precious mana power that the king possessed. Cannibalism, it is true, has often been motivated by sheer appetite for meat, the pleasures of incorporation of a purely sensual kind, quite tree of any spiritual overtones. But as just noted, much of the time the motive is one of mana power. Which largely explains why cannibalism becomes uniformly repugnant to men when the spirit-power beliefs that sustained it are left behind; if it were a matter of instinctual appetite, it would be more tenacious. And as for the lust for killing, this too, we now know, is largely a psychological problem; it is not primarily a matter of the satisfaction of vicious animal aggression. We know that men often kill with appetite and excitement, as well as real dedication, but this is only logical for animals who are born hunters and who enjoy the feeling of maximizing their organismic powers at the expense of a trapped and helpless prey.

This much evolution and some million years of prehistory may have given us; but to talk about satisfying one's appetites for purity

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and heroism with a certain relish and style is not to say that this relish is itself the motive for the appetite. Freud thought it was man's appetite that undid him, but actually it is his animal limitation as we now understand it. The tragedy of evolution is that it created a limited animal with unlimited horizons. Man is the only animal that is not armed with the natural instinctive mechanisms or programming for shrinking his world down to a size that he can automatically act on. This means that men have to artificially and arbitrarily restrict their intake of experience and focus their output of decisive action. Men have to keep from going mad by biting off small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some organismic satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the most narrow and unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them. From this point of view the main problematic for the future of man has to be expressed in the following paradox: Man is an animal who must fetishize in order to survive and to have "normal mental health." But this shrinkage of vision that permits him to survive also at the same time prevents him from having the overall understanding he needs to plan for and control the effects of his shrinkage of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through all reflective men. If Freud's famous "fateful question for the human species" was not exactly the right one, the paradox is no less fateful. It seems that the experiment of man may well prove to be an evolutionary dead end, an impossible animal—one who, individually, needs for healthy action the very conduct that, on a general level, is destructive to him. It is maddeningly perverse. And even if we bring Freud's views on evil into line with Hegel's, there is no way of denying that Freud's pessimism about the future is just as securely based as if man did actually have evil motives.

But it does influence the whole perspective on history which I am sketching here. History and its incredible tragedy and drivenness then become a record of understandable folly. It is the career of a frightened animal who must lie in order to live—or, better, in order to live the distinctive style that his nature fits him for. The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group; and each group is a codified hero system. Which is another way of saying that societies are

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standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence. History can then be looked at as a succession of immortality ideologies, or as a mixture at any time of several of these ideologies. We can ask about any epoch, What are the social forms of heroism available? And we can take a sweep over history and see how these forms vary and how they animate each epoch. For primitive man, who practiced the ritual renewal of nature, each person could be a cosmic hero of a quite definite kind: he could contribute with his powers and observances to the replenishment of cosmic life. Gradually, as societies became more complex and differentiated into classes, cosmic heroism became the property of special classes like divine kings and the military, who were charged with the renewal of nature and the protection of the group by means of their own special powers. And so the situation developed where men could be heroic only by following orders. Men had given the mandate of power and expiation to their leader-heroes, and so salvation had to be mediated to them by these figures. In a primitive hunting band or a tribe the leader cannot compel anyone to go to war; in the kingship and the state the subjects have no choice. They now serve in warfare heroism for the divine king who provides his own power in victory and bathes the survivors in it. With the rise of money coinage one could be a money hero and privately protect himself and his offspring by the accumulation of visible gold-power. With Christianity something new came into the world: the heroism of renunciation of this world and the satisfactions of this life, which is why the pagans thought Christianity was crazy. It was a sort of antiheroism by an animal who denied life in order to deny evil. Buddhism did the same thing even more extremely, denying all possible worlds. In modern times, with the Enlightenment, began again a new paganism of the exploitation and enjoyment of earthly life, partly as a reaction against the Christian renunciation of the world. Now a new type of productive and scientific hero came into prominence, and we are still living this today. More cars produced by Detroit, higher stock-market prices, more profits, more goods moving—all this equals more heroism. And with the French Revolution another type of modern hero was codified: the revolutionary hero who will bring

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an end to injustice and evil once and for all, by bringing into being a new utopian society perfect in its purity.

Psychology

This is hardly a complete catalogue of culturally codified heroics, but it is a good representation of the ideologies that have taken such a toll of life; in each of the above examples masses of human lives have been piled up in order for the cultural transcendence to be achieved. And there is nothing "perverse" about it because it represents the expression of the fullest expansive life of the heroic animal. We can talk for a century about what causes human aggression; we can try to find the springs in animal instincts, or we can try to find them in bottled-up hatreds due to frustration or in some kind of miscarried experiences of early years, of poor child handling and training. All these would be true, but still trivial because men kill out of joy, in the experience of expansive transcendence over evil. This poses an immense problem for social theory, a problem that we have utterly failed to be clear about. If men kill out of heroic joy, in what direction do we program for improvements in human nature? What are we going to improve if men work evil out of the impulse to righteousness and goodness? What kind of child-rearing programs are we going to promote—with Fromm, Horney, et al.—in order to bring in the humanistic millenium, if men are aggressive in order to expand life, if aggression in the service of life is man's highest creative act? If we were to be logical, these childhood programs would have to be something that eliminates joy and heroic self-expansion in order to be effective for peace. And how could we ever get controlled child-rearing programs without the most oppressive social regulation?

The cataloguing of maddening dilemmas such as these are, for utopian thought, could probably be continued to fill a whole book; let me add merely a few more. We know that to be human is to be neurotic in some ways and to some degree; there is no way to become an adult without serious twisting of one's perceptions of

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the world. Even more, it is not the especially twisted people who are most dangerous: coprophiliacs are harmless, rapists do not do the damage to life that idealistic leaders do. Also, leaders are a function of the "normal" urges of masses to some large extent; this means that even psychically crippled leaders are an expression of the widespread urge to heroic transcendence. Dr. Strangelove was surely a psychic cripple, but he was not an evil genius who moved everyone around him to his will; he was simply one clever computer in a vast idealistic program to guarantee the survival of the "free world." Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" people whom we can hold responsible for this.

I know all this is more or less obvious, but it puts our discussion on the proper plane; it teaches us one great lesson—a pill that for modern man may be the bitterest of all to swallow—namely, that we seem to be unable to approach the problem of human evil from the side of psychology . Freud, who gave us the ideal of the psychological liberation of man, also gave us many glimpses of its limitations. I am not referring here to his cynicism about what men may accomplish because of the perversity of their natures, but rather to his admission that there is no dependable line between normal and abnormal in affairs of the human world . In the most characteristic human activity—love— we see the most distortion of reality . Talking about the distortions of transference-love, Freud says:

it is to a high degree lacking in regard for reality, is less sensible, less concerned about consequences, more blind in its estimation of the person loved, than we are willing to admit of normal love.

And then he is forced to take most of this back, honest thinker that he is, by concluding that:

We should not forget, however, that it is precisely these departures from the norm that make up the essential element in the condition of being in love.

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In other words, transference is the only ideality that man has. It was no news to Freud that the ability to love and to believe is a matter of susceptibility to illusion. He prided himself on being a stoical scientist who had transcended the props of illusion, yet he retained his faith in science—in psychoanalysis—as his particular hero system. This is the same as saying that all hero systems are based on illusion except one's own, which is somehow in a special, privileged place, as it given in nature herself. Rank got right at the heart of Freud's dilemma:

Just as he himself could so easily confess his agnosticism while he had created for himself a private religion, it seems that, even in his intellectual and rational achievements, he still had to express and assert his irrational needs by at least fighting for and about his rational ideas.

This is perfect. It means that Freud, too, was not exempt from the need to fit himself into a scheme of cosmic heroism, an immortality ideology that had to be taken on faith. This is why Rank saw the need to go "beyond psychology": it cannot by itself substitute for a hero system unless it is—as it was for Freud—the hero system that guaranteed him immortality. This is the meaning of Rank's critique of psychology as "self-deception." It cannot contain the immortality urge characteristic of life. It is just another ideology "which is gradually trying to supplant religious and moral ideology," but "is only partially qualified to do this, because it is a preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology." In other words, all that psychology has really accomplished is to make the inner life the subject matter of science, and in doing this it dissipated the idea of the soul. But it was the soul which once linked man's inner life to a transcendent scheme of cosmic heroism. Now the individual is stuck with himself and with an inner life that he can only analyze away as a product of social conditioning. Psychological introspection took cosmic heroics and made them self-reflective and isolated. At best it gives the person a new self-acceptance—but this is not what man wants or needs: one cannot generate a self-created hero system unless he is mad. Only pure maroissistic megalomania can banish guilt.

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It was on the point of guilt, as Rank saw, that Freud's system of heroism fell down. He admonishes Freud with the didactic mocking of one who possesses a clearly superior conceptualization:

It is with his therapeutic attempt to remove the guilt by tracing it back "causally" to the individual's experience in childhood that Freud steps in. How presumptuous, and at the same time, naive, is this idea of simply removing human guilt by explaining it causally as "neurotic"!

Exactly. Guilt is a reflection of the problem of acting in the universe; only partly is it connected to the accidents of one's birth and early experience. Guilt, as the existentialists put it, is the guilt of being itself. It reflects the self-conscious animal's bafflement at having emerged from nature, at sticking out too much without knowing what for, at not being able to securely place himself in an eternal meaning system. How presumptuous of psychology to claim to be able to handle a problem of these dimensions. As Progoff has so brilliantly summed up psychology after Freud, it all culminates once again in a recognition of the magnitude of the problem of cosmic heroism.

This is what Adler meant when he summed up in a simplifed way a basic insight of his whole life's work, "All neurosis is vanity."

I do find myself frequently having precisely this thought when encountering mentally disturbed people on the streets of LA and OC. There is an unmistakable arrogance and self-regard, all the same whether mere neurosis or full-blown psychosis, all the same whether fallen-from-grace or untouchable-from-the-start. It is very noticable.

Neurosis, in other words, reflects the incapacity of the individual to heroically transcend himself; when he tries in one way or another, it is plainly vain. We are back again to a famous fruit of Rank's work too, his insight that neurosis "is at bottom always only incapacity for illusion." But we are back to it with a vengeance and with the broadest possible contemporary understanding. Transterence represents not only the necessary and inevitable, but the most creative distortion of reality. As Buber said, reality for man is something he must imagine, search out in the eyes of his fellows, with their gleam of passionate dedication. This is also what Jung intimates about the vitality of transference when he calls it "Kinship libido." This means that men join together their individual pulsations in a gamble toward something transcendent. Life imagines its own significance and strains to justify its beliefs. It is as though the life force itself needed illusion in order to further itself.

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Logically, then, the ideal creativity for man would strain toward the grandest illusion.

The Science of Man

Well, obviously, none of this has been unimpeachable to the critics over the years. Words like "irrationality," "illusion," "wilful and heroic dedication"—these rub many people the wrong way. They have hardly helped make our world any better, especially in modern times. Erich Fromm, for example, impugned Rank's whole system of thought by arguing how perfectly suited it was as a philosophy for fascists. The essay in which this was done was not an essay to bring any credit to Fromm as a thinker; but it was animated in part at least by the demonic crisis of the times, by Hitlerism, and in spite of its shabbiness it did convey a truth, the need to be wary of life-enhancing illusions.

It is precisely at this point that the science of man comes in. We know that Nazism was a viable hero system that lived the illusion of the defeat of evil on earth. We know the terrifying dynamic of victimage and scapegoating all across history, and we know what it means—the offering of the other's body in order to buy off one's own death, the sadistic formula par excellence: break the bones and spill the blood of the victim in the service of some "higher truth" that the sacrificers alone possess. To treat the body with the same scorn that God seems to treat it is to draw closer to Him. Well, we know these things only too well in our time. The problem is what to do with them. Men cannot abandon the heroic. If we say that the irrational or mythical is part of human groping for transcendence, we do not give it any blanket approval. But groups of men can do what they have always done—argue about heroism, assess the costs of it, show that it is self-defeating, a fantasy, a dangerous illusion and not one that is life-enhancing and ennobling. As Paul Pruyser so well put it, "The great question is: If illusions are needed, how can we have those that are capable of correction, and how can we have those that will not deteriorate into delusions?" If men

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live in myths and not absolutes, there is nothing we can do or say about that. But we can argue for nondestructive myths ; this is the task of what would be a general science of society.*

I have argued elsewhere that one very graphic way of looking at mental illness is to see it as the laying onto others of one's own hyperfears of life and death. From this perspective we can also see that leaders of nations, citizens of so-called democracies, "normal men" are also doing the very same thing all the time: laying their power-expiation immunity trip onto everyone else. Today the whole world is already becoming uncomfortable with the repeated "war games" and hydrogen-bomb tests by nations on power trips, tests that lay their danger onto innocent and powerless neighbors. In a way it is the drama of the family and the Feifferian love affair writ large across the face of the planet, the "family" of nations. There are no particular leaders or special councils of elite to blame in all this, simply because most people identify with the symbols of power and agree to them. The nation offers immortality to all its members. Again, Erich Fromm was wrong to argue that psychically crippled people, what he calls "necrophilic characters," do evil things by valuing death over life and so lay waste to life because it makes them uncomfortable. Life makes whole nations of normal people uncomfortable, and hence the serene accord and abandon with which men have defeated themselves all through history.

This is the great weakness, as we have now discovered, of Enlightenment rationalism, the easy hope that by the spread of reason men will stand up to their full size and renounce irrationality. The Enlightenment thinkers understood well the dangers of the mass mind, and they thought that by the spread of science and education all this could change. The great Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky had already singled out the hero as the enemy of democracy, the one who causes others to yield their wills because of the safety he offers them. The thing that had to be done was to prevent society from turning the individual into a tool for the sake

* This admission of the need for guiding heroic myths, and at the same time the plea to be wary of their costs, reconciles a long-standing argument in social theory: the challenge that Georges Sorel threw down in his critique of reason as a guide in social life. Social scientists had to admit that Sorel had something, yet at the same time they could not admit it, since it seemed to leave them no role as the representatives of reason.

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of social efficiency and safety. How could the infringement of individuality be overcome? Mikhailovsky answered in the same vein as modern humanist psychiatrists: by giving the individual the opportunity for harmonious development. At about the same time that other great Enlightenment man, Emerson, made his famous plea for self-reliance, for persons with full and independent insides so that they could have the stability to withstand herd enthusiasms and herd fears.

This whole tradition was brought up to date by Herbert Marcuse in a brilliant essay on the ideology of death. He argued that death has always been used by leaders and elites as an ideology to get the masses to conform and to yield up their autonomy. Leaders win allegiance to the cultural causa sui project because it protects against vulnerability. The polis, the state, god—all these are symbols of infallibility in which the masses willingly embed their fearful freedoms. There we have it: the culmination of the Enlightenment in a proper focus on the fundamental dynamics of mass slavishness. On the highest level of sophistication we know in detail what men fear and how they deny that fear. There is a single line from Emerson through Mikhailovsky up to Fromm and Marcuse.

But wait. We said that Enlightenment rationalism was too easy a creed, and so we would expect to see this weakness in all its thinkers, and Marcuse is no exception when he naively says:

. . . death [is] the ultimate cause of all anxiety, [and] sustains unfreedom. Man is not free as long as death has not become really "his own," that is, as long as it has not been brought under his autonomy.

Alas, the fact is that men do not have any autonomy under which to bring things . This great and fundamental problem for the whole career of Enlightenment science was posed by Rank:

Whether the individual is at all in a position to grow beyond . . . [some kind of transference justification, some form of moral dependence] and to affirm and accept himself from himself cannot be said. Only in the creative type does this seem possible to some extent. . . .

But it can be said, and Rank says it: even the highest, most individuated creative type can only manage autonomy to some extent.

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The fact is that men cannot and do not stand on their own powers; therefore they cannot make death "their own." Moral dependence—guilt—is a natural motive of the human condition and has to be absolved from something beyond oneself. One young revolutionary once admonished me in saying that "guilt is not a motive"; he never saw that his guilt was absorbed by submission to the revolutionary cell. The weakness of the Enlightenment, then, was that it did not understand human nature—and it apparently still does not. Marcuse, in an eloquent line, asks for "the good conscience to be a coward," the uprooting of heroic sublimation. But this is too easy: even it men admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. There is no "harmonious development," no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from men their need for a "beyond" on which to base the meaning of their lives. The fallacy of vulgar Marxism was that it overlooked the depth and universality of the fear of death; Marcuse has remedied this. The other fallacy was to fail to see the naturalness of existential guilt—and here Marcuse likewise fails. The task of social theory is to show how society aggravates and uses natural fears, but there is no way to get rid of the fears simply by showing how leaders use them or by saying that men must "take them in hand." Men will still take one another's heads because their own heads stick out and they feel exposed and guilty. The task of social theory is not to explain guilt away or to absorb it unthinkingly in still another destructive ideology, but to neutralize it and give it expression in truly creative and life-enhancing ideologies.

The question we are left with, then, is to whom does one expiate? So far as I can see, this is the dénouement of the Enlightenment quest for a science of society. It will be some combination of Marxist critical thought and a tragic dimension, a perspective on the inevitabilities of human unfreedom. In this, the science would share a place with historical religions: they are all critiques of false perceptions, of ignoble hero systems. A science of society, in other words, will be a study similar to the one envisaged by Old Testament prophets, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Max Scheler, William Hocking: it will be a critique of idolatry , of the costs of a too narrow focus for the dramatization of man's need for power and expiation.

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As Norman Brown so well summed it up in three brilliant pages, the prophetic function of religion is the same as the function of psychoanalysis: the "return of the repressed," the release from the unconscious of true perceptions of empirical reality in place of the wishful cultural and private fantasies we put there. Both religion and psychoanalysis show man his basic creatureliness and attempt to pull the scales of his sublimations from his eyes. Both religion and psychoanalysis have discovered the same source of illusion: the fear of death which cripples life. Also religion has the same difficult mission as Freud: to overcome the fear of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to the person how his self-esteem was built; on the powers of others in order to deny his own creatureliness and death. Character is the vital lie that covers over the painful ambiguities of man's worm-godlikeness—the despair of the human condition, the miraculousness of it tightly interwoven with the stink and decay of it. Religion as unrepression would reveal both truths about man: his wormlikeness as well as his godlikeness. Men deny both in order to live tranquilly in the world. Religion overcame this double denial by maintaining that for God everything is possible. What seems to man to be fixed and determined for all time, beyond human wormlike powers, is for God free and open, to do with what He will.

This gave the possibility of a new heroism, the heroism of sainthood. This meant living in primary awe at the miracle of the created object—including oneself in one's own godlikeness. Remember the awesome fascination of St. Francis with the revelations of the everyday world—a bird, a flower. It also meant unafraidness of one's own death, because of the incomparable majesty and power of God. And so religion overcomes the specific problems of fear-stricken animals, while at the same time showing them what empirical reality really is. If we were not fear-stricken animals who repressed awareness of ourselves and our world, then we would live in peace and unafraid of death, trusting to the Creator God and celebrating His creation. The ideal of religious sainthood, like that of psychoanalysis, is thus the opening up of perception: this is where religion and science meet.

But I am not saying that the science of society is merged into organized religion. Far from it. We know only too well how easily

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traditional religious heroism has given way to the hero systems of the secular societies. Today religionists wonder why youth has abandoned the churches, not wanting to realize that it is precisely because organized religion openly subscribes to a commercial-industrial hero system that is almost openly defunct; it so obviously denies reality, builds war machines against death, and banishes sacredness with bureaucratic dedication. Men are treated as things and the world is pulled down to their size. The churches subscribe to this empty heroics of possession, display, manipulation. I think that today Christianity is in trouble not because its myths are dead, but because it does not offer its ideal of heroic sainthood as an immediate personal one to be lived by all believers.

Be careful what you wish for.

In a perverse way, the churches have turned their backs both on the miraculousness of creation and on the need to do something heroic in this world . The early promise of Christianity was to bring about once and for all the social justice that the ancient world was crying for; Christianity never fulfilled this promise, and is as far away from it today as ever. No wonder it has trouble being taken seriously as a hero system. Even worse, as they have done all through history the churches still bless unheroic wars and sanctify group hatred and victimage. It is an age-old story known to all, so there is no point in lingering on it. But these kinds of betrayal of an ideal heroism seem to be more and more obvious to today's youth. They are even becoming obvious to the organized religions themselves, which are wondering how to divorce themselves from defunct hero systems and recapture the imaginations and the heroic impulses that are stifled in the youth. One way, of course, is by a reaffirmation of traditional evangelism, which still seems to offer a way to overcome exaggerated fears of life and death by heroic dedication to special purity and worthiness. There is no easy way out of the dilemma, as Tillich and others have so well written; organized society seems to represent a necessary denial of religious heroism. In the United States today courageous priests like Daniel Berrigan are again proving this truth: that society will move against religious sainthood (heroism) when it poses a threat to its own system of heroic apotheosis, no matter how self-defeating and immoral that system has become.

Also, if we say that the science of society is partly immersed in

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a tragic perspective, this should not give any comfort to dogmatic conservatives. Man simply cannot accept human limitations as inevitable in the scheme of things. If we talk about the "Devil" side of human nature and about man's depravity, we cannot be fatalistic or cynical about them. If we are skeptical about utopia and acknowledge the Devil, it is only the better to fight for the angel side. Today there is a real onslaught of intellectual conservatism, recruiting some of our best thinkers and trying very adroitly to discredit leftist thought. It is all right to glorify thinkers like Edmund Burke and to offer profound theological and philosophical commentaries on the tragedies of the human condition, on the follies of history, on the natural limitations of man. But this is not offered as a corrective , but as a substitute for social action, for the achievement of social justice, as an apologetic for the system as it is, for a traditional herd patriotism. This is what makes most "intellectual and moral conservatism" today fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical.

I agree that Marxism in its own dogmatic form has to be richly supplemented by a psychology that shows how men welcome unfreedom and how the basic motives of human nature remain unchanged. But I also know that differences in talent are not so biological or hereditary as conservatives oftèn want to make out. Nor is freedom to obey and to delegate one's powers as free as they like to imagine. Sure, society goes on because of a silent accord by the majority that they prefer structure to chaos, and are willing to be lulled to sleep because of the security and ease it offers them. But it also holds over their heads the ideology of death, power, immortality—just as shamans and kings once did—and dominates them with it. The sophisticated Marxian question has to be asked in each society and in each epoch: how do we get rid of the power to mystify? The talents and the processes of mesmerization and mystification have to be exposed. Which is another way of saying that we have to work against both structural and psychological unfreedom in society. The task of science would be to expose both of these dimensions.

One of the reasons for our present disillusionment with theory in the social sciences is that it has done very little in this liberating direction. Even those intelligent social scientists who attempt a

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necessary balance between conservative and Marxist perspectives are amiss in this. If we read the last three pages of Gerhard Lenski's important book Power and Privilege, we get a vista of the future—but it is such a slow, patient, scientific future, still unrelated to the pressing problems of an insane world. All he seems to want to present us with is an indefinite program extending far into the unknown future, devoted to patient checking, refining, extending the blend of conservatism and Marxism. I am hardly saying that social theory should stop dead and not be perfected; what I am saying is that a general critical science of society that unites the best of both wings of thought is a present reality, and need not be delayed. We have, as of today, a powerful critique of hero systems, of systems of death denial and the toll that they take. It is a toll of unfulfilled life based on a continuing denial of social justice; it is a toll of internal victimage based on the inequality of social classes and the state repression of freedom; it is a toll of external victimage that helps siphon off internal social discontent and transform magically social problems into military adventures. Whatever form of government uses victimage, the use is still the same: to purify evil social arrangements, distract attention from the failure to solve internal problems. Scientists must expose these things from their own scientitic torums. In science, as in authentic religion, there is no easy refuge for empty-headed patriotism, or for putting off to some future date the exposure of large-scale social lies.

I don't see why conservatives and radicals could not unite on such a science, if their sentiments are where their words are. Both believe in free public information, increasing the awareness of the masses as well as their responsibility. Both wings of thought agree on limiting the authority of the leaders, exposing their talents tor mesmerization and their shortcomings. This is, after all, the dearest and grandest feature of a democracy, that it tries to keep these critical functions alive. The problem has always been that the leader is the one who usually is the grandest patriot, which means the one who embraces the ongoing system of death denial with the heartiest hug, the hottest tears, and the least critical distance. As Zilboorg pointed out so penetratingly, the leader lives with his head full into the clouds of the cultural symbols; he lives in an abstract world, a world detached from concrete realities of hunger, suffer-

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ing, death; his feet are off the ground, he carries out his duties much like funeral directors and men who perform autopsies or executions—in a kind of emotional and psychological divorce from the realities of what he is doing. The result is that the leader is actually in a state of limited responsibility to human beings in this world—and what power he has in this state! The whole thing is lopsided and rather eerie—like compulsive neurosis or psychosis, says Zilboorg. Words, symbols, shadowboxing—no wonder so much pulsating life is so serenely ground up by the nation-states.

It is all too true, alas, but we do not live in an ideal world. If we wanted to imagine such a world, give in to utopian fantasies, we already know what we would want our leaders to be like: persons who abstracted and objected least, who took each single life and its suffering full in the face as it is. Which is another way of saying that they would know the reality of death as a primary problem. We might even let our musings go wild while we are at it, and imagine that we would choose leaders for exactly this quality: that they themselves were conscious of their own fear of life and death, and of the cultural system as a way of heroic transcendence—but a way that is not absolute, that is relative and not timeless. This might be another way of saying that we would want our leaders to be "well- analyzed" men, except that even the best analysis does not guarantee to produce this level of self-conscious, tragic sophistication.

***lasch democracy as educational***

Yet, democracy does encroach on utopia a little bit, because it already addresses itself to the problem of mystification by free flow of self-criticism . We could carry the utopian musings further and say that the gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its own system of heroic transcendence—and this is precisely what democracy is doing much of the time. This is why authoritarians always scoff at it: it seems ridiculously intent on discrediting itself. The free flow of criticism, satire, art, and science is a continuous attack on the cultural fiction—which is why totalitarians from Plato to Mao have to control these things, as has long been known. It we look at the dénouement of psychiatry and social science today, they represent a fairly thorough self-revelation of the fictional nature of human meanings—and nothing is theoretically more powerfully liberating than that. Lifton has even detected self-mockery and

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caricature as peculiar signs of a new type of modern man who is attempting to transcend the horror and absurdity of his cultural world.

Conclusion

If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system which embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once its peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. They would argue and propagandize for the nonabsoluteness of the many different hero systems in the family of nations, and make public a continuing assessment of the costs of mankind's impossible aims and paradoxes: how a given society is trying too hard to get rid of guilt and the terror of death by laying its trip on a neighbor. Then men might struggle, even in anguish, to come to terms with themselves and their world.

Yet I know that this is a fantasy; I can imagine how popular and influential such a body would be on the planet; it would be the perfect scapegoat for all nations. And so, like a true Enlightenment dreamer, now supposedly sobered by experience, I turn my gaze to the stars and imagine how wiser visitors from some other planet would admire such a world-scientific body. But nothing, then, changes: must we scientists still despair of the masses of men and forever turn our yearnings to the Fredericks and the Catherines—but now in outer-space garb? Or perhaps, like the monks in Walter Miller's great science-fiction tale A Canticle for Leibowitz, we should rocket our carefully shepherded manuscripts from this planet to another; and when that one, too, falls into ashes for having ignored the wisdom about evil that we have so painfully compiled, rocket them still again to another world—a sort of eternal pilgrim-

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age into space, looking for a place where men will finally take command of their drivenness.

Fortunately, no one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities. One of the last thoughts of the great Williams James was that when all is said and done there is no advice to be given. And it a man of Freud's stature shrank back before prophecy, I surely am not going to peep any note of it at all. When we throw a wide net over the seething planet we have to admit that there is really nothing anyone can say about the possibilities for man; thinkers who have understood human nature and could take in the largest picture of history and tragedy have always shrunk back and shook their heads. Yet I think that there is a solid minimum achievement. If we can't go much beyond Freud's pessimism, at least we have subjected it to an empirical scientific statement— something that Freud did not satisfactorily do.

It seems to me that this leaves a margin for reason in the affairs of men. If men kill out of animal fears, then conceivably fears can always be examined and calmed; but if men kill out of lust, then butchery is a fatality for all time. The writer Elie Wiesel, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, summed it all up in a wistful remark during a TV interview: "Man is not human." But it is one thing to say that man is not human because he is a vicious animal, and another to say that it is because he is a frightened creature who tries to secure a victory over his limitations. Melville's moral in Billy Budd was that men need desperately to make panic look like reason. So it is the disguise of panic that makes men live in ugliness, and not the natural animal wallowing. It seems to me that this means that evil itself is now amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the sway of reason. Freud speculated that it was possible that cultural developments might lie ahead which might make it possible even to renounce age-old instinctual satisfactions. It is even easier to speculate about cultural developments that might influence the fear of death and the forms of heroism, and so blunt the terrible destructiveness that they have caused.

This is truly the great gain of post-Freudian thought; it gives us a merger of science and tragedy on a sophisticated level, one where

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science does not drop out of the picture. We surely will never be able to do great things with our condition on this planet, but we can again throw something solid into the balance of irrationalism. When all is said and done about the failure of thought to influence man's fate, we have already witnessed great things in our time: Marxism has already had an enormous influence for human survival: it stopped Hitler in Russia, and it eliminated the gratuitous and age-old miseries of the most numerous people on earth. We have no way of knowing what gain will come out of Freudian thought when it is finally assimilated in its tragic and true meanings. Perhaps it will introduce just that minute measure of reason to balance destruction.