Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)
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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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