Becker—Escape From Evil (iii)

Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

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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—...

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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... 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.

Indeed, much contemporary art is little more than bullying; unless you are the bully.

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.

"Europe quickened [Randolph] Bourne's political sympathies. A progressive, he became something of a socialist as well. ...in his later work he was less the genteel essayist and more the critic of politics—and his critique, as time went on, became increasingly astringent and increasingly effective. Yet in the conventional sense Bourne had no politics at all. ... Though he spoke glowingly of social and political advance, he conceived of it as cultural progress. On the continent, he had noted, "life was enriched by a certain natural sensitiveness to art," the absence of which in England and America had a "brutalizing" effect. He advised a friend in New York, an architect, that if he could do anything "towards spreading that sensitiveness at home," he would have accomplished a work "as important as that of the best social reformer." "Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we shall not have, I fear, any great social advance."
(Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, pp. 80-81)

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.