Therapy is the devil #1: From the germ of Trump to the healing of all

Imagine a D. Trump admirer seeking therapy for depression. If we are engaged in depth process, I’m helping him fall into childhood loss and injury and pain, which will be the sources of his depression and also of his Trump-like antisocial beliefs and absence of empathy. Non-caring beliefs are a form of self-medication that numb and deflect from core, formative injury. Lack of empathy is calluses covering the heart. Odd as it may sound, then, if therapy is radically successful, the client, his pain exorcised, will lose his self-medication and calluses. His love for Trump will evaporate, though he may remain a conservative.*

Most of us are born with a baseline of life and its positive feeling. (For some, birth or pre-birth trauma may pollute or kill that state.) It can’t be seriously disputed that this original good will be the seed of later pro-vital and caring feeling, thought, philosophy and behavior, while life’s vicissitudes will nuance these qualities. So if there are individuals who, though remaining alive, are a pained and immune-sabotaging emotional body, who have toxic feelings and have beliefs that want death not life, dehumanization not equality, we must know these people became sick. Some of them will come to therapy. And though they name disturbances that seem altogether unrelated to their beliefs, they may find that everything is one in them.

Everything is one.

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* This could be because conservatism has, to some, strains of what may be called “libertarian self-esteem”: valuing the individual’s right to own and enjoy his or her life. That is to say, healthy feeling.

Today's question: Professional intellectuals

Once a simple doctoral student in neuroscience who wrote on atheism and Christianity, Sam Harris has grown, over the years, to gift us his wisdom on an ever-expanding almanac of subjects: free will, morality, happiness, Islam, artificial intelligence, mindfulness, “it is always now,” enlightenment without spirituality (or spirituality without religion), reason, Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, the meaning of life, drugs and the meaning of life, faith, racism, the afterlife, consciousness, how to deal with anxiety, death and the present moment, religious violence, sex and gender, dictators, the MeToo movement, and many others. Jordan Peterson, Canadian debonair, has nourished armchair intellectuals everywhere with these topics: twelve rules for life, legalization of marijuana, feminism, Brett Kavanaugh, “ten things that will change your life immediately,” Christianity, advice about depression, Trump, Jung, “truth as the antidote to suffering,” Marxism, “warning to America,” atheism, why some kids are awkward, gender and patriarchy, hate speech, how to salvage a relationship, how to get respected, and more.*

Today’s question is: Why do these men, who once discovered they were good at logic, argument, rhetoric, and creating orgasm out of controversy, come to believe they understand or could speak authoritatively and uniquely about everything? Is there something about a professional intellectual that he believes he covers all things?

The answer, I think, is that Being-in-itself intellectualism is one of the few forms of masturbation (self-medication) – another is great wealth – that feel benign, as opposed to sordid, and like a human form of God. As God is the source of all subjects and the unity of all differences, so a supple mind feels, to its owner, like the greased skeleton key to the variegated universe. To professional considerers such as Harris and Peterson, deep thinking produces the feeling of identity between the intracranial world and the infinite outer one. The inner and outer are One.

This feeling is so confident that Harris can feign undermining that confidence and discuss with Brian Greene, physicist, whether human consciousness might be naturally barred from real or ultimate knowledge, with the same implacability that a dog’s brain is barred from understanding Sartrean Existentialism. I believe that in his heart of heart’s mind of minds, Sam really believes his mind is not so barred, and could discover the infernal quiddities himself, or at least prove to a galactic superior being that no human or alien can ever find fundamental knowledge (because, for example, of the problems of free will and phenomenology).

The problem is that Sam and Jordan are wrong about the discovering power of intellect. Thinking, no matter how genius and diamond drill it is, can never understand human truths, non-perceptual truths, when it is severed from the seat of human living: the body and feeling. 

As an example, Harris believes that road rage would be

“impossible if you’re being mindful of the shortness of life. If you are aware that you are going to die, and that the other person is going to die, and that you’re both going to lose everyone that you love, and you don’t know when, you’ve got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it’s not dimmed by morphine in the hospital, on your last day among the living, and the sun is out, or it’s raining – both are beautiful – and your spouse is alive, and your children are alive, and you’re driving, and you’re not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You’re just running an errand, and that person in front of you who you’ll never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, he’s just driving slow. . . . This is your life, the only one you’ve got, and you’ll never get this moment back again, and you don’t know how many more moments you’ll have, no matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You’ve had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them, in a way that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it, and you’ve missed most of them, and you don’t know how many more you’re going to get. You’ve got this next interaction with another human being, to make the world a marginally better place; you’ve got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence, so why not relax and enjoy your life – really relax, even in the midst of struggle, even while doing hard work, even under uncertainty . . .”**

Sam’s is a poetic, emotionally compelling argument. How could anyone deny that we can and must squeeze meaning, serenity and “love” from the short amount of life we are given? But the point would have no legitimacy in any possible way to Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas mass murderer. In him, equaling him, must have been the meaning of injustice, of the failure of his life to ever be human, with the necessary and final expression of that failure the annihilating of the world in fifty-eight people. Harris’s beautiful speech could only inspire beauty in someone capable of it. But how many people are not? So many have lost so much in the beginning that their life became false or die, false or kill.

Harris is a trenchant debater for atheism. But in his ivory tower he remains emotionally unaware of and resistant to the carte blanche we are given by the limitations of perception, thought and mathematics to plumb the mystery of existence. What is the absolute tiniest, indivisible form of matter or energy? A quark or a superstring? What is it made of? More than carte blanche, a blurry treasure map: We are practically required to wonder what there is behind this reified question mark of existence. Is there a mind? (And does it have a long beard?)

Another detached head is Harris’s*** belief that Islam is an especially dangerous “motherlode of bad ideas” which has caused especial harm in the world. Someone whose reality ground is ideas, informed by his self-medicative feelings, will believe that murderous ones such as jihad (“armed struggle against unbelievers” – Wikipedia) bring evil acts. But our deeper feeling teaches us that destructive thoughts come out of pain, and it is unhealed pain – not religious doctrine – that generates misbehavior. I recently talked with a woman who was consumed with guilt about her bad parenting of her children. To help her feel better, I deepened her predicament: “Even had you not passed on your parents’ shaming of you to your children, had you been a saint in your restraint and deeply loving, they would still see the pain in your eyes and be affected by it. Your small distractions during child-centered moments would have caused them mini-abandonments. They would feel the heaviness of your depression and be made heavier by it. There is so much you could not help, because of the gift from your parents.”

No intellectual can understand liberty or women, racial prejudice or happiness, life meaning or belief or anxiety unless he feels his, then realizes the individuality of others’, first-born and adaptive nature. Human knowing comes not from cerebration but from the inescapable personal. There’s no climbing a mountain on amputated legs, or Maslow’s hierarchy to “self-actualization” when you lived through childhood without love. It’s self-medication to believe otherwise. And masturbation to lecture to the world otherwise.

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* Topics pulled from youtube.

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEDDNJkrkeo.

*** I am limiting my arguments to Harris because I find Peterson’s thinking so invalid – dogmatic and unpsychological for a psychologist – that there is no enjoyment in addressing it.

Fantasy impromptu #7: If everyone were like me

I know a young woman who doesn’t like her character, her personality. Specifically, she tends to be irritable at times, intolerant and snarky, but wants to be smooth and nice. I suspect, though, that most of us are harmonious with ourselves even when we are a bit down about our flaws.

Or maybe I should just speak for myself. Here is how it would go:

If everyone were like me, people would be decent to each other but not much would get done. No buildings or skyscrapers would be built, probably just one- or two-story wooden shelters. We’d probably be back at early 1800’s technology, because no single person would have much drive to create. It would have to be sporadic spurts of slowly contagious inspiration hitting people in different places.

Society would be libertarian: There would be, in each person’s insularity, no communal assumptions such as welfare and “rights” to medical care or shelter. But we’d all want to give enough to keep unfortunate people from falling beneath the waves. Criminals would be psychotherapized to see if they’re corrigible. If not, they’d be sent far away, to an island where they could grow their own food and be messed up amongst themselves. This is because compassion would only go about as far as you can throw a softball.

There would be no people with big nonsense ideas like “women are inferior” or “God loves America” or “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas.” These are delusory generalizations, and people would be grounded in their earliest childhood injuries and their organic feelings, so no irrational delusions would grow from them.

There would be love and love affairs, but very abortive torrid romances. Torrid romances are seemingly good-feeling neuroses coming from starved needs in childhood. People might have children: It would be a flip-of-the-coin thing.

Some scientists would be (going against my 1800’s technology idea) very gung-ho about the universe and getting to other planets and galaxies. That is because the here-and-now and lived reality would not feel satisfying and they’d want to live a dream. They’d want to go to the great mystery, hoping for answers from God, or the presence of a great father like Tom Bombadil, or a home where they are children with ice cream and fireworks and musical peace and tucked-in warm beds forever.

There would be way too much simple, pretty, diatonic harmony go-nowhere “new age”-type music, no heroic and cosmically driven or id-driven creations like Rachmaninoff or Stravinsky. Jazz wouldn’t exist as it makes not the slightest sense and comes from no authentic mood, just some faux-attitudinal pretension of coolness.

Situation comedies and dramas would last for only six or so episodes, because all the characters would just go to therapy and stop farting around.

People would crash and burn in a mood-state of utmost nihilism, then would “recover” and go on with their lives.

Late at night, every night all over the world, there’d be millions and millions of campfires and tents on front lawns and friendship circles and solitary travelers and walkers and wanderers breathing the dark and the aromas, wondering What is this?, being depressed and in love and feeling glorious and empty and wondering What have I not realized?