Narcissists

It’s important to remember, and easy to forget, that the people who annoy us, who hurt us, who try to destroy us, and tempt us to hate them often do so because they’re deeply wounded themselves. That’s one thing I thought of this week on our trip to Long Island to bring my wife’s daughter home. She had been living there with her grandmother. Her grandmother had gone to  Florida for the winter,  and my wife’s daughter was joined by her uncle, a very hurt and angry man who likes to control, berate, and fight with people. Understandably, my wife’s daughter got very tired of him treating her that way.

Her mother has been telling me a lot about their family. She’s the older of the two children, her brother only about a year younger. She tells me that he was so cute when they were very young that he was often mistaken for a girl, while she was mistaken for a boy, and that he quickly became their mother’s favorite. Paradoxically, he was also neglected (they both were) and became angry and rebellious very young.

This was because their parents were narcissists. The word is taken from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection in a pool to such a degree that he neglected to take care of himself and starved to death. That’s more positive than the reality of narcissism.

Narcissists, as my wife explains them to me, are self-centered and incapable of love even, to a large extent, of their own children. They care about no one’s feelings but their own, except to make others unhappy, which some very much enjoy. My wife’s parents married young on the basis of sexual attraction and little else. Both came from dysfunctional families, and had no interest in having children, and should never really have become parents. The reproductive instinct is powerful, but much less so is the instinct for how to parent. That requires thought and empathy, as well as sacrifice. My wife’s parents resented their children.

Her father was an alcoholic, who often drank enough to be unable to afford food, so they were often hungry. When he was drunk he would terrorize his wife, which traumatized MY wife, if not her brother. Her mother went to nursing school, and after she graduated, got a night job. That meant the children had to be quiet during the day. They would either be put outside with no supervision, once they were old enough to take care of themselves more or less (this must have begun prior to elementary school), or shut up in their bedroom together, where her brother would bang his head against the wall, over and over again. Outside they were first tied to the clothesline. Later, they were untied, but told not to go out of the yard. Having no supervision, they eventually did go, at the ages of about four or five, when all the other kids in the neighborhood were bigger than they, and some of whom were bullies. They got little attention, let alone nurture.

The parents also found their children threatening, and competed with them, something that seems strange to me. My wife’s brother could beat his father and grandfather in chess, which they didn’t like at all. Doesn’t that seem strange? I think if your child can do something better than you, that’s a cause for celebration. In the same vein, when my wife was a teenager, her mother would flirt with her boyfriends.

Both children became dyslexic. Dyslexia, like other childhood ailments like ADHD, borderline personality disorder, and possibly even autism (at least some forms)  are not, my wife informs me, genetic problems, but the fruits of childhood trauma. When a father threatens to kill a mother, the children are traumatized too, making it hard for them to concentrate in school, for instance.

My wife’s mother’s favoritism of her brother encouraged her brother to blame his sister for his not receiving any love and to physically abuse her. When she complained to her parents they accused her of instigating his behavior, so after several tries, she stopped telling them.

In spite of all that, they care about each other, on some level. She has tried, she tells me, many times to help him, unsuccessfully. He, on the other hand, has never tried to help her, even when he had money and she didn’t.

Because he eventually did have money. That’s an impressive part of his story. Their parents broke up after my wife graduated from high school, and left their home. My wife was able to stay for awhile with her mother, but her brother was left homeless. He began working in construction, and eventually worked up to having his own company, for 25 years, he told me.

He made a lot of money, and spent a lot, too. Women, alcohol, expensive food, and drugs. He also had trouble keeping employees because of the way he treated them, and he had an accountant who embezzled from him. He also fell off a roof and broke his back, though he recovered reasonably well from that. But in the Great Recession of 2008 he went bankrupt.

During all this time he had plenty of sexual encounters, but never lasting relationships, though he fathered three children. One of them later beat him up, and not long after OD’d on heroin, which may say something about his abilities as a father. My wife tells me that when one of his sons was born he confessed to her that he was afraid he couldn’t be a good parent. Unfortunately, he seems to have been right.

While we were in the house on Long Island, each of us had a turn at being berated by him, but my wife most. She was to blame for the breakup of the family, for having raised her daughter to be irresponsible, for having allowed her mother to control her, and for being controlling, herself–as if his trying to tell each of us what to do, and getting mad if we disagreed, WASN’T controlling. When she got tired of that, and remarked that maybe she should just die, he got into my face (spit flying) and told me I had to get her on antidepressants, having assumed she meant she was suicidal. That’s when my wife’s daughter called the police, who came to settle things down so we could leave.

There seem to be many people like him. People who have been traumatized and shamed, which often leads to violence. They’re also fearful people, not least because times have changed, and the kind of factory jobs that enabled many men to support their families in style have gone and aren’t coming back. The memoir, The Man They Wanted Me to Be says that the old-fashioned male was brought up to suppress his emotions, to be the strong silent man. But this made many men unable to express emotions at all, except through violence. Such men are unfit for jobs that emphasize communication skills. No wonder they’re both fearful and angry.

My wife tells me their parents had been superficially liberal (but not deeply enough to prevent them from abusing each other and the children), so evidently part of his rebellion was to become conservative. But I think he also had a deep concern about weakness and strength, feeling weak and worthless because of the rejection by his parents (and many others), and compensating for that by being a bully. That’s similar to the pathology of Adolph Hitler, who saw brutality as being a positive masculine quality. I think a significant portion of the president’s supporters may have been traumatized when young, and seek scapegoats, especially at a politically divisive time when world’s stability is questionable.

The misunderstanding of what constitutes weakness and strength is probably the basis of much domestic violence. Abused people find it hard to summon the courage to be vulnerable, and therefore disdain people who can empathize with others, especially with others who are different. People who have been mistreated are threatened by difference. Byron de la Beckwith, who was eventually convicted of conspiracy in the murder of Medgar Evers, saw himself as defending the white race. In a biography of him, the relative who wrote the book comments that the white race had never treated Beckwith particularly well. He seems to have thought he was slick; his high school classmates seem to have considered him a joke. He probably was aware of their feelings on some level.

Hitler and Stalin were two prominent 20th century figures who were abused as children, and subsequently had low self-esteem. Stalin became a professional revolutionary almost immediately after leaving the seminary he had attended, and a bank robber sometime after that. He didn’t have the intellectual brilliance many of the other Bolsheviks had, but was ambitious and a better strategist than the others, on whom he eventually revenged himself for their outshining him.

Hitler wanted to be an artist, but couldn’t pass the entrance exams to the school he wanted to attend in Vienna. He stayed in Vienna, rather than returning to his home town, using the inheritance his mother had left his sister, then becoming homeless for some time, supporting himself by painting and selling postcards.

It wasn’t until after moving to Germany, becoming a successful soldier (and receiving two Iron Crosses, a decoration not handed out casually), and then discovering his talent for speaking in public, that he began to be successful in civilian life. But he remained deeply insecure, despite his increasing political success. That insecurity gave way to an overconfidence, but one of his biographers, Robert. G. L. Waite, sees him as not always wanting to win the war he had provoked.

One example is his declaration of war on the USA four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler had fought in a war that had had two fronts, and knew the dangers of that. Roosevelt had always intended to fight the Nazis, but sentiment in the country was against it. Until Hitler declared war, making it easy to persuade Americans to enter the European war.

Of course my wife’s brother doesn’t have that kind of power, and most narcissists don’t, but those who do can be very dangerous. He never got physically violent with any of us while we were there, but it was obvious he was an angry man, and that nothing we could do could make him happy. Violence always seemed a possibility.

On the way home I commented that he had gotten his fun while he could, meaning yelling at us. My wife’s view was that he may have felt we were abandoning him, the way many others have in the past.

Our mutual opinion is that he’s not a very nice person, but that a lot of it isn’t his fault. He was treated badly as a child, and never was able to really put that behind him, even though he was successful at running his own business–for awhile. Had he been loved and supported by his parents, he might have achieved much greater things than he did. His ability to make money despite his handicaps strongly suggests that.

And if he had received love and support, he probably would have become a much nicer person, one who wouldn’t have left the damage behind him that he did.

His problems didn’t begin with him. His parents were both mistreated, and his paternal grandfather too, if not others. Generations who don’t manage to heal from their traumas pass them to their children and beyond. This is a problem affecting many more people than we know, as many videos on YouTube testify. The damage done to families is severe, and when a Hitler or Stalin reaches power the damage can be tremendously worse, as the 20th century testifies. When the times are unstable it’s hard to keep narcissists and sociopaths from attaining power, in which they’re always interested. Power gives them the ability to revenge themselves on anyone they think has treated them badly, whether true or not, and they often manage to find scapegoats and encourage others to agree, and persecute them. A source of power, and a way of maintaining power once achieved.

It may be possible, but certainly seems unlikely, that my wife’s brother will ever live happily. He’s been angry all his life, and is almost certainly too old to change. My wife also believes he can’t accept that his mother has never loved him. He wants my wife to take care of their mother when she can no longer care for herself, but not allow her mother to control her. That’s only because he can’t take care of her, lacking those kinds of skills, and not realizing that his mother can afford to hire people to care for her. Like him, she has driven both friends and family away from her. The two of them are most likely to spend their last years alone. Probably a sad thing, but one that they’ve spent most of their lives arranging.

Alexander the Great

I was disappointed years ago when I found that Mary Renault, one of my favorite authors, was writing not only one book about Alexander the Great, but three. I was less interested in him than in her retelling of the Theseus legend, and was fascinated by the Mycenaen period of which we know far less than of classical Greece.

But on rereading the series now, I find that her treatment of Alexander the Great is perfectly in line with her other earlier novels about ancient Greece. Among her concerns is not only good government, but how humans can be better than we usually are. Theseus was her early exemplar of these concerns; it only made sense for her to treat Socrates and Plato, as well as Plato’s friend and disciple Dion of Syracuse, who tried, despite the tragic flaws which caused his failure, to bring good government to Syracuse. Alexander could be seen as a more successful attempt to give what most people wanted at that time–and possibly even at this.

He was Macedonian, and looked down on for that. The Macedonians seem to have been related to the Greeks (Renault depicts their speech as a Doric Greek dialect), but living far to the north of the famous Greek cities they had neither stable government nor intellectual development–until King Philip came along.

He was the first of the kings to not only manage to stay in his position for enough time to accomplish some things, but to also have a vision of what he wanted to accomplish: uniting Macedonia and preventing their neighbors from molesting them, to begin with. Not only that, but to be chosen, by a more or less united Greece, to free the Greek cities on the coast of what is now Turkey. These cities had been conquered during or after the Peloponessian war, and Greeks in general wanted them to be free again–but not to be freed by Philip.

The Greeks had tried most of the possible forms of government: monarchies, tyrannies (a tyrant was roughly the same as a dictator now), oligarchies, and democracies. All had become corrupt.

Alexander was born at the same time a general of his father’s won an important battle, his father’s horse won an important race, and someone burned down an important temple in Ephesus. Lots of omens there, along with dreams of a fire exiting Philip’s wife’s womb. That was almost equivalent to his being of divine birth, something he later claimed. Renault says, in an afterword, that we know very little about his early life, since the memoirs of his friends didn’t survive. We do know, however, that his mother and father didn’t get along.

His mother, Olympias, seems to have been known (with some excuse) as a witch. Renault has a very Freudian scene at the beginning of the novel, in which Alexander gets into his mother’s room at night, and is found there by his father who has come to join her. He is only four or five, but tells his father his mother doesn’t love him, and will marry HIM instead. But it later becomes clear he loves and admires his father TOO. His mother does not, and his father ceases to visit her bedroom.

Instead, Philip finds sex elsewhere, both from women and men (bisexuality is readily accepted in Macedonia, as in southern Greece), and when he is on campaign (frequently) he often takes a wife, even going so far as to go through the marriage rituals, though the connection generally ends after the campaign. These are usually women from barbaric tribes of the general area, and aren’t taken too seriously–except by Olympias. She is perpetually resentful, and her conflicts with Philip repeatedly wound Alexander, as do his own conflicts with his father.

Perhaps this is why he is so appreciative of love when he receives it, why he tries so hard to be better than all the rest so he deserves love, and why he so hates disloyalty. He is practically worshiped by the soldiers who follow him to Asia, where he stays the rest of his life. Eventually the soldiers get tired of continuing conquest, and refuse to go further, but that takes more than a decade.

Renault didn’t believe that he set out to conquer the world, only to free the Greek cities in what is now Turkey. But when, at the battle of Issos, the Persian Great King Darius turned and fled the battlefield leaving behind his wife, mother, and children, Renault has Alexander say he believed he could give the Persians better leadership.

He has been brought up not only with the example of his father, a very able politician as well as military man, but with the examples of Homer’s Iliad, and especially the example of Achilles, whom his family believed to be an ancestor. He readily criticized the high king Agamemnon for his conduct at Troy, which had instigated the events making Homer’s story. He saw that leaders who are seen to be unjust cause terrible trouble, and tried very hard to be just himself. Sparing the Persian royal family was unusual in a war leader of those times, but typical of Alexander’s behavior. It seems possible to say that he almost never killed in anger, and when he did he found it hard to forgive himself. War was a kind of problem for him to solve, and he was extremely talented and inventive in doing so. It was that aspect he loved, not the violence, though of course he was also an excellent fighter, frequently taking terrible risks.

The first of Renault’s novels, Fire From Heaven, is told by an omniscient narrator. The ancient legends are there, but Renault has to infer his early personality from his later. She sees him as a busy active boy, pursuing accomplishment very early, and refusing to allow fear a hold on him.

She has him kill his first man at age 12, without any documentary evidence (killing a man was a way to assert one’s manhood in Macedonian culture), but notes that he was a commander in the Macedonian army at age 16, and has troops following him without objection, strongly suggesting that they already knew he was competent at that age. He also served as regent while Philip was fighting at Byzantion, repelled rebel forces during that time, and founded a city. When Philip went south to fight against Athens and Thebes, who objected to his growing power, Alexander went with him as a commander and his cavalry did much to win the battle–at age 18. Two years later, after Philip was assassinated, Alexander became king, and entered Asia.

Renault’s second novel in the series, The Persian Boy, is told by the “boy” of the title, Bagoas, who is historical. Renault surmises that he was of noble blood.  As he a slave he would thus have commanded a high price, and have been that much more acceptable to Darius who becomes his owner until his defeat by Alexander. Bagoas then becomes Alexander’s lover. Renault portrays him as having been forced, after being castrated, into prostitution, citing the example of Phaedo, one of Socrates’ students (who apparently was freed at least partly through the influence of Socrates). It seems Persian nobility were particularly known for good looks, which made someone like Bagoas particularly desirable as a bedmate. He describes himself, however, as loving Alexander first for his qualities rather than his attractiveness.

Alexander, as was common in both Greece and Macedonia, was bisexual. His first lover was Hephaistion, also of noble blood, and almost his exact age. Renault remarks that ancient sources say Alexander was extremely moderate sexually, which suggests a low sex drive. It may well also reflect how active he was in other arenas almost all his life. As Renault portrays it, Alexander’s initial attraction to Hephaistion is mainly as an understanding friend. The sexual aspect of the relationship comes later. It’s also worth noting that despite his taking Bagoas as a lover, his bond with Hephaistion remained powerful. He was upset to the point almost of madness when Hephaistion died in Babylon. In the novel Bagoas frequently expresses jealousy to the reader, but not to Alexander, who would not have tolerated it.

It’s amazing how much ground Alexander covered. Genghis Khan conquered more territory, but few others came even close. He reached Afghanistan, what is now Pakistan, the area north of Iran known generally as Turkestan, and India. Some traders might have been that far, but probably few others.

One effect of his conquests was to make Greek the lingua franca of the Middle East for some centuries to come. One thing he TRIED to do, but with mixed success, was to encourage his men to accept the Persians and other peoples as their equals. One method was trying to get the Macedonians to prostrate themselves in his presence, as Persians did to the Great KIng. The experiment wasn’t successful. King was an elective office in Macedonia, so his soldiers weren’t going to accept a practice that put them in an inferior position. They were allowed to bluntly express their opinions to their king. Nor were they amenable to accepting the more sophisticated Persians as equals. They resented his having married first a noblewoman of Bactria (somewhere in the vicinity of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkestan today), then a daughter of the Great King he had conquered. They wanted him to marry a Macedonian, though Macedonia was far away, but Alexander suited himself in marriage.

Only slightly more successful was his arranging eighty Macedonian soldiers to marry Persian women at the same time he married the daughter of Darius, whom he had defeated. No doubt some couples were happy, but a number got rid of their Persian wives. Some Macedonians were open-minded, but on the whole the culture was xenophobic. One of Alexander’s virtues was being able to assess the worth of men of different cultures.

But Greeks would be mixing with Middle Eastern peoples for centuries to come. Alexander’s empire didn’t last as a whole, but in three major segments until the Romans took over: Macedonia, Seleucia, and Egypt. And even after the Romans became overlords the government of the eastern empire, which survived the fall of the western empire and became known as Byzantine, centered on what is now Turkey, was predominantly Greek. I think it would be fair to say that Greeks never again had a leader as famous or influential as Alexander, though.

Renault points out that the one area in his life that Alexander didn’t manage well was acquiring an heir, which he did nothing about until the last year of his life. His first marriage was to Roxane, the Bactrian heiress, and seems to have been based on attraction to her, so it wasn’t because of indifference to women. Far more plausible is the influence of his parents’ marriage, in which they repeatedly wounded each other. He also married Stateira, a Persian princess, and left her and Roxane both pregnant before he died rather suddenly in Babylon. Though he was still full of plans for the future, Renault believes he was indulging in self-destructive behavior, like drinking too much. This was a common habit for Macedonians, though Alexander wasn’t usually very inclined. But Hephaistion had died two months before, which had had a huge impact on him.

George Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher, referred to Alexander as “the arch-vainglorious Greek” because his invasion interfered with the teachings of a man (supposedly based partly on an historical figure) he called Ashiata Shiemash in his novel, All and Everything. This is a valid criticism, but Renault points out that Alexander would never have heard that idea: that there was something wrong with war was an uncommon notion until well after his death. Pursuing glory by military means was very acceptable in Greek culture, and Alexander fulfilled that ideal about as well as anyone could.

But, as much as anything, it was his charisma that held his empire together. After his death it came apart quickly. Stateira, poisoned by Roxane, was among the first victims. Among the last were his mother and his son by Roxane. In between, a lot of generals.

Ptolemy had been one of the most successful of these, and had almost immediately decided he wanted Egypt for his kingdom. He got there as quickly as he could, organized an army for defense, and was so successful his dynasty still controlled the country almost 300 years later. Other generals weren’t so skillful or so lucky. Renault sees them as reverting to the Macedonian pattern of civil war after the death of a king. I think it’s something more than that.

Alexander’s charisma was based on his excellence in not only war but government. He wasn’t as successful at the latter, but there too he tried to be just. Macedonians didn’t appreciate Persians (with some exceptions), but Persians in particular appreciated Alexander, who was willing to learn from them and recognize their virtues. It wasn’t just the Macedonian habit of civil war that recurred after his death, but the absence of his charisma challenging each person to be better than he thought he could be–something usually, but not always, greatly appreciated. The army which had loved him reverted to lazier sloppier ways in his absence and the absence of generals who knew how to discipline them. It took more than a decade for the chaos following his death to subside.

It seems usual that a great leader like Alexander may inspire behavior from his followers they would ordinarily not exhibit. Nor does the inspiration commonly last. Perhaps a few of Alexander’s generals (Ptolemy seems to be the best example) continued to follow Alexander’s influence, but many did not. Most tried to fill the leadership vacuum left by Alexander, and were simply unable–which didn’t prevent them from trying. This may have been, as much as anything, part of the mores of the time, or perhaps it was simply part of masculine DNA.

The Greeks in general were less than expert at constructing stable governments. Athens had a blaze of glory in the fifth century BC, but unwisely overreached, and had a long period of degeneration when they became far less than admirable. Sparta was perhaps the most stable Greek state, at the expense of change, but during and after the Peloponessian war, when money entered the country, so did corruption, and Sparta lost its position as the most potent military in Greece. Macedonia had a long history of volatile behavior. Maybe it’s as simple as that. But for whatever reason, the Romans were more skilled at constructing and maintaining stable government, despite periodic civil wars.

The last of Renault’s novels about Alexander (though it’s really about the absence of Alexander) ends with Ptolemy looking back decades after Alexander’s death. Most of Alexander’s relatives and generals are dead. His mother has been stoned to death by survivors of her murders while she acted as regent in Macedonia, but not before she has had Alexander’s retarded brother and his wife killed. Kassandros, who hated Alexander, and was cordially disliked in return, has succeeded her, and has poisoned Alexander’s son by Roxane, an echo of Roxane’s poisoning of Stateira. He has also given an alternate version of Alexander’s behavior to a historian in Athens to try (unsuccessfully) to blacken his name.

But Kassandros hasn’t enjoyed what revenge he has accomplished long. He has died of a disease in which worms ate his flesh while he still lived, another echo, this of King Herod hundreds of years later. His sons are less successful than he, and have also been forgotten. Greek government doesn’t become notable again until the Byzantine empire.

Fyodor Dostoievsky

Looking into the past shows that many old problems recur frequently. Fyodor Dostoievsky was born about 200 years ago in Russia at a time when modern technology had only begun to emerge, but modern problems were already here, if not with the severity they would exhibit later.

His father was a doctor, and the family lived outside a hospital in Moscow. One of Fyodor’s early traumas was the discovery that a little girl with whom he played had been raped and murdered at the age of nine, her body discovered near the hospital.  Dostoievsky would always be concerned about child abuse, and also feel he could have committed the crimes some of his characters do.

Dr. Dostoievsky worried about poverty, but wasn’t too badly paid. He bought a village in rural Russia to achieve financial security, but keeping the farms working during a drought was extremely stressful. Dostoievsky’s mother died of tuberculosis at 37; his father two years later. He was 16 at his mother’s death, 18 at his father’s. There’s a legend that Dostoievsky hated his father for his brutality, and that at his death was first smitten with epilepsy. The other legend was that his father was killed by his serfs. Neither story turns out to be true: Dostoievsky’s father died of a stroke, the peasants immediately sent for the nearest doctor (who couldn’t certify the death), and Dostoievsky never had a seizure until he was in Siberia years later. He later wrote that his childhood had been filled with love, and it seems to have been overall a very positive experience. His father may have been severe, but was also loving and concerned about his family’s future.

His father had put him and his brother in an army engineering school, thinking this would give them occupations with which they could support themselves. But Fyodor had writing talent, and immediately became successful on publishing his first novel, Poor Folk in 1845. He had been influenced by the German ETA Hoffman, the French Balzac, Sir Walter Scott, and the Russians Pushkin and Gogol, but showed enough originality that to the end of his life he was remembered as the author of Poor Folk. One of his early friends, the critic Valerian Maikov, saw him much as he saw himself: as a writer who saw the fantastic being part of real life, and that the depiction of life wasn’t realistic without the fantastic element.

Russia had been a backward country by European standards until the time of Peter the Great, who forced the country to learn new skills. This began a recurring conflict between the “Westernizers”, who looked for inspiration to Europe, and the Slavophiles, who were suspicious of European ideas and trends. Dostoievsky began his career as a “Westernizer”, but circumstances caused him to change orientation.

He became friends with a man named Petrashevsky who had regular gathering that played at liberalism, then began to make more radical noises. Mikhail Bakunin, a revolutionary, didn’t take them seriously, but the Czarist secret police did. The group didn’t agree on everything, but did agree that serfdom was an evil, and should be ended. The author notes that Dostoievsky probably thought liberation of the serfs should come from the Czar, but if it did not, “Then let it happen through rebellion,” he is alleged to have said. An informer had entered the circle, and in April of 1849 Dostoievsky was arrested, with 23 others. (Serfdom actually was ended by the Czar in 1861, earlier than slavery was ended in this country).

The next incident was to become famous too. Dostoievsky and the others were held until late in December, when they were taken out to be executed. Unknown to them, the Czar had decided to pardon each from death, but to condemn them to prison, and for some to lose their civil rights. Dostoievsky was to enter the army after four years of prison, which, the author comments, was actually very lenient compared to usual Czarist practice. The drama was to continue until a firing squad was aiming at the prisoners before they would be told their actual fates. After Dostoievsky was reprieved he later wrote that he sang loudly in his cell from gladness. He was fitted with ten pound shackles to arms and legs that would remain until the end of his prison sentence, and was sent to Omsk, north of Khazakstan.

Probably few would have expected him to live to complete his sentence; he was small, and his health wasn’t very good. He had to labor outside with the other convicts, standing in the river Irtysh to help unload barges in winter. The prisoners didn’t like him, though he often pitied them, so he kept his distance from them too. He felt as if he were being buried alive in prison, but was stubbornly determined to stay alive. He managed to get onto good terms with a number of people who would help him become rehabilitated, meeting many of them in the hospital, where he often was taken.

He felt very isolated most of the time he was in prison, which led him to reevalutate his former attitudes. Lower class prisoners told him and others that in the outer world the political prisoners had wanted nothing to do with peasants and other poor people. “Now you’re in here, you want to be our friends.” Thinking this over, he decided the criminals were fully justified. That led him to think about the “Westernizers” (of which he had been one) who wanted to “enlighten” the peasants without really knowing them, what their virtues and faults were, what they needed and wanted. While he still thought serfdom to be an evil, he began to believe that the Russian peasant was more virtuous (though hardly perfect) than the bourgeoisie because of their humility and willingness to repent, as well as being better than what he considered the inauthentic life of Europe.

After four years he was released from prison and inducted into the army in Semipalatinsk, a pretty dreary army outpost north of Kazakhstan, but at least more free than prison, especially after he was allowed to live by himself. He busied himself making friends who could help him be discharged from the army and eventually be allowed to return to Russia, but only to Tver, which didn’t suit him. He needed to be in St. Petersburg, the center of literary activity. With the help of friends, including the governor of the area, he was able to accomplish this too, returning to St. Petersburg, publishing novels and stories, and starting a magazine with his brother.

The first book he published was The House of the Dead, a story about his imprisonment, which was a sensation. But at the same time as he’d moved back to European Russia he had married. The marriage was an unhappy one. His wife was ill and didn’t get along with him. She had tuberculosis and died from it within three years.

The magazine he started with his brother was quite successful, but its attempt to comment on the Polish rebellion against Russia, suggesting Polish culture was superior to Russian (Dostoievsky did not agree), was more than the censor could tolerate, and the magazine was shut down.

In this time period he had made a potentially disastrous deal in which he had to finish Crime and Punishment in a month (he had had most of a year to work on it, but had made little progress) or a man who had loaned him money would have the right to publish his work for nine years without paying him. He tried dictating to a stenographer, which worked: he finished the novel in time, and he also fell in love with the stenographer and married her, greatly to his benefit. She not only took dictation, but also took charge of his business affairs and took care of him very competently.

But he upset his family when he married, instigating a lot of fighting about money: after the magazine he and his brother started had ended his brother had died, and he now was responsible for supporting his brother’s family. He also had many debts, and creditors hounded him continuously, preventing him from working. Accordingly, he and his wife escaped to Europe in search of places he could write in peace.

But peace was difficult to find. Dostoievsky didn’t like western Europe. He was xenophobic and thought western culture immoral. He also didn’t like what he saw of various national cultures, thinking the Germans arrogant and the Swiss smug.

Besides that, he became addicted to gambling, with disastrous effect to his finances, but which stimulated his writing. It seems to have been a masochistic sort of mechanism, in which he was not only addicted to the thrill of gambling, but to the guilt that resulted from losing all his money. Legend has had it he found the determination to stop gambling, but the biographer doesn’t think so: he says Dostoievsky quit because Germany closed all gambling houses, not to reopen them until Hitler’s regime. But he was able to finish The Idiot in Europe; unfortunately it didn’t sell well.

Crime and Punishment is the first of the novels everyone considers great. It describes horrifying living conditions in the slums of St. Petersburg (Dostoievsky had seen these at first hand), and a university student who has dropped out, and is trying to survive. He wants to help his mother and sister, and decides an effective way would be to murder an old woman pawn broker and steal from her. He reasons that the old woman is both stupid and cruel, so the world would be better off without her, arrogantly believing he’s competent to make such decisions. But he discovers that his conscience won’t allow him to get away with murder, and he feels forced to confess, which then gives him the opportunity to suffer in atonement for his crime.

This is Dostoievsky’s portrayal of what he calls nihilism, something other writers were also treating. Nihilism could be considered the loss of belief in morality, apparently caused by loss of Christian belief, also happening elsewhere in the western world, perhaps in part because of the conflict between science and official Christianity. If one believes in nothing, any kind of behavior could be permissible.

This was also the period in which resentment of the Czarist regime was building, which manifested in terrorist incidents. Such an incident would inspire his novel The Possessed later on.

Meanwhile, as he worked on The Idiot, a novel with a main character based on Jesus, his wife bore him two children, the first of which died very young, to the sorrow of both. Dostoievsky particularly loved children. His own especially, but children in general. He often watched them in playgrounds and struck up conversations with them.

The Idiot’s main character is Russian, coming home after a stay in a sanatorium in Switzerland (where Dostoievsky was living at the time). He is thus a contrast to the Russians bringing western European attitudes back to Russia. He’s also a contrast because he’s not jealous, and is very forgiving, finding excuses for numerous bad behaviors. In this he is much like Jesus, but not in the sense of performing miracles. He is a stranger to the people he meets, and his qualities prompt people to confess to him. That he is unable to make people’s lives better in any other way apparently doesn’t bother Dostoievsky. His empathy is what attracts people (Dostoievsky thought empathy to be perhaps the most important element of Christianity) and his attitude towards the people he interacts with is what may help them. He doesn’t have miraculous powers to do things for them.

This, the biographer explains, is one of the differences in Dostoievsky’s view of Christianity. He is more concerned with attitudes than with actions. Actions follow from attitudes, he believes, and bad actions leading to degeneration provide a sort of fertilizer for remorse and regeneration. This is the opposite of the belief that it’s impossible to recover from any mistake, even if made unconsciously, but wrong attitudes make forgiveness less possible than merely bad behavior, if one is sincerely remorseful and seeks forgiveness.

Dostoievsky and his wife had intended to stay in Europe three months, but stayed there four years longer. They suffered a good deal there between his gambling, which left them chronically short of cash, and fairly often of food; and the loss of their child. Because Dostoievsky also didn’t like Europe he wanted to return to Russia, but couldn’t before he made some money. He did this with his next novel, The Possessed.

This was about nihilism again, and the characters were mostly revolutionaries, revolutionaries who denied the truths of Christianity, and thus were parallels for the apocalyptic events described in the Book of the Revelation. He saw socialism as being prophesied in the Revelation, though his perspective was more Christian than capitalistic. And, whatever the virtues of socialism, The Possessed WAS prophetic about what was to happen in Russia within about forty years.

One of the inspirations of the novel was the murder by Sergei Nichaev, an associate of Mikhail Bakunin, of a student who had refused to cooperate with him. This was exactly the sort of thing Dostoievsky had predicted nihilism would lead to, and affected him especially strongly since he knew the student slightly. Bakunin had said, “As long as God exists, man is a slave. Man is rational, just, free–consequently there is no God.” Irrespective of the logic or illogic of these sentiments, such a sentiment is opposed to that of Dostoievsky at every point. Bakunin’s words are words of rage, underlined by the Catechism of a Revolutionary (probably prepared with help from Nichaev), which calls for either liquidation or exploitation of the ruling classes in every possible way, so they end enslaved if not killed. No evidence of empathy or mercy there, and to Dostoievsky that meant they had lost all the Russian virtues and been possessed, if not by Western atheistic ideas, then perhaps literally by Satanic powers. Certainly the words of Bakunin and the actions of Nichaev presage some of the most terrible actions of the twentieth century. And yet the picture of Nichaev in the biography shows a mild-looking young man. His face seems to show nothing of his will to terrible crimes.

It’s easy to condemn nihilism as amoral, if not immoral, but it’s also true that horrible things have frequently been done in the name of religion. Dostoievsky in fact addresses this later, in his last novel. Of course it’s easy to call for revolution in the name of the people, who will ostensibly benefit from a change in regime. Sometimes that even happens, but those calling for revolution are often only interested in power, and might as easily be found within government.

In the last ten years of his life Dostoievsky wrote A Raw Youth about a young man’s relationship to his father and to someone more a father to him, but perhaps more significantly was his publication of The Diary of a Writer in magazines, which spread his name around the country and gave him the chance to express opinions about a wide range of subjects. It was also during this period his wife undertook the publication of his works, which contributed to paying the family’s debts and putting them on a much sounder financial basis.

But most significant was the publication of Dostoievsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. This took the form of a mystery: the murder of a father of four sons, and the question of who did it and why.

The old man is known to have been violent and lustful, and is disliked if not hated by most of the brothers. Ivan is the rationalist brother who doesn’t deny the existence of God, but refuses to follow him because of the suffering of children, in particular. He can see no reason for children to suffer, and denies God’s goodness because of that, to the distress of his brother Alyosha, follower of a monk named Father Zosima. Another brother, Dmitri, is a sensualist, and he is blamed for the murder, tried and condemned, even though Ivan rises in court to take responsibility for having at least inspired the act. But Dmitri accepts his sentence because he knows that he too desired his father’s death.

The actual murderer turns out to be an illegitimate brother, son of a mute woman possibly raped by the elder Karamazov. Smerdyakov is a servant of the older Karamazov, and the others may not even know he’s their brother. It is Ivan’s ideas that have freed him to do the killing, but he then commits suicide.

The author points out that Dostoievsky’s view of sin and guilt is much different from much of western religion. He has two different characters speak eloquently of their views of life: Ivan Karamazov and Father Zosima.

Ivan reads a story he has written to Alyosha: About 1500, in Spain, Jesus returns, and roams the country preaching and healing. He is duly brought to the Inquisition and confronted by the Grand Inquisitor, some 90 years old, who tells him that he has done wrong to expect so much of humans. The Roman Catholic church, he tells Jesus, is correcting his doctrine by giving people security and food, and not expecting more of them than they can possibly give. The Inquisitor, the author explains, is really an atheist, though he wishes he could believe in humans as Jesus does. The same is true of modern critics of Dostoievsky’s parable: they wish humans had the strength Dostoievsky credits them with, but are unable to believe it. But Dostoievsky returns to his view that commission of evil can prepare a person for regeneration.

He has Father Zosima say, in his last talk before he dies, that contrite love is the way to approach anyone who has offended, and that no one should look down on anyone, even if they’ve behaved criminally. If YOU had behaved better, he says, maybe your example would have kept them from doing evil.

Father Zosima has two basic beliefs: We live in paradise, but don’t want to believe it. If we truly did, we would directly experience it. And, that all of us are guilty, before all, and of everything.

This latter is like the concept of original sin: if we are ALL sinners, none of us has the right to feel superior to anyone else. It connects also to the quote from Julian of Norwich: “God said, It is necessary that sin should exist, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of thing shall be well.” The reason sin (or evil) must exist is so each can make his choice. If God controlled all, forcing each person to be good, humans would be unable to make choices, which would exclude from them the possibility of transformation.

This makes the statements of mystics like Father Zosima (who says he came to his conversion because of his own bad behavior for which he felt bound to seek atonement) a matter of consciousness. Like science, which can only measure phenomena available to either the senses or to instruments, rationalists can only acknowledge phenomena they are able to perceive, not realizing that they have the potential to perceive far more, and angrily denying this may be possible. If there is no validity to religion, why are they angry at it, and why do they wish to copy its worst deeds? As the Communists in Russia discovered, attacking religious institutions doesn’t destroy religion.

The Brothers Karamazov cemented Dostoievsky’s reputation in Russia, with the aid of A Writer’s Diary. He was in the public eye the rest of his life, spending time with the nobility and other public figures, giving public readings of his own work, as well as Pushkin’s poetry, and so on. People were moved by his readings to such an extent they called him a prophet (He used to read Pushkin’s poem The Prophet). He still had many ambitions, but was running out of energy.

He died early in 1881, possibly of tuberculosis (his mother had died of that, as had his first wife), but more likely of emphysema since he was a heavy smoker most of his life. He was never wealthy, but the government gave his wife a pension supporting her and their children.

I’ve always found it difficult to understand what Dostoievsky was saying. His work was psychological, but I have found it murky, and needed a good biography to try to unravel his meaning. Henry Miller, in his book about Arthur Rimbaud, Time of the Assassins, includes Dostoievsky with others of the same period who sensed that things were wrong, and called for reformation and regeneration. Nietzsche was another such figure, as was van Gogh. All were religious in some form, though hardly in orthodox ways (Dostoievsky might be considered an exception in this respect).

The biographer says that one thing that makes his work difficult to understand is that he allowed different characters in his novels to debate without manipulating what they say to indicate his own beliefs. Thus, Ivan Karamazov’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor is powerful, and Dostoievsky doesn’t try to undermine its power. Instead, he tries to balance it with the speech by Father Zosima. Of course Father Zosima’s approach to life is much different from the worldly approach. It contradicts the Grand Inquisitor’s use of power to control his world with its emphasis on acknowledgment of guilt and embracing the suffering from it.

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoievsky’s most powerful novel, as he treated his usual themes of rebellion and criminality even more profoundly than before. He became famous throughout Russia because of it, as well as his Diary of a Writer, and his public speeches and readings. He is said to have read powerfully. With his fame came more money and many more public appearances. He was even invited to meet the Czar, but died before he could.

After more than a hundred years he still has things to say to humans in general. I don’t care for his Russo-centrism and xenophobia, but perhaps these are understandable as a contrast to too much respect for European ideas which, as we see from our present vantage point, were not always very healthy. Russia paid a huge price, at least partly foreseen by Dostoievsky, for accepting ideas that led to Communism. Dostoievsky’s ideas may not have been so wrong.

 

Infinity War

This movie is one of the Avengers series, and as such is an excuse for lots of violent action and cute dialogue, as well as plenty of special effects. One could be excused for thinking the resulting movie totally trivial, but maybe there’s something significant to be seen in it.

In this movie the super-villain threatening the universe is Thanos (derived from from Thanatos, the personification of death in Greek mythology?), who has embarked on a project to kill half the populations on over-populated planets across the universe, fairly, without reference to any social or political status. According to him, he sees himself as a benefactor who makes the depopulated planets into paradises. To do this more efficiently, he seeks gems with magical powers, some of which are held by individual Avengers. One of them he can only obtain by sacrificing his “daughter” (whom he had rescued from one of the planets in which he has committed genocide). Why is his goal so compelling that he can bring himself to make this “sacrifice’?

One could contemplate genocide in the abstract, but not everyone would be willing to undertake the concrete actions to slaughter people. Thanos’s claim to altruism is unconvincing. Our historic experience with genocide, whatever the rationale for them, has generally included hatred for some particular ethnicity or political group. What else would provide the emotional drive to commit such atrocities?

This reflection reminded me of Mary Renault’s retelling of the Theseus cycle of Greek myth, The King Must Die, and The Bull from the Sea. The novel follows Theseus from his childhood in a small kingdom, where he discovers he is the heir to the king of Athens, through his trip to Athens, his sojourn in Eleusis, and his determination to travel with the other young people demanded by the Cretans (who, as the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean, have to be propitiated by most other governments) where they are to be sacrificed to (in the myth) the Minotaur.

Renault depicts the situation in Crete more realistically. Central to the story is the bull dance, which Sir Arthur Evans found artistic renderings of when he investigated Knossos. Renault (and maybe others) saw this as a religious event, a human sacrifice to ensure the well-being of the Cretan nation. But the bull dance evolved (or devolved) into a sporting event (as Renault describes it) observed by the nobility in particular, and bets placed on which dancers would survive their dance with the bull. Theseus, having been raised in a milieu where religion is taken very seriously, is shocked at the rather secular attitude. He is more shocked by the behavior of the Minotaur–in this telling the heir to the throne–who, as Theseus sees it, is willing to sacrifice others for power. Theseus has been brought up to be a king, and the ethic in which he believes is that when a sufficiently severe crisis besets a kingdom the king is supposed to sacrifice himself for the good of the people.

Our archetype of self-sacrifice is Jesus; here is an example of the same idea some thirteen centuries earlier, and Renault cites some other examples of the ethic in ancient Greece.

Compare this ethic with the rationale articulated by Thanos. Whether or not his idea is valid, who is he to impose his solution on anyone? How is it appropriate for him to sacrifice others to achieve his goals? And again, what is it that drives him to kill so many when so many oppose him?

My hypothesis is that relieving the universe of excess population is only the rationalization for his actions. His REAL desire is power to avoid death himself; thus his desire to find the magic gems so he can employ them for his own security, as much as for his self-imposed task. “I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” He has become obsessive, and fallen into the psychological condition of inflation: he sees himself as more than he is, identifying himself with God, and believing that the actual God must want the death of anyone he sees as enemies.

One can see this motive in the great mass-murderers of the 20th century, too. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao tended to see themselves as necessary to their countries, which made it necessary to murder their opponents. The black and white aspect they shared of their individual visions encouraged the idea that destroying their evil opponents would produce a paradise on earth. Few (other than extremists) venture to seriously advocate genocide as a solution to anything, but dehumanization hasn’t ended, so the idea remains a possibility. Fear and scapegoating can allow history to repeat itself.

The movie ends with Thanos having achieved his desire but, as my grandson assured me, there will be a sequel to this movie. The Avengers franchise isn’t going to allow their series to end on such a hopeless note.

A Very Strange Dilemma

Author James Baldwin asked, “Why does white America need niggers?”

The first obvious reason has always been cheap labor. Black labor played a large part in the development of America, especially in the South (for which they received few benefits). But it seems as if there’s always been more to it than that.

The slave trade in North America really took off in the 18th century, if not the 17th. Was it really necessary? Weren’t there enough white people to provide labor in the colonies? In retrospect it doesn’t seem to have been very efficient to go all the way to Africa to get slaves and have many of them die on the return voyage. But the slave trade continued right up to the beginning of the Civil War.

And that’s in spite of the fear and resentment whites felt towards blacks. Part of the fear was because slave owners used their slaves sexually (probably not all owners), as can readily be seen by the range of skin colors in the black community even today. Southern whites in particular were afraid of black men doing the same to white women, and lynched a number of those they even suspected of the desire.

Another part of the fear was because on large plantations especially whites were badly outnumbered by blacks. They used brutality to intimidate blacks, and consequently feared what blacks might do in return.

One result of slavery in the Unites States was identification of it with black skin and further resentment of blacks after the Civil War supposedly fought to free them. In the Old World slaves could be of any nationality or skin color, and could fairly readily become free, even powerful. Identification of slavery with black skin necessitated the rationalization that blacks were inferior, and that having been brought to this country was somehow in their interest. But how could it be beneficial to have their own cultures erased and to be made to feel inferior because of their skin color, the different texture of their hair, their culture, etc?

The oddity of the relationship between white and black is underscored by the fashion for minstrels in about the 1850s, in which white musicians used makeup to look black when performing. What was THAT about? Was it done just to make fun of blacks, or was there something about the culture whites wanted to emulate? If so, what might it have been?

Could it have been an emotional and/or sexual freedom blacks possessed and whites usually didn’t? Knowing little about the era, I can only guess, and not with much confidence. Whites were later more willing to make use of black influence, if not to credit them or reward them financially. Jazz became the first purely American musical art form, but it was white musicians who more readily profited from it.

Whites came to resent blacks for their presence in the country they never should have been brought to. Perhaps the rational thing would have been to apologize and start over again, but whites were generally unwilling to admit their mistake, didn’t want integration, and sending blacks back to Africa, however desirable, wasn’t practical. Nor did all blacks want to go.

But a look at history reveals that blacks in general are perfectly capable of succeeding in America–when they’re allowed to. In each generation there were a few who became doctors, lawyers, or teachers in spite of the odds against them. In the 20th century particularly blacks were successful in music (though often taken advantage of by record companies and having their music copied by whites) and athletics. In the second half of the century they became successful in politics too. If not for segregation in most parts of the country, a form of white affirmative action which prevented competition no matter the rationalized reason, they would most likely have been successful in a wide variety of other fields too.

As it is, the resentment continues. James Baldwin’s question could be extended: why did Europeans need Jews? A recent article in The Atlantic focuses on the late 1930s when Nazi persecution of the Jews reached a higher gear, but before the Holocaust began, when Jewish professionals were forced to clean streets with toothbrushes. The article points out that they were treated this way not because they were subhuman, but because they were obviously human, to humiliate them. But for most of 2,000 years they had been Europe’s favorite group to persecute. Why was that? And why did blacks get awarded that position in the New World?

It seems to me the institution of slavery need not have taken the direction it did in the Americas. It would probably have been a corrupt institution anyway as power imbalances usually are, but it didn’t have to become identified with dark skin, nor did it have to be so cruel.

Why DID we need niggers? What does that say about us?

Addiction

Like much of my generation, I was thrilled by rock & roll, beginning in my case with the Beatles. It was an amazing musical time. Maybe it’s like that for everyone when they discover music, but it still seems different to me. Music was coming from all over the place and cross-fertilizing, getting more complex and exciting all the time.

In the late 1960s I began to be disappointed. After Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band I liked what the Beatles were doing less, partly because I had left high school, left home, was working for a living, and was pretty depressed about it. Bob Dylan also changed radically in a way I didn’t like.

There were other bands coming along, though, a great explosion  of them, so I remained a musical addict for some years more. But eventually I lost interest in contemporary popular music. Part of it was because of new styles, metal, disco, punk, and eventually rap, none of which I liked much. But I think part of it too was that the musicians I had loved got decadent.

At the time I thought drugs like marijuana and LSD were a good idea, or at least not bad. That may have been naive, but I wasn’t naive enough to think that speed, cocaine, heroin, barbituarites, or too much alcohol were a good idea, and not only did I begin hearing more about those, but the music started to be less good too. A book, Live at the Fillmore East and West informs me that there was even more over-indulgence in that period than I’d known. Lots of alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. With all this seems to have gone a lot of very egotistical behavior. Not very inspiring. It seems as if when musicians became successful they also graduated to harder and more addictive drugs. It’s disappointing to think so many heroes of my youth were so insecure–at least that’s what I presume it was.

Of course, I started picking up addictive behaviors too, though most of them were legal, unlike a lot of my musical heroes. I smoked marijuana, for a short time took (what I was told) was LSD and mescaline, but took very little else that was illegal. I began smoking cigarettes (to learn how to smoke marijuana), and that became habitual, lasting some forty-seven years. I also started drinking, and for several years drank like an alcoholic. After awhile I got tired of being hung over all the time, and began losing my tolerance (that may have been because I had Hepatitis C, unbeknownst to me), and began drinking less. And my very first addictive behavior had been reading, beginning from the time I learned, and continuing to this day.

I think it’s pretty clear to most of us that addictions usually have to do with pain. Sometimes it’s physical pain. I think even more often it’s emotional pain. We don’t want to fully experience that, so we run away from it. An interview I listened to yesterday suggested that meditation is a good way to approach emotional pain, not that it’s an easy fix–it still takes a lot of effort–but it’s a method of looking at pain objectively in which one focuses not so much on the pain as its characteristics and where it comes from. But it’s always tempting not to try to do anything effective about it, and just keep running. It’s certainly not a problem I’ve solved to any extent, even at my advanced age.

There’s always been drug abuse in this country’s history, especially if you count, alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes. There was an explosion of illegal drug abuse beginning sometime in my youth. Exactly when it began is debatable. It really got going among white people in the late sixties, but it had become a plague in Harlem about 1950, when heroin hit town. Now heroin is no longer an urban phenomenon. It’s a plague in rural America too. Overprescription is frequently blamed for the latest manifestation, but I think the main temptation for addictive drugs is hopelessness.

There are some objective reasons for hopelessness in this country, as well as reasons that are more subjective. Many of us grow up unhappy with our parents, with school, or many other things. But we shouldn’t ignore objective reasons too.

One is financial. In my early life I didn’t find it hard to support myself ( I also didn’t have a wife or children), but for people much younger than me this was much less true. I won’t try to go into the reasons for the financial instability of many, but only say it’s a major reason for lack of hope.

Along with financial instability, rapid cultural changes of all kinds have had a bad effect on people. Divorce has broken up a lot of families, which has caused economic and other kinds of instability. Do children feel more neglected now than they did a couple of generations ago? I don’t know, but fewer families have both parents now. And not only is there neglect, but other forms of abuse. Those kinds of problems generate feelings that many people try to deal with by self-medicating.

So do problems like bipolar disorder. I don’t know if disorders like this, ADD, and ADHD are more frequent now than they were before the diagnoses were formulated, but in any case, the medications are available, so the temptation is always there. As long as we have drugs they’re going to get used, unless our culture changes tremendously.

Heroin took over Harlem for awhile, and spread across the country, because people’s lives in ghettos like those were not very happy, and drug use was an acceptable way out. It still is, no matter how people preach about it. The only way to end drug abuse, as far as I can see, is to get to the roots of it in each individual case, which would be very difficult and inconvenient. People adopt addictive behaviors often because they feel unloved. Loving them effectively would take a tremendous effort that many people don’t want to make. And since we live in a capitalist society, as long as there’s a market for addictive things (drugs or other) there will be someone to supply them. If you’re selling things you have to consider addiction as part of your market strategy. If people can’t get along without your product, you’ll have a steady income.

It’s a shame this is how we live. It’s not how humans were meant to live, and getting really caught up in addiction can make us less than human. But our addiction as a society isn’t just to drugs, but to our whole lifestyle that is destroying the natural world that allows us to live. It’s a shame we live the way we do, that drugs destroyed the music and many of the musicians we’ve all loved, and that most of us don’t have the courage to turn away from that. But that’s dwarfed by the way in which we’re destroying not only our individual worlds, but the great world around us too. And it’s much easier to just go with the flow than to actually do anything effective about it.

 

An Interesting Time

We live in a fractured nation, and some of us hardly even know it because we’ve imposed a de facto segregation  on ourselves, and often hear few opinions we disagree with, except on TV.

But there is disagreement, and it’s virulent. Conservatives think conservatism is the natural way to be, and think liberals are hypocritical and malicious. Liberals feel the same way about conservatives. Neither lives up to their best ideals; both feel the other wants to impose their views on a whole range of issues. Not just abortion, but in religion, schools, etc. Part of the problem is economic: an expanding economy and good pay makes up for a multitude of sins, but a lot has to do with cherished beliefs too. A Dominionist Christian is quoted as saying other denominations should have their religious liberties taken away. This is extreme, but isn’t different from past Christian attitudes. It’s contrary to the vision our Founding Fathers had, though.

The Founding Fathers weren’t, in many cases, conventionally religious. They amended the Constitution to include religious liberty because of the still remembered (by some) religious wars of the 17th century. One way to avoid these was to allow every religion to practice, but none to impose its views on any other. The monotheistic religions tend to produce fanatics, and fanatics like to impose their own beliefs. Perhaps we periodically need to be reminded how well that works.

Daryl Davis attended Howard University intending to become a spy or a diplomat. He became a musician instead. He also acquired an unusual hobby: he began talking to members of the Ku Klux Klan.

This may have begun accidentally. He talked to someone after a performance who appreciated how he played piano. That person was a Klan member, and maybe other contacts followed from that one. Davis’s attitude towards him and other Klan members wasn’t accidental, though. He said his question was, How can you hate me when you don’t even know me? It turned out not many could. All many of them wanted was to be listened to. After he listened to them, many began feeling different, and got out of the Klan. Those leaving no longer had any use for their robes, and gave them to him. In the PBS program about him he estimates he has twenty-five or six such robes.

That part is inspiring. He has justified his faith that people can change. What is sad is when he talks to three activists in Baltimore who don’t believe white supremacists CAN change. I couldn’t really blame them: nothing in their experience leads them to believe that, and they feel Davis is a traitor.

They’re not the only people who feel others are traitors, or are angry for other reasons. According to Sidney Blumenthal, our 45th president has always pined for the love of New York City, which has resolutely withheld it from him. This may account for the resentment he displays, and also for his ability to engage the resentment of others, which enabled him to win his campaign. It’s possible we will suffer because New York City didn’t love Donald Trump enough, but many people feel unloved. Christianity told us to love one another, but didn’t teach us how to do that. Consequently, we have done a miserable job of it.

In Mary Renault’s novel about ancient Greece, The Last of the Wine, one character quotes Socrates as saying, “Be what you wish to seem.” This expresses much of the exasperation various groups in America feel about each other: not necessarily their views, but that they don’t behave according to those views. Shaming opponents for believing differently doesn’t change their minds, it causes resentment.

It’s not hard to understand why many people oppose abortion. At least until they know someone who wants to get one because of, for example, rape or incest.

Homosexuality is a similarly hot-button issue. Sexuality is a difficult issue for almost everyone, and the idea of not only having sex outside of marriage but with one’s own gender seems alien to most. Some can be persuaded that it’s not so evil when they know someone who is gay, but not all can. Some parents reject their children when they discover they have AIDS. They seem to believe their children have chosen a life of evil, but aren’t objective enough to ask why they would choose an orientation that so many people detest. When asked that question, they take it very personally, as an attack on their faith, as in some ways it is. Faith in the literal truth of the Bible is a kind of anchor for many who find any analysis of its text to be personally threatening. That’s much of the quarrel of a certain kind of conservative with liberals: liberals make them think unwanted thoughts. That some of these thoughts may embody the sort of compassion Jesus Christ taught doesn’t improve matters. We all prefer the religion that confirms our preexisting beliefs.

When such a resentment is present, it’s not hard to play on it and encourage hatred of others. How did Daryl Davis persuade white supremacists that their views were mistaken? He didn’t judge them. He listened to them and, he says, they persuaded themselves.

Not all will be persuaded, though. The 45th president may or may not emulate Hitler in every way, but there’s a family resemblance in their resentment. Hitler’s father abused him. The president’s father may not have, but the president does seem to feel unloved. Whether it’s New York City he feels rejected by, or whether the rejection comes from elsewhere, it seems likely many of us are going to be punished for it because many others share the feeling. Liberals are an enemy many can agree on, so liberals will be punished. Ordinary people may find that as liberals get punished, so do they, and regret their vote, but by then it will be too late.

Perhaps less justly, Muslims and Hispanics will be punished too. They too seem alien to a lot of people, so are easy to stereotype. It’s not hard for people who don’t know any Muslims to believe they all are terrorists. That few of the Muslims in this country are, that few are likely to get here, and that we have terrorists of our own seems harder to process, especially if one sympathizes in some respects with the white terrorists. Fear of immigrants is easy to take advantage of. The mechanism seems to be that many fear new immigrants will do to us what our ancestors did to Native Americans and imported black slaves. We all know we haven’t treated minorities well, which gives us good reason to fear them. Because of our fears, we mistreat them again, which won’t resolve our difficulties.

Anger can be a potent fuel, but it doesn’t help us harmonize with our neighbors. Unfortunately, the time seems ripe for a holy war. War certainly releases tensions, though it would be nice if we could release them in a more productive fashion. But that’s a matter of individual decision. Perhaps enough individuals will find a better way to behave than they are being encouraged to. This is an interesting time, in the Chinese sense.

Robert Anton Wilson’s Journey to Expanded Consciousness

Robert Anton Wilson is a philosopher of sorts whose acquaintance I first made some forty years ago with the Illuminatus trilogy. Recently rereading it for the first time in decades, I found it wasn’t as compelling as back then, so I went on to his memoir, Cosmic Trigger, which was.

In that book he tells how he grew up in an Irish Roman Catholic home, jettisoning his Catholicism when it conflicted with his sex drive, and reached adulthood interested in lots of things. For one thing, he tried joining a lot of different groups (Ayn Rand and Trotskyite groups, for instance) which made him realize that there were a lot of different ways to see the world, and that different groups have different things they accept and reject. This means that virtually no one sees the world as it actually is: there’s always something being rejected or ignored which provides a different perspective on things. Wilson called these tunnel realities.

And humans tend to dislike different perspectives. Christianity in particular has dictated what people must and must not believe. A lot of people and organizations have imitated them. We’ve become very aware that people give us propaganda instead of truth, and resent it, even if we’re not good at telling the difference.

Wilson got caught up in the psychedelic experience of the early sixties before it became well-publicized. He took peyote first, then LSD when it became available. On one of his peyote trips he observed a green-skinned humanoid figure dancing. This was before Carlos Casteneda began publishing his books, when the green-skinned figure would become known as Mescalito, the spirit of the peyote. As the sixties progressed he met Timothy Leary to interview him, and they realized they had a lot of interests in common. Leary suggested he investigate Aleister Crowley, and Wilson did so, with increasing interest.

Crowley practiced magick (the spelling to distinguish it from Harry Houdini sleight of hand), and found it a rich source of unusual perspectives. Wilson had heard Crowley was a junkie, but also that he had climbed higher on Chogo Ri (a mountain in the Himalayas) than anyone else, which seemed unusual for a junkie. He began reading Crowley’s books, many of which suggest exercises to expand consciousness. Wilson began practicing a number of these, sometimes in conjunction with LSD or other psychedelics, sometimes without.

One such was to go a week without using the word “I” and punishing himself (Wilson bit his finger) whenever he slipped and said it. He found his state of mind changed pretty dramatically, and began to see his ego as an inconvenience.

Another practice was to invoke various gods or goddesses of the pagan past. He would decorate with colors and symbols associated with each, pray to them, and recite various invocations that Crowley had written. He found that these practices began changing his worldview too. Once he began getting results, he would start invoking a different god or goddess.

Wilson had also met William S. Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch most famously), who told him about strangeness associated with the number 23. Burroughs had discovered it when talking to an ferry boat sailor named Captain Clark, who told him he had sailed the ferry 23 years without an accident. That day Burroughs heard that Clark’s ferry had sunk, killing all aboard. Then he heard about an airplane crash, piloted by another Captain Clark. It was flight number 23. Wilson began looking for 23s, and began finding them synchronistically. Synchronicity is a pattern which doesn’t seem to have a cause, but appears too meaningful to be merely coincidence. The more Wilson looked for 23s, the more he found, and the more meaningful they were. He records numerous examples, one being that sperm and egg each contribute 23 chromosomes to what becomes a human fetus. There are many more.

He was also interested in UFOs, and their significance. Such incidents are often witnessed by lots of people, though not all agree on what they see. The incidents seem to contradict the laws of nature, and it’s uncertain what their cause is. They’re similar to reported incidents prior to the twentieth century which people used to attribute to encounters with angels, or with fairies. They can be pretty bizarre. My favorite was reported by a man living in Wisconsin, who said a UFO landed in his yard, an alien got out and handed him some pancakes. That seems a nice thing to do, but what was the significance? The pancakes, incidentally, turned out to be ordinary pancakes when analyzed. Wilson thinks such an incident (and many others) indicate that when we’re confronted with something completely unfamiliar, like a technology well in advance of our own, our consciousness tries to change it into familiar terms, however senseless (or hilarious) those terms turn out to be.

Besides the magickal practices and psychedelic drugs,  Wilson had been reading as many of Crowley’s books as he could obtain, and found that Crowley had been practicing Tantra, or sexual magick, which consisted of various ways to postpone orgasm which would make it extremely powerful and psychedelic. In the early 1970s in the midst of these practices Wilson began to believe he was receiving messages from the area of the star Sirius.

Sirius is the brightest star in our sky, and has a very interesting history. When he began to research it, Wilson found that the Dogon tribe in Africa had told people (Including Robert Temple, who wrote a book about it) a lot of information about Sirius no one would have expected them to know, including that it was a double star, and that the second star (invisible until the twentieth century to astronomers until they had telescopes powerful enough to see) was much smaller than the primary, which is the one easily visible. Sirius, known as the Dog Star, contributes heat to the “dog days” of summer, and would contribute much more if the universe weren’t expanding, and Sirius receding from us. When asked how they had found out these things, the Dogon said aliens from Sirius had told them.

When Robert Temple researched further he began to believe there had been contact with aliens in the Middle East about 4500 years ago, and that knowledge of this had traveled across Africa to the Dogon. If such a thing happened, and if his timeline was correct is difficult to say. Egypt already had a great deal of interest in Sirius well before 2500 BC. They identified it with the goddess Isis, and in building the Great Pyramid, constructed a shaft to the south through which they could observe the star. When Wilson looked into this further he found that a LOT of people claimed to have received messages from Sirius, including Crowley.

George Gurdjieff seems to have known about this too. When writing his most important book he realized that he had made some passages more plain than he intended, and said he needed to bury the dog deeper. When asked if he didn’t mean the bone, he said, No, the dog, and that the dog was Sirius. Sirius is also said to be the star portrayed on the card by that name in the Tarot deck. Some say the Tarot was put together by Sufis, and Sufis provided at least some of Gurdjieff’s education in the occult.

By the time all this was happening, Wilson had quit his job at Playboy, and was trying to earn his living by writing. He was having some difficulty. He and Robert Shea, who had also worked at Playboy, had written the Illuminatus trilogy, satirizing many conspiracy theories they came across while working at Playboy. The Illuminati were composed of people from the Freemasons who had achieved higher consciousness, but their organization located in Bavaria was outlawed in the 18th century. Some saw them as heroes, many saw them as villains, and the more the two authors researched the group the more probable it seemed that they had a long ancestry which may have extended back to ancient Egypt or even further. Learning about them fit well with Wilson’s desire to expand his own consciousness.

He and Shea had finished writing the novel, but were having trouble getting it published, so Wilson was poor. He and his family were living in San Francisco with poor people, since they couldn’t afford a great place to live. He was doing a Sufi exercise to open his heart, and was often horrified at things he saw poor people have to go through.

Such things touched his own family too. His youngest daughter, who was aware of his occult interests, and shared them, got beaten up by a gang of black kids, but understood that if she held a grudge against them, it would only continue the negative energy–so she forgave them, and never showed any fear or dislike of anyone black. Wilson was amazed that a girl in her early teens could be so wise.

By this time Timothy Leary had been busted for possession of pot and imprisoned. He managed to escape and spent some time overseas before being kidnapped in Afghanistan and brought back to the USA. Just why the authorities were so hysterical about the threat his advocacy of LSD posed may be clearer when one realizes that his interest in the drug was because of its ability to change what he called “imprints”, impressions that cause the mind to see things in certain ways. Governments prefer that people see things in ways they prescribe. Anything that allows them to see independently is threatening. Leary had incautiously advertised his intentions, trying (as Wilson sees it) to reserve the use of LSD to competent professionals who could use it as a tool to safely help people. That he publicized it so effectively helped to spread its use, and many used it less than safely. Of course the main effect of government prohibition was to drive LSD into the black market and prevent scientists from studying it. But before LSD became illegal Leary had used it in a project with prisoners that was very successful in preventing recidivism. With less public hysteria, and with good training, mental health could have been greatly improved.

When Leary was released from prison he no longer wanted to talk about drugs, but about immortality and space travel. He had theorized a model of various higher “circuits” that LSD, other drugs, and various practices can induce to begin operating in human beings. Four of these he said were the ones we use in our ordinary life on earth. There are, he said, four others which are rarely experienced, and which are for use in outer space. He wanted to become immortal and journey in a starship which need not go faster than light if its passengers were immortal. He expected science to discover a method (or methods) to attain immortality quickly (this was in the mid-1970s). This was where I began to part company with the ideas in the book.

For one thing, immortality would cause immense problems if people in general stopped dying. Nature, as experienced on this planet, is organized around death: each generation has to make way for the next. All living organisms reproduce, therefore all must die. Their deaths help provide, through decomposition, the food that will nourish all the organisms that support life on the whole planet, which is already overpopulated with humans. An order of magnitude more would even more rapidly deplete the natural resources which could provide for them. And not enough space ships could be built–at least until we can easily mine the asteroids or moon– to take more than a small percentage to other star systems. There’s also a possibility that the bulk of the human race has responsibilities here.

Leary and Wilson seem to have been confident that human science would rather quickly find a way to stop death and keep humans healthy and happy for hundreds, thousands, even billions of years. That was forty years ago. Why haven’t we heard anything about it since?

One reason is that immortality is something the powerful wouldn’t want ordinary people to have. If a method of immortality was discovered, powerful people would want to keep it for themselves. If such a thing has been discovered, I suggest that is exactly what has happened. Immortality would be a powerful tool to obtain even more power.

That section of the book seems almost insanely optimistic, reminding me of something Wilson says he learned about Crowley from someone who knew him well. Crowley, his acquaintance said, often believed that the illumination he had attained was shared by many of the people he met, causing him to trust wrong people. Israel Regardie, a biographer of Crowley, who has worked as his secretary in the 1920s stated that Crowley had unresolved issues which caused him to have blind spots. He was, in some respects, wiser than many, but he wasn’t perfectly wise. Regardie’s autobiography stops before 1914, by which time he had had and assimilated most of the visions which had so deepened his perceptions. He had written most of the works for which he is known, and had also lost all his money. He lived more than thirty more years, but Regardie didn’t find his later life inspiring.

Another example of the optimism Wilson shows is his view of the acceleration of knowledge. Human knowledge took a long time to increase in the past, especially knowledge shared with the largest part of humanity. With the beginning of science about 500 years ago, knowledge has been piling up at an ever increasing rate. Some were predicting forty years ago that by this time the human race would be entirely transformed, with many obstacles passed very quickly. This has obviously not happened. The human race remains stuck in sorrow and suffering.

But much of the book remains exciting, though I can’t agree with all of it. It’s a sort of detective novel in which the author tries to understand more and more of how the world operates, and goes further and deeper than usual understandings. That can be pretty thrilling.

Wilson ends the book by telling how his daughter was beaten to death by an unhappy man who couldn’t have understood what he was doing, and how he resisted allowing that to crush him. As terribly as he suffered from that, he found that many people loved him and his family, and wanted to help in any way they could. One psychologist made a point of visiting a couple of times a week to talk if anyone needed him. Wilson later called such kindness bewildering, and was grateful and amazed it should exist. I don’t know if one should see such a crushing death as some kind of punishment for Wilson or anyone else in his family, but if he had done wrong, he was certainly punished.

He ends the book by asking Timothy Leary what he did when he was overwhelmed by negativity. Leary replied, “Come back with all the positive energy you can.” This, said Wilson, was how he learned the final secret of the Illuminati.

 

Addiction

Addiction is complex, and isn’t just about illegal drugs, as problematic as that issue is. It’s not just a metaphor, but literally encompasses a great deal of human behavior.
Illegal drug use has spread and become more persistent. Heroin used to be an urban problem. It’s part of the rural landscape now too.
The War on Drugs has been going on for more than forty years, and we’re losing. One big reason for that is that illegal drugs intersect with something very American: capitalism. There’s an immense demand for illegal drugs, and as long as that’s true there will be people to supply them. Illegal drugs are among the most valuable substances there are, and the behavior around the others is comparable.
This was true of alcohol during Prohibition. One might think lawmakers might have learned from that, but maybe they learned the wrong lesson. A business that profitable probably supports legislators, as well as others. Prohibition only lasted long enough to give us organized crime. The War on Drugs has given us organized crime on steroids.
But illegal drugs are only a small part of addiction. Alcohol is legal again, tobacco always has been, but both are very destructive. Alcohol can destroy families as thoroughly as drugs (it may or may not take longer), and tobacco is good for destroying health.
But these are still only part of the story. Sugar and salt are the two substances that sell most processed foods, even though we know too much of them is bad for us.
I used to drink like an alcoholic, but had increasing trouble tolerating it. I haven’t taken a drink for at least a couple of years, but it took a very long time to quit entirely.
It’s been almost a year since I last smoked. I don’t feel the desire too strongly, but know that if I started again I probably wouldn’t stop. I’ve smoked most of my life.
I like sugar in particular about as much as anyone, though I also like salt. But those aren’t my only addictive behaviors.
I’ve read more than most people all my life, which takes us out of the realm of substance abuse as ordinarily understood. In this sort of category are TV, movies, computers, and video games. I’ve probably been less addictive about TV and movies than most, and I’ve hardly played video games at all. Computers are another matter.
Computers are an immense resource in the sense of available knowledge, as well as a great way for merchants to advertise and sell. I’d be willing to guess a major part of computer use is to interact with others, though. That was the initial attraction for me, as it seemed easier than trying to meet people in bars, for instance. That can be positive. but trolling is a familiar word now.
In any case, other forms of behavior can also be addictive. Sex is probably as addictive as anything else people do, since it’s intensely pleasurable, as well as being a fundamental drive.
Nor does it stop there. Few of us are entirely authentic. We identify with whatever we say “I” to, and identification is a form of “sleep”, which is a way of not being conscious, and addiction is a way to avoid consciousness, because consciousness can be painful.
How did narcotics come to be abused? They kill pain, and not just physical pain. There are plenty of people with chronic physical pain, but arguably even more with chronic emotional pain. Illegal drugs will numb both. So will legal drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, to say nothing of tranquilizers. You can add coffee, sugar, and chocolate to that list too. And money.
In this country, and much of the rest of the world, we are convinced that buying things will make us happy. There’s evidence to suggest there are limits to this happiness, but few of us are willing to give up all we own, as Jesus recommended. We make the people who sell things very happy, and many of them happily cut corners to make themselves even happier.
A lot of what is sold can be called convenience. Central heating, cars, computers, and cellphones are all convenient. We’d rather not have to do the intense physical work our ancestors did even a hundred years ago when technology had already begun to make a real impact on our lives. Nor do we care that the convenient products tend not to be biodegradable, or to pollute in other ways. Our desire to be less conscious masks the natural world for us, and how our behavior harms it, and ultimately ourselves. Ideology about individuality has as much to do with the right to pollute and mistreat one’s employees as anything else, it seems.
It seems obvious that the way to be happy is to do pleasurable things, but the great religions contradict that picture. Jesus talked about it being more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than pass through the eye of a needle (the eye of the needle was a very narrow gate into Jerusalem, which a camel could enter only if its baggage was removed). Capitalism seems largely to be about selling us pleasures, if not entirely. It does pretty much reduce the world to buying and selling, and strongly implies that these are the means to happiness.
William S. Burroughs observed of his experience with narcotics that the perfect customer was an addict “who will crawl through a sewer to buy”. Look at advertising anywhere and ask yourself how much of it is to sell anything people really NEED. In very many cases, perhaps most, it’s trying to stimulate a desire to be satisfied by buying something, and an awful lot of the time it’s not something really NEEDED.
Anytime we say “I” to any of our desires, whether it’s to buy something, or to behave in a certain way, that can be called identification. Or attachment. Either can be seen as a form of addiction. And addiction is essentially lack of balance.
George Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher of the last century, said that non-desires should predominate over desires. Another way to say that is that we should discipline ourselves and refuse to indulge. How many of us actually do that, no matter what we tell ourselves?
It is the constant temptation of manufacturers and merchandisers to amass more profits than they really need by selling products to people THEY really don’t need. What is the consequence?
On the production side, the person has more wealth and possessions than they know what to do with, which makes little sense on an individual level, since they know (but may not believe) they’re going to die, and can’t take their money or possessions with them. If they have family or friends to leave them to it makes slightly more sense, but it’s questionable how much good the money does their descendants. It keeps them out of poverty, but suppose all that is taken away. Like any other addiction, once it’s withdrawn, the former possessor may go into withdrawal. But keeping the bequest may lead to arrogance. Rich children sometimes are able to earn their own money–especially if their inheritances give them a great advantage–and sometimes not. But they tend to see themselves as better than others, and others do too. I doubt that’s good for them.
For those of us not wealthy, are the consequences much better? If we amass money and possessions that leave us below the wealthy level, are we better off than the really rich? We still can’t take our possessions with us. Our children need to learn how to make their own livings too, and without the advantage wealthy children have.
Perhaps the worst thing is living in the money universe and believing it’s all there is. Actually, we live in worlds within worlds. The natural world, which is what keeps us alive, is seen as a bank we can withdraw from without depositing. It’s also seen as a place we can dump our trash without consequence. That’s a dangerous way for us to live.
Addiction also makes us self-centered, no matter the substance, behavior, or anything else. Addiction makes us desperate too, willing to do almost anything to anybody for our own satisfaction. We as a nation are addicted to oil to power our buildings and vehicles, which has led us into destructive behavior in the Middle East, not least to ourselves.
It’s not like we have no idea about this. The ostensible reason for the War on Drugs, as well as Prohibition, was to protect people from addiction. It was never the real, or at least only reason, though. It was used to feed other addictions, not only to money, but to power as well.
Power may be the worst of the addictions. It promises us the ability to change the world. Our motives may be good or not so good, but if we’re drawn to power, we may well be corruptible.
Of course power is a reality in human life. Some individuals and classes will be inevitably more powerful than others. Some will also be more responsible with power than others. Plato thought in an ideal society those who were to be trusted with power should not be allowed other pleasures, like sex and family. They should also not DESIRE power. Is this humanly possible? Not to a very large extent.
We see in our own country that power has corrupted our political and economic leaders to greater or lesser extent. The power of being able to possess has also corrupted the rest of us. Few of us want to have less. We almost always want to have more, and given how many of us there are in the world, this is not sustainable. That’s not hard to see, but we prefer not to see it.
Suppose we have a catastrophe that destroys our capacity to produce electric power or fuel our buildings and vehicles. How will we survive? It would be nice to dismiss that as impossible, but it isn’t. If it happens, a great many people will not only struggle to survive (quite possibly in not very nice ways), but will enter more than one kind of withdrawal.
That’s the kind of change we live in fear of, and which explains at least some of the hateful rhetoric and actions many of us indulge in. We fear to lose what we have, with which we (more often than not) have an addictive relationship. Look at drug and alcohol addicts who have quit. Often they simply exchange one addictive habit for another: coffee for alcohol, for instance. Reality is still too fearsome to experience “naked”. What will happen when we lose things that seem even more necessary than drugs, with which we also have an addictive relationship?
I’m not better in this area than most people. I too want to live comfortably. I hope not to see social collapse in this country, or anywhere else. We’ve already seen it in Asia and Africa, and it’s not pretty. It would be nice to believe it can’t happen here, but that would be stupid. And unless we begin to be willing to change our behavior in very fundamental ways, it’s almost inevitable.

Fear and Jerry Garcia

I’ve been a fan of the Grateful Dead for a long time, though far short of being a Dead Head. I just started rereading an interview conducted with Jerry Garcia in 1971, when the band was still expanding in reach, technique, and material. Comparing what he was then and later is instructive.
In the interview he seems enlightened, though that might be exaggerating. At least he seems happily engaged in his music, the band, and with his common-law wife, in spite of money and other problems with the band.
He speaks, at one point, of how some people fear, and put up walls to protect themselves, and says this isn’t necessary. Ironically, a few years later, he would begin putting up some very high walls around himself when he began using heroin. Why was that?
There seem to have been several reasons. One is a fairly unhappy childhood: his father died when he was quite young, he didn’t get along well with his stepfather(s), and rarely found school very interesting. So he joined the army at age 15, didn’t last very long, and then lived on the street. He had an unsuccessful marriage, then emerged into the Grateful Dead.
He was lead guitarist there, wrote and sang most of the songs, was very smart and articulate. That made him the focus of a lot of people’s interest in the band, something he always felt at least ambivalent about. No doubt it helped him pick up women (he did his share of running around), but he didn’t like the demand on him to be something like a messiah. He wanted to just play his music and be able to live like a normal person.
Accordingly, he began using heroin, left his wife, and became more and more isolated as he descended further into that process. The band, which had been expanding for its first ten years, seemed to begin to contract.
I base that at least somewhat on their studio albums, which was never the best way to judge them. But as Garcia got more strung out (and he wasn’t the only band member with drug problems), their outstanding performances got fewer too.
According to his friends, he never entirely lost his optimism and interest in the world, even though his darker impulses had surfaced and become stronger as he gave into them. Later he seems to have become cynical, perhaps (at least in part) due to his shame at his own behavior. In a much later interview, he said that there was a part of him that always said, “Fuck you!” when he tried to get himself onto a more positive path, and that he was reluctant to force the issue, since he felt that part of him was important.
But as he allowed heroin to take over more of his life, it began to detrimentally influence his health. Getting busted in the mid 1980s influenced him to quit heroin, and a severe diabetic coma that left him extremely weak influenced him to get healthy again. That only lasted a few years, though. He slipped back into heroin use and other bad habits.
Who knows if it was necessary for him to experience the negative side of life as he did? It seems a shame, as he appeared to be such a positive voice, and also seemed to recognize his shortcomings, without allowing them to take over–until he did allow them.
His story is probably not so unusual, it only happened in circumstances few of us experience. It takes something to resist our less appetizing desires, something we see quite clearly today, when so many of us are activated primarily by fear. Fear may not be necessary, but it’s a barrier difficult to surmount.