THE HYSTEROIDAL CYCLE
Ever since human societies and civilizations have been created on our globe,
people have longed for happy times full of tranquility and justice, which
would have allowed everyone to herd his sheep in peace, search for fertile
valleys, plow the earth, dig for treasures, or build houses and palaces. Man
desires peace so as to enjoy the benefits accumulated by earlier generations
and to proudly observe the growth of future ones he has begotten.
Sipping
wine or mead in the meantime would be nice. He would like to wander about,
becoming familiar with other lands and people, or enjoy the star-studded sky
of the south, the colors of nature, and the faces and costumes of women. He
would also like to give free rein to his imagination and immortalize his
name in works of art, whether sculptured in marble or eternalized in myth
and poetry.
From time immemorial, then, man has dreamed of a life in which the measured
effort of mind and muscle would be punctuated by well-deserved rest. He
would like to learn nature’s laws so as to dominate her and take advantage
of her gifts. Man enlisted the natural power of animals in order to make his
dreams come true, and when this did not meet his needs, he turned to his own
kind for this purpose, in part depriving other humans of their humanity
simply because he was more powerful.
Dreams of a happy and peaceful life thus gave rise to force over others, a
force which depraves the mind of its user. That is why man’s dreams of
happiness have not come true throughout history. This hedonistic view of
“happiness” contains the seeds of misery and feed the eternal cycle whereby
good times give birth to bad times, which in turn cause the suffering and
mental effort which produce experience, good sense, moderation, and a
certain amount of psychological knowledge, all virtues which serve to
rebuild more felicitous conditions of existence.
During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound
reflection, introspection, knowledge of others, and an understanding of
life’s complicated laws. Is it worth pondering the properties of human
nature and man’s flawed personality, whether one’s own or someone else’s?
Can we understand the creative meaning of suffering we have not undergone
ourselves, instead of taking the easy way out and blaming the victim? Any
excess mental effort seems like pointless labor if life’s joys appear to be
available for the taking. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good
sport; a more farsighted person predicting dire results becomes a
wet-blanket killjoy.
Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an
understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue
during the so-called “happy” times; thoughtful doubters are decried as
meddlers who cannot leave well enough alone. This, in turn, leads to an
impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating
the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold
minds creatively. The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so
essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means. A nation’s
enrichment or involution regarding its psychological world view could be
considered an indicator of whether its future will be good or bad.
During “good” times, the search for truth becomes uncomfortable because it
reveals inconvenient facts. It is better to think about easier and more
pleasant things. Unconscious elimination of data which are, or appear to be,
inexpedient gradually turns into habit, and then becomes a custom accepted
by society at large. The problem is that any thought process based on such
truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it
further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient premises by more
convenient ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of psychopathology.
Such contented periods for one group of people - often rooted in some
injustice to other people or nations - start to strangle the capacity for
individual and societal consciousness; subconscious factors take over a
decisive role in life. Such a society, already infected by the hysteroidal23
state, considers any perception of uncomfortable truth to be a sign of
“ill-breeding”. J. G. Herder’s24
iceberg is drowned in a sea of falsified unconsciousness; only the tip of
the iceberg is visible above the waves of life.
Catastrophe waits in the wings. In such times,
the capacity for logical and disciplined thought, born of necessity during
difficult times, begins to fade. When communities lose the capacity for
psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of
evil are intensified at every social scale, whether individual or
macrosocial, until everything reverts to “bad” times.
We already know that every society contains a certain percentage of people
carrying psychological deviations caused by various inherited or acquired
factors which produce anomalies in perception, thought, and character. Many
such people attempt to impart meaning to their deviant lives by means of
social hyperactivity. They create their own myths and ideologies of
overcompensation and have the tendency to egotistically insinuate to others
that their own deviant perceptions and the resulting goals and ideas are
superior.
When a few generations’ worth of “good-time” insouciance results in societal
deficit regarding psychological skill and moral criticism, this paves the
way for pathological plotters, snake-charmers, and even more primitive
impostors to act and merge into the processes of the origination of evil.
They are essential factors in its synthesis. In the next chapter I shall
attempt to persuade my readers that the participation of pathological
factors, so underrated by the social sciences, is a common phenomenon in the
processes of the origin of evil.
23
Hysteria is a diagnostic label applied to a state of mind, one of
unmanageable fear or emotional excesses. Here it is being used to describe
“fear of truth” or fear of thinking about unpleasant things so as to not
“rock the boat” of current contentment. [Editor’s note.]
24 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a
theologian by training and profession, greatly influenced German letters
with his literary criticism and his philosophy of history. Along with W.
Goethe and Schiller, he made Weimar the seat of German neohumanism. His
analogy of national cultures as organic beings had an enormous impact on
modern historical consciousness. Nations, he argued, possessed not only the
phases of youth, maturity, and decline but also singular, incomparable
worth. His mixture of anthropology and history was characteristic of the
age. [Editor’s note.]
Those times which many people later recall as the “good old days” thus
provide fertile soil for future tragedy because of the progressive
devolution of moral, intellectual, and personality values which give rise to
Rasputin-like eras.
The above is a sketch of the causative understanding of reality which in no
way contradicts a teleological25
perception of the sense of causality. Bad times are not merely the result of
hedonistic regression to the past; they have a historical purpose to
fulfill.
Suffering, effort, and mental activity during times of imminent bitterness
lead to a progressive, generally heightened, regeneration of lost values,
which results in human progress. Unfortunately, we still lack a sufficiently
exhaustive philosophical grasp of this interdependence of causality and
teleology regarding occurrences. It seems that prophets were more
clear-sighted, in the light of the laws of creation, than philosophers such
as E. S. Russell 26,
R. B.
Braithwaite 27, G. Sommerhoff 28,
and others who pondered this question.
25
Teleology is the supposition that there is design, purpose, directive
principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the
philosophical study of that purpose. [Editor’s note.]
26 Russell, E.S. 1916. Form and Function: A
Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology. London: Murray. [Editor’s
note.]
27 Braithwaite, R.B. (1900-1990): British
philosopher best known for his theories in the philosophy of science and in
moral and religious philosophy. Braithwaite’s work in the philosophy of the
physical sciences was important for his theories on the nature of scientific
inductive reasoning and the use of models, as well as on the use of
probabilistic laws. He also applied his scientific background to his studies
of moral and religious philosophy, particularly in the application of
mathematical game theory. In his book Theory of Games as a Tool for the
Moral Philosopher (1955), he demonstrated the ways in which game theory
could be used to arrive at moral choices and ethical decisions. His classic
work was Scientific Explanation: A Study of Theory, Probability and Law in
Science (1953), on the methodology of natural science.[Editor’s note.]
28 G. Sommerhoff, Analytical Biology (O.U.P.,
1950). [Editor’s note.]
When bad times arrive and people are overwhelmed by an excess of evil, they
must gather all their physical and mental strength to fight for existence
and protect human reason. The search for some way out of the difficulties
and dangers rekindles long-buried powers of discretion. Such people have the
initial tendency to rely on force in order to counteract the threat; they
may, for instance, become “trigger-happy” or dependent upon armies.
Slowly and laboriously, however, they discover the advantages conferred by
mental effort; improved understanding of the psychological situation in
particular, better differentiation of human characters and personalities,
and, finally, comprehension of one’s adversaries. During such times, virtues
which former generations relegated to literary motifs regain their real and
useful substance and become prized for their value. A wise person capable of
furnishing sound advice is highly respected.
How astonishingly similar were the philosophies of Socrates and Confucius,
those half-legendary thinkers who, albeit near-contemporaries, resided at
opposite ends of the great continent. Both lived during evil, bloody times
and adumbrated a method for conquering evil, especially regarding perception
of the laws of life and knowledge of human nature. They searched for
criteria of moral values within human nature and considered knowledge and
understanding to be virtues.
Both men, however, heard the same wordless
internal Voice warning those embarking upon important moral questions:
“Socrates, do not do this”.
That is why their efforts and sacrifices
constitute permanent assistance in the battle against evil.
Difficult and laborious times give rise to values which finally conquer evil
and produce better times. The succinct and accurate analysis of phenomena,
made possible thanks to the conquest of the expendable emotions and egotism
characterizing self-satisfied people, opens the door to causative behavior,
particularly in the areas of philosophical, psychological, and moral
reflection; this tips the scale to the advantage of goodness.
If these
values were totally incorporated into humankind’s cultural heritage, they
could sufficiently protect nations from the next era of errors and
distortions. However, the collective memory is impermanent and particularly
liable to remove a philosopher and his work from his context, namely his
time and place and the goals which he served.
Whenever an experienced person finds a moment of relative peace after a
difficult and painful effort, his mind is free to reflect unencumbered by
the expendable emotions and outdated attitudes of the past, but aided by the
cognizance of bygone years. He thus comes closer to an objective
understanding of phenomena and a view of actual causative links, including
such links which cannot be understood within the framework of natural
language. He thus meditates upon an ever-expanding circle of general laws
while contemplating the meaning of those former occurrences which separated
the periods of history. We reach for ancient precepts because we understand
them better; they make it easier for us to understand both the genesis and
the creative meaning of unhappy times.
The cycle of happy, peaceful times favors a narrowing of the world view and
an increase in egotism; societies become subject to progressive hysteria and
to that final stage, descriptively known to historians, which finally
produces times of despondency and confusion, that have lasted for millennia
and continue to do so. The recession of mind and personality which is a
feature of ostensibly happy times varies from one nation to another; thus
some countries manage to survive the results of such crises with minor
losses, whereas others lose nations and empires. Geopolitical factors have
also played a decisive role.
The psychological features of such crises doubtless bear the stamp of the
time and of the civilization in question, but one common denominator must
have been an exacerbation of society’s hysterical condition. This deviation
or, better yet, formative deficiency of character, is a perennial sickness
of societies, especially the privileged elites.
The existence of exaggerated individual cases,
especially such characterized as clinical, is an offshoot of the level of
social hysteria, quite frequently correlated with some additional causes
such as carriers of minor lesions of brain tissue. Quantitatively and
qualitatively, these individuals may serve to reveal and evaluate such
times, as indicated in history’s Book of San Michele 29.
29 Axel
Munthe, (1857-1949) physician, psychiatrist, and writer, was born in
Oskarshamn, Sweden. He was educated at the University of Uppsala and at
Montpellier in Paris where he received his M.D. He studied the work of the
French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot and used hypnosis in his own work
with the physical and psychological symptoms of his patients. He later
became physician to the Swedish Royal family. He became known as “the modern
St. Francis of Assissi” because he financed sanctuaries for birds. As a
writer Munthe recounted his own experiences as a physician and psychiatrist.
He is most famous for the autobiographical work The Story of San Michele
which was published in 1929. [Editor’s note.]
From the perspective of historical time, it would be harder to examine the
regression of the ability and correctness of reasoning or the intensity of
“Austrian talk”, although these approximate the crux of the matter better
and more directly.
In spite of above-mentioned qualitative differences, the duration of these
time-cycles tends to be similar. If we assume that the extreme of European
hysteria occurred around 1900 and returns not quite every two centuries, we
find similar conditions. Such cyclical isochronicity may embrace a
civilization and cross into neighboring countries, but it would not swim
oceans or penetrate into faraway and far different civilizations.
When the First World War broke out, young officers danced and sang on the
streets of Vienna:
“Krieg, Krieg, Krieg! Es wird ein schoener
Krieg ...”.
While visiting Upper Austria in 1978, I decided
to drop in on the local parson, who was in his seventies by then. When I
told him about myself, I suddenly realized he thought I was lying and
inventing pretty stories. He subjected my statements to psychological
analysis, based on this unassailable assumption and attempted to convince me
that his morals were lofty.
When I complained to a friend of mine about
this, he was amused:
“As a psychologist, you were extremely lucky
to catch the survival of authentic Austrian talk (die oesterreichische
Rede). We young ones have been incapable of demonstrating it to you even
if we wanted to simulate it.”
In the European languages, “Austrian talk” has
become the common descriptive term for paralogistic30
discourse. Many people using this term nowadays are unaware of its origin.
Within the context of maximum hysterical intensity in Europe at the time,
the authentic article represented a typical product of conversive thinking:
subconscious selection and substitution of data leading to chronic avoidance
of the crux of the matter. In the same manner, the reflex assumption that
every speaker is lying is an indication of the hysterical anti-culture of
mendacity, within which telling the truth becomes “immoral”.
30
Paralogism: n. illogical or fallacious deduction. paralogical, paralogistic,
a. paralogize, v.i. be illogical; draw unwarranted conclusions. paralogist,
n. [Editor’s note.]
That era of hysterical regression gave birth to the great war and the great
revolution which extended into Fascism, Hitler-ism, and the tragedy of the
Second World War. It also produced the macrosocial phenomenon whose deviant
character became superimposed upon this cycle, screening and destroying its
nature. Contemporary Europe is heading for the opposite extreme of this
historical sine curve.
We could thus assume that the beginning of the
next century will produce an era of optimal capability and correctness of
reason, thus leading to many new values in all realms of human discovery and
creativity. We can also foresee that realistic psychological understanding
and spiritual enrichment will be features of this era.
At the same time, America, especially the U.S.A., has reached a nadir for
the first time in its short history. Grey-haired Europeans living in the
U.S. today are struck by the similarity between these phenomena and the ones
dominating Europe at the times of their youth. The emotionalism dominating
individual, collective and political life, as well as the subconscious
selection and substitution of data in reasoning, are impoverishing the
development of a psychological world view and leading to individual and
national egotism. The mania for taking offense at the drop of a hat provokes
constant retaliation, taking advantage of hyper-irritability and
hypo-criticality on the part of others.31
This can be considered analogous to the European
dueling mania of those times. People fortunate enough to achieve a position
higher than someone else are contemptuous of their supposed inferiors in a
way highly reminiscent of czarist Russian customs. Turn-of-the-century
Freudian psychology finds fertile soil in this country because of the
similarity in social and psychological conditions.
31 The
litigious nature of Americans is known the world over. [Editor’s note.]
America’s psychological recession drags in its wake an impaired
socio-professional adaptation of this country’s people, leading to a waste
of human talent and an involution of societal structure. If we were to
calculate this country’s adaptation correlation index, as suggested in the
prior chapter, it would probably be lower than the great majority of the
free and civilized nations of this world, and possibly lower than some
countries which have lost their freedom.
A highly talented individual in the USA finds it ever more difficult to
fight his way through to self-realization and a socially creative position.
Universities, politics, and businesses ever more frequently demonstrate a
united front of relatively untalented persons and even incompetent persons.
The word “overeducated” is heard more and more often. Such “overquali-fied”
individuals finally hide out in some foundation laboratory where they are
allowed to earn the Nobel prize as long as they don’t do anything really
useful. In the meantime, the country as whole suffers due to a deficit in
the inspirational role of highly gifted individuals.
As a result, America is stifling progress in all areas of life, from culture
to technology and economics, not excluding political incompetence. When
linked to other deficiencies, an egotist’s incapability of understanding
other people and nations leads to political error and the scapegoating of
outsiders. Slamming the brakes on the evolution of political structures and
social institutions increases both administrative inertia and discontent on
the part of its victims.
We should realize that the most dramatic social difficulties and tensions
occur at least ten years after the first observable indications of having
emerged from a psychological crisis. Being a sequel, they also constitute a
delayed reaction to the cause or are stimulated by the same psychological
activation process.
The time span for effective countermeasures is thus
rather limited.
-
Is Europe entitled to look down on America for suffering from the same
sickness the former has succumbed to several times in the past?
-
Is America’s
feeling of superiority toward Europe derived from these past events and
their inhuman and tragic results?
-
If so, is this attitude anything more than
a harmless anachronism?
It would be most useful if the European nations
took advantage of their historical experience and more modern psychological
knowledge so as to help America most effectively.
East Central Europe, now under Soviet domination,32
is part of the European cycle, albeit somewhat delayed; the same applies to
the Soviet empire, especially to the European portion. There, however,
tracking these changes and isolating them from more dramatic phenomena
eludes the possibilities of observation, even if it is only a matter of
methodology.
32 At the time of
writing, 1984.
Even there, however, there is progressive growth
in the grass-roots resistance of the regenerative power of healthy common
sense. Year by year, the dominant system feels weaker vis-a-vis these
organic transformations. May we add to this a phenomenon the West finds
totally incomprehensible, and which shall be discussed in greater detail:
namely, the growing specific, practical knowledge about the governing
reality within countries whose regimes are similar.
This facilitates individual resistance and a
reconstruction of social links. Such processes shall, in the final analysis,
produce a watershed situation, although it will probably not be a bloody
counter-revolution.
The question suggests itself:
-
Will the time ever come when this eternal
cycle rendering the nations almost helpless can be conquered?
-
Can countries
permanently maintain their creative and critical activities at a
consistently high level?
Our era contains many exceptional moments; our
contemporary Macbeth witches’ cauldron holds not only poisonous ingredients,
but also progress and understanding such as humanity has not seen in
millennia.
Upbeat economists point out that humanity has gained a powerful slave in the
form of electric energy and that war, conquest, and subjugation of other
countries is becoming increasingly unprofitable in the long run.
Unfortunately, as we shall see later in this work, nations can be pushed
into economically irrational desires and actions by other motives whose
character is meta-economic.
That is why overcoming these other causes and
phenomena which give rise to evil is a difficult, albeit at least
theoretically attainable, task. However, in order to master it, we must
understand the nature and dynamics of said phenomena: an old principle of
medicine that I will repeat again and again is:
“Ignota, nulla curatio morbi.”
One accomplishment of modern science,
contributing to the destruction of these eternal cycles, is the development
of communication systems which have linked our globe into one huge
“village”. The time cycles sketched herein used to run their course almost
independently in various civilizations at different geographical locations.
Their phases neither were, nor are, synchronized. We can assume that the
American phase lags 80 years behind the European.
When the world becomes an interrelated structure
from the viewpoint of communicating both information and news, different
social contents and opinions caused by unlike phases of said cycles,
inter alia, will overflow all boundaries and information security
systems. This will give rise to pressures which can change the causative
dependencies herein. A more plastic psychological situation thus emerges,
which increases the possibilities for pinpointed action based on an
understanding of the phenomena.
At the same time, in spite of many difficulties of a scientific, social and
political nature, we see the development of a new community of factors which
may eventually contribute to the liberation of mankind from the effects of
uncomprehended historical causation. The development of science, whose final
goal is a better understanding of man and the laws of social life, could, in
the long run, cause public opinion to accept the essential knowledge about
human nature and the development of the human personality, which will enable
the harmful processes to be controlled. Some forms of international
cooperation and supervision will be needed for this.
The development of human personality and its capacity for proper thinking
and accurate comprehension of reality entails a certain amount of risk and
demands overcoming comfortable laziness and applying the efforts of special
scientific work under conditions quite different from those under which we
have been raised.
Under such conditions, an egotistic personality, accustomed to a comfortably
narrow environment, superficial thinking, and uncontrolled emotionalism,
will experience very favorable changes, which cannot be induced by anything
else.
Specially altered conditions will cause such a personality to begin
disintegrating, thus giving rise to intellectual and cognitive efforts and
moral reflection.
One example of such a program of experience is the American Peace Corps.
Young people travel to many poor developing countries in order to live and
work there, often under primitive conditions. They learn to understand other
nations and customs, and their egotism decreases. Their world view develops
and becomes more realistic.
They thus lose the characteristic defects of the
modern American character.
In order to overcome something whose origin is shrouded in the mists of time
immemorial, we often feel we must battle the ever-turning windmills of
history. However, the end goal of such effort is the possibility that an
objective understanding of human nature and its eternal weaknesses, plus the
resulting transformation of societal psychology, may enable us effectively
to counteract or prevent the destructive and tragic results sometime in the
not too distant future.
Our times are exceptional, and suffering now gives rise to better
comprehension than it did centuries ago. This understanding and knowledge
fit better into the total picture, since they are based on objective data.
Such a view therefore becomes realistic, and people and problems mature in
action. Such action should not be limited to theoretical contemplations, but
rather, acquire organization and form.
In order to facilitate this, let us consider the selected questions and the
draft of a new scientific discipline which would study evil, discovering its
factors of genesis, insufficiently understood properties, and weak spots,
thereby outlining new possibilities to counteract the origin of human
suffering.
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