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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