Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

harmony, is expressed by the following: When a human being behaves like an animal, he is often described as having “lost control,” as though it is only conscious control that reins in our bestiality; we are presumed to be rampant individuals pursuing our own survival at any cost. However, when a parent sacrifices herself for a child, it is never described as a “loss of control.”

Obviously, no one can deny the ample evidence of morally bad behavior. But neither ought one deny the evidence of the opposite. There are noble acts of selflessness, generosity, empathy, sharing, caring, and even self-sacrifice. The difference is in that which “comes naturally.” One group chooses to see human beings as survival-oriented hedonists whose aggressiveness is contained only by the restricting forces of civilization. This group views unselfishness as an attribute that must be indoctrinated into the actions of the individual by a controlling culture. The other group sees caring as innate, but capable of being destroyed by a lack of proper nurture.

Freud straddled both camps but ended up on the side of a norm for decency. He was aware of the bizarre extended helplessness of the human child and the biological mandate for adult care and sympathy. Since the fate of the species could not depend on some learned control patterns on the part of parents, he had to assume that care for the helpless child must be guaranteed by nature, not simply learned. Caring is not like chemistry or piano playing, something that must be taught. Caring must be part of the genetic mandate of our species. A tender and protective attitude to the newborn—and by extension to the innocent and the helpless—is innate.

If we accept this premise, one can not suspend moral judgment of certain behavior by attributing it to cultural diversity. There are at least some norms and values that cross political and cultural boundaries. There are some absolute criteria of good and evil. Encouraging innocent children to destroy other innocent children for political purposes is evil. How can we cope with such evil? Only by confronting and understanding it. Only by seeing the links that tie pathological to normal behavior. Therefore we need to examine the decidedly strange conduct of “normal” people before analyzing the pathological aspects of behavior.

We do not conduct our lives like the ants, in a predictable pattern designed to support our survival. We are capable of being unpredictable to the point of self-destructiveness. The fact that we are animals endowed with rationality unfortunately does not mean that we are rational animals. The possession of reason does not ensure reasonableness. At least not all the time. One has only to look at the crazy pace and pursuits of life in our times to know that something besides survival is at stake and that something other than reason is driving us to our goals. Think of the tobacco industry, where executives spend their lives encouraging people to kill themselves by utilizing their products. And think of the people who buy these products in the face of the clearest evidence that lung cancer is an elected option, the one malignant disease we are all free to escape.

Many of us, bankers and brokers, hucksters and peddlers, devote seventy to eighty hours each week to grinding and unrewarding work, waiting for the opportunity to retire. Is there anything that money can buy that is worth the time spent earning it in often deadening and sometimes immoral pursuits—in dissipation of energy and self-respect? And here we are talking about presumably normal behavior, as distinguished from the pathological actions of terrorists.

Human conduct is obviously not analogous to the practice of engineering. We do not take the best available evidence and apply it to the problem at hand. We do not design our lives the way we design bridges. But before we can deal with something so irrational as paranoia and psychopathic conduct, we must deal with the “irrational” elements of normal people in their everyday life—if only to be able to draw a moral distinction between them and the crazy and aberrant.

Normal human beings operate in what had for years seemed mysterious ways, best explained elliptically through the creative insights of our great writers. With the birth of modern psychology in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the study of normal behavior—perception, memory, learning, and motivation—was put on scientific footing. This was quickly followed by a systematic attempt to understand pathological behavior. Out of that crush of insight and genius emerged one towering figure who attempted to fuse the two, Sigmund Freud.

Oh, how this mighty figure who dominated intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century has fallen in recent decades! The oversell and overkill of psychoanalytic theory promised an explanation for all behavior and relief from all mental illness. No theory could ever fulfill the expectations of all this hype. But the disillusionment with what it failed to achieve—a cure for mental illness—must not obscure what it did accomplish; it supplied us with one of the most comprehensive and usable theories of normal human motivation. Certain Freudian insights can help us in understanding the variety of normal experience and also the limits of normalcy. By establishing the boundaries of even so irrational an animal as the human being, we will be able to understand the neurotic and psychotic extensions that lead to hatred and terror.

The contributions of Freud that have stood the test of time—and have been absorbed into commonsense understanding of how we behave—can be grouped into the following:

1. We are not all as rational as we like to think. Freud assaulted the cockiness and arrogance of the technological optimists at the birth of the twentieth century by pointing out the limits of reason. He focused on the emotions that are often the hidden drivers of our actions, the sexual instinct and our aggressive needs. Admittedly he overemphasized the role of the sexual drive, but in the process he forced us to attend to