Human Nature
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New Answers for Eternal Questions: Collective Image Psychology
There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and duly; nor any science so arduous as to know how to live this life of ours well and naturally. And of our maladies the most wild and barbarous is to despise our being.
Michael Eyquem Montaigne
3. Chapter - Collective Image Psychology
Collective
images, like self-images, motivate. People
who distrust Jews allow anti-Semitism to contaminate the possibility of congenial relations,
just as Jewish anti-Gentilism destroys hope of inter-denominational friendship. My mother
predicted a day comes in every interfaith marriage when the argument ends with someone called
"dirty Jew".
I do not know about intermarriage, but I know about
anti-Semitism. Working in the Chicago office of Arthur Young & Company, a national accounting
firm, I fell into the habit of lunching with another junior auditor. One day, for want of
something better to do, we compared New York and Chicago. We assessed theaters, restaurants,
whatever came to mind, until he offered the real reason for Chicago's superiority. "New York",
he said, "has too many Jews." When I told him I was Jewish, it was his turn to be flabbergasted.
The next day he transferred to another audit and I never
saw him again. I decided I was wrong to be offended by his slander. We were victims of
collective competition, which like individual competition, generates animosity. Unlike individual
combat, collective battles are never won. Jews endured inquisition, pogrom, and holocaust,
ancient atrocities that contaminate relations between Jew and gentile to this day.
We absorb stereotypes early, accumulating collective wisdom.
Parents teach their vision of life's lessons, it being a vain but general belief that hard learned
knowledge remains valid forever. It disturbs parents when children question ancient wisdom.
Parents forget the young have no stake in the status quo. Life stretches into an infinite
future, providing the time one needs to be tentative and experimental. Parents know that life
is finite, but rejection of the standards on which they based their lives rankles.
In primitive circumstance, collective truth endures. Tribes that sail oceans in canoes retain
lessons taught by wind and sea until outboard motors alter the equation. Societies caught in
rapid technological change have few lessons one generation can teach another. The result
is a generation gap. Grandmothers, whose bathing suits extended from knee to elbow,
grapple with the implications of the bikini. To be young in 1900 meant being grateful chastity
belts are no longer the vogue.
Collective wisdom differs
from culture to culture, and
at this point theory founders. Since we want nothing less than an explanation for universal
collective behavior, we need a universal collective perception, a world view common to every
society. I believe that world view is a perception of humankind as brutish and nasty. I know
a negative perception of Homo Sapiens permeated Trenton, New Jersey in 1949 where, as a
market researcher, I asked random pedestrians, "Do you think human nature can be changed?"
My employer, attempting to pique the curiosity of strangers, intended to mislead my subjects
into thinking we were about to explore cosmic matters when he wanted their opinion about
bath soap. I asked a few hundred people and not one believed human nature could be changed.
At the time I did not think human nature could be changed either.
When theory
reevaluated assumptions, I realized that
'human nature' is the collective equivalent of self image, working the same behavioral
sorcery. Like individuals who define themselves, we make our collective expectation true
by becoming the species we think we are. My negative perception of mankind originated with
my father who told me that in this life everyone must get his and hang on to it, a depressing
precept learned early in his life. He immigrated to the United States when he was eight and
landed in a savage Brooklyn slum. Jewish boys who wandered into neighboring Italian or
Irish precincts were beaten for their audacity, a favor the Jews repaid when tables were turned.
My father feared poverty to the day he died. In his scheme of things, money made you
'something'. Without money you were 'nothing'. Since the stakes in this economic game
were one's sense of self, he recognized few rules. In 1928, the year I was born, he and his
brother opened "The Bridgeport Dress Store" whose motto, "Dresses made on premises",
referred to my Uncle Lou's shop upstairs. Although my father did not sell my Uncle Louie's
dresses, he insisted the motto was accurate.
By the time I was
fourteen I worked for my father after
school and all day Saturday. When the owner of the shoe department offered to triple my pay,
I jumped at the chance, expecting my father to welcome this economic advance, but he delivered
a tirade on ingratitude. It was a sign of my times that I saw no alternative to working at his
lower rate. On Saturdays, as we drove to work, he lectured me on life as he saw it.
Like all sons, I thought my father knew what he was talking about. I now know his dreams were
nearly as grand as mine. He wanted a mercantile dynasty, and tried to persuade me that
making money my highest priority would serve me as well as it served him. In 1946 we moved
into a Westport, Connecticut mansion complete with swimming pool. When Burt Lancaster made
The Swimmer, a movie about a man who swims across his town by swimming across several
swimming pools, the house in the nude pool scene was ours.
My parents loved that
house. It was a dream come true. I hated
it. Where they wanted space between themselves and the world, I longed to be one of the bunch.
My heart sank when friend's eyes widened as we entered the gate with the big house some distance
away. I resented the wall that house erected. My parents enjoyed going one up before visitors
opened the door. I blamed my parents for my deficient sense of self and tried to persuade
them their life had been a mistake. I wanted revenge because I could not meet their expectations.
By the time I discovered they were as trapped in their time as I was in mine, nothing could
be undone. When I was twenty-two my father told me that at twenty-two Alexander Hamilton was
Secretary of the Treasury. It was years before I realized my father had not been secretary
of the treasury either. His death brought relief, not unselfish thanks pain
finally ended, but gratitude our competition was over. His last years were the most difficult
of our relationship. I learned the man I feared into adulthood, was so insecure he had
difficulty dealing with those he saw as equal or better. When I understood the extent of
his fears, I knew what ails the world.
It seems foolish
to equate a private quarrel with the
human condition, but I cast my father as every capitalist, although like all stereotypes
it may abridge a larger reality. My father exemplified the strivers of any day, and he
hated humanity. He thought it beneath contempt, and the perception justified anything
necessary to separate himself from that awful mass. A hard man, he choose battles carefully
and avoided situations he did not control. He used money to manipulate his family and those
who wanted his business. He taught me money is power, but he did not see questing after
power as deranged. I believe the power seekers of the world hate humanity and that we
follow them confirms their low opinion of the rest of us. Mention of classless societies
angered my father. When I talked of utopia, I demonstrated my stupidity.
Inter-generational
conflict begins when the Oedipus
complex hardens into a way of life. That was the problem with me and my father. I wanted
to rub his nose in his beliefs, destroy his beloved class structure, demote financial
accomplishment to aberration, and do it despite a society that reveres greed and selfishness.
He wanted me to concede his superiority because he started with nothing and prospered.
Since I began where he ended, I could never match his achievement. My debt to his success,
was, as he saw it, eternal and inescapable. After time tempered anger, I decided my desire
to beat him at his game reflected an insecurity that demanded I prove myself in terms he understood. My urge to be great began in an ambiguous family relationship with a father displaced by his son. Mothers who chose sons over husbands create nasty triangles in which sons become pawns in the battle of the sexes. My father came from that psychological environment and created another in his home. Occupied with earning a living, he had no time to explore life's meaning or consider breaking with the past.
To my father being ordinary was a terrible offense. Like the hero of Koestler's Darkness at
Noon he thought God hated the common man because he had made him so common. My father's vision
of humanity was bleak and constant. He saw everyone motivated by human nature which meant no
one could be trusted.
Since we think 'human nature' is innate, we again chose
between
mind and body, and again negative experience justifies negative expectations. My suggestion
that destructive collective behavior derives from negative collective imagery is not
immediately reasonable, but it follows the logic of self-image psychology.
Comparison, the process that defines individual identity, defines collective identity, and
like individual comparisons, collective comparisons yield meaningless distinctions created
by arbitrary standards. We compare groups as eagerly as we compare individuals.
When a group succeeds, its members share the triumph. We ignore the collective contribution
to the sense of self even when unpaid bills drive us to distraction. Men who steal bread when
their children are starving might not steal under different conditions, but we are
self-righteous because another's fall proves our superiority. It does not overstate the problem
to say we cannot find individual peace without changing collective circumstance.
Ironically, wealth
does not guarantee psychological
well being. I toured the Vanderbilt summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, marveling at
marble floors and an enormous dining table. How outraged that old man would be to know
the likes of me now walk his hallowed halls, but the discomfort and unfriendliness of the place,
even for its masters, was apparent. I pictured Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt at each end of that long
table, eating silently because conversation over that distance was too taxing. Money
contaminates the rich the way lack of money contaminates the poor. Missteps abound and falls
from heights damage more than never reaching "the top". Years ago industrialist Robert Young
purchased the New York Central Railroad. It was a mistake, and he killed himself when his net
worth fell to six million dollars. My father, who never accumulated six million dollars,
could not understand how anyone with so much money could kill himself. Never having failed,
he did not see failure as bitter, sometimes fatal, medicine.
If self image
psychology is relevant to collective
behavior, the cure for present collective difficulties requires us to change our perception
of humanity. The suggestion we can be decent seems foolishly optimistic, but there is no
harm giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We have imagination enough to aspire
to the farthest reaches of space, but perhaps nature in her devious way insures that
unstable species self-destruct before they violate the universe. Without a change of our
collective mind we would spread human pollution and destroy less powerful life forms to
gratify an inferiority-based need for triumph. Collectively we foul our nest to the point
of madness, and are so thoroughly discouraged, we may, like suicidal individuals, destroy
ourselves, saying good riddance as we go.
We need no opinion
poll to prove we take a dim view
of humanity. We remember the insults of prominent men and bequeath them to subsequent
generations as wisdom. Marcus Tullius Cicero saw in the common man, "...no wisdom, no
penetration, no power of judgment." Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) believed:
Men have less hesitation in offending one who makes himself
beloved than one who makes himself feared; for love holds by a bond
of obligation which, as mankind is bad, is broken on every occasion
whenever it is for the interest of the obliged party to break it. But
fear holds by the apprehension of punishment which never leaves men.
Today munitions dealer
Sam Cummings says, "The arms
business is founded on human folly. That is why its depth will never be plumbed and why
it will go on forever." Marvin Harris asserts, "No anthropologist would deny that there
is a human nature", and Newsweek's Peter Prescott reports that, "Even under socialism
human nature remains an unregenerate constant." Jimmy Breslin characterizes the Catholic
doctrine of original sin as, "...constant acknowledgment of the dark side of man".
Anthony Lewis grimly intones that no one can be naive anymore about human nature.
L.S. Stavrianos
studied Stone Age behavior and
concluded our natural impulse is towards cooperation. "The human nature myth", he wrote,
"holds that Homo Sapiens is a singularly disagreeable creature-selfish, covetous, and
bellicose. But when we examine the records of our Paleolithic ancestors, whose history
comprises some 80 percent of total human experience, we find that they were the precise
opposite of this 'human nature' stereotype. The proof of this is the dramatic discovery
in 1971 of the Tasaday-a tribe of 27 Stone Age tribesmen who had been living in complete
isolation is southern Mindanao Island of the Philippines for at least six centuries."
Twenty-seven stone
age tribesmen do not define human
behavioral possibility, and if recent collective behavior is any indication, we may be
as bad as we think. We think we need law and order to keep from each other's throats
and like Machiavelli, believe fear the true motivator. Why else increase jail sentences
to decrease the incidence of crime?
Religions presume
the universality of sinners,
and have so consistently taught the wickedness of basic human impulses, Barbara Tuchman's
description of fourteenth century Christianity describes Christianity today.
...The Christian ideal was ascetic: the denial of sensual man. The result was that under
the sway of the Church, life became a continual struggle against the senses and continual
engagement in sin, accounting for the persistent need for absolution.
Rejection of utopia
as a human possibility is additional
proof of a universal negative perception of humanity. The American Heritage Dictionary (1975 ed)
defines a 'utopian' as, "...a zealous but impractical reformer of human society", a bleak
appraisal that might be overlooked were it not increasingly reasonable to see the future as
a race between utopia and extinction. The choice is extreme and having heard many prophets
of doom, we are to be excused if we do not take present circumstance seriously. The original
Jeremiah predicted the Jews would be enslaved, and they were, but Jews have not been slaves
for some time. Being right in the short run but wrong in the long is an occupational hazard
of Jeremiahs. A millennium from now a twentieth century nuclear war may lose its horror.
Five-armed mutants evolved from atomic battles may decide what was devastating for us was
not so bad after all. It is, however, more reasonable to prophesy an unhappy end for World
War III, just as it is reasonable to suggest we cannot continue as we are. Either the burdens
we place on the environment will overwhelm life, or the contaminations of war will be too
onerous for human resilience to overcome. Positive thinking is an unlikely antidote for these
problems, but we have nothing to lose. If brimstone awaits, it does no harm to greet oblivion
with a modicum of collective self esteem.
I cannot 'prove' a
universal distaste for the human
animal causes our present collective predicament, but how else explain creatures who spend
brief lives establishing differences from their fellows? Wealthy people I know invariably
disparage humanity and reject the idea of a different future. My father had a capitalist's
instincts and he despised humanity, but I have not asked political or economic leaders if
they think war inevitable or if they categorize people as something or nothing depending
on how much money they have. In these days of public relations, overt contempt for humanity
is unfashionable, but it is a basic tenet of capitalist theory that people will not work
unless their efforts are translated into advantage over their neighbors. "All of us," says
Philip Felig, "have come to depend upon and expect clearly expressed awareness of
accomplishment in the form of promotions, good reviews, election to professional societies,
gratitude from patients and clients and, of course, raises. I'm sure that only a very small
group of idealists would be left to toil if all these rewards vanished." The first Rockefeller
admonished his family to appreciate, "...that we have so prospered...it seems a fabulous
dream but I assure you it is a solid and very comforting fact...How different our condition
from the multitudes, let us be thankful." It remained for Thorstein Veblen to hit the
capitalist nail on its acquisitive head. "The possession of goods," he wrote, "whether
acquired by one's own exertion or passively by transmission through inheritance from
others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The possession of wealth, which
was at the outset valued simply as evidence of efficiency, becomes in popular apprehension,
itself a meritorious act. Wealth is now itself intrinsically honorable and confers honor
on its possessor." Karl Marx ignored our inclination to self-aggrandizement and predicted
capitalist nations would quickly adopt communism. It turned out his beloved proletariat
prefers the capitalist fantasy of shackling others with economic chains.
Hierarchies
provide opportunities for individuals to
'prove' themselves, but if the game is to be significant, available wealth must be
limited while individual accumulations are not. The result of this zero-sum entertainment
is disparity which is its point. Were there no envy of haves by have nots, if some are
not starving while others overeat, hierarchy's gratifications vanish. Negative collective
imagery creates a psychology of scarcity, a system in which production is curtailed in order
to maintain the significance of wealth. It strikes no one as strange that widespread hunger
is accompanied by systematic limitations on the production of food, and it is not enough
that people starve. Those who succeed remain unsatisfied because the validity of the truth
they mean to establish is proportional to the money or power they acquire. Inferiority drives
some up, others down. At the extremes are the true haters, the despots and the maniacs.
Another product of
negative collective imagery is
the exalted status of work. Work earns one's keep, and although many employments demean,
we work because work cleanses. We think workers, regardless of what they do, contribute
to society, a more realistic perception when collective survival depended on contributions
from every citizen. Work's emotional gratifications tamed frontiers and develops the
technology we enjoy, but when self esteem is derived from employment, (a relationship also
found in communist countries) those willing to work must have an opportunity to do so.
In the United States
the collective demand for full
employment inspires torrents of political rhetoric. Jimmy Carter, imitating all presidential
aspirants, declared, "I believe that anyone who is able to work, ought to work--and have the
chance to work," a sentiment shared by running mate Mondale who said, "We believe in
the dignity of work and the right of everyone to a job." This attitude towards work (it does
not matter what you do as long as you do something) differs from Tolstoy's-"One can live
magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the
person one loves and to love one's work." Unlike Tolstoy, we divorce work from feeling.
One rarely meets a salesman warmed by the romance of life insurance or an accountant
transformed by the Internal Revenue Code. Assembly lines, clerical tasks, secretarial skills,
mail handling, most of today's employments, have little potential for satisfaction. When
the value of work is questioned, this imposition of unproductive life long careers is
revealed as the cruel and unusual punishment it is.
We work for many
reasons. Idle fingers, we believe,
lead to idle minds, and idle minds foment the unrest that encourages human nature's dark
side to surface in riot and murder. The Old Testament asks:
How long will you sleep, O Sluggard?
Yet a little sleep, a little slumber,
A little folding of the hands to sleep
So shall your poverty come as a thief
And your want as an armed man.
We work for
necessities and for luxuries, for status,
or for want of something better to do, but it has been some time since what we do related
to collective need. Most of us are clerks and tellers, inventory takers and lawyers. For
the sake of livelihoods we endorse an inefficient system in which each producer creates
a chaos of different versions of the same thing. We transform automobiles from transportation
to personal statement to indulge our fancy for individuality and further our goal of full
employment. Changing fashion creates employment by creating demand, but the need to be
employed, like the need to be fashionable, cannot be excused as genetic command.
Intensified demand
for amenities (we want it now!) places
increased pressure on capitalism forcing it beyond Veblen's conspicuous consumption. With
the concept of disposable everything, we move from foolishness to psychosis. Manufacturers
incorporate obsolescence into products to insure demand for future production, and we ignore
the waste and bother of breakdowns because they provide jobs. We change style to persuade
the style conscious to buy new before exhausting the old, expanding a concept previously
limited to clothing. "The history of fashionable dress," says Quentin Bell. "is tied to
competition between the classes. In the first place the emulation of the aristocracy by
the bourgeoisie and then the more extended competition which results from the ability of the
proletariat to compete with the middle classes." We compete in houses, lawns, automobiles,
boats, and interior decor, anything that persuades us we are better for owning it. To the
dismay of those catering to fashion, many young people reject the game. Pierre Cardin, whose
contributions to fashion are well known, refers to denim jeans as an enemy of creativity
which must be "destroyed".
Our need for jobs
influences social decisions. We choose
automobiles over mass transportation, trucks over trains, and find ourselves in an energy
crisis that cannot be resolved without profound social change. Every gallon of petroleum
consumed contributes to the goal of employment, but fuel shortages may force us to acknowledge
that full employment is no longer a reasonable social expectation. Our effort to create jobs
spawns huge bureaucracies and a wasteful armaments industry, but even so large a commitment
does not accommodate everyone who wants work. The futility of present perceptions culminated
in a lawsuit against the University of California. The plaintiffs sought to enjoin development
of mechanical tomato pickers. They claimed the displacement of farm workers by machinery
improperly used public funds. They did not complain of the thick-skinned, tasteless tomatoes
bred to make the machine practical. That indignity does not approach the indignity of
unemployment.
Economics is everywhere
and important decisions are made
with no regard for social consequences. Designs of nuclear reactors, airplanes, and automobiles
are compromises between safety and thrift. Pollution comes from industries that find
it cheaper to contaminate, and whose managers fear the expenditure required to end present
practices exceeds corporate resources. Inflation, a problem associated with federal deficits,
is also job related. Spending less eliminates deficits, but, as the debate over the B-1 bomber
proved, government spending creates jobs, and, as Shana Alexander put it, "Jobs are the bottom
line." The late Robert Kennedy went beyond employment and saw jobs as an important part
of the individual sense of self. "In the United States you are what you do", he said, an
allusion to the fact that some occupations are grander than others. Different self concepts
explain why farm workers in California fight to remain farm workers while others strive to
avoid farm work. Jobs gratify our need to be individual, but entrepreneurs
and commissars are inconsistent with conservation of limited resources. Technology makes
unbridled individualism too dangerous, but we have been at it so long we see no alternative
to the way things are. With livings to earn, our need for income locks us into present practice.
Necessity, evil product of a psychology of scarcity, inclines us to keep things the way they are.
Economics causes that
ubiquitous resistance to change
sociologists call `cultural lag'. We defend our niche because we resist being less than
we are. When Joseph E. Levine said, "Financially my whole life was in this movie. If it had
gone wrong, I would have been badly damaged", he described the anxiety that accompanies
the toss of the economic dice. Others with less to lose, fight equally hard to keep what
they have and the result is hardening of the social arteries. Children endure outmoded
curricula because teachers, who know nothing of the technology of the day, resist departures
from the reading, writing, and arithmetic, that is their stock in trade. Carpenters,
plumbers, or computer programmers might share occupational skills, but with livelihoods
dependent on special knowledge, they keep what they know to themselves.
Whatever one thinks
of hierarchy, the conclusion is
inescapable that the emotional force driving would-be achievers is a negative perception
of humanity, an appraisal so low they do anything to keep from believing they are no different
from the rest. Like Groucho Marx who would not belong to a club that would have him for a
member, those who climb hierarchies despise those they surpass. Contempt of high for low
is as old as history, and representative democracy changed nothing. Presidents demonstrate
disdain for constituents with devices like the press release, a manipulation of those deemed
incapable of handling truth, especially when that truth reveals the leader as less than grand.
With the advent of television and a perpetual race for the presidency, presidential stature
declines because few so badly need the approbation of strangers, they stay that terrible course.
Interaction between
negative collective imagery and
collective practice touches every aspect of our lives. Industrial pollution is a grandiose
rejection of limitation, a state of mind we have no difficulty diagnosing as deranged
when it occurs in individuals. Charles Barden, Executive Director of the Texas Air Pollution
Control Board, found no constituency for environmental considerations and concluded that
we prefer economic growth to clean air. Judging from the number of communities that put
industrial development ahead of pollution control, he is right.
Environmentalists
suffer abuse from those who do not
see the preservation of a species as more important than employment. In a letter to Time
Magazine, Kent Williams wrote that if he were "...an out of work construction worker
in Maine, he would sure take care of the Furbish Lousewort", a species of plant endangered
by a proposed power project. A scientist friend would solve the problem of radioactive
waste by shooting it into the sun where in his words it would be, "A fart in a windstorm",
an indelicate reference to human insignificance. He may be right. The sun's mass and
temperature should overwhelm our rubbish, but the sun, like the earth, may be more fragile
than we imagine. Adding radioactive material to the sun's mass may create conditions we
are too ignorant to anticipate, just as pesticides and industrial wastes carried risks
we knew nothing about. It is significant that first warnings of dangers inherent in
technology came from inspired and questioning amateurs like Rachel Carson, not from our
experts who have difficulty believing anything they do matters.
If we bombard
the sun with atomic effluent and
thoughtlessly extinguish its light, the stupidity of the gesture will underscore our
strength and our insignificance. Wheeling galaxies will not note the failure of our
evolutionary scheme, but we will have proven ourselves strong enough to take the sun
with us. Perhaps our search for significance through destruction will tempt us to take
the universe with us, but destruction is an insane goal. Seeking the power to destroy or
the ability to conquer is the essence of inferiority. The intensity of the effort is the measure
of the madness.
Everything about
our lives indicates a widespread negative
perception of humanity, and collective behavior based on that perception, exhibits patterns
similar to those found in self destructive individuals. We eradicate life and pollute at
our convenience, transgressions so malevolent they can only be explained as mental disorder.
We move mountains and harness atoms, yet remain persuaded we do not matter. If there is excuse
for what has been done, it is that we underestimate human potential. We endanger not from
malice, but because we do not believe we can bring the planet down. We see nature as vast
and ourselves as weak long after that reality ended.
Like individual
behavior, collective behavior has many
possibilities. Nations can be colonizer or colony, victor or vanquished and, as with
individual behavior, the transaction supposedly reveals something about winner and loser.
We wage war to prove superiority, the same reason we wheel and deal. I know Jews who take pride
in Jewish accomplishment, the writings of Freud or the insights of Einstein. They glory in
Israel's military victories. A similar pride in collective accomplishment warms gentile
hearts. A radical laborite Englishman told me he would retain the royal family in his
new order because it would not be England without them. He is wrong. England remains England,
but without feudal pageantry, nothing remains to provoke memories of former glory. Collectively
we play the games individuals play. Bad as we are, victory proves they are worse.
The antidote for
collective self hatred is to view all
humans as equal, and believe humanity possesses infinite possibility. Equality does not make
us identical, but we are equal in the sense that status in this life is irrelevant to the next.
Brotherly love is not required, nor need we feel guilty if, unlike Will Rogers, we meet
someone we dislike. Self image psychology deals in equality, not love, and its kinder perceptions
eliminate gratifications derived from individual or collective combat. When we are equal, we can
take nothing from anyone to create the illusion of superiority in ourselves.
The change of mind
will be difficult because contempt
for humanity is grounded in self contempt. Somerset Maugham who saw himself as no different
than most, believed that if he set down every thought that crossed his mind, the world
would consider him a monster of depravity. In My Fair Lady Eliza Doolittle dreams
of revenging herself on Henry Higgins. "Just you wait", she sings, and we smile knowingly
because we, too, find in reverie the redress indignity demands. Like Jimmy Carter we lust
in our hearts, and confronted by individual experience, we decide that we, collectively,
are depraved. Our boss belittles us and we dream of murder, stopping short of the crime.
We think ourselves depraved and project that perception on strangers. We judge others by
ourselves and do not like what we see. Were we to eliminate inferiority, we eliminate
inferiority based fantasies, the nasty visions that persuade us we are mean.
The humanity
perceived by self-image psychology is
more complex than Rousseau's noble savages or Freud's inhibited demons. Neither
'good' nor 'bad', we collectively are what we think we are. We create collective reality
with collective expectations and inhabit the reality those expectations create. If you
think war inevitable and ordinary people incapable of understanding the issues of the day;
if you think utopia impossible and humanity irredeemably vile; if you think history must
repeat itself, it is time to reconsider. Change is a human possibility, but before
exploring what may be, we must examine the perceptions that brought us to where we are.
Back to top
Book chapters
- Chapter - Theory Overview
- Chapter - Self Image Psychology
- Chapter - Collective Image Psychology
- Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Religion
- Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Sex
- Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Parents
- Chapter - Pollution and Other Terrors of our Times
- Chapter - More Problems: Representative Democracy
- Chapter - More Problems: William Toste
- Chapter - Embracing the Future: Television
- Chapter - Embracing the Future: Computers
- Chapter - Embracing the Future: Floating
- Chapter - Embracing the Future: Scenarios
- Chapter - Embracing the Future: Utopia
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