Читать книгу The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays - Edwin H. Friedman - Страница 10

Talk more about the dark side.

Very well. I have designed a whole set of temptations to fit those three natural limitations of the human condition: omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality, which as I said become more tempting as anxiety increases. If you want, I’ll explain how I have structured each set, but let me warn you, you’re going to find some of this very disturbing.

I’ll just pretend you’re not telling the truth.

Fair enough. To begin with: omniscience. What I do here is to get the human species to equate the mind — or more narrowly the cortex — with the soul.

As with the word “psyche”?

Ah, that one word helps immeasurably. It originally referred to the soul, but I have gotten the social sciences to equate it with the mind.

As in psychology, psychiatry, and psychosomatic?

By getting humans to think that their thought processes are the key to everything, I get them first of all to overlook the emotional processes that might be driving their thinking processes. That, in turn, furthers the absurd dichotomy between body and soul, which, as you may know, goes against all the new findings that the brain is the largest organ of secretion, sending messages to and receiving messages from all parts of the body simultaneously. Not even memory is solely in the brain. In all events I have succeeded just through that one word, “psyche,” in seducing the entire eastern intellectual establishment into concentrating on all kinds of irrelevancies. I begin with the focus on IQ as a quantitative category. That one starts in grade school, determines the structure of SATs in the selection process for higher learning institutions (which also sets the selection process for who will run society), and evolves into evaluations throughout every organizational structure. From that point, it’s relatively easy to get both parents and presidents to think that communication is a cerebral phenomenon depending on syntax, vocabulary, and rhetoric rather than an emotional process that depends on distance, direction, and anxiety. You know, people can’t get near you unless they are moving towards you.

So that whenever you are pursuing or rescuing, your message will never catch up.

Exactly. Next I get them to focus on values rather than self-regulation. And once I’ve got them concentrating in this fashion, then it becomes child’s play to focus them on data and method rather than on maturity and stamina. Have you any idea how many different diseases now have names? I mean emotional and physical illness. Why, I just got DSM 4, the new version of the psychiatric scriptures, to include almost a hundred new syndromes, though they left out another hundred disorders I thought up. In fifty years no one is going to be able to carry it around. But this is where the increased anxiety and the denial of human limits comes in. By overwhelming everyone with data, no one can feel adequate — and this one is also equally true for parents and presidents — so that the increased knowledge, instead of helping, adds to the anxiety. Then I work on the helping professions particularly. Focused on data rather than on their own maturity, they are easily caught up in society’s quick-fix attitude and try harder and harder to “cure” everything. But of course they can’t keep up. And here’s the best part of all. As long as I can keep the helping professions focused on addictions such as alcohol, drugs, and abuse, rather than their own self-regulation, they can’t see how their own perpetual imbibing of data and technique is the worst form of substance abuse around.

They’re searching for knowledge.

Nonsense, it’s not knowledge; otherwise it would lead to wisdom. Wisdom is one’s accumulated response to adversity. Wisdom is not a function of information. But, you see, that’s the beauty of what I’ve been able to tempt them into. The perseveration after data and technique keeps humans from focusing on what really would lead to wisdom. That’s why it’s a form of substance abuse. It makes the abuser feel better temporarily, but the very state of depending on it causes precisely those qualities that would make the substance unnecessary to atrophy.

That, sir, is absolutely devilish.

Thank you. But that’s only the half of it. The real secret to my perversity is getting humans to deny theirs. The more anxious society becomes, the more they want certainty. So I delude everyone into confusing their models with reality. And I find I am equally successful everywhere. Reductionism in science and fundamentalism in religion are really the same phenomenon. The key is to make people forget that the world is essentially ambiguous, to tempt them into thinking that there are answers out there just a little beyond their reach, and that if only they tried hard, they could solve or, at least, measure anything. But the critical factors in salvation are not subject to measurement.

That one idea could put a lot of people out of work.

And there are side benefits. The more they reify their models — you know people today assume the ego and the id have substance. I’ve gotten them to think they’re sophisticated when they give up belief in the supernatural , but notice how tempted they are to believe with perfect faith in the sub-conscious. Anyway, the more they are given to black and white, all or nothing, either/or conceptualizations of life, that really reduces the richness of their repertoire of responses, which is the key to any maturation process. And, to come full circle, once I get them thinking this way, monolithic communities form spontaneously.

Reminds me of schizophrenia.

How about idolatry? You see, I’ve infiltrated the social sciences as I used to infiltrate the monasteries. Instead of the social sciences being sources of direction out of the problem, I’ve managed to turn them into humanity’s psychological defense. Just as I used to focus the clergy of yesteryear on angels-on-a-pin kind of issues, I have again succeeded in leading humanity’s soul growers off track. As long as I can keep tempting everyone to fill their brains with data such as Myers-Briggs profiles, or right-brain/left-brain differences, or gender issues, or ethnic background, I can be quite sure that no one will focus on the information that counts.

And that is?

The important information categories of the soul (and they are the real bridges to community) are:

1 Knowing what you believe. I mean not only what you live for but what you’d die for.

2 Knowing where you begin and where other people who are important to you end.

3 Being able to preserve your own self, that is, having integrity, in a close relationship.

4 Having horizons that are not limited by what you can actually see.

5 Being able to stay on course when others sabotage you. By that I mean mustering up the self-regulation not to be reactive to the reactivity of others when you succeed at the above.

6 And, as I said earlier, making your own salvation dependent upon your own functioning rather than on using or saving others.

These are the information categories that count and they totally transcend social science data.

What about responsibility for others? Where does that come in?

It naturally flows from the above, because all unethical, all immoral, all manipulative behavior is really a form of dependency. The use of others means you need others to pave the path to your own salvation.

You seem to be saying that togetherness can’t be willed.

Correct. That is exactly how the Creator, being a God of process, set it up, and that is why I know that the best way to frustrate his plan is to constantly seduce everybody into willing others to come together.

Like counselors?

Like counselors, like clergy, like educators, like doctors and nurses, like parents, like managers and administrators.

But what is the alternative?

Presence. The nature of one’s presence — being a healing presence, a challenging presence, a nonanxious presence, the kind of presence that turns the verb “to be” into a transitive verb. Entities don’t have to have moving parts in order to modify other entities.

As with catalysts, enzymes, and transformers.

Healing also is a natural phenomenon that can be promoted by the presence of the healer; it also cannot be willed. Frankly, all healing that depends on the functioning of the healer is faith-healing. But let me go on a little. These things are connected. First let me explain how I tempt flesh and blood into violating the second limitation that I was mentioning earlier, omnipotence.

I’m all ears. But before we go on, I would like to ask you something. I notice that you keep referring to the Holy One as “him.” Is God then male, after all?

Don’t get me started on that one.

You are opposed to liberation theology, then?

Liberation, tribulation, I couldn’t care less. What bothers me is that no one has questioned my gender. How do you think I feel? Name me one solid theological work in the past twenty-five years that has suggested that I may not be patriarchal. Some of the process theologians have come close, but they’ve depersonalized everything. All this talk about inclusivity is just plain hypocrisy. You can’t have it both ways, you know. And as long as everyone is going to keep me male, I’m not going to change my ways.

I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was going to be such a sore point. You were about to describe how you tempt human creatures into violating the boundary of omnipotence.