Democratic Desire & Myth
Yesterday keith418 pointed out this essay from Stephen Gardner. Since I have read some of Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic, I eagerly dove into the essay. I found it fascinating and a good overview of many of Rieff’s points in the book. It also gave me an opportunity to look at the world around me and reflect.
The rise of democracy and equality, the loss of authority and hierarchical order that has defined the modern world, have produced not just a change in regime but a virtual transformation in human character. The “surface effects” of this revolution-though here surface and depth are difficult to distinguish-seem obvious. To name some of the most striking, these include: a corrosion of the distinction between public and private spheres; an “ethics” of entitlement and victimology; and a popular and consumer culture dedicated to explicit sexuality and to an equally obsessive cult of violence, as if they were twin paradigms of freedom. In general, this panoply reflects the emancipation of desire that accompanied the advance of equality; these phenomena are the contemporary issue of what we may call democratic desire.
I couldn’t help but see how true this is. Also Rieff spends most of his time looking at the sociological implication of Freud and Psychoanalysis. He also looks at the point of therapy in out culture as a whole.
Psychoanalysis [and all other psychological therapies] is as much about finding strategies to protect democratic myths from reality as it is about helping democratic man come to terms with that reality. It is a negotiated solution to the quixotic collisions between reality and imagination that beset the mentality of democratic man. Put another way, psychoanalysis does not so much overcome the native fictions of democratic man as refine them with such subtlety that their conflict with reality can be temporized, postponed, kept in suspense. The illusions of the “neurotic,” the type in which Freud diagnosed the characteristic crises of the modern self, have a very short life cycle; something more sophisticated, agile, and durable is called for. But it is still imaginary all the same. And so, I suggest, Freud justifies the constitutive myth of democratic man, the myth of his own freedom, spontaneity, individuality, and originality.
What I find so fascinating is how these democratic desires and myths get carried along and transplanted into contradictory systems like Thelema. Rieff points out how the democratic man with his democratic desire and myth allow the individual to temporize and postpone having to deal with the conflicts and contradictions. The only way to do this is retreat into a mythological reality that is at odds with reality. Instead of dealing straight forward with these issues, democratic man projects his myths onto the conflicting reality. We see this frequently in the O.T.O. The leadership has already decided the myth which they are going to believe and when contrary situations appear they project their myth on it to suspend having to deal with the actualities of the situation. This leaves them paralyzed to act; they are unable to effect significant change because they lack the ability to deal with reality.
What makes their situation worse is that the democratic desire leads them into a state of alienation from reality and an inability to discipline themselves and take responsibility for their circumstance. They also lack the ability to know who they are because they cannot integrate into the community around them. They keep a distance between everything in their lives.
Such an individual is unable to find adequate satisfaction by immersing himself either in the common good or in the higher spiritual ambitions of traditional culture, in art, religion, and philosophy. He remains subject to the limits of nature and society, of course, but only as external forces or obstacles, alien powers that may be parried or negotiated, exploited or resisted, if never finally defeated. Yet the evisceration of religion and tradition and the weakening of communal bonds are registered with seismographic precision in his inner conflicts, the colliding vectors of his “psychology.” In the absence of a vital tradition, such an individual is left to fend for himself, morally and psychologically. Without the magnetism of communal integration, he is forced, as it were, to create himself, to become the author of his “personality.”
The democratic man, whose highest values are democracy and equality, inhibit themselves from transcending their conditions and ultimately isolate themselves into a world of subjectivity and distance whereby they cannot fully manifest themselves as individuals in communities. They cannot take any one thing/community/ideology seriously and integrate it into themselves because that would privilege one over another contradicting the value of equality. Instead democratic man negotiates a relative and mythical environment where he maximizes his potential and in the process defines his personality. Because personality is self-made and not in relationship to the community, personality can be changed at any time; very similar to changing clothes. There is no deep seated integration with reality or community. Personality is an artifact of myth.
I see all this in action within the local bodies of the Order. Our members are not invested in taking the community and thelema seriously. Instead they build a myth of community and fraternity. They want to maximize their potential in it without making the deep seated commitments to do the personal work necessary. Instead they want a herd of “democratic men” each reinforcing the myths of the other. They call this community. Until our membership can start jettisoning their myths, and instead embrace the often difficult realities around them, the community will maintain its state of neurosis. The line “things are getting better” will always ring hallow because the myths are in a stasis perpetuated by the neurotic individuals who feel they benefit by the illusion. Thelema is about dispelling these illusions and dealing with the realities around us. Not by projecting myths of the self, but dealing with the self as is found within community. Democratic man is not Thelemic man. They are antithetical. The more democratic man projects his myths and illusions calling it thelemic, the more neurotic and dysfunctional he will be. This, unfortunately, is what we see around us now in the Order.
The rise of democracy and equality, the loss of authority and hierarchical order that has defined the modern world, have produced not just a change in regime but a virtual transformation in human character. The “surface effects” of this revolution-though here surface and depth are difficult to distinguish-seem obvious. To name some of the most striking, these include: a corrosion of the distinction between public and private spheres; an “ethics” of entitlement and victimology; and a popular and consumer culture dedicated to explicit sexuality and to an equally obsessive cult of violence, as if they were twin paradigms of freedom. In general, this panoply reflects the emancipation of desire that accompanied the advance of equality; these phenomena are the contemporary issue of what we may call democratic desire.
I couldn’t help but see how true this is. Also Rieff spends most of his time looking at the sociological implication of Freud and Psychoanalysis. He also looks at the point of therapy in out culture as a whole.
Psychoanalysis [and all other psychological therapies] is as much about finding strategies to protect democratic myths from reality as it is about helping democratic man come to terms with that reality. It is a negotiated solution to the quixotic collisions between reality and imagination that beset the mentality of democratic man. Put another way, psychoanalysis does not so much overcome the native fictions of democratic man as refine them with such subtlety that their conflict with reality can be temporized, postponed, kept in suspense. The illusions of the “neurotic,” the type in which Freud diagnosed the characteristic crises of the modern self, have a very short life cycle; something more sophisticated, agile, and durable is called for. But it is still imaginary all the same. And so, I suggest, Freud justifies the constitutive myth of democratic man, the myth of his own freedom, spontaneity, individuality, and originality.
What I find so fascinating is how these democratic desires and myths get carried along and transplanted into contradictory systems like Thelema. Rieff points out how the democratic man with his democratic desire and myth allow the individual to temporize and postpone having to deal with the conflicts and contradictions. The only way to do this is retreat into a mythological reality that is at odds with reality. Instead of dealing straight forward with these issues, democratic man projects his myths onto the conflicting reality. We see this frequently in the O.T.O. The leadership has already decided the myth which they are going to believe and when contrary situations appear they project their myth on it to suspend having to deal with the actualities of the situation. This leaves them paralyzed to act; they are unable to effect significant change because they lack the ability to deal with reality.
What makes their situation worse is that the democratic desire leads them into a state of alienation from reality and an inability to discipline themselves and take responsibility for their circumstance. They also lack the ability to know who they are because they cannot integrate into the community around them. They keep a distance between everything in their lives.
Such an individual is unable to find adequate satisfaction by immersing himself either in the common good or in the higher spiritual ambitions of traditional culture, in art, religion, and philosophy. He remains subject to the limits of nature and society, of course, but only as external forces or obstacles, alien powers that may be parried or negotiated, exploited or resisted, if never finally defeated. Yet the evisceration of religion and tradition and the weakening of communal bonds are registered with seismographic precision in his inner conflicts, the colliding vectors of his “psychology.” In the absence of a vital tradition, such an individual is left to fend for himself, morally and psychologically. Without the magnetism of communal integration, he is forced, as it were, to create himself, to become the author of his “personality.”
The democratic man, whose highest values are democracy and equality, inhibit themselves from transcending their conditions and ultimately isolate themselves into a world of subjectivity and distance whereby they cannot fully manifest themselves as individuals in communities. They cannot take any one thing/community/ideology seriously and integrate it into themselves because that would privilege one over another contradicting the value of equality. Instead democratic man negotiates a relative and mythical environment where he maximizes his potential and in the process defines his personality. Because personality is self-made and not in relationship to the community, personality can be changed at any time; very similar to changing clothes. There is no deep seated integration with reality or community. Personality is an artifact of myth.
I see all this in action within the local bodies of the Order. Our members are not invested in taking the community and thelema seriously. Instead they build a myth of community and fraternity. They want to maximize their potential in it without making the deep seated commitments to do the personal work necessary. Instead they want a herd of “democratic men” each reinforcing the myths of the other. They call this community. Until our membership can start jettisoning their myths, and instead embrace the often difficult realities around them, the community will maintain its state of neurosis. The line “things are getting better” will always ring hallow because the myths are in a stasis perpetuated by the neurotic individuals who feel they benefit by the illusion. Thelema is about dispelling these illusions and dealing with the realities around us. Not by projecting myths of the self, but dealing with the self as is found within community. Democratic man is not Thelemic man. They are antithetical. The more democratic man projects his myths and illusions calling it thelemic, the more neurotic and dysfunctional he will be. This, unfortunately, is what we see around us now in the Order.