The Age of Absurdity - Michael Foley Flashcards
The Absurdity of Happiness
There is a compelling reason to develop a personal strategy for living. Those who do not produce their own solution must be using someone else’s.
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded” - Nietzsche
For our understanding of how the mind can be colonised we should thank Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Marx showed how much of what we assume to be independent thought is actually imposed by society; Freud how much actually arises from the unconscious.
“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.” - Tolstoy
The Ad and the Id
The most persuasive argument for any activity is that everyone is doing it.
Brain scans have shown that high-end brands evoke the same neural response as religious images.
Neuromarketing uses neuroscience to infiltrate the brain, study its defences and find ways around them.
Buddha’s last words were: “All accomplishment is transient. Strive unremittingly.”
Freud’s single most enduring and important idea was that the human psyche (personality) has more than one aspect, structured into three parts: the id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives. These are systems, not parts of the brain, or in any way physical.
According to Freud’s model of the psyche, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual/aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.
The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited components of personality present at birth, including the sex (life) instinct and the aggressive (death) instinct.
The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the instincts. The personality of the newborn child is all id and only later does it develop an ego and super-ego.
The id operates on the pleasure principle (Freud, 1920) which is the idea that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately, regardless of the consequences.
The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable.
Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure (i.e., tension reduction) and avoids pain, but unlike the id, the ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure. The ego has no concept of right or wrong; something is good simply if it achieves its end of satisfying without causing harm to itself or the id.
The superego’s function is to control the id’s impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression. It also has the function of persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection.
The Righteousness of Entitlement
As Schopenhauer pointed out, human nature has always tended to live in anticipation.
Reverence for potential is a form of greed that believes there is always something better just ahead.
The only true excitement is the next Big Thing - the next lover, job, project, holiday, destination or meal. As a consequence, the most attractive solution to problems is flight.
“The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon tomorrow and wastes today” - Seneca
It is a common mistake to assume that liberation is in itself enough for fulfilment, that everything will be fine if one can just escape the soul-destroying job, oppressive relationship, dreary town.
There is a modern tendency to become a commodity, to develop not as a person but as a brand.
The key Stoic virtue is detachment - if it is not possible to influence the world, it is at least possible to moderate the world’s influence on the self.
Sarte defined not potential but finitude as the essence of freedom. The very act of freedom is the assumption and creation of finitude. This exercise of responsibility rules out grievance, ‘since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, how we live or what we are.’
Finitude: To be carefully distinguished from “mortality.” Finitude refers not to the fact that man dies but to the fact that as a free choice of his own project of being, he makes himself finite by excluding other possibilities each time he chooses the one which he prefers.
Sartre denounced the passive acceptance of social roles and cultural conditioning as ‘bad faith’, lack of ‘authenticity’, the lazy excuse of ‘this is the way I am’. The self must be constantly made and this making becomes a way of transcending the self. Living is perpetual self-transcendence.
The existentialist triumph is the preservation of a secret self.
The Old Self and the New Science
The message of serious psychology is the opposite of self-help - fulfilment is not easy, but exhaustingly difficult.
Cognitive dissonance - unable to tolerate two dissonant beliefs, the mind simply eliminates the more inconvenient of the two.
‘Set point’ - a psychological term to describe a kind of default setting or equilibrium state of the self. This explains why we always overestimate the impact of future events - we are never as happy or as miserable as we expect to be.
The importance of most forms of status is relative. We will be happy with very little if everyone else has a little less.
Consumer culture is aware of the universal hunger for differentials and has provided an artificial form of exclusivity in the brand.
Much consumption is driven by a futile attempt to get ahead of the pack - or a defensive need to avoid falling too far behind.
Bad is always stronger than good. Shakespeare was on to this long ago:
‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.’
Albert Ellis defined belief in the unholy trinity as ‘musturbation’: a form of self-abuse.
The 3 crippling musts:
1/ I must succeed - the curse of perfectionism
2/ Everyone must treat me well - the curse of neediness
3/ The world must be easy - the curse of stupidity
The Quest and the Grail
The temptation to surrender to a system is strong and the prospect of independence can be terrifying. For those incapable of such a leap there is a responsibility to pick and mix ideas.
According to Freud, ‘Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.’
Here are the concepts that keep turning up in philosophy, religious teaching, literature, psychology and neuroscience:
Personal responsibility Autonomy Detachment Understanding Mindfulness Transcendence Acceptance of difficulty Ceaseless striving Constant awareness of mortality
All of these are discouraged by contemporary western culture.
Awareness of mortality is urged by everyone from Buddha to Sartre, who believe that only intense and constant awareness of death exposes the emptiness of convention and breaks the crust of routine; only death is the guarantor of intense life.
The Undermining of Responsibility
In science there is the Holy Trinity of Determinism:
Genetics (behaviour is determined by genes)
Evolutionary psychology (behaviour is determined by evolved survival mechanisms)
Neuroscience (behaviour is determined by modules of a hard-wired brain).
Neuroscientists have challenged the ‘hard-wired brain’ theory, suggesting instead that the human brain is extraordinarily plastic. It constantly rewires itself throughout a lifetime in response to experience.
The bad news is that less desirable activities - anxieties, obsessions, compulsions, addictions, bad habits - also develop their own dedicated brain networks, which become efficient and self-sustaining and difficult to change.
There is no justification for the old excuse, ‘This is just how I am.’
Temperament is what you are - but character is what you do. Temperament is a given; character may be forged.
We can choose to oppose the dictates of temperament and, if we act differently in a certain way for long enough, the new behaviour will establish its own brain connections.
As Hamlet says to his weak mother, ‘Use, almost, can change the stamp of nature.’
The age of entitlement does not seek character, which demands obligation, but identity, which demands rights.
A sense of deserving has surely been a factor in the growth of debt. If you are entitled to a certain lifestyle then borrowing the money to fund it is simply claiming back what is rightfully yours.
Activity is another means that has become an end because it provides relief from anxiety, and the illusion of significance and meaning.
The Atrophy of Experience
Experience is nothing other than what we decide to attend to, so the quality of experience depends on the quality of attention.
Literary reading revitalises personal experience by revealing what appeared so drab and dreary was in fact mysterious and extraordinary. Reading increases empathy, and therefore compassion and patience, by inspiring understanding for unsympathetic and even atrocious characters.
“In reality, each reader is reading his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which enables the reader to discern what, without this book, he would possibly never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of this truth.”
After reading Proust you know, in the marrow of your bones, in your DNA, the craziness and absurdity of living perpetually in expectation.
We all yearn for renewal but imagine that it may be found only in novelty - a new place, a new lover, a new job. More effective, and much cheaper, is to see the familiar with new eyes. And a few writers offer just such transfiguring eyes. They smash the crust of habit and permit us to see life anew.
Literary reading can deepen and extend experience by improving understanding of the self, the world and other people.
One of the greatest gifts in a writer is the ability to create characters who leave atrociously but are entirely sympathetic.
The Absurdity of Work
The great victory of the work religion has been to increase the pressure to conform whilst almost entirely removing any awareness of conformity.
Work involves not just the activity for which we are paid but the maintenance of the simplified persona, a constant performance, ceaseless acting.
We are acting without even being aware of it, and entirely sublimating all negative feelings.
This may explain why so many professionals with well-paid and apparently satisfying jobs are suddenly and for no obvious reason struck down by depression.
Promotion is self-evidently good. Should we ask the successfully promoted whether the extra money justifies the extra responsibility and stress?
A sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.
Literary writers have also largely avoided the subject of work.
The workplace is a stage where disparate, incompatible people are forcibly confined together for long periods and suffer violent emotions such as power-hunger, greed, lust, hatred and rage. It may be that the experience of work, with its shocking expenditure of time and energy, is just too appalling to contemplate.
Or that the deadening effects of habituation make it impossible to raise to the level of the imagination.
The Absurdity of Love
Cyberspace teems with seekers of love entirely undaunted by constant past failure. The magic of potential, the key facilitator of the age, is strongest in sexual attraction. Love is indeed blind.
Never have so many sought relationships so urgently or entered into them with such high expectations.
The primary illusion is that establishing a relationship is easy. This is built into the language: to ‘fall in love’.
It is astonishing how those with a string of failed relationships rarely accept that they themselves must be at least part of the problem.
Almost all so-called love stories are really infatuation stories. Is there a novel or film that portrays mature, happy love?
Infatuation does not last. The infatuated themselves are blissfuly unaware of a time limit so the disenchantment comes as a nasty shock.
Infatuation is a transcendent state, a loss of self, and transcendent states cannot last.
Recent neuroscience research has confirmed the distinction between infatuation and love.
Brain scans reveal that ‘romantic love’ and ‘attachment’ involve entirely different brain circuits and neurotransmitters.
Romantic love is associated with increased levels of dopamine and lower levels of serotonin.
The brain pathways and dopamine levels prominent in romantic lovers are similar to those in users of all the major addictive drugs. Romantic love is indeed a form of addiction.
This confirms Stendhal’s insight that such love, which presents itself as the most selfless activity, is in fact largely selfish. The lover is in love not with a person but with a high.
The beloved is indeed thrilling - but only as a line of coke is thrilling to an addict. This also explains why infatuation never lasts. Addiction creates tolerance - with ever higher dosages required to produce the same effect.
But infatuation cannot increase the dosage beyond a certain point, so the high finally wears off.
The transition from infatuation to love is difficult because the two are opposites in many ways. Infatuation is transcendent; love is down to earth. Infatuation creates a fantasy; love accepts a reality. Infatuation is an addiction; love is a commitment. Infatuation is effortless; love is hard work.
This is a fundamental axiom: no one is easy to live with.
There is no such thing as a final, definitive state of love. Like happiness, love is an ongoing process, a kind of never-ending joint creative project. It takes a lifetime to learn any worthwhile skill properly - and love is no exception.
It is not surrender and immersion but autonomy and detachment that are necessary. The growth of the partner, often perceived as a threat, may be a source of renewal. Contempt is the most dangerous development in any relationship.
Rilke suggests, love, like happiness, cannot be achieved directly but is a by-product of living productively.
Fromm: ‘It is an illusion to believe that one can separate life in such a way that one is productive in the sphere of love and unproductive in all other spheres. Productiveness does not permit of such a division of labour. The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awareness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.’
The Absurdity of Age
The years bring an overpowering temptation to withdraw from difficulty into a comfort zone. The only way to retain life is to be interested in all of it. Otherwise life will take its revenge. Those who show no interest soon become of no interest.
