IS SOCIETY SICK? PART II THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY

Part II

THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007

“We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains. Indeed, the special disease of civilized man might be described as a block or schism between his brain (specifically, the cortex) and the rest of his body. This corresponds to the split between the ‘I’ and ‘me,’ man and nature, and to the confusion of Ouroboros (Greek word means "tail swallower") the mixed up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head. We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives out of all proportion to instinctual wisdom, which we are allowing to slump into atrophy.”

Alan W. Watts
British Philosopher

The conflict does not end with this obsession with roots and security. It actually begins here as our brains war with our bodies. We see it all around us. The brain desires food and pleasure and comfort or things that the body does not want. The brain gives the body directions it will not follow. And the body gives the brain impulses it does not understand.

This has manifested itself as a double bind between personal integrity and security; between contentment and anxiety. It prompted Samuel Warner (1966) to depict this conflict as a war between self-realization and self-defeat. Gregory Bateson (1972) it this way:

A double bind is a situation in which an individual feels they are receiving contradictory messages from a highly significant person, which result inconsistent and sometimes disruptive behavior.

So, it is an intra-war (between the brain and the body) and also an inter-war (between authority givers and receivers). I worked in an organization in which managers were asked to take a voluntary pay cut up to twenty percent, which they believed was to save the company. It puzzled them greatly, however, when the annual report came out showing that senior managers across the board were given twenty percent bonuses.

It is so easy to forget that we are animals. When we compare human with animal desire, we find many extraordinary differences. The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal’s stomach is full, it stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop so he keeps on eating. When he has eaten as much as his stomach can take, he still feels empty.
Depression, loneliness, and lack of esteem or many other shades of self-deception may feed the mind’s sense of emptiness. So, he eats on for compensatory gratification.

This is largely due to anxiety, to the knowledge that a constant supply of food is uncertain. I watched a man grow from 200 pounds on a six-foot frame to over 400, as an adult. Seemingly, he could never get enough food to satisfy his psychological need. He had nearly starved to death as a small boy as his prostitute mother left him alone for days without food with all the doors locked. He eventually contracted diabetes in his mature years, and died in his fifties.

In the uncertain world of constant war, where instability and insecurity plague the conscience, pleasure is uncertain, which feeds a compulsion to take pleasure where we find it.

We stimulate our sense organs with food and drink, cigarettes and booze, or advertisers stimulate them for us, to the point that our organs become insensitive. Then we look beyond simple pleasures to the surreal world of drugs, brutal sports, and the craziness of death-defying stunts.

The brain is in pursuit of happiness. Because it is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee to a pleasure filled life. Yet, the brain knows that a life of pleasure is of limited duration. So it attempts to cram as much pleasure as possible into the span of a few years, burning the candle at both ends with the mindset, “you’re only young once!”

Modern society has invented this self-destructive vicious circle as it refuses to live in the present clamoring always for the future to unfold. It is no accident that slogan writers created the General Electric catch phrase, “Progress is our most important product,” as progress denotes the future. This translates into the pursuit of more, always better, finer, more convenient, and more pleasurable. Ironically, this slogan condemns us all to a life of perpetual frustration.

Consequently, we are vulnerable to anyone who has a future oriented gadget. For years, it was limited to those that occupied the occult world and trafficked in innocuous fantasies. Now, the occult has become mainstream in futuristic proclamations of physical scientists, medical professionals, and enterprising technologists with the promise of bionic man, and a universe of robotics and Dick Tracy contraptions.

If but one of these contraptions touches our uncertainties, or forgives an excess, we will line up to buy its color, composition and construction without a moment’s reflection. Even this is not enough; we must make heroes of these creators, as they provide a pause in our all out war with our real and imagined enemies. They give us an opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief for not having to deal with our problems.

Patent medicine is a television dinner of the mind. Yet, in fairness, is it not necessary in this busy-busy, dog-eat-dog world we have created? Who has time to solve their problems anyway? We are too busy living for the future to pay attention to the present.

The future, of course, is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only in the mind. Primary consciousness of the basic mind knows reality, but does not know the future. It lives completely in the present and is capable of perceiving only “what is,” or the moment.

The brain, however, retains memory and by using it is able to make predictions. These predictions vary from reliable (everyone will eventually die) to fanciful (anyone can become president). Watts (1951) saw this clearly leaving us with this consideration:

“The future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements – inferences, guesses, deductions – it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.”

We see this futuristic psychobabble in the language of humanists, which is hyphenated with such words as reinforcement, satisfiers, trade offs and hygiene factors.

At first glance, it would appear we have no trouble being prisoners of someone else’s mind, a mind that would gather all our loose ends and doubts, package them, and tie them neatly together into a bundle of security.

This is revealed in the con we play on ourselves. We accept the pabulum of experts and the promise of security because we don’t want to change. We want to believe experts can protect us from insecurity and our fears, real and imagined, that threaten us. But even a kidder can kid himself only so long. Time runs out and reality sets in on these proffered myths that we can be healthy, wealthy and wise without changing the fluidity of our universe. Eventually, it seeps into the fissures of our brain that what is not earned is not learned.

Freud traced the problem of insecurity to the repression and suppression of the libido. There is little evidence today in this era of “make love, not war” that much repression and suppression exists. Still, insecurity reigns supreme in every quadrant of society.

We have gotten rid of Victorian and Puritanical double standards, yet man is still not at peace with his nature. Now that sex has come out of the closet it would appear that with all the research, educational programs, and the dissemination of information, sex education has gone awry of its intended purpose. Instead of blissful contentment, it has created the most permissive climate in Western society’s history, which in turn has produced the most sexually uptight generation on record. In medical parlance, iatrogenic, the cure has been worse than the disease. Why is this so?

First of all, the desire for sexual security and the feeling of sexual insecurity are the same thing. Remember to hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society obsessed with a quest for sexual security is patently insecure. Such a society might be compared to a breath retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as red as a beet.

Secondly, the kind of security we are speaking of is not physical but primarily spiritual and psychological. Sex is only part of nature in which a disproportionate amount of time is spent in quest of food, drink, shelter and clothing to survive as a species.

Stated in another way, we are only sexually active a small part of our existence. The most sensuous part of us is not our body, but our mind. To satisfy the mind through the body by sensitivity training, touching exercises and quasi-scientifically designed love making therapies has been an interesting development. We know, for instance, that a newly born baby responds positively to be touched, held, petted, and cooed to, contributing to the child’s positive development. So, intimate contact is good. The “joy of sex” has taken up this theme and carried it into the adult world against cultural taboo.

The problem comes when we are persons second and sex objects first. Provocative dress, for example, especially among women, suggests “exploit me, let me show you the ways.” Much of this is first done in innocence, but it can become the justification in some people’s mind for sexual exploitation.

The indicators are reflected in the rise of venereal disease to nearly epidemic proportions. The contradiction between the manifest and latent function of our identity through sexuality is illustrated in “The Thin Edge Report (1975):

· Live births for adults are up 23 percent since 1940; they are up 323 percent for unwed teenagers for that same period.

· In 1974, alone, teenagers gave birth to a record 608,000 illegitimate children.

The full impact of this changing socialization process is yet to be determined. It is this focus on sexuality, which has, at least in part, increased our prevalent sense of separateness that has made us feel insecure. This is quite opposite to that intended. How could it be otherwise?

To be secure, sexually or in any other way, means to isolate and fortify the “I” in “me.” But it is this feeling of being an isolated “I,” which makes us feel lonely and afraid. This puts the pressure on us to prove we are sexually desirable at any cost. The problem feeds on itself. The more sexual security we can muster the more we shall want and have to have. Statistics bear this out for all types of security. It would appear we are looking for security in all the wrong places.

In case you didn’t notice, there is a paradox at work here. We want to be happy, to forget ourselves, and yet the more we try to forget ourselves the more we remember and are obsessed with the self we want to forget, resulting in increased unhappiness. We think happiness is a thing: a loving relationship, a career, a new car, a fine home, and an idyllic family. Happiness may include some or all of these things, but it is none of them, because happiness is only a state of mind that has nothing to do with circumstances. Watts (1951) puts it this way:

“Happiness is something to experience, not explain. Once you attempt to explain it, you lose it.”

We want to escape from the pain of loneliness, but the more we struggle to escape and press to be accepted, the more we inflame the agony as less as less others want to be in our company.

We fear we are despicable, and want to be brave and press on, but our efforts to be brave become like fear trying to run from itself. We want to enjoy peace of mind and contentment, but the more we attempt to pacify ourselves it becomes like trying to stop worrying, causing us to worry even more.

We worry because we feel insecure and unaccepted and want to be secure and accepted. We know that worrying is futile, but we go on worrying because calling it futile does not stop it.

Given this predicament, it is useless to say that we should not want to be secure. Everyone wants to be secure, leastwise that is what we have been led to believe.

What we are discovering in the process of what seems so futile is that there is a key to all this, and that key is that there is no such thing as security; to seek security is to embrace isolation, and isolation is enhanced as we press to become secure. Likewise, we cannot seek happiness because in the seeking we only become unhappier. Happiness is a choice, a state of mind, not something that can be explained, but only embraced.

What a powerful discovery! To know there is no escape from insecurity; there is no sanctuary for the “I” until we let go of it. We understand we must not face the “I,” but be it! In being it, we have acquired the wisdom of insecurity. We have come to accept our lot and to deal with it. We no longer look for acceptance outside ourselves but inside ourselves. We have become our own best friend. We have chosen to be happy because we can.

Erich Fromm (1941) provides a caveat to this freedom. He sees modern man freed from the bondage of pre-industrial society, on the one hand, which has simultaneously given him limited security, but on the other, has failed to give him freedom as an individual:

“Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom, which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.”

We cannot have it both ways, Fromm is saying, we cannot be free and secure in that freedom, and beholden and dependent on others for our sense of worth and satisfaction. That is only one of the crossroads challenging modern man. We are in the post-Christian era as well as the post-industrial. As cogent as Fromm’s analysis, it is just that, an analysis, a theory, and a talking point to better understand our present circumstances. Its importance is that the foundation of our society that we have taken for granted is shifting, and we are shifting with it, and should take note, and make adjustments.

The last half-century cannot be explained away by social change theorists. It cannot be analyzed into submission. Analysis is not action. We are in a societal revolution of global proportions. Nothing is quite as it was: not the family, church, school, industry, or government. What once worked well is working poorly now, or not at all.

There has been change in conduct, thinking, and feeling, which is well documented, but there is a seismic change in philosophy of life, which is not. The social and behavioral sciences are stuck in their own rhetoric and paradigms. The physical sciences are chasing unnamed atoms or exploding stars. Mathematical models are clean and can be replicated, are predictable. The collection of atoms designated, as people are not. While the physical sciences escape the confinement of their physical bodies in sanitized research, the social and behavioral sciences have hardened self-consciously around quantitative objective research when people are totally subjective beings. Small wonder the great insights into present humanity have come from poets, novelists, and social philosophers.

The challenge and opportunity is young people. Young people want to go with the flow. Life to them is less a question mark but something to experience. They move innocently into a culture of free low, drugs, cohabitation without a marriage license while their parents are obsessed with success, career, upward mobility and wealth, creating a great divide between them. The divide is broaden by less a resentment of authority than a total disregard of it; the same goes for conventional religion; the same goes for attending classes and graduating from school; the same goes for work and responsibility; the same goes for planning for the future. To them the future is now, so why sweat it!

This is not simply a case of society dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. It is a movement away from maturity to immaturity, from dressing, talking, acting and thinking in ways far removed from the norm.

A societal revolution is taking place right under everyone’s eyes, which baffles the best of parents and other authority figures. The result is parents are acting like children, and children have become their own parents, and everyone is attempting to escape from Fromm’s freedom. Lost in this great escape is the gravitas of the situation, and the need for somebody to be in charge, while the mindless cry of “now” reverberates: “do it now, have it now, be it now!” Seemingly forgotten is that we are all on this same boat going down this boundless river of time.


11. Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, A Vintage Book, New York, 1951.
12. Samuel Warner, Self-Realization and Self-Defeat, Grove Press, New York, 1966.
13. Gregory Bates, The Ecology of the Mind, Chandler Publishing, New York, 1972.
14. Ibid, Watts.
15. Calvin S. Hall, A Primer of Freudian Psychology, A Mentor Book, New York, 1954.
16. The Thin Edge Report, Public Broadcasting System, Television Channel 3, Tampa, Florida, May, 1975.
17. Ibid, Watts.
18. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1941.