THE CHALLENGE OF LOVING PERSONS IN A CULTURE OF SELF-HATRED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 1, 2012
“No one ever gets tired of loving, they just get tired of waiting, assuming, hearing he’s saying he’s sorry and hurting.”
The lament of a loving person in pain.
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PREAMBLE
America is a self-hating culture. From the earliest moments of our existence we are programmed to be self-critical, to worry more about how we look and others see us than how we see ourselves.
We are compulsively other-directed rather than self-directed. We are never clever enough, tall, fast or agile enough, never pretty or handsome enough compared to others.
We compare and compete at home, in school, on the playground and with friends. This delays or prevents us from self-discovery. Too often we settle for a mere imitation of ourselves. If we do, psychiatrist Willard Beecher claims we are humanly dead, zombies, devoid of initiative, imagination, originality or spontaneity.1
Self-doubters are inclined to trust the opinions of others more than their own, to retreat in terror from any intimacy with self, and therefore an impossibility to have intimacy with anyone else except on a physical level.
Self-haters lack a moral center, a governor to guide the person to prudent interaction. For example, it is not prudent to please others at the expense of pleasing self when the action depletes rather than completes the person, and is therefore counterproductive.
Self-haters are often generous to others to impress, but much less generous to family, which they feel no such need. They charm and show good cheer to people at work and strangers, while treating family members horridly at home. The false face they wear at work finds them bankrupt emotionally at home where they are likely to explode. Imagine what it would be like if pleasing self and pleasing others had discretionary balance.
By the time we are of an age to grow up and take responsibility we are likely to be a hodgepodge of other people but pretty much a stranger to ourselves. This is a gift of contrary cultural inculcation.
We hide the truth of ourselves from ourselves as long as we can, sometimes forever, often stumbling into some type of disorder from eating, drinking, drugs, gambling, fornicating, video games, or delusions of grandeur, anything to escape a reminder we are all pretty much ordinary.
Corporate society has latched on to and exploited our cornucopia of hang-ups for profit. It has discovered it is easier to manipulate our fake self than to appeal to our authentic self. Biographical novelists have dissembled self-hatred into an art form. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a want-to-be plutocrat who questioned his libido (The Great Gatsby), and became an insufferable drunk; Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) masked his false bravado in bizarre machismo exploits, committing suicide when this no longer worked; William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) pretended to be a wounded Canadian Air Force veteran when he never left the shores of the American continent in WWII.
Into the midst of this quagmire, rise loving persons. They quietly and privately become authentic, developing their centers with a capacity to love. Often weary, they still believe love conquers all, even self-hatred. This is written with them in mind.
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If you have had a life without being in the midst of a self-hating person, you have been blessed. I would suggest in a normal American family it would be near impossible not to have a mother or father, brother or sister, uncle or aunt, friend or classmate, or an acquaintance at work that was not suffering from this malady.
THE LOVING PERSON
The loving person often falls in love or in friendship with a person in which self-hatred is well disguised. Self-haters are chameleons and have an ability to appear mirror images of the loving person’s nature.
The self-hating person is often attractive, magnetic, engaging with an endless repertoire of stories and facile humor to establish intrigue and act as a magnet to the loving person.
Once the freshness fades and remarks are made seemingly out of character, the loving person is put on guard, but is apt to retreat into denial. Blind acceptance follows denial, which foreshadows trouble on the horizon. The loving partner has missed an opportunity to expose and foil the deceiver.
Self-hatred stretches over a lifetime. The self-hating student thinks school sucks and is bored with the process, and it is collective teachers’ fault. When a worker, the employer doesn’t pay enough, the job doesn’t give enough recognition or reward, the company doesn’t promote fast enough. No thought is given to squelching the problem by moving on.
That would be out of character. More than likely, the self-hating person gets fired, as resentment and complaint are cumulative properties of self-hatred that become self-prophecy. We engineer our fate.
With self-hatred, blame is the game, first with parents, then the school, then the workplace and finally with the long-suffering loving person.
THE WELFARE STATE AND CHRONIC SELF-HATRED
Over the past hundred years, there has been a shift from self-responsibility to societal responsibility to irresponsibility. Now, no one is responsible, and everything can be explained away as to why it happens. Explanatory models have come to assuage guilt and shame and seed self-hatred.
Western culture has become a “cry baby culture.” The rigors of life, and the inevitable false steps that people take have resulted in little learning and even less consequences, and are now unraveling. A safety net culture of apology has no place for reality.
The European economic model is crashing into chaos. Whose fault? The United States is claimed by the EEC to be the blame for the 2008 banking meltdown and real estate collapse. The socialistic policies of Europe over the past sixty years are given a pass even though such policies have bankrupted Europe. Self-hatred seems to flourish on both banks of the Atlantic Ocean.
The US is not yet Europe. Europe would rather vacation and play than work and produce and manage its fate. It can no longer afford the 35-hour-work week with a month or more of vacation, and retirement in the worker’s fifties at 75 percent of the worker’s net earnings. In Greece, public employees make more than private sector employees, and the public sector are not profit centers.
With the exception of Germany, the European community is in economic turmoil. The United States cannot bail Europe out of its mess for America is heading in the same direction. Americans are still hard working, but many lack the skills required, while community and state governments can no longer maintain European like welfare programs. The chronic source of self-hatred is the failure of the mature adult to appear on the scene and to deal with these problems. Instead, something else is happening.
THE SURREAL WORLD OF VIRTUAL REALITY
Corporate society over the last several decades has unwittingly emptied the individual of a self-monitoring conscience and discerning center. Self-responsibility has been the major casualty. It has done this by protecting the individual from pain and struggle, failure and defeat, and therefore growth and maturity.
Collective passivity has become the norm, complaining and explaining a substitute for action. Waiting has dissolved into stalemate.
Hard on the heels of this collective gridlock has been the distracting influence of virtual reality. Here there is no need for conscience, no need for discernment, no fear of personal conflict and confrontation. Life has been reduced to doppelganger video games.
Industrial society promised the individual cradle to grave security for the sacrifice of ownership of what he did. Control was given freely for pay and benefits, but this has proven an unsustainable contract.
The individual in self-retreat has abdicated self-responsibility to such surrogates as personal trainers, guidance and advice counselors, technical experts, religious gurus, spellbinding wordsmiths, charismatic leaders, fawning academics, intrusive polltakers, and an assortment of ergonomists, economists, psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociobiologists, and pundits. Small wonder he has looked for escape.
Virtual reality has made “corporate sin,” as I’ve described it elsewhere, venial in comparison.2 Students at universities believe multitasking with iPads and smartphones are signs of brilliance when this has been shown to be a dumbing down process with efficiency hovering around 50 percent.3
It doesn’t help that only 50 percent of the student’s attention in class is on the lecture. Students are texting, checking emails, surfing the net, or playing virtual reality games, few sensing problems are on the horizon.4
Roughly only 2 billion souls out of 7 billion on the planet have such access. A virtual universe of 5 billion souls experiences a separate reality.
PBS’s Frontline had a recent segment on US Air Force drone pilots to show how bizarre this disconnect has become.5
Pilots are required to dress in combat fatigues as they assume their stations in air-conditioned facilities in the United States to direct drones on combat missions. In such safe and mundane quarters, they launch missiles from drones flying 7 to 9 miles above their targets some 7,500 miles away in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These pilots sit in front of screens that survey the landscape of enemy territory checking movement of people and vehicles on the ground. Military intelligence identifies these targets as “good and bad guys” not unlike in video games.
A button is pressed, which activates the drone to launch a missile to wreak death and destruction visible on the screen. The controlling pilot lacks the psychic insulation from the mayhem bomber pilots had in WWII. He can see the havoc he has wrought.
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We blunder into new technological warfare as we blunder into all technologies that come to consume our interests never considering the unintended consequences, or what has been lost for what has been gained.
President George W. Bush was fascinated with the possibilities of drones, which he made known to President Barak Obama as he left office. Drones have clearly captivated Obama, so much so that they are now being mass-produced as a primary war strategy of the Obama Administration.
I shudder at the thought of what this means for the future. We have the drones today; tomorrow every advance society on earth will have them.
War may soon be fought like “Star Wars” with drones carrying nuclear devices. Star Wars was a film; it was fiction. Recently, a film “The Book of Eli” (2010) revolved around a nomad (Denzel Washington) in a post-apocalyptic world, thirty years after a nuclear holocaust left the United States desolate with rogues and highway bandits seemingly the only survivors. The story revolves around a book that represents the essence of what was lost, and which the nomad hopes to get to the West coast to have it published for the future of man. I could not sleep after viewing the film.
Imagine the world reduced to video games and virtual reality where politicians offer eye candy campaign promises on television and smartphones, promises that are never kept. Self-hatred has never had a more effective accomplice
Could reality reduced to virtual reality be a prescription for disaster? We have in the past always found a way to escape the crush of our missteps.
At the end of the nineteenth century, as society entered the confusion of post modernity, Sigmund Freud provided his psychosexual psychoanalytical explanation for societal uptightedness. Elton Mayo followed in the early twentieth century with the performance spike to paying attention to menial workers. Social engineers took over, but in three quarters of a century have had little positive to show for the attention.6
The unintended consequences of Elton Mayo were to treat workers as if spoiled children. This resulted in arrested development with workers drifting from contribution to comfort to complacency to ceaseless complaining. The misreading of Freud resulted in free love unintentionally leading to the decline of the family and the sharp rise in illegitimate births, which continues to this day.
Close on the heels of these misinterpretations were a plethora of management paradigms that implied that management and managers were the key to the future, but paradoxically as management, per se, was becoming increasingly redundant.7
The decline in management, and rise of knowledge workers in decision-making has produced tension and dissention. This has surfaced in self-hating passivity (re. the six silent killers),8 as management brought out its big guns in resistance with the power of pay and promotion. Obviously, it is illogical for disgruntled workers to punish the company by dragging their feet, but they do so because they fail to see how it places their survival in jeopardy. There is little sense to anger and self-hatred.
THE CULTURE OF SELF-HATRED
When an Olympic champion was mercilessly abused for his sexual orientation, New York Times columnist Murray Kempton was moved to write, “Why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?”9
From our earliest days, we are shoe fitted into a size designed to fit all. It starts with school and play, continues in our dreams and fantasies, our expectations and pursuits.
The few who escape this are schooled into the belief they were meant to lead, to administer to the needs of the majority, and to provide meaning to otherwise meaningless lives. After all, what do most people need but a roof over their heads, food on the table, a job, and a surfeit of entertainment to distract them from wanting more?
The majority has been relegated to spectators to life, spending their hard earned money to finance the elaborate lifestyles of the rich and famous in sport, film, the arts and public life, while they sit back in passive adulating compliance.
The majority imitates in dress and manner, nesting and lifestyles a modest version of those idolized, becoming a shadow of what they could become. They embrace laudatory expressions such as “the greatest generation” and “the best and the brightest” without hesitation, while having little clue as to their own nature other than to find it wanting.
Educators promote cultural biases that program the majority to admire and support, trust and emulate the few, which distance them from self-discovery.
The few have driven society to the brink while being relatively unscathed for the effort. The majority, on the other hand, has seen their modest wealth plummet by as much as 40 percent. The majority always pays for the foolhardiness of the few.
This brings us to the crux of the problem of self-hatred.
Self-haters despise what they are and desire what they could never be. The nouveau rich envy inherited wealth failing to appreciate that inherited wealth a few generations ago was right where they are now. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic for it is the loving person who suffers this pointless self-pity.
My sense is self-hatred stays entrenched because Americans have never left the nostalgia of World War Two, when everything seemed to work and everyone seemed to get along. It was never as perfect as perceived, but that is not important. Then the shoehorn culture worked. Stubbornly and foolishly, Americans still hold adamantly to that apparition despite obsolescent skills, inappropriate college curriculums, outmoded industrial and governmental policies, and capricious leadership/management practices.10
When what you know and can do no longer has tangible value, self-worth plummets and self-hatred flourishes. Prudence would suggest learning more appropriate skills, demanding more relevant college curriculums, and a workplace culture that energizes. This is unlikely to happen in an other-directed passive environment. The tendency instead is to beat up on ourselves and wallow in self-contemptuous gridlock.11
Those closest to the self-hater suffer the collateral damage, although innocent, while the architects of this obsolete design continue to practice business as usual. Top down leadership has been a bust for decades, but few have had the courage to suggest, much less organize, bottom up initiatives.
NOT EVERYONE IS ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH
Among the few who have had such courage is Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics (2009). Ostrom didn’t believe in the 2008-2009 TARP bailout of banks or the rationale some corporations were “too big to fail.” She has demonstrated quietly over the past fifty years the wisdom of bottom up decision-making.12
Ostrom emphasizes how people interact with ecosystems to maintain long term sustainable resource yields. She conducted bottom up studies in the pastures and villages of Africa and Nepal, creating community managed systems. Her institutional arrangements provided ways to maintain forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands and irrigation systems to avoid ecosystem collapse.
Her human-ecosystem interaction template argues against grand scale interventions and panacea approaches to individual social/ecological system perturbations. Her emphasis on a self-organized governance system includes effective communication, internal trust and reciprocity, and human-ecosystem maintenance consistent with natural law.
Ostrom has much in common with William L. Livingston’s Design for Prevention (2010) mathematical/social engineering template. Livingston’s primer on prevention was published shortly before the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Had it been in place the disaster could have been avoided. D4P is an operational approach to problem solving.
Ostrom’s human-ecosystem principles read like a Livingston echo: (1) clearly defined boundaries, (2) rules and provisions adaptable to conditions and contingencies, (3) collective-choice arrangements for decision-making, (4) effective monitoring for accountable results, (5) a scale of prevention practices and penalties for violations, (6) mechanisms for conflict resolution, (7) steps to establish self-directed authority, (8) common pool of resources (CPRs) for multiple layers of nested enterprises.
People count in these front-end approaches to prevention. Ostrom and Livingston see a need for a radical change in institutional culture. Ironically, Ostrom is a trained political scientist, not an economist, and Livingston a trained engineer, but both use multiple disciplines to establish their modalities and practices.
Were these front-end efforts institutional norms, my sense is that there would be little reason for this discussion. Livingston, in particular, examines all aspects of institutional society, and offers a rigorous proof how prevention and reconfiguration could solve many of our ills. It would not eliminate self-hatred, but it would put a serious dent in its rationale.
As matters stand, students are not being prepared for the demands of contemporary life, jobs and job training are not consistent with these demands, and crisis management rather than prevention remains the order of the day.
Self-hatred flourishes in a climate of eternal frustration and debilitating fatigue. I would suggest cultural depression precedes economic depression. This is the case when the problems we solve are not the problems we face. To wit, we have witnessed over the past sixty years, given the practices of management, unions and governments, a progressive increase in worker dependence in the public and private sector. Workers appear to be stuck in arrested development in terminal adolescence waiting for someone to rescue them. Safety nets shielded them from economic reality. Now, these salary and benefit packages, this system where 80 percent of productivity is accomplished by 20 percent of the workforce, are no longer sustainable or a luxury that post-industrial society can afford.
Companies are going bankrupt, and now communities are joining the bankruptcy lines. The city of Stockton, California, a community of some 300,000 citizens, has recently declared bankruptcy. Its commitment to public employees in terms of pay, benefits and retirement income is far beyond its ability to pay. Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and several other cities may follow. To be sure private employers are facing the same pressures, but the majority of the Fortune 500 companies do not have entrenched unions, or have found a way to keep them in check. Often, this is not the case in the public sector.
When people are management dependent and/or counterdependent on the place of employment for total well being, and that support is withdrawn, we have mob theatre in the streets. It is happening in Greece and recently happened in Wisconsin’s state capitol. Santa Claus has left the building.
A BROADER PROBLEM THAN THE INDIVIDUAL
We pride ourselves with our intelligence despite the fact that we forever go blindly into the future, inventing and innovating seemingly never stopping to ask ourselves, “What will be the consequences of this change? What impact will it have on the planet and us? What will be sacrificed for this new gain? Will what is lost ever be recovered? What judicious steps might we have taken to minimize the damage?”
Rather than pausing, assessing and judiciously evaluating, we simply blunder blindly forward in perpetuity celebrating the new breakthroughs disregarding the wake left behind.
The seeds of self-hate are native to the romantic who never has time to bear in mind possible consequences. Since this seems so pervasive, my sense is self-hatred is common to us all. We dare the future to break our stride. We laugh in the face of fate and turn contempt into comedy. Take comedienne Joan River’s new book, “I Hate Everyone Starting with Me!” (2012). She has made a career of self-contempt constantly reconfiguring her appearance with plastic surgery. She is not alone.
Men’s Health (June 2012) rates American cities on a vanity index that includes consumer use of Botox, teeth whitener, at-home hair dyes, shapewear, plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry and tanning salon sessions. The top ten in the order of obsessive vanity were Tampa, Plano, Texas, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Houston, Miami, San Francisco, and Providence, Rhode Island. Des Moines, Iowa won the distinction of being the least vain of the 100 cities ranked.
Tampa, which incidentally is my residence, is also rated one of the smuttiest cities in the country based on online pornographic film views, number of adult bookstores and the nature of Internet searches. Moreover, CNBC did a survey and concluded that the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro area, as calculated by divorce rates, commute times, unemployment, violent crime, property crime, suicides, alcohol consumption, percentage of households using antidepressants, having mental health problems from feeling depressed or sad all the time to having sleep problems, and the annual number of cloudy days, contributes to being one of the highest stressful places in the United States.
As you can see, self-hatred is tied to self-estrangement and an obsessive projection of external angst on everything imaginable except oneself. With self-examination and self-acceptance, the individual would be more inclined to embrace his fears, acclimate to his circumstances, or retreat to more favorable circumstances. He would then be less likely to be so consumed with fear and loathing.
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The loving person suffers the brunt of this sickness, choosing to believe this too will pass. It will not. It will fester and show itself in a number of dehumanizing ways, no doubt more bland than the surveys above, but nevertheless unsettling. The loving person will be:
(1) Kept out of the loop as to the economic status,
(2) Presumed to be available for whatever folly catches the whim of the partner without forewarning,
(3) Expected to be understanding when offended, shamed or embarrassed,
(4) Expected to forgive and forget when truth catches up with a litany of lies,
(5) Presumed to be satisfied as simply an appendage to the partnership.
Failure of the loving person to be taken into confidence is evidence of being undervalued, considered clueless, weak and inferior, which justifies the treatment. In contrast, self-hatred displays an inexhaustible need to dominate as proof it is in control.
* * *
The greatest foil to male dominance in the past half century has been the attaining of professional credentials by women. The ultimate badge of independence and freedom for women has been the college degree. They can take relationships on their terms and in their time, delaying marriage, having or not having children, doing, going and being whatever they choose to be without taking orders from someone bent on conquest. I single out women in this context because it is women more than men who, at the moment, suffer self-hating relationships, but that, too, is changing as education is rebalancing the gender equation.
What should the loving person do given the scenario I have created here? As Socrates said, he did not have answers; but could only frame the question. That is what I have attempted to do.
Dostoyevsky tackled the problem of self-hatred in “Notes from the Underground” (1864). To him the “underground” dealt with the depths of degradation and humiliation to which the acutely conscious person suffered because of perverse self-hatred. He saw the disappearance of the individual dedicating his writing against this rising tide. He could see modern social forces were molding man into an uncomfortable sameness with everyone else that would make man easier to dominate. Dostoyevsky’s opening lines underscore this point:
“I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you will probably not understand. Well, I understand it, though.“
You get the picture. The Underground Man is totally self-absorbed. You learn in reading the book that this wreaks havoc on his love interests, as it does on loving persons to this day.
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1 Willard and Marguerite Beecher, Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-reliance and Maturity (1971);
2 Corporate Sin: Dissonant Workers and Leaderless Leaders (2000). Corporate sin was defined as schizophrenic management (pp 113-116).
3 “Digital Nation,” Frontline PBS (October 16, 2009).
4 Ibid.
5 “War by Remote,” Frontline PBS (June 19, 2012).
6 Work Without Managers (1991) deals with iatrogenic interventions, a medical expression that means the cure is worse than the disease.
7 Ibid. pp 185 –212.
8 Six silent killers: passive aggressive, passive defensive, passive responsive, approach avoidance, malicious obedience, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
9 Murray Kempton, “Home of the Brave,” New York Review, April 20, 1995
10 See A Look Back to See Ahead (2007)
11 If anything, it is even more complicated. Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products in Baltimore, a metal fabrication machine business, cannot find qualified employees to operate his equipment. Tens of thousands of jobs across the nation are sitting idle because of the lack of qualified workers. This is especially true of small or medium sized companies. Mega corporations siphon off what is available, and still have skill worker job openings. One company claims it has 18,000 orders it cannot fill because of a lack of skilled workers (Tampa Bay Times, June 29, 2012, pp 4-5B).
12 Dr. Ostrom’s work confirms the bottom up capacity of people to harness their collective power in productive engagement. I have had the same experience documenting it in a series of books and articles, as well as seen it demonstrated by William L. Livingston III in his work.
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