Are You Passionate?
James R.
Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 30,
2014
There is in most
passions a shrinking away from ourselves.
The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive. Passions usually have their roots in that
which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is less a response to
stimuli from without than an emanation of inner dissatisfaction.
Eric Hoffer, The
Passionate State of Mind (1955)
Before answering, you may want to consider what it
means. Passion could find you on the
horns of a dilemma moving away from one cage only to find yourself in
another. This may ring counterintuitive
to what you imagine passion to be, but on closer examination it might surprise
you. We tend to associate passion with
intense feeling or being swayed by our emotions. We don’t think of it as something moving away
from as well as toward. We don’t think
of passion as conflicting.
A passionate state of mind is associated with deficiency,
not efficiency, with a lack of skill, not a surfeit of it. The true nature of passion has been cleverly
masked in the modern era by technological wonders. Passion is all about dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction, whatever its cause, is at bottom
dissatisfaction with self. The fact that
we pursue something with great passion does not always mean we really want it
or have a special aptitude for it. Often
it is a substitute for something we want and cannot have. Intense desire is perhaps a desire to be
different from what we are.
Passion as escape can be habit forming. Many attitudes induced by discontent may also
be induced by desire. Intensity
heartened by inner inadequacy initiates a release of energy, which can work
itself out in discontent, desire, sheer action, or in creativity.
Exploring Passion
Passionate intensity can serve as a substitute for
confidence otherwise born of talent. The
talented have no need orchestrate their skills in histrionic fashion as they
can accomplish their tasks with the insouciance of play. Equating passion with efficiency is missing
the point.
Robinson Cano, formerly of the New York Yankees of Major
League Baseball, now of the Seattle Mariners, a perennial All-Star, has been
accused of being nonchalant in his style of play for the effortless way he goes
about his business at the plate and in the field. Cano epitomizes the confusion when passion
and talent are treated as synonymous.
The irony is that we have more affection for the hard worker
than the effective worker, and a kind of resentment when a person is incredibly
effective, as in the case of Robinson Cano, and seemingly without effort.
In sport, when an athlete attempts to compensate for a lack
of skill with passion, we call it “pressing,” meaning trying too hard or
thinking too much about what should flow naturally.
Alan W. Watts says Westerners have gotten it all wrong when
they consider thinking to be hard work.
“There is no work to it at all,” he advises, then goes on to quote Zen:
Only when you have no
thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant and spiritual, empty
and marvelous. That is why meditation or
prayer are so compelling. A quiet mind
empty of thought is in touch with itself and nature. It is free of intensity and therefore free of
the cage of self-doubt, conflict, and self.
Passion displays itself most prominently during periods of
pervasive social change and chaos. In
the midst of this, innovators distract us from our sense of dissatisfaction by
canalizing our attention to new cars, gadgets, movies, TV programs, business
strategies, health issues, sports celebrity gossip and medical “magic
bullets.” It is the lure of the scam in
the cage of insatiable hedonistic yearning.
Eric Hoffer sees us as a society of misfits who have the
ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse. The artist is as much a dissatisfied person
as the revolutionary, yet one creates while the other destroys. He writes:
The times of drastic
change are times of passion. We can
never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every
radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test; we have to
prove ourselves. A population subjected
to drastic change is thus a population of misfits, and misfits live and breathe
in an atmosphere of passion.
Colin Wilson sees the misfit as the outsider in quest of
truth. According to him, the outsider
finds himself living in a country of the blind and a world without values. The outsider feels caught in a moral vacuum
with the outsider at its center. Wilson
explains:
The Outsider’s case
against society is very clear. All men
and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a
pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy,
their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and
rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.
What the misfit and outsider have in common is a compelling
drive to go against the grain; to think outside the box; to go it alone. Not belonging, they try to find their way
amongst the rubble. They have eerily
come to the forefront and are now setting the table.
Some of the attributes of the passionate misfit are
discernible:
To be running ahead is to have something to be running from.
Desire creates its own talent.
Longing becomes a habit that dominates all activities.
Self-esteem is at root passion.
A gauge of passion is its unfulfilled desire for toys.
The drive of the revolutionary is to stir those to action
who no longer know.
Unfulfilled desire is destiny.
To be in balance is to be at rest. Passion is never at rest.
The self-sufficient straddles the fault line between the
achiever and deceiver.
Social disturbance is at root a crisis in self-esteem.
True believers gravitate to the promise land of pride.
With a lack of talent, keeping busy gives a sense of worth.
The passion of the dreamer is either an urge to build or
destroy.
Mass fervor emasculates passion which kills creativity.
In a universe of change, something is dying as rapidly as
something is being born. Since we are
never ready, we are always surprised.
Forced to adjust, which is a radical departure from the status quo,
self-esteem is threatened. To convince
ourselves that we are all right, we submit to tests created by those who
believe themselves to be all right, and scoff at the legitimacy of the tests,
but keep taking them nonetheless. Let us
look at this phenomenon from several perspectives.
Ambient deficiency Motivation
Sociologist Billy G. Gunter sees us being habitually
attracted to what we are not. Gunter
calls his theory, ambient deficiency motivation. The theory gives the reader another gauge on
passion.
Since passion is moving away as well as toward us, it could
be said it involves dissatisfaction with the person we are and a desire to be
what we are not. These conflicting
desires of the dichotomous self are known to play tricks on self-identity.
The synthetic self is observed in teenagers who dress in a
way to define themselves separate from their elders but in league with other
teenagers. Entertainers Madonna and
Michael Jackson set new trends in dress and style when they came on the
scene. Their synthetic self on display
drew attention to a desired group and scorn from a despised one, conformist to
the status quo.
Passion is not on display but its deficiency with rings in
ears, nose, lips, tongues, eyelashes, navels, nipples, and genitalia, which is
to exasperate and attract, as exhibitionism has become the new norm.
We are young so short a time, and styles and fads change
even faster. A point has been reached
where ritualistic and primitive mutilation of the body has become so common as
to be boring.
Take the phenomenon of tattooing. This art form has been around as long as man
has endured. Now, it no longer has
subtle implications or recognizable limits.
Tattooing was once the domain of the rebel, but now
tattooing has gone mainstream. People,
from the very young to the very old proudly display their tattoos as the human
body has become a personal billboard with a public display of an instinctual
search for the self.
In the past, people who mutilated or painted their bodies
with needle artwork were peripheral to society.
Radical change has made the misfit an ideal type. Now, the eccentric is someone without tattoos
or an aversion to them. Conformity has
been converted to parody.
Not only celebrities but the drags of society sport body
artwork in a common universal identity.
Gone primitive are CEOs, professors, college students, middleclass
professionals as well as those in the upper echelons society as being branded
has come to be distinctive.
The crowd mentality personifies the times in a passionate
quest for the authentic. Outsiders have
become insiders without choosing to be so, as others are looking for true
connection with their mystique if not identity with their cynical world. There exists a passion to emulate, imitate
and replicate the mechanistic heart that this electronic age has given us, a
cage that more than a billion souls call home.
As technology becomes more precise, people become less so;
as the postmodern world becomes more surreal, society becomes less real.
Biker gangs once considered “outlaws” are now adored and
copied. We see professional athletes not
subjected to law, forgiven for their transgressions as long as they win. We see parents adoring their children but not
managing them.
Growing up is no longer an option because it would admit to
growing old, as that would in turn admit to dying, and denial of death is the
new mantra. Psychologist James Hillman,
author of “The Soul’s Code” (1996),
might see this identity crisis and new tribal norm as our collective search for
the real parents of our soul.
Gunter’s ambient deficiency
motivation fits an impressive collection:
Walter Kennedy was physically impaired but rose to
commissioner of the National Basketball Association (1963-1975).
Pete Rozelle created the Super Bowl, but was too small to
play football. He transformed the
fledgling National Football League (1960-1989) into the national pastime taking
that distinction from Major League Baseball.
Bowie Kuhn, totally inept as an athlete, but with a burning
love of sport, especially baseball, became MLB’s commissioner (1969-1984)
during its contentious years, when expansion was also new and
controversial.
Howard Stern couldn’t buy a date in high school, and was
known as “the stork” or “Dracula” for his long six foot six inch slender
frame. He would become a $500 million a
year “shock jock” on radio.
Rush Limbaugh, has always had a weight problem and resembles
the dumpy physique of the “Pillsbury Doughboy.”
The intellectual climate of college academics didn’t work for him, but
intellectual neo-conservative talk radio did.
He would become an influential voice for the Republican Party, and a
multimillionaire in a class with Howard Stern. Limbaugh and Stern were born on
the same day and year, Limbaugh the Midwest, and Stern the East.
A cadre of television evangelists who preach “Hell’s fire
and damnation” with unbridled passion are frequently trapped in that same fire,
and fall on their own petards as adulterers, pornographers and embezzlers, some
of ultimately confined to the hell of real prison.
We see ambient deficiency motivation in parents who punish
their children for behavior commonly practiced by them, then wonder why their
children are a problem.
We saw Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), once a drug dealer
and petty criminal, convert to Islam and joined the Nation of Islam, become a
strong voice for Civil Rights, only to be gunned down by three members of the
Nation of Islam.
In a frantic drive to escape the cage, many dream of an
another self: the profligate spender a
banker; the prostitute a nun; the common criminal a police officer, the
pedophile a priest; the failed athlete a coach; the wallflower an actress; and
the poor student a professor.
Ambient deficiency
motivation fits a person running from himself only to run into himself with
a burst of passion.
Passion: as negative
& positive
History is replete with examples of ambient deficiency
motivation. St. Augustine of Hippo was
born of a Christian mother and pagan father.
He rejected his mother’s religion when he went off to school in his
early teens, and was attracted with passion to hedonism, sin, and a wastrel
lifestyle.
He became a devoted student to Manichean dualistic
philosophy, then was rescued from this by St. Ambrose who baptized him on
Easter Sunday, 387 AD. Next to St. Paul,
it can be argued that Augustine has exerted the greatest influence on
Christianity, both for Catholics and Protestants through his sermons, letters
and his 22-book volume called The City of
God (413 AD).
There is also St. Thomas Aquinas to consider, who also fits
into ambient deficiency motivation as he was thought to be a slow learner,
possibly retarded because of his stuttering and reticence to respond quickly to
his teachers. Some historians reference
him to being characterized as “the dumb ox.”
He was St. Thomas Aquinas that rescued the Church at its
most critical juncture. The Christian faith seemed to be collapsing as reason
threatened its dominance and relevance in the 14th century. In his Summa
Theologiae he argued philosophy examined the supernatural order in the
light of reason, while theology did in the light of revelation. Although reason used theology, revelation did
not fall into the province of philosophy.
It followed that philosophy could not contradict theology because truth
could not contradict truth. Faith and
knowledge were not mutually exclusive.
Thus, there would be two kinds of knowledge in the future:
that which related to revelations, which would be the province of theology; and
that which would deal with the natural world, which reason and philosophy could
handle. The result of this new
understanding would one day be known as science.
Passion is a negative and positive force. It can be expressed as a force for good, but
equally as a force for evil. We know
Adolf Hitler, an Austrian citizen and corporal in the German army in WWI,
blamed the Jewish selection committee after the war for his failure to win
admission in the Vienna School of Fine Arts.
His twisted passion took this rejection as the logic for a lifelong hatred
of Jews. It led to his extermination
policy and the Holocaust, an example of passion in the hands of evil.
How passion plays out has much to do with how we resolve
conflict in our life.
Self-demands & Role demands
Passion is subtle, multidimensional and can be
self-realizing or self-defeating, manifestly good or patently evil.
Passion has induced company sabotage. Take the wildcat oil dweller of a major oil
company who failed to receive the dollar per hour raise that he expected. When drilling was nearly complete, he threw
his wrench down the drilling shaft, destroying the diamond headed drill and
causing more than $100,000 in damages to the rig, and hundreds of thousand dollars
more in delayed operations.
Less apparent but ultimately discernible are passionate
passive behaviors described elsewhere as “six silent killers.” Thwarted passion as passive behavior may be
less spectacular, but far more common and therefore consequential.
What happens is that the ideal self (how a person is
expected to behave) and the real self (how he actually behaves) clash within
the individual confusing self-demands and role demands resulting in the
situation being poorly defined.
The ideal self is an expression of the inner voice
programmed into the individual by parents, teachers and priests and other
authority figures. The real self is how
the individual encounters and deals with life.
A victim complex can easily develop from wounded pride and
self-demands. Role demands are driven by
the nature of the roles we assume.
Self-demands reflect immaturity with the individual fixated
with an adolescent disposition. Role
demands reflect maturity and an adult orientation.
When something goes wrong on a job the voice of self-demands
shouts, “Not my job. Can’t blame
me!” With role demands the response is,
“We missed the deadline. Let’s figure
out what we have to do now to minimize the damage.”
Self-demands relate to comparing and competing, jealousy,
envy, and spite for something, say failure to win an expected promotion. Role demands relate to the job you’re getting
paid to do. If it isn’t working out,
then you decide to move on.
Self-demands sees the company at fault when things go
awry. Role demands takes the position of
being paid to do a job, and does it to the best of the worker’s ability.
Self-demands feeds on paranoia, distrust, innuendo, anxiety,
stress, chaos, conflict, confusion and ultimately self-doubt. Role demands focuses on what is expected and
what can be done.
Self-demands pushes deeper into the cage of
victimization. Role demands bypasses the
cage to focus on the fix.
Self-demands plays on pride, “Do you know who I am? What makes you think you can treat me that
way?” Role demands admits failure,
“Yeah, I screwed up. What would you like
me to do?”
The Mortality Dance
The passion to live on the horns of a dilemma is
powerful. Born of the fear of dying,
temperance is thrown to the wind in false bravado: “I work hard and play hard,”
as if hard is the operational word to passion.
By the same token, passion can consume so much energy there
is none left for contributing. The
passionate want a career but they’re not into changing jobs, going back to
school, learning new skills, or starting afresh. They want what they are doing now to be
resurrected to career status as if Lazarus rising from the dead. In truth, all passion is spent. It can happen to anyone at any time, and does
consistently to the passionate.
Consequently, it takes all the effort in the world to get out of bed in
the morning.
The title of John O’Hara’s first novel, “Appointment in
Samarra” (1934) illustrates this anxiety.
The title is a reference to an old story of a merchant in
Baghdad who sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the
servant comes home white and trembling and tells his employer that in the
marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she
made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top
speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles, where he believes Death will
not find him.
The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death,
and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not
a threatening gesture, it was only a shock of surprise. I was astonished to see
him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
Metaphorically speaking, those afraid to live and are
running from Death are sure to find it waiting for them in that cage of theirs
75 miles away. Existing is not living,
and for those waiting to live chances are they will run out of life before they
find time to live.
Those of such dispositions justify their lethargy and
self-indulgence on the pantheistic philosophy of hedonism in mocking tribute to
Hugh Hefner of the Playboy Empire.
Not long ago Playboy celebrated its 50th anniversary. Television showed Hefner and his
confederates, a group of septuagenarians men of ample frame sitting around a
long table smoking cigars and drinking brandy after scooting their beautiful
female companions off, ingénues the age of granddaughters or younger, smiling
in the camera and congratulating themselves on their bon vivant lifestyle, as
if to say, “Don’t you (in television land) envy us?”
This personifies self-demands in a culture in which role
demands have been reduced to “making it,” with “making it” an end in
itself. This displays the “narrow self”
as opposed to the “generous self,” where the focus in on getting rather than
giving, on self-absorption rather than generosity.
There was no apparent sense of the incongruity in sending
these demoiselles off to other quarters
to have coffee and smoke cigarettes while they engaged in worldly “man talk,”
as if this were a 19th century redux den of iniquity.
This misogynic time warp of 100 years past indicates a
dislocation without appearing to be so with the atavistic misfit wearing the
mask of death as celebrity. I have
written elsewhere:
Death is always
beckoning from beyond. The undertaker
contemplates his funeral; the rich man his destitute, the jailer his
imprisonment, the debaucher his impotence, the priest his fall from grace, the
actor an empty theater, the writer the blank page, the dying man the absence of
mourners. What are these but premature
visions of dying?
Hedonism is a Requiem
High Mass without the purple robes or incense. To accept death as inevitable is the first
step to living. That said you cannot
deny the tort of spiraling pressure in everyday life in a climate of drastic
change between need and want, pain and pleasure, as misfits and outsiders stir
the cultural drink.
A natural high has been augmented by Iron Man and Iron Woman
Contests to release endorphins as a natural narcotic to the spirit. Endorphins are neurotransmitters, chemicals
that pass along signals from one neuron to the next. Neurotransmitters play a
key role in the function of the central nervous system and can either prompt or
suppress the further signaling of nearby neurons.
Endorphins are produced as a response to certain stimuli,
especially stress, fear or pain. They originate in various parts of the body --
the pituitary gland, the spinal cord and throughout other parts of the brain
and nervous system -- and interact mainly with receptors in cells found in
regions of the brain responsible for blocking pain and controlling
emotion. Endorphins can lead to a better
self or the explosive discord of self-destruction.
This Mortality Dance
is real for we are dying as we are living.
There is a desire in us to shed our unwanted self, the self that can’t
keep up with change, can’t hold on to a relationship or job, the self that has
become our enemy. This unconscious drive
of blind striving to escape the cage, only forces us deeper into the cage
unaware as we might be.
In the name of passion, we go from self-disgust to self-love
and then back again. The unwanted self
is always there even if not acknowledged.
Fortunate we are that it is because it is a vital part of us. We may assume a new self that is the opposite
of the old self, but it is only looking at the same self as if from the other
end of the telescope.
We have a passion to change everything consistent with our
new self. In religion, this is called
being “born again!” Becoming an outsider
to our insides is not becoming born again but self-estranged.
Persons “born again” often become crusaders out to rescue
alcoholics, drug addicts, spouse abusers, petty criminals, and so on. Addiction is a choice, so the best medicine
is not pontification but patient tolerance with attention to the possible cause
or causes of the addiction. Then it is
up to the addict to do the rest.
Gunter’s ambient
deficiency motivation, Hoffer’s misfit and Wilson’s outsider know this
well. Hoffer writes:
If what we do and feel
today is not in harmony with what we want to be tomorrow, the meeting with our
hope at the end of the trail is likely to be embarrassing or even hostile. Thus it often happens that a man slays his
hope even as he battles for it.
So, when you are attempting to govern your coefficient of
passion, remember it is subjective and qualitative and something you want to do
not something you have to do. We, alone,
decide whether to be self-creators or self-destroyers. You get a pretty good reading of where you
stand on this continuum.
Look at time – how do you spend your time?
Do you measure the joy or burden of it in chronological or
psychological time? Do you see time in
terms of instant joy or delayed gratification?
Do you invest time in something today for its benefits tomorrow?
Look at rewards – why do you need rewards anyway?
What is more important to you, being recognized by others or
knowing you have done your best and feel good about it? Do you consider risks part of rewards or do
you avoid risks and still expect rewards?
Look at status – why do you do what you do? Is it for the pleasure or recognition? Are you a puppet on the string of status, or
do you do what you do and let the chips fall where they may?
Look at focus – are you a jack-of-all-trades and master of
none? Do you want to excel at something
or are you afraid if you do others will think you arrogant?
Look at values and priorities. Are they yours or not? Who creates your agenda? Are you driven by security or
challenge? Are you running toward or
away from your passions?
This checklist could have been placed first, but passion is
not an easy street to walk much less cross.
We are constantly at the crossroads of helping and hindering ourselves
and others. It sometimes feels as if we
are walking a plank above an angry sea, but that is only in our minds. Our life, good, bad or indifferent is mainly
our affair, and it is as easy or as difficult as we choose to make it. Passion notwithstanding, the race to get
ahead is not relevant, not relevant at all!
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