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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