Uncertainty and the Human Heart
When I was a boy, the surprise in my reading was how often I found I thought as others did who wrote. Then it dawn on me we all have the same machine between our ears however some are perhaps better wired than others.
[An educator and historian once asked me, "Jim, what is your genre?" At the time, I couldn't come up with an answer somewhat surprised by the question. Later, after some pondering, I decided my empirical perception of my life and experience from my earliest memory to the present was my genre. Empirical knowledge (a posteriori) is empirical evidence, also known as sense experience. This acquired source of knowledge uses the senses, particularly by observation and experimentation. I have endeavored from my earliest efforts to use this methodology and convey this perception in my books and articles.]
Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg’s (1901 – 1976) “Principle of Uncertainty” relates to the subatomic world of quantum physics but may apply equally to the changing behavior of homo sapiens whose narcissistic detachment from reality suggests that psychopaths in our presence are attempting to create a new nervous system for justifying themselves and our departure from sanity.
In any case, whatever your perspective, people appear to be running away from freedom and themselves into an uncertain cage of fantasy, anxiety, hysteria, and conformity.
Words Words have been the primary vehicle to convey our thoughts yet seldom if ever has it proven adequate as a replacement for action. There are exceptions. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) at the site of the new cemetery to honor the more than 50,000 soldiers who “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
The three-day Gettysburg battle (July 1-3, 1863) marked a turning point in the American Civil War for one main reason: Confederate General Robert E. Lee planned to use it to invade the North and force an immediate end to the war, but due to his colossal failure at Gettysburg the South was forced to surrender unconditionally at Appomattox two years later (April 9, 1865).
Harvard president and scholar Edward Everett (1794 – 1865) was the keynote speaker at Gettysburg while President Lincoln was asked courteously to make a few remarks. Everett, a national orator, spoke for two hours, Lincoln’s remarks of 272 words lasted three minutes.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressed the Congress of the United States after the Empire of Japan destroyed the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu on December 7, 1941: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." Congress declared war on Japan that same day, on Germany and Italy on December 11, and on Bulgaria on June 4, 1942. World War Two would change America and the world forever for that action.
Fast forward to now: climatic agony is global with thunderstorms, hurricanes, and disappearing coastlines. Communities across the globe are plagued with heat waves, raging forest fires, and torrential rains burying communities under mudslides, yet there is little evidence the public intends to give up its toys or change behavior. Delayed gratification seems severed from our conscience.
Pandemics such as Covid-19 alert the public to the need for an immediate and drastic change in behavior with scientists and pharmaceutical manufacturers taking action to meet that need while the public continued to behave ambivalently, passively, or indifferently consistent with Freud’s spoiled CHILD.
"Fat pills" became the forgiveness placebo provided by the pharmaceutical industry to appease a gluttonous consumer society with the promise of reducing obesity without the necessity of changing poor eating habits.
Since the time of ancient Greece, people have hidden behind deep polarities of situational life confusing the one and the many; lightness and darkness; the sacred and profane; mortal and immortal; words and deeds; teachers and the taught; age and youth; male and female; choice and willpower; past and present; life and death; birth, death, and rebirth.
Polarities are palpably evident following disruptive situations such as war. It was true of the American Revolution, American Civil War, World War One, World War Two, and now the saber-rattling of Russia in Ukraine and China with Taiwan. A mortuary climate hovers over our daily existence today with those in political power often behaving like spoiled children while the general public hides behind the nebulous phantom that it is the fault of the government, failing to realize they are the government.
Collapsing societies inevitably use a plethora of words as surrogates for action, words such as those of Edward Everett. The media today often sounds “Everett-like,” which does little to appease our collective conscience. Alas, we are tired of the white noise of television that assaults our minds but fails to quiet of our situational lives.
Effective oratory is invariably succinct as it echoes the poignant sentiments first found in the Bible, Shakespeare, and the Greek classics, words that understand the human heart are key to behavior. Rabble-rousers, demigods, and oligarchs eventually fade but their toxic damage persists for generations.
Ideas – Dramatizing the Obvious American author and psychologist Robert Linder’s (1914 – 1956) “Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath” (1944) describes the rebel as a psychopath incapable of acting for the sake of others.
American film director Nicholas Ray (1911 – 1979) created from this work the popular film “Rebel Without a Cause,” in 1955 as entertainment. That said the film illustrated that rebellious and senseless behavior had invaded our youth and was on the rise. Young people since WWII were shown to live in a state of constant narcissistic torment acting as if their own parents while pointing fingers at everyone except themselves.
Authors Linder and Ray recognize that words or the changing nature of our common American language were profaning youthful behavior and the civil tongue which had now become rough-edged with the “f” word common to language whatever the socioeconomic class. Alas, the will of society had become rudderless. Language is now visual. It is blatantly evident on cellphone screens imbued with barbaric apps. It is as if history and culture have been reduced to a microcosm of the immediate.
The psychic havoc of the subconscious is prominent in past sins (i.e., Holocaust, atomic devastation, American slavery, et al) with new fears: "the fear of freedom" as Erich Fromm shows “Escape from Freedom” (1941); "the fear of death" as Ernest Becker exposes in “Denial of Death” (1973); "the fear of life" as Krishnamurti demonstrates in “You Are The World” (1972), stating:
In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open except yourself (p. 158).
We have gravitated to a point in American history where the middle class and the upper class are now primarily neurotic conformists afraid of what they might lose when it is already lost. This is equally true of some segments of the working class. American class society is collapsing to a collective form of forward inertia in which we have become a mass media culture that appeals only to our lesser angels.
Ideas – Sigmund Freud’s "imaginings" persist culturally if not clinically.
The shadow of Sigmund Freud looms large in the climactic paucity of new ideas. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century declared the “death of God,” which introduced the public to the sweep of secular society to the “Age of Enlightenment,” Freud formulated his “seduction theory” in 1883 and published it in 1895 as a Study on Psychosexual Hysteria.
Freud believed hysteria was rooted in the repression of unpleasant emotions that caused traumatic events in the patient’s sexual life. First, in 1896, he outlined a theory that explains hysteria as a reminiscence of sexual abuse that occurred during childhood.
It is not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in Vienna (Austria), and came of age there. In Freud’s time, the cultural climate in Vienna displayed a fascination with both mental illness and sexual problems in a way unique to the Western world, a fascination that extended throughout society even into the Imperial Court of the Monarch which dominated Vienna’s social life.
Freud’s imaginings plague us today, especially his prejudices about the mental capacity of women and their sexuality confessing women to him were largely a “dark continent.” He asked, “What do women want?” He never found a satisfactory answer. His descriptive science launched a bevy of interpreters.
Eric Berne (1910 – 1970) – Transactional Analysis (T/A)
If you think we have moved on from Freud, think again. Mental illness and its treatment is a tapestry of confusion with its residence in psychoanalysis.
This is equally true of sex role identity, and psychosexual obsessions, with Freud’s theory obvious in Alfred Adler’s psychology of individualism and his theories of introversion and extroversion, Wilhelm Reich’s invention of "free love," and the ultimate orgasm, and now more recently in psychoanalyst Eric Berne’s “The Games People Play” (1964) where he changed Freud’s Superego (the Moral Principle) to the self-righteous PARENT, the Ego (the Reality Principle) to the ADULT, and the Id (the Pleasure Principle) to the CHILD.
Thomas A. Harris (1910 – 1995) – Common T/A Stages
Berne sees us displaying all three of these behaviors in our human personality at various times giving the variance the name of “transactional analysis.” Psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris developed a practical guide to transactional analysis with his “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967):
The phrase I'm OK, You're OK is the Ego or the ADULT with four "life positions" that each of us may assume at any time in our lives although not always appropriate. The four positions are:
1. I'm Not OK, You're OK – early childhood
2. I'm Not OK, You're Not OK – later childhood perceiving something is wrong at home
3. I'm OK, You're Not OK – still later in childhood becomes judgmental of parents
4. I'm OK, You're OK – matures into adulthood and develops a tolerance for his parents and himself as he is.
John M. Dusay: T/A -- Adapted/Free Child; Critical/Nurturing Parent
Psychiatrist John M. Dusay reinterpreted and expanded on the works of Berne and Harris and developed “EGOGRAM: How I See You and You See Me” (1977). He differentiates the PARENT behavior between “Critical Parent” and “Nurturing Parent,” the ADULT remains unchanged, while the CHILD is considered between the “Adapted Child” and the “Free Child.”
Eric Erikson (1902 – 1994) – Youth, Identity and Society
Neo-Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson accepted many of the central tenets of Freudian theory but added his ideas and beliefs.
His theory of psychosocial development is centered on what is known as the epigenetic principle which is reduced to four states or conditions of human development: first, people grow; second, people grow in sequence; third, people grow in time; fourth, people grow together in a community.
Erikson sees all people going through a series of eight stages with this central thesis prominent in a series of books:
“Identity, Youth and Crisis” (1950),
“Identity and the Life Cycle” (1959),
“Identity, Youth and Crisis” (1968), and
“The Life Cycle Completed” (1982).
Identity seems one of Erikson's greatest concerns. As an older adult, he wrote about his adolescent "identity confusion" in his European days. "
My identity confusion," he wrote,
"was at times on the borderline between neurosis and adolescent psychosis." Born Erik Salomonsen when he came to the United States, he invented the new name of Erik Erikson which his daughter claimed proved a prophetic choice signaling a new career and providential acceptance.
More surprising is that this Vienna native came to the United States without a single academic degree, yet served as a prominent
professor at
Harvard, the
University of California, Berkeley, and
Yale.
A
Review of General Psychology (2002), ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Erikson's Identity versus Role confusion (or diffusion) stage is characterized by the adolescent question of “Who am I,” during which time the youth is conflicted with dozens of values and ideas of who he should be and what he should think.
This occurs from the ages of 12-20 years and bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood. Rapid bodily changes during puberty, changing roles, and social relationships can either make the adolescent feel more responsible and ready for adulthood or make him more anxious.
[As Eric Hoffer and others have pointed out the trauma and suspension of self-regard crystallized into psychopathology after WWII roaring to the “terrible 60s” and beyond seemingly only to accelerate in the disenfranchised late 20th century and into the 21st century.]
Bruno Bettelheim (1903 – 1990) – T/A and Autism
Bruno Bettelheim was a history major in Vienna with the assumed identity as a psychoanalyst when he entered New York City in late 1939. An early writer on
autism, Bettelheim focused on the education of
emotionally disturbed children and Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he gained a position as a professor at the
University of Chicago and director of the
Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, leaving that institution in 1973 to teach at
Stanford University.
Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of
those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy, a treatment that rejected the use of
psychotropic drugs and
shock therapy.
During the 1960s and 1970s, he had an international reputation in such fields as autism,
child psychiatry, and
psychoanalysis.
Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of
plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community (see BETTELHEIM: A Life and a Legacy, 1996, Nina Sutton; and The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, 1997, Richard Pollak).
At the Orthogenic School (1944 – 1973), Bettelheim made changes and set up an environment for
milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some emotionally disturbed children and wrote books on both normal and abnormal
child psychology becoming a major influence in the field, and widely respected during his lifetime.
Bettelheim was noted for his study of
feral or isolated children, who revert to the animal stage without experiencing the benefits of belonging to a community. He discussed this phenomenon in the book
“The Informed Heart” (1960). Even critics agree that, in his practice, Bettelheim was dedicated to helping these children using methods and practices that would enable them to lead happy lives provided given proper care and attention to adapt to their environment.
Bettelheim was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.
After retiring in 1973, he continued to write and taught at
Stanford University.
His most widely read book was
“The Uses of Enchantment” (1976) where he analyzed
fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. In this work, he discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of
fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the
Brothers Grimm.
Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. By engaging with these
socially evolved stories, he believed children would go through emotional growth and be better prepared for their own futures.
In the United States, Bettelheim won two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the
National Book Award in the category of
Contemporary Thought.
However, in 1991, well-supported charges of plagiarism were brought against him for this book claiming he had copied from Julian Herscher's 1963
A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales. Depressed and in ill health, the much-achieving Vienna-born psychotherapist committed suicide on March 13, 1990.
In terms of skill in creating an audience, Freud had the literary flair of a novelist being able to spin captivating tales of his psychoanalytical research that were as enchanting and as compelling as novels. Likewise, his Vienna disciples, especially Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim displayed similar gifts.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) – Man and His Symbols Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Initially, he was a great admirer of Freud's work. After meeting him in Vienna in 1907, the two talked for thirteen hours straight, resulting in an intense five-year friendship. But from early on, Jung thought that Freud placed his authority above the quest for truth. Moreover, beyond that, there lay deep theoretical differences as Jung was unable to accept Freud's reductionism with the claim that the main drive in human life was sexual.
That said Freud liked having the Swiss Protestant psychiatrist as a colleague in his Jewish federation of psychiatrists to render it legitimate beyond his ethnicity. The two men conducted a
lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Although their collaboration was short-lived, they rendered psychology the professional status it had not previously enjoyed, having its origin in theology and philosophy.
Jung's work has been influential in the fields of
psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He is acknowledged as one of the founders of analytical psychology, psychological types, the collective unconscious, complexes, archetypes, the differentiation of anima and animus, synchronicity, the shadow self, extraversion, and introversion.
Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is
individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best-known psychological concepts, including
synchronicity,
archetypal phenomena, the
collective unconscious, the
psychological complex, and
extraversion and introversion.
Jung was also an artist, craftsman, symbolic builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.
For Freud, Jung departed from science into the metaphysical world of religion. Freud questioned Jung's use of the “shadow self” to describe the unconscious or
“undercovered self” of the personality. Our conscious ego, Jung claims, refuses to identify with its collective unconscious; that is, the anima or the feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus or the male image in the female psyche. To Jung, the anima/animus represents the "true self" rather than the image we present to others and serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.
Early on Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir apparent to his "new science" of psychoanalysis. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made that impossible for him to follow his older colleague's doctrine. A schism was inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.
Werner Erhard (born 1935) – A new identity and escape John Paul Rosenberg was born in
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. His father was a small restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission before joining his wife in the
Episcopal Church, where she taught Sunday School. They agreed that their son should choose his religion when he was old enough. John Paul chose to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, served there for eight years as an acolyte, and has been an Episcopalian ever since.
From the mid-1950s until 1960, Rosenberg worked in various automobile dealerships (starting at a Ford dealership where he was trained by
Lee Iacocca, then Lincoln Mercury, and finally Chevrolet), with a stint managing a nearly defunct medium-duty industrial equipment firm. This firm became successful under his management.
Rosenberg married in 1953 with the couple having four children. In 1960, he left his wife and their four children in Philadelphia, traveled to
Indianapolis, and changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard." He chose his new name from
Esquire magazine articles he had read about
West German economics minister
Ludwig Erhard and the Copenhagen physicist
Werner Heisenberg.
He moved to St. Louis, as Werner, and took a job as a car salesman. His wife Patricia Rosenberg remained in Philadelphia with their four children relying on welfare and help from family and friends. After five years without contact, Patricia Rosenberg divorced Erhard for desertion and remarried. In October 1972, a year after creating
Erhard Seminars Training (est), Erhard contacted his first wife and family, arranged to provide support and college education for the children, and repaid Patricia's parents for their financial support. Between 1973 and 1975, members of his extended family took the est training, and Patricia and his younger siblings took jobs in the est organization.
The brief history of the Erhart est seminars (1971 – 1984) attracted celebrities, movie stars, rock & roll entertainers, Hippies, and Yippipies, as well as middle-class professionals and workers who felt they had lost their personal, religious, and political identity.
L. Ron Hubbard (1911 – 1986) – Sci-fi novelist & creator of a new religion An American author, primarily of science fiction and fantasy stories, L. Ron Hubbard founded the
Church of Scientology.
In 1950, Hubbard authored
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and established a series of organizations to promote
Dianetics. In 1952, Hubbard lost the rights to Dianetics in bankruptcy proceedings and subsequently founded Scientology. Thereafter, Hubbard oversaw the growth of the Church of Scientology into a worldwide organization.
Born in
Tilden, Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard spent much of his childhood in
Helena, Montana. After his father was posted to the U.S. naval base on
Guam, Hubbard traveled to Asia and the South Pacific in the late 1920s. In 1930, Hubbard enrolled at
George Washington University to study civil engineering but dropped out in his second year. He then began his career as a prolific writer of pulp fiction stories.
Scientology became increasingly controversial during the 1960s and came under intense media, government, and legal pressure in some countries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard spent much of his time at sea on his fleet of ships as "
Commodore" of the
Sea Organization, an elite quasi-paramilitary group of Scientologists.
Hubbard returned to the United States in 1975 and went into seclusion in the California desert after an
unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of
Clearwater, Florida. In 1978, Hubbard was convicted of fraud after he was tried
in absentia by France. In the same year, eleven high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Church's
Snow White Program, a systematic program of espionage against the United States government. One of the indicted was Hubbard's wife
Mary Sue Hubbard, who was in charge of the program; L. Ron Hubbard was named an unindicted co-conspirator.
Hubbard spent the remaining years of his life in seclusion in a luxury motorhome on a ranch in California, attended to by a small group of Scientology officials. He died at age 74 in January 1986. Following Hubbard's death, Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. Though many of Hubbard's autobiographical statements are fictitious, the Church of Scientology describes Hubbard in
hagiographic terms and rejects any suggestion that its account of Hubbard's life is not historical fact.
Whereas est seminars are no more, Scientology has a contentious existence to this day in Clearwater, Florida operating mainly under the radar of detractors and speculators. Its continued existence is yet another reminder that the American conscience is still far from at peace.
Thomas Stephen Szasz (1920 – 2012) – Retreat from Sanity Freud’s world from its initial stage was strong on description and less convincing neurologically. This is changing but the shadow of Freud still lurks in our collective conscience and the practice of mental health.
Maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has compared the treatment of mental illness to that of the Spanish Inquisition seeing Christian history has much in common with today's institutional psychiatry. He writes of this in “The Manufacture of Madness” (1970), and “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1974), while admiring Freud’s brilliance and his systematic style of work, Jung’s humanness and sensitivity to man’s moral and religious nature, and Adler’s common sense and directness.
Szasz writes, “It seems Jung and Adler must have been superb psychotherapists which Freud was not.” Szasz acknowledges that brain disease and brain damage, and brain defects exist but “they cannot be cured with conversation.” In terms of behavioral science, he believes that science belongs on the side of the people it studies rather than aligning itself with a society that wants to control differences. He opposes all involuntary hospitalization, pointing out “there are many crimes committed in the name of mental illness” from the abuses in private practice to our system of criminal justice.
In “Second Sin” (1973), he writes, “If a man says he is talking to God we say he is praying; if he says God is talking to him we say he is schizophrenic.” He adds, “treating addiction to heroin with methadone is like treating addiction to Scotch with bourbon.” He sees mental hospitals as “the POW camps of our undeclared war and unarticulated civil wars.”
Szasz sees fundamental similarities between the preoccupation of the people with religion and religious matters, especially with the religious deviance called “heresy,” and the therapeutic state characterized by the preoccupation of the people with medicine and medical matters, especially with medical deviance called illness.
He explains, “a symbiotic relationship developed between medicine, especially psychiatry, as the prestige and popularity of organized religion diminished following the Enlightenment. Medicine took over many of the functions formerly performed by churches. Physicians became the new priesthood and it has been psychiatrists, especially who have played the roles of priests. They are our secular and ‘scientific’ priests.”
More specifically among psychiatrists, Freud’s presence has been the most pervasive as he possesses the imaginings of a novelist with a descriptive talent to reduce many “diseases” in mental health to conversation treatable with psychotherapy.
[Notice I fail to mention the cadre of organizational efficiency experts who would return operational health to the workplace by focusing exclusively on management such as Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960); David McClelland, The Achieving Society (1961); Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid (1964); Frederick Hertzberg, Work and the Nature of Man (1966); J. M. Juran, Quality Control Handbook (1974); Peter Block, The Empowered Manager (1987); Rensis Likert, The Human Group (1967); W. Edward Deming, Out of the Crisis (1986); Peter Drucker, The New Realities (1989); Michael Hammer & James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (1999).
Systemic organizational behavior, like economics, is mainly intuitive and reactionary rather than reliably effective with analytics and mathematical algorithms. Well-meaning as these experts, they collectively have failed to note the radical shift from “position power” of management to “knowledge power” of late 20th century workers, especially professionals. Ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic forced management to finally loosen the screws one turn with “Work Without Managers” (1991) finally entering the conversation.]
Legacy of Freud & his followers – Dependence on Descriptive Science
The legacy of Freud is that mental illness as Szaz has pointed out is a myth justified by descriptive science. This diagnosis has resulted too often to the branding of those so designated. To wit, children disruptive in the classroom are commonly diagnosed as suffering from ADHD or ADD, controllable by a retinue of drugs whereas nutritionists claim a more reliable approach would be to reduce the offenders' diets to far less sugar.
Likewise, children have been misdiagnosed as being dyslexic or autistic as we learn by reading the biographies of Bruno Bettelheim. The same could be said of a person being “bipolar” based on a description of observed pivotal behaviors supportive of that diagnosis. Again, a retinue of drugs is likely to be administered as a corrective measure. Medical practitioners consistent with Freud’s descriptive science continue to identify all kinds of syndromes and disorders sometimes to embarrassment.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA), DSM-I, and DSM-II pathologized homosexuality as a disease before 1973. Thereafter, DSM III and subsequent editions of the manual removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
The psychic havoc of our times subjects the individual to the calculus of the state machine that falls back on labels rather than scientific studies aggravating the problem rather than resolving the behavioral issue.
We are gluttons for simplistic explanations of what we construe as atypical behavior. Russian British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) claims we are afraid of freedom preferring others to do our thinking and evaluating. He sees this as a drift toward “positive freedom” where the state takes care of everything at the expense of “negative freedom” where the individual as a private contractor trusts his situational judgment.
That said a pure state of “negative freedom” or “positive freedom” would be chaotic. The character and context of man collectively are impressionistic with an instinctual sense of survival. Behavior follows this dictum.
Americans live in a conscious climate of violence with imagined or anticipated fear. This finds us with the compulsory need to find refuge in the collective will of the state. Even so, certain citizens prefer to live on the edge marginalized in the quiet prison of the mind in primitive isolation from the boring sickness of society expressed in the rebellious imperative of the self as a literary option. British writer Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013) exploits this state in “The Outsider” (1956) profiling such artists as H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The “outsider” acts according to his desires, while the “insider” behaves as the group would insist. These polar extremes describe our world today.
