The Mystique of Moral Overkill

The question is: Are we going to put some of the "bunk" back? After a long fight against dangerously overinflated or fake values, stultifying conventions, ready-to-wear opinions, blinkers and illusions; after a brave struggle against all kinds of iron chastity belts wrapped around our minds, are we now reaching the point where debunking has become overdebunking—a kind of moral, political, ideological overkill, with the result that our search for "truth" has led us to a new kind of phoniness, no less destructive and false than the virtuous "lies" of yesteryear? I begin to feel very strongly that it is impossible to destroy illusions completely and totally, and that it's wrong to attempt it—no less absurd than the pursuit of total victory in a total war. All we can do is to choose our "beautiful lies" and then attempt to give them some kind of approximative truth. There is no such thing as Truth, a universal truth, an unshakable, foolproof, final truth. All our notions have to be constantly revised, and that includes all our moral "unshakable" values. There are only arrangements with human nature, attempts at peaceful coexistence with certain aspects of our psyche that simply do not allow any kind of total victory, unless victory is achieved over man himself. There can be no "final solution" to man. I even doubt if there are such things as natural good values and natural bad ones: Everything is of our own making. The kind of pursuit of total truth, of total realism on which, for instance, to choose a comical example, the Actors Studio technique is based, is a fallacy, and a dangerous and destructive one to boot. The contemporary pseudo-Freudian crusade against inhibitions is another typical example of the oft-forgotten fact that any kind of dignity, decency, generosity or idealistic outlook is in no way a natural, beautiful golden fruit growing in the splendid garden of our being, but to a considerable degree the result of inhibitions, frustrations, discipline, restrictions, of a constant "rape" of our instincts, of a terrific, painful struggle against nature. Yes, against nature: The belief of Jean Jacques Rousseau and of the 19th Century anarchists, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, in the good savage, was long ago exposed as a total fallacy. Without falling prey to undue pessimism, we find it nevertheless a fact of life that civilization is man's attempt to control the facts of life and himself. The unrepressed, uninhibited individual can in no way be called civilized, and let me say at once that the only thing that matters to me here is not civilization itself, but happiness. For anyone who comes in contact with the generation in their 20s today, it is difficult not to conclude that some of the greatest beauty of life is no longer available to them, and that in the process of overdebunking sentiment, romanticism, phoniness, patriotism, the heart, myths, mothers, fathers, love, humanism, God, purity and about every kind of arbitrary value, the only aspiration left to them now is nirvana, which is the coward's suicide. It is, of course, impossible to blame them. This spiritual no man's land is the result of centuries of totalitarian beliefs. It is difficult to express in one article the full hatred, rancor, and dismay felt by me when some of these completely bewildered, unhappy and lost youths in their 20s come to me with their Freudian jargon, their deliberately monosyllabic 300-word vocabulary. The hydrogen bomb and racial discrimination make for the only solid ground left under their feet, in the sense that to oppose these monstrosities gives them at least some kind of aim and consistency. Needless to say, I am deeply attached to them, and I have written a whole book—The Ski Bum—about one of those knights-errant of the total void. Lenny, the ski bum of my book, whom I know well, is a typical product of the overdebunking process, of psychological, ideological and moral overkill.

Total lucidity is death and self-destruction. Happiness is to a great extent blessed ignorance; and total realism or rationalism is, for instance, incompatible with the state of illusion in which Van Gogh or, for that matter, any great painter, poet or writer struggled to achieve a masterpiece. In all logic, this kind of absolute dedication of an artist can only be qualified as absurd in an "absurd" world. A total adjustment to reality leaves no room for artistic creation and no need for it. Remove the inhibitions, the frustrations, and reach adjustment, and the very basis of our cultural achievement will be destroyed. The removal of "fallacies" through psychoanalysis or by other means and the subsequent "realistic" approach to oneself and to one's relationship with the world can certainly produce a hard-working and submissive citizen, but can only lead, in the long run, to cultural castration. Total psychoanalytical approach is a substitute for culture and, anyway, to consider adjustment to society as a desirable result is a threat to society, in the sense that there is no progress without change, and no change without refusal to accept the generally accepted standards. The Freudian overkill, which the genius of Freud had foreseen and warned against, has already produced a generation of morons talking and thinking in ready-made clichés. At a Bonnard exhibition some time ago, I overheard a group of students after much contemplation conclude that Bonnard "suffered from a shoe fetishism." The sexual overkill is another example, (continued on page 138)Moral Overkill(continued from page 115) Sex is closely related to curiosity, to discovery, to imagination and to what used to be known as mystery. Overexposure can only lead to debunking. The number of things a man and woman can do together in bed is, after all, limited, and unless new and interesting organs are developed, the visual overkill resulting from the commercial tie-ins of sexy models and essentially nonsexual goods, in order to lend these products spurious mass appeal, can only help destroy the feeling of mystery and expectation. Nudist camps are notoriously the least erotic places in the world. The result is that the relationship between male and female today can no longer supply the basic motor of pursuit and energy in life, a situation that leads to a morose, matter-of-fact and depressed approach to life itself. Alcoholism and homosexuality are the obvious consequences, and what is alcoholism if not an artificial creation of a state of illusion? Can anyone deny that the spread of alcoholism or drug addiction is largely the result of the overdebunking process, of realistic overkill with a corresponding loss of illusions? How can one deny that the discarding of sentimental and romantic notions leaves us with a feeling of loss, of nonexistence, of drabness and banality—of reality, in fact? I shall probably repeat as long as I live that culture and civilization mean the deliberate, artificial and arbitrary creation of superstructures, and that there is no such thing as a natural culture or a natural civilization.

A great psychoanalyst recently told me that the next step in the field of psychology will probably be the creation of new myths, of worthwhile illusions and of deliberately achieved distortions, which will lead, or at least help, us to make man his own creation. The rational acceptance of what man actually is about can be pretty ghastly. On the other hand, no one in his right senses would plead for putting us back into the orbit of any of the "masterpieces" of human thought of the past 2000 years.

Our history has always been and still is dominated by the reign of individual kingdoms of human genius and a constant conflict among them, a struggle for the purpose of capturing allegiance of the mind, soul or spirit, and establishing a monopoly on culture. We have lived up to now—and are still living—torn between the feudal kingdoms of the Christian masterpiece and the Marxist masterpiece; even the disciples of Freud show constantly the same totalitarian approach by their claim to a universal key to the human psyche. Within Christendom itself, other religious masterpieces were evolved as a result of religious conflicts; and even within the Catholic Church, throughout the ages, schisms and fratricidal struggles were common in the name of the true dogma, in the claim to the monopoly on God and His truth.

When the French Revolution destroyed the spiritual and material power of the Royal Absolute, the myth of the "people" became endowed with the same aura of final perfection, and claimed total love and allegiance. To this day, throughout the world, be it in China, Soviet Russia, France or America, the word "people" is pronounced with the same nauseating, sanctimonious, pious and intolerably smug tone which used to be reserved for the masterpiece of God alone, but which now is granted to the infallible, beautiful perfection to be found in the masses, considered as sacred and untouchable, the holders of all truth. Any word against this masterpiece centered in the people is blasphemy. This new absolute and its untouchability gives me a nosebleed at the very mention of it, as do all the other claims to totalitarian monopoly on truth, beauty and infallibility. Thus, after generations of subservience to one of these feudal absolutes, each covered in blood and tears, the necessary debunking process called upon such a need to mobilize all our resources for the fight, that the result was not one of putting everything in proper perspective, but one of total destruction, an overkill, a fanatical eradication of good and bad alike in the tyrannical individual kingdom of thought, accompanied by a radical sway to the opposing masterpiece, and either a desperate clinging to a new belief, or nihilism. It is a kind of moral and psychological Silent Spring resulting from overkill—a process described so well by Rachel Carson. This is typical of the struggle between the Church and atheism, each becoming a dogma, a fortress of thought, of intolerance, blinkers and hate.

We are witnessing today the birth of a psychoanalytical culture that is not far from claiming to be the source of culture itself. Let me take as an example of psychoanalytical overkill an admirable statement from the American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm as quoted by Nabokov: The reason why Little Red Riding-hood's bonnet was red, in the opinion of Mr. Fromm, is that the color symbolized the little girl's coming menstruation. It is my contention that any moderately cultured human being, upon reading this piece of horseshit, cannot help turning red with anger and, in fact, become intolerant of the Freudian approach as a whole. Thus, the overkill acts both ways, and the necessary opposition to the totalitarian expansion of the Freudian masterpiece will result in the rejection of everything that is valid in Freud as well. Marxism is another case. It declares itself incompatible with everything but itself. All that can be valid in the Marxist analysis is therefore rejected in America, as Freud is rejected in Soviet Russia, simply because each intellectual kingdom lays a total claim to our minds. And yet, to totally reject Marx in the name of total capitalism, or vice versa, is as absurd and damaging from the point of view of culture as it would be to force science to choose between Euclid and Einstein, or to forbid teaching arithmetic in school in the name of Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy. Of course, with nuclear weapons handy, the conflict between the individual archmasterpieces has become infinitely more dangerous than ever before.

The ocean of culture as a whole, in which all the individual masterpieces merge, as opposed to the individual kingdoms of human genius and their totalitarian claims, is the only means at our disposal to stop the endless process of kill and overkill and the resulting spiritual no man's land of total realism, of sex, alcohol and a "no-shit" attitude where a new kind of human baboon desperately clings to the only certitude he can "experience realistically"—his phallus, or what is left of it.

A lot of the so-called "phony" illusions destroyed are the very soul of our culture, and by our culture, I mean the whole of humanity. They are known as myths. The kind of lobotomy that is practiced today in the name of Freud or Marx, of church or atheism, consists in the removal of those illusions and leads to a spiritual bareness that strongly reminds me of the bare red behinds of apes in a zoo, the most realistic thing I know. Thus, the mystery of the woman has been completely erased. Every modern novelist considers it his duty to debunk the illusion of the female member of the species as being anything but a phallic complement. It is true that the nauseating romanticism of the 19th Century, the pink Victorian fig leaves placed by romantic literature on every spot of womanhood, needed some reduction to less inflated proportions, but the process went so far as to reduce woman in Western society to a kind of Marxist comrade-in-sex. The result of this overkill of an essential myth is an appalling impoverishment of literature and art: Any trace of poetry has vanished from a relationship that seems no longer to leave any room for anything except a kind of masturbation duet. The only passionate plays, or fiction full of hate but at least deeply emotive, are written by homosexuals, for the simple reason that the romantic relationship between man and man cannot be reduced to anything "normal"; thus the homosexual brings his still-forbidden fruit to sex, evoking the kind of passion that sex alone cannot supply.

The Marxist dogma "Religion is the opiate of the masses" has been extended by its Western equivalent, realistic materialism, to every kind of "unreality," an unreality that is nothing but cultural superstructures and, in fact, culture itself. Cultural values cannot be called realistic; they are myths, conventions and fiction, and are not compatible with total adjustment to the facts of life. To sit down and write a love poem is sublimation; abstract painting is turning your back on materialism and on the world as it is; the whole of Renaissance art was based on something that Marxism or atheism considers a fallacy. The unreasonable, irrational beliefs, myths and fantasies are at the source of our greatest achievements. It is impossible to reconcile Faust, Don Juan, Homer or Hamlet with awareness. Total awareness is cultural suicide and sometimes just plain suicide.

I spent many months in the company of young people victim of the debunking overkill: They are irresistibly drawn toward acting, because this is the only permitted illusionism left in the adjustment to reality through which they can escape reality. In fact, the overdebunk and overkill is resulting in a most frightening, claustrophobic and depressing imprisonment behind the barbed wire of new conventions and new phoniness. Even the very movements of the body—gestures and facial expressions—are conditioned by what is "natural" and "uninhibited," with the resulting disappearance of style, reserve, courtesy and manners, and the substitution of an unformulated longing for a return to the Garden of Eden, where we could happily swing from the trees by our tails. The loss of self-respect is absolute, with the corresponding lack of respect for others. The cornerstone of this kind of realism was laid by Göring in his famous: "When I hear the word culture, I grab my gun." Let's play a bit with the slogans: "When I hear the word love, I grab my phallus"; "When I hear the word sentiment, I fart"; "When I hear the word romantic, I say 'Oh, shit!' "

Any reading of literary criticism of the last 20 years will show that the most damning ingredient a novelist can use is sentimentality. I must apologize here to the reader for showing so much restraint, out of respect for the English language, and for not using strong words to express my feelings about that realistic overdebunking by our highbrows and our lowbrows alike, wallowing in the same total adjustment to reality. I shall say here only two things. First, the taboo laid on Marxism by American society has resulted in the frustrated Marxist intellectuals' transfer to a no less totalitarian Freudianism. Secondly, a truly rational outlook, beautifully unsentimental to the problems of both hunger and overpopulation in India, would be to practice genocide on newborn babies and serve them to their famished parents for meals, as they are basically nothing but protein. I'm not joking: The overdebunking process can only result in man's being treated as meat and protein, in genocide, the use of nuclear weapons and the happy return to a fascist and Nazi kind of efficiency. The only thing that stands between man and murder, between civilized society and Auschwitz, between you and me, and Eichmann, is a refusal to submit to the basic facts of the human animal, a painful process of building illusions about ourselves through culture, or conforming to those illusions and myths.

Civilization is, has always been and will always be, a struggle against nature, against what we truly are, an effort to strike some kind of balance between reality and unreality. The development of man depends more on myths than on science–it is motivated by fear, frustration, inhibitions and anxiety. Culture is born out of neurosis. The cure of anxiety can only lead to the kind of acceptance of man by himself that leaves no room or chance for any kind of revolt against our "self." The final solution, of the type that was carried out by Eichmann, will always be tempting as long as we do not succeed in inventing an image or illusion that can only be defined as pure poetry, and the kind of romanticism that goes with the words "dignity," "nobility." "honor" and other kinds of similar "bunk." Nobility or dignity, in the light of mechanistic rationalism, is bunk, nothing but bunk, sheer cant, and, in fact, an almost stylistic, aesthetic approach to mankind. The debunking of idealism, of the ineffectual idealis, cannot be reconciled with culture. The term "idealist" has become an insult both in the Communist East and in the democratic West. Idealism has become synonymous with the lack of a practical, rigorous and rational approach to society; it means, at best, imprecision, nebulous good will, sentimentalism, cloudiness and a general hiding from facts under the smoke screen of elevated but meaningless noble aspiration. The term "beauty" itself has fallen under suspicion. In painting and literature, beauty can mean only escapism, for it can hardly be denied that it is incompatible with any truthful account of the world in which we live. In the light, for instance, of the Los Angeles riots, of the nuclear peril or of the fact that 60 percent of the world population is starving, beauty is becoming more and more an escapist never-never land, and it cannot be decently indulged in. The result is that a man such as Sartre angrily turns against literature itself as an intolerable luxury in a suffering world; and this sort of egomaniacal approach, in which a man's conscience is monstrously inflated so as to identify itself with the suffering of the whole world, is more and more apparent in the totalitarian and extremist approach to reality.

It can hardly be denied that a Jackson Pollock painting shows nothing but indifference to the situation, let's say, of Indian peasants in South America. This is an example of a cultural overreaction when escapism is condemned by a society. I am amazed that the effect of debunking has not yet reached that achieved by Savonarola in Florence, who, in the name of man's suffering, God and Christ, turned his righteous fires against all art, beauty and aesthetic delight. Aesthetic delight in our world can be only too easily represented as playing ostrich.

The overkill is perhaps more perceptible in America than anywhere else, and I think it's possible to bring the reasons into focus. Culturally speaking, the self-destructive attitude is usually the result of a totalitarian dedication to one single masterpiece of the human genius, as opposed to culture as a whole. This situation occurs when one masterly "beacon of light," to use Baudelaire's words, attracts us and blinds us like moths on a dark night.

In an old culture like France, different intellectual kingdoms—from church to atheism, from monarchy to socialism, and literally dozens of others; from Voltaire to Rousseau, from Montaigne to Bergson, from Descartes to Pascal—for centuries have fought for supremacy without ever achieving it. The end result is strong individual resistance and a strong margin of skepticism. The apparition of, let us say, a Freudian or Marxist masterpiece meets a kind of elastic reaction or sinks in without dislodging the partial influence of other historically absorbed and digested spiritual kingdoms. On such a psychological and intellectual ground, it is extremely difficult for an idea to obtain monopoly or domination. There will always be a particle of Voltaire reacting against a particle of Freud, a particle of Montaigne, Descartes or Pascal restraining the action of a particle of Marx. This typically French cultural cheese, made of centuries-old ferments and ingredients, has brought about a strongly protected individual mentality, with its accompanying social division, conflicts, total lack of unanimity, contradiction, egoism, nastiness and personal independence; but it makes it very hard to conquer a Frenchman's mind and soul.

This cultural, historical cheese, except among the elite, cannot be said to have fermented in the same general way in America, because of the briefness of America's history, with the consequence that the individual there is infinitely more exposed and vulnerable to the impact of any strongly presented masterpiece. The addiction, submission and monopoly is therefore infinitely easier to obtain. The impact of the Freudian masterpiece becomes staggering. The American democratic ideal becomes an absolute, for it can truly be described as a masterpiece of human genius and achievement, and therefore sacred; and so the American masses preach this type of Americanism to the world, just as the Russians preach their Marxist gospel. When this universal key suddenly fails to open the door to happiness, a reaction sets in, an indignant rejection of the key in the name of some other absolute solution—Marx, Freud or religious dogma—and the constant swinging of the pendulum between hope and disillusionment ends in cynicism and spiritual barrenness. For instance, it is no longer possible for a young man of our time to mention without a smirk such debunked values as honor, courage or heroism. There can be no more heroes: A hero is a psychopath, a neurotic or a victim of his ignorance of psychology.

Recently I saw a picture made from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and enjoyed it thoroughly as an interesting case of the destruction and vandalism of a work of art through the moviemaker's dedication to the genius of Freud. In the book, Lord Jim went to his death deliberately so as to redeem himself in his own eyes. Now, of course, the very notion of redemption can only bring a belch of scorn from a psychologist; and so the authors of the picture introduced Freud himself, under the guise of Mr. Stein, acted by Paul Lukas, made up as the spitting image of the Viennese master, who delivered long, realistic, psychoanalytical speeches to Lord Jim, trying to make him aware of his neurosis. Nothing is left of the romantic character so typical of the Polish tradition and of Conrad's glamorous, poetical, nostalgic longing for the value of honor, perhaps the most deeply representative of centuries and centuries of Polish dreams and beliefs. The book and the character are totally destroyed; the 20th Century psychoanalytical totalitarian gimmick reduces the 19th Century hero to idiocy.

There is no way of creating great literature without the kind of unrealistic approach of man to himself that leads in the end to the building of a new kind of reality. Moral and spiritual values are the pursuit of a dream, the dream of man about himself; civilization is mythology—it is invented, it is an artifice; it does not correspond to the basic facts of human nature, but is a result of escape from those facts. To gauge how low we have fallen and how dangerously close we are to zero in the intellectual process of overkill, it's enough to remember that the most provoking statement made in Soviet Russia in recent years was expressed in the title of a novel: "Man does not live by bread alone." If this is a daring discovery made by a so-called progressive society in the mid–20th Century, then we are certainly due for either an agonizing reappraisal or just agony. We are the result of a competition with reality. We are a creation of our own imagination, a culturally evolved image to which we are trying to conform, a myth of dignity, decency, fraternity, generosity, humanity that is pure poetry. There can be no scientific approach to our nature—cultural man is an artistic creation.

In the last 25 years, both in the American West and in the Communist East, our myths, all the noble lies we sing about ourselves and then try to live up to, have been smashed one after the other. The results are vandalism, alcoholism, mechanization of sex, drug addiction and the constant riots of the motorcycling, black-leather-jacketed kids: They are normal consequences of realistic debunking, a kind of return to base; that is, a regression. The Watts riots in Los Angeles have been falsely represented in America as purely racial. I am not minimizing the racial aspect, but the same kind of riots occur in Russia, in Warsaw, on the English seaside, in Sweden, with the same hate, burning and killing. They are the consequence of nothingness, of vacuum, of overdebunk and overkill, of the destruction of myths. The cultural center of gravity is not inside us, it is a deliberately invented fallacy, a deliberately created artificial sun, an exalted belief of man in the existence of his soul. There is, of course, no longer such a thing as soul. It has been thoroughly debunked. All kinds of words are used: psyche, ego, self, id, mentality and a hundred other ways of avoiding something that sounds dangerously like pure poetry. And that is what it is: poetry, and romantic poetry to boot. No scientific process, no psychological doctrine, no Freud or Marx, no analytical genius can tell us anything at all about it; they can only analyze it out of existence. It has about as much factual presence, realism and authenticity as Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, Prince Mishkin or any other fabrications of our great "liars," "phonies," "fakes" and "illusionists."

I venture the opinion that within the next 30 years a strong distrust will be laid upon them in the name of the gospel of realism, of total truth and total adjustment to that truth. Yes, I believe the truly great days of rationalism are still ahead of us. For instance, it will soon be unthinkable that men should kill one another in a war and leave it at that. In the light of the most elementary rational approach, this kind of waste of priceless proteins is barbaric. The more I think in terms of logic about wars, overpopulation and hunger, the more cannibalism seems to me a rational solution. All we need is a little more realism, a little more debunking of sentimentalism, romanticism and inhibition; in fact, a little more adjustment.

The endless swinging of the pendulum can end only when the feudalism of individual kingdoms of thought comes to an end, when Marxism, for instance, agrees to become part of culture instead of desperately and bitterly attempting to force all culture to become Marxist. It is quite possible that the universal fear of nuclear weapons and the ensuing stalemate of peaceful coexistence will slowly, with time, ensure this interpenetration, the sinking in of individual master thoughts within a new spiritual dimension, a cultural ocean from which a new civilization will evolve.

However, as long as individual beacons of human thought claim monopoly of light, there can be nothing but successions of flashes of light and of darkness, of faith and disillusionment, overbelief and overdebunking, fanaticism and withdrawal, bloody crusades followed by hatred for the very word "faith," total dedication and then total nausea, the kind of amoralism that comes from too rigid a morality and then again the kind of rigid morality that comes from too much amoralism.

Being by nature an optimist, I feel that, no matter what disasters and perils lie ahead, the next century or so will see the emergence of a universal spiritual power, quite possibly under the impact of some scientific discovery, that will be in part religious and in part artistic; and if this hope seems vague and unconvincing today, let me remind you of the conclusion of an Anatole France tale. Years after the Crucifixion, one of Pontius Pilate's secretaries, discussing some local riot, told his superior that it reminded him of a certain fellow who had given them some trouble in Judaea. "What was his name?" Pontius Pilate asked. "Jesus," the secretary answered, "Jesus of Nazareth." Pontius Pilate thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Jesus of Nazareth," he repeated. "It couldn't be very important. I don't recollect the name at all."