Freud and Nietzsche: Psychiatry between Existentialism and Scientism

Art by Andrew Baines

In The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker defends and broadens Otto Rank’s view of psychotherapy. Rank was one of Freud’s colleagues who broke with Freud, like Jung. Jung and Rank both interpreted psychological problems in spiritual and philosophical terms, whereas Freud clung to a narrower, sexual theory of mental dynamics. For Rank, the human mind is torn between opposite tendencies, towards separation and greater individuation, on the one hand, and towards union with a collectivity, on the other. This is an absurd, dangerous foundation for personal growth, because it threatens the person with the fate of being forever internally conflicted and with the anxiety of oscillating blindly back and forth between the poles. For example, a person might demonstrate her ego’s distinctiveness with displays of conspicuous consumption, while pretending to worship a deity that demands humility and submission to its greater power. The opportunity for what Becker called “heroism” is found in creative solutions to this existential predicament of having an unstable mental structure, stemming from the trauma of separation at birth, and of being propelled by the fear of the final separation at death. Art, love, and a mystical hope for cosmic reunion with a divine being that somehow encompasses all natural things are Rank’s recommendations for avoiding the stalemate of neurosis, of failing to learn how to unlearn past experience or to find a balance between the desire to stand out and to fit into a greater whole.

Freud from Nietzsche

Becker’s presentation of this theory emphasizes its existential aspect, and indeed Rank’s ideas are much more plausibly universal than Freud’s positing of infantile sexuality. But Becker’s criticism of Freud neglects Freud’s direct connection with existentialism. Freud, after all, was aware of Nietzsche’s writings, although he professed to having avoided reading them in depth, even while Freud’s work betrays his familiarity with several Nietzschean themes (as well as with Darwinism). As a relevant Wikipedia article says, “in the 1890s, Freud, whose education at the University of Vienna in the 1870s had included a strong relationship with Franz Brentano, his teacher in philosophy, from whom he had acquired an enthusiasm for Aristotle and Ludwig Feuerbach, was acutely aware of the possibility of convergence of his own ideas with those of Nietzsche and doggedly refused to read the philosopher as a result.” However this may be, Nietzsche must have rubbed off on Freud. This study, for example, summarizes what the two approaches share:

(a) the concept of the unconscious mind; (b) the idea that repression pushes unacceptable feelings and thoughts into the unconscious and thus makes the individual emotionally more comfortable and effective; (c) the conception that repressed emotions and instinctual drives later are expressed in disguised ways (for example, hostile feelings and ideas may be expressed as altruistic sentiments and acts); (d) the concept of dreams as complex, symbolic "illusions of illusions" and dreaming itself as a cathartic process which has healthy properties; and (e) the suggestion that the projection of hostile, unconscious feelings onto others, who are then perceived as persecutors of the individual, is the basis of paranoid thinking. Some of Freud's basic terms are identical to those used by Nietzsche.

The Christian psyche famously provided Nietzsche with his case study in repression and paranoia, just as Nietzsche demonstrated his “genealogical” form of explanation in his account of master-slave morality. Instead of dictating principles or arguing systematically, Nietzsche sought to undermine various philosophies and perspectives by purporting to trace their psychological causes back to either “noble” virtues or to unheroic, “weak” acts of self-deception. For example, instead of celebrating the will to power, a Christian might passive-aggressively cloak her predatory instincts with a show of false humility. Logicians typically regard Nietzsche’s whole approach as resting on the genetic fallacy. Moreover, his philosophy seems self-contradictory, since he presupposes the universal truth of his metaphysics of power, even while he maintains that knowledge depends on perspective and that all truth-claims are surreptitious attempts to overpower others. All living things are beasts, for Nietzsche, and beasts have no sound basis for believing they’re in touch with objective, nonpragmatically-construed reality. Reasoning is a sham, and displays of power are the only demonstrations that matter in that they testify to the greatness of heroic individuals who distinguish themselves from the prosaicness of the herd mentality.

In any case, Freud does add much to the structure of Nietzschean thought: whereas Nietzsche’s arch concept is power, Freud’s is sex. But while Nietzsche’s corresponding image of people as animals led him to write only aphoristic or literary appraisals, Freud’s single-minded interpretations were in the service of his drive to pioneer a science of the mind. Freud reduced every desire or impulse, every conscious or unconscious image, every mental or social event to a sexual cause originating in the Oedipal or castration complex. Whereas power is vague and can take myriad forms, sex is concrete and objective. The Id or unconscious may be irrational, but if it desires sex with the mother, expressions of that desire can theoretically be confirmed, because the sex act provides a benchmark for comparisons. Thus, in a dream a cigar might unconsciously symbolize a penis. Likewise, had Nietzsche identified a particular powerful act as all-important in human relations, as Freud had done in Chapter Four of Totem and Taboo(a prehistoric killing of a father figure, or alpha male), Nietzsche’s thought might have taken on the power of a science. However, like the phony spirituality of Christian religion, psychoanalysis is only pseudoscientific in the Popperian sense of being unfalsifiable. You can posit an infantile, unconscious sexual urge to explain any action, but the merit of that explanation isn’t tested in practice. Indeed, in so far as the applications of psychoanalysis testify to its power, the theory fails the test of being technoscientific, because the analyst-analysand relationship is typically endless. The talking never ends, because the imagination can always conjure new sexual fantasies and interpretations of events in the person’s formative years. Moreover, the theory is awkwardly implausible: sexual impulses are hormonal and the relevant hormones are released in puberty; thus, children have no sexual desires. 

Becker’s existential psychology would likewise be unfalsifiable, since you could just as easily trace any decision or action to a response to some universal fear, such as the fear of death or of standing out as an independent individual. However, existential psychology has the merit of being more plausible than psychoanalysis. Children do learn about death at an early age and they certainly are frustrated by obstacles to their attempts to further their bloated self-interest. The existential condition of being condemned to realize that we’re mortal and fragile creatures with the potential for creative transcendence does plausibly distinguish human mentality from most other animal forms.

Nietzsche against Freud

Ernest Becker

Meanwhile, psychoanalysis can be criticized on Nietzschean grounds. Psychoanalysts may pretend to be interested only in instrumental, value-neutral evaluations of their success or failure in technoscientific, medical terms. Their ostensible goal is to allow the patient to vent unconscious longings, while preserving enough of the ego’s illusions to help sustain a profoundly dishonest society that reflects the absurdity of our mental foundations in our infantile urges. But psychoanalysis is little better than a cult of personality, like the cult that pervades North Korea. Although psychoanalysts don’t necessarily worship Freud, their theory of the mind is just the handiwork of that amoral genius who strove first of all not for truth but for power, going as far as to steal some of Nietzsche’s methods while ignoring the existential insights that would undermine psychoanalysis if they were more widely known. Becker likewise shows that Freud was ruthless in serving his “personal immortality project,” as Freud attempted to outlive his biological death by creating an institution that would survive him while bearing the marks of his preoccupations. More importantly, the pretense that psychoanalysis is scientific is itself an exercise in self-deception and thus fails the existentialist’s test of demonstrating the primary virtue of personal integrity. For Freud, the mind is always at odds with itself, because the social forces informing the Superego are bound to clash with the infantile urges of the unconscious Id. Thus, there will always be work for the psychoanalyst and Freud’s immortality is secure. Freud’s pessimism is thus a subterfuge, covering for his animal urge to overpower others by imposing his peculiar reconciliation with the prevailing Victorian mores onto patient and therapist alike, not to mention on wider Western culture which has absorbed Freud’s scientistic version of Nietzsche’s thought.

While existentialists, too, are often pessimistic, they hold out simple honesty and responsibility as practical ideals, and it’s relatively easy to distinguish between those who know and are true to themselves, and those who lie compulsively to others and to themselves. To be sure, psychoanalysis admits of a difference between mental normality and pathology or neurosis. But the absurd foundation of the human psyche, the idea of which psychoanalysis inherits from existential philosophy via Freud’s engagement with Nietzsche’s writings, conflicts with the therapeutic goal of curing the patient. This is evident from Becker’s discussion of the existential undertones of Freudianism, in which the point emerges that there is no firm line between mental health and disorder. So-called mental normality is already the beginning of neurosis. We’re all trapped by the existential paradox in which we try to immortalize ourselves, to preserve our ego by one illusion or another while simultaneously wishing to merge with a greater totality such as a god or a culture. For Becker, neurotics are merely failed artists, lacking the genius to transcend their greater awareness of life’s absurdity, which enhanced understanding prevents them from automating their social interactions. Thus, for example, the neurotic will be incapable of fulfilling his sexual function as a member of our species, but will cling to perversions to lessen the resulting anxiety.

Becker attempts to divide mental health from disorder in a revealing way, saying clumsily at one point, “But somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure, and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism” (240). Thus, he criticizes Rank for being

so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion that he almost obscured the overall picture…Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it…In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity….If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. (232-3)

This is supposedly because perverts or fetishists were deprived of a certain upbringing which might have established a secure sense of their body, “firm identification with the father, strong ego control”, and “dependable interpersonal skills.”

Art by Albert Carel

Of course, there are differences between normal and abnormal sexual behaviour, although Becker’s analysis here is rendered dubious by his inclusion of homosexuality as a perversion that supposedly has ingenious or somehow inferior “motives” (232); instead, this abnormal sexuality is likely in part genetic. In any case, what Becker doesn’t justify is his value judgment. Even if fetishists were weak in being unable to carry out their species role of sexually reproducing with routine indifference rather than with creative flourishes, why should that weakness necessarily call for a cure? This is like saying that normal people lack the “strength” to murder without being burdened by a conscience. Whether our species ought to continue is an empirical question, not one with a self-evident answer. So the average sexual reproducer’s “strength,” fostered by a certain upbringing shouldn’t necessarily be encouraged. At least, Becker only presupposes that the weakness in question represents a failure. If it turns out that our species eventually destroys the planet’s capacity to sustain life, the “failure” of the perverts who resist normal sexuality would have to be reinterpreted as tragically heroic rather than ignominious since the value assignments would be reversed.

Whatever the merits of Becker’s discussion of this particular point, psychiatry is notorious for being unable to sustain its distinction between mental health and disorder, without resorting to spurious appeals to mass opinion. In fact, there are two sources of this difficulty. One is, as I said, the universality of the existential condition which renders us all clueless puppets in the big picture, an assumption Freud takes over from Nietzsche. The other source is the scientism which Freud adds to Nietzsche. Psychiatrists in general must be instrumentalists rather than righteous in their evaluations if they’re to retain the esteem that’s due to practitioners of a science. Engineers are interested only in doing what works, given some presupposed goal, not in figuring out which goals are right in the first place. Thus, if psychiatrists are medical doctors curing the mind rather than the body, they must likewise presuppose the social functions that enable them to target deviations as requiring their professional attention.

In so far as psychiatry is still informed by Freudianism, the discipline is caught between existentialism and scientism, between recognizing the absurdity of our situation, which calls for an artistic or a religious response, and feeling compelled to fit into a power hierarchy and seeing technoscience as the best instrument to secure the therapist’s elevated status and to establish a certain social order. Nietzsche’s revenge against psychiatry is that he has the resources to heal the doctor, to diagnose the phony neutrality of a pseudoscience as a disguise for a power play, and to recognize the source of the absurdity of that play in the existential condition which calls for decidedly nonscientific solutions.

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The American Spectacle

Liberals and globalists (proponents of globalization) are aghast at the Western conservative’s retreat to infantile, care-free farce, as in Brexit and the Republican nomination of Donald Trump, the latter having been preceded by the astroturfed Tea Party diversion from the economic causes of 2008’s American housing market crash. The suspicion is that American and British white male losers in the global marketplace are scapegoating gays, Muslims, or Mexicans because these whites no longer know how to be men enough to recognize the reason why their middle classes have vanished, which is that the postindustrial environment spoils these men and so they can’t compete with the likes of the hyper-pragmatic Chinese. Heretofore the aristocratic winners in the genetic lottery that ruled their segregated societies until the 1960s’ social revolutions, whites in North America and Europe must face the prospect of being marginalized in the global melting pot, as not just Chinese and Indians but also machines come to dominate the workforces. Partly also as an unintended consequence of feminist overreach in liberal societies, Western men have lost touch with their innate sense of honour, and so they’d sooner drug themselves to death than admit that their history—from the medieval Christian atrocities in Europe to Spain’s genocide against Native Americans and the African slave trade—is sordid and wholly unforgivable, and that whites need a spiritual, existential awakening or risk becoming a laughing stock class of deluded crybabies.  

The Debordian Spectacle of Trump and His Minions

Guy Debord’s concept of the society of the spectaclecan partly explain the Trump phenomenon. According to Debord’s postmodern (i.e. pretentious and obfuscating) application of Marxist theory, capitalism is a process in which “the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” Social interactions become more and more mediated by mass media images, to which we passively defer, and we live in an infotainment bubble in which past and future are conflated to make capitalistic culture appear eternal and immutable. “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” says Debord. “The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment.” The spectacle “is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement…”

This concept of the spectacle, of the image or other representation that functions as an oppressive cultural intermediary, needn’t be restricted to a Marxian analysis. There are social spectacles or myth-laden images, and there are individual ones just as there is culture and there’s the stage in each mind in which stereotypes compete for the spotlight of our personal attention. Society flatters its economic structure, defending the power allotments in its dominance hierarchy, and we each spin a private tale, the narrative of our life in which we’re the starring protagonist. Images from our dreams and symbols of the idols to which we dedicate ourselves compel us to trust the judgments issuing from these self-serving thought-worlds, from the mental space we inhabit when we live in our heads with existential inauthenticity. The alternative isn’t to trust in The Force, to walk the heroic path like Neo from the Matrix, without thinking we’re on it. Animals are the relatively thoughtless ones; thoughts—including second-order and objective ones—are weapons in our war against the godless environment. What we need isn’t nirvana, the inner peace from detaching from our thoughts as a result of our personal self-destruction. Instead, we should learn to tell better stories; we need to learn how to be self-respecting artists.
   

In any case, Trump, then, is a phony revolutionary. His supporters believe that he’ll save the white portion of the lower middle class, by protecting the US economy from foreign cheats such as the Chinese (who actually just work a hundred times harder than North Americans and a thousand times harder than Europeans), or that he’ll punish the double-dealing political class by blowing up the whole American government. But those are wishes, not rational predictions, and anyway empirical interpretations of Trump’s intentions are irrelevant, from a Debordian perspective. Mainstream Trump is a symbol and his cultural significance is determined by underlying economic processes. Ever since Nixon brokered a deal with Strom Thurmond, creating the GOP’s Southern Strategy, Republicans have pretended to champion the backward social positions of the antediluvian white southerners, while double-crossing them with free trade deals and other plutocratic economic policies that have hollowed-out the American middle class. Again, instead of taking responsibility for having been duped as gullible, irritable voters, these southerners together with low-information blue collars prefer scapegoats. Now Trump is merely doubling-down on this trusty political strategy. Superficially, Trump has the capacity to fight for this once-dominant social class (again, a class that deserves to languish for having benefited from the atrocities of its forbears). Technically, Trump could repair the American infrastructure by establishing a Democratic-style, protectionist welfare state under the cover of xenophobic bluster. But the profound ironies of social reality are perceived only at a more rarified level. Trump is himself a plutocrat, after all. Instead of controlling the government’s policies from a distance, with lobbyists and Manchurian candidates, a hero of the power elite has decided that pulling the levers directly is more efficient. We get the candidates we deserve, but the question is: Who are “we”?

The US has become infamous for its economic inequality. The vast majority of the country’s economic gains over the last several decades have gone to only a handful of individuals who belong to the top tenth of the top one percent of American wealth holders. The cultural spectacle which is a nation’s unfolding of its story to its citizens would have to be informed by such a momentous shift. And so while Trump may speak for the little guy, like a classic populist demagogue, the medium is the message: to cynical connoisseurs of political spectacles, such as to those who have overdosed on philosophy, the deeper meaning of Trump is that he inadvertently displays the id of American plutocrats. These billionaires have the wealth of kings, so democracy is an encumbrance to them. Hints of how wealthy Americans see themselves were dropped when, instead of running for the hills out of embarrassment to show their faces after their fraudulent banks were bailed out at public expense, the Wall Street bankers were indignant that Main Street called them bad names. The top one percent displayed an aristocratic resentment towards their inferiors; after all, who are mortals to complain about the deeds of their gods? Regardless of how egregious Yahweh’s treatment of Job appeared to be, Job was necessarily in the wrong, because God’s ways transcend Job’s capacity to understand. Likewise, the sheeple of Main Street were to blame for indebting themselves to achieve their preposterous dream of owning a mansion. No one deserves to live anywhere; we must fight for what we want and need. Those who can afford to pay can take what they want, while those who can’t should know their place. Meanwhile, as explained by Thomas Piketty and others, the top one percent have reaped enough wealth to take virtually anything they want anywhere in terrestrial space. Naturally accompanying those outsized fortunes is godlike insanity, the jealousy, pettiness, and narcissism featured in all monotheistic spectacles. After all, the deities of traditional religions were only fictions mined from the ancients’ familiarity with mortal tyrants. American plutocrats are godlike, then, in all the obnoxious ways, and Trump’s persona is their stereotype. As befits a superhuman aristocrat, there’s even the hint of incest between Trump and his daughter Ivanka.

As Debord writes, culture is the prevailing economic order’s “laudatory monologue” and “self-portrait.” The national story is revealed not in the form of words spoken in speeches, tweets, or pundits’ talking points. That foregrounded discourse is fodder only for the conscious and rational sides of our mind. The enduring story of a zeitgeist operates as myth and so follows a dream logic that sways us like a command issued to children or to pets (or as Elliot says well in Mr. Robot, to “paying fanboys of their [the theocratic charlatans’] poorly written sci-fi franchise”). A free lower class that’s been betrayed and needs to fight for its survival would band together and resist the forces that oppress them. This happens all over the less-developed parts of the world, but not in the United States since the ‘60s, because since that time Americans (and citizens of Americanized postindustrial societies generally) have become free only in the ironic, Orwellian respect. Our freedom is the negative kind, to choose between a thousand varieties of irrelevant products. We lack the positive freedom to be able to decide what we most want, because our cultural discourse is dominated by spectacle, by a glitzy, misleading narrative that glorifies the minority who prosper in our neoliberal regimes. That minority doesn’t write the spectacular narrative. We alldo, because unconsciously we long to worship our alpha rulers, as Loki says in The Avengers movie.

Indeed, that movie is itself a Trump-like spectacle. As in most action movies, the villain speaks the subversive naturalistic or cosmicist truth, and is defeated by a hero who represents an unrealistic ideal, an ideological superstructure, as Marx said, that sustains and excuses each individual’s position in the local dominance hierarchy. Loki tries to rule so-called freedom-loving Americans, but is eventually vanquished and thrashed as a false god by the Hulk. As if most Americans don’t tell themselves daily that they’d bow at the first sign of the return of a true immortal! And as if the hyper-consumption by these worshipers indicates they’re interested in Jesus’s morality! Most Americans evidently long to be peasants in God’s Kingdom because they’re social animals, like all of us, and social animals form pecking orders in which the majority abase themselves before their masters for the sake of surviving in a world that could dispose of all life on Earth without warning or apology—by a solar flare, say, or by a meteor impact. Militaries form strict chains of command and the lower ranks are trained to revere their superiors. All living things are at war with their environment. Our artificial worlds (languages, cultures, machines, cityscapes) give us breathing room, providing us distractions that delay our reckoning with natural reality. But our animalism always hinders our plans for transcendence. We form democracies based on Enlightenment rhetoric and pseudoscientific economic myths. But just as theocratic Middle Eastern kingdoms are run by the oil industry and communist China is controlled by its oligarchs, so-called liberal America is dominated by its economic titans, by its most powerful alpha males. Trump seems to look to Putin for guidance, because Putin reached a deal with his Yeltsinian oligarchs whereby he wouldn’t imprison them on politically-motivated charges as long as they’d support him and his government. Putin’s Russia is now a crony capitalistic kleptocracy in which Putin rewards his close personal relations by making them oligarchs who in turn form pro-Putin counterweights in internecine power struggles in the Russian oligarchy.

The spectacle of Trump shows us that he would be the American Putin. And just as consumers love to laugh at the defeated Loki, Americans across the political spectrum condemn Putin for being a godless autocrat. However, that shibboleth aside for being vacuous, the rise of Trump attests to the fact that animalism has the last word in human affairs. If we’re coddled as late modern consumers and so we can’t dictate the course of our lives by telling our stories with our actions, as it were, but must settle for a mediated life in which we’re trained and managed by our cultural conventions, living through the images that embody myths of materialism or of theistic supernaturalism, these myths must preserve this social order. We don’t want the music to stop, because if it does we might be the ones left without a chair. We’re as children begging to be told a comforting bedtime story so that we can endure the inhuman darkness of nighttime. Subscribing to a new national narrative entails a social revolution, which means destroying the old social order. That task is fit only for upstanding or desperate individuals, not for a blinkered, lillywhite herd of obese, infantilized consumers.

Again, Trump’s supporters may intend to lay waste to the American government in retaliation for being stabbed repeatedly in the back by the more “serious,” professional politicians. But the American political spectacle is even less kind to these Lilliputians. If Trump’s grotesque personality signifies the disfigurement that happens when a hairless ape acquires an Olympian degree of power, the flock that follows him is committing collective suicide because unconsciously the lower-class whites know their proper place. Studies have found that poor white Americans are literally killing themselves at a high rate by drug or alcohol overdoses or by suicide. These whites seem to understand that globalization spells their demise as a privileged class and that the American Dream for them is a cruel fantasy. They resent having fallen so low in the pecking order, and so they mimic the heroism of their mortal enemy, the Islamist suicide bomber: “If we can’t have our country,” they seem to whine, “no one will.” At least, that might be their rationalization for their self-destructive political gambit.

But even should Trump win the presidency and burn Washington to the ground, the American plutocracy would endure, because the wealthy are transnational, not mere loyal Americans. Only the animistic gods of small, unorganized religions were considered tied to particular times and places. There was the god not just of trees but of this particular tree, and a god who dwelt in this particular shrine, and so on. Gods of larger groups, such as pharaohs, emperors, or late capitalistic plutocrats range across the continents, jet-setting from one branch of their empire to the next. Should the US systems of government fall into disarray, should the Constitution lie in tatters and average Americans be left to fend for themselves in the Ayn Randian wilderness, the upper class would still have their private armies, doctors, chefs, servants, and personal trainers. The despondent lower class of whites may wish that their nation can’t live without them, so that as they decline so too does their country. But the record would show that their suicide via their electing Trump to high office would rid the population only of their dead weight, being so many unenlightened omegas or have-nots. They would unconsciously sabotage only themselves, like the underwear bomber whose device failed to explode. Thus the full Republican spectacle emerges: the alphas strut like hideous invading aliens, oblivious to how they’re despised by the conquered masses, while half of the latter are mesmerized by the vast inequality of wealth and find themselves bowing before their masters, presenting their posteriors for the rape they secretly know they deserve.  

The Tiresome Fallacies in Democratic Myths

Let’s turn to the Democrat’s all-too convenient counter-narrative. As Thomas Frank, Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges, Robert Reich, and others make clear, the Democrats have sold out the middle class just as have the Republicans. As I said, the Republicans did so because they found they could exploit the opening of white Christian resentment against the liberals who led the 1960s’ civil rights movements. However, the Democrats haven’t sided with the hippies. After Walter Mondale lost in the landslide re-election of Ronald Reagan, losing 49 out of 50 states, Democrats formed the Democratic National Convention, which is a centrist, neoliberal think-tank and governing body that supplies tactics allowing the liberal party to feign allegiance to progressive principles, while actually pursuing donations from wealthy individuals and aligning the party with what Thomas Frank calls the professional class. Ethologically, these professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, civil servants, etc.) are betas, meaning they defend the nation’s status quo, because they’ve escaped being victimized by the economic forces that have shaped their society and because they hope to advance in the pecking order to become alpha dominators.

The liberal or progressive rhetoric you hear from these professionals, including from professionals-in-training such as the young adults supporting Bernie Sanders or from the spoiled pseudo-hippies cheering for Jill Stein, the head of the American Green Party, is irrelevant. By choosing even to remain as citizens of the United States, of the world’s capital for global arms exports, hyper-consumption, and imprisonment of the poor and the mentally ill, these professionals have betrayed their progressive principles—regardless of their micro exercises in tolerance and environmentalism. Certainly, by voting for the neoliberal, DNC-led Democratic Party, the professional is one with the hypocritical Donald Trump in making empty gestures towards caring about the plight of the working poor, while complying with the decrees from the quasi-religion of neoclassical economics and from the corporate sector, and instituting “free trade” agreements that allegedly allow the invisible hand of personal greed to raise everyone’s living standard; instead, these trade deals merely enable economic competition to happen on a global scale, withdrawing the social safety net (thanks to the forming of monopolies or oligopolies that limit competition and oppose rules that benefit workers at the owners’ and managers’ expense) and so degrading the First World’s living standard to that of the Third World, the latter being the place in which most of the world’s real productive labour gets done.   

Did Mondale lose because American voters learned that progressive principles are bankrupt? Not exactly. Reagan won because he convinced moderate Democrats to switch sides. These “Reagan Democrats” were southern whites and northern blue collars who, being practical rather than academic, elitist types, were more interested in real-world economic and national defense issues, not in an airy-fairy ideal of social equality or in unearned redistribution of wealth to the poor. Having been bombarded with propaganda against the evil Soviet Union, Americans were ready to demonize the socialist enemy within. In any case, the resentful, bigoted whites and the undereducated blue collars broke from the professional class, and the latter came to dominate the remnants of the Democratic Party via the DNC. The Republican myth is that Reagan’s policies triumphed: he defeated the communist empire and free trade empowered the majority of Americans.

Indeed, Reagan’s arms buildup after the decay of the US military under President Carter contributed to the collapse by forcing Russia to overspend on its military. But this was only the tail-end of the US cold war against Russia, which had begun directly after WWII. Moreover, the US victory can’t be interpreted as one for conservative economic principles, because the American military buildup was accomplished by the government, not by the private sector, and that government vastly expanded the size of its bureaucracy as a result. Indeed, if American conservatives can take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, they should accept blame for what happened afterward: privatization under Boris Yeltsin produced the monopolies of the Russian oligarchy which had to be curbed by the strongman Putin. Also, if the war of escalation in the building of nuclear weapons was insane in its proportions (each side came to have enough nuclear missiles to destroy all human life many times over), the more responsible, sustainable society would surely be the one that failed that particular test. Only an economic system which is poised to be a cancer upon the earth, to grow far beyond the capacity of its host to sustain it would be equipped to out-compete others in such a race to the bottom. Finally, these same economic policies of deregulation proved disastrous to the US economy in the Savings and Loan Crisis (1980s-1990s), the global stock market crash of 1987, the Dot-com bubble (1997-2001), and the Great Recession (2007-2009) that was caused by the bursting of the American housing bubble (2007).

If liberal democratic goals haven’t been superseded by right-wing ideology, why have Democrats abandoned the working poor and embraced the hypocritical professional class as its chief voting block? Again, an answer is found in the legend that preserves the Democrat’s sense of self-worth. According to this narrative, liberalism originates from ancient Greek rationalism. The Greeks started to progress culturally when they thought critically about deep questions. For example, the abstract, impersonal God of the philosophers replaced the gods of naïve people’s traditional religion. The modern globalist’s concept of universal humanity is implicit in the objective, scientific outlook that began in the West with classical Greek mathematics and philosophy. Of course, like the early Americans, the ancient Greeks didn’t live up to their principles of rationality: women and slaves were regarded as inherently inferior and the democratic Athenian empire ended Greece’s golden age with the catastrophic Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Still, the classical Greek ideal was rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, and it fostered the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment culture of progress through technoscientific empowerment. The ideal in question is that of rational moderation, which the Greeks thought of as happiness-through-virtue (through excellence in the forming of character traits). The idea is that reason is our greatest gift as a species, allowing us to control our animal impulses, to be civilized, dignified persons as such, to understand our surroundings and to exploit that knowledge to improve on the world as we find it.

And to come to the point, the Democratic conceit is that modern liberals and progressives are the inheritors of this vision of our purpose in life, whereas the Republicans are plainly antirational. Hillary Clinton chuckles in her nomination acceptance speech, as she’s bewildered she has to come out and say that she “believes in” science and global warming (and likely in evolution by natural selection). By contrast, Republicans wallow in anti-intellectualism in their Fox News infotainment bubble of truthiness. Trump’s vocabulary is that of a four-year old. He dumbs-down every issue, makes absurd and empty promises with no detailed plan to keep them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully who’s temperamentally unfit to hold high office. And before Trump there was Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. Worlds apart, President Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton are highly intelligent, competent, and serious individuals.

This, then, is the spectacle of Hillary Clinton and of her professional class. The chatter about her untrustworthiness, her maniacal laugh, and her inauthenticity misses the mark of what her personage indicates about the state of the professional betas she represents. Of course, she stands for the establishment and the status quo and is thus the more conservative candidate. Progressivism is revolutionary and so true progressives don’t fare well under an establishment; naturally, they’re the omegas, those that have lost out and so seek to change the system. The Green Party is progressive and so has the same omega status nationally as its true constituents, the working poor and indirectly the rest of the world’s have-nots. Empty rhetoric notwithstanding, the constituents who benefit from centrist, DNC policies are the American professionals and the wealthiest one percent, not the working poor. But Hillary Clinton can claim to be progressive because she taps into the Enlightenment ethos. As a woman, she fulfills the ideal of equality through rational self-control. For again, unlike Trump, her statements aren’t wildly irresponsible; on the contrary, she modulates everything she does, calculating each focus-group-tested word she utters in public. She’s not just a professional politician, representing the professional class; she’s an exemplary one. She’s attacked for this or for that minor scandal and she’s exonerated in all of them.

Meant to dramatize a myth for a beta herd, the Democrat’s spectacle which reveals so-called American liberals’ unconscious self-image is trite. Beta followers lack the desperation of the omega underclass to turn to an extreme cultural narrative to galvanize them. Likewise, liberal professionals lack the sociopathy and brazen evil of their alpha rulers and so aren’t guided by the muse or daemon that’s been familiar to artists and shamans from time immemorial. By contrast, the impoverished American southerners or blue-collar whites and the transnational oligarchs who happen now to reside in the United States are resentful or cruel and deranged enough to craft a great work of ideological art. Together, by their actions more than by their consciously-uttered words, these polar-opposite Republicans have captured their nation’s zeitgeist. Instead of sacrificing a goat upon the altar to invoke their god’s power, Republicans have honoured their muse by channeling their unconscious dread and fantasies. Economic inequality in the US has reached such Gilded Age proportions that this country is obviously unfit for democracy. Why, then, shouldn’t a plutocrat rule there as a quasi-dictator? How is that fantasy untrue to the social facts on the ground? Even if Trump loses or pulls out of the race, offended by this or by that like a prima donna, he deserves to win the presidency on aesthetic grounds.

The horrific spectacle he embodies is poetically superior to the Democrat’s lame tale with its academic half-truths. Recognizing that while reason is supreme in instrumental contexts, in devising techniques on the basis of scientific investigations, reason is irrelevant to the normative task of deciding what should be done with those techniques, Republican leaders are free to denigrate science and empirical truth, to tell one cosmic-sized lie after another, because they understand the postmodern state of their environment. Meanwhile, Democrats think reason suffices in politics, because they’re stuck in their positivistic, Enlightenment past in which science-led philosophy tossed out the baby of myth with the bathwater of systematic theology. Democrats condemn Trump for being stupid—as if Trump spoke like a four-year old in the ‘80s when he wasn’t running for office. (Feel free to watch the interviews yourself.) Or they despise him for being a lying demagogue, because Democrats are jealous of the emotional power of the Republicans’ message: “Revenge against the backstabbing professional politicians who sold you out with NAFTA!” “Blow up the dysfunctional democracy with a strongman insider!” “Tear down the system of corruption and plutocracy!” What Trump would actually do in office makes no difference to the fantasies animating the spectacle on the stage of the political theater which is trotted out at election time. Likewise, establishment Democrats fought against Bernie Sanders whose movement was energized by omega millennials, rendered broke by establishment scams from Washington, Wall Street and the American college system.

Indeed, the centrist Democrat’s self-image is unbecoming. Texas swagger and mediocrity gave Americans the major scandals of George W. Bush (Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War fiasco, the financial meltdown, the loss of respect around the world). But American technocrats under Robert McNamara micromanaged the Vietnam War which ended in American defeat, and pseudoscientific, over-mathematized economic models bamboozled Bill Clinton and the neoliberals after Reagan, including President Obama, who continued Reagan’s and Bush’s policies of deregulation which left Americans their present iteration of the Gilded Age. For that matter, overconfidence in technoscience brought the world the sinking of the Titanic, while technocratic rationality automated the international system of treaties that led to World War I, and Marxist rationalism produced Russia’s doomed, centrally-planned economy and Mao’s communist holocaust. “No drama” Obama is a fitting nickname for a technocrat who pretended to be progressive and to want to change the system, when he ran for office, but who ended up governing as a centrist protecting the status quo. His allegiance was made clear when he bailed out Wall Street with no strings attached and left Main Street with no comparable assistance or protections. The Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to ensure that the economy couldn’t again be held hostage by unscrupulous, too-big-to-fail institutions, but of course that piece of legislation was gutted by lobbyists so that the banks are now larger and more leveraged than before. The phrase “moral hazard” is a singular misnomer because morality is held in contempt by both technocrats like Obama and Hillary Clinton and by the supervillains who scramble for advantage on Wall Street. Morality is for the little people who “cling to their guns and their Bibles,” to paraphrase Obama.

Hillary Clinton promises to bring, in effect, a third term for Obama—and in the name of seriousness, maturity, and rationality. The Democratic blather about ensuring that people get their “fair share” is supposed to follow from reason. Everyone’s equal, at least in their personal potential, so they should be treated equally. But the premise is flawed since the members of our species are obviously not equal. This is just an overflow of bogus quantification to conceal the likelihood that the slogan “fair share” emerged on the scene as a jingle concocted by some corporate market researcher. (The phrase rhymes so it must be true! And what do you want me to buy, again?) Also, the conclusion doesn’t follow, because of the naturalistic fallacy. Even if everyone were identical, being clones, for example, that fact alone wouldn’t entail that we ought to treat each other as equals. The fact that someone wants to act unfairly or to make an exception of herself doesn’t make her unfairness wrong. Unfortunately, science ripped up the roots of morality when it demolished the case for theistic religion. Reason is supposed to replace faith, but it doesn’t, contrary to secular ethicists like Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. Technocrats who think professional experts should rule bypass this inconvenient truth, by proclaiming that their normative slogans are self-evident. The Declaration of Independence contains several fallacies just in its famous second sentence, although the founders were only self-deceiving deists, not full-blown postmodern technocrats.

Serious politicians like Obama and Hillary Clinton stand for gradual progress, not the revolutionary kind. There’s no Debordian spectacle in the Democratic Party, they might contend, because myths are private affairs, like the religions crushed by the powers of reason that are supposed to direct government policy. And anyway, Democrats stand for the little guy, not for the system. If there’s a spectacle on the Republican side, that’s because Trump is a showman who belongs on reality TV. Unfortunately for "serious," "grown-up" Democrats, the American electoral system has become a reality TV show, and all such shows only caricature the real world. Myths and fantasies are needed because reality is too disturbing ever to be discussed in polite company, and those whose emotions are wrapped up in their favourite stories try to enact them, like cosplayers who think of themselves as secretly heroic in their workaday lives. We behold our reflections in the parts of culture with which we identify. Writ large are our unconscious yearnings and fears and hatreds, as well as the impersonal processes that unfold in our midst. The less faithful we’ve been to ourselves and to the world, the duller our grand narratives will be, in which case we’ll have disarmed ourselves in our primary, existential struggle against them both. 

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Stultified by Reason: the Vision of Heartless Nature

Art by Jim Kazanjian

It’s often said that the scientific way of thinking is counterintuitive. Worse, the mathematical analysis of nature is alien and incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t mastered that language or who aren’t in the habit of thinking within the bounds of an austere standard of precision. Scientific knowledge is hard to acquire not just because there have been so many discoveries in the last several centuries, that delving into even a fraction of modern knowledge overloads the human memory capacity. On top of that and more importantly, the math-centered form of scientific thinking is estranged from the heuristics that make up our innate logic that’s responsible for our intuitive, snap decisions. Those genetically-preprogrammed cognitive rules give us a head-start in the harsh business of surviving but also blind us to the nature of cosmic reality. Our on-board techniques for coming to grips with the world are suitable for reading each other’s minds and climbing social ladders, as well as for interpreting useful terrestrial rhythms such as the cycles of night and day and the four seasons, but not for fathoming chaos, quantum mechanics, or dimensions beyond space and time. Early modern scientists made a heroic effort, based in part on the antisocial leanings of geniuses like Isaac Newton, to develop an inhuman method equal to the task of modeling the remote universe that’s perfectly indifferent to the emergence of life.

We fall in love with each other, losing ourselves in emotional bonds to the point that we risk being blackmailed as we strip off our clothes and carry out sex acts that are banned in public spaces to preserve our presumed dignity. That’s the extent of our preference for the familiar social world. How alien, then, must be any form of cognition that encompasses the ocean beyond the puddle that we call home! How alienated from our native feelings and biases must we become even to entertain the antihuman thought that the entire saga of our historical comings and goings is peripheral to universal reality! And what madness must we court to study the undead shuffling of natural processes, to deprive ourselves of the comfort of trotting out our myopic metaphors that are so many gauche shout-outs to our brothers and sisters in the ‘hood of humanity!

Anthropocentrism: the Norm for Human Happiness

Anthropocentrism is our original sin. It begins with the clueless egoism burning in the tiny heart of every child, passing into the fragile pride of each toddler who’s indignant whenever he or she is told “No.” We all enter the wide world unable even to form the conception that anything could be other than ourselves. Everything from Mother’s milk to Mother herself and the toys we play with are thought of as parts of our craving. We demand this or that and we receive it as a matter of parental necessity or else we throw a tantrum. In effect, as children we perceive every event as being miraculous, because we don’t separate cause and effect in our imagination: everything happens in the orbit of our self-centered expectations. Even after we pass the trials of teen disenchantment, when puberty compels us to long for the Other, in a morass of lusts and other hormonal intoxications, when we grow into independent adults, we still rely on those childish habits of thought. We carry our self-centeredness with us in the theistic delusions of our exoteric religions, when we live with the knowledge of our certain death by spellbinding each other in our collective hypnosis, daydreaming that physical death is illusory because the spirit lives on for eternity in the House of the Lord. With our cities’ light pollution that blots out the far-flung heavens, we facilitate the illusion that the world revolves around us, as though by enveloping ourselves at night in those electric screens we were telling each other, “Keep moving, keep consuming; there’s nothing to see here”—no infinite void all around terra firma, for example, which likely surpasses even scientific understanding so that all our preconceptions about the worth of what we’re doing would eventually be laughed off as so many naive fairytales if only they could be remembered across the generations. Instead, the vain, wishful narratives that contextualize our lives, in which we’re invariably the starring attractions, will pass into obscurity, nullified by the outer void after the curtain call on our species and on our epoch. 

But those examples are just some usual suspects of our inborn self-centeredness. In fact, the very happiness which psychiatrists call the goal of normal human functioning depends on a kind of tenuous stability, called sanity, which is impossible as long as we occupy the view from nowhere that allows the world’s impersonality to seep into our consciousness. Objectivity, the understanding of something as having no subjective qualities is a paradoxical perspective that depersonalizes the knower and the known together, rendering her robotic and functionally amoral. It’s akin to the aesthetic stance in which we ignore our personal preoccupations and allow something’s givenness to wash over us so that our reaction to it flows from our unconscious side and helps reveal our authentic self. Unless we actively suppress our inclinations and thought routines, and think logically which is to say universally, objectively, and thus inhumanly, such as when we carry out some scientific or technical analysis to get at the facts by interpreting the data with minimal regard for our preferences on the matter, we’re playing the animal game of thinking or acting out of self-interest; we’re attempting to succeed according to some conception that, at best, merely rationalizes the pointless flow of genes.

You might be thinking that the insanity of being wholly out of touch with reality would be useless for evolutionary purposes, since some knowledge of facts is necessary to our survival and procreation. But the knowledge that suffices for evolutionary success has nothing to do with objectivity. The “facts” you need to know to avoid falling down a cliff or to help you identify a potential mate aren’t universal or fundamental. When we behave as genetically-driven higher primates, we don’t describe the world as an indifferent deity would or even as would an extraterrestrial intelligence in the midst of conducting an experiment on us. Instead, we think of the world pragmatically, interpreting things in terms of their instrumental relevance, or their being “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger put it. We view the cliff not in terms of its geological composition but as a danger, and we construe the potential mate not as an individual in his or her own right, but as the object of our desire, as something to be won over to complete us as though that person were put on earth to make us happy, as we’re wont to romanticize. The innate ways of thinking that are evolutionarily most useful generate only practical conceptions that are one and all anthropocentric.

By contrast, the inhuman knowledge that issues from objectivity is likely detrimental to the genes, at least in the long run, because it threatens all life with extinction. In fact, objective knowledge of reality is as accidental and anomalous as the emergence of life. Certainly, technoscientific know-how and industrial manufacturing have extinguished most of the wild animal species that have been unfortunate enough to have been thrown up by their genes in the Anthropocene. And we have the power now to slaughter each other in a world war the effects of which would be measured in megadeaths, thanks to the inventions of nuclear and biological weapons. Only the anthropocentric presumptions at the base of the myths of liberal humanism make the use of such weapons taboo. A purely rational, objective people could easily resort to such weapons of mass destruction, since they wouldn’t labour under the feel-good sentiment that humans have special rights in the animal kingdom. This means that we currently survive in spite ofthe fearsome power flowing from objectivity, because we’re seldom ruthlessly detached and logical and we eagerly succumb to the childlike, magical thinking that makes us happy. Again, unless we resist our natural tilt towards self-glorification, our everyday conceptions presuppose that humans are central to the universe, that the world owes us a fulfilling life. So-called normal human functioning is thus categorically (as opposed to instrumentally) irrational, not because we’re ignorant of the means to achieve our personal goals, but because those goals themselves stem from an embarrassingly-false picture of the world in which we each truly matter.

The Horror at the End of Objectivity

Still, anthropocentric normality in both its secular and religious guises passes for sanity, because a deeper madness awaits those who override conventional wisdom and attempt to see the world as it really is. Witness the stock character of the mad scientist such as Victor Frankenstein, Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and numerous others from movies, television, and comic books. The prototypical wise person was the shaman who ingested psychedelic substances to shock himself out of his profane, pedestrian worldview to formulate more fundamental truths. That rough form of antihumanity would just as often mislead with projections of subjectivity in the form of so-called gods and other spirits, as it would enlighten by decentering the self. Next, there were magicians and occultists, saints and mystics who professed to prove that mundane, consensus reality is itself a trick, by performing or experiencing miracles made possible by a glorious, hidden realm. To those forerunners could be added priests and other bureaucratic officials of organized religions who merely speakof such miracles, attributing them to greater spirits. In all such cases, the proof of wisdom was a bout of religious ecstasy or the faith needed to believe in a promise of such ecstasy in the afterlife. Then those occult figures morphed into the one-dimensional scientist. Again, Newton is the link between them, although his esoteric side is less well-known than his narrowly scientific one.

Notice, though, that the madness that ought to accompany scientific understanding, which is credited still in the pop cultural caricature of the mad scientist, became politically risky as scientists found themselves at the center of world-spanning industrial enterprises. No one wants to entertain the suspicion that the serious businesses that elevate our material living standards are powered by the ravings of madmen. Sure, we’re titillated by anecdotal confirmations that therapists and physicians are disproportionately narcissistic, such as when we’re faced with the bizarre character of Ben Carson in his brief starring role in the American political spectacle. The popular comedy show The Big Bang Theory pictures young scientists and engineers as only harmlessly mad, owing to their arrested development. In any case, scientists and engineers have learned to hide their quirks and to compartmentalize their modern, secular form of ecstasy which is best characterized in terms of such existential burdens as angst, dread, and an all-encompassing sense of the absurd and the tragic.

One technique for erecting such mental barriers is scientism, the prejudice against philosophy, artistic interpretation, and the search for meaning in general. If all such interpretations in the humanities departments are just woo, meaning frivolous opinions unwarranted by logic or strict adherence to the evidence, the latter virtues being the mainstays of scientists and engineers, then the madness of envisioning the world as composed entirely of objects, having no purpose or intelligent design or any prospect for divine rescue from annihilation, is of course postponed. After all, the mad scientist doesn’t merely pursue evil schemes of world domination, but is driven to them by a mental break from traditions of morality and religion, of family and community which are the bedrocks of sanity for the anthropocentric masses. In turn, those traditions are subjective articles of faith and value, and so the act of leaving them behind is no mere mathematical calculation, but a comparable leap of faith, albeit one into an inhumanway of life. Indeed, neither the “sanity” of anthropocentric ignorance nor the insanity of cosmicist awe is a matter of strict rationality. No one provesthat humans are central to all beings or that the contrary scenario is dire for our social conventions: logic and observation take us only so far, but they don’t justify our ideals, goals, or stubborn convictions. Thus, the faith-based insistence that the philosophical or religious search for meaning doesn’t matter because it’s not scientific is an attempt to preserve the scientist’s or the engineer’s normality, despite that individual’s having no recourse to happy anthropocentrism or to world-weary nihilism. The scientismist can’t be content with the former because she knows too much about nature, and she can’t fall into existential depression because that would be bad for business. So she maintains the conventional happiness she shares with the unknowing folk, even while she employs and often prizes the objective outlook, and she does this under the cover of some halfway house of denial.

Interestingly, while the embarrassment of common anthropocentric conceits is foreshadowed by the crazed self-centeredness of children, the limit case of inhuman objectivity is the subcriminal psychopath’s amorality, which is stereotyped by the mad scientist. Children best display the arrogance of presuming that we’re each a crown jewel of natural creation. Likewise, the predators who usually dominate our social systems, owing to the latters’ tendency to become corrupt, are the quintessential outsiders burned by their embrace of the antihumanist’s objective worldview. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that the rules that bind society are arbitrary and anomalous compared to nature’s evident impersonality, and you don’t have to understand the mathematical formulas that zombify our endeavours to feel alienated from the herds of frail, childish lemmings that need mental crutches to feel happy. To be sure, the psychopath is a monumental egotist, but his selfishness isn’t based on a conviction that the world cares whether he lives or dies; instead, it’s a reaction against knowing that the world is fundamentally a cold and indifferent place. The psychopath doesn’t care about society, because he embodies nature’s indifference; thus, all that remains to drive his activities is the genetic preoccupation with his individual survival. This amoral avatar of nature’s heartlessness doesn’t feel that he deserves to rule the world, because he has no feelings to take the leap of faith that could generate that or any other value judgment. Whereas children haven’t yet developed powers of reasoning and thus can only feel their unparalleled worth, the supervillains who manage our most powerful institutions have only the capacity for objective calculations, and so their amorality symbolizes nature’s cold-blooded regularity. The genius who’s forced into madness, who makes a Faustian bargain for knowledge and pays for that curiosity with a soul-destroying vision, takes a tragic route to an antisocial endpoint. But that endpoint is found also by the psychopath who reaches that plateau from another direction: the scientist only learns about nature’s inhumanity, while the psychopath lives it.   

What, though, do we see with objectivity? What does the world look like when we understand we’re not integral to its development? Of course, the details of scientific theories supply the full answer. But for an analogy, recall your days in school as a teenager, when the boundaries between cliques and castes were stark. Were you one of the popular kids who participated in extracurricular school activities, who had many rich, healthy, physically attractive friends, who did well enough in schoolwork to gain the status and knowledge for a successful career, but not so well that you were ostracized as a nerd? Or were you one of the freaks? Were you an unpopular outsider who resented being picked last in sports or in dating and who rebelled against the whole social order for teens, by ridiculing the unfairness and superficiality of that order’s recipe for success? Were you so obsessed with learning, that puberty passed you by like a silly, irrelevant ad on TV? The popular kids never feel alienated because their identities and deeds delimit the holy ground that’s untouchable by the flawed lower classes. You can’t feel like an insider if no matter what you do, most everyone else wishes they could have done it, because you incarnate the community’s ideal. The popular kids are inescapably insiders because they can’t step outside themselves and everyone else wants to be them. By contrast, short of some miraculous transformation, the outsiders can’t be cool because they can only long to be perfect.

But weirdos and losers have an inside track on understanding the objective status of the human adventure. If you can recall sitting at home while the popular kids enjoyed the prom, if you lusted after one of the beautiful people whom you could no sooner touch than you could survive an impact with an ethereal angel, or if you longed to have the privileged life of one of the cool kids, congratulations! You have an affinity for knowing what it’s like to be outside the world’s orbit. Like the noble deeds of our high schools’ upper echelons, the universe proceeds with its phases and amplifications, with its complexifications and peregrinations which happen regardless of our lack of consent or our absence. Like the voyeuristic outsider who steals glances at the revered little aristocrats as they stroll down the hallways, we can peer into nature’s depths to glimpse a fraction of what’s been happening long before our emergence and of what will continue to transpire for unimaginable ages after we’ve fizzled out of existence. We’re all freaks as far as nature is concerned. To understand that objectivity is the root of cosmic horror is to realize that our show isn’t the whole of the universal one, and that what we do—whether in our public or our private lives—doesn’t even adequately represent what nature does at large. All our striving to learn and progress, to live well and to pass on our knowledge to the next generation amounts to a side show that’s far removed from the drama unfolding on the main stage. We have to read the tea leaves of images transmitted by telescopes to discern the barest outline of the incomprehensible complexity of what’s occurring on trillions of other, preposterously distant worlds. And we can detect only the remotest aftereffects of what’s happening in fundamental reality, such as what may be the vibrations of one-dimensional strings that give rise to particles, but that are much smaller than a person compared to a person’s size in relation to a galaxy. (If a person occupies the 10⁰ meter order of magnitude, the Milky Way is 10²¹ meters, while the subatomic length shrinks to 10^-35meters.)

“So what?” you might be thinking. “We have our stage and the rest of the universe has its colossal platform. So be it!” But the abyss between insiders and outsiders does negatively impact the latter. In the case of teenagers, the issue is largely that the losers are jealous of the winners, because some teens are better than others according to conventional standards. By contrast, the cosmic show isn’t exactly better than the human one, although we could compare them by saying, for example, that natural forces are much more creative and destructive than are living things. However, that sort of normative judgment has no place in the objective conception of our place in the world. Objectively, what we have is a vast difference in scale between the intergalactic course of events and the blip that will be coextensive with all of human history. Being on the vanishingly smaller side of that value-neutral comparison, we’re still positioned as voyeuristic freaks in relation to the universe. And if we set aside their understandable jealousy, the teenaged underclass still can offer us insight into the horror at the end of objectivity. The unpopular kids are often so much worse than the popular ones that their difference becomes a division between types rather than just degrees. The two classes are alienated from each other, since they live in different worlds. What would it have been like to make out with the prettiest girl or the hottest boy in school? The shunned losers can only dream of it, but the contents of those dreams will be pitifully irrelevant, deriving as they do from Hollywood fables. Unless they somehow switch their social status, losers can’t know what it’s like to live as a winner. They can watch John Hughes films and other romantic comedies, but those scenes are obviously staged. The loser can’t know what it’s like really to be desired by a god or goddess, for example, because the gods and goddesses cavort on Mount Olympus which is inaccessible to mere mortals.

That difference in worlds which is bridged mainly by the negative estimation that you’ll likely be on only one or the other side calls into question everything that’s dear to you if you find yourself to be a disadvantaged nobody in school rather than a cool kid with an edge in life. Next to the rich, beautiful, popular teens, the opposite ones are nonentities. Thus, they’re mocked and bullied so that they learn their position at the bottom of the pecking order. While the teachers spout feel-good lessons of equality, merely by mouthing empty words, the children learn through much more memorable experiences that winners are unequalto losers. The unpopular kids know they’re conventionally inferior, but they sense also that their inferiority is absolute and that to persist in the shadow of the greater beings they must distract themselves with pathetic fantasies. Jealousy is only the beginning of an existential dread of having gods and goddesses in your sight to confirm your metaphysical lowliness. Likewise, we know the universe is so much larger than our world that it’s no longer even meaningful to aver that we occupy a central or a pivotal role in nature. There’s so much else that’s out there, that our smallness becomes a constant embarrassment because we tend to cope with our objective status by telling tall tales such as the panoply of anthropocentric myths. Just as the unpopular kids have movies that caricature the higher realm, and just as they take voyeuristic glances to taunt them with evidence of their insignificance, we generally have the capacity for objective, impersonal reflection on the fact that our world is as though it were nothing. Our ability to objectify doesn’t make us adequate to the universe, doesn’t make us less puny. Instead, our science is like the spycam installed in a lady’s toilet or in a hotel room by some dejected pervert caught in a downward spiral of self-loathing: instead of exciting him in some sustainable fashion, the illicit images—like all pornographic navel-gazing—further establish his worthlessness. The more you’re reduced to spying on others as they enjoy what you crave, the more you must wonder whether that practice demeans you even more than the act of having sex for money demeans the porn stars. With our understanding, then, that the world is fundamentally physical and impersonal, we learn just enough to appreciate that we too are inherently vain, gullible, feeble creatures, and we begin to question the wisdom of our rational enlightenment.

Coda for Aristocrats

For the illustrious alphas who may be reading this and who grew up as privileged, esteemed kids in school, I should qualify my remarks on the analogy between the teenager’s dominance hierarchy and the abyss between nature and the alienated rational observer. While the popular kids are indeed typically superior in various ways to the uncool ones, those advantages are short-lived or fraught with peril. Privileged teens become spoiled and weak, and power over others degrades the dominator (as well as the dominated). So we should expect the inner life of a full-fledged aristocrat to be as vacuous as a stone’s. The rich kid’s upbringing in elite institutions won’t refine her feelings or deepen her character so much as it will establish a sophisticated façade to cover for the psychopathy which accompanies her rise to power. We idolize the power elites even when they have the coarseness of a wild animal, as in the case of Donald Trump. We might as well anthropomorphize the moon. 

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