Maybe you can be brave
“Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to antifa.” — Portland murder suspect Jeremy Joseph Christian in open court last week
I t’s fairly obvious to most of us that we are not our rhetoric.
Carl Jung is said to have put it this way (though I’d appreciate it if anyone could give me a cite more specific that Internet quote collections or blog posts): “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
I like what Jean-Paul Sartre said in 1946 in his lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”:
“In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled … ”
That’s a tough lesson, but it’s true. We are what we present to the world. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or what your job title is. If you act like a punk, you’re a punk. If you act like a bully, you’re a bully. What you say is in your heart doesn’t count.
The same goes for nations. It’s easy to advertise your virtue with pretty words—to use adjectives like “greatest” and “best”—but self-aggrandizement is of limited value in building a reputation. If you want to build a reputation you do what you say you’ll do, you treat others with respect, you recognize when cooperation is a better strategy than competition. Some countries behave better than others. They can’t all be above average.
One of the problems with Americans is that we like to believe in the idea of ourselves as a special people. And in some ways, I think we are. We’re an experiment, Alexander Hamilton wrote, designed “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
The jury is still out on that question, for a couple of reasons. First of all, a democratic republic is only as strong as the character of its people, and we all know how weak-minded and lazy people can be. From the very beginnings of the Republic smart people worried about allowing average people the opportunity to vote on their leaders; that’s why we have curious institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College. (Some of the founders worried about a popular demagogue gaining power through the force of his personality.)
Some would argue that for a political system like ours to really work, you’d need a population of well-informed and engaged citizens willing to put the common good ahead of what they perceive as their narrow self-interests. And that’s a big ask.
Wilhelm Reich, another Austrian psychoanalyst, thought what we call fascism was “the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society.” In his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he wrote, “My medical experience with individuals from all kinds of social strata, races, nationalities and religions showed me that ‘fascism’ is only the politically organized expression of the average human character structure, a character structure which has nothing to do with this or that race, nation or party but which is general and international.”
Reich believed there’s a potential fascist inside everyone of us. The 20th century corroborated his theory.
There’s little evidence that we are better than the Germans who lived between the world wars or anybody else. We’re luckier; we’ve been born in a wealthy, powerful country that— whatever its problems with economic inequality and tribalism—allows most of us a reasonable chance to live a meaningful life.
Yet a lot of us don’t really prize high-toned ideals like liberty, justice and freedom all that much. A lot of us would trade them for free cable and cheap gas, for the illusion of security. A lot of us just want to be left alone in relative comfort, free to not have to think about polar bears on dwindling ice floes or the sweatshop children who stitch our sneakers.
Most of us aren’t brave, not like the guys who stood up to the bully harassing a 16-year-old girl and her Muslim friend on that train in Portland and got stabbed in the neck for their trouble.
We like to think we are—we might even like to proclaim to the world that we are—but most of us would have calculated our chances against a deranged, knife-wielding 250-pound homeless man and moved as far away from the trouble as possible.
Christian says he is a patriot, but we all know that isn’t true. His politics aren’t coherent. He is what he did.
And we are what we do, whether it’s pretending to decapitate a president or spray painting a racial slur on a millionaire’s gate or posting a snarky anonymous comment online or feeding the dispossessed in a park. When we phone it in at our jobs, when we’re rude to waiters, when we comfort a scared child —that’s us.
That’s the real work—to be alert to opportunities to do better. Because it will always be easier to act from fear than reason. The people who would manipulate you are counting on you as seeing the world as a dangerous place from which they can protect you. And it is a dangerous place. But no one can protect you.
You might as well try to do what’s hard. Maybe you can be brave. pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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