After Cagney’s ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’
By ERIC LE ROY
Content 18+ Artem, in his typically eloquent appeal to our better instincts and judgment, opines the following: “Just because war achieves objectives doesn’t make it rational in the truest sense of the word. It makes it efficient, perhaps even logical, but not rational in a way that considers the broader consequences for humanity.”
The broader consequences for humanity. Let’s examine these ‘broader’ consequences more closely. Suppose that we live on the day of Monday, our children will live on Tuesday, our grandchildren on Wednesday, our great grandchildren on Thursday, our great-great grandchildren on Friday, our great-great-great grandchildren on Saturday, and our great-great-great-great grandchildren on Sunday.
Just suppose. Then I would suggest that by Thursday (most likely) and Friday (most definitely) we will have completely lost track of things. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, there will never be a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (each representing a future generation, you understand) – not because we are just too self-centered and self-consumed to care (though in all likelihood we are), but because our identifiable concerns simply can not reach that far. Our minds run out of gas.
We hit headlong the same problems when we try to define ‘eternity’, inhale in a symbolic breath the distance of a million light years from here to the next galaxy, or summon up any form of deeply personal, intimate compassion for the 250 people who, we have just found out, died in a plane crash on the other side of the world. (I have made this point before.)
Not that we don’t try. I have no doubt that many people are full of high sentence and when – either in the purest form of contemplation on the mountainside, or high on the exactly right combination of drugs – the ‘privileged moment’ overwhelms them to the point that they see – or imagine they do – into and beyond the deepening skies, far past the feasting banquet halls of queens and kings, and straight into eternity and the most profound offices of Forever, a feeling of sheer bliss and unsayable serenity confirms the existence of, of…of what?
Then it passes. We are back in plastic. Back among the alley cats, dining on baked beans and bluish bread, and cursing the accursed neighbors. Because, that’s who we are.
Never mistake the poem for the poet.
So why do I go on like this? It is because I feel that Artem, in his admirable humanitarian zeal, keeps imagining that we are better than we are. For it is the human race – not some other bag of chemicals – which has got the world to its present precarious state. Not the birds, beasts, bugs, and black mambas. Us. We. Now it is cool to be cavalier and say happy stuff like “I have been part of the problem and now I want to be part of the solution.” It is quite another to ask a bunch of criminals to conduct a ‘war on crime’, a doper to lead the fight against drug abuse, or a malignant tumor to make itself benign. Or Us to self-correct. In truth, the ‘better’ part of our nature often says ‘Don’t ‘ at the moment just before we Do.
Artem brings forward the famous Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of volunteers divide up into one group of prisoners and the other group into guards. (A lot of research has called this whole legendary escapade into question, but for now we won’t go there. We’ll agree that it happened just like the popular version has it). Infamously, the guards start acting like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, and the hapless prisoners are subjected to indignities worthy of Guantanamo Bay. What makes it even more horrible is that these guys were all of a piece – mere students who had signed up for a harmless experiment. Artem evaluates it as such: “But their behavior wasn’t driven by reason—it was driven by the darker parts of human nature that rational thought failed to control.”
But how, if our ‘human nature’ is a seamless cloth, albeit one composed of ‘good’ threads and ‘evil’ threads’ – how do we separate them? For it can not be both ways: either (1) we are, as Jung holds, ‘birds of a shadow’ – a seesawing creature combining Jekyll and Hyde elements which can indeed (maybe through genetic engineering) be separated – the ‘good’ then held aloft and the ‘bad’ flushed down the toilet; OR (2) we are of a single fabric with discordant and irreconcilable elements weaving and coursing through and through – and if that is so then we cannot, simply can never escape ourselves, at least in our present form. That being the case, our noblest instinct will be forever shackled to our worst, not because they are different but because they are essentially the same. Does the guy who helps the lame old woman across the wide boulevard do it from altruism or virtue signaling, hoping that someone watching will declare him ‘good’.
Alas, the world is different between day and night. It is different on the public thoroughfare and behind closed doors. “Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre delicat, – Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable – mon frere!“ (“You know him, reader, this delicate monster – hypocrite reader – my fellow man – my brother!”) – Baudelaire.
The man who smiles at the passing infant in its carriage is the same who makes gargoyle faces in front of the mirror, as he gives vent to rage or masturbation. All of a piece.
But there is one tormenting problem, one inexplicable flaw in the design of all things apparent, and one that I have been aware of for many, many years. Artem speaks wisely of the need we humans have to master our own worst instincts. Even anger management programs teach that we cannot deconstruct the emotion (jealousy, for instance) but we can control our behavior. The idea behind it is basically that the whiskey can’t get you drunk if you don’t open the bottle and tip it down your throat. Ultimately, the behavior dominates the emotion to such an extent that – best case scenario – it literally replaces the old emotion and becomes the new one. Problem solved. Of course, this assumes that the jealousy was unfounded. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But the lesson to be learned is undeniable: we must rise up to be the masters of our emotions, the constables on patrol watching over our worst instincts.
However, as I said, there seems to be one grand, tragic flaw in the process of creation and sustainability, and it is as ghastly as it is simple: destruction is easier than construction. Think about it in the most common terms you can come up with. You can spend months, even years, creating a beautiful garden of shimmering leaves and brilliant flowers, and it can be trampled in no time at all, especially if we speak of a bulldozer or forklift. You can employ 600 men to build a tower with 60 floors, and it can be burnt to the ground in 6 hours. Cultivate a friendship or even a marriage for 50 years, and then watch it all go down the drain because of one major indiscretion or moment of madness.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Or at least on equal footing? Just think what a fine world we would have if it took as much effort to fuck something up as it did to put it together in the first place. Or even half the effort. But, as my one time boss Jerry Elliot, a paunchy military career guy with a hound dog face who ran a business college in Jacksonville, Florida told me the day he fired me for getting drunk and regaling my Business Ethics class with my repertoire of filthy jokes (it was some female Christian who ratted me out): “Eric, let me ask you something. If you build a thousand bridges and suck one cock, do they call you a Builder of Bridges?”
The answer is obvious, and it remains one of the pearls of wisdom I have ever heard. One mistake. Just one, and it all comes tumbling down.
Now let’s apply this to Artem’s idea about the rational man, the reasonable man, the logical man (armed with a soulful of compassion and goodwill towards humankind) doing nothing but fine things…for years….and then, dadgummit!!! – he has one bad hair day and shoots up the place – or maybe, though he’s been the Perfect Priest and saved a thousand souls from the pits of burning hell for, let’s see, how many decades?? –, he…he…he…well, he just can’t keep his eyes off that winsome choirboy… and….
And.
. Dean Nitin Nohria propose a theory of four basic drives that motivate all humans in Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (Jossey-Bass, 2002). The drives are:
- To acquire what we need for survival, conception and our offspring’s survival. This drive far surpasses our drives to acquire food, water, warmth and a mate. We are driven to attain things that interest us, give us a sense of identity and meet our loved ones’ needs.
- To defend ourselves and our offspring from threats. We’ll protect our family and groups to which we belong, our ideas and beliefs, our sense of pride and hope, and our self-image.
- To bond and form long-term, mutually caring and trusting relationships with others.
- To comprehend (to learn, create, innovate, and make sense of the world and our place in it).
You’ll notice that nowhere does it come right out and say anything about the Will to Power. Point to Artem. But I truly believe that this is like those surveys which ask the workers what is most important to them about their jobs, and they answer: 1. Good work life balance; 1 Rewarding work; 3. Good colleagues; 4.Pleasant work environment; 5 devotion to sustainable environment… etc. And not until they get to #8 or #9 do they say anything about money. Such a survey was actually in an advanced English Student Book I used, and the first time I saw it, I knew it was nothing but a load of British Bollocks. Most of the time, it’s about the money, and nobody knows this better than the descendents of the capitalists who built the British Empire. The Brits taught the Yanks everything they know. But now the goody goodies want a friendly work environment. Get outta heah.
The main thing that people who have power want is to hold onto it. For men it is a drug, for women an aphrodisiac. In America, there are many phrases and slogans to back this up: “The Golden Rule: He who has the Gold, Rules.” “Money talks and Bullshit walks.” “Piss or Get Off the Pot.” “TGIM (Thank God It’s Monday!” The Bottom Line. Intelligence is Power. Ruthlessness is Power. Ambition is Power. Youth is Power. Sex is Power. The guy who can pick up a phone and make something happen will get more glamorous women than the auto mechanic who’s packin’ like a donkey, but can’t move anything more than a case of beer on Saturday night.
I think that many people strive for high ideals, but – except for a select and wholly remarkable few – they compromise sooner or later. There is a saying: Power corrupts, and Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely. How many young police officers and even politicians entered their professions determined to be the one who would never cave in to the Creeps – but did?
Of those four main drives I listed, having read up on the subject, I would agree with them to some extent, although to me they seem to be describing a world that once was but has vanished. The premise (#1) that never changes is our desire to survive. All living things have it, from men and women to flies and ferrets. So, #1 is right. But of course survival depends on identifying and neutralizing perceived enemies. It happened in the caves and it happens in the corporations. The homo sapien is the deadliest animal ever created and don’t let his polite and ‘professional’ ways of destruction fool you. To ensure survival, one must have power over one’s perceived enemies. I said ‘perceived’. Ask Joseph Stalin what that means.
Many enemies, like the demons put forth by the church, are imaginary. But those are the worst kind because they are invisible. To the dictator, the autocrat, the CEO, and the Alderman of the Village, the threat is right there in the morning light, and at dusk in the shadows, and at night hovering in the closet among the shroud of coats and hooded jackets. The loss of power means the loss of autonomy and the loss of that means demotion, ostracization, imprisonment or death. #2 merges with #1. Two out of two so far.
#3 is about bonding, forming relationships, presumably ones which will endure in all kinds of weather and withstand the pressures of dissent. I think that was true in the past. My grandfather died in the world he grew up in, and his friends in boyhood remained at least recognizable right down into the cancerous wilderness of his last breaths. He was still jabbering about them and calling out to them. He died at least in a familiar world. That is not true now. We are disjointed. We isolate willingly from a world that pretends diversity, community, neighborhood, and all the rest, but which in reality drives us more and more toward remoteness, toward a savage inner silence or speaking in streamlining tongues often built upon a scaffolding of furious but inexpressible resentments.
My grandfather didn’t feel any need to lock either his front door or his car at night. And it was not because he thought people were kind, good, or honest, it was because he trusted in exactly the same level of morality that You, Artem, say is going to save us. My grandpa knew that nobody would steal his car because in those days, people in middle class neighborhoods like ours didn’t steal cars in neighborhoods like the one we lived in. They might do wonders of destruction in their own homes, but they didn’t walk into yours and bust things up. Not where I lived.
Now they do. We are would-be isolationists but we live in a madhouse without borders. And you are optimistic, Artem? What we seem to be witnessing, my friend, is the breakdown – not the bolstering or augmenting – of social connections. The children can explain it all. When they look up from their self-isolating smart phones and video games which, with utter falseness, con these abject adolescents into thinking that they actually have friends?? We can see, if we look hard enough – the blank bewilderment in their eyes. And these lonely people are the ones who are going to save humanity?
#4 has to do with making sense of the world. In this regard, existentialism seems better than religion. But in many ways, as even I as a ‘weekend warrior atheist’ (meaning a wanker riddled with ambivalence), trumpet the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’ and about paraphrasing Sartre’s notion that we must create not only our only reality but our own code of ethics in order to live in a world where tennis is played with the nets down – guess what? A secret part of me longs, like a child of a negligent parent, for some kind of authority. At least an authority figure that makes sense. Something to tell him/her to be Good. But there seems to be nothing. Therefore, I conclude that, stupid, bigoted, and ridiculously imprisoning as the past was, it at least made sense. Awful sense, but sense. Tell me, Artem, what do the children of today trust?
Then show me how our desperate need to ‘go viral’, to have the Mic in our hands just for a second, to flaunt our sexual problems before hateful or gleefully glad strangers, to cling as to life itself to the rise and fall of our Selfies as they are subjected to the Opinion Court of the Protagonists of Ridicule with their own weird agendas…– how these slaves to an abominable fashion– are going to ‘save us.
Show me how the Thieves and Scammers and Con Artists of the internet portend the great self-discoveries of the human race that your optimism – beautiful though it may be – assures us of in the wake of all evidence to the contrary.
Show me how the pilgrims of peace will fare under the increasing and gloomy shadows of nuclear warheads.
Show me how the human individual will rise to the surface like fresh cream on a cup of cappuccino when he/she is already being replaced by robots with the sexual identity of the dials you turn and the morality that you want to hear..
Show me how in Mexico City, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Chicago, how all the lonely people, millions and millions and millions of them, will choose to be Brave and Idealistic in a world where they have no power. Power means freedom to choose your company and make decisions that count, They possess NONE.
In the modern world, the very notion of a collective solution bearing any resemblance to that ridiculous song “Imagine” by Lennon and/or Ono becomes insulting to the intelligence. We live in a world of plastic and fast food French Fry grease while nuclear warheads and viruses that mysteriously escape from innocuous backstreet windows blacken not only the weather outside but the weather in our hearts.
Rebel. By all means, REBEL. But don’t expect the rest of the herd to follow you because they won’t. And in the end, don’t feel too ashamed or deflated when you start following their swishing tails as they head for some new brief sanctuary.
Try or remember who you are. Or who you thought you were. Die Brave. But Live with one eye on the door leading from the street – one hand on your wallet, the other on your hopefully loaded gun. My guess is you’ll need both. One to kill and the other to escape. Shame on me.
Good luck staying ahead of the posse, and I hope you make it to Mexico.
It wasn’t supposed to go down like that, was it, Artem?
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