Post #106: Our Troubles with the Reality Principle

1 April 2024

“What determines the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle. This principle governs the operation of the human mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its program is at loggerheads with the whole world.”

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, chapter 2

     What I wrote in my previous post (#105) was originally intended as no more than a prelude for something else. It concerns a part of myself that I am not comfortable with and that I do not wish to parade before the world (although it is probably indispensable for understanding why I see things the way I do), and my intention was for it merely to set the stage for what I needed to get off my chest on one of the most hotly contested issues of the day. Before I walked into the minefield, I wanted to make one thing as clear as I could—that I am not stranger to the pains and struggles of self-definition and self-invention, nor to the miseries of coming up against their limitations. It is not a contest in who has it harder, but crucial to my purposes that I do not simply have an ax to grind on other people’s difficulties. It looks very much like a question of human universals to me, though we all have our different angles.

     As I stressed in the previous post, it is not that our self-identifications count for nothing, or that they can be simply brushed aside. They do matter, but they are not everything, and cannot be. I would be the first to say that meaning is not something we can simply read off from the conditions we are born into: it is something we give to those circumstances. But to take this reasoning to the other extreme, where I must not only get a hearing for how I choose to identify myself, but where such self-identification is all that matters, raises questions of how reconciled we really are to the reality principle, as against the world of wish-fulfillments, and be it only in our dreams.

     Which brings me, somewhat reluctantly, to the domain in which this problem has been stirring up the fiercest storms in recent years. An important aspect of the condition we are born into (though by no means exhaustive of who we are) is our evolutionary inheritance and genetic makeup, including the chromosomes that are inscribed upon our every cell. It has, of late, become an article of faith that while biology may be real, what we make of it is entirely up to us. And there I must protest, against all the cries of outrage it may engender, that this is the pleasure principle run rampant—a world view governed entirely by what we want to be true (or some of us anyway) as against the realities that we must all face, like it or not.

     How imperious the pleasure principle will get when we let it—taking on all the world, as Freud wrote—is on vivid display when a middle-aged man decides that he is now a woman, and then resents the resistance that his body puts up to the transition; or when he has trouble understanding why his wife should now want to divorce him; or when he calls up his venerable old college to ask that they switch him, retroactively, to the women’s college next door. It is likewise on display, more starkly and alarmingly, when thick-bearded two-hundred pounders claim the right to be Cinderella or dainty ballerinas, or to step into the boxing ring as women. The point here is not to deride anyone; such yearnings are not ridiculous so much as tragic; it is the human condition to pine for what we cannot get. That said, the readiness to distinguish our agonies on account of unfulfillable desires from those of being wronged is not a negligible detail, but one of the most defining requirements of being an adult. It is also one of the main pillars of the Dhamma, along with the Buddhist reality principle that I keep invoking at every turn, yatha-bhuta.*

     The pain that comes from these frustrated impulses is very real; we not only should, we must be sympathetic to them, because we all face, in one way or another, the same difficulties, though they may not appear to be anywhere so dramatic and spectacular (a significant part of their underlying appeal, one cannot help but suspect sometimes). Whenever we look in the mirror or at our bodies and we don’t like what we are seeing, whenever we contemplate our lives or survey the world with dissatisfaction or grief, we witness the pleasure principle rubbing up against the universal dominion of dukkha. Such dissatisfactions, whichever form they may take, are not only endemic in the world, they constitute the very fabric of existence and cannot possibly be torn up, unless we pull up the roots of our condition altogether in the manner of the fully enlightened and liberated.

     The distinction between the sexes is billions of years old; our species, barely a few hundred thousand. Its meaning must of course be more complex in humans than in other animals, because we are thinking, imagining, projecting creatures in a way they are not; but we are still deluding ourselves when we imagine that it is every bit as malleable as we wish it to be. Just because we add extra layers to everything we find in the world, just because it really is up to us to find meaning in different places and different ways, does not mean that there is no such thing as being who we are, whether we like it or not. Belonging to one’s sex is not an identity to be adopted or cast off at will, it connects us in a primal way to elementary forces of life that are vastly larger than any of us, and it is presumptuous in the extreme to treat them as mere variables for us to manipulate at will.**

     There is no need to shout anyone down for saying something so obvious, unless it be precisely because it is so very difficult to get around other than by shouting. Interested others may see it quite differently, to put it mildly; perhaps even most others these days (at least among those who will speak up on the issue). But such truths are not liable to reversal upon majority votes, or noisy pluralities in this or that public or semi-public arena. We have to go, all of us, by what we can see ourselves, not what others tell or try to impose on us, and whether we are right or wrong about it is not something that can be determined collectively, but that we must all answer for to a higher authority, conceive of it as you will. Those who disagree with me here may also be inclined to shrug or brush off any notion of such a higher law or authority, internal or external; again, they are as free as I to believe what they want or must, but what we believe does not thereby become true. We are entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts, as Patrick Moynihan put it, and to our own truths only in a metaphorical sense that too often gets misconstrued as if it meant that we can bend the very universe to our desires—echoes of the pleasure principle once again.

     The old canard about all limitations being self-imposed has a long history of flourishing in America, though blatantly untrue; but the New World too can flee the reality principle only at the cost of sliding ever deeper into fantasy,*** becoming unmoored, and jeopardizing its sanity. However cruel it may feel to us, we cannot simply decide to be, or become, whoever we wish, and finding ways of reconciling ourselves to the harsh demands of the reality principle is the key to healthy adult mental development. It is at this juncture, in how we deal with the inevitable frustrations of not getting what we want, that our maturity proves itself, and it seems that we need the old Viennese (Adler as much as Freud) to remind us more than ever that our refusals before this severe test raise not only political and philosophical, but also urgent psychological and therapeutic questions.†

     What unresolved issues are hiding in the depths of my unease with being German (das Unbehagen in dieser Kultur)?†† What monsters are truly lurking, in individual minds and souls, behind our violent agitations over racial divides? What is it you hope to gain, at the depths of your being, not the surface, by “changing sex,” when the attempt to do so must defy nature herself? These are not questions to be answered publicly or politically; they go to the heart of what it means to be human, or rather, what it means to live this one human life that you, and only you, have been born into and that you have shaped for yourself. We refer these matters too much to the mob and the ballot box, the demonstration or the heated debate; they are intimate questions, to be asked quietly, and I am far from convinced that we are doing better with them than Papa Freud and Alfred Adler did.

*Our common-sense, everyday, conventional understanding must obviously be distinguished from the deeper aspects of the Buddhist Teaching, which posits very different layers of reality behind the appearances. Nor am I signing up with the full Freudian program here, and running it together with the other two. What I am trying to say is that all three converge on one crucial point: that as adults we need, perhaps above all else, to be willing to confront things as they are, not as we would like them to be, which means forgoing wishful thinking and accepting limitations and frustrations that we do not, even unto despair, want to be there. Things do not yield before our desperation, only before our acceptance.

**That the prestige of being a man has, traditionally, been rated far too highly, and that this was due for a correction, few moderns would probably deny; but what the stampede into womanhood by males often blatantly ill-suited to the part suggests, among other things, is that we have succeeded only too well in going to the other extreme. The point should never have been to devalue one of the sexes, even with corrective intent, but to give them both the respect they deserve, in their different ways. We pay lip-service to this ideal, of course, with few ready to say openly how much the trends of the past decades have been directed against masculinity—but that disavowal doesn’t make it so in fact. To gain traction and justify its revaluations, every cultural revolution needs enemies, avowed or implied. There must be losers as well as winners in all such upheavals, and to make the gains on one side look more legitimate, the losses on the other need to be discounted.

***Just how deep the roots of fantastical thinking run in America, left or the right, is traced admirably if a little tendentiously by Kurt Andersen in Fantasyland (Ebury Press, 2017).

†The test from a Buddhist perspective for determining whether we are dealing with a craving, or instead a more innocent and wholesome preference compatible with equanimity, is likewise what happens when we do not get something we want, or when it is taken away.

††It came as a great revelation to me when a wise therapist, the former priest I’ve mentioned before, pointed out to me that not all issues are resolvable. Keeping your distance from a problem, as if it were a solution, has never seemed very apt to me, but when you cannot resolve something (which need not be a sign of failure, just a reminder of our fallen condition), then keeping your distance is often your best option, my therapist consoled me.