The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (8 page)

Nature is therefore to be understood by microscopy and analysis, to find out what the bits are and how they are put together. This was the view of the nominalist philosophers of the late Middle Ages, who strongly opposed the then-called realists for maintaining that such entities as Mankind or Human Nature were real "substances" underlying the

"accidents" of particular men and women. Every individual was therefore an example or case of the human "substance," though the word as then used did not mean matter or stuff but a kind of essence standing (
stance
) under (
sub
) its particular manifestations. The nominalists maintained that this was nonsense. For them, Mankind was no more than the sum total of individual people. Mankind was not a substance but simply a name for a class of creatures; it was not real but merely nominal.

Nominalism, as we know, became the dominant attitude of Western thought and especially of the philosophy of science. In the eighteenth century Rousseau went so far as to suggest that Society and the State had originally been formed by a contract between individuals. Society was an association, like the Rotary Club, which individuals had at some time joined and thereby abandoned their original independence. But from the standpoint of modern sociology we feel that man is necessarily a social thing, if only for the reason that no individual can come into being without a father and a mother—and this is already society. Until quite recent times it has been the prevailing view of Western science that animals and plants, rocks and gases, are "composed" of such units as molecules, cells, atoms, and other particles in much the same way that a house is composed of bricks.

But a consistent nominalist will have to be forced into the position that there really is no such thing as the human body: there are only the particular molecules of which it is composed, or only the particular atoms—not to mention electrons, protons, neutrons, and so forth.

Obviously, these particles do not by themselves constitute the human body. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts if only for the fact that a scientific description of the body must take account of the order or pattern in which the particles are arranged and of what they are doing.

The man behind the microscope

Has this advice for you:

"Instead of asking what it
is
,
Just ask, 'What does it
do?
'"

But even this is not enough. We must also ask, "In what surroundings is it doing it?" If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its "parts," are
doing
—that is, of its
behavior
—this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog.

It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out

"how they are made." This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing
goes with
a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings.

This was the grain of truth in the primitive and unreliable science of astrology—as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's, character or soul, he draws a horoscope—that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment—social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical—throughout every moment of his life.

But as things are, we define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" consciousness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom"—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name.

When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name.

Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.

Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviromnent. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.

Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do—that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused.

This state of affairs is known technically as the "double-bind." A person is put in a double-bind by a command or request which contains a concealed contradiction. "Stop being self-conscious!" "Try to relax."

Or the famous prosecuting attorney's question to the man accused of cruelty to his wife "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Answer yes or no." This is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation which arises constantly in human (and especially family) relations. A wife complains to her husband, 'Do you realize that since we were married two years ago you haven't once taken me to the movies? It wasn't that way when you were courting. I think you're beginning to take me for granted." When the penitent husband returns from work the following evening he says, "Darling, what about going to the movies after dinner?" And she replies, "You're only suggesting it because I complained!"

Society, as we now have it, pulls this trick on every child from earliest infancy. In the first place, the child is taught that he is responsible, that he is a free agent, an independent origin of thoughts and actions—a sort of miniature First Cause. He accepts this make-believe for the very reason that it is not true. He can't help accepting it, just as he can't help accepting membership in the community where he was born. He has no way of resisting this kind of social indoctrination.

It is constantly reinforced with rewards and punishments. It is built into the basic structure of the language he is learning. It is rubbed in repeatedly with such remarks as, "It isn't like you to do a thing like that." Or, "Don't be a copy-cat; be yourself!" Or, when one child imitates the mannerisms of another child whom he admires, "Johnny, that's not you. That's Peter!" The innocent victim of this indoctrination cannot understand the paradox. He is being told that he
must
be free. An irresistible pressure is being put on him to make him believe that no such pressure exists. The community of which he is necessarily a dependent member defines him as an independent member.

In the second place, he is thereupon commanded, as a free agent, to do things which will be acceptable only if done voluntarily! "You really
ought
to love us," say parents, aunts, uncles, brother, and sisters. "All nice children love their families, and do things for them without having to be asked." In other words. "We demand that you love us because you want to, and not because we say you ought to." Part of this nonsense is due to the fact that we confuse the "must" expressing a condition ("To be human you must have a head") with the "must" expressing a command ("You must put away your toys"). No one makes an effort to have a head, and yet parents insist that, to be healthy, a child "must"

have regular bowel movements, or that he must
try
to go to sleep, or that he must make an effort to pay attention—as if these goals were simply to be achieved by muscular exertion.

Children are in no position to see the contradictions in these demands, and even if some prodigy were to point them out, he would be told summarily not to "answer back," and that he lacked respect for his

"elders and betters." Instead of giving our children clear and explicit explanations of the game-rules of the community, we befuddle them hopelessly because we—as adults—were once so befuddled, and, remaining so, do not understand the game we are playing.

A double-bind game is a game with self-contradictory rules, a game doomed to perpetual self-frustration—like trying to invent a perpetual-motion machine in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or trying to trisect any given angle with a straightedge and compass. The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:

The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.

Everyone must play.

You must love us.

You must go on living.

Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.

Control yourself and be natural.

Try to be sincere.

Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to
be
spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not always respond to faith as we might wish. Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes. But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead. The alternative to a community based on mutual trust is a totalitarian police-state, a community in which spontaneity is virtually forbidden.

A Hindu treatise on the art of government, the
Arthashastra,
lays down the rules of policy for the complete tyrant, describing the organization of his palace, his court, and his state in such fashion as to make Machiavelli seem a liberal. The first rule is that he must trust no one, and be without a single intimate friend. Beyond this, he must organize his government as a series of concentric circles composed of the various ministers, generals, officers, secretaries, and servants who execute his orders, every circle constituting a degree of rank leading up to the king himself at the center like a spider in its web. Beginning with the circle immediately surrounding the king, the circles must consist alternately of his natural enemies and his natural friends. Because the very highest rank of princes will be plotting to seize the king's power, they must be surrounded and watched by a circle of ministers eager to gain the king's favor—and this hierarchy of mutually mistrusting circles must go all the way out to the fringe of the web.
Divide et impera
—

divide and rule.

Meanwhile, the king remains in the safety of his inmost apartments, attended by guards who are in turn watched by other guards hidden in the walls. Slaves taste his food for poison, and he must sleep either with one eye open or with his door firmly locked on the inside. In case of a serious revolution, there must be a secret, underground passage giving him escape from the center—a passage containing a lever which will unsettle the keystone of the building and bring it crashing down upon his rebellious court. The
Arthashastra
does not forget to warn the tyrant that he can never win. He may rise to eminence through ambition or the call of duty, but the more absolute his power, the more he is hated, and the more he is the prisoner of his own trap. The web catches the spider.