I chose this quote to use in a posterboard presentation about addiction for school a couple of semesters ago. It was grouped with a few other notable words, such as George Carlin’s phrase, “Just because you’ve got the monkey off your back, doesn’t mean the circus has left town.” I must admit that I hadn’t the faintest notion of the context of the quote or even where it came from, but the words have resonated with me in so many incidences since that it came to mind right away as probably my favorite quote of all. Though the message has obvious connotations to the phenomenon of addiction, I have found that it has a much deeper meaning as it relates to the human condition in general.
James Baldwin used this sentence in the introduction of his book, Nobody Knows My Name, a collection of essays about race relations in America. It was relatively early in his career, when he was still referring to himself as a Negro. The affliction shed pertained to the racial prejudice that had “menaced” him his whole life, until he decided to move to Europe to pursue his writing career. There, Mr. Baldwin found that the color of a person’s skin did not have the same importance as it did in the US, that he could no longer count on the two strikes against him that he was used to. He said that, suddenly, the ingrained responses he had clung to for so long had no meaning, that for the growth of his creative process, he now had to look within his own self. And that self did not have the crutch of blame to lean on.
What is this self, as if no one has asked this question countless times? Carl Jung, in The Undiscovered Self as psychoanalysis was taking hold, was staking claim to psychology as the window to the unconscious, which he said, “if not regarded outright as a sort of refuse bin underneath the conscious mind, is at any rate supposed to be of ‘merely animal nature’.” The animal nature part was a dig delivered to Freud as part of their ongoing feud; he thought the unconscious might be somewhat more important. We have to remember that the world had, at this time, engaged in devastating world wars that had been enabled by rapidly progressing technology. Humankind had become acutely aware of an uncertain future, even to the extent of possible annihilation. Just as in feudal times, huddled masses sought the protection of the church and the State was emerging as another social construction, providing these same masses with the comfort of nationalism. Jung and many others were espousing a new exaltation of the individual in response to the horror that mass mentality seemed to be perpetrating. Jung said that, “absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proof”, referring to God as the explanation for everything.
It was only surprisingly few years later that James Baldwin, during the beat generation to be followed by the whole Civil Rights and Hippie Movements, would be looking to the individual self as the answer. I find it a little more surprising, though, how quickly it became fashionable to find one’s self, sitting alone on a mountaintop or staring into one’s navel. The absolute certainty that Jung was talking about was being taken to an extreme, along with just about everything else.
Today, science shows us that the brain houses trillions of neurons that fire messages back and forth in numbers that have hundreds of zeros at the end. Only a miniscule portion of that activity is what could be called conscious. If anything, the dangers to life present a hundred years ago have expanded to such a degree as to be incomprehensible, along with the population. It may be time to face the fact that whatever our conscious mind thinks about it all is relatively insignificant. I believe that our affliction is one of the soul and it can be gauged by the difference between our view of our self and how others see it. David Brooks, in his new book, The Social Animal, said that “a brain is something that develops inside the skull of the individual; a mind grows through interaction with others”. He points out that our every expression, the words we use, just about all that we would call our self, we got through our relationships with someone else. I think that our crutch is the insistence on our certainty as individuals. We hold on to blame, as Baldwin did, and our reasons to dislike and our excuses for wrongdoing, as if no one else could see. The fear is that if we reached out, letting go of theses ingrained responses, we would be rejected. The paradox is that the self must be cast aside to reach its own fulfillment, just as the actual crutch must be in order to walk.
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