The Hitchhiker,
Part III: Magical Thinking
February 14, 2003
by David E. Reiser, MD.
Overheard
in unsecured cyberspace:
Jeb: Well, it is a free country, Zeke.
Zeke: Yeah, right, and what planet are you living on, Jeb?
Jeb: Still say--everyone’s gotta right to an opinion, Zeke.
Zeke: For a while I just tried to put up with this guy’s mewling and puking.
“Zeke,” I said to myself, “Zeke, this fella’s a little off; you already know that. It’s probably on account of some broad or other…Divorce, you know…Remember, that can happen to anybody, Zeke, it even happened to you.” So, I held my tongue, Jeb, even when he started mouthing off about world affairs. I still held my tongue, even then. Fundamentally, I’m a peaceable man, Jeb...But this business now, with him posturing himself like he’s a damned movie critic…I don’t know. It just seems to me he went too far is all. Spouting off about some dumb TV show from forty years ago that ain’t even colorized. Something just snapped in me, Jeb…I just went ice cold. Even free speech has its limits.
Jeb: Thinking about it that way, I see your point...But, I’m gonna’ have to run here in a minute, Zeke…So, show me this SCUD missile you’ve been building in the basement.
********************************************************************
I’ve taken Zeke’s remarks under advisement. And perhaps it was presumptuous of me to speak for Rod Serling. On the other hand—does Zeke have any justifiable reason to take offense at my speaking directly about what’s really going on in the world right now? Must I restrict myself to “men’s issues”?
That would be an idiotic contention. Even from a narrow perspective,
our
imminent self-annihilation has direct implications for men currently
victimized by our court system. You know and I know, for example, that
permanent restraining orders will continue to proliferate in post-Armageddon
civilizations. Even completely decimated cultures, ones that, say, have
forgotten the use of the wheel, or how to harness fire, will still doubtless
find themselves governed by some hizzoner or other. Nor
will hizzoner look especially different. How much more preposterous
will a stylish wart-hog loin cloth seem than do the remnants from a
La Cage aux Follies fire sale that he cavorts around in now?
Protecting children from the noxious effects of love from their fathers
will always be a social imperative, and thus these orders will always
to be enforced. In some cases, yes, the aggrieved party may be forced
to obtain injunctions solely against a miscreant’s remaining molecular
isotopes, widely scattered. But lawyers are working feverishly to resolve
the technical glitches here and I think we can therefore rest easy.
Deadbeat atoms will indeed still be brought to justice by the appropriate
social agencies. Again, I concede, there may not be as many social workers
as we enjoyed in halcyon days, but some will survive. I can see them
now, trudging through the rubble of what once were our great cities,
tight-lipped, filled with piety, lugging those unattractive oversized
purses (talk about butch!...and, come to think of it, has anyone
wondered besides me why they all go for that steel wool perm, with those
kinky piggy-wiggly curls? I mean—Yuk!). They will have, admittedly,
a ghoulish quality. But let us not kid ourselves. Those bands of fibrous
tissue where their eyes used to be can still spot exactly what’s going
on. With their bald pates, metastatic sarcomas, and necrotic skin they
may not be Charlie’s Angels; I will concede this. And unless she’s trying
out for the witch scene in Macbeth, no one elects to be covered with
abscesses and boils. But these courageous warriors will not be deterred.
They will get the job done. Remember—nothing is can stop a person who
combines fulminating character pathology with complete self-ignorance
and extreme moral rectitude. Certainly not the truth.
Oops…Sorry…Sometimes I just get swept away in a tide of patriotism these days…
Back
to Zeke’s complaint. So far, I’ve used the symbolism of The Hitchhiker
to illustrate four elemental themes that operate in our present world
crisis:
- Guilt. We may well bear guilt, asking ourselves—“with such a sizeable portion of the world hating us so profoundly, can we be sure we are all lily white? Probably not. Some of this country’s foreign policy for the last half century is troubling. The guilt we feel now need not be rational or warranted, and if we allow it to paralyze our own will to act, the consequences could be disastrous. But I am heartened by the way we are rising to this crisis so far. I do think that acting decisively now may ensure a future for this planet. Maybe even a more secure future. If these, my deepest hopes, are realized, I do intend then to look into our history more deeply, and I anticipate that there will be much to learn. To me, patriotism is not synonymous with “jingoistic frenzy.”
I remember Malcolm X’s pronouncement—“America’s chickens will come home to roost.” It upset people greatly when he said it forty years ago, and I am confident that some will find it abhorrent to hear me quote it now. But perhaps we protest too much. If nothing else, bin Laden believes that he is visiting us with just punishment for our prior sins. It probably helps to understand his reasoning, however destructive it is. I recall the old Life Magazine covers from the late 1950’s in which Nixon’s limo was swarmed by angry third world peasants protesting our nation’s intrusion into their countries. I was too young then to comprehend the broader significance of these photographs, but I do recall that Americans were shocked to discover that we were so loathed around the world.
As a country, we now broached a subject openly for the first time, one previously held to be taboo. Perhaps, some wondered, our own CIA had not always defended friends of freedom. Maybe we had cynically propped up brutal tyrants in some deeply suffering and desperate nations out of cynical end-game strategies contrived during the cold war.
Ultimately,
I want to learn more about these matters, and I reject any contention
that my wish to get to the bottom of our history undermines my deep
patriotism now. In my view, my loyalty to my country does not require
that I, or anyone, support blanket repression of the historical truth.
This country engaged in catastrophic foreign policy blunders over the
last fifty years, I suspect, ethical blunders. I think that they may
still haunt us to this moment. In particular, I wonder if our lack of
resoluteness in the last ten or twenty years hasn’t stemmed from the
tangled foreign policy messes of the cold war. What politician would
relish digging al of that history up and solely because he had the courage
to play Cassandra for real? I do think it is this courage that distinguishes
Bush now. We have until now seemed paralyzed by a Hamlet-like indecisiveness
and our resulting inaction has greatly increased the threat all of us
now must contend with.
Jean Paul Sartre once said, “The problem with you Americans is that you don’t know when to apply green lights and when to apply red lights.” This is worth considering. I think we have been incapable of putting a stop to world bullshit for several decades, and in the vacuum of our “restraint,” global evil has grown much stronger. I think that Viet Nam was tragically doomed by precisely this sort of indecision. And I think the atavistic savagery of bin laden did not just appear. It has its roots in Lockerbie, Nigeria, and Beirut, historical outrages where we just plain blinked. This, in turn, emboldened those who now terrify us all.
I think that we will live to see another day, and that America’s resoluteness now will give everyone on this planet a shot sat at a better and more humane future. But, in my view, America is great because it is not afraid to ask hard questions, even of itself, especially of itself. This nation is my country, do or die. But not—do and deny. We must always seek the truth.
I’ve proposed that The Hitchhiker may also offer us a glimpse into
how
terrorism wreaks havoc in our unconscious minds. It is discouraging
to consider that the outcome or world events may play out ultimately
not in the rational and conscious decisions we make, but in child-like
regressions to unconscious terror that we are all prone to. Discouraging,
but true. Sometimes it is very difficult to tell whether we are reacting
logically to a dangerous enemy, or whipping ourselves into hysterics
about the boogey-man under our bed. Terrorism itself exploits this dualism
in our nature. It wins when we invoke child-like denial, but equally
when, like Chicken Little, we scream in terror that the sky is falling
every time that we discern the shadow of a passing cloud.
Roosevelt said it seventy years ago, and his word still ring true: it is our fear of fear that poses the ultimate threat to our future. There is not question that bin Laden may be able to inflict suffering and terror on a once unimaginable level of magnitude. It is conceivable, perhaps even likely, that we will wake up one morning to the news that a major American city is in ruins—having been attacked with nuclear bombs, or infected with Anthrax, or worse. Let’s face it—the visions that loom in our minds are horrific. That they are also compellingly real seems to have dazed us—we reel from the blow with an eerie and preternatural global silence. The shadow of the future, as Schopenhauer observed, has indeed cast its terrible darkness back into the past now. And the penumbra falls darkest across our present.
Imagine. New York—a disaster zone, with hundreds of thousands of people in status epilepticus from mustard gas. Los Angeles—doomed, its water table poisoned, its citizens only now learning that they have been ingesting fatal toxins for weeks. Now, people wait to die.
All of this is horrifying. But I worry that our suppression of these thoughts could prove more deadly than our allowing them to emerge.
Consider the bright side. Yeah, the bright side. And I’m not being sarcastic. What we imagine is horrific. But it is also probably the worst that can happen. The Middle East does not have the arsenal with which it could launch a full-fledge nuclear holocaust. It would be lucky to get a couple of primitive devices to detonate. And, yes, its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons is gruesome. But, ladies and gentlemen, lads and lassies—Iraq did not invent these devices of warfare. We did, Europe did, in World War I. That is where all of Hussein’s weapons were first created and field tested. He does not have the power annihilate civilization. Only our descent into civil anarchy can leads to that doom. Only if we drag ourselves back into the Dark Ages will bin Laden prevail.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, lads and lassies, brings us to what may be the most alarming reality of all: we engage as a society, a surprising amount of the time, perhaps the majority of the time, in flagrantly psychotic thinking. Repeat: psychotic. “The chickens will come home to roost.” Call it reincarnation, fate, irony, karma, or “what goes around comes around”—the Hitchhiker alludes to something that we all know, and yet cringe to know. What we do not deal with in the first place comes back to haunt us. Again and again. It haunts us until and unless we finally face it. This is why his relentless reappearances in the Twilight Zone episode are so terrifying. He says with mute power—“Your past does indeed haunt you.”
Clinicians involved in the treatment of addiction have long understood this principle. In some Twelve Step programs it is alluded to by the acronym F.E.A.R. In middle class AA meetings, this stands for “Face Everything and Recover.” I’ve heard rougher members of AA and NA offer this variant—“F---- Everything and Run!”
Ladies and gentlemen, lads and lassies, in Part II, I asked—why were we so unprepared for the World Trade Center? As horrifying as it was, only a moron would have truly believed that it was beyond the pale of possibility. Or, if not that, some other low-tech Armageddon surely was bound to happen eventually.
Our denial was psychotic. Consider: psychosis means, by definition, a steadfast refusal to face reality.
Our entire nation has been lulling itself into false complacency by using magical thinking. Nothing like this could ever happen, we told ourselves, because…well. This is America…It just can’t…God would never permit it…
Yeah, sure…. Right…
It is this kind of magical thinking that will destroy us, not Hussein and bin Laden. Only our abject denial will leave us vulnerable to collapse.
Freud once said, “Where id is, let ego be.” How about—“Where denial is, let truth enter.”?
I’ll buy that.
Our greatest peril, I think, does lie in our indulgence in magical thinking. And as a psychiatrist I must share with you an observation I have long had concerning the inclinations of those most drawn to the political arena (including me). We seem to have a strong is aversion to introspection. God knows this includes the men’s movement. I have been disturbed by the lack of impact this movement has had on national perception and policy. We have had very little effect in view of the enormity of the problem. And frankly, I have wondered whether our distaste for introspection doesn’t explain some of our blind spots. We are so reflexively ready to externalize blame. God knows the external problems we vilify are real. But, as people in AA often say, whenever we point a finger at someone else, we ignore the fact that three more fingers are pointing back at us. It is human nature, perhaps. But is also a mode of self-deception that can prove catastrophic.
In Part IV, I will consider the recent histories of two political figures: Mahatma Gandhi, and Moahmmhar Ghadaffi. The sublime and the ridiculous, I know. But I believe that their respective fates ultimately hinged on whether they took refuge in denial and magical thinking.
“To thine own self be true.”
Never has this admonition had a more urgent quality.
As for Zeke’s consternation that the Twilight Zone was in black and white. I say, “Before you colorize those masterpieces, first you’ll have to pry the Smith and Wesson from my dead clenched fist. Some things are worth fighting for!
David E. Reiser, MD.
David E. Reiser is a writer and physician. His books and articles in the 1980s addressed medicine's urgent need to make education and patient care more humane. Along with others, he quietly changed the way students are taught throughout the world. The New York Times described his book, Medicine as a Human Experience, as a textbook that revived "a long-lost skill" in physicians--"compassion."
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
