The majority of what we do in the conduct of our lives is irrational. Our most important decisions are driven by unconscious processes. Later on we attempt to rationalize what we have done and invoke our reason secondarily to convince ourselves that we are far more rational than we actually are. As a general rule, the more vital and central a decision is to the rest of our lives, the more likely it is to get made on an entirely unconscious basis. Examples of unconscious decisions include how we select a partner, why we start a family, and how we decide upon a career. If you find this disconcerting—what can I tell you? Perhaps our unconscious’s can make better determinations than we can. Maybe it’s just as well that we have little input into the life-decisions that count. It’s possible. And for you control freaks, remember that there is a place for reason in human behavior. We are much more cognizant of reality, for example, when it comes to ordering take-out pizza and solving seventh grade Algebra problems.

I know that some of you will find my contention unsettling. It may help to express it as an equation:

The likelihood that I know what in the hell I’m doing =  1/ The impact it will have on the rest of my life.

This equation does nothing to reduce or even explain the existential horror of what I am telling you, but expressing it as an equation makes it sound scientific. Doctors have been getting away with this for years and you may find that it comes in handy if you ever have reason to impersonate one.

Here’s an additional tip that has never been revealed outside of the inner chambers of the American Medical Association. You can safely add this notation beneath the equation:

P= < 0.0001

It means absolutely nothing, but since no one knows what probability statistics really mean yet believe that they should, they will rub their chins sagely and say, “Very interesting.”

Here’s how it looks when you go the whole nine yards:

The likelihood that I know what in the hell I’m doing =  1/ The impact it will have on the rest of my life.

                                                P= < 0.0001

Presumably, if you’re in the men’s Movement, you’re unattached and stripped of all self-esteem as well. You may wish to print this article out and wave it around while taking public transportation. If you see an attractive girl, wink and then say, “This is really really heavy shit…It’s sure a good thing that I’m in MENSA!” I know you are skeptical, but you’d be surprised. This is how I got my wife. Of course, she speaks mostly Swedish and thought I was reading the script for an Ingmar Bergman film. That worked in my favor. But try it! What have you got to lose? Odds are things couldn’t get much worse!

If you find yourself anxious to the point of being truly uncomfortable, here is a safe treatment that can help: take a piece of paper and draw a line right down the middle. On one side list all of the arguments supporting my contention that we have virtually no control over a damned thing that we do. Now, write down all of the reasons that I’m full of hooey. Excellent. Now, go to the top of a stairwell, shut your eyes (no cheating). Release the paper and allow it to drift down the flight of stairs. Retrieve the paper and examine it closely for any scuffs or other marks that may have appeared. This will not give you the answer that you want, but it does demonstrate that you’re a bit compulsive and therefore more apt to feel disconcerted by the fact that you conduct your entire life in chaos, more or less like a novice rodeo participant atop a three-thousand-pound bucking and snorting testosterone-crazed bull.  

What about our political beliefs? Are these also irrational and unconscious? My serious answer is—it depends. The Men’s Movement has been criticized for being comprised of many men who have been directly affected by the inequities of the divorce courts, as though this truth means that they’re simply self-preoccupied, or even worse, self-pitying whiners. If we give that notion any credence, we might just as well claim that Helen Keller worked for the deaf and blind because she was narcissistic and that Martin Luther King was too self-centered to get off the pity pot. Serious political advocacy almost always begins in some trauma that a person directly experiences.

On the other hand, there are many people who gravitate to politics for irrational and unconscious reasons. It’s easy to see why. The political process invites polarization, externalization of blame, and finger pointing. It neither requires nor expects much in the way of inner growth or introspection from its constituents. Such a climate may or may not be necessary for democracy. It is indisputably a very tempting refuge and subterfuge, however, for people with problems who want to blame the world and not take an honest look at themselves.

I intend to talk here about some of the ways in which neurotic and even psychotic people sometimes try to legitimize their pathology by gravitating toward partisan politics. My desire is not to indulge in name-calling or to label those who differ with my views as being automatically “sick.” [1] On the other hand, I believe that great harm has resulted from a widespread confusion about who is sick and who is espousing a well-reasoned ideology.

If all of this sounds Freudian, you’re right. It is. A scientific theory that was developed to explicate how utterly oblivious we all are seem eminently those of us involved in politics. Something that takes abject folly into account must be invoked; it seems to me, to explain our current culture’s obnoxious preoccupation with political correctness. And only a theory that seriously endeavors to understand what happens when you combine lunacy with poor hygiene and sadism is imperative if we hope to understand the mind-set of neofeminism. Moreover, to be serviceable, the theory has to include not only a plausible explanation of instinct, but also the way in which threats of castration are used to suppress its expression. Only a paradigm this broad and encompassing can hope to explain the ease with which many men have abdicated their civil rights and hopped up into the laps of people espousing hatred of men. There, they wag their tails, eat bon-bons, and behave like well house-broken Pomeranians. To understand politics, you have to have a theory that understands such insanity and Freudian theory is the only encompassing psychology that actually takes this kind of idiocy seriously.

Freud did not discover the unconscious. He did, however, map the territory and no subsequent cartographer has added much. He wrote The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and in it he single-handedly categorized the unconscious’s operation in stunning detail. He used the dreams of his patients to explore what is ordinarily hidden and called dreams “the royal road” to the unconscious. He also used literature, art, religion, anthropology, folklore, hypnosis, hysterical physical symptoms, dirty jokes, and the psychotic behavior of mobs to buttress his observations. He used whatever he found suitable and, as it turns out, virtually every human enterprise was eminently suitable. Civilization itself is governed by unconscious processes every bit as much as individuals are; it turns out, and more or less as clueless.

Freud is nowadays largely ignored. He was positively despised in Victorian, Austria. It may have been his ideas, or it may have been the fact that it was a Jew who had them. Hitler personally wanted Freud dead he was ultimately forced to flee to England where he lived out the rest of his life dying slowly from jaw cancer and pondering the role of thanatos in human affairs. Thanatos was Freud’s term for “the death instinct” and he encompassed in it a range of self-destructive tendencies that have plagued humanity from the very beginning and still do. Ultimately he abandoned his theory of thanatos, regarding it as theoretically unsuccessful. As I behold the post-September 11^th. World, I wonder if he might have been premature.

Whether it was Freud’s ideas alone that caused many people to hate him, or his nose, is anyone’s guess.  Regardless, hated he was and not just by Vienna. All of Europe turned its back on him, and ultimately the only reason his ideas spread was because of the enthusiastic response that he received in America. In 1909 he delivered a series of talks at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts—commonly referred to as the G. Stanley Hall Lectures. They drew world-wide attention and Europe could no longer ignore him entirely.

Freud had a theory about why his ideas were so vehemently detested. He said that humankind has had to endure three severe blows to its narcissism. The first, Freud said, was the result of the Copernican Revolution. It demonstrated that mankind was not the center of the universe. The second, according to Freud, was the Darwinian Revolution, because now man was revealed to be not King of the animal kingdom but simply a primate that could count chimps and rhesus monkeys as close kissing cousins, to name only two. As I’m sure you can guess, Freud himself was an exceedingly modest and humble sort of guy. Thus, he shyly suggested that the third great blow to humanity’s over-weaning sense of self-importance was the Freudian Revolution because it revealed that people aren’t even in control of themselves. What we think of as our conscious identities, Freud stated, were actually just small islands in the middle of a vast sea teeming with forbidden impulses, and especially sexual impulses. Brittany Spears may be repulsive, but she is not a scourge that cannot be explained.

Many of Freud’s ideas make things sound bad for humanity indeed. Even on their good behavior, human beings are vicious and unpredictable. Still, there is some good news at least. Fortunately, human beings—while they do make big mistakes are widely lauded for their ability to learn from them.

Yeah sure. And if you believe that, let me sell you the E-mail address of a place that ships Oxycontin for less than twelve cents a pill….

Humanity’s capacity for self-destruction is matched only by its vanity when it looks in the mirror. Frankly, compared to humanity, Sleeping Beauty’s mother was pretty damned hard on herself. It goes without saying, therefore, that there has never been a time in history during which Freud’s ideas were not widely attacked and dismissed. The current atmosphere is no exception. Lately people tend to claim not that Freud was a filthy-minded Hebrew-spouting Lucifer, but more that his ideas are now passé. It matters little that few of these people have actually read him. That’s what Cliff Notes are for.

Even in my own field, psychiatry, his influence is rapidly waning. I greet that with mixed emotions. On the one had, while I regard his theories as brilliant, they generally have led to lousy treatments. Thousands of analysands got up from their couches after decades of paralysis following their tenth dose of Prozac. I think it’s great. On the other hand, those who seize upon this to claim that Freud’s ideas were nonsense are, to put this as tactfully as I can, a bunch of morons who are full of shit.

Freud has always been especially reviled by political-types. It hardly matters what ideology the politico espouses—Marxism, socialism, communism, conservativisim, or a devout commitment to mom and apple pie—all are united in their loathing of Sigmund Freud. No political movement hates Freud more vehemently, however, than feminism.

Perhaps it was Freud’s declaration that women felt inferior because they lacked penises. Possibly it was the controversy that surrounded his reversal on the prevalence of incest in Vienna, Austria.  Maybe it was his stinking cigars. Regardless, to this day, pseudo-scholarly feminist journals are full of articles claiming to debunk Freud.

Now, I’m going to completely change subjects. But I’ll get back on track eventually. And at least I warned you. This is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to the dangerous and sordid business of being a writer:

All of the phenomena I have alluded to, albeit incoherently, do have a serious side. They all contribute to a problem today that I view as exceedingly grave. It is one that is bigger than the issues of the Men’s Movement alone and it poses a threat to everyone’s future. I am referring to what has been called a vacuum in the quality of our political leaders. Many have observed that nowadays nobody in his right mind would run for office and it’s hard to argue that the observation is true. I urge you here to leave aside speculations about the Bush presidency and please, just this once, set aside the carping about who is sufficiently conservative. The problem is too enormous for such pettiness.

I believe that a fundamental need in all human beings is to find heroes. Many of us have, within our lifetimes, been called to war. Many of us have had to witness our children being summoned to war. There is no greater sacrifice that a republic ever exacts. What is needed for any of us to muster the needed courage, it seems to me, is idealism, and idealism must in turn be epitomized by those who lead us. I have no influence to exert with my son. He was removed from me by a sick bitch and a corrupt court system that aided and abetted her. But if my son did come to me and ask me if he should serve in some conflict half-way around the globe, what would I say? I know what his mother would say—“Go to Canada.” And frankly I might say that too unless I really had respect for those who lead this country. I could not lightly ask my son to bleed and die for shop-worn clichés mouthed by second rate lawyers running for political office.

Again, I urge you to leave aside the historical place of George Bush, Jr. and Tony Blair. It’s too soon historically to know. And, puh-leaseee! Don’t pontificate to me that none of this would be happening if we had a few more Ronnie Reagan’s. America is built on a two-party system, remember, not a one party hegemony? The idea behind all of this is that cyclical swings between one party and another may not only be inevitable but might be downright healthy. And we should all want to see a country that is sufficiently robust that a good presidential nominee will come from both parties—one who can rise to his obligations regardless of politics.

And here I see a terrible problem.  There is a widespread practice today that consists of destroying a leader’s credibility on the basis of his personal behavior. JFK has been “demythologized” because he apparently screwed around. Likewise, regardless of how you might feel about Bill Clinton, he was the sitting president and there was something alarming about seeing him mocked on late night TV for ejaculating on an intern’s dress. I mean, for God’s sakes! However you voted, Clinton was the elected president and here he was being ridiculed mercilessly. We diminish ourselves in this process and endanger ourselves. The images on TV of Henry Hyde and the rest of his associates waddling into the capital’s rotunda tight-lipped and holy was bullshit and everyone knew it. It was partisan politics pure and simple. People aren’t stupid. I don’t care what people think of Clinton, this behavior made a mockery of democracy not Clinton. I mean, let’s be real—the guy was an idiot. He got a blow job from a kid under the noses of the Secret Service. That’s pretty lame, but it is not as though he had been caught selling nuclear arms to Libya. The spectacle of Clayton Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court comes to mind.  So does the merciless derision of Jimmy Carter, a humane and good man, because he addressed the nation in a cardigan sweater and was powerless to secure the release of our hostages.

What we see over and over in such instances is a cynical ploy based on partisan politics along with a “Fifth Estate” that appears to have escaped from a zoo, not graduated from schools of journalism. What about Watergate? You might ask. That was different. We all know that the congressional leadership at that time weighed in based on personal determinations of whether Nixon’s White House posed a threat to the republic itself. Right or wrong, these individuals acted by and large patriotically, not politically. Judgment and balance are always required.

Sometime between Watergate and Gerald Ford’s dignified and appropriate recommendation for a Nixon pardon, this country lost its way. Serious responsibilities to the office and bona fide ethical dilemmas vanished and were replaced by a tawdry and cynical obsession with catching everybody with his zipper down. I have little doubt that today many superb leaders refuse to run for office at all. And it’s a pity.

The phrase—“Is nothing sacred?” does come to my mind, and I find myself hearing Bob Dylan’s 1965 lyrics as well:

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

So—you may say, well and good. Now I’ve indulged in my Boomer diatribe and quoted from forty-year-old Bob Dylan records. What does that have to do with feminism?

A great deal, actually. The degeneration in morality that I allude to above that occurred around the time of Ford’s presidency also happened when the first wave of feminism was at its peak.  I refuse to join ranks with those who lump all feminists into one category and condemn them all. Some of what 1970’s feminism addressed was valid. The work of Susan Brownmueller, redefining rape as a crime of violence and not one of horniness is one example. Nevertheless, the overwhelming voice of 1970’s style feminism was sarcastic, derisive, cutting, and….downright castrating.

It was often hard to know where the article in Ms. Magazine left off and the hostile commercial on television in which some harried housewife rolled her eyes in disgust at her obese slob of a husband began. The tenor that was set was not simply that of anger and ideology. It was bitchy and demeaning.

Even more amazing—men seemed, for whatever reason, to buy into it. I do not wish to oversimplify what occurred historically. But I do believe that our current malaise is grave and has much to do with the implicit self-denigration we engage in when we collude in this kind of bullshit.

And this brings me down to some elemental realities that no one articulated better than Sigmund Freud himself. Freud openly stated that the shrewish, envious, and derisive tone of some women, who in a distastefully sour and passive-aggressive way chronically felt compelled to carp at and belittle men, was, quite simply, a manifestation of penis envy.

It was rampant in 1970’s feminism and fit in all too well with this country’s profound self-loathing and doubt that followed the conclusion of the Viet Nam war.

As I said, I refuse to lump all feminists from that period into this category, but I do assert that many factions did degenerate into a long commercial for Mr. Kleen. Shrewish is as shrewish does, and a lot of women were just that—querulous harpies and shrews. Not all, perhaps not even most. But a lot of them. I think it is time to differentiate malcontents and career psychoneurotics from individuals such as Brownmueller who grappled with substantive issues. One is scholarship. The other is….PENIS ENVY.

It is even more disturbing to witness men pandering to this bullshit. Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, “I’m the only man I know with a severe case of penis envy.” He may have been wrong.

William Shakespeare wrote the Taming of the Shrew in 1594 and spoiled little middle class bitches still act out in abundance today. These ill-tempered hags are readily distinguishable from women who in a scholarly and earnest manner attempt to illuminate inequities that are centuries old and still problematic.

What of today’s neofeminists? My answer is: Who knows? They’ve all gone underground—hardly a good sign. My guess is that they are driven almost exclusively by profound psychiatric disturbances. I can’t prove it because few of them will come out from hiding, but I have encountered four or five professionally. Based on my exceedingly limited direct contact, I believe that most of these women are afflicted with a lifelong hatred of themselves as women. They also loathe and detest men, but I suspect that they loath and detest themselves even more. It is inconceivable to me that women who organize into terrorist cells could be fit as nurturing mothers to anything human. I for one am prepared to say that they are not espousing any legitimate political ideology. They are mentally sick and the rest of the world should not legitimize them by reacting to them as if they espoused a single rational concept. They do not. They’re sick. They’re dangerous. They need to be stopped. A political movement they are not.

David E. Reiser, MD.