The Reenchantment of the World Read Free Page B

advancement. The employee's wife is also evaluated as an asset or

liability in terms of her diplomatic skills. And for most males in the

industrial nations, the sex act itself has literally become a project,

a matter of carrying out the proper techniques so as to achieve the

prescribed goal and thus win the desired approval. Pleasure and intimacy

are seen almostas a hindrance to the act. But once the ethos of technique

and management has permeated the spheres of sexuality and friendship,

there is literally no place left to hide. The "widespread climate of

anxiety and neurosis" in which we are immersed is thus inevitable.7
     
     
These details of the inner psychological landscape lay bare the

workings of the System most completely. In a study that purported to

be about schizophrenia, but that was for the most part a profile of

the psychopathology of everyday Life, R.D. Laing showed how the psyche

splits, creating false selves, in an attempt to protect itself from

all this manipulation.8 If we were asked to characterize our usual

relations with other persons, we might (as a first guess) describe them

as pictured in Figure 1 (see above). Here we have self and other in

direct interaction, engaging each other in an immediate way. As a result,

perception is real, action is meaningful, and the self feels embodied,

vital (enchanted). But as the discussion above clearly indicates, such

direct interaction almost never takes place. We are "whole" to almost no

one, least of all ourselves. Instead we move in a world of social roles,

interaction rituals, and elaborate game-playing that forces us to try

to protect the self by developing what Laing calls a "false-self system."
     
     
     

     
     
     
In Figure 2, the self has split in two, the "inner" self retreating from

the interaction and leaving the body -- now perceived as false, or dead

(disenchanted) -- to deal with the other in a way that is pure theater,

while the "inner" self looks on like a scientific observer. Perception

is thus unreal, and action correspondingly futile. As Laing points out,

we retreat into fantasies at work -- and in "love -- and establish a

false self (identified with the body and its mechanical actions) which

performs the rituals necessary for us to succeed in our tasks. This

process begins sometime during the third year of life, is rexnforced in

kindergarten and grammar school, continues on into the dreary reality

of high school, and finally becomes the daily fare of working life.9

Everyone, says Laing -- executives, physicians, waiters, or whatever --

playacts, manipulates, in order to avoid being manipulated himself. The

aim is the protection of the self, but since that self is in fact cut

off from any meaningful intercourse, it suffocates. The environment

becomes increasingly unreal as human beings distance themselves from the

events of their own lives. As this process accelerates, the self begins

to fight back, to nag itself (and thus create a further split) about the

existential guilt it has come to feel. We are haunted by our phoniness,

our playacting, our flight from trying to become what we truly are or

could be. As the guilt mounts, we silence the nagging voice with drugs,

alcohol, spectator sports -- anything to avoid facing the reality of

the situation. When the self-mystification we practice, or the effect of

the pills, wears off, we are left with the terror of our own betrayal,

and the emptiness of our manipulated "successes."
     
     
The statistics that reflect this condition in America alone are so grim

as to defy comprehension. There is now a significant suicide rate among

the seven-to-ten age group, and teenage suicides tripled between 1966 and

1976 to roughly thirty per day. More than half the patients in American

mental hospitals are under twenty-one. In 1977, a survey of nine- to

eleven-year-olds on the West Coast found that nearly half the children

were regular users of alcohol, and