9. Human Destructiveness

The dilemma is escaped only by those willing to discard
personality.
Norman O. Brown

Thanotos, Freud’s death instinct, is essentially the drive in man that makes him destructive. As pointed out in the past post, thanatos is the creator of man’s illusory ego, the falsehood whose only purpose is to create conflict between man and his universe. That ego is the illusion that seduces man into believing that he is something different than the environment that he pollutes, the enemy that he kills, and the companion that he controls and dominates. Man’s destructive ego is the false impression that fools man into believing that he is a victim or a victimizer. When we look out at our world with its wars, terrorists, murders, and rapists, it is Thanatos that is the origin of the destructive actions of mankind.

Above all, there is the destructive emotional damage that man does to himself because he identifies himself with the fictitious ego. He serves two masters, his own nature and the higher authority that judges his ego, telling him how he needs to act to have a historical ego of real value. Civilized man, with his authoritarian character, obeys the rules of those who offer him a sense of specialness, denying the direction that is within his own heart – the spiritual guide of his own nature.

Civilized man places all of his trust in external masters, his family, a dictator, a professor, or a social group, but regardless of his commitment, there is something within him that opposes his unnatural enslavement to external authority. The opposition between his external authority and his inner nature results in the stress and tension of constant conflict. Man’s obedience to authority, as opposed to the freedom of his own nature, is the source of his experience of anxiety, experienced as guilt in the direction of his past and as fear in the direction of his future.

See page 130, Being and the End of History.

8. Death Wish

“The dilemma is escaped only by those willing to discard personality.”
Norman O. Brown

Thanotos, Freud’s death instinct, is the creator of the ego. It alienates man from nature and his own natural self by giving him the sense of being special. Specialness, in turn, exempts man from the laws of change that dominate all of nature, giving man the hope for an individualistic immortality. The trees and rocks of nature may come and go because of their lack of specialness, but historical man will live on because he has a special self – the ego that was ironically generated by his will to die.

The specialness in man’s ego allows him to transcend the boundaries of space and time. Man has a body that belongs to nature, obeying its laws of growth and decay in time, but man’s individual ego is separate from his vulnerable body, existing unchanged as his body ages and becomes frail. The ego of man is immortal and ageless because it is special, being exempt from nature and her laws.

However, man’s sense of specialness is the product of thanatos, his destructive wish to kill his natural self. The sense of being something apart is really alienation, the nightmare of isolation, fear, and guilt. Because he is special, man experiences a sense of regret for a past that shouldn’t have been and a fear of the future that might be. Because he is special and the father of himself, he must bear the responsibility for a guilty past and a fearful future.

See p. 127, Being and the End of History.