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.

History as Necrophilia

The distinction between prehistoric man and his historic successors is that prehistoric man escaped from nature by turning within the tribe or group that he belongs to, while man from the historic era uses his individual ego to isolate him from nature. Prehistoric man did not need an historical identity as a fixed definition that made him separate and special because prehistoric man had a special place within a tribe that, in turn, had a special place in the universe. His life might ebb and flow, but the specialness of his group and his contribution to that specialness survived by promising him an island of immortality in the swirling sea of flowing time.

The man without a nation, clan, family, tribe, or individual ego is isolated from everything but nature, and, faced with the terror of the all-destroying nature, must either join one of these units in their war on the universe or he must have the courage to accept his role in the flow, finding his immortality in being part of the flow itself. For all but the few, perhaps an occasional Lao Tzu, Buddha, or Jesus, men have needed to belong and acquire a history.

While nature, with its dynamic flow, is immortal, the man of the prehistoric tribe or the historic memory creates only mortal death.

2. Fear of the Unknown

Man is alienated from the universe by his unwillingness to accept the unknown. He craves for security and certainty in his life, but finds himself in a world that is inherently uncertain. If he accepts the great unknown that is his nature, man experiences “being” in the world, but if he turns his back on Nature, he assumes the burdens of conflict and anxiety as he struggles to “become” something in the world.

Western civilization’s relationship with Nature is that of alienation. Western man considers himself apart from Nature, a superimposition of something grand atop something that is mundane. He believes that civilization progresses while Nature remains quaintly “very natural.” Western civilization measures its members by the distance they have traveled from the “natural state.” He measures his wisdom by how much of the unknowable that he knows.

Western civilization, more than others, is dominated by the myth of guilt and redemption, and, like a carrot on a stick, the repressed and enslaved man of western civilization seeks redemption and scorns the temptations of freedom in order to obtain a reward in heavenly eternity. Man’s goal is a paradise that is apart and alienated from the unknowable Nature and is the product of the knowing mind.

The mind divides itself into the high and the low – the high being the security, the permanent entity – but still remaining a process of thought and therefore of time.

J. Krishnamurti