One of the favorite things my wife and I did in the first years of marriage was watch on television the romantic comedy series, “Love Boat”. We were public school teachers in Florida making a barely livable salary. There was little to no money for “going out” on a Saturday night so we contented ourselves with lying in bed, snuggled together in our own “love boat”. Following this show was “Fantasy Island”, an even less realistic vision of life involving a parade of characters who have life transforming experiences during a stay on Mr. Roark’s island.
If we had enough money at the end of the week, we’d pool our resources for a take out meal from Howley’s Restaurant. Howley’s was a local fixture that had been around since 1950. It’s illuminated sign in front boldly proclaimed its signature motto: “Cooked in Sight, Must be Right”. Its grill and lunch counter were positioned at the right front side of the restaurant surrounded by large plate glass windows where patrons and cooks could be clearly seen from the busy highway. To me, it was reminiscent of the well-known 1942 painting by Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks”. At night, under the exterior neon lights and bright incandescent interior lights, its 1950’s decor gave it the quality of a time machine that connected us to a bygone era of hula hoops, doo-wop music, Buddy Holly’s horn-rimmed glasses, “I Like Ike” campaign buttons and Sputnik.
The menu was also a throwback to earlier times. California Cuisine had not yet found its way to our part of Florida. Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, roast beef on slices of white bread slathered in brown gravy and fried chicken were major features at Howleys. It wasn’t haute cuisine and certainly not nouvelle cuisine but it fit our budget and satisfied our hunger.
When you are young and in love your needs are not great. A retro-dinner and a corny TV show or two gave us the only context we needed to wrap our new marriage in the bubble that kept us safe and restored our courage to be ready for the week ahead.
“Love Boat” was a rom-com that in its fifty minute, pre-recorded world presented the Shakespearian comedy formula of: conventional status quo, disruption of status quo and the ultimate reestablishment of a happier status quo. The show left you with a feel-good tingle that fit nicely into the world of newly weds. It also set us up for “Fantasy Island” which followed. It was even more unrealistic than the plot lines of “Love Boat” but continued to reinforce that goodness and reasonableness could and would ultimately prevail.
Perhaps it was our belief in human kind as reflected in a couple of Saturday night network TV comedies that eventually pulled us out of our tenured teaching jobs in South Florida, away from family, friends and the absolutely fabulous grapefruit from our backyard. In our work in the public school system, we saw the pain and confusion of our students trying to grapple with a society that missed or ignored their emotional needs to cope with life. Florida only less than a decade before had begun to desegregate its schools. The Viet Nam War had emptied our national treasury, killed thousands of our young, and sent our moral compass spinning. Watergate had profoundly shaken our trust in the highest levels of government. Illegal drugs were flooding the country and South Florida was one of the major gateways for those drugs.
We both felt education was no longer enough to give people the tools to navigate the onslaught of challenges facing them. We found ourselves drawn to the growing practice of psychotherapy. This led us to California which was, at the time, the epicenter of cutting edge ideas and innovation in the practice of psychotherapy. Marilee started first. While she was in graduate school, I worked on the waterfront of Oakland driving a propane and gasoline laden fire bomb disguised as a catering truck making twice what I made as a teacher.* It took us a little longer than we both had hoped but I eventually returned to school and got my doctorate in clinical psychology.
Our training pushed us both to grow personally. This transition wasn’t easy for us individually and as a couple. At times, it felt like everything we believed about ourselves and the world came into question. I don’t think either of us at the time realized it but what was happening was that our idea of ourselves was being rebuilt in a way that gave us a fighting chance to mitigate, modify and strengthen our ability to maintain a balance between our unconscious desires and aggression and our prejudices about how the world should be. In simplest terms, we were being trained to be non-judgmental and non-reactive so our clients could safely reveal the whole of themselves. In the protected environment of the consulting room, clients could develop the strength and courage to manage their fears, their unexpressed anger, their wounds. In the non-judgement context of therapy, they could also gain the courage to face their harshest inner critics and clarify for themselves how they should live their lives.
The Greek philosopher, Socrates, is quoted as saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. I would agree with that, though I would add a corollary to that quote: the unexamined life may seem easier but in practice it creates misery for the individual, their loved ones and the society in which they live. I say this out of my own personal experience and my work with clients over my thirty-six years of practice. The unexamined life leaves us vulnerable to our unconscious motivations and primitive drives as well as our worst inner critics. Who we want to be, who we know we could be, is battered by the opposing voices of impulse and judgement to the point of despair or into the arms of false prophets who would use our confusion and co-opt our fears and insecurities for their own personal aggrandizement and power.
Dictators, demagogues and con men look for ways to exploit those who have not examined their thoughts, feelings and motivations. They look for people who will surrender their power to them in the hopes of feeling safe. What people actually receive is less security, more confusion and fear. They are perpetually vacillating between being told what to believe or not believe and who is a threat. In this state, they can do things that, if their true self wasn’t so undeveloped, unexamined, they would never do. Mass hysteria and riotous mobs arise when people are brought together by a demagogue who provides the permission to act unhindered by reason, knowledge and compassion that an examined life would never permit.
In many ways, I see this is what is happening in many parts of our world today. Whole countries have polarized into an ideological civil war. No mitigating dialogue or compromise seems possible. The “Ego”, as Freud named it, which would seek compromise, balance and peace is under siege by unexamined critical judgements and primitive fears.
How do societies find their way out of the current ideological polarization? Big question. No easy answers. It is far easier to pander to people’s fears and prejudices than it is to appeal to their reason in the same way it is vastly easier to start a war than end one, as we are currently witnessing in Afghanistan. Wars are perhaps the ultimate polarization with their accompanying death and destruction that can leave both sides with long lasting pain and suffering no matter who is the “winner”.
When a country fights internally, whether it is a true civil war or an ideological war, there are never any winners unless the grievances of the vanquished and the victors are addressed and resolved in such a way that the desire for continued conflict is eliminated. Otherwise, the underlying issues will go dormant waiting like a virus for the right time to emerge and rekindle old conflicts.
The enablers of this ideological pandemic are the demagogic opportunists who will prey on our basest fears and emotions and pander to our most ingrained biases. They will use all the tools available to them to weaken our sense of justice and compromise that a democracy requires. They go after our connection to ourselves and the values that maintain a sense of balance in our lives. The “Super Ego”, as Freud named it, is besieged and confused into doubting what we believe is right and wrong
When we lose the ability to compromise, we lose two important things: our connection to others and our connection to our conscience or perhaps more precisely put, consciousness. We lose choice in our actions because we lose mental and emotional flexibility. We surrender to our destructive tendencies, our primitive drives, the “Id”, as Freud named it. Truth becomes purely subjective and we listen only to those who would support us in our destructiveness. “Alternative facts” and “fake news” become weapons against reason and ourselves.
I have been thinking a great deal about how I can maintain a balance within myself as I witness the continued ideological wars. It is difficult to not let my fears or my biases overtake my ability to reason. It often feels nearly impossible to not be drawn into an unhealthy duel that leaves my civilized, educated, moral self behind. The pressure to resolve the tension created by the seesawing between wanting to be right and justified in my biases and the fear of change can be enormous. It often feels like it is easier to just take a side and demonize those who don’t agree with me. But in doing so, I lose myself just as those rioters at the U.S. Capitol did when they called for the lynching of the Speaker of the House and smashed their way into the Capitol without thought for those they were harming or the laws they were breaking because they were so sure they were “right”.
The “Ego”, as Freud named it, is a part of us that serves to moderate between our extremes and maintain emotional balance. When it becomes overwhelmed it loses its ability to do that. Polarization cannot be mitigated unless people desire peace more than they desire being right. Peace is a process of continually asking ourselves what sustains and supports life? Warfare, either physical or ideological does not support life. By its very nature, it denies someone their life, their beliefs. Yet we continue to let ourselves be called to war by demagogues, despots and charlatans, who have mastered the art of activating the collective prejudices and fears in us so we forget who we really are and serve a false prophet. In the process, we lose the ability to maintain our responsibility to each other. We lose our humanity, our compassion for others and our ability to tolerate differences among us.
Many years ago, I had a client who was a nurse. She once said she had come to believe that, “If you can name it, you can tame it.” She said this in reference to physical illness. I believe that it also applies to emotional illness which is the basis of polarization in us and in society. The first step to addressing emotional distress is having a conceptual framework that helps us see the bigger picture, to gain some objectivity on our actions. This allows us to stop reacting to events around us. It gives us time to consider alternatives. It gives the” Ego” a chance to moderate our passions and our biases.
The next step in reducing polarization is identifying where we are as a society and as an individual. Are we ignoring our obligation to living peacefully in relation to those around us? It involves asking ourselves if being “right” is more important than being safe. It requires us to be willing to listen to the needs and beliefs of others. It obligates us to seek accommodation and compromise in the service of peace. It demands of us to accept that not everyone will agree with us, that our beliefs are not the absolute truth. It means doing the hard work required to have a multi-cultural, diverse world that accepts differences not demonizes them. It necessitates being our best self, our strongest self. It means turning away from those who would validate only those parts of ourselves that serve their need for power.
If we can name it, we can tame it. This is why I offer, thanks to that nurse and many other clients who have shared their lives with me over the years, the Freudian framework of ID, Ego, Super Ego. It is one way to “name” and “tame” the forces within us and serve as a model for how we can achieve balance within ourselves and our societies.
I’m not ready to watch reruns of “Love Boat” just to get a feel good fix. I am ready, however, to snuggle with my loved one on a Saturday night, order a healthy dinner and feel I have done what I could to live an examined life, a life that seeks understanding of who I need to be to contribute to a more peaceful and loving world. That is perhaps my Love Boat. I hope it never sinks. I hope yours doesn’t either.
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Thank you for being one of my readers. This is the longest I have gone between essays since I started writing them over a year ago. My work load has been very heavy. So much has happened where I am stationed. It is the primary air hub for the ending of twenty years of war. Perhaps I will, in a future essay, write about how this war and the way it ended has affected me after sixteen years of working with military members and their families. That will require some time to digest it all.
Meanwhile, as I always do, I urge you to love the ones you are with and the ones you wish you could to be with. Life is short even when there is no war or pandemic.
“Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.” This an ancient and eternal law, quoted in, “The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times” by Pema Chodron 2001
* You can read the full story about my time as a catering truck driver on the Oakland waterfront in my April 12, 2020 essay, La Cucaracha.