Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [93]
Balancing the Balls
Apparently human beings suffer from a hangover in our hippocampus from a long, tooth-and-claw bender with evolution. As a result, even a normal person’s mind teems with uncivilized thoughts. Freud argues that a well-adjusted person blocks or keeps out of her conscious awareness many of these socially unacceptable ideas, wishes, and fantasies. He refers to the mental activity of suppressing such thoughts, which often occurs on a hidden, subterranean level of the mind, as repression. If Freud is right, it turns out that we all need some repression in our lives (especially if we’re serial killers). Otherwise there would be many more people in jail (unless they’re as clever as Dexter), and all of us would be much more frustrated than we already are (thereby joining the club of all Cubs fans).
But too much repression also is unhealthy. If repressed infantile thoughts and wishes are deeply rooted and powerful enough, they can invisibly exert control over a person’s life, thereby robbing her of autonomy. They also can keep a person alienated from healthier versions of herself and render her a prisoner of destructive emotions, such as fear and crippling anxiety, whose origins are obscure (maybe in the basement where the gimp is kept in Pulp Fiction). Furthermore, it takes considerable psychic energy to keep an overwhelming number of thoughts and wishes repressed (unending war on mental terror).
The upshot is that human flourishing is a matter of psychic balance. Some people need therapy to achieve such balance (read: some people can afford therapy). The end game is to develop a civilized self that reasonably manages the various conflicts between superego and id and adeptly navigates the external social world—a kind of Joe Torre of the mind, which Freud refers to as a healthy ego. Freud’s way of summing up this goal of mental health is: where id was, there ego shall be.
Talk Dirty to Me: Tell Me You Want My Geneva Conventions
Freud’s perspective raises an interesting question about our culture. Are we too repressed overall or not repressed enough?
It might be more helpful to break this question down into two more specific ones: 1. Are we too prone to physical aggression and violence or not aggressive and violent enough? 2. Are we too sexually liberated and permissive or not uptight enough about sex?
If Freud were with us today and not simply haunting our psyches, he surely would find it curious but unsurprising that so many Bible-thumping members of the religious right think that our culture is far too sexually explicit. But they also support the bellicose, warmongering approach of the Bush administration. For instance, James Dobson, a big fan of W’s blustery foreign policy, heads Focus on the Family. This evangelical organization seeks to put sex back in its proper place: in the missionary position in a heterosexual, patriarchal, church-sanctioned home (prompting a crisis in foreclosures on foreplay). One of Dobson’s cohorts, the right reverend John Hagee, routinely fantasizes from his Texan pulpit about violence in the Middle East as a providential tool in God’s overarching strategy to herd Jews back to Jerusalem to hasten a final bloodbath, at which point a Ted Nugent-looking Jesus finally returns. Like many other fundamentalists, Hagee sees a divine formula at work as well in natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina: in case of too little homosexual repression, expect the Gloryhound’s wrathful aggression. (Duck, San Francisco!)
On the other hand, there are many people—usually significantly to the left of the religious right—who exhibit the opposite pattern. Arianna Huffington, author and founder of The Huffington Post, filmmaker Michael Moore, and Jon Stewart (not to mention Spongebob Squarepants) strongly oppose