The Unluckiest People in the World
People who live under the control of Superpowers (Russia, China, North Korea) are addicted to owning mechanical slaves (AI), who process all of their consumerist needs without having to move (courtesy of Uber).
Erik Erikson’s final stage of life: acceptance of termination of life (a good death), crucially depends on an inner belief they have lived the life- they were meant to or feel they were meant to have lived.
Who speaks for people — who for much of their lives, sometimes from early childhood to the end of their lives, lead lives of quiet desperation (who despair of ever being connected to another human being)? How are they to believe- as their pastor might tell them — “God loves you.” And if they do believe — what kind of love is it that allows them to suffer endlessly without intervening? We see why Theodicy — the problem of why there is evil in the world, over the past two thousand years is so unanswerable. How can a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving justify the almost infinite heartbreak that daily torments millions of people around the world? What is the divine calculus of mercy — who gets saved, who doesn’t? What are the criteria , how is it decided who gets pardoned and who doesn’t?
As a psychotherapist, I am familiar with a kind of person who experiences the onset of Christmas as a burden from which they yearn to be liberated — when they must face the music.
What music?
Not Shakespear’s, “… if music be the food of love, play on.”
Not Barbara Streisand’s…”people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
But a kind of desolate tunnel at the end of which there is no light. Invariably they are relieved when their Christmas depression seems to pass with the season: (thank God it’s over). As someone who has long been fascinated by the manifold roots of primal belief — (Alper, God in Therapy- What People Believe When No One is Watching) I cannot help but note that this is the time when the most heartfelt appeals to the chronically downtrodden, the helpless (“oh, ye of little faith”) are voiced.
Such as: the priest in the Bowery who tells his parishioners: “I know it seems hard to believe that God loves you” (as it most surely does). Or the priest, heartsick at the recent, agonizing death of his beloved eight-year-old niece, finds his faith renewed by a startling epiphany: as one mourner after another comes to console him and his family — he realizes that while God does not come down directly to comfort us — he does send his compassionate love in the form of mourners.
Or, just last week, a wonderful article in the NY times from a psychotherapist on The Finding of the Light (available presumably to all of us who seek it): of a sunrise, a sunset of the beauties of primal nature, of the memories of kindnesses, of countless people who have crossed or blessed our paths.
Each of these apostles of hope whether secular, religious, or humanistic, or existential, in their own way have counseled us to avert our eyes from the black hole of despair and look upwards and seek of the light.
But what if they lack the fortitude or the will to pull themselves up by their bootstraps by themselves? What if they need not to be judged but to be helped? If a higher being, a God, loses faith in a particular person and sentences them to eternal damnation (as we are warned he often does) — how are they to believe in themselves? Mercy is not mathematical: it is not a quantity to be calibrated — it is a reaction; it is an unthinking, instinctive, humanistic, reaching-out. It comes down to this: imagine a superhuman being with superhuman powers but with a capacity to understand human beings. Imagine this being, having witnessed first-hand, throughout the ages, one by one, as the parade of unthinkable horrors that have transpired. Imagine (as undoubtedly is true) that at a certain point, each afflicted person, in one way or the other, has cried out or silently screamed — to MAKE THE PAIN GO AWAY, to tell them what they have to do to MAKE IT STOP; and every time, in one way or another, the answer has been NOT YET. Does it matter, then, (as apologists imply) in some incomprehensible algorithmic way, at some distant point, the mercy that is eventually manifested will thereby be maximized? Can anyone (certainly not the afflicted) can anyone be able — in a human way, love such a being?
The answer is no.
Such a being, a kind of mercy-computing being can exist; but it can never be the beneficiary of a spontaneously offered human love. We want a cosmic parent but in a recognizable human form. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t believe in Santa Claus and I don’t believe in evil. In my lifetime, the two people who came closest to being evil were Hitler and Stalin. Since then, there have been a number of candidates for third and fourth place (we know who they are).
I don’t believe any one man (e.g. Trump) has the power to overturn our two hundred and fifty year democracy. Although I would never voluntarily bet on that, if I were forced to I would bet everything I had (i.e.the few people I’ve loved the handful of human principles I continue to believe in) that Donald Trump has no chance of being elected President of the United States if there is a rematch between Biden and Trump.
Why? Because there is no resemblance between the celebrity real-estate, apprentice star, and the Ugly American (see Alper) into whom Trump morphed the moment he drank the post 2016 election Kool-Aid. Bill Mahar may be one of our most brilliant iconoclastic humorists — but when he ratchets up his claim for the almost limitless stupidity of the American People — we part company. Freedom is in our blood. I like to think of the seven-year-old boy or girl who I sometimes hear and see — protesting the frequent attempts of bigger bullies to tell them what to do — “you’re not the boss of me!” Mahar is right; Americans are fond of wallowing in spasms of idiotic consumerist greed — fantasies of being serviced by superhumanly-empowered Chat GPT mechanical slaves, chauffeured by Uber, who stand ready to service our every self-pampering need, without having to stir from the sofa. But, be warned. If you dare to disturb so much as a single hair of their woke comfiness, their warriors are ready, to quote the Bard, “ let loose the dogs of war and cry havoc!”
If not Trump and the far-right, white supremacists, then who? There’s never one villain, one tributary to a mighty oceanic zeitgeist. But if I had to pick one, I would go back to what Bertrand Russell over a century ago said: “The problem with a group is that it is intrinsically insensitive to the needs of the individual.”
So, think about that: in other words — there is no evil, no devil, no Manichean principle in the world, but there is the impersonal monster of GROUP THINK.
Take Away
These are the people who throw in their cards or surrender to GROUP THINK. In the platitudinous shibboleths of materialism, consumerism, religion, power games, addictive stimuli - who speaks for them? Depth Psychology tells us that a mother’s face is the mirror in which we first see ourselves; in which we first learn what affirmative nurturing (love) looks like.
Before there is faith in the other; there is faith in ourselves. Before there is faith in oneself, there is the mother’s (and father’s) faith in us. We are loved before we are born. We are loved before we become whatever we become. We are loved into being: into having the courage to be.
- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
