On Utopian Thinking An essay by Stephen Rittenberg, M.D. and Herbert M. Wyman, M.D.
https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/on-utopian-thinking
Introduction
Pundits, professors and social psychologists have made numerous attempts at explaining the nature of contemporary woke progressivism. None seem to perceive the great awokening as a human, psychological phenomenon, perhaps precipitated by a national trauma such as the George Floyd knee-on-neck fatality, but ultimately, at its deepest level, generated by profound utopian longings, intrinsic to human nature. These may seem harmless enough as fantasies, but in fact they have been at the root of political ideologies that have made the 20th century the bloodiest in human history, and promise to do the same for the 21st Century.
As psychoanalysts with a combined experience of 100+ years, our observation of the human psyche has revealed how rarely humans, under the influence of utopian fantasies, are guided by reality and rationality. We will take as a given that consciously stated motives can coexist with behavior that has the exact opposite result from conscious desires. We will describe the largely unconscious motives that drive the great awokening in its search for the perfect world.
What follows first is an unpublished essay written 40 years ago. At the time we wrote it we were disturbed by the destructive violence of the New Left. We tried to understand, from our perspective as psychoanalysts, how people who wished to create a perfect world would want to destroy the world we live in first. Fortunately the Radical Left of those days did not succeed in destroying our world. But now, forty years later we have another group the Woke Progressives who again seem bent on destroying civilization in the service of building a perfect world. And so, we will be bringing up to date the observations in this earlier essay. While we could not have foreseen the contemporary version of utopian thinking, this early paper can serve as an introduction to our present moment. We will subsequently update the perspective while holding fast to its central account of the human mind.
Utopia
Utopian longings are virtually as old as human consciousness itself- or one second younger. For if the dawning self-awareness of primitive man, shivering in his cave could be fancifully telescoped into a single sequence of thought, it might have been: “Why look at this…there has to be something better.”-and so. utopianism was born.
Of course, the utopian dream in its fullest expression comprises much more than “something better.” Utopia is perfection itself: no pain, no worries, no conflict, no evil, perfect humans in a perfect world- one happy family needing no “government”. Marx and Engels, for example, argued that after the revolution “state interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies of itself..”
For most thinkers, Utopia is impossible as a matter of common sense intuition. There is no need to demonstrate, to the realistically inclined, the impossibility of perfection. Hence the pejorative connotation which clings to the word “utopian”. Nevertheless the dream never dies despite numerous refutations down through the ages. Perhaps the most logical was that of Robert Waelder (Progress and Revolution, I.U.P., New York 1967) Waelder pointed out that the notion of a civilization without a power structure is an illusion. Unless absolute genetic homogeneity is achieved, such that the brains of all individuals will be identical, each person will continue to think somewhat differently from the other. Hence, even in Utopia, disagreements will arise as to what constitutes “the good.” Groups will form in support of various opinions. If anything is to be done one opinion must prevail. That group whose opinion prevails, whether by vote, persuasion or force, becomes the “power structure”. There will thus arise, inevitably a “government of utopia”… and to that extent it will no longer be Utopia.
There are many arguments of this nature, all superfluous to the common sense realist—-and also to the Utopian who dreams on.
The shapes and programs of Utopia have varied from culture to culture. The chronological location of Utopia has also varied. In classical antiquity, Utopia was the Golden Age of the distant past which had been lost, but might yet be regained. In the Middle Ages, Utopia was not to be found either in the past or the present, but in the future, the afterlife, in Heaven.
The enlightenment produced a fundamental revision in the notion of Utopia, a revision which informs utopian philosophy to the present day. According to Rousseau, Condorcet and other Enlightenment philosophers, Utopia is immanent in man. We are all, it seems, innately unflawed at birth, or if not entirely perfect, we are born with the full potential of becoming so. Human nature is a tabula rasa, and if we do not achieve perfection it is because of the damage inflicted upon us by civilization itself through its deforming effects on our parents and through them on ourselves. One need only compare the smiling natives of Tahiti with the frowning Frenchmen of Paris to comprehend how civilization has deformed nature.
If the word “civilization” is replaced with “capitalism” in the above formulation, the result is the core of Marxist utopianism. Capitalism has distorted human nature in ways that are all too obvious to the Marxist utopian: the capitalist, his natural goodness distorted beyond recognition by a system which fosters greed, then inflicts the malformation upon his workers, whom he mercilessly exploits and oppresses, while destroying the environment in which both must live.
After the revolution Man will be restored to his true nature, or be even more perfect: “Man will be incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle. His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical, his style of life will acquire a dynamic beauty. The average type of man will rise to the level of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx.”-(Leon Trotsky, Literature Und Revolution.. Tr. by R. Waelder, Progress and Revolution I.U.P. 1967 P.91)
Utopianism and the Jews
The Enlightenment, through its redefinition and intensification of utopian thinking has had a serious impact upon Jews and Jewish intellectual life. In the new era the gates of the ghetto swung open and Jews poured forth to participate in the national and intellectual life of their respective countries. At the same time the Enlightenment, through its intensification of utopianism has worsened the anti-semitism it was supposed to eradicate,
In the first place, to the extent that Utopia is to make of us one big happy family, uniform in its humanity, Jewish ethnicity is an obstacle. In Utopia nationalism will cease to exist as we embrace each other in one universal human identity. Jews stubbornly refuse to lose themselves in a universal humanity. They insist on their own particular identity.
Perhaps more significantly, and more ominously, Utopianism fosters a Manichean view of history in which the forces of Absolute Good (utopia) are pitted against the forces of Absolute Evil. The utopian mind, when confronted with the inevitable frustration of its dreams must find a scapegoat since, by definition, perfection cannot fail on its own.And since no good person would oppose the realization of Utopia, the absolute good, its opponents must be absolute evil.
The designated opponents of Utopia have varied from time to time. In our current age the scapegoats are capitalism, patriarchy, Western imperialism and white privilege. In all ages including our own, Jews are scapegoats as carriers of all evil attributes. In Western civilization, until recently, Christian theology held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, thereby preventing the arrival of Utopia on earth. As God killers Jews were available as the incarnation of whatever evil was plaguing the earth. For the Soviet communists the former anti-Christs became the “rootless cosmopolitans.” For the Nazis the Jews were diseased and threatening the health of perfected aryan man.
For modern utopians, from either end of the political spectrum Jews are still the enemy. In our time and place they are inculpated for their attachment to the nation state, Israel, and labeled “white adjacent”, thus infectious carriers of the disease called “whiteness”, killing people of color.
Ironically in the minds of many, including some Jews, Utopianism is itself a Jewish product, the heritage of Jewish messianism and Jewish prophetic teachings? However this is an error. The Jewish prophets aimed at improvement in their own people as a primary goal. The Jews were to become “a light unto the Gentiles.” The Messiah was not to usher in an age of perfection on earth. He was to redeem the Jewish people and lead them back to Zion. If Utopianism is to be found anywhere in Judaism it is in the story of the Garden of Eden, from which Man was banished, never to return, because of unchangeable problems in his very nature. This story is, if anything, anti-utopian, because it indicates that human nature itself will forever prevent return to the Garden of Eden. In any case when the Messiah comes, He will not be a utopian: he will be a Zionist.
It should come as no surprise that Jews can be found on either side of the discussion of Utopianism, either as advocates of misguided Jewish “messianic” Utopianism, or as scapegoats for failed Utopianism.
Psychoanalysis and Utopia
Psychoanalysis has, from its earliest days exerted a compelling fascination for utopians of the left, be they socialists, Communists, anarchists or just plain dreamers. On first glance it isn’t hard to understand why this should be so. After all, doesn’t psychoanalysis assert that human nature, especially in its sexual drives, so large a part of human nature, has been “repressed?” And didn’t Freud himself write that “civilization” itself because of its “repression” of those drives inevitably produces “discontent?” Therefore doesn’t that imply that utopia might be achieved through the liberation of human nature from the repressive force of civilization, i.e. Capitalism?
And so, over the past 110 years, psychoanalysts have had to watch bemusedly as a never ending procession of utopians marched through, and then out of their ranks.
The procession began almost immediately with Alfred Adler, an Austrian Social Democrat, and friend of Trotsky. He saw in Psychoanalysis the vehicle for his political ideas and sought to reconcile Freud and Marx. In 1909 at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society Adler presented a paper titled The Psychology of Marxism. In it he struggled to prove that Marx, by raising the “class consciousness “ of the proletariat, had performed a function upon the masses analogous to a psychoanalyst who makes the unconscious conscious. Marx had enabled the proletariat to realize they were being repressed. Once this realization had been achieved, the proletariat could direct its aggression, previously turned against itself against its oppressors in the “class struggle.”. Adler’s attempts to show that Marx and Freud were compatible were limited by his rather weak commitment to both of them. He drifted away from both socialism and psychoanalysis.
Wilhelm Reich, however, was in earnest about both and can properly be called the first “Freudo-Marxist.” He was also an authentic Enlightenment utopian. “Beneath the neurotic mechanisms”, he wrote, “behind all the dangerous, grotesque, irrational phantasies and impulses I found a bit of simple, matter of fact, decent nature.” (Function of the Orgasm, 1927, pg. 148 tr.) These decent impulses, which Reich called man’s “…spontaneous sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work and capacity for love…” were unfortunately squelched by sex negating, orgasm destroying capitalist culture. Particularly destructive was the weakening of orgasm, which Reich thought crucial to human well being. Reich concluded that the “Freudian Unconscious” was not a primary fact of human nature, but rather would fade away when revolution overturned the system. In the meantime all psychotherapy was a palliative and Reich even apologized for practicing psychoanalysis when he knew the roots of neurosis lay in the social system of capitalism itself. It is not surprising that Reich left psychoanalysis to concentrate on Marxism. He strove mightily to persuade fellow Communists that a fusion of Marxism and psychoanalysis could be effected. He argued that the family structure under capitalism was responsible for neurosis. In particular the patriarchal family and monogamy were brutal, archaic institutions. The suppression of genital sexuality by these repressive institutions channeled energy from pleasurable orgasms into exploitative work. Reich’s vision of the benefits to be obtained from Communism included the liberation of innocent children from the sexual tyranny of parents by “guaranteeing” them the right to free masturbation and sex play.
Evidently this was not what the Politburo had in mind and Reich was quickly expelled from the Party as an embarrassment. Reich, like Adler, drifted away from both Marxism and Psychoanalysis. He spent his last years searching for the causes of neurosis not in repressive capitalist institutions but in quasi-biological forces. Reich’s late paranoid decompensation cannot detract from the intellectual earnestness and ingenuity of his effort to reconcile Marx and Freud.
Far and away the most serious effort at synthesis of Freudian and Marxist theory was penned by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955, Beacon Press). It can fairly be considered an intellectual landmark, unequalled since. Marcuse accepted Freud’s theories in their entirety: the unconscious, infantile sexuality, the psychosexual stages leading to genitalia, the reality principle, and even Freud’s later philosophical notion that civilization was based on the repression of instincts, especially sexual impulses. However, Marcuse proceeded to argue that under Capitalism man is victimized by surplus repression. This surplus amount of repression, more than is necessary for civilization, is utilized for exploitative labor. Furthermore, argued Marcuse, in place of the ‘reality principle’, under capitalism, the ‘performance principle’ took its place and human beings are driven to produce exploitative work. Like Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse argued that Capitalism exacted undue sexual repression. However Marcuse criticized Reich for limiting his critique to the repression of genital sexuality. According to Marcuse the entire sequence of psychosexual stages- oral, anal, phallic, genital) is in itself unnatural, and a product of capitalism. In man’s original, blissful, polymorphous perverse state, he was free to enjoy libidinal sensations arising from all parts of the body. Is it any wonder that Marcuse became a popular hero of the ‘60s youth generation? The enemy of pleasure was the capitalist system that instituted “genital tyranny”. Under it’s reign, natural libidinal pleasure has been drained from all parts of the body and focused on the genitals, the better there to be successfully repressed. Moreover the rest of the body, now non-libidinized, could be coopted for exploitative labor. All this, predicted Marcuse, would be reversed when the system is overthrown and mankind restored to its natural state.
Utopia Where Is It?
The list of Freudo-Marxists is by no means exhausted with Adler, Reich and Marcuse. There have been others including Norman O. Brown, Frantz Fanon, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, authors of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
While we can only guess at what Marx’s reaction to the Freudo-Marxists might have been, we do know that in the early years of psychoanalysis Freud rejected their efforts. He even insisted that a psychoanalytic article by Reich be preceded by a warning that Reich belonged to the Communist party so the reader should treat the findings with skepticism.
Like Freud, most psychoanalysts continue to reject these efforts and in turn have been criticized as tools of the capitalist system. Nevertheless it is important to point out that the arguments of the utopians are replete with misunderstandings and methodological errors. Among them is utter confusion between the mechanisms of the individual human mind and the mass movements of societies and nations. For example, the psychoanalytic concept of “repression” refers to an intra-psychic mechanism generated by internal conflicting mental forces and is related to the “repression” of the proletariat by metaphor only. Similarly, as was pointed out to Adler in 1910, the internal conflicts of which psychoanalysis speaks bear only a metaphorical relation to the class conflicts in a mass society. The very concept “class consciousness” is not a finding of psychology, but a political doctrine.
The same confusion applies to the utopians references to “sexual repression” leading to neurosis which they see as a pathological consequence of Capitalism. They fail to see it as an unavoidable intro-psychic phenomenon originating early, out of the developmental necessities of human childhood. It is a universal phenomenon occurring equally in socialist and capitalist countries. It bears little, if any, relation to the degree of sexual freedom granted to adults. This point has been proven yet again by our recent “sexual revolution”, during which neurotic sexual problems, e.g. impotence have kept pace with or even outstripped the revolution.
It is also quite typical of the utopians to offer no real evidence to support their theories. Unimpeded by the constraints of conceptual and methodological accuracy, the utopians regularly proclaim their breakthrough discoveries.Marcuse left the pristine confines of academia to offer, for clinicians, a radical revision of Freud’s psychosexual developmental scheme. There is something intellectually dazzling about such tours de force. It is as if an accomplished mime were convincing us that those are real balls he is juggling. It is startling to remind oneself it’s illusion. Marcuse has precisely nothing to offer as evidence for his ideas. Marcuse’s notions of “genital tyranny” and the bliss of polymorphous perversity spring from his own politically fertile imagination and are not to be discerned by any observer of the actual human psyche. To which Marcuse would undoubtedly reply that only after the revolution will the rest of us notice what has become visible to him. And here we depart the terra firms of reasoned discourse for the blue sky of utopian speculation.
It cannot be said, however that arguments such as the above have had much effect upon the Marxist/utopian inclination to use psychoanalysis for ideological purposes. One might hope that some impact might have been produced by actual political events, such as the Russian revolution. It is thus of considerable interest to trace the fate of psychoanalytic ideas in the Soviet Union.
Psychoanalysis and the Revolution
In the early days of the Russian Revolution, the fondest hopes of the Freudo-Marxists seemed to be realized. The situation of psychoanalysis in Russia seemed at first, in fact, “utopian”. The “liberated” Russian society seemed insatiable in its appetite for Freudian theory, and in its appreciation for psychoanalytic practice. Within one month of its publication in 1922 Freud’s Introductory Lectures sold 2000 copies, an incredible figure considering the state of Russian education and publishing. Psychoanalytic training Institutes sprang up and flourished. A Russian State Psychoanalytic Institute was founded in 1921. Activities of this Institute included a full program of public lectures, a Children’s Home run on psychoanalytic lines, an outpatient clinic and a publishing house whose presses never stopped humming. For several years reports from Russia were glowing. However by the 1930s disquieting reports began to appear in reports of the Russian Society. The President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, M. Wulff, M.D. abruptly resigned and left for Palestine. Then—-silence from Russia. What happened?
In the 1930’s Joseph Stalin consolidated power and eliminated his opposition. He extended the hegemony of the party apparatus to scientific as well as political. It is widely recognized that in genetics Stalin imposted the environmentalist views of a scientific charlatan, Lysenko, and ruthlessly eliminated those scientists who opposed him. It is less well known that a similar phenomenon occurred in the field of psychiatry, with the destruction of Russian psychoanalysis. Although it is true that most of the Russian psychoanalysts were Jewish and few were Communists, it cannot be said that Stalin’s motivation was purely anti-semitic or crassly political. In a chilling but logical way, Stalin correctly perceived that the psychoanalytic view of the mind constituted a frontal challenge to the Communist view of the human animal. This is because psychoanalysis does not view the mind as entirely malleable, a robotic product of external social forces, and easily manipulable. Instead, according to psychoanalysis there are forces operating in the human psyche independently of socio-cultural forces. There are powerful unconscious drives which make their own claims and settle their bargains, regardless of external economic or social institutions. Certainly Pavlovian psychiatry, with its emphasis on susceptibility to conditioning, with its view of the human animal as akin to a rat on a treadmill, responding passively to external stimulation was far more congenial with Communist dogma. Pavlov himself was not a Communist and in fact opposed the regime but was tolerated as his theories became official by decree.
Although psychoanalysis disappeared, there remained within Russian psychiatry some lingering opposition to the Pavlovian view. In the early 1950’s Russian psychiatry was further “remolded” to conform with Communist ideology. The “anti-Pavlovian” psychiatrists, many of whom were Jews, were purged. This occurred at the time of the so-called “Doctor’s Plot” when Stalin decided to root out Jewish influences in Russian life. Jews were spared a pogrom only by Stalin’s fortuitous demise. However Stalin’s influence lived on, especially in the fields of medicine and psychiatry. Unlike the Hippocratic oath which swears allegiance to the patient, the Soviet physician’s oath swears allegiance to the state. The Soviet physician’s oath swears allegiance to the State. The Soviet physician swears to be “guided by the principles of Communist morality, ever to bear in mind the high calling of the Soviet Physician and my responsibility to the people and the Soviet state.”
Functioning on such an oath Russian psychiatry in the post Stalin era became itself an instrument of political terror. The Soviet government and the psychiatric establishment, in one of history’s grossest perversions of medical science, incarcerated dissidents in psychiatric hospitals. Political dissidents are, by definition, mentally ill and old fashioned sadism allows torture to be presented as “treatment.”
These abuses, the worst since the Nazi medical “experiments” became known to the outside world through the writings of survivors and through an important study by Bloch and Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror (Basic Books, 1977) The authors document in convincing fashion the history and extent of these abuses in the Soviet Union, a tragic sequel to the utopian hopes of the 1920’s.
We have gone into considerable detail about the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the Soviet Union inorder to fully depict the paradoxical position in which the Western Freudo Marxists find themselves. As we have shown, the argument of these utopians has run as follows: Psychoanalysis reveals that capitalism is the essential cause of mental illness and human suffering. Hence mental health requires that capitalism be destroyed and replaced by communism. Psychological utopia will then supervene. What was believed to be fixed and immutable in human nature will disappear. In Marx’s words “All that is solid melts into air” to be replaced by the new healthy, Communist man. Instead, what actually happened after the revolution? The very same psychoanalytic theories with which the utopians sought to discredit capitalism were banned by the Communists. Instead of Utopia, a totalitarian dictatorship gained power, with psychiatrists among others, in charge of the instruments of terror.
One might think this history might be a little bit discouraging to the utopian theorist. One might—but no, it’s simply business as usual for the utopian. The Russian revolution is discounted as a failure, not “true Communism”, not the real thing. The reason for this, according to Marcuse, was quite simple. It seems there can be no true revolution until human nature is changed (Essay on Liberation, Beacon Press, 1969). Whereas before it was asserted that the Revolution would change human nature, now apparently, human nature must change first. Otherwise as has unfortunately occurred in Russia, the same old human nature will reproduce the same old tyrannies. And how was human nature to be changed? Abandoning psychoanalysis as an historical archaism Marcuse argued that the innate internal contradictions in capitalism will result in change. In the sixties Marcuse saw evidence of this change in the “joy” and “freedom” of the new left student radicals.
Characteristically , the severest criticisms emanating from the utopians have been reserved not for the Russians, the Chinese, Cambodian or the Iranian genocidal regimes. Instead they have been and continue to be aimed at the non-Utopian western states, especially the U.S. The shortcomings of American Psychiatry are denounced as if they were the equivalent of the Russian, (see the writings of Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing) much to the amazement of survivors of the Russian terror. Admiring liberals, in the 1970s brought back glowing reports of the elimination of neurosis in China (Lowinger, Psychiatric News, 10/21/77, p.22.) More ominously, utopians can be found amongst the psychiatric profession, calling for social action, and sounding very much like their totalitarian counterparts, as witness the following two speeches, one by Joseph Stalin, the other by the President of the American Psychiatric Association:
“There is one branch of science which Bolsheviks in all branches of science are duty bound to know, and that is the Marxist-Leninist science of Society…a Leninist cannot just be a specialist in his favorite science, he must also be a political and social worker, keenly interested in the destinies of his country, acquainted with the laws of social development, capable of applying these laws, and striving to be an active participant in the political guidance of the country.”
—Joseph Stalin, quoted in M.G. Field, Doctor and Patient in Russia, Harvard University Press, PO.74
“In sum, I plead for a psychiatry that is involved with fundamental social goals. I plead for a psychiatry that would eschew isolation altogether and assume its proper leadership goal in advancing the total health of the nation. I plead for a psychiatry that is at once concerned with individual liberty and communal responsibility. And I ask of psychiatrists that they be no only pragmatists but also dreamers with a vision of the future.”
—Raymond Waggoner, President, American Psychiatric Association, May 1970
It would appear that the moment psychiatrists, whose profession involves concepts of mental health and normality, are asked or choose, to become “visionaries” advocating “fundamental social goals” then the path is open to the designation of those whose “dreams” do not include the same “fundamental social goals” as abnormal. Such social visionaries, particularly of the utopian kind, tend to develop highly dogmatic views of “total health.” For example, according to Erik Erkikson, in the brave new world there will be no longer the affliction he terms “pseudo speciation”, which causes people to insist on ethnic identity, rather than universal human identity. Jews can expect they will have the honor of being the first expected to relinquish their “pseudo speciation.”
In the Soviet Union these developments proceeded to the outright persecution of those whose “consciousness” was insufficiently raised.
However despite all these realities, the utopians can be expected to proceed apace. In the 1960s ‘70s and ‘80s a new generation of Freudo Marxists grappled with the historical task of Revolution. The most psychoanalytically sophisticated of this group was Joel Kovel, in whose writing the Reichian tradition found an able spokesman. Dr. Kovel possessed a keen descriptive eye for the modern sense of alienation and malaise. Like certain imaginative writers such as Norman Mailer (also heavily influenced by Reich) he was at home with Reichian phrases like “the plague,” when speaking of Capitalism and its cultural manifestations. Like Reich, Kovelbelieved that Psychoanalysis and indeed all forms of psychotherapy, are but palliatives, interim measures to be practiced with apology, until the capitalist system, the root cause of mental apology, until the capitalist system, the root cause of mental illness, is destroyed. In his book White Racism Kovelinstructed us on the shortcomings of our economic system from a clinical perspective. Capitalism, it seems, requires the discharge of inordinate amounts of anal-sadism, thereby fostering dehumanization of workers by owners. Mankind’s worst evil, the persecution of blacks is dictated by the necessities of such an economic system. A certain curious imbalance is discernible in this work which causes us to wonder whether the author is investigating the psychology of prejudice or is he using the existence of anti- black prejudice as a polemical device to indict Capitalism. It would appear that that the existence of anti- black prejudice is not to be understood as an outcropping of human irrationality which also occurs in other forms, (e.g. antisemitism). Rather as per Kovel it exists as a special case, one which can serve to prove the existence of the unconscious equations: black=feces & Capitalism=anal sadism.
In another book, A Complete Guide,to Therapy, Kovel was quite explicit in stating the following:
“It seems to me that the realities of neurosis in advanced industrial society have to be faces squarely both as to their magnitude and causes…the truth is tat neurosis springs…from advanced Capitalism, as it imposes contradictions upon all forms of personal life. So long as we have a dominating society with division of labor, alienation, and class distinction, it’s splits…will produce neurotic characters of one kind or another. In the meantime (that is until the revolution) we are stuck with a social system that generates colossal amounts of neurosis from every corner.”
Kovel goes on to write that neurotic suffering is so great that the “therapies cannot be turned aside,” though the ultimate goal, the abolishing of neurosis, cannot be realized “within the confines of a capitalist society.”
Although Kovel avoids the more egregious methodological errors of earlier Freud’s-Marxists he does so by replacing reasoned argument with ex-cathedral politico-psychological pronouncements. We are told, for example, that Capitalism “generates colossal amounts of neurosis from every corner” but we are not told exactly how it does this. Apparently we are not to ask questions but simply exclaim “Right on” and enlist in the revolutionary struggle.
Perhaps, it might be objected, we are taking these authors entirely too seriously. 100 years of largely unsuccessful intellectual exertionprove their Freud’s-Marxist polemics are harmless. After all, scholars on more than one occasion have tried to spin gold from thread, so let the, write their books arcusemis harmless, Kovel is harmless. They are all harmless.
The Consequences
Or are they? We begin to have some doubts when we learn of the behavior of some young ‘idealists’. For example, a group of young people hijack an airliner, kill the pilot and threaten to blow up the plane and passengers. When captured the surviving terrorists explain that they are idealists, motivated by belief that “the system” is evil and must be destroyed to make way for a better world. Terrorists are prepared to kill and die for a better world.
In other words they are utopians and part of a world wide revolutionary movement. Furthermore, Utopianism appeals psychologically to young people eager to find meaning and significance as they are entering adulthood, with all its uncertainties and challenges. It reassures them that it is the system, not themselves, that is responsible for their unhappiness. And it offers the shared pleasures of belonging to a vanguard of history. Marcuse outlined their beleaguered nobility as follows:
“The opposition which escapes suppression by the police, the courts, the representatives of the people and the people themselves, finds expression in the diffused rebellion among the youth and the intelligentsia, and in the daily struggle of persecuted minorities. The armed class struggle is waged outside: by the wretched of the earth who fight the affluent monster. In his Essay On Liberation, Marcuse condemns Capitalist America as “obscene in stuffing itself and its garbage cans while poisoning and burning the scarce foodstuffs in the fields of its aggression….Obscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her public hair but..a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression.” (P.7-8) Marcuse goes on to assert in utopian fashion that human nature itself will be transformed following the revolution. To the list of Nazism’s New Aryan Man and Communism’s New Soviet Man Marcuse would add a transformed New Man and Woman: “This ( the new sensibility) would be the sensibility of man and woman who do not have to be ashamed of themselves anymore because they have overcome their sense of guilt: they have learned not to identify themselves with the false fathers who have built and tolerated and forgotten…the torture chambers of all the secular and ecclesiastical inquisitions and interrogations, the ghettos and the monumental temples of the corporations…If and when men and women think free from this identification, they will have broken the chain which linked the fathers and sons from generation to generation..” p. 24-5 Thus will human nature be transformed as the parental past is destroyed.
One need not be a psychologist to imagine the effect on even the normally rebellious adolescent of such writing.
At this point the question may fairly and finally be raised: why do radical utopian intellectuals write this way, encouraging the more disturbed to act violently. Why, when in the history of the world no utopia, Marxist or otherwise has ever come into being? And why do the radical utopians cling to the belief that total destruction of of existing, necessarily imperfect social systems will usher in Utopia when never in history have efforts in that direction produced anything but bloodshed and suffering. Aren’t these people, when all is said and done, crazy?
The Question of Madness
Here one has to be very cautious. Utopian thinking is not prima facie evidence of insanity ( as the Russian KGB psychiatrists assured us while they locked up their dissidents in mental hospitals). Indeed we live in an age of such rapid technological progress that todays utopian dream becomes tomorrow’s scientific reality. But, if we exclude these milder forms of Utopianism rooted in real science, and narrow our focus to radical extreme Utopianism we do begin to see some evidence of disturbances in thinking.
First, there is the simple disregard of reality, in both its historical and contemporary aspect. The reality principle sees rendered inoperative in the utopian prospectus. Of greater weight to the utopian than reality, is his own abstract construction of Utopia. Indeed the “addiction to abstract systems” has long been noted as a feature of utopian thinking. It was held by Matthew Arnold to be a defining feature of Jacobinism. And Edmund Burke distinguished the English Whigs from the French Jacobins by pointing out that “we trust our hearts above our inventions.” For the utopian it is his own thoughts, rather than the facts of reality which are felt to be more powerful. We are in a realm of mental activity characterized by the omnipotence of thought.
Another feature of utopian thinking which is striking and immediately apparent, is its tolerance for mutually contradictory ideas and wishes. For example, the celebrated utopian goals of Liberty and Equality, on close inspection are found to be inherently contradictory in the real world. In the real world there is a tremendous variety of human genetic endowment. Some people are skmaarter, stronger, taller, faster, etc., than others. When left entirely to their own devices (that is, at total liberty) human beings seem naturally to differentiate. The more intelligent do more intelligent things and wind up in a better position. Some become richer than others. Some become better athletes. Soon enough, substantial inequalities appear amongst the group, both as to nature and status. If then, the principle of Equality (or in its current manifestation “egalitarianism”) is to be realized, some external forced must intervene to prevent the group from developing its natural distinctions. Someone will have to impose a program of “affirmative action” or “reverse discrimination”, in order to achieve a completely egalitarian society. But this then interferes with the Liberty of those who, in a free society would inevitably have achieved more than other, by their very nature. Hence the twin ideals of Liberty and Equality are mutually incompatible in any world other thant the world of dreams.
Another example, minor but telling, of the utopian tolerance for contradiction is the very book by Joel Kovel entitled A Complete Guide to Therapy. In this book Kovel advocates for the overthrow of the Capitalist system. However the book itself is a typical example of the entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of such a system: it is designed to appeal to the market for self-help books. Its proceeds are to go to a trust fund set up by the author and his lawyers, etc. This contradiction in terms is blissfully ignored by both author and admiring reviewers.
Thus far, then, we have seen that utopian thinking is characterized by the following features: failure of reality testing; implicit belief in the omnipotence of thoughts; tolerance of mutually contradictory thoughts. This collection of features will inevitably begin to seem familiar to teachers, psychologists, parents, anyone having to do with small children. For these are precisely the characteristics of infantile thought processes at a particular stage of development: the stage in which the infant mind conceives of itself as comprising the entire universe, and as absolutely perfect: the stage of infantile, omnipotent narcissism. Here, at last we have come upon Utopia! For it is to this lost, dimly remembered but never to be recaptured infantile bliss that the utopians long to return. In fact. such an infantile state is the only Utopia we humans ever have known or ever shall know.
At first glance it might seem that such traces of unrealizable yearnings are harmless despite their imperviousness to historical evidence. Perhaps so, but another characteristic may give us pause, and that is the intensity of the aggressive drive at this phase of life. The infant can become terribly angry if his utopia is disturbed.
Still for most of us human beings Utopianism recess and our ange is assuaged by new sources of satisfaction. these latter, say rooting for defeat of a rival team, while providing less than perfect bliss, can be enough to get us through life’s inevitable disappointments.
However for some, infantile narcissism will never recede. At adolescence it may find renewed force and intensity. Utopian longings now will occur, not in a helpless baby, but in an adolescent possessing the strength and intelligence to carry out deadly plans. In fact, who else makes revolutions? The Wall Street Journal was psychologically correct when it entitled its editorial on the Cambodian Revolution “Lord of the Flies”. And like the infant who experiences intense pleasure from discharging its aggression, the adolescent radical’s real satisfaction comes from destroying the system. The narcissistic pleasure in destruction helps explain why the radical utopians are never quite able to define what the world will be like after the revolution, how things will work. They’re not really interest in making the omelet when it’s so much fun smashing the eggs.
Surely, it might be objected, we are describing only a small minority of possibly disturbed adolescents. This may be true, but what we wish to emphasized is the explosiveness of a certain mixture: 10 A disturbed adolescent, possessed of a regressive yearning for utopia and a willingness to do anything to achieve it. 2) An adult or aging radical, teaching in a university, who provides in his writings and speeches and on social media, rationale for revolutionary action. 3) A democratic and open society which rears such children, provides universities for them to attend, and provides salaries for their radical teachers/
Add these up and we have the situation in Western Capitalist societies. It should come as no surprise that the utopians join hands with antisemites, for the Jews are the original anti-utopians. The appeal to disturbed adolescents is likely to produce acts of terror but the appeal to less disturbed young people is also dangerous, for the failure of utopia to arrive will inevitably create the resentments that fuel destruction. While the direct threat to the democratic West may come from the young whose brains have been addled by the writings of Utopian thinkers, these intellectuals bear a heavy responsibility as educators of the young.
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