POSSESSED:

It is to our tremendous disadvantage that we have ceased to describe people as having been possessed. We are much too severe in treating people for having been, even temporarily, out of their right minds. Everything is reduced to a strictly chemical, impersonal, and logistical problem for which the individual is held responsible, only as a practical formality for purely utilitarian purposes. Invariably, an adult, and even in some cases child, “should have known better”: he should have KNOWN better than to take those drugs, or to work so many hours, or so few; his health was his own responsibility. Outside forces can be considered catalysts, but only to the extent that they are written off as injustices which are part of a LARGER PLAN in an impersonal political agenda; as for INTERNAL forces, if the cause is not chemical, we MAKE it chemical, so that being “possessed” by a sudden fit of madness, lust, or apathy is considered that sort of illness for which one is not only hospitalized but imprisoned, within an institution that does not even grant one criminal rights because the crime is presumed to be inevitable and therefore the punishment absolute and no less depraving.

The origin of this problem, as far as I’m aware, both internally and externally, lies in the radical responsibility of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s philosophy sought to eliminate all arbitrary appeals to an absolute moral authority. Instead, the individual was to be freed of the confines and strictures of group thought and dogma by being held responsible for everything he did and even said, not so much before a jury of one’s peers (though they would end up invariably acting as judge, jury, and executioner), but rather before the blatant facts of a godless universe where he is responsible for himself.

What IS this self, exactly? It is not simply the sum of one’s actions. Unfortunately, though we might like to romanticize Sartre as a deontologist, the logical consequence of Kant, whose philosophy was a philosophy of duty and conscience before an impersonal and hypocritical system, Sartre really all ways was a pragmatist. In the Sartrean worldview, you are not only responsible for everything you DO, but also everything which HAPPENS to you. This means that you are never a victim of anyone else’s karma, so it really does not matter how your actions affect OTHERS except insofar as that effect upon them MIGHT inspire them to act in a manner which disadvantages (or, in some devious cases, ADVANTAGES) YOU, so the manner of your dealing with others “ought” to be such that it will advantage YOU, IRRESPECTIVE of such “abstractions” such as social duty, so long as you would PREFER for it to be so, and the nature of this moral epistemology is really only as valid as the physical ability for men such as Sartre to remind you of these facts.

If that sounds fishy to you, it is because it is. Yet that does not prevent modern schoolboys who in the same breath criticize Freud for “being wrong” from behaving in a blatantly Sartrean manner, especially in judging others. I still remember my early Jungian days wherein I first suggested to a Berkeley student and former schoolmate that most of our actions could be seen as the expressions of internal archetypes, and that perhaps we should revert to the Greek model wherein we describe our actions as expressions of the wills of the Gods. To my mind, this was a path of liberation from that ego which takes far too much credit for the workings of these internal forces. While Buddhists strive, of course, to be independent of these forces, even the Buddhist mythology can be understood in terms of them, and those subtler Western minds (and even Eastern minds!!) who have rejected Buddhism argue that “disowning” these archetypes is folly, probably because they are too powerful to be denied and must be accepted in order to reach Enlightenment.

My associate from Cal did not think it through to that extent. His kneejerk reaction was to say, “that seems like a way of avoiding responsibility. Like: you could just say whenever you mess up that, ‘oh, that was Dionysus.’”

Needless to say, though I shall underscore it, he went on to judge me with such severity and pretense over the years that I severed ties with him before long.

Sartre had the same effect upon many people. Yet the reason that I ascribe so much to him is not purely personal. It may be true that his peculiar brand of sociopathy was the cause for a great deal of personal recrimination in my early adulthood, and it was out of a fervent drive to escape this specter of constant guilt that I ended up getting myself into these situations wherein the demons of my unconscious might more easily possess me. Yet part of what makes the Sartrean worldview seductive presently is that it is so pervasive; even had I not been an existentialist, I would have learned Sartrean existentialism, under the guise of maturity and common sense. Most young people who are “educated” will parrot Sartrean thought when they blame you for your own misfortune. It’s not that abstaining from self-interested pursuits, for instance, entitles you to immunity from ill fortune before a jury of your peers. Even judges tell you that you should have been more self-interested.

In other words, your happiness is your own responsibility, and altruism is never an excuse. Human beings are creators of themselves, so they are not borne out of necessity or as expressions of a higher cause. Nor can they be.

What if we COULD be? What if Sartre was wrong? To begin to answer this, we should examine his assumptions. Sartre disbelieved in the existence of a transcendent subconscious mind. To his mind, all must be made conscious. What we do when we are half-asleep belongs to us. What we say and think when we are high is our own.

Jung disagreed. According to Swiss psychologist and genius Carl Jung, the unconscious more often than not has the first and last say in our lives. Jung does not reduce us entirely to puppets of unconscious forces, however; the gods themselves grant us free will. Jung’s concept of the freely willing ego is incredibly generous to free will by contrast with the views of modern atheism; we are not puppets, but heroes on a spiritual quest of self-discovery. We do make our own decisions, most of the time, but often we are choosing from several preordained responses, and at any moment we might have our power usurped by whatever deity we ally ourselves with, a choice that, like in Sartre’s worldview, is often without guidance, so, UNLIKE in Sartre’s view, it is one for which we cannot be blamed, BY THE SAME TOKEN. The fact that I do not know what the nature of the unconscious is, by its very nature as being unconscious (and knowing that much about its nature does not really help, except for the sake of arguments such as this one) means that when I choose a life path I am innocent. The fact that it’s the path ITSELF that determines my course means that after a certain point I am no longer in control, which means that, even as the consequence of my own actions, the things that I do, AFTER A CERTAIN POINT, are no longer my own, because anything that I CAN do, in terms that can be understood within the scope of society, a society that inherits this understanding just as helplessly, has been inherited and effectively programmed thousands of years before me.

That might seem like just a long escape from responsibility, except that refusing to think things through is surpassingly irresponsible.

In the real world, Sartre’s philosophy cost a lot of people their freedom. Even Bojack Horseman alludes to the capacity for Sartrean thought to be misappropriated for hegemonic purposes. One must wonder: how did Sartre manage to be remembered as a “Marxist” when he blamed people for their own victimhood? Would he have held the child labourers of the nineteenth century responsible for “choosing” to abide by their parents’ will and submitting themselves to slavery? Arguably so, since Sartre claims that man is responsible from the moment that he is borne. Perhaps it is the first kick of the fetus?

Corporations and ostensibly Marxist dictatorships perpetually hold the individual responsible for what happens to him, and the presumption that he cannot of his own will will anything of universal value creates a power vacuum that tyrants feel entitled to fill. If man is truly a worthless passion, then clearly his value is to be supplemented and assessed by the State. Of course, the same problem arises in Sartre’s most revered critics, such as Foucault, but for different reasons. Foucault’s folly was that he dismissed the individual entirely; Sartre took the introverted path, reducing everything in the World to the individual.

Now let us examine some advantages to the alternative view. If I define my mistakes as the actions of various forces, I not only open my mind to extreme possibilities, allowing myself to encounter those forces as a mystic. I also strike a most diplomatic balance between two extremes, effectively coming closer to the Buddha and Aristotle, all at once. I do not simply renounce my actions or attempt to defend their merit, but neither do I go beyond acknowledging them as events. Since I could not have reasonably prevented them, they cannot weigh upon my conscience, nor is there any reason for you to believe that I will repeat them; I am just as likely as you are, and perhaps unlike you I’ve come to acknowledge the possibility, whereas you may commit the same wrongs and deny the fact. Mine is an antihegemonic posture; I answer only to my instincts, though I do not claim any personal entitlement, for these instincts are expressions of universal principles and the most fundamental human goods, to be explored instead of ignored outright. My will is not absolutely responsible, but neither is it totally powerless, and this power is one that cannot be tamed and therefore cannot be regimented in an authoritarian fashion. What we have achieved is a success both spiritually and socially. Socially, we have eliminated the necessity for blame, though we can now avail ourselves of blame AS AN ARCHETYPE in dealing with those people who are CONSCIOUSLY evil, who now can no longer hide behind their kinship with those who are ACCIDENTALLY so. If the Unconscious truly MUST become conscious, which both Sartre and Jung aspired to do, though Sartre, by denying the Unconscious perpetually, failed, then it is only by this road of acceptance that it can. We are not responsible for being accidentally ignorant, but rather for being willfully so. And we are just as responsible for pardoning those who are accidentally ignorant as we are for condemning those who remain willfully ignorant on purpose. We must trust that our inner wisdom will discern the difference. Spiritually, we have opened a doorway to wisdom that may transcend life itself. Getting to know ourselves on this level is a birth right, so no humane institution can dismiss it as a mere feeling of entitlement. Dionysus is more than an excuse; he is our savior. We must be saved.

Dm.A.A.