Facing the Beast, page 20
Their lust for obedience had in it an element of pleasure; an erotic of submission as captured in the only half-joking phrase on a meme, “Lock me down harder, Daddy.”
The past three years, this social lust for submission, coinciding with a lust for domination and control; this embrace by certain elites of the performing of cruelty and of imposing cruelty (injections, more and more of them; the masks, the isolation) on oneself—recall of course the Sylvia Plath poem, “Daddy,” in which Plath makes the case that “every woman adores a Fascist.”5
But in this case those adoring the fascist were of both genders, and the brute was the worshipped State.
What could have contributed to this neurosis, this perverse dynamic of dominance and submission, this desire of millions to lose their individuality, their willingness to sacrifice, in what should have been obvious ways, the wellbeing of their children, and their acceptance, at Milgram- and Zimbardo-experiment-speed,6 of more and more levels of dystopian sadism in their own and in others’ lives, in the years from 2020 to (at least) 2023?
What contributed to turning the culture of liberal elites, in cities especially, into a fertile soil for breeding acts of public cruelty?
Coming from that world, and having lived in it for decades—and now living in a totally different world, a world that we may call “the Rest of America”—I suspect that one contributing factor to this sadism/sadomasochism of the elites is what Freud and Reich both suggested could be dangerous: that is, the systematic denial of pleasure, spirituality, fun, and meaning in the lives of the “laptop class.”
The world of liberal elites is one of workaholism, in which family life is often downgraded as a priority, and in which spiritual life has little focus on it at all; it is also made joyless by constant self-surveillance and self-denial.
It is a world full of opaque rules, and the rules constantly shift; some of the rules are about virtue signaling, so you don’t get kicked out of your tight, judgmental, privileged little society; but many of the rules are about maintaining a class status that feels, to members of this group, as if it is constantly in danger.
Only by one’s knowing the secret codes of the elite—how one is supposed to talk, dress, decorate one’s home, entertain—can one signal to others that one is a member of the in-group and that one knows its rigid signifiers.
The code serves to keep everyone else out, even as it reinforces the status of the insiders. But the code, along with the workaholism, contributes to the self-denying atmosphere—the sense of deprivation in relation to spontaneity and fun.
I once sat in a La-Z-Boy recliner, and I loved it; so, secretly, I always longed for a recliner. But you can’t have a recliner if you are in the world of liberal elites. Don’t ask why, you just can’t. “Those people”—the people who support “Don’t Say Gay,” who love Trump, those “out there” who are benighted, the “deplorables”—they have recliners.
So you can’t. Your friends will smirk.
(It is only now that I am in that “other” world, the Rest of America, that I have learned that if you are worried that your friends will smirk, then they are not really your friends.)
I loved the feel of wall-to-wall carpeting, when I encountered it in old- fashioned hotel rooms. But you can’t have wall-to-wall carpeting in the elite world. It’s tacky. You have to have bare, polished wooden floors, with handmade rugs from some Central Asian location. Whether you like that or not.
In the elite world, there are certain crackers you can’t put out, for heaven’s sake, when guests are expected. It has to be Carr’s table water crackers. Why? Who knows?
That’s the rule.
I do not come from money. I don’t come from that world. I was raised barely middle class; my father was a professor at a state university. My mom was a graduate student.
When I got to Yale (which was only possible for me via a scholarship), I was humbled to discover that the Oxford button-down shirts I had bought at Sears, and had felt so proud of having selected—to prepare to fit in, as I had expected, to my new life on the glamorous East Coast—were completely unwearable.
Why?
Because they were not all cotton.
They were an unspeakable, unmanageable, polyester-cotton blend.
How did the unacceptable nature of my poor shirts, with their taboo admixture of fabrics, even get communicated to me? Who knows.
In the world of elites and their prep-school children, a lifted eyebrow, a barely hidden glance between two better-informed friends—friends who were roommates at Andover, of course—can do it in a heartbeat.
But once you have been on the receiving end of elites’ smug displeasure and censoriousness, you don’t forget it.
I internalized their codes, over time, for survival at first. But eventually their codes became my atmosphere, my world. I forgot how little they really mattered.
I knew that I was bored as a member of the world of “liberal elites,” but I did not know the remedy, because that was the only world I eventually knew. I knew that I wanted to take a Valium (not that I did) when I was a young mother in Washington, D.C., during the Clinton years, because all—all—conversation among the senate aides, speechwriters, chiefs of staff, TV pundits, Washington Post journalists, lobbyists, and so on, was about work—or else about the gigantic, costly extensions that they were building on their homes.
No art, no emotion, no spirit, no God, no philosophy, no deep questions, and little real sharing.
Later I was bored, bored, as a liberal journalist in New York City, though I was going to the most celebrated gatherings in town; to Literary Lions’ galas at the public library; to the trendy screenings; to the most written-up events. I was a regular on the formerly golden publicist Peggy Siegal’s B list; hooray for me.
I was bored talking to the star writers at the Nation, at the Wall Street Journal, at the Atlantic, because—after you got the news of the day, it was so limited a world of discourse and so dry a cultural context. Politics, work, work, status, work, status—and maybe, as an aside, competitive conversations about how their kids were doing better than other kids with Ivy League waitlists; that was the fare of our conversations, week after week, dinner after dinner, gala after gala.
When I was first dating Brian, we were going to a Peggy Siegal screening in the Hamptons. I explained that the dress expectation for men there would be khakis, a white or blue open-necked Oxford shirt, a navy blue blazer, and brown loafers; it was a uniform. I thought I was making him comfortable by explaining this code related to privilege.
Brian wears black Punisher T-shirts and black jeans and combat boots and heavy silver chain bracelets.
He looked at me with pity—pity that my life, my society, was so circumscribed.
It was not until I was ejected from the world of liberal elites and welcomed by the Rest of America that I realized that there is a massive community of people who accept others based on their character, no matter what they are wearing; who don’t look around the interiors of their friends’ homes, or assess their canapés, with icy judgment.
I have been learning that in “The Rest of America,” people have other things going on in their lives than just or primarily their work or their status; and that they are allowed, and allow themselves, to incorporate meaning, adventure, and even fun into their lives.
So in contrast to a subculture of hardworking super-achievers who, as adults, have no fun—I am amazed to find that the world I inhabit now allows for joy, fun, and meaning.
And I think that the joy and the sources of meaning kept this half of the country from devolving into animal rage and cruelty.
When I was single, I was invited on a date by a local contractor. He took me hunting. I sat beside him at the foot of a tree, at dawn, in a field, watching the world of animals wake up, and listening to the meadow itself thrum with life and then start to sing. The cool mists burned away before my eyes as the sun rose. The man later shot a wild turkey and cleaned it and presented it to me as a gift. I could not cook it—it was very tough—and the date never turned into a relationship; but I recall sitting there in wonder at where I found myself, with the whole world coming alive before our eyes, and thinking, This is fun.
I remember hanging out with my friend in the modest country neighborhood where we live now. She and her husband had put a pool table in their garage and had built a bar, and had a dartboard on the wall, and had brought some old couches out to the garage; we and our neighbors would all hang around, listening to country music and drinking Jim Beam, and Coors, and playing pool, and making each other laugh, as warm summer breezes swirled around us, the garage door open to the view of green hills, and to the sight and sound of children playing in the street.
And I thought: This is fun.
When Brian first took me on an ATV and we sped around our property, and he revved it to jump the wheels up over hillocks along our little river, I thought: Damn, this is so much fun.
But in my former life, one was not allowed to like hunting or pool tables in the garage, or ATVs. They are all on the naughty list.
In the past, elites have always hoarded pleasure; look at the robber-baron era. Look at Versailles. It is historically anomalous that today’s American elites are so grim and gray and abstemious. Sometimes I wonder if the same enemy that is degrading various aspects of our culture, has also sought to weaken our elites by fostering this culture of anemic self-denial.
In contrast, though, the people I know now, in the Rest of America, have a great deal of art, music, beauty, family as a priority, community, and faith in their lives. I don’t mean to generalize or romanticize, and I am sure there are many exceptions, but speaking broadly, the people I used to know, for all of their money and privilege, had relatively dry, lonely, empty lives, compared with what seems often to me to be the richness of lives, the permission to have joy and fun and adventure, in the Rest of America.
Church, friends, family, hunting, shooting, patriotism, music, celebrations—there is so much, I have learned, that makes many of those outside of liberal urban-elite circles feel that they are part of something larger; there is so much more joy and adventure and meaning culturally allowed outside the purviews of the “laptop class”—so perhaps as a result of this, if Freud and Reich are right, the Rest of America is less susceptible to the lure of collectivist cruelty.
A few months ago I was speaking to the East Valley Republican Women’s Club in southern California. I was full of vestigial trepidation, as I had been propagandized for most of my life to believe that “Republican women” are Puritanical, blinkered, Church Lady–caricatures.
Of course, when I met them, I encountered a group of sophisticated, delightful, powerful, elegant, and perceptive community leaders. I liked them all and was pleased and honored to be taken into their midst.
I was staying at a casino/resort, where the ladies’ luncheon was being held. I realized I had packed only shoes fit for East Coast weather. I did not have sandals for my down time; we were in the desert, and it was hot.
I looked in the shop in the casino, and saw that only a pair of glittering red-and-gold-beaded sandals were available—and I kind of loved them!
But with my lifelong training in the world of liberal elites, I instinctively thought: I can’t possibly buy and wear those shoes.
They were sparkly and red. They were too much fun. It was unthinkable.
But then I went into the luncheon. There was a beautiful woman onstage, a singer, with long black hair, and perfect makeup; and at midday, she was wearing a blazing red, floor-length gown, with cutout shoulders. She looked stunning. The lighting on her glowed as she sang the national anthem.
We all stood and sang with her. I got chills.
We remained standing and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Again, this was something that never would have happened in my former world. But a shiver went through me at the awesome sight of so many solemn faces, of the room full of hundreds of people, hands on hearts, all swearing their loyalty to “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Lastly a female minister gave an invocation. She asked for blessings for the gathering, committed its efforts to the service of God, and expressed heartfelt gratitude for the chance for old and new friends to be in fellowship together. (“Fellowship” was a term about whose nuances I am just learning.)
The luncheon had many subsequent high points; but what I felt above all was that people in this community had meaning in their lives. They had friends, faith, they were prioritizing family life; there was music, beauty, idealism.
There is no way to know this for sure, and history shows as many right-wing tyrants as left-wing ones. But the emotional richness I saw and the acceptance I felt at gatherings such as that—and that I feel in my country community now, and when sojourning among the many conservatives, Libertarians, and others I meet these days in the Rest of America—compared with the poverty of spirit, self-denial, and censoriousness on the elite Left out of which I have been exiled—is striking.
Are the early-twentieth-century philosophers and psychologists correct? Does emotional repression prime people for fascism?
Whatever the answer, I am glad to be free of that shadow world.
I bought the shoes, and I wore them, and I had a lovely time; and I joined my new friends in the sun.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Last Taboo
I was talking to Ora Nadrich, the gifted author of books about spirituality. We were mulling over the disturbing state of the world. Given that she is at home in the more mystical realms, I let down my guard.
“I feel,” I blurted out, “as if in the last few years, the physical world has almost melted away, and that the institutions we thought were permanent have visibly collapsed; and now what has emerged into obvious, palpable form are primarily positive and negative energies.”
I try never to share these kinds of observations with anyone but close friends, and only with those who I know are open to such discussions.
I thought she would look at me as if I had two heads.
But Ora said something like, “Exactly.”
We delved into how we both sensed that the world itself—not just history, not just human behavior—but the planet; the dimension in which we found ourselves; time and space, and our relationship to them—felt to us as if they had somehow changed in the last three years or so; leaving us—us humans—uprooted; trying to make a home again, in a place that was now unfamiliar and new; a place that was shifting; one that was hard to navigate or to understand.
Ora embraces the change and is ready for a new world. Many people in the spirituality community feel that the previous world (pre-2020) was deeply corrupt anyway—the corruption was just better disguised and better dressed—and that it is bracing to see at last the unmediated nakedness of all that was wrong, so that change can come about quickly in the old world passing away and the building of the new.
I wish I had her courage.
But I am uneasy. I feel as if my whole life I have lived on dry land and now I have somehow stepped onto a lurching boat, and I do not yet know our destination. Yet others seem not to see these massive changes at all.
When I read in Ora’s book Time to Awaken that she believed we as humans on the planet were living in parallel realities, this had the shock of verisimilitude for me, though it was a pretty startling notion.1
As Ora explained, we shouldn’t be concerned with those whose perception does not contain the “invisible”—that which they cannot see. As it is now, we have come to know that there are those who “see” what is going on, and those who don’t.
Ora describes that we are living in a parallel universe, so perhaps there are the “seers of the invisible” and those who cannot see what is not visible to them because they can only live in the visible realm, and even in that realm, there is so much they still do not see.
How else could some millions or billions of people see so clearly the abyss of lies, coercion, and tyranny of the past three years, and the other millions or billions saw nothing but the snooze-worthy status quo?
How is it that we keep speaking directly past one another? We do seem to be in different realities.
Or if not two dimensions, what if humanity is now divided into two modes of perception, which is—even trippier—essentially the same as our inhabiting two worlds?
And even beyond that alarmingly intriguing hypothetical, there is the possibility of a major metaphysical shift overall, of some still-to-be-understood kind.
I think it is really possible that the world has indeed changed and shifted in some mysterious way, such that we are blinking into new awareness in a time in which more than ever before, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”2
I think we need to break the taboo, in our educated, Western discourse, against talking about metaphysical energies, both positive and malevolent.
I believe the world has indeed changed—recently—in such a way that the taboo against such discussions is disempowering to us.
The idea that the world in which humans find themselves changes energetically—that there are palpably different “ages” that bring with them different qualities—is familiar to all great civilizations except our own, post-Enlightenment, mechanistic, Newtonian culture.
The Vedic world believes that time brought humans, about 5,000 years ago, into Kali Yuga; that we are in the middle of “the era of the demon”—of vice and darkness, of conflict and hypocrisy.3 Astrologers, whose art derives from Mesopotamia, India, and China, believe that we entered the Age of Pisces about 2,000 years ago, and that in the next few hundred years (there is debate about just when) we are due to enter a golden age, the Age of Aquarius.4 The Aztecs, for their part, believed that there were four ages of creation, each lit by a different sun.5
