It is historically, philosophically, and psychologically significant that not one of the defenders of capitalism chose to attack the position of its opponents at the root, on the level of basic premises; not one of them challenged the altruist-collectivist frame of reference in which all discussions concerning the value of capitalism were held. Economically, the case for capitalism has never been refuted. Capitalism has lost more and more ground because we have lacked a moral philosophy to sustain and support it.*
In the world of the present, most people regard the right of a government to initiate force against its citizens as an absolute not to be debated or challenged. They stipulate only that the force must be used “for a good cause.” Precisely because capitalism in its ideal (that is, consistent) form forbids the use of force to gain social ends, or any other kind of ends, intellectuals dismiss the laissez-faire concept as “antisocial” and “unprogressive.” Whatever the differences in their specific programs, all the enemies of the free market economy—communists, socialists, fascists, welfare statists—are unanimous in their belief that they have a right to dispose of the lives, property, and future of others, that private ownership of the means of production is a selfish evil, that the more a person has achieved, the greater is his or her debt to those who have not achieved it, that men and women can be compelled to go on producing under any terms or conditions their rulers decree, that freedom is a luxury that may have been permissible in a primitive economy, but for the running of giant industries, electronic factories, and complex sciences, nothing less than slave labor will do.
Whether they propose to take over the economy outright, in the manner of communists and socialists, or to maintain the pretense of private property while dictating prices, wages, production, and distribution, in the manner of fascists and welfare statists, it is the gun, it is the rule of physical force that they consider “kind,” they who consider the free market “cruel.”
Since the moral justification offered for the rule of force is humankind’s need of the things that persons of ability produce, it follows (in the collectivist’s system of thought) that the greater an individual’s productive ability, the greater are the penalties he or she must endure, in the form of controls, regulations, expropriations. Consider, for example, the principle of the progressive income tax: those who produce the most are penalized accordingly; those who produce nothing receive a subsidy, in the form of relief payments. Or consider the enthusiastic advocacy of socialized medicine. What is the justification offered for placing the practice of medicine under government control? The importance of the services that physicians perform—the urgency of their patients’ need. Physicians are to be penalized precisely because they have so great a contribution to make to human welfare; thus is virtue turned into a liability.
In denying human beings freedom of thought and action, statists and collectivist systems are anti-self-esteem by their very nature. Self-confident, self-respecting men and women are unlikely to accept the premise that they exist for the sake of others.
A free society cannot be maintained without an ethics of rational self-interest. Neither can it be maintained except by men and women who have achieved a healthy level of self-esteem. And a healthy level of self-esteem cannot be maintained without a willingness to assert—and, if necessary, fight for—our right to exist. It is on this point that issues of psychology, ethics, and politics converge.
If I may allow myself a brief aside, one might imagine that psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers who speak enthusiastically and reverently about freedom, self-responsibility, autonomy, the beauty of self-regulating systems, and the power of synergy (the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of the parts taken separately) would naturally be champions of noncoercion. More often than not, as I have already indicated, just the opposite is true. They tend to be among the most vociferous in crying for the coercive apparatus of government to further their particular ideals. To quote Waterman once again:
It should be recognized that a defining feature of a synergistic society is that participation in it is voluntary. If people do not choose to engage in a given cooperative activity, the implication is that they do not perceive that activity to be helpful, either for themselves or for others. Efforts to promote social cooperation within a synergistic society may appropriately include such techniques as education, persuasion, and negotiation. However, the use of political force to compel cooperation represents the abandonment of the synergistic ideal.90
A free society cannot automatically guarantee the mental or emotional well-being of all its members. Freedom from external coercion is not a sufficient condition of our optimal fulfillment, but it is a necessary one. The great virtue of capitalism—laissez-faire capitalism, as contrasted not only with the more extreme forms of statism but also with the mixed economy we have today—is that it is the one system whose defining principle is precisely this barring of physical coercion from human relationships. No other political system pays even lip service to this principle.
If we pause to look back at the road we have traveled since the beginning of this book, we can appreciate, perhaps, that the whole course of human development and evolution is in the direction of increasing freedom, higher and higher actualizations of personal choice.
Every concept we have entailing the idea of progress, higher levels of development, evolution, and the like contains the same core intention: a wider possible range of action, an increasing absence of constraints on our choices. On the evolutionary scale, when we speak of one species as being higher than another, an essential part of what we mean is that the more advanced species has a greater range of options, a wider repertoire of possible responses, in any given situation. When we speak of a person being more psychologically evolved, less encumbered by blocks, repressions, institutionalized areas of unconsciousness, again we think of this greater freedom. And if we speak of scientific or technological progress, once again we are referring to this wider range. Political freedom is the triumph of this same process in the external world of human relationships.
These chapters, as I have already indicated, are intended only to sketch out a general ethical-social-political orientation, not to provide a finished, detailed portrait; the latter would be the task of another book. I am aware that I leave many issues and questions undealt with. But no discussion of the meaning of honoring the self could be complete that did not address itself, however briefly, to such issues as the moral justification of egoism, the destructiveness of the creed of self-sacrifice, and the supremacy and inviolability of individual rights in human relationships.
Now we must face one last group of questions: Is this the end of the journey? Is the achievement of an internal condition of self-esteem and the external condition of freedom the final climax of the evolutionary process? When we have learned to honor the self, psychologically, morally, politically, have we reached the final stage of our development?
*While the following books and authors are not all entirely consistent in their advocacy of economic-political freedom, and there are points of philosophical difference among them, they represent an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to study the nature and history of capitalism, as well as its future possibilities: F. Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy; M. Friedman and R. Friedman, Free to Choose; H. Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson; P. Johnson, Modern Times; R. W. Lane, The Discovery of Freedom; T. Machan (ed.), The Libertarian Reader; R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; I. Patterson, The God of the Machine; A. Rand, Atlas Shrugged; Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal; and The Virtue of Selfishness; A. Rustow, Freedom and Domination; H. Spencer, Man Versus the State; F. von Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians and The Road to Serfdom; and L. von Mises, Human Action; Nation, State, and Economy; and Socialism.
*One will find the same longing among such contemporary psychologists as Erich Fromm. See, for example, Escape from Freedom. I discuss Fromm’s viewpoint in some detail in The Disowned Self.
†One of Ayn Rand’s major goals in Atlas Shrugged was to provide just such a moral justification—and, in my estimation, she succeeded brilliantly, notwithstanding our areas of disagreement.
15
Self-Esteem and Beyond
In this final chapter, I address myself to the notion that the disappearance of ego is a hallmark of the higher stages of human development and that self-transcendence is the ultimate goal of our psychological and spiritual evolution.
While this view of ego and self-transcendence is very familiar in Eastern religious literature and in mystical literature generally, it has become prominent in Western psychology only with the advent of the fairly recent transpersonal psychology movement. For a long time the cutting edge in psychology has been moving farther and farther away from the view of the so-called well-adjusted personality as the ultimate psychological goal. Being able to function with reasonable effectiveness is a laudable goal, but increasing numbers of psychologists are finding themselves challenged by the possibility of exploring the territory of the optimal. Transpersonal psychologists insist, and I would hardly disagree, that what is commonly regarded as normal, everyday consciousness is suboptimal.89
In Beyond Ego, the best introductory text to this field, editors Roger N. Walsh and Frances Vaughan state: “Transpersonal psychology is concerned with expanding the field of psychological inquiry to include the study of optimal psychological health and well-being. It recognizes the potential for experiencing a broad range of states of consciousness, in some of which identity may extend beyond the usual limits of the ego and personality.”
In the enthusiasm that transpersonalists exhibit for their field, it is not always easy to separate the serious from the frivolous, the promising from the pretentious. Often, a certain naivete and irresponsibility manifest themselves at the frontiers of new knowledge. For example, many transpersonalists exhibit an alarming naivete concerning claims made in the fields of parapsychology and paraphysics.* Nonetheless, their basic premise—that the course of evolution has not stopped, but continues in us and through us, and that the upper limits of our developmental possibilities are almost beyond speculation—appears to be borne out by research in the fields of biofeedback, hypnosis, psychedelic drugs, meditation, and altered states of consciousness of all kinds. All have supported the belief that we have underestimated our potential for growth, well-being, and evolution.21 It has certainly never been my own view that once we acquire high self-esteem the process of individuation and development is complete. My point has rather been that the level of development with which I have been concerned cannot be bypassed—that it is the foundation for wherever the next steps of our evolution may lead us.
It would take me far beyond the subject matter of this book to discuss what I think is rational or irrational in the transpersonal field. But since I am concerned here with honoring the self, and since many transpersonalists (especially those heavily influenced by Eastern religions) have launched what amounts to an attack on the ego and the self, I feel the need to say something about those attacks and their psychological and philosophical meaning.
The theme of self-transcendence and the dissolution of ego has begun to appear more and more prominently in Western psychology since the 1960s. The transpersonal movement was anticipated by Abraham Maslow, one of the pioneers in humanistic psychology, itself a rebellion against the overly restrictive view of human nature promulgated by proponents of psychoanalysis and behaviorism. The chief thrust of Maslow’s own work was the further development of his vision of the “self-actualized personality.” In the last years of his life, however, he predicted a psychology that would be “transpersonal, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interests, going beyond humanness, identity, self-actualization, and the like.” 51
Such a formulation raises formidable intellectual difficulties. First, there is the purely logical problem: a psychology that purports in any sense to be about human beings and yet to be centered, not on human beings, but on the cosmos, is a contradiction in terms. More important, perhaps, is the fact that whatever human beings can rise to or attain is within the province of the human—it is not transhuman. It may be reasonable to speak of an expanded sense of identity, but not of going beyond identity.
Second—and this is the chief point I wish to develop in this chapter—when and if the gates of enlightenment finally open, however enlightenment is conceived, an individual human being (no doubt transformed) will walk through, or no one will walk through. But let us proceed to see why it should even be necessary to make such an observation.
Since the concept of self-transcendence will figure so prominently in this discussion, I want first to make a number of ground-clearing observations about both the experience of transcendence, of any kind, and that of self-forgetfulness or self-obliviousness. There is a healthy and valid aspect to these phenomena that has nothing to do with the disappearance of self or the annihilation of ego.
To transcend is to rise above a limited context or perspective—to a wider field of vision. The wider field of vision does not negate or deny the previous, narrower field, but goes beyond it. Growth itself, as we have already seen in an earlier chapter, can be conceptualized as a series of transcendences, as we move from one stage of development to a higher one, emotionally, cognitively, morally, and so forth. Thus, for example, according to Piaget’s theory of stages of cognitive development, we transcend one level of mental operation to reach a higher level.60 Similarly, with Kohl-berg’s theory of stages of moral development, we transcend one level of moral perspective to reach a higher one.41,46 In a different sense but within the same principle, when we leave family and learn to exist as self-supporting individuals, we are again engaged in a process of transcendence. And ideally, when I cease to identify exclusively with my body, my emotions, my beliefs, or my thoughts, when I realize that my ultimate “I”—my ego—is awareness itself and not the contents of awareness, I am shifting from a lower vision of self-in-the-world to a higher one. And this, in a psychological context, is precisely what transcendence always means.
But who is transcending? I am. And what am I transcending? A lower level of development. Thus, the concept of self-transcendence is logically incoherent—a contradiction in terms. The self is that which transcends, not that which is transcended. On any other view we would have to deal with the impossible question, Who is it who will experience the bliss promised to those who transcend their egos? When I “transcend” awareness, the ultimate witness, I am not enlightened—I am either unconscious or dead.
It is reasonable to talk about transcending a limited self-concept, or perhaps any self-concept, but not reasonable to talk about transcending the self. It is reasonable to talk about transcending an overrestricted concept of ego, but not reasonable to talk about transcending ego.
These observations strike me as so obvious and incontrovertible that the question arises as to why the notion of self-transcendence and the annihilation of the ego can be so prevalent throughout the transpersonal community. (For examples, see articles in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and ReVision.) As regards ego, it might be argued that transpersonalists use the term, not, as I do, to mean the unifying center of awareness, but rather, in a narrower, more restricted sense, to mean an individuals self-concept, or that part of the self with which the individual chiefly identifies. But I do not think this explanation suffices because, for one thing, sometimes transpersonalists do use ego in the sense I mean, and, for another, the disdain and contempt with which many of them often refer to ego (evidenced by a marked tendency to precede ego by such adjectives as narrow, little, petty) irresistibly suggest that considerations deeper than semantics are involved. I believe that an anti-individualist, antiself ideology is so deeply ingrained in our thinking, the notion of virtue so mired in associations with selflessness, that many writers in this field see a seductive glamour in notions of self-transcendence and emancipatio
n from the ego that “transcend” logic.
True, their denigration of ego and self is not social or political, certainly not in its primary thrust; rather, reflecting the perspective of Eastern religions and mysticism in general, their viewpoint is that individuality is an illusion to be transcended through the awareness that we (and everything that exists) are all part of One Great Consciousness—much as a drop of water is part of the ocean and with a nature identical with the nature of the ocean. 15,79,89,91,92,93,94 We shall return to this theme.
But now I want to say a few words about self-forgetfulness in its healthy or desirable aspect.
A person who enjoys a high level of self-esteem is not normally preoccupied with thoughts of how wonderful he or she is. A person of high self-esteem may be cheerfully involved in some task or deeply absorbed in study and quite unself-aware. Obviously neither self nor ego have disappeared, but they are background, not foreground.
If a person is deeply engrossed in the writing of a book, he or she is not simultaneously thinking about self. If we are caught up in contemplating the beauty of nature, or experiencing the thrill of skiing down the side of a mountain, or listening to a great piece of music, or looking into the eyes of the person we love, we may indeed be utterly and ecstatically self-oblivious. Everyday boundaries of self may seem to have melted at the level of immediate feeling. But this hardly means that self has been transcended or ego annihilated. It merely means that life consists of more than self-contemplation.
Honoring the Self Page 27
