Before retiring last night, I watched the Maysles brothers’ highly acclaimed 1969 documentary, “Salesman.” There are perhaps few rivals with this bleak but extraordinary film when it comes to dealing with the persona – and its differences from the ego “behind the mask.” It is also an unflinching study of spiritual-professional burnout (in the case of “the badger,” Paul Brennan) and the dark, cynical core of American, predatory capitalism (with the endorsement, in this case, of the Catholic Church’s imprimatur). The film was hard to watch – like reading Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” on downers. It (perhaps unintentionally but very effectively) exposed the shabby, drab, sterile, desperate, delusional reality, not only within this particularly slimy Bible sales program, but in the very innards of the (modern) American dream – by gently removing the multiple masks behind which these ugly features lurk.
One insightful reviewer of 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑛 noted that it was Paul Brennan’s “detached,” critical awareness of the nefarious “dog-eat-doggedness” of the whole business that undermined his effectiveness as a salesman. His burnout was a crisis of faith – not so much in God or Christ – but in his own shtick, in his Irish charm, in himself. His steady, half-conscious, half-willed descent into a kind of paralyzed state of self-contempt and despair is a powerful indictment against the diabolical, perverse business model or “system” he had been obediently serving for eight years. Weren’t many of those persons who received massive home loans (that the lending officers of the banks knew, beforehand, they would never be able to pay off), prior to the orchestrated 2008 financial crisis, recent analogues of the “leads” who were targeted for the overpriced Bibles in 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑛? Isn’t this the nature of the beast – the way the game is played – a con game, at bottom, where the most effective con artists (like the Rabbit, the Bull, the Gipper) actually believe they are doing their “marks” and “gulls” a benefit?
Trump is a swaggering, unapologetic con artist who not only continues to get away with his crimes and villainies, but is actually admired and emulated by a large segment of morally deformed and irresponsible dunderheads. There can be little or no honor in either the predators or the prey in such a symbiotic relationship, can there? The targets for the crafty and “motivated” salesman were, for the most part, losers or desperate strugglers in the big “American dream-game.” Look at the product being sold to them: a colorful, expensive book of hope in place of any real or substantial opportunity to lift themselves up by their own beleaguered powers and limited ingenuity. In this sense, the four salesmen were akin to door-to-door drug dealers – the publishing company, and the Catholic church in league with it, resembling Pablo Escobar and his cartel. An expensive, road-tested narcotic that effectively puts its users to sleep – makes them content with their discontentment – resigned to their (perfectly justifiable) resignation.
Were these the sorts of people that Trump somehow spoke to – persons who felt betrayed by the system (associated with the “Democrats” by Trump), persons who were treated with disdain and contempt by puffed-up, amoral liberals and intellectuals. Trump managed to tap into this smoldering, festering resentment – this widespread lust for revenge among the “unvalued,” conservative, survival-minded “mass men” and serve as a channel or lightning rod for that yet to be discharged fury, hatred, and fear. He has to share their psychology to some extent in order for this warped symbiosis to form. Being almost proudly unreflective and irresponsible himself, Trump merely exploited the gushing firehose of hostility and rancor by directing it at his (many) critics and enemies. And who were these enemies? For the most part, they were those who publicly called him out for being an infantile, attention-craving narcissist – a moral imbecile who was making a mockery of America – turning the country into the butt of jokes and marginalizing us even further from the global community, dividing our country as it has seldom been divided.
I think 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑛 had such a strong, depressive impact on me for a variety of reasons. Encounters I used to have with my deceased brother, Chris (in his own element), often left me in a similar state of inner distress and uneasiness. I am strongly tempted to approach this peculiar state of emotional distress from the angle of aesthetics– from what I might call my “normal” sense of beauty. The documentary, like so many of those peeks into Chris’s world (and his psyche), exposed the ugliness, the shabbiness, the despair, the suffocating dreariness that are always just under the (barely deceptive) skin or mask of much of American “culture.” War can certainly do this to large populations – rip away the thin veneer of civilization – reducing us to a state of baffled barbarization, revealing “the ugly truth” about our creaturely-instinctual, naked existences in a world where “man is a wolf to man.” What war achieves on a grand scale, the “daily grind” of relentless and spiritually demoralizing economic and social pressures achieves for many ordinary individuals during so-called “peace time.”
When I get a big, concentrated dose of this empty ugliness – as I often did in my painful interactions with my brother (before his sad end) and as I did with this “difficult” film last night – I become aware, if only temporarily, of how powerfully dependent I have always been on beauty (or beautiful illusions, dreams, and surfaces) in order to make life bearable, tolerable, and worthwhile to me. To the extent that this dependence on an aesthetic experience or face constitutes a falsification of the naked truth of things before me, it is at cross purposes with my professed (and believed-in) devotion to the truth. I am aware of the fact that much of what comprises my “work” as a thinker-writer entails ordering and beautifying my “raw” experience by means of artfully mixing and matching words, concepts, metaphors, and images. I am acutely aware of the fact that when, for some reason or another, this activity is blocked or interrupted, I begin to feel uneasy, anxious, and “at sea.” My self-esteem dips noticeably when I am unable to derive (or construct) meaning from stumping opacities – to extract significance or symbolic value from banalities and commonplaces.
It seems to me that “civilization” and what we generally regard as decent human behavior depend on all or most of us cooperating, as best we can, in this mysterious (but nevertheless universally human) process of translating (raw, given) nature into (meaningful, purposeful, ameliorative) culture. When a critical mass of humans within a society lose faith in the vital importance of continuing this process, entropy, nihilism, and degeneration slowly but surely begin to assail the “garden” like invading weeds and insect pests. At some point, these forces of entropy and decay begin to predominate. The collective will (to employ “art” and “meaning” as weapons or antidotes against overpowering “savage” nature) declines so drastically that despair and pessimism spread throughout the infected members. Like a cancer patient whose “wild cells” have overwhelmed the “healthy” ones, the most sensible path forward seems to be a painless death.
In what ways do the tensions – and the divergent or conflicting aims – between “ego” and “persona” resemble these tensions (or antagonisms, contradictions, and splits) between “nature” and “culture”? Do some or many of us humans suffer from a divided conscience where this nature-culture contest is concerned? (Nietzsche may be the poster boy for this unresolved, and possibly un-resolvable tension within the human psyche. He stands for “nature” and naturalness – in his anti-transcendent/physiological stance towards the human – but at the same time he’s a cheerleader and enthused spokesman for artful, i.e., Apollonian, forms that creative spirits construct for the purpose of making existence livable, or endurable.)
At any event, there would seem to be a 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑠 𝑠𝑎𝑝𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑢𝑚 that we humans are necessarily dependent upon our various interpretive schemes, which serve as buffering but insulating interfaces with the given text of 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑎. These various interpretive schemes (myths, religions, sciences, philosophies, ideologies, moral systems, aesthetic principles, etc.) cover a broad spectrum in terms of orientation, sophistication, depth, comprehensiveness, emotional tone or attitude – but there is one for just about everyone’s needs and requirements. The only problem – and only for those who see this as a problem – is that none of these various worldviews or interpretive schemes can legitimately claim to be more than an elaborate fiction, in the end, an “as-if” sort of construction – and not some apodictic or universal truth. Conveniently, this has never been a problem for the majority of humans, who have always been inclined to take their “received” worldviews on the authority of their “superiors” and pastors, which is to say that they are taken dogmatically as the truth.
For those of us, on the other hand, who have thought this through on our own and come to terms with this troubling realization that the human mind, as such, trades more or less exclusively in names, concepts, and constructed “fictions,” this divided conscience problem is all too real and troublesome. And why is this? Is it possibly because, in a rivalry for superior ontological status (the degree of being or reality), “nature” clearly wins over fictional constructs (from which cultures – all cultures – are built and, in times of trouble, patched up and mended)? But, as we have seen, nature ceases to be “pure” or “unmodified” in the very process of being translated into a humanly experienceable or intelligible form. The interpreting, verbalizing, conceptualizing, “humanizing” mind is not merely a cozy home and pleasant workshop, but it can also be experienced as a kind of prison or inescapable bubble in which we are helplessly confined. And to add even greater poignancy to our plight, we are actually enclosed within “worlds” of our own making (or passive assent) – even if much of the construction process is unconscious and automatic, like the forming of the shell about a turtle before it’s released from the egg. Thus, when some of us become acutely conscious of the confinement within a bubble-world of quite limited capacity and means of expression, we become inflamed with an irrepressible drive to expand this bubble and find means of reducing our understandable sense of pod-isolation. Think for a moment of what spirits like Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Jung were able to achieve with this drive—whipping them, as it were, from behind.