Angels & Automatons
What are people for anyway?
Forgive me if this question sounds indulgent, but sometimes, when I find myself confronted by another person, I'm not sure what to make of this knowing presence. Most of the time my socialization guides me through the motions: I ask how they are, what they did last weekend, how their job or relationship is going. I usually don't question it. But every so often, I drift into this mood of detached observation and begin to analyze these interactions. Comments and gestures become signifiers of deeply-wrought personality patterns, projections, and grasps for validation.
I overhear two women—coworkers, it seems—trade stories after their shift. Each tells about a triumph of the day: how they read a client perfectly and knew exactly what to say to resolve the inevitable problems as they arose. They take turns bragging and praising each other. They need to do this to relieve the stress of the day. This is how they relate to each other, forming a bond by regularly giving one another they affirmations they need to feel competent and valued.
At least, this is my analysis of it all. I don't know them, but the patterns are easy enough to recognize. After all, a large part of my job in mental health is noticing patterns in people and helping them recognize and, if they need to, change them. This is what I need to do to relieve the stress of an overactive mind. I look for patterns and form my theories.
Does this interest in people make me feel connected to them? Not particularly. In fact, the distance created by this sort of observation makes one feel quite cold. Spending so much time looking at patterns and characteristics, you begin to see only those. People become just collections of discrete parts moving together unison, easily quantifiable masses. They might as well be robots, bourn along by cosmic currents that have existed for eternities before falling into the meat grinder at the end of our finite existence.
Well, that went to a pretty dark place, didn't it? It's not much different from Tolstoy's immortal denunciation of life:
“To deceive oneself is pointless. All is vanity. Happy is he who was never born. Death is better than life; one must free oneself from it.”
After reaching middle age in the midst of a successful literary career, Tolstoy had an existential crisis. A sense of meaninglessness crept over him and the life drained out of him as he dragged himself through the drudgeries of his materialistic existence. Being an intellectual, he sought solace in literature and philosophy, determined to find answers among the writings of history’s brightest minds. He summarized the conclusion of this search for knowledge—citing Schopenhauer, Socrates, Buddha, and the book of Ecclesiastes—with the above pronouncement. The wisest men seemed to agree: life is pointless and evil, and the only resolution is to escape from it. That the majority of men don't realize this and face the same aching despair only speaks to their stupidity and capacity for distracting themselves.
However, as Tolstoy eventually figured out, looking at people in only this way inevitably leads you to a dark place. His ascent from despair rested, partly at least, on his turning toward the Other, to his fellow man.
If you find yourself stuck in such a mindset, as I’m sure we all occasionally do, know that there is another way of looking at people that counterbalances the objectifying, trivializing one. This way of looking sees people as more than just the sum of their parts. It doesn't lead you to assume that you have someone totally figured out after gleaning a few details about their lives: what books they have or haven’t read, which aspects of their personality they accentuate in front of their friends, whether they busy themselves with work of substance or seem to flitter away their lives in pleasure or distractions.
When you look at a person like this, you see them as something larger than you or she could really know. You assume depths where you don't necessarily see any. You trust that a genuine connection is possible. You do all this without being sure of any of it. Unlike that first mode of looking, which seemed so self-assured, you don't know that these assumptions will turn out to be right. And yet, this basic faith is the very thing that makes that connection possible—or even inevitable.
So what exactly does man look like from this perspective? Ernest Becker offered a rather evocative image in the title to one of his books: man is an angel in armor. The idea, borrowed from Wilhelm Reich, is that people wear a kind of "character armor" which makes up their personality and lifestyle. It's the way you learned early in life to deal with the stresses of the world, a set of responses that became codified over the years and now make up a set of habits repeated daily. The armor protects us, but also constricts us and weighs us down. Curiously, never in the text does Becker elaborate on the other part of the image: that beneath the armor, we're angels capable of rising above our station, of possibly being more than humanly possible. (Becker presents himself as a hard-nosed realist, though the more poetic passages in his work belie that his quest to explain man to himself was also a quest to save man from himself.)
This shift in our image of man—from a robot when we first began, now to an angel—leads to a shift in our relationship with man. The way we think of him, the place that we allot him in our lives, determines how we react when confronted by him. The objectifying perspective causes men to lose their special luster. The human qualities that don’t fit the paradigm are ignored and they become uninteresting and impossible to relate to. Seeing man as merely another object in a world of objects, the basic separation of man intensifies. So then how do we change to see the angelic in man?
We need to remove our armor.
To break down the stunted image of man, we must first break down what is stagnant and calcified in ourselves. Understand that your personality is only one way of acting in the world, conditioned in you from an early age in response to the demands of your environment. You are more than you think you are; more lines of action are open to you than you can see. Trusting in the possibility of change, letting yourself be open to others, is not in itself the solution to the problem: it jump starts the process, and it’s rekindling sustains it.
For Ernest Becker, love is the crucible that melts down our defenses:
“Love draws one out, breaks down barriers, places the human relationship on more mutual terms: in a word, it takes it somewhat out of the control of the armored person. It takes strength to love, simply because it takes strength to stand exposed without armor, open to the needs of others.”
The genuinely loving person gives love out of his strength, not his weakness. Not concerned with using others to satisfy his needs, he can approach and respond to them as they are, not as he wants them to be. Genuine relationship can only arise out of this place of understanding. When we don’t allow our insecurities to create caricatures of people so that we can mentally dispose of them, we no longer feel so closed off and defensive in the world.
Tolstoy ultimately found respite in a renewed attitude towards people. From the perspective of the Russian intellectual circle he immersed himself in, the religious masses seemed merely ignorant. They hadn't thought too deeply about life, else they would have landed upon his own conclusion that life is pointless and evil. Tolstoy realized (correctly) that an intellectualizing view of life, for all the thought put into it, usually leads to a reductionistic viewpoint. Everything reduces to zero and nothing has any more inherent meaning than anything else. Even the men of faith in his circle he found to be indolent and distracted. How could you not be with such a view on life?
What led Tolstoy out of his despair was not just a renewed faith in God. He merely looked at the people around him—the “common folk”—saw their contentment, and knew that he must be wrong. His reasoning actually got him nowhere; he just opened himself up to others. The vast majority of people, he felt, found ways to live with themselves and with the instability and decay so natural to the world. In changing how he viewed their motivations, he could accept their faith as as the bedrock of their lifestyles, no less an error for being unquestioned.
“I looked more widely around me. I looked at the live of the multitudes who have lived in the past and who live today… And all of them, endlessly varied in their customs, minds, educations, and positions, and in complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, endured suffering and hardship, lived and died and saw this not as vanity but good. And I came to love these people. The further I penetrated into the lives of those living and dead about whom I had read and heard, the more I loved them and the easier it became for me to live.”
“What are people for anyway?”
This question, which I asked at the beginning, was actually asked of a therapist by his patient. The patient, who had up until this point been driven by a sexually-compulsive mode of relating to women, wondered what he was supposed to do with women besides fuck them. His therapist, Dr. Irvin Yalom, says that such questions inevitably arise when a person moves from an I-It to an I-You mode of relating—that is, when he begins to relate more directly to people rather than treating them like obstacles or equipment.
The question stuck out to me as I read it because, in those moments of people-watching, I’ve asked myself similar questions. On the surface, the question seems inane. You find yourself chuckling as you attempt to answer it. But the question, in its stark absurdity, reveals that at that moment, I had cut myself off from my fellow man. Only by considering deeply and ultimately disposing of the question can we begin to relate—and to see others, and ourselves, for what we really are.
Header image adapted from artwork by Owen Gifellon.
