Beyond Self-Care

Towards a deeper humanism

Dear Reader

In lieu of a retrospective, I’ll dedicate my final post for 2023 to my personal writer of the year,

John Pistelli

, who changed the way I think about literature, about writing and about life; without whom this neoblog, for what it’s worth, would not exist.¹ Everything I’m trying to say here has been said and said better in the digital pages of MAJOR ARCANA.²

May you manifest a magnificent 2024 — in the 3D, in the 4D and in however many Ds you can handle!

m.j.e.

xxx

Chat-GPT’s interpretation of a William Blake painting of a tarot reader.

Sam Kahn

’s insightful piece on living creatively within the neoliberal order rather than waiting for something better to replace it, chimes with my recent preoccupation with how to respond wisely to the late capitalist imperative of self-care (ie doing whatever it takes to maintain yourself as a productive piece of human capital, or failing that, at least contributing to the operation of the Faustian machine through your consumption of bath bombs and yoga retreats).

It can be rather dispiriting to scroll through a social media feed that is algorithmically designed to disturb your psychological balance only to be confronted with a targeted ad offering you mental health support (most likely in the form of a nice lady kindly encouraging you to love yourself because there is no guarantee that anybody else will). And if you choose to spurn Big Pharma and Big Psych, the biochemical and psychospiritual alternatives will likely send you, as St. Vincent succinctly put it:³

From healer to dealers and then back again

From guru to voodoo and voodoo to zen

Naturally, critics of these tendencies have found their own market niches. From the moralistic right, former Mr. Susan Sontag (m. 1950–1959), Phillip Rieff, as summarised by Park MacDougald, “believed that the Western elite had abdicated its responsibility to continue transmitting moral commandments, instead embracing an ethic of liberation and transgression designed to free themselves from the too-strict demands of the interdicts”. From the moralistic left, George Scialabba grants that society may have got a bit too loosey-goosey with the sexual mores, but passionately defends intellectual freedom and points curious readers Laschwards.⁴

Lasch and his disciples indeed offer a compelling diagnosis of the modern predicament. The narcissist is the personality type most immune to psychoanalytic treatment and the most likely to seek it out. Unscrupulous analysts create perpetual patients;⁵ the entire capitalist system runs on keeping people psychologically needy and insecure, motivating them to look to the market for assurance and encouraging them to commodify parts of themselves to barter for social validation. This thesis is entertainingly dramatised in Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self ⁶

And say what you want about Jung, he at least recognised the limits of psychotherapy:

A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not discovered what life means for him. But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from a state of mental suffering, and it is spiritual stagnation, psychic sterility, which causes this state.

The doctor who realizes this truth sees a territory opened before him which he approaches with the greatest hesitation. He is now confronted with the necessity of conveying to his patient the healing fiction, the meaning that quickens—for it is this that the patient longs for, over and above all that reason and science can give him. The patient is looking for something that will take possession of him and give meaning and form to the confusion of his neurotic mind. Is the doctor equal to this task? To begin with, he will probably hand over his patient to the clergyman or the philosopher, or abandon him to that perplexity which is the special note of our day. As a doctor he is not required to have a finished outlook on life, and his professional conscience does not demand it of him. But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?

What is to be done? I for one am not holding my breath for the restoration of the Catholic Magisterium⁷ or the dawn of a global workers’ paradise. What’s left, realistically, is to accept the situation, however unsatisfactory, tel quel.

I’d recommend believers heed Alan Jacob’s frequent admonitions not to indulge in self-pity but to face the lions with the courage of your convictions. For those of us unable to rely on faith, I’d naturally suggest turning to Iris Murdoch for inspiration.⁸ In her essay Existentialists and Mystics, a veritable tour de force first published in 1970, Murdoch, inter alia, provides an historical overview of the 19th and 20th century novel; makes the case for the greatness of Shakespeare; summarises the moral arguments in The Sovereignty of the Good; seriously considers the “profound and rather unnerving question” of whether literature can survive the disappearance of religious belief; suggests that maybe “in the end the novelist will prove to be the saviour of the human race”; and even questions the ultimate importance of her own moral standards for art:

The novelist is potentially the greatest truth-teller of them all, but he is also a fantasy-monger. This is too cosy an art form not to be often degraded in the interests of the self-indulgent fantasy of both the writer and the reader. As far as we can see into the human future there will doubtless be bad novels, cheering people up and probably not doing them too much harm. It is an index of the fears that sometimes haunt one that even an endless vista of bad novels seems so happy and so humane a prospect.

Replace “novel” with “TV series” and this is an apt description of our cultural moment — and a good reminder that the defects of liberal consumerism is infinitely preferable to tyranny and famine.

The mounds of mind-numbing bullshit that continue to be peddled under the labels of self-help and self-care should not discourage us from cultivating self-reliance and self-respect. But rather than striving to release the god within, we may be better off realising that we are, as Mary Midgley put it, “some kind of animal”. And we might as well give up the fantasy that we can do it all ourselves, as Sartre explained in his introduction to No Exit (my loose translation):

It has been believed that I meant [by the phrase Hell is Other People] that our relations with others are always poisoned, always infernal. I wanted to say something very different: if our relations with others are tortured, we can be nowhere else but in hell. Why? Because, at bottom, other people are what is most important within ourselves for the proper understanding of ourselves. When we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge that others already have about us. We judge ourselves through the means that others have given us.

Or as they say where I come from: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

To a pro-human 2024!

1. OK, some more personal favourites of the year, if you insist:

Film: Past Lives by Celine Song

Album: Something To Give Each Other by Troye Sivan

Essay: Taylor Swift does not exist by Sam Kriss

TikTok: internet princess

Iris Murdoch novel: The Black Prince

Book by someone other than Murdoch or Pistelli: The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

City visited: Porto

It has been a good year.

2. I’m rooting for John’s expansive imagination, though I fear due to various congenital and self-induced cognitive limitations, alt lit 2.0 is a more realistic aim for moi.

3. I might write in more length about this later, but as a provisional coda to my two posts on psychedelics, I’ll provide a rude schema of the various forms of magical thinking (sensu Didion) that the use of psychoactive substances may encourage:

1. ego-inflation (from Messiah complexes to full-blown solipsism)

2. techno-utopianism (summarised by Leary as SMI²LE: space migration, intelligence squared and life extension)

3. orientalist spiritualities (Huxley’s perennial philosophy, Watt’s panentheism, the Jewish Buddhism of Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg)

4. accelerationisms of various sorts (including queer totalitarianism à la Sophie Lewis)

5. Gaia worship (from Lin’s “Nature is not cruel” to Just Stop Oil iconoclasm)

6. Jungian and post-Jungian psychoanalytic obsessions (from the sensemaking of Jordan B Peterson and John Vervaeke to the trauma-centrism of Bessel van Der Kolk and Gabor Maté)

I acknowledge a partial overlap with the categorisation used in Helen Lewis’s excellent BBC radio documentary series The New Gurus, whose first episode is on the über guru Steve Job’s psychedelic mission to put a device for enlightenment in the hands of every unsuspecting man, woman and child.

I would describe most of these beliefs as “near enemies of the truth”, a useful Buddhist term I learnt from the serious tantric scholar (that’s not a joke) Christopher D. Wallis. His book is a much-needed corrective to the many distorted teachings being hawked in the spiritual marketplace, including “follow your bliss”, “love yourself”, “everything happens for a reason” and “you create your own reality”. Perhaps his most important piece of advice to spiritual seekers (and I think many, if not all, psychonauts fall into this category) is the following:

Contrary to what many assume, spiritual awakening does not come with a built-in moral code (morality being, after all, a social construct), nor does it automatically bring about psychological maturity. For this reason, people who want to have a healthy psyche must do psychological work in addition to their spiritual work. Surprisingly few people realize this, despite abundant examples of gurus and teachers who experientially realized essence-nature (the fundamental truth of our collective being) and/or realized the truth of nonduality but never did psychological work on themselves or educated themselves about social issues.

4. Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three.

I do not disagree with the following statement by Scialabba sensu stricto:

Although untrammeled sexual freedom is not a requirement of human flourishing, any more than the untrammeled freedom to accumulate money, untrammeled intellectual freedom most certainly is.

However, I do want to take umbrage at how breezily us sexual deviants are thrown under the bus with the gazillionaires (I’m sure that is not what Scialabba meant, but unfortunately things often end up that way after the revolution). And I’m no historian, but to my knowledge states that take a prurient interest in the sexual and financial affairs of their citizens are not as a rule the biggest champions of freedom of thought. Granted, this review essay was published in 2007, but Scialabba’s politics do not appear to have shifted much in the interim.

Of course, government censorship is by this point completely redundant given the alacrity with which writers on this very platform are willing to relinquish freedom of speech rather than deal with the unpleasant consequences of this human right. And while I can perhaps forgive nice white ladies for not being able to imagine ever running into trouble with the morality police, I would have thought that being an object of ridicule and disgust for a sizeable portion of the population would have made queers allergic to censoriousness, but, no, the rainbow commissars appear to sincerely believe that they can create Plato’s Republic with added DEI.

This is also what I find frustrating about the drug debate. If freedom is not considered a value in itself, one may very well come to a different conclusion on societal risks and benefits. But I’d ask our communitarian friends to consider carefully whether or not they would prefer an approach closer to that taken by South Korea — a society even more reluctant than the decadent West to continue the human experiment.

On the question of liberty, I believe that it is time to go back to basics. Judith Shklar’s The Liberalism of Fear might be a good start.

5. This is also my main concern about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

6. Curtis is a genius at combining archival footage, eerie background music and suggestive historical anecdotes to spin a yarn. However, I never finished his 2021 series Can’t Get You Out of My Head — I was baffled by the attempt to relate the role that Mao’s wife played in the Cultural Revolution to the Western turn from 60s radicalism to 70s individualism.

7. Especially since the Church seems to be in the process of tearing itself apart on the question of how far universal brotherly love should go.

8. I recognise that for a neoblog named in honour of the Dame, there has been shamefully scant content on Murdoch (blame my fat, relentless ego and the ghost of Simone Weil), but hopefully this thoughtful Xmas gift from my wonderful gen Z boyfriend will inspire me to remedy that.