Adult moralists are always angry people. The more the moralist is confronted with
sloppy old experience, the more hysterical he or she becomes. We all get hysterical, but some of us lighten
up and come to our senses more often than others. Some of us operate from hysterical moralism
most of the time. Famous political
moralists like Joseph McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, J. Edgar Hoover, and Hitler are
great prototypes of the disease in our culture.
More lawyers come to me for therapy than do members
of any other profession, and it's not coincidence, since so much of their
training is to learn to live by rules. One
important rule they try to live by is that the proper way to be angry is to
have a fight using the rules. They often
try to do this in their private lives, with complete lack of success. Perpetual arguing to convince others of the
Tightness of your case doesn't work worth a damn in personal relationships, and
we all know it but can't seem to stop.
A law school education emphasizes the idiocy already
built in by the culture. Law school
begins with memorizing torts - formally learning the cases from the past and
the principles they represent - and it gets worse as it goes on. After three years of law school a graduate
usually takes the next step toward a law career: the bar exam for which he or
she has to take a cram course to memorize cases, principles, generalizations,
and values.
When the exam is administered, the potential member
of the bar knows in advance that he or she must score in the upper fifty
percent of those taking the exam or fail. In the District of Columbia
However, they will not tell you the new grade until
after the next bar exam has been administered. If you want to be sure you can go to work as a
lawyer, you had better take the exam again even though you may have passed
already. This is to teach you a lesson:
do what you're told, no matter how ridiculous or unfair, if you want to be a
lawyer. This continues, year after year,
with the only apparent purpose being to make sure you have really learned to
kiss ass in the culturally approved way.
Having passed the bar, if you are a high achiever,
you then typically do a three to seven year stint of working 70 to 80 hours a
week for a law firm trying to "make partner." After you have proven, through many additional
trials, that you have learned to kiss ass in all circumstances, you may make
partner. By the time you make partner
you are a workaholic, so you keep up the pace out of habit, but also because
you don't know what in the hell else to do in life but work and count
principles.
This is the group from which we choose our political
representatives. This is where judges
come from. Though the learned disease of
moralism is rampant in all professions, the middle-aged lawyer is the
quintessential prototype for this disease. Lawyers are the best representatives of the
way people are today. They are the mind
of our culture.
One of the things that helps this disease of moral
hysteria to progress is detachment from identification of ourselves as our
experience. Hard physical work for the
sake of survival used to keep more people in touch with the world of being. As life becomes less toil and more thinking
and problem-solving, there is less opportunity to have one's attention called
forth from the mind by more immediate demands of survival on a day-to-day
basis. The gap created by lack of
grounding in our experience leaves us dependent on ideas, principles, rules,
values, and imagination as our primary modes of orientation.
These
ideas and values are tightly held in the same way an adolescent grasps onto
roles when he joins a gang or becomes a Christian or a Hare Krishna or falls in
love and gets married in high school. Without
roles and rules, we fear we will lose control of ourselves. We will go crazy. We will lose our minds. The more intensely these rules and roles are
defended; the further removed from grounding in experience the individual
becomes.
After
enough practice at role-playing and idealism, our whole way of orienting
ourselves in the world depends on principles of orientation rather than
on the ability to respond as needed based on what we perceive. This moralism, this web of entrapment of
human aliveness, is a crippling disease. We all have it. It is terminal. It cannot be cured. It's a hell of a lot worse than herpes. It is as deadly as AIDS. It is in our schools. It is in our minds. It is in the bloodstream of our culture.
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