CHAPTER 12: A Simple Question

 

How Can We Heal or Replace the Collective Mental Illness Called

Corporate Capitalist Civilization?

 

"Symptoms may shift and particular forms of dis-ease may be exchanged for others. The basic condition remains. Transformation of society is the only real cure."

—George Leonard

What follows here is George Leonard's description of the work of Fritz Perls, who trained me in Gestalt therapy, and whose work is central to the work I do with individuals, couples, families, and groups, and from which Radical Honesty is an extension.

To begin to answer the mega question—what's the big idea? —that makes up the primary focus of this third section of the book, I want to focus on some smaller questions that lead us to information usable in creating the big answer. The questions for the beginning of this chapter and for the beginning of some dialogue and deliberation sessions among us, as we continue to think this thing through together, are:

How can we integrate into ongoing life in society the same kind of opportunity for family or institutional growth as we are capable of offering for personal growth for individuals? (How do we have an ongoing growing therapeutic community?)

Can ongoing opportunities for the re-enlightenment for citizens be designed into society itself (ongoing education and renewal)?

Can personal growth and spiritual renewal, having to do with the primacy of observing, noticing, describing, and sharing—over thinking—be converted into a collective therapeutic transformation of society itself? Is there a therapeutic social renewal that repeats itself, one which renews the perspective on life for participants in the society?

To answer these more general questions about a new therapeutic social order we need to start by taking a good look at how psychotherapy works at an individual level. So as background, to shed light on all these questions, here is George Leonard talking about Fritz Perls.

George Leonard on Fritz Perls1

Frederick S. Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, was a master showman. He was also a master craftsman. Even his critics have had to grant that he could get to the heart of a neurosis with stunning speed and accuracy. We are not privileged to view Freud at work with his patients. Even if electronic recording devices had been widely available in his time, Freud's mode of treatment probably would have precluded their use. Perls, on the other hand, believed that the presence of a group or even a large audience is necessary, for one thing, to keep the therapist honest.

Thousands of people watched him work, and his sessions were recorded on hundreds of hours of tape, videotape, and film before his death in 1970. His dreamwork demonstrations were particularly spectacular, since he would work with his "victim" before a sizable audience, making explanatory asides at key points in the procedure much in the manner of a surgeon describing a tricky operation to a group of medical men in a surgical theater. Those in the audience could see, in a few minutes, just how much a person loves his neurosis, how desperately he clings to it, how cunningly he manipulates the environment to keep it propped up, how he will resort to charm, humor, intelligence, deafness, blindness, dumbness, confusion, pity, outrage, amnesia, anything to avoid the loss of this, his most precious possession, his adored disease.

[I will insert commentary occasionally in parentheses referring to the analogy between social structures and personality structures. What George Leonard refers to here is at the heart of Fritz Perls brand of gestalt therapy. Entropy, or resistance to change of something one is attached to whether it is functional or not, is as true of the institutions of society as of suffering, self-torturing individuals. We have our collective conspiracies to keep things the same whether they work or not—take Congress, for example—please! People en masse are as attached to resisting social structural change as they are to changing their individual neuroses. —Brad]

A pleasant sense of anticipation pervaded the dining room at Esalen Institute on the California Coast on those nights when Perls was scheduled to give one of his demonstrations. Tables were quickly cleared away. A partition was moved to expand the gallery where he would perform. Chairs were set up and a fire was built in the large brick fireplace at the end of the room. As soon as the doors were opened the room would fill to overflowing. Perls, an Old Testament prophet in a white jump suit, would take his place on a low platform near the fireplace. In addition to his easy chair, the platform was provided with two empty straight chairs—one the "hot seat" for the victim, the other a place where the victim would sit while enacting one of the phantom cast of characters with which he keeps his neurosis alive and active.

After a brief talk, Perls would ask for volunteers. About a third of the hundred or so people present generally would raise their hands, eager to be diagnosed, dissected, and stripped of their most intimate pretenses before curious onlookers. A victim would mount the platform, take the hot seat, and start to describe a dream. Perls would miss nothing. He would find clues, not just in the cognitive content of the words, but in the voice, the gestures, the breathing, and the posture. Sometimes he would make the victim aware of what his hands were doing, and then ask for a dialogue between the right and the left.

Sometimes, hearing different tones of voice in different situations, he would create a dialogue between, for instance, the victim's whining voice and his domineering voice. The victim would move from one chair to the other as he played the two parts. The dream itself would come alive in a reconstituted present tense. Instead of talking about the people and things in the dream, the victim would be asked to become each person and thing; the dream, after all, is entirely his and every element in it some aspect of his being.

Perls often commented that a neurotic is someone who does not see the obvious. He would make the obvious explicit, then cut off the escape routes the victim may have painstakingly and cleverly maintained over the years. Relentlessly, Perls would follow the trail that leads directly to the neurosis. If the victim began trembling, Perls would have him "go into" the trembling, exaggerate it, personify it. He would never shy away from the victim's anxiety or terror; he took this to be a very good sign that he was nearing a neurotic center.

Finally the moment would come when the victim's escape routes were entirely cut off, when all the props that had supported the neurosis had been knocked out. Perls called this moment "the impasse." Here the victim is offered the opportunity for an existential leap past the neurosis, a sort of death of the ego structure and a rebirth, however temporary, into a state of pure being in the here and now. The impasse is a moment of high drama. Getting past it demands a headlong dive into unfamiliar waters.

Once Perls brought a heavy stammerer to the impasse by having him increase his stammer. As he stammered, Perls asked him what he felt in his throat. "I feel like choking myself," he answered. Perls gave him his arm and said, "Now, choke me." "God damn," the man said, "I could kill you." As his anger became explicit, his stammer disappeared. He spoke loudly, without difficulty. Perls pointed out that he now had an existential choice, to be an angry man or a stammerer.

These short demonstrations were by no means cures. But they were often remarkably powerful. They cast doubt on the efficacy, and the real function, of the five-year long, five-day-a-week therapies.

I once saw Perls bring a handsome and ingratiating young man to his impasse in a period of about fifteen minutes. Within ten minutes it was perfectly obvious to everyone in the room except the victim that he was keeping himself in a constant condition of dis-ease with a fear—clearly a false fear—of homosexuality. He was unwilling to confront this simple fact. His chief escape modes, his ways of squirming around the truth, were charm and humor. Fritz cut these out from under him. There was a tiger in the young man's dream, snarling and clawing up at him from a deep ditch. But when he became the tiger, the snarls and threats were less than frightening. The tiger was paper. The fear was false.

We may balk at accepting the fact that a person wouldn't be quite happy to realize that his worst fear is false. But that is almost always the case when it is part of a neurosis. As the charming young man was brought closer and closer to the truth, he was overcome with dismay. His once mobile, ingratiating countenance became blank. His memory failed. He couldn't hear what Perls was saying to him. At this point Perls turned to the audience and, in a classic aside, murmured, "Ah, the impasse!" The victim broke through in a flood of tears.

The next morning, I met the young man walking on the edge of the cliff by the sea. His face was transformed, no longer ingratiating or "charming." His smile was fresh and real. He had the soft, tremulous, vulnerable look of one reborn. And all this from one fifteen-minute demonstration. How often I have seen that look on the faces of friends and family who have had the good fortune to experience the little transformations that are offered at Esalen. I have seen how beautiful people can be. And I have seen that beauty fade within a period of weeks after reentry into the world we so thoughtlessly call "real."

One Friday evening in the autumn of 1967, I came home to find a stranger sitting in the middle of my living room rug. I recognized him soon enough as one of my closest friends, Leo Litwak, who had driven straight from Big Sur after a five-day encounter experience with William Schutz. Litwak's early years as child of a labor leader in Detroit had been far from tranquil. His World War II service as a medic with General George Patton's forces in Europe was by all odds the most harrowing I had ever heard. These formative experiences, along with his long study of Western philosophy, had contributed to a habitual expression that lay between sadness and skepticism. But now he simply shimmered. His eyes—there is no other way to say it—were like stars. When he rose to embrace me, I had an impression of a butterfly just emerging from a cocoon—moist, trembling, and unquestionably newborn. Later, Litwak described his experience for The New York Times Magazine. The article has since appeared in over a dozen anthologies and remains one of the very best written on a subject that generally defies graceful description. Its final paragraph speaks directly to the subject of this chapter: The condition of vulnerability is precious and very fragile. Events and people and old routines and old habits conspire to bring you down. But not all the way down.

There is still the recollection of that tingling sense of being wide-awake, located in the here and now, feeling freely and entirely, all constraints discarded. It remains a condition to be realized. It could change the way we live. I, too, have experienced that tingling sense of being wide-awake. And I have felt it fade under the relentless, often unrealized pressures of daily existence. Much criticism of some of the early Esalen-type experiences [Gestalt, encounter, sensory awakening —Brad] has centered on the proposition that they "don't last."

Of course they don't last. It becomes painfully obvious that no one can live safely and successfully in civilized society without some kind of going numb defense. [The words are George Leonard's, the italics mine. —Brad] This is the heart of the matter for both individual personality change from dysfunctional to functional. It is the place where social change and personal change are intimately related.

It is also obvious that some sort of long-term psychotherapy is needed to effect what is generally termed a "cure" for a neurotic condition. The Esalen experiences, despite some popular misunderstanding, were never meant to "cure" people who consider themselves "sick." But let us ask what the usual long-term therapy really accomplishes. It certainly does not take very long to isolate a neurosis and cast it out. Perls, among others, has demonstrated this point again and again. Diagnosing and casting out neuroses, however, is by no means the basic function of most psychotherapy. According to Perls, "Anybody who goes to a therapist has something up his sleeve. I would say roughly 90 percent don't go to a therapist to be cured, but to be more adequate in their neurosis."

Let us at least consider this possibility: that the main function of the conventional therapies is not curing the patient of neurosis, but helping him build, polish, tune up, and test a new neurosis to replace the old. The new neurosis will continue to keep the patient discontented with his own being [so that he will be successful in civilization—Brad]), but it will do so in a manner that is more acceptable to himself and those around him.

[So becoming acceptable enough to fit into a sick society is a primary goal of the conspiracy between therapist and client. Clearly, in the realm of politics and social change the same principle applies. —Brad]

What Can We Do to Heal Ourselves of the Social Disease Called Corporate Capitalist Civilization?

This ending insight by George Leonard that the main purpose of conventional therapies are to make people stay sick enough to maintain civility (and thus civilization), do their jobs, and keep their mouths shut. Why can't we just up and decide to remake civilization so people are not so ill and unhappy trying to force themselves to fit? Could we possibly reform civilization through healing people of the effects of civilization and have them pass it on, and renew it on an ongoing basis? How could we have this work on personal growth provided for citizens and have it result in the evolution of culture?

One possible design for deepening organized community living and making our whole social life more gratifying, growing and self healing in every way is to develop community and personal health models that support each other. How do we do this? How do we heal people both individually and collectively at almost the same time?"

Gene Marshall and I have been talking about this…

Gene: The face-to-face work that you do and I do is so important in enabling real changes in personal lives.

However, I want to dialogue further with you about social-change vision, strategy, and action.

Brad: Thanks Gene!

The vision of a possible and viable future seems first to require an acknowledgement of what didn't work or no longer works. Then we need proposals and experiments to invent/discover some new ways for humans to live together—and for consciousness to enhance, rather than wipe out the living conditions of people and other living beings.

Gene: On this we entirely agree.

Brad: Given that all diagnoses are reductionist, we have to use the best combinations of simplistic thinking to undermine faith in what used to work, or the way things used to work, and demythologize the past. In individual and couple's therapy participants have to come to the impasse where they acknowledge that continual persistence in trying to make the unworkable work has to be given up on. I think when you talk about how to throw a monkey wrench into the "machine" of social habit so we all have a "wrenching experience" is good for our mutual disenchantment and the opportunity for mutual new beginnings. And I agree that having diagnosed what is now dysfunctional, whether or not it once was, we need to spread the word of the possibility for renewal. And now that we can predict the likely downfall or destruction of our form of life if we persist in our old ways, we need to come up with a vision for a functional, less destructive model that is not just reactionary (to tribal times) or excluding of the advances of deadly civilization. We want to hold on to certain scraps from the demise of what once worked, but works no more, to cannibalize, if we can, certain still useable parts, like electricity, for example. And that is what I would like to have more dialogue about

Gene: Me too.

Brad: As you know, I am fascinated with the healing potential of deep democracy based on honest sharing. And I am convinced that co-hearted co-intelligence in a context of honesty is a cut or two deeper than being civilized in the usual obedient neurotic survivalist mode. And I think the egalitarianism of being to being sharing that creates the possibility of co-hearted co-intelligence and everyone participating in inventing and modifying new social forms on an ongoing basis, is the best game in town. That's why we are discussing co-consciousness, or the love that nurtures and kills and renews, as the fundamental path to psychological as well as social healing.

Co-consciousness that comes from co-operation and co-facilitation, mutual honesty, forgiveness, and support for change like that provided in AA and similar groups is a fine model for social reform. This means, I think, people getting used to being in charge one day and a servant of others in charge the next, while life flows on. We had this for a while in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the Sixties, and for a while in the Seventies all over the country. We were renewed, awake, happy, and making new social reforms on an hourly basis then. In hopes that recalling what it was like to be in a climate of social reform based on liberation from pre-existing frames of mind, here is an excerpt from my autobiography, Some New Kind of Trailer Trash (Sparrowhawk Press, 2011):

I was in San Francisco at the Peace Rally at Kezar Stadium, and in the march to the stadium and away from the stadium. This was at beginning of the massive protests against the war in Vietnam and the spark that was the start to what became the summer of love in Haight-Ashbury that year.

I don't know how we did it except by sheer numbers. We were many tens of thousands strong and we were fed up with all the bullshit about the war and anti-communism and a dozen other things about conventional society and we had experienced altered states of consciousness and we knew that we knew things people older than us just didn't know. We were people who could not be dominated by conventional forces, and the police and the government didn't really know what to do with us. So they made agreements with us to keep the peace. We made a deal with the cops that they would remain entirely outside the stadium while we had our rally and concert inside. We didn't want to be interfered with for smoking pot, being too loud, getting out of hand, cursing the fucking establishment, or any goddamned, jack leg fucking excuse the cops might come up with to interfere with us.

Everyone was there from The Fillmore—Janice, The Dead, The Airplane… and many more. There was a big bandstand in the middle of the stadium with sound that reverberated throughout. There were 70,000 hippies packed in there. As we walked among the bleachers to find a seat, people handed us a joint and we'd take a toke and hand it to the next person down the row. Then we would take a toke from the next person and pass it on to the the next person. The whole damned stadium had a cloud of marijuana smoke inside and above it. It was a peace rally as well as an anti-war rally. Everyone was high and everyone was happy. Everyone was dancing and the stadium was rocking, and I do mean rocking—shaking, bouncing, moving, and maybe near to collapsing. We were in there four or five hours—all afternoon.

When the concert, speeches, dancing, and singing were over, we streamed out of there and headed for the park and Haight-Ashbury. As we streamed toward the Haight there were a few people walking toward us though the flow of people—the Provos (They were a group that started in Amsterdam, just creating social services for people in general for free—like putting out bicycles and maintaining them so people could just ride all over town and leave the bikes wherever they got to and someone else who needed to go somewhere else could take it and go). The Provos were wearing big black hats like Abraham Lincoln used to wear, and they took them off and turned them up to collect money. They held out their hats and said, "If you need money take some. If you have money put some in."

People were doing that. And it worked! People who had money put it in and people who needed some took it out. Every hippy in San Francisco had food and a place to stay that night! We made sure of it! And for a while there, at least through that summer (I went back later in "the summer of love" for a about a month), there was an economy of love and sharing that really worked. I can't tell you how wonderful it was.

My brother Jimmy was living there then, too, and many friends of mine from Texas. Everyone rode free bycicles to wherever they were going and dropped them off there, and others took them and went where they wanted. The Provos re-distributed bikes and repaired them and kept things going. People hitchhiked all over the city and all over California. If you had a car, you gave people rides. If you wanted to go somewhere, you went out on the road and stuck your thumb out.

Sometimes, traveling during those days, people would give everything they owned to each other. I had a hitchhiker in a car I was driving say to me, "I think I'll leave you this back pack. I've had it for a while." I said, "Great, take mine," and he did.

Once me and my friend Jim were driving up to Mendocino from San Francisco and we picked up a hitchhiker who was headed for Las Vegas. He told us he was going to see his mom who was very sick. When we got to the turn off toward Nevada, Jim pulled over, reached into the glove box, took out the title to the car, signed it, and handed it to the hitchhiker. He said, "I think your need to see your mom is more pressing than any we have. You take the car. We'll hitch the rest of the way." And we did.

Once, at another time (I can't remember all the times completely clearly because I was stoned a lot. That's why we say, "If you remember the 60's you must not have been there."), I was down somewhere south of Big Sur, off Highway One, a few miles up a creek called Bear Creek. There were a bunch of people there (from a dozen to about twenty as the group ebbed and flowed) without any clothes on all day and all night. We would sleep in sleeping bags under the open air or sometimes in tents. Every day at about noon we would gather at the fire site and draw straws. Two people who got short straws would have to go put on some clothes and get the sack and the sign (the sign said, "FOOD"), and walk the couple of miles out to the highway and hold the sign up at one of the pulloffs. People would stop, we would drink a beer and smoke a joint with them, and they would leave something for us to put in the sack—something to eat or get high on.

At around five or six o'clock, the two people would bring the sack back, we would all open the cans, cut up the veggies, add a little water and salt and throw in the dope into the big cook pot over the fire. When it got hot, or it seemed the right time, we would eat the food and wait to see what happened to us. I remember one day when we woke up we had all the sleeping bags unzipped and either under us or over us covering everyone in the group. We thought we might have had an orgy the night before, but nobody could remember.

I remember meeting an ex-Episcopal priest there, who had just quit preaching and become a hippie. He was kind of making his way down Highway One in no particular hurry to get anywhere.

One night, there at Bear Creek, sitting around the fire talking and playing the guitar, at one of the lulls in the music I noticed the earring the fellow across from me had in his ear. "I like that earring," I said. "It looks good on you." He stood up, came over to me, and took another earring out of his pocket like the one he was wearing. He also had a needle. He stuck the needle through my ear, and inserted the earring. I thanked him, and laughed and bled a little. I kept that earring right there for several years.

You might say we were all very interested in the possibility of what could be a new way of living together for human beings. We didn't know what it would be, but we figured it was more a matter of discovery than thinking, so we went about investigating and researching alternative ways of living.

So this is a kind of hippy-dippy vision from me, a former stoner in Haight-Ashbury who lives alone in a tent on a hill from which he can see the downfall of man and the birth of "some new beast, it's time come round at last… stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born."

Gene: I love that poem. It has always been the monastics, contemplatives, and other outcasts of the current social consensus who live in a locus of consciousness that enables them to be relatively objective about both past and future and therefore create new possibilities that have long-range promise.

Brad: One mind in charge is usually a terrible thing, but a bunch of minds of people who love and are in love can correct the tendency of that one-minded way of being, and guard against the extremes of injustice of our learned, civilized, mentally ill ways of being.

So here is the simple question: What is the best governmental, economic, and educational structure for the ongoing re-creation of agreements, laws, standards, and modes of operation that maximizes the possibility of happiness, security, freedom, and love between and among human beings and their sentient contemporaries so that joy happens a lot throughout life for most sentient beings—and co-hearted, co-intelligent, co-consciousness rules?

Gene: Yes, you are describing a group of people that I call "the invisible league (or church)." It is invisible because no human being knows the boundaries of this league. But we discover one another from time to time and our co-hearted, co-intelligent, co-conscious conversations build the consensus that can be taught to the awakening masses and thereby empower cultural, political, and economic institutions, and change the course of history.

Brad: My vision is not clear, but it looks like government by a whole bunch of World Cafés in comedy clubs all over the world, televised and analyzed on the nightly news.

Gene: Here I want to insert a bit of caution. We must not confuse government with the invisible league. The governmental establishment is always "next to last," never the first part of society to embrace new innovations. Lincoln, for example, was not the first wave of slavery abolition, but the next to last. The last stage was cleaning up through law and order the stubborn minority who still resisted this massive change. The first stage is represented by people like Frederick Douglas and other abolitionists who slaved away during many earlier decades. This principle also applies to our current political situation. The Obama administration is the next to last stage of a set of change directions that are now a couple of decades old. The current invisible league is a decade or more ahead of what the Obama administration will be clear about or politically able to do.

Brad: Well, your analysis is eloquent and undoubtedly accurate as an understanding of how things have worked in the past. The problem is that there is an escalation of entropy here that we can't afford to let follow its natural course. Jeremy Rifkin, in The Empathic Civilization says that though we humans have become increasingly empathic, as we have evolved, because of many things that had us being with and learning more about each other. One thing, over the last hundred years or so, was electricity, which let us know so much more about each other and our commonality. But the very advances that made this possible have built up an entropic debt of such proportions that by the time we get to complete empathy or "atmospheric consciousness," we will have killed ourselves with the pollution from corporatocracy-controlled nation-states which created a deadly mess while creating the possibility of empathy. This is ironic to such a degree that we may only be able to exit laughing and crying at the same time. Real comedians are real tragedians anyway, and when the joke is so much on us we may just die laughing.

Mutually admired, appalled, laughed at, and taken with a grain of salt, we stumble on together, drunk on God, and occasional other substances. Cheerful Easy Laughter Church Court Legislature is in session, and they are discussing fart jokes on the way to modifying the interest rates and taxes for the next quarter, in preparation for building mass graves. My point is, either the invisible league catches up with the government (or the government speeds up in recognizing the wisdom of the invisible league) or we all die laughing and vice versa.

My view of the way around this hilarious tragic end to life as we know it is to structure into government an early warning system for creative, disruptive, but life-sustaining ideas.

As different World Cafés are conducted to focus on major questions, and ideas are brought forth, they are formulated into referenda for the public to vote up or down every six weeks. Those passed would be carried out by elected representatives who actually would get paid to serve the public for limited terms (no professional politicians). Sometimes the collective of people who come up with brilliant ideas get hired for a while longer and are assigned to manage bringing into being what they dreamed up. Then there could be referenda on what people think about the job they do and/or did once it is over. Talk shows and comedy routines would get the word out about what is in process and what's coming up in the way of referenda.

Gene: Here you are talking about the tactics of various organizations of the invisible league, not the government.

Brad: No, that would have been true in the past, but will no longer be true in the future. There would be two weeks of open voting on the Internet using fingerprint and voiceprint identification. In my vision, commentary is also requested and made public—blogged about and summarized on the news—over the course of the two weeks of open voting before the count is taken. Once everyone who wants to, votes something in, the comedy cafés and the short-term elected representatives hire, assign, and accept volunteers to do the job.

Gene: Now you are talking about governmental structures. But I do not trust Internet voting. I think we need to continue going to polling places, and every part of the voting process needs to be supervised carefully by people not just machines. Also, I have a preference for conventions as a replacement for ballot boxes wherever that is practical. Certainly this works well for electing delegates to state and national party conventions.

I have a wider point that is not clearly articulated so far in this dialogue. Government is a power structure using specific rules of law and order, punishments, and coercive force (where needed) to enforce the consensus that has already been arrived at through the democratic discussion we want to vastly increase and empower. We need democratically-founded government institutions to enforce the last stage of any progressive change as well as preserve previous progressive changes from being revoked. This governmental role is needed in spite of the fact any empowered government that does this job will be behind the times and, thus, act as a block to be overcome in making the next sequence of progressive changes. This, dynamic, I believe, is just a tragic given within human history.

Brad: I think this is brilliant and probably accurate, and still it seems very sad and fated to fail in this time of escalating crisis. And I don't want to accept it… I do think a better design could lessen the problem. I still want the invisible league to become visible much more quickly and it's benefits put into place more efficiently, and I want the maintainers of social order replaced more rapidly. Just because you have accurately described the way this has functioned in past history doesn't mean it must persist into the future. What if the invisible league governed?

Gene: These governmental-to-invisible-league relationships are not being clearly understood by the more libertarian and hippy-happy elements of the invisible league. If we want actually to win, we have to learn how to work this relationship realistically.

Brad: Well a lot of new thought has to be funny and brilliant and applicable quickly. Comedians rule! Everyone's a comedian! That can be our call to each other's arms!

Gene: Yes, comedians are crucial in the life of the invisible league. And governmental officials also need a broad sense of humor. But we have to describe the role of statesperson as something more than a comedian sort of role. It includes competent, courageous, careful, step-by-step decision-making within the always ambiguous, but deadly serious options of history.

Brad: Okay, I agree. We can keep a few serious noses to the grindstone. We can have committed, hard working people around as long as we can crack a lot of jokes about them, and replace them periodically when we thank them, retire them, and provide for them in gratitude. Thanks for this whole dialogue.