8

WILL TO POWER

“What will you be when you grow up?” is a prime cultural “guilter.” The fantasy response of childhood grows into a survival issue in adolescence. Refusal to accept and respond to this question brings on threats of lifetime recriminations.

The question implies that whatever one is, a child, preadolescent, or adolescent, he is in an incomplete, temporary stage of significance only as it points ahead. The question denies the moment and focuses on a future. Further, the question implies that without the pursuit to become something (such as one of the myriad adult images offered by culture) one will have no being. Indeed, it implies that one has no being. Being, it seems, must be attained.*18

This question as accusation happens to the child at about the same age in all cultures. The question, implying inauthenticity of one’s present state, links with the loss of self to the persona mask occurring in adolescence. The young person is easily guilted by the question, “What will you be?” since he is unsure of what he is. (He may have been told in Sunday School that he is a “child of God,” but this notion, dropped in a brief hour once a week, is overwhelmingly denied by the whole social fabric the rest of the week.)

The question falls on fertile soil and plays on a rich network of fear and anxiety. Identity is withheld by the question. Granting the young person a stable place is held out in front of him as a carrot before the donkey.

Persuading him to accept the inauthenticity of his natural state and move from centeredness to the peripheries of a social semantic has been the job of education to this point. Education’s task then becomes persuading the young person to choose an image of what he might become, from those images currently needed by the society. Then education “prepares” him to pursue that image. The first quarter to one-third of one’s life is devoted to preparing for one’s chosen illusion.

This image pursuit fulfills the earlier persona mask, which has been secret if conscious at all. The chance is given to convert this covert energy into an overt performance granted sanction by society.

Archaic cultures had a ready-made choice and a ritualized mode for becoming the clearly defined cultural image. The codified procedures of the rites of passage kept the cyclic culture intact and ensured prediction and control. One served a stylized preset culture with stylized, preset acts. A minimum of ambiguity or variation, as well as a minimum of anxiety concerning one’s “identity,” existed.

As the mask effect of the social ego takes over the child of our culture, his “identity” shifts to a semantic context. Homeostasis must find stable placement in a semantic reality. The authentic is that which offers cultural sanction, and the drive for personal authenticity is a drive for ego-image verification by other people. This drive continues usually into the mid-thirties at least. By then, success or failure in becoming one’s mask and winning authenticity is usually played out.

The child is “ego centered” without being “selfish.” His world simply generates from him and is complete. The child doesn’t have to become anything. He already is. The question, “What will you be?” can only be formulated by a split-mind culture and can only be inflicted on a mind finally split. By being denied identity until such hypothetical time as one shall win “self-verification,” one’s life energy must give over to the culture.

Our culture, in distinction from more archaic ones, offers a rich variety of personal-image projections for pursuit. These change according to the needs of a flexible culture. The more gifted are offered “careers” on a graded scale of salvation. These avenues of pursuit are culture. The drive for such attainments is the life of the culture.

The pursuit of adult verification links with the earlier buffer shield. The life investment of self, energy, time, attention, and hope of fulfillment creates a buffer effect. Such activity is the only real “insulator” against despair. The hope of attainment keeps one’s energies focused and staves off a confrontation with the split of mind.

Heretofore the bulk of this guilt procedure fell on the males of our culture. Female authenticity was more concrete and almost assured. A pseudo-rite of passage for females sufficed until most recently and still holds in conservative areas. Highly romanticized and ritualized, this rite had three clearly defined steps: 1) engagement—stamp of authentic desirability: 2) marriage—authentic femininity: 3) motherhood—final sanction with archetypal fertility status.

Actual arrival was largely automatic for most women, as it was and is almost automatically impossible for men. The procedure produced its own anxiety for women, however, since failure in this domain left few avenues open. And in a world where females outnumber males, particularly after the periodic and regular cyclic round of wars, an underlying frustration has existed. Increasingly, the sanctioned state of motherhood itself has been found dust and ashes, too, cloaked by sentiment as it may be. The bitter status of women has been evident throughout all the cultures, from Aborigine on down.

Perhaps as a result of “universal education” and “intellectual achievement,” the female was inadvertently hooked into the same inauthenticity accusations as the male. (No more simple home economics and maybe some shorthand and typing: science, technology, and math are for everyone.) Thus the necessary authenticity-pursuit syndrome being induced into the male hooked the female as well.

This has had disruptive effects, typical of the often hilarious irrationalities of culture. We see the feminine-liberation movement reject a fairly stable image-authenticity procedure for the extremely heartbreaking illusion crippling the male.

The search for image verification implements and complements the cultural grid of data screening. The data for verification of one’s image of self must come from the cultural context, from consensus. The “other person” and the whole social context is always seen through a grid of apparent survival needs. Each of us functioning in this way is the actual drive for prediction and control as we strive to attain and maintain our culturally created image.

Image verification operates on two levels: the long-range goals of “career” or life investment and the immediate short-term needs for immediate-context image feedback. Homeostasis still drives for stable placement of self and can never relax, since the semantic context consists only of ego centers each trying to achieve identity or stable placement.

We demand self-verification from those important to us—which means those we think might fill our verification need. We try to maneuver this “other” into compliance with our grid. This “other,” of course, has the same grid functioning driving him. Grids function identically, though each is unique to the individual’s experience. So grid needs vary, and human relations are made of continual clashes of survival needs. Each subtly tries to outmaneuver the other and gain compliance.

Should two grids coincide on a sufficient number of need points (which generally means that two people find their as-if performances complementary), a “happy” relation may result—even marriage. Positive feedback is simultaneously given both. Positive feedback changes grid needs, however, and diminishes the need for and will finally dispose of that kind of grid. Sooner or later, as a result, each of us “fails the other” in this world of images. And each of us senses these failures to be a breakdown in our insulation against despair. We then “suffer a depression.” (Antidepressants are the chemical rage among the cultural priests.)

Depression is disappointment of a predicted goal, and all goals are buffers to despair. Everyone knows chronic depressions on a wide scale, since goal prediction, attainment, and then collapse, or nonattainment and shift of goal, is the modus operandi of culture. Either way lies “depression.” When depression threatens a total rupture of one’s buffers to despair, depression becomes a serious medical concern. For annihilation of one’s buffers to despair is annihilation of one’s cultural orientation. So avoidance of depression is achieved by the continual buffering of our insulators. This leads to the active, indeed, increasingly hyperactive busyness that we call “progress.”

The cultural process produces a split and then offers the ameliorative. The ameliorative can never be attained since the entire affair exists in the imagination of a split mind. The products of depression cannot alleviate depression any more than gravity can do other than its own thing. All pursuits and all grids move for a wholeness that lies outside such pursuits. Positive feedback attainments never alleviate the underlying need, so new pursuits or grids must be adopted.

A kind of pseudo-verification by a process of default or elimination often occurs. After the young person has played his hand, rushing out on the “stage of life,” clamoring for attention and verification for his image act, and, if need be, shifting from image to image, he will often collapse inwardly into quiet resignation. He docilely sinks into the nearest niche of least resistance and quits. At that point the cultural sifting process will have attained its quota of “winners,” and the amorphous mass of losers, necessary to sustain the system, are then accorded a kind of booby prize. One’s social context (predominantly one’s family) then may reward the loser with “Ah. At last he has found himself and settled down.” Down it is indeed. This often occurs in the mid-thirties, a time when a peculiar tendency for heavy, compulsive drinking has been noted.