Why We Avoid Looking at the True Source of Our Problems
"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls."
One of my favorite novels is Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. The novel opens with Tommy Wilhelm (whose real name is Wilhelm Adler) meeting his father—a successful and admired physician—for breakfast at the Hotel Gloriana on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Tommy, who is in his forties, was blessed with good looks, but is nevertheless a total failure. His estranged wife hates him but refuses to divorce him, he recently lost his job, and he is almost completely broke. What little money he has left he decides to invest in the get rich quick scheme of an intriguing but obvious confidence man who calls himself “Dr. Tamkin.” Despite being a dubious character, Tamkin has a number of great lines, including the following:
Don't marry suffering the way some people do. They marry suffering. They eat with suffering. They sleep with suffering. And if they find some joy in their lives they think they're committing adultery.
Tommy’s father, Dr. Adler, is ashamed of his son, and Tommy is deeply wounded by it. Tommy knows he’s a failure, and though he occasionally catches a glimpse of self-awareness, true insight eludes him.
For example, part of him senses that Dr. Tamkin is a fraud, but he still can’t resist the spell of all the vivid and clever sounding things the “doctor” tells him. As Bellow put it:
His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.
He knows that he consistently makes mistakes, but he is incapable of grasping why he keeps making them, and thus resorts to existentialist philosophizing about it.
Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here.
When the pressure is really on under his father’s judging gaze, he resorts to blaming others.
She [his wife] just has fixed herself on me to kill me. She can do it at long distance. One of these days I’ll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her.
The short novel is laugh out loud funny and heartbreakingly sad at the same time.
Over the years I have known many characters who have reminded me of Tommy Wilhelm. I recently made a documentary film about a desperate, high-stakes gambler who grew up across the street from me. In my conversations with him about his life, I occasionally felt as Dr. Adler must have, gazing across that breakfast table, marveling that someone could make such a long series of bizarre decisions.
What all the Tommy Wilhelms I’ve known have had in common was an obstinate refusal to be alone and to examine themselves. It seemed they would go anywhere and occupy themselves with anything to avoid looking inward.
They turned to heavy alcohol and cocaine use, strippers, hookers, gambling, brawling, constant traveling and staying at expensive hotels and dining at expensive restaurants—anything apart from holding still and being alone. If they occasionally stayed at home, they binge watched a sensational and violent show on Netflix while knocking down three bottles of wine.
I had a charismatic young cocaine addict friend in Vienna whom I once asked,
“Do you think it lies within the realm of possibility for you spend one night at home in silence, perhaps taking a bath and reading a book or listening to classical music?”
He gazed at me intently for a few seconds and said, “No.”
He reminded me of Carl Jung’s famous dictum that “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid confronting their own souls.”
As I wrote in my post earlier today about America’s latest foreign policy adventure in Venezuela, it is in the nature of powerful central states to go abroad seeking conflict, drama, conquest, and booty and then to exult in the triumph.
Powerful states do this, it seems to me, because the spectacle of quickly vanquishing someone else—someone who has been characterized as a bad guy—enables us to continue avoiding looking at ourselves. This is what Jesus was talking about when he asked the rhetorical question, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye but don't see the log in your own.”
It seems to me that the United States is now having a Tommy Wilhelm moment. Reviewing reader comments on my post this morning, I am told that it was necessary to intervene in Venezuela and abduct Maduro because of the following:
His goons were pumping drugs into our country
His goons were tampering with our voting machines
He was in league with Soros and other globalist villains who are destroying the U.S.
Really? A Banana Republic dictator was responsible for our problems?
How about our people stop using cocaine? I’ve known dozens of coke sniffers. Without exception, they were spoiled, arrogant, self-indulgent twits who didn’t think the rules applied to them.
How about we erect our own voting machines, free of “Venezuelan tampering”? Wouldn’t that be a remarkable achievement for a nation whose top seven tech companies have a market capitalization of 22 trillion dollars.
How about the U.S. Justice department arrest George Soros or at least revoke his citizenship and declare him persona non grata in the U.S.?
Recently, I had to endure an extremely difficult circuit training session in which which our coach had us do all kinds of leg, abdominal, and posterior chain exercises that it would never occur to me to do on my own.
“These are so hard!” I told the trainer, and then joked, “Are you a fitness coach or a sadist?”
“I choose the exercises that none of you guys would do on your own. You don’t do them on your own because they’re hard, and it’s the hard stuff that you need to be doing.”
This, it seems to me, is the essence of the human condition. We spend so much of our lives avoiding looking inward, where the real source of our problems lies. We avoid the exercise of facing our own souls because it’s hard.
Grabbing Maduro is a good move, and it has nothing to do with a nation state having a "complex".
Why don't we institute voting that is truly secure? Because, tampering is how crooks secure their hold on power.
The USA is a great nation when its leaders are ethical and do not grab power. Unfortunately, many have done exactly the opposite. As a nation of law-abiders, citizens cannot just waltz in and seize offenders; there is a justice system. Problem is, it costs money, employs largely guild attorneys (who risk embargo for having the wrong client), and judges have taken a turn for the worse in their political activism on the bench. Those guard rails act as active filters and allow acceptable criminality to flourish while lawful citizens are kept on leashes.
When drug addicts roam the cities unmolested, then society has yielded to the criminals--common and political pros.
Taking down Maduro should neuter his narco regime and divulge the network of American pols, officers of the court, sheriffs, and corp execs who are on the books.
About time an American leader started taking out the trash.
This was the very thing I was talking to a friend about tonight maybe 30 minutes ago. I have been trying to look deep inside myself and spend time in quietness alone with God and the Word. Soul searching. I have throughout my life made poor decisions in relationships that turn out poorly in the end. I realize now it’s me. So my desire is to follow the Lord’s lead in my life. I want to make healthier choices and I am working towards it. I am in a woman’s group counseling and support group and it is helping so much. I am learning I am not alone. So we are all working in our own lives and together to grow and mature. Have more peace and joy in my life than I have had ever. Thank you Lord. Suffering with a purpose and grieving the loss and repenting for my part is very freeing. It frees me to hear God speak. Thank you Lord!