Dualism Rules: the importance of ritual and structure in the management of instinct (Or: “There are two sorts of people – one who says there are two sorts of people and another who doesn’t”
A weakness in what follows is that it merely re-states rather than proves its premise. In other words, it simply recycles what is assumed. Still, if Freud can do the same over fourteen volumes of the Pelican edition of his works, maybe it is acceptable to go with what rings true rather than is true.
Observation tells us, as Freud himself often began another speculative chapter, that some see the superficial binarism of new technology as a weak echo or projection of the primary, ineluctable binarism of human nature – the 0 of the bad and the 1 of the good. They would describe themselves as pragmatic realists and view those who believe in the possibility of a permanent transformation of the individual or of a culture from this primitive state into a unitary or non-binary whole as romantic optimists.
The unitarists, by contrast, see the binarists as perverse pessimists who somehow want to impose a regressive world view on others who have grown up, moved on and passed through to a more sophisticated, developed way of being and behaving. In practice, however, the binarist-pessimist who, like all pessimists, has insured himself or herself against disappointment, nevertheless has a weak glimmer of hope that the ego strengths of the individual and of the collective will most of the time be able to accommodate, bridge or in some way reconcile the two opposing forces or impulses of human nature. The unitarist-optimist, on the other hand, will often be dismayed by news of brutality, inhumanity or abuse because it tells him or her that the fantasy of transformation has not yet been realised. For the binarist, bad news or bad deeds are helpful information about human nature at its core; for the unitarist they are an attack.
The operating principle of the positive strand of binarism is that the fundamental, default state of human nature is dyadic and that, unrecognised and therefore unmanaged, it will produce binary thinking and duolithic social structures and constructs. In this way, the danger is that the Kleinian couplet of good-breast/bad-breast will lead on to me-you, us-them, in-out, safe-not safe (distinctions whose function is to protect the individual) and further to racial, religious, gender and political pairings such as black-white, purist-pluralist, Catholic-Protestant, Sunni-Shia, believer-infidel, capitalist-communist, deserving-undeserving, right-left, nationalist-collectivist and so on). For the individual, a failure to develop both the ego capacity and awareness to accommodate the shifting tectonic plates of this divided identity will lead at best to a chronic state of intrapsychic attrition, and at worst to a kind of psychic earthquake. And, similarly, societal, cultural or political failure to develop and maintain rituals and structures to reduce the pressure generated by necessary and built-in conflict carries the risk of widespread and violent upheaval. The more repressive and uni-cultural a society or country may be, the greater the eventual and unavoidable explosion will be.
These observations, topped up with a certain amount of intuitive hunch, indicate that people are primarily either agoraphobes or claustrophobes, it being difficult or perhaps impossible to have two conflicting neuroses at the same time. The Freudian tradition has it that the former fear separation from the mother while the latter fear being smothered or engulfed by the mother. This may have something in it but tracing problematic behaviour back to the mother runs the risk of an early loss of one’s audience. A less matricentric hypothesis would be that agoraphobes derive their sense of security from being and feeling enclosed while claustrophobes can only feel safe if there is a way out. The claustrophobe who knows the door is open is content and will not leave the room, whereas the agoraphobe will shut it. Thus they both remain in the same place but have taken different psychological routes to get to this position.
On the face of it, the consequences of belonging to one or other of these two camps would seem to be fairly trivial: either you are not too keen on wide open spaces or you feel uneasy in lifts or the tube. But these traits can be detected in the public sphere, the personal becoming the political as, given an opening, it generally does. Agoraphobes like certainty, claustrophobes prefer doubt - though the claustrophobe who is near the cusp of this particular schema struggles with the conundrum of how it is possible to be a strong believer in doubt. Freud, incidentally, was an agoraphobe and saw doubt as a form of neurosis. Jung, I suspect, was a claustrophobe: his theories opened up while Freud’s closed down. To look at it from a different angle, Freud was clever where Jung was wise.
Dilemma, equivocation and ambivalence are second nature to the claustrophobe, who sees decision as a prison. For agoraphobes, on the other hand, decisions are bricks in the structure of the sanctuary which they crave. They are also more troubled by dying than death, the finality of which offers a kind of comfort. Claustrophobes worry less about dying because they will at least still be travelling whereas death itself is a blank, impenetrable wall which instils horrors too profound to contemplate. Death, for them, is not a release but a capture.
For agoraphobes, God is their long-stop, there to tidy up when the terrestrial wicket-keeper takes his eye off the ball. Claustrophobes are generally agnostic, rather than atheist, preferring to hedge their bets. They have a morality, of course, but it’s a homely, equivocal and relativistic one. Agoraphobes like to plan, control and legislate. Claustrophobes prefer to see how things go and respond ad hoc. They are pragmatic, being interested in problems and how to manage them. They work phenomenologically – that is, they like to describe and observe, while agoraphobes are attracted to category and entity, and the complex typologies that naturally flow from this way of responding to the world. They tend to put other people in boxes because that is where they would like to be themselves. The claustrophobe feels relaxed and at home with fluidity, the agoraphobe with stasis.
Agoraphobes tend to believe in original sin, which often is what they believe may stalk or attack them in the wide open spaces of the social world. This is alien to the claustrophobe who tends to believe in the intrinsic good nature of people, hoping for the best but prepared to act if forced to. Should they become mentally ill, agoraphobes become paranoid and anxious, claustrophobes anxious and depressed: if you like, one fears attack from without, the other from within. Obsessionality is the agoraphobe’s way of dealing with excessive anxiety while the claustrophobe prefers alcohol or drugs: the one attempts to bind anxiety, the other to escape from it.
The agoraphobe favours sending wrong-doers to prison, because father-figures with keys and four secure walls are what they unconsciously want for themselves. He, or she, will also be drawn to measures such as electronic surveillance and anticipatory or preventive detention as ways of closing off or minimising the opportunity of escape. On the other hand, the claustrophobe judge or Home Secretary prefers to give short sentences and suspend the rest. The agoraphobe-authoritarian sees - or more accurately portrays - the claustrophobe-liberal, who believes if you really trust people they generally live up to that trust, as a romantic idealist who is indifferent to the safety of the citizen. The carefully cultivated public image of the first type is that of the rugged and pragmatic realist whose covert belief is that everyone should be distrusted and that occasionally punishing the innocent is a price worth paying for safety, which in truth is more a psychological than a physical one.
The claustrophobe believes in accident, which is anathema to the agoraphobe who believes every event can or should be traceable to action and will therefore be somebody’s fault. Agoraphobes prefer to operate in cabals, in camera, if possible. For them, trust is a room with too many exits – or entrances, depending on whether they fear defection or attack. They tend to be emotionally attached to their decisions or points of view, whereas claustrophobes will have strong opinions, weakly held. Claustrophobes like to travel, agoraphobes to arrive. The claustrophobe likes to be moving towards a better place but, on arrival, the better place has become or, rather, must become somewhere else.
It gradually becomes clear that this primitive polarity can give rise to some interesting and far-reaching epiphenomena. Agoraphobes, with their belief in original sin – which is usually not so much a fixation as an idea which is an integral part of who they are – tend towards authoritarianism. There is a subset which subscribes to the concept of evil, a kind of powerful distillation or derivative of sin which is almost anthropomorphised but not quite. Claustrophobes, on the other hand, tend by nature to be permissive or libertarian because they believe that good will eventually flow through boundaries which are left open or permeable. The purest forms of these two positions are totalitarianism (and its various forms) and anarchism respectively.
Agoraphobes favour simplicity, also, and fear complexity because it contains too many variables or potential permutations. Claustrophobes prefer psychological explanations of human behaviour because they tend to be more speculative, uncertain and diffuse. Agoraphobes feel at home in the binary world of politics with its schismatic culture of left and right, in and out, them and us. Claustrophobes who are also political will generally be on the backbenches and tend to favour proportional representation, something which is primarily a psychological rather than political threat to those who hold power in a two or few party system.
Political leaders tend to think broadsheet but talk tabloid, which often leaves them uncertain about what they may believe in. This increases their susceptibility to sloganising, a technique borrowed from the market which is primarily used to plant a pre-consumption idea. However, slogans are not easily translated into action, a problem in the political world which leads to ineffectuality, which in turns creates instability and waste. There is no daylight between the concept of being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime and that of a washing-powder being tough on stains. However, the latter leads to a purchase, the former to paralysis because it goes no further than itself. Decisions in political life about whether to simplify or complicate are generally driven by habit, expedience or underlying disposition rather than consideration of what may be necessary or desirable at a particular time. As a result, disagreement is often not about substance but about the level of complexity which should be brought to bear on a particular problem or goal.
The question which forces itself to the front of this hypothesis is – how do we handle our binary inclinations so that our politics, religion or whatever are not also binary? When policy or principle are the rope in the tug-of-war not between sophisticated and considered credos but between basic types, the result is likely to be either stalemate or sudden oscillation. This dynamic tends to draw in schismatists, that is those who feed on or derive satisfaction from difference or, in particular, polarisation and whose ideas may appear radical but are in fact deeply regressive. On the other hand, it will tend to exclude synthesists or those who prefer alloy to the elemental.
There are some basic ground-rules or facts of politico-psychological life. It is not possible to browbeat, hector or coerce one type into being another. However, it is possible for someone belonging to one category to understand this and factor it into his or her exchanges with someone from another – which may be the first step on the road to a kind of wisdom. The culture of a healthy group can synthesise the two – or be flexible enough to adopt one or the other as circumstances dictate or require. Healthy – or wise – leaders or managers will be able to export themselves temporarily into the type to which they do not instinctively belong. For example, they will know when to reflect and when to act; when to simplify and when to complicate; and above all when to follow their inclinations and when to apply the brakes to them. They understand that their disposition is a powerful and durable asset which must nevertheless be applied selectively.
Being oneself and being true to oneself are the language not the story. The extent to which one can consciously adopt a meta-level when circumstances demand it is perhaps the extent to which one is wise, mature and even good. We can only curb or occasionally synthesise elements in ourselves not in others or groups of others. If we want a society which is heterogeneous, accommodating, tolerant and in balance, we must first of all be those things ourselves. That is where the work lies.