Polemic on Middle Class Life

Outside of psychology, I find the subject of children boring, and, as you surely know, I find the world of football games and picnics equally bankrupt. I work hard developing myself (through reading, writing, travel and the arts) so that I may have more to discuss with people than kids. For the world of the petty bourgeoisie interests me little: Actually, I detest the idea of living in a world where everyone is competing with one another based on material wealth and, by extension, fertility.  Do you think I care if John Doe, Dan Smith or anyone else has bought a new car or had another kid?

There are a million mediocre men out there who can’t amount to anything more than working at a dead-end job, are losing their sense of attractiveness (not to mention hair), and who are willing to jump into a marriage, or an affair, for the sake of finding some meaning in their vacuous existence. There are a million more men who are so spiritually inane that sitting in front of a TV watching sports, visiting a strip bar now and then, drinking beer, and going to their kid’s baseball game is enough to keep them going. (Their wives are just as ugly, the only difference being they watch talk-shows instead of sports.)

Walt Disney and daughters

But don’t get me wrong: I believe it’s possible to have children and live an artistic life (Walt Disney and Stanley Kubrick did it), just as I believe children can enhance life immeasurably. My problem is not with children, but with middle-class, suburban existence, which revolves around child rearing and materialism. I reject the idea of following in my children’s footsteps: children should enhance my lifestyle, not end it. I hold the same views of marriage. Let’s be clear about it: I don’t give a damn what other people think of me, my work and my private life. It’s none of their business—and I refuse to succumb to the insecurity arising from peer pressure. Unfortunately, this is what I think of anyone who challenges me for not having developed in the “right” way. To hell with them! Show me one of these people who isn’t neurotic in his or her secret hours, plagued by the feeling that life is insignificant.

Marriage vows spoken to the tune of a biological clock is risky at best, and, in my opinion, to take this route is to head down a path of stress: get married (but it didn’t turn out like you hoped), have kids (but it didn’t turn out like you hoped), buy a house (the same), get a new job (the same again) and so on and so forth. I believe that happiness stems from physical and spiritual health. Physical health is easy: run a few laps around the track everyday, eat right and sleep deeply. Spiritual health is less easy: it demands the constant stimulation of the intellect, which must be fed from both abstract sources (books, films, music, etc.) and real sources (travel, people, laboratory, etc.).

Abraham Maslow

Writing about education, the psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “You ask the question about the courses you took in high school, ‘How did my trigonometry course help me to become a better human being?’ an answer echoes, ‘By gosh, it didn’t!’ In a certain sense trigonometry was a waste of time.” Basically, I disagree with him here, although I can understand why he said this. He means to say that book learning (i.e., empiricism and positivism) is insufficient for spiritual development. “Far more important,” he says, “have been such experiences as having a child. Our first baby changed me as a psychologist. It made the behaviorism I had been so enthusiastic about look so foolish that I couldn’t stomach it anymore.” And yet one of life’s paradoxes is that those who reach self-actualization (or at least get near to it) are in the minority. Despite his pique over the limitations of science as a tool to learn about people, if Maslow has fulfilled his creative potential, it is not from having a baby.

“Far more important…” I deny that, and we had better argue about that. Human knowledge is collective, and to rely on personal experience as a means of enlightenment is to miss out on humanity’s greatest achievements: books, schools, movies and the Internet—that is, the external sources of information that do not derive from instinct and intuition. Because it is flat out impossible to think on your own, to think without the thoughts of others. Creativity is based on synthesis. How do you make music without notes? And how do you think without books?

The problem with reading is that it costs time and energy—unlike sex, it is not deeply imbedded in our consciousness—and thus it remains a minority that has time to enjoy it and benefit from it. The profound experience of childbirth does not produce profound people. If this were so, the guy with ten kids would be a prophet and priests would be out of work.