Organizational Man: Refined or Repressed?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal is the courageous, ancient Greco-Roman nobility, including the unashamed conquerors replete with self-confident will to power rather than shame at having vanquished formidable resistance. Rather than actually advocating that we return to the raping and pillaging that took place back then, Nietzsche wanted to depict modern, emaciated man as a contrast in order to turn the weakening of man around in Europe. Similar to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote his satirical novel, Babbit (1922) to showcase the utter vacuity of the middle-class businessman in America, Nietzsche laments “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal . . .”[1] By that he meant us: modern, enervated, and cultured incarnations of human nature relative to the full, untamed, and resilient lives of the ancient Greco-Roman conquerors. Having no knowledge of the lives that they lived in terms of full, unashamed and unconstrained will to power as will to living life with gusto, we scarcely realize the extent to which our societal institutions and vocational organizations box up our nature to that which is inoffensive and even polite even to competitors.

The full essay is at "Organizational Man."

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 478.

Worse than Hell on Earth: Gaza

Each of us is so close to human nature that our perception of it may be blurry or partial. One of Freud’s contributions is the insight that we don’t even know ourselves completely, given the existence of the subconscious. This is also true of trying to comprehend human nature at a distance, as whether humanity is or is not by nature compassionate to people who are suffering greatly at a distance. The sheer duration of the extreme suffering of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst of ongoing military attacks by Russia and Israel, respectively, beginning in the early 2020s, and the sheer impunity absent any interventionist coalitions of countries from around the world combine to give a negative verdict on human nature concerning compassion from a distance. It can even be said that the ongoing passive complicity around the world impugns not only us, but human nature itself. While less explicit than in furnishing weapons to Russia or Israel, the complicity of human nature is more serious, for even as geopolitics change, human nature is static, at least in a non-evolutionary timespan. Given the extreme suffering in Gaza in particular, the lack of political will around the world to step in militarily and assume control of Gaza may mean that human nature itself is worse than hell on earth.

The full essay is at "Worse than Hell on Earth."

A Dangerous Method

The method being referred to in A Dangerous Method (2011) is psychoanalysis, as pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The danger referred to is that of freeing people from their sexual repressions. The film revolves around the relationship between Freud and his younger colleague, Carl Jung (1875-1961), and the relationship between him and Sabina Spielrein, his former patient and eventual lover and colleague. She also had an affair with Freud, but it was not shown in the film. Keira Knightley plays the Russian woman a bit too strongly in the first few scenes. In terms of the acting, Knightley exaggerates facial contortions as if fishing for an Oscar out of sheer emotionality. In terms of the narrative, Spielrein’s “transformation,” or cure, is hard to take as credible because it is so drastic within a year or two. Before long, she is behaving completely normal and even attending medical school. The film’s merits lie not with the acting, but, rather, with the intellectual content, whose salience and integration into a good narrative is rare in Hollywood. It is due to this feature that the film is apt to stay with a viewer for some time.

The full essay is at "A Dangerous Method."