Stupidity, after all

Heroism, is, after all, an ideal matter. The problem of mental illness, since Kierkegaard and through Scheler, Hocking, Jung, Fromm, and many others, has been inseparable from the problem of idolatry. In what cosmology is one going to perform his heroics? If – as we have argued – even the strongest person has to exercise his Agape motive, has to lay the burden of his life somewhere beyond him, then we are brought once again to the great questions: What is the highest reality, the true ideal, the really great adventure? What kind of heroism is called for, in what kind of drama, submission to what kind of god? The religious geniuses of history have argued that to be really submissive means to be submissive to the highest power, the true infinity and absolute – and not to any human substitutes, lovers, leaders, nation-states.

From this point of view the problem of mental illness is one of not knowing what kind of heroics one is practising or not being able – once one does know – to broaden one’s heroics from their crippling narrowness. Paradoxical as it may sound, mental illness is thus a matter of weakness and stupidity. It reflects ignorance about how one is going about satisfying his twin ontological motives. The desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics. The suffering and the evil that stems from these motives are not a consequence of the nature of the motives themselves, but of our stupidity about satisfying them. This is the deeper meaning of one of Rank’s insights, which otherwise would seem flippant. In a letter of 1937 he wrote:

Suddenly … while I was resting in bed it occured to me what really was (or is) “Beyond Psychology.” You know what? Stupidity! All that complicated and elaborated explanation of human behavior is nothing but an attempt to give a meaning to one of the most powerful motives of behavior, namely stupidity! I began to think that it is even more powerful than badness, meanness – because many actions or reactions that appear mean are simply stupid and even calling them bad is a justification.

E. Becker, p. 251