Perhaps even more than Simone de Beauvoir’s “Must we burn Sade?” [the answer, obviously, is no, because he is a hero. Culture::Counter-culture, as Electron::Postriton, as Non-ironic conceptions of Good::psychotic hipster], this article highlights all the evil I have been working hard to describe in what I will now call the “Culture of the Fuck-ups”.
Mailer in effect conflates Beat with Hip, Hip with blacks, blacks with psychopathy, and psychopathy with individual mental health (as opposed to collective mental illness symptomized by conformity). That is the gist of this piece.
I will quote a number of places, but I will first point out that this is the flip side of the USE of blacks as political props: here he argues that the blacks at their most fucked-up, most dysfunctional, most violent, most criminal, most unhappy, represent models for whites in their aspirations to escape their bourgeois monotony.
Given this basic template, what is there NOT to applaud in rapes, murders, emotionally detached sex, and large scale failures in all traditional (white and black, if one looks to Africa) cultural ideals? Why not make heroes of the violent criminals? Why not make hip hop a template for us all?
Who, in other words, would want blacks to change, if they view them as role models? What white intellectual–and fellow traveling black intellectual– would not resist efforts to get kids to go to school, to buy into the system, to learn emotional self regulation, to act with self restraint and responsibility, to marry and raise kids in two parent families? You know, to do the dull, suburban stuff?
I am in some respect echoing Mailer’s racism and stereotyping, but that blacks are vastly more likely to enter adulthood uneducated, grow up in single parent homes, be poor, have children out of wedlock, and do time in jail, is really a matter of statistics, and the statistics are clear enough. As I have said before, black kids who grow up in two parent homes conform to none of these stereotypes, but so few do, that the statistics hold for most.
Here is Mailer talking about how blacks basically cannot be expected to become civilized human beings, and so become something like animals who live in an eternal moment, and that we can all learn from them:
In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-à-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro had stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could. Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, “I feel this, and now you do too.”
And listen to Mailer valorize and praise the psychopath.
First, he quotes approvingly a definition by a psychiatrist:
The late Robert Lindner, one of the few experts on the subject, in his book Rebel Without A Cause—The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopathpresented part of his definition in this way:
. . . the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; lie is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires
. . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and tins trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts.
He then goes on to offer his own comments:
Yet even Lindner who was the most imaginative and most sympathetic of the psychoanalysts who have studied the psychopathic personality was not ready to project himself into the essential sympathy— which is that the psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentieth century is over. For the psychopath is better adapted to dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us, and if it be remembered that not every psychopath is an extreme case, and that the condition of psychopathy is present in a host of people including many politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, call-girls, promiscuous homosexuals and half the executives of Hollywood, television, and advertising, it can be seen that there are aspects of psychopathy which already exert considerable cultural influence.
And this:
Yet there is this to be said for the search after the good orgasm: when one lives in a civilized world, and still can enjoy none of the cultural nectar of such a world because the paradoxes on which civilization is built demands that there remain a cultureless and alienated bottom of exploitable human material, then the logic of becoming a sexual outlaw (if one’s psychological roots are bedded in the bottom) is that one has at least a running competitive chance to be physically healthy so long as one stays alive. It is therefore no accident that psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro. [emphasis mine] Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt. (Actually the terms have equal weight. Depending on the telescope of the cultural clique from which the Square surveys the universe, “evil” or “immature” are equally strong terms of condemnation.) But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute.
I will comment that there is clearly some Freudian thinking going on here, about repression and sublimation and “Civilization and its Discontents”. Freud, I will continue to note, was a clever imbecile. He was not a scientist, and in most of his major ideas, was close, but wrong, and so wrong, that he came close to getting things backward. His patients, for example, almost certainly did not have sexual fantasies about parents, but memories of actual abuse.
Then this, which I share without comment:
If, however, yon agree with my hypothesis, if you as a cat are way out too, and we are in the same groove (the universe now being glimpsed as a series of ever-extending radii from the center) why then you say simply, “I dig,” because neither knowledge nor imagination comes easily, it is buried in the pain of one’s forgotten experience, and so one must work to find it, one must occasionally exhaust oneself by digging into the self in order to perceive the outside. And indeed it is essential to dig the most, for if you do not dig you lose your superiority over the Square, and so you are less likely to be cool (to be in control of a situation because you have swung where the Square has not, or because you have allowed to come to consciousness a pain, a guilt, a shame or a desire which the other has not had the courage to face) . To be cool is to be equipped, and if you are equipped it is more difficult for the next cat who comes along to put you down. And of course one can hardly afford to be put down too often, or one is beat, one has lost one’s confidence, one has lost one’s will, one is impotent in the world of action and so closer to the demeaning flip of becoming a queer, or indeed closer to dying, and therefore it is even more difficult to recover enough energy to try to make it again, because once a cat is beat he has nothing to give, and no one is interested any longer in making it with him. This is the terror of the hipster—to be beat— because once the sweet of sex has deserted him, he still cannot give up the search. It is not granted to the hipster to grow old gracefully—he has been captured too early by the oldest dream of power, the gold fountain of Ponce de Leon, the fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm.
And here, the crux of the matter, the Lebensanschauung underlying Postmodernism, and most of the current academy, the “ideas”–so called–informing the attempted return to 1930’s Germany through Antifa, which does not know what it loves, but feels empowered to state what it hates:
It can be asked then what really is unique in the life-view of Hip which raises its argot above the passing verbal whimsies of the bohemian or the lumpenproletariat.The answer would be in the psychopathic element of Hip which has almost no interest in viewing human nature, or better, in judging human nature from a set of standards conceived a priori to the experience, standards inherited from the past. Since Hip sees every answer as posing immediately a new alternative, a new question, its emphasis is on complexity rather than simplicity (such complexity that its language without the illumination of the voice and the articulation of the face and body remains hopelessly incommunicative). Given its emphasis on complexity, Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility.
As individuals, what can be asked of such people? What communal responsibilities can they be expected to embrace? None. The answer is none. Is there, then, any reason to be confused–as I long have been–by the simultaneous moralizing seen in the protests against the Vietnam War, and the absolute abdication of subsequent sense of responsibilty for the terrors, the purges, and the mass death which followed our voluntary surrender in the period from 1973-1975? No, it is not confusing. It is logical to expect anti-logical people to behave irrationally and inconsistently.
What IS somewhat amazing to me, still, is the capacity of people who claim to live for “the Deep” to be so fucking emotionally superficial. But, again, Mailer is not really praising psychological growth, so much as rationalizing its failure. Growth is a matter of comparing one moment to another. But if you live for “the Moment”, then such comparisons are never done, and you live one side of your life to the other, as Neal Cassady did, and die a stupid death, as a stupid person, having lived for nothing, learned nothing, and been a waste to everyone around you.
He does eventually cite Sade:
If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience of the past, is that the Hip ethic is immoderation, child-like in its adoration of the present (and indeed to respect the past means that one must also respect such ugly consequences of the past as the collective murders of the State) . It is this adoration of the present which contains the affirmation of Hip, because its ultimate logic surpasses even the unforgettable solution of the Marquis de Sade to sex, private property, and the family, that all men and women have absolute but temporary rights over the bodies of all other men and women—the nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself. Which is exactly what separates Hip from the authoritarian philosophies which now appeal to the conservative and liberal temper—what haunts the middle of the Twentieth Century is that faith in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that it would restrain us from ourselves. Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the barbarian for it requires a primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes literal faith in the creative possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares growth.
It is impossible to overstate how stupid this whole thing is, or how widely this basic ethos has been adopted. They have this vague sense that nuclear war and concentration camps are bad, but given their presuppositions, they can’t really explain why. Why, if there is no morality, is State violence wrong? Answer: because you don’t like it. That is not a principle. That’s just the way you happen to be “swinging” at that moment. In our present era this manifest and palpable self hatred and bloodlust happens to have swung back in the direction of state sponsored violence. There are literally millions of people in this country and around the world who would to see our governments set up laogai for everyone who fails to share their political religion.
This whole read is profoundly solipsistic. I had a vague sense of Mailer as an asshole, and it is certainly substantiated by this piece. There is literally no reason why he would not take pleasure and pride in being an arrogant piece of shit.