On Being Political

[Triton]

On Being Political:

Hillman: There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the
real issues. Why are the intelligent people -at least among the white
middle class- so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent
people are in therapy! They've been in therapy in the United States
for thirty, forty years, and during that time there's been a
tremendous political decline in this country.

Ventura: How do you think that works?

Hillman: Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway,
our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture,
the crime on the streets, whatever- every time we try to deal with
that be going to therapy with our rage and fear, we're depriving the
political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by
emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the
decline of the actual world. Yet therapy goes on blindly believing
that it's curing the outer world by making better people. We've had
that for years and years and years: "If everybody went into therapy
we'd have better buildings, we'd have better people, we'd have more
consciousness." It's not the case.

Ventura: I'm not sure it's causal, but it's definitely a pattern. Our
inner knowledge has gotten more subtle while our ability to deal with
the world around us has, well, deteriorated is almost not a strong
enough word. Disintegrated is more like it.

Hillman: The vogue today, in psychotherapy, is the "inner child."
That's the therapy thing - you go back to your childhood. But if your
looking backward, you're not looking around. This trip backwards
constellates what Jung called the "child archetype.." Now, the child
archetype is by nature apolitical and disempowered - it has no
connection with the political world. And so the adult says, "Well,
what can I do about the world? This thing's bigger than me." That's
the child archetype talking. "All I can do is work on myself, work on
my growth, my development, find good parenting, support groups." This
is a disaster for the political world, for our democracy. Democracy
depends on intensely active citizens, not children.

By emphasizing the child archetype, by making our therapeutic hours
rituals of evoking childhood and reconstructing childhood, we're
blocking ourselves from political life. Twenty or thirty years of
therapy have removed the most sensitive and most intelligent, and some
of the most affluent people in our society into child cult worship.
It's going on insidiously, all through therapy, all through the
country. So of course our politics are in disarray and nobody's voting
- we're disempowering ourselves through therapy.

Ventura: The assumption people are working out of is that inner growth
translates into worldly power, and many don't realize that they go to
therapy with that assumption.

Hillman: If personal growth did lead into the world, wouldn't our
political situation be different today, considering all the especially
intelligent people who have been in therapy? What you learn in therapy
is mainly feeling skills, how to really remember, how to let fantasy
come, how to find words for invisible things, how to go deep and face
things-

Ventura: Good stuff to know-

Hillman: Yes, but you don't learn political skills or find anything
about the way the world works. Personal growth doesn't automatically
lead to political results. Look at Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. Psychoanalysis was banned for decades, and look at the
political changes that have come up and startled everybody. Not the
result of therapy, their revolutions.

Ventura: So you're making a kind of opposition between power,
political power or political intelligence, and therapeutic
intelligence. Many who are therapeutically sensitive are also dumb and
fucked up politically; and if you look at the people who wield the
most power in almost any sphere of life, they are often people whose
inner growth has been severely stunted.

Hillman: You think people undertake therapy to grow?

Ventura: Isn't that a huge part of the project of therapy? Everybody
uses the word, therapists and clients alike.

Hillman: But the very word grow is a word appropriate to children.
After a certain age you do not grow. You don't grow teeth, you don't
grow muscles. If you start growing after that age, it's cancer.

Ventura: Aw, Jim, can't I grow inside all my life?

Hillman: Grow what? Corn? Tomatoes? New archetypes? What am I growing,
what do you grow? The standard therapeutic answer is: you're growing
yourself.

Ventura: But the philosopher Kirkegaard would come back and say, "The
deeper natures don't change, they become more and more themselves."

Hillman: Jung says individuation is becoming more and more oneself

Ventura: And becoming more and more oneself involves a lot of
unpleasantness. As Jung also says, the most terrifying thing is to
know yourself.

Hillman: And becoming more and more oneself - the actual experience of
it is a shrinking, in that very often it's a dehydration, a loss of
inflations, a loss of illusions.

Ventura: That doesn't sound like a good time. Why would anybody want
to do it?

Hillman: Because shedding is a beautiful thing. It's of course not
what consumerism tells you, but shedding feels good. It's a lightening
up.



"When the soul's depths are revealed on the very surface, 'seeing-
through' becomes a superfluous act and a denial of the presented
phenomenon"



Empty Protest



The dilemmas of life puzzle me. What a person usually does with these
puzzles is to make an either/or decision. Either I say it's all beyond
me and remain passive on the sidelines, or I figure out an idiology
and come down hard with it. I think now there's a third way. Empty
protest. I don't even know what's right. I have no answer. But I sure
smell something wrong…

I used to get stopped cold in my arguments. I would be going on about
something, and the other guy would say, "All right, if you're so
smart, what would you do about it?" And I had no positive idea of what
to do, no program, nothing. It wasn't just that I was impractical; I
was empty. My protests were suddenly emptied out because I had nothing
positive to offer.

Empty protest puts the emptiness in a new light. It values emptiness.
It says "empty protest" is a via negativa, a non-positivist way of
entering the political arena. You take your outrage seriously, but you
don't force yourself to have answers. Trust your nose. You know what
stinks. Don't try to replace the helpless frustration you feel, the
powerless victimization, by working out a rational answer. The answers
will come, if they come, when they come, to you, to others, but don't
fill in the emptiness of the protest with positive suggestions before
their time. First, protest! I don't know what should be done about
most of the major dilemmas I face, but but my gut (my soul, my heart,
my skin, my eyes) sinks, creeps, crawls, weeps, cringes, shakes. It's
wrong, simply wrong, what's going on here.

Yet, to the question "what would you have done with Saddam Hussein in
August 1990, in October, in January and february, wise guy?" I have
only my physical sense of something wrong. Only my empty protest.
Therapy itself blocks this kind of protest. It does not let these
"negative" emotions have their full say. It may value them, and
quickly analyze them, but therapy insists they have to lead us into
deeper meaning rather than immediate protest action. Therapy says,
Think before you act, feel before you emote, judge, interpret,
imagine, reflect. Self-knowledge is the reason for the emotions and
the protest, says therapy: know thyself; know what you are doing
before you allow a gut response, and know the meaning of an action
before you act. Otherwise you are projecting and acting out.

So, therapy would say, You can't protest in this empty way because you
haven't made clear what your inner protest really wants and why and
what for. It has to mean something.

An empty protest, however, hasn't got a defined meaning. It doesn't
have an end goal -not even the end of blocking something it protests
about. My protest about the Gulf War doesn't clearly say, "Stop the
war!" Empty protest is protest for the sake of the emotions that fuel
it and is rooted not in the conscious fullness of making improvement,
but in a radical negativity. In theological language, empty protest is
a ritual of negative theology. It's what the Hindus call neti, neti,
neti - not this, not this, not this. No utopia, no farther shore
toward which we march, only the march, the shout, the placard, the
negative vote, the refusal.

[James Hillman, from 'We've had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and
the World's Getting Worse']