The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
[1] Hobbes made fear the most important motive in the conduct of
man.
“Why strive, thou poor creature, for wealth and power; sink
thyself in the, Godhead!” “Turn, turn from vain pursuits; fame,
the bubble, is bound to break as thou art.” This is one type of
reaction against this fear,—for men react to the fear of death
variously. If man is mortal, God is not, and there is a life
everlasting. The life everlasting—whether a reality or not—is
conjured up and believed in by an effort to compensate for the
fear of death.
I have a son who, when he was three, manifested great emotion if
death were to enter in a story. “Will anything happen?” he would
ask, meaning, “Will death enter?” And if so, he would beg not to
have that story told. But when he was four, he heard some one say
that there were people who took old automobiles apart, fixed up
the parts and these were then placed in other automobiles.
“That’s what God does to us,” he cried triumphantly. “When we
die, He takes us apart and puts us into babies, and we live
again.” Thereafter he would discuss death as fearlessly as he
spoke of dinner, and all his fears vanished. Here was a typical
rationalization of fear, one that has helped to shape religion,
philosophies, ways of living. And the widespread belief in
immortality is a compensation and a rationalization of the fear
of death.
If some men rationalize in this fashion, others take directly
opposite means. “Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.”
The popularity of Omar Khayyam rests upon the aptness of his
statement of this side of the case of Man vs. Death, and many a
man who never heard of him has recklessly plunged into
dissipation on the theory, “a short life and a merry one.” This
is more truly a pessimism than is the ascetic philosophy.
“Well, then, I must die,” says another. “Oh, that I might achieve
before death comes!” So men, appalled by the brief tenure of life
and the haphazard way death strikes, work hard, spurred on by the
wish to leave a great work behind them. This work becomes a Self,
left behind, and here the fear of death is compensated for by a
little longer life in the form of achievement.
Many a father and mother, looking at their children, feel this as
part of their compensation for parenthood. “I shall die and leave
some one behind me,” means, “I shall die and yet I shall, in
another form, live.” Part of the incentive to parenthood, in a
time which knows how to prevent parenthood and which shirks it as
disagreeable, is the fear of death, of personal annihilation. For
there is in death a blow to one’s pride, an indignity in this
annihilation,—Nothingness.
There is a still larger reaction to the fear of death. I have
stated that the feeling of likeness is part of the feeling of
brotherhood and in death is one of the three great likenesses of
man. We are born of the labor of our mothers, our days are full
of strife and trouble and we die. Men’s minds have lingered on
these facts. “Man that is born of a woman, is of few days, and
full of trouble.” Job did not add to this that he dies, but
elsewhere it appears as the bond for mankind. Reacting to this,
the reflective minds of the race have felt that here was the
unity of man, here the basis of a brotherhood. True, the
Fatherhood of God was given as a logical reason, but always in
every appeal there is the note, “Do we not all die? Why hate one
another then?”
So to the fear of death, as with every other fear, man has
reacted basely and nobly. Man is the only animal that foresees
death and he is the only one to elaborate ethics and religion.
There is more than an accidental connection between these two
facts.
Fear in its foreseeing character is termed worry. As a phase of
character, the liability to worry is of such importance that book
after book has dealt with the subject,—emphasizing the dangers,
the futility and cowardice of it. It is surely idle to tell
people not to worry who live continually on the brink of economic
disaster, or who are facing real danger. But there are types who
find in every possibility of injury a formidable threat, who are
thrown into anguish when they contemplate any evil, remote or
unlikely as it may be. The present and future are not faced with
courage or equanimity; they present themselves as a never-ending
series of threats; threat to health, to fortune, to family,
reputation, everything. Horace Fletcher called this type of
forethought “fear thought.” Men and women, brave enough when face
to face with actualities, are cowards when confronting remote
possibilities. The housewife especially is one of these worriers,
and her mind has an affinity for the terrible. I have described
her elsewhere,[1] but she has her prototype among men.
[1] “The Nervous Housewife.”
Fear of this type is an injury to the body and character both and
is one of the causes and effects of the widespread neurasthenia
of our day. For fear injures sleep, and this brings on fatigue
and fatigue breeds more fear, —a vicious circle indeed. Fear
disturbs digestion and the energy of the organism is thereby
lowered. The greatest damage by worry is done in the
hypochondriac, the worrier about health. Here, in addition to the
effects of fear, introspection and a minute attention to every
pain and ache demoralize the character, for the sufferer cannot
pay attention to anything else. He becomes selfish, ego-centric
and without the wholesome interest in life as an adventure. I
doubt if there is enough good in too minute a popular education
on disease and health preservation. Morbid attention to health
often results, an evil worse than sickness.
Sometimes, instead of the indiscriminate fear of worry, there are
localized fears, called phobias, which creep or spring into a
man’s thoughts and render him miserable. Thus there is fear of
high places, of low places, of darkness, of open places, of
closed places,—fear of dirt, fear of poison and of almost
everything else. A bright young man was locked, at the age of
fourteen, in a closed dark shanty; when released he rushed home
in the greatest terror. Since then he has been afflicted with a
fear of leaving home. He dares venture only about fifty feet and
then is impelled to run back. If anybody hinders his return he
attacks them; if the door is locked he breaks through a window.
He is in a veritable panic, and yet presents no other fears; is a
reader and thinker, clever at his work (he is a painter), but his
fear remains inaccessible and uncontrollable. Often one
experience of this kind builds up an obsessive fear; the
associations left by the experience give the fear an open pathway
to consciousness, without any inhibiting power. As in this case,
the whole life of the individual becomes changed.
Throughout history the man without fear has been idolized. The
hero is courageous, that he must be; the coward is despised,
whatever good may be in him. Consequently, there is in most men a
fear of showing fear; and pride, self-respect, often urge men on
when they really fear. This pride is greater in some races than
others—in the Indian and the Anglo-Saxon—but the Oriental does
not think it wrong to be afraid. In the Great War this fear of
showing fear played a great role in producing shell shock, in
that men shrank from actual cowardice but easily developed
neuroses which carried them from the fighting line.
There is this to add to this little sketch of fear: it turns
easily to anger for both are responses to a threat. I remember in
my boyhood being mortally afraid of a larger boy who one day
chased me, caught me and started to “beat me up.” Before I knew
it, the fear had gone and I was fighting him with such fierceness
and fury that in amazement he ran away. So a rat, cornered,
becomes fierce and blood-thirsty and there is always the danger,
in the use of fear as a weapon, that it become changed quite
readily into the fighting spirit.
7. Anger is a primitive reaction and is the backbone of the
fighting spirit. It tends to displace fear, though it may be
combined with it, in one of the most unhappy —because
helpless—mental states. Anger in its commonest form is a violent
energizer and in the stiffened muscles, the set jaw, bared teeth,
and the forward-thrust head and arms one sees the animal prepared
to fight. Anger is aroused at any obstruction, any threat or
injury, from physical violences to the so-called “slight.” In
fact, it is the intent of the opponent as understood that makes
up the stimulus to anger in the human being. We forgive a blow if
it is accidental, but even a touch, if in malice or in contempt,
arouses a fierce reaction.
We call becoming angry too readily “losing the temper,” and there
is a type known as the irascible in whom anger is the readiest
emotion. The bluff English squire, the man in authority, is this
type, and his anger lasts. In its lesser form anger becomes
irritability, a reaction common to the neurotic and the weak.
When anger is not frank, but manifests itself by a lowered brow
and sidelong look, we speak of sullenness or surliness. The
sullen or surly person, chronically ill-tempered and hostile, is
regarded as unsocial and dangerous, whereas the most lovable
persons are quick to anger and quick to repent.
As a man’s anger, so is he. There are some whose anger is always
a reaction against interference with their comfort, their
dignity, their property and their will; it never by any chance is
aroused by the wrongs of others. Usually, however, these folk
camouflage their motive. “It’s the principle of the thing I
object to,” is its commonest social disguise, which sometimes
successfully hides the real motive from the egoist himself.
Wherever wills and purposes meet in conflict, there anger, or its
offshoot, contempt, is present, and the more egoistic one is, the
more egoistic the sources of anger.
The explosiveness of the anger will depend on the power of
inhibition and the power of the intelligence, as well as on the
strength of the opponent. There are enough whose temper is
uncontrolled in the presence of the weak who manage to be quite
calm in the presence of the strong. I believe there is much less
difference amongst races in this respect than we suspect, and
there is more in tradition and training. There was a time when it
was perfectly proper for a gentleman to lose his temper, but now
that it is held “bad form,” most gentlemen manage to control it.
If it is common for men to become angry at ego-injury, there are
in this world, as its leaven of reform, noble spirits who become
angry at the wrongs of others. The world owes its progress to
those whose anger, sustained and intellectualized, becomes the
power behind reform; to those like Abraham Lincoln, who vowed to
destroy slavery because he saw a slave sold down the river; to
the Pinels, outraged by the treatment of the insane; to the
sturdy “Indignant Citizen,” who writes to newspapers about what
“is none of his business,” but who is too angry to keep still,
and whose anger makes public
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