The Collapse of Self

What a thought-provoking title, "The Undiscovered Self"¹ For it implies a dark continent in the mind awaiting exploration, and suggests that the discovery and development of the inner life is the only way to lengthen the per­imeter of all that man can call reality. The expanding universe, in this sense, is but the measure of man’s expanding mind. Only a moment ago, in evolutionary time, this orb of ours was thought to be flat. The expanding self — increas­ing awareness — not only is re­sponsible for that correction but accounts for the appearance of the electron, countless galaxies, and numberless other wonders that recently have come within the range of man’s concept of all that is real. And the end will never be in sight!

Nor need we confine our ob­servations on the significance of the expanding self to the physical universe. As the inner life is more successfully explored, spiritual qualities are increasingly per­ceived, embraced, and experienced: creativity, inventiveness, piety, love, justice, charity, integrity, a moral nature.

We conclude, therefore, that man’s destiny, earthly goals, pur­poses, aspirations — properly fo­cused — are linked inextricably to a deeper understanding and mean­ing of expanding selfhood.

And, by the same token, we can infer that any abandonment of selfhood is dehumanizing; it is devolutionary as distinguished from evolutionary; it is collapse!

The collapse has numerous man­ifestations: strikes; riots; mass hysteria; political chicanery; li­centiousness in the name of art, music, poetry; in a word, public bawdiness; in classrooms and pul­pits alike the pursuit of excellence is more pardoned than praised. The signs, to say the least, are ominous.

It is, thus, of the utmost im­portance that we try to pinpoint the cause of this dwindling self-respect for, as I see it, this is the taproot of the deplorable effects we observe.

The mere phrasing of the col­lapse or decline as "the loss of self-respect" comes close to sug­gesting what the cause really is: a marked removal of responsibil­ity for self. And while the individ­ual who is forced to relinquish responsibility may take comfort in the fact that he did not divest himself voluntarily, the end result — coercively taken or willingly given — is no responsibility for self. Next to life itself, self-res­ponsibility is the most precious possession one can lose, and it matters not how he loses it.

Talents to Be Tested

Before discussing the careless and lackadaisical attitude toward self-responsibility, let’s review its importance. For, unless an in­dividual is aware of its deep meaning, he will regard it lightly and will not cling to it as one of the most priceless of all possessions.

Frederic Bastiat sets the stage for my thesis: "We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life. But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of pre­serving, developing, and perfect­ing it. In order that we may ac­complish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties."2

Marvelous potential faculties would be more to my liking. A faculty is marvelous only when there is some attempt to realize its potentiality. There is nothing marvelous about the faculty of sight if one will not see, or of in­sight if one lets it lie forever dor­mant. The "marvelous" quality rises and falls with the develop­ment or atrophy of faculties. Put our faculties to use and they de­velop; neglect to use them and they decline.

Tie the arm to ‘one’s side and it withers; cease exercising the mind for a prolonged period and think­ing can no more be recovered than spoiled fruit can regain its fresh­ness. It is use, practice, exercise that gives muscle to the faculties, all faculties— intellectual and spir­itual as well as physical.

Observe a person in extreme difficulty — over his head in water, financial problems, or whatever. Except in rare instances, he’ll frantically hope for someone to rescue him. But what happens when no helper is to be found? He finds only himself; he’s on his own responsibility; it’s sink or swim, as we say. And nine times out of ten he’ll work his way out of the mess he’s in. Faculties, if not too far gone, rusty though they may be, will rise to the occasion; creak­ily they’ll begin to function.

Responsibility for self not only rescues the faculties from non­use and atrophy but serves to re­new, invigorate, and expand them; these faculties are the very es­sence of self, that is, of one’s life. Further, self-responsibility has no substitute; it is the mainspring of the generative process.

Any individual who intelligently interprets and identifies his high­est self-interest — the growth or hatching of faculties — and then clearly perceives the role self-re­sponsibility plays in achieving this objective, must cherish, prize, and cling to its retention. Toward this right of being responsible for self he has a defiant possessiveness; it is among the last of all rights he will permit others to take from him — next to life itself. And the idea of voluntarily transferring one’s self-responsibility to some­one else is unthinkable. How could anyone call such a thought his own?

Shedding Responsibility

But what, actually, is the situa­tion? Millions of citizens are do­ing all within their power to rid themselves of responsibility for self as if it were a dreaded burden. They implore government to be re­sponsible for their prosperity, their welfare, their security, even their children.³ They voluntarily drift — nay, militantly march —toward total irresponsibility.

And on the other side of the coin are the governmental power seekers — all too ready to accom­modate. Members of the hierarchy who devoutly wish to assume re­sponsibility for the people’s lives and livelihoods — with the people’s money! — are greeted less with resistance than with eager accept­ance. Laws are then written to en­force compliance; that is, govern­ment forcibly takes the responsi­bility for problems, as much from those who oppose as from those who applaud the transfer of re­sponsibility.

Together — those who eagerly shed responsibility and those who as avidly assume it for others — they present not only a collapse of self but a landslide to tyranny.

Strikes, riots, and other provoc­ative demonstrations are but the actions of a people bereft of self-respect. These millions are no longer anchored to responsible be­havior; they have cast themselves adrift, their trade union or the government or some other "bene­factor" assuming the responsi­bility for their lives. The disci­plined behavior required for social felicity, which responsibility for self imposes, is so lacking that they suffer no obvious penalties for their follies. To absolve human be­ings of this corrective force is to populate the world with people recklessly on the loose, every base emotion released, vent given to the worst in men.

Individuals responsible for self are rarely found in mobs. They concern themselves, rather, with spouses, children, perhaps aged or helpless relatives and friends — others who are less fortunate than themselves. Above all else, they pay attention to an emerging, ex­panding selfhood. In a word, there’s work to do — no time or even inclination to indulge in ac­tions unrelated thereto.

Paternalistic Government

So, when lamenting the current trends, point the finger of blame where it belongs, at The Establish­ment, namely, at the preponderant thinking of our day: the mischie­vous notion that it is the role of government to look after "its peo­ple."’ Point the finger, also, at the dwindling respect for our most priceless right: the right to look out for ourselves.

Observe that the finger of blame points at the mischievous notion of paternalism and the loss of self-respect — not at discrete individ­uals. Without question, we make a grave error when we try to shame persons because they espouse ideas which we believe to be false. One can take no credit for this tactic; it is as shallow as, indeed, it is identical to, name-calling. Such personal affronts generate only re­sentment; under this kind of fire, these human targets of our criticisms rise to their own defense and are thereby hardened in their ways. Utter silence is preferable to this.

We should, instead, work at the impersonal level, which means coming to grips with the ideas at issue. All of us share in common a feeling of gratitude toward those who keep us from making fools of ourselves. That it’s the function of government to look out for "its people" is no more valid than the ancient belief that the earth is flat. Were we adequately to work at the intellectual level, the former notion would no more be upheld than the latter, and for the same reason: its invalidity!

It is clear that expanding self­hood is possible only in a state of freedom. And it is equally clear that freedom is out of the ques­tion among an irresponsible peo­ple, seemingly a vicious circle. Yet, this circle can be broken, the col­lapse ended, and a reversal begun by little more than a recognition that self-responsibility is the mas­ter key. Man then may see that his earthly purpose is not to be a ward of the government but his own man, under God — self-respect­ing and self-responsible.     

—FOOTNOTES—

^I The Undiscovered Self by Dr. Carl Gustav Jung (New York: The New American Library of World Literature. A Mentor Book).

2 The Law by Frederic Bastiat (Ir­vington-on-Hudson, N. Y.: The Founda­tion for Economic Education, Inc.), p. 5.

³ The child is but the extension of par­ental responsibility. So far as responsi­bility is concerned, parent and child be­gin as one and the same. Ideally, parental responsibility is relinquished as the off­spring acquires responsibility for self; self-responsibility thus suffers no loss. But, to an alarming extent, this proper transition is ignored. Instead, the re­sponsibility for children — education, for instance — is more and more turned over to government, an apparatus incapable of transferring the responsibility it has assumed to the child. It is this parental irresponsibility which accounts, in no small measure, for the juvenile delin­quency we observe all about us.

⁴ Many of the persons who deplore riots are those who support one or an­other Federal handout — free lunches, Medicare, subsidies, the Gateway Arch, you name it — little realizing that their type of action set the riots in motion.

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A Harmony of Interests

The socialists believe that men’s interests are essentially an­tagonistic. The economists believe in the natural harmony, or rather in the necessary and progressive harmonization, of men’s interests. This is the whole difference….

To be sure, if men’s interests are naturally antagonistic, we must trample underfoot justice, liberty, and equality before the law. We must remake the world, or, as they say, reconstitute society, according to one of the numerous plans that they never stop inventing. For self-interest, a disorganizing principle, there must be substituted legal, imposed, involuntary, forced self-sacrifice — in a word, organized plunder; and as this new prin­ciple can only arouse infinite aversion and resistance, an attempt will be made at first to get it accepted under the deceptive name of fraternity, after which the law, which is force, will be invoked.

FREDERIC BASTIAT, Justice and Fraternity (1848)