He would have liked to be able to read but could not concentrate and therefore kept himself informed through television news programs at dinner time. He watched a great deal more TV than he felt was right, but could not stop himself.
When Mr. Bruto came to group therapy he felt defeated by alcohol. He was not hopeful since he had repeatedly heard that alcoholism is an incurable disease. He was amazed to hear that it wasn’t a disease and certainly not incurable. He drank in information about ego states, strokes, games, rackets, stamps, power plays, and scripts. He said, “It’s like a curtain being pulled from my eyes.” His awareness expanded by leaps and bounds. He was very interested in the life styles of the other members of the group, and how they saw the world.
He was fascinated by the suggestion that he had a script to kill himself through overwork and shocked when he realized that his expectations of retirement and security were groundless fantasies designed to keep him working and which might actually cause him to die soon after his retirement date, if not before.
He immediately resonated to the suggestion that alcohol and TV were helpful aids to the promotion of his script; they were tranquilizers that kept him from thinking. His major injunction was “Don’t think!” and his attribution was “You are a hard worker.” Harder for him was to accept that he was a cigarette, coffee, and sleeping pill addict; hooked just like those “junkies” that he heard about.
He was astounded at the suggestion that work could be pleasurable, having assumed all of his life that it was not, and that he should not expect it to be.
Play was to be found after work, but he could not find enjoyment in things. He knew that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” but, again, he felt he could not help himself. He felt he was dull and wished he knew how to play.
He knew, because he belonged to a union, that industry exploits workers, but he felt that it was not really bad in his case since his pay was good. He was surprised that some group members felt that his job was lousy (he operated a machine doing the same monotonous thing all day long) and that he was far more exploited than he had ever imagined.
Hardest for him to accept was the tendency in himself to rebel against work, to want to quit, to want to strike, as a good one; one that he should feel free to follow, and one that, if supported, would lead him out of his alcoholism. Having gained this awareness, he made plans. He decided to stop driving himself with work, to stop drugging himself with alcohol, cigarettes, and coffee, and to seek pleasure and leisure so as to be able to live well beyond sixty. He gave up his seniority at the factory and got a job with less pay and shorter hours close to home. He developed his plumbing work. He reserved weekends for leisure, stopped drinking and smoking. He thought about what was wrong in his life and how he wanted to change it. He discussed problems and their solutions in group.
He began to sleep well, enjoy sex; he earned less, spent less, worked less, watched less TV. Sixteen months after first coming to group he looked back in amazement. Gradually, without fanfare, his life had come under his own control. He felt powerful rather than powerless. He felt, he said, “that he had time to think and figure things out.” He did not call it awareness; but, to me, expansion of his awareness was the prime mover of his changes. The support of the group members throughout the hard times in his therapy was another important factor.
The King (or Queen) Has No Clothes
Why do parents interfere with their children’s rationality and awareness? I believe that the principal reason is that the parents feel “not O.K.” and do not wish to be observed, clearly perceived, or understood by the youngsters in their family. They are ashamed of themselves as people, parents, and providers and are embarassed to be seen as they feel they are—not O.K.
Like the Emperor who wore no clothes, parents bank on not being closely observed by their children lest they discover some great flaw. But a child’s world consists mostly of its parents. They are the focus of interactions and take up most of the child’s attention. The child’s inquisitive and constant attention on the parents, if not checked,-can make them uncomfortable. Thus, parents will give the child injunctions such as “don’t look at me,” “don’t talk about me,” “don’t talk about the family,” and, eventually, “don’t talk about yourself to others.” These injunctions come from the Pig Parent in the father or mother, and eventually prevent the child from seeing the world, especially the world of people, as it is. The end result of this kind of basic banal training is that by the time the youngster is an adolescent his capacity for understanding himself, others, and the world is greatly diminished.
People who are aware feel capable to themselves and to others and tend to be able to get what they want for themselves. Mindlessness—which is the result of the systematic attack on this kind of capacity—results, on the other hand, in a feeling of confusion, of not being able to understand, of being torn between one’s feelings and what one is told one is supposed to feel, and of being unable to choose between what one understands the world to be and what one is told the world really is.
Lying
Lies, along with discounts, undermine the awareness of children. Lying is the rule rather than the exception in human affairs. We are all aware of the fact that we are being lied to by those who govern us, by the media as well as by those who constantly attempt to convince us to spend our money on their products whether we need them or not. But we are less inclined to be aware of the fact that lying is more common than truth-telling in our everyday relationships.
A lie is defined in the dictionary as “an act or instance of lying; a false statement made with intent to deceive.” This definition of lying, which is also the definition which most people follow, is patently inadequate. It implies that lying only happens when one utters a lie; when one willfully and consciously makes a statement that one knows not to be true.
Yet even under such a narrow definition of lying people lie to each other constantly. If, in addition to the constant bold-faced lies that are told to children, one considers the half-truths and omissions of truth which they are subjected to, it is clear that lying is a basic dimension of a child’s experience.
It takes a lengthy training period throughout childhood and adolescence to accustom human beings to lying and accepting lies without protest. Children are told lies by commission when they’re told about the stork who brings the babies, Santa Claus who brings the presents, and when they’re given false and untrue explanations and justifications for what happens in their daily lives. They’re also lied to by omission when they’re kept away from information which is considered to be too strong or too forceful or premature for their “malleable” minds.
When a child asks her parent, “How are children born?” it is clearly a lie to say, “The stork brings them.” But it is also a lie to say, “They just come out of the mother’s belly,” or to change the subject. The parent has information that the child wants. In order to be truthful, the parent has to either give the information or, without lying, explain why it isn’t given. “I am embarrassed to tell you” is not a lie. “You are too young to know” is. “I am afraid you will get upset” isn’t a lie; “I’ll tell you when you are ready” is.
Complete truthfulness between human beings is rare, but from grownups to children it is almost unheard of.
We are not supposed to lie. Yet, if we examine that rule, we find it to have endless exceptions. Only one kind of lie seems to be truly not permissible: the kind we tell those who are one-up to us (our parents, teachers, employers, the government) and the kind that is told to us by those who are one-down to us (our children, students, employers, those we govern).
We may lie to our students, children, employees, and constituency. We expect to be lied to by our parents, teachers, employers, and politicians.
Lies and half-truths are as corrosive to children’s awareness as are discounts. Children believe what they are told. When the things they are told as truths contradict each other it “jams their computer,�
�� and causes them to feel stupid and mindless.
Statements and lies can be made verbally and they can be made with actions as well. A person can make a statement verbally on one hand and belie it with an action on the other. For instance, John recalled being told the following information by his father:
1. “I love your mother.” (verbally)
2. “If you love someone you don’t have eyes for others.” (verbally)
3. “I have no eyes for other women.” (verbally, to his wife)
John saw his father acting hatefully toward his wife and calling her names, and he knew he had eyes for a neighbor because he saw them kissing in the laundry room. Thus John was exposed to a situation with at least one built-in lie. Statement 3 was a definite lie. Statement 1 was a possible lie. Statement 2 was a possible lie depending on whether 1 was true. But because father clearly lied with 3 it cast a doubt on all other statements, including 1 and 2.
Children are supposed to become truthful adults, but given the circumstances of their upbringing, this outcome is very unlikely. One of the parables that is supposed to encourage truth-telling in children is the story of “Washington’s Cherry Tree,” which is in itself a lie invented by a resourceful book salesman, Mason Locke Weems.1 Children are told lies about Santa Claus, and parents ruefully and regretfully regard the day when they finally demystify the situation and come to see the world of Christmas for what it, at least partially, really is. The origin of human kind, its biological functionings, is kept away from children’s awareness for as long as it possibly can be. Grownups hide their naked bodies and all signs of sexuality from children, and they distort and hide their conversation with each other when in the presence of children. And, of course, grownups are constantly encouraging children not to tell how they truly feel and think about whatever they truly feel and think about.
Ours is a consumer society. Through the buying and selling of merchandise firmly based on the dictum caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) we are deeply grounded in lies regarding what we buy and sell. Merchandising and public relations is the selling of things and people through lies. We sell ourselves through lies.
Television and newspapers survive by selling (through lies). Deceptive advertising laws apply only to verbal lies by commission, but they cannot touch the lies told with pictures and by omission. Further, we expect as little truth from commercials as we do from the material between them, be this news or political statement. We know we are surrounded by lies but don’t know what to do about it.
So, as we grow into civilized adulthood, we are fully prepared not only to be liars but to accept lies from others. It’s a small wonder that people passively accept the lies of their elected officials,1 advertisers, and the media; their training to do so is relentless from early childhood on.
Teaching in public schools carefully avoids discussing certain topics; human affairs are taught about in the form of history or political science rather than in terms of the everyday lives of people, their personal histories, their political situations, their freedom or lack of it. Lies in the schools are primarily by omission, though lies by commission also abound, especially when children are told outright lies about the functioning and administrative aspects of their school, their city, and their country. Here lies by commission are quite common. For instance, school children are exposed to certain views about government. They are told, for instance, that politicians are elected in a democratic process. How many school children are told with the same emphasis that some feel that politicians are bought by business interests and rubber-stamped by the people? Lies by omission are the stock in trade of the educational system, which is a sophisticated training ground in advanced forms of lying. Kerr2 speaks about the “wonderfulness” approach to teaching; basically, a game of “Ain’t It Wonderful.” Teachers seem to feel that only positive, uplifting, and wonderful facts are worthy of a school curriculum. Negative, depressing, and awful facts are carefully screened out of children’s attention.
An untrained child has a great deal of difficulty in saying something that is not true as well as failing to say something that is true. Both the expression of falsehood and the non-expression of truth are unnatural activities. Soon after the child begins to speak even the shortest sentences training to do the former (lie) and avoid the latter (being truthful) begins.
Children are supposedly encouraged not to lie. Lying, they’re told, is not good. When children lie or are caught in a lie they are punished or shamed. Children who are truthful are, as far as I can see, simply children who have learned to lie skillfully (as grownups do); and only those who have not learned to lie in an acceptable way and are blunt and indiscriminate in their lying are are punished for lying. In other words, “truthfulness,” as taught by grownups to children, is simply a sophisticated way of lying as opposed to the crude, more simple way of lying which is punished.
What, then, is truthfulness as opposed to lying? An adequate definition of lying more closely parallels the dictionary definition of falsehood; namely, “a want of conformity to fact or truth; an intentional falsity; an untrue proposition.” Lying is deception, falsification, or imposture as well as an intentional assertion of what is false. This definition includes under it not only a willful utterance of something which is false, but any act that contributes to giving a false impression or allowing it to remain.
Thus, I would like to define lying as: 1) A willful act; 2) involving false statements; and 3) the omission of statements which are true and which would prevent a known false impression on another’s mind. That is to say, lies are not only false utterance (or lies by commission), but also lies by omission, that is, the failure to correct a false impression.
Lying and secrecy are powerful influences in scripting for Mindlessness, and lies along with discounts are capable of producing the kind of mental confusion which is called “schizophrenia” and which I prefer to call madness.
Madness
One per cent of the United States population, we are told, will at some time in their lives occupy a bed in a mental hospital. That is to say, one per cent of the people in the United States will lose their minds, go crazy, become “mentally ill.”
All of us have an awareness of this spectre of madness. Some of us have actually been temporarily or continually mad. Some of us know people who are mad, perhaps members of our own family. Some of us have read literary accounts describing the madness of fictional characters or real ones like Vincent Van Gogh or Virginia Woolf. For some of us madness is a joke, something to nervously laugh about; for others it is a state of mind that we profoundly fear or pity.
Going crazy is an utterly terrifying experience in which nighttime is filled with sleeplessness or nightmares and infinite fear and dread, and in which daytime is fraught with incapacity to act, unwillingness to move, contempt and abuse from others, confusion, disorganization, suspicion, despair, and a recurring wish to end one’s life and be done with it. People who “lose their minds” experience themselves as slimy, inferior human beings, patronized by others, the subject of detached inquiry and examination, absurd thoughtlessness, disrespect, incarceration, institutionalization, army-like scheduling, forced feeding and drug taking, electroshock therapy, and perhaps even lobotomy.
People who go through this experience are said to be “mentally ill”; usually the psychiatric diagnosis is “schizophrenia,” though psychiatrists by their own admission have very little to offer to its many victims. Major tranquilizers are believed to be effective in allowing the “schizophrenic” to “function”; hospitalization can help “compensation”; but there is no hope that “schizophrenia” can be cured. The “schizophrenic” is seen by the psychiatrist as a semi-human being, a subject of pity and charitable thoughts.
I believe that the state of mind described above, the state of being mad, is the end result of a childhood and adolescence filled with discounts and lies, and devoid of support and nurturing. The antidote to madness is awareness, validation, and human support.
Schizophrenia is not an illness; it is not anything except an insulting name which mental health workers use to describe the wretched of our civilized earth. Being “diagnosed” a schizophrenic is like being given a plaque to wear around one’s neck for everyone to see and stay away from. Young people who are taken to psychiatrists or other therapists and are labeled schizophrenic are often dealt with this, the final in a long series of blows. This label—schizophrenia—is the ultimate sentence, which from then on causes the person to think of himself as “schizophrenic” and to be treated by others as “schizophrenic,” perhaps hospitalized, sometimes for long periods. The result of this action on the part of the family and therapists who collude with it is to render the victim truly hopeless and mindless.1
Madness can be quiet, agitated, pathetic, fearsome, or dramatic. The most dramatic form of madness is so-called “paranoid schizophrenia.”
Paranoia
The official psychiatric view of paranoid reactions is that they are psychotic disorders with persistent delusions, usually grandiose or persecutory, and the creation of pseudo-communities. This shorthand description of paranoia is interesting to examine. The paranoid person usually feels that she is the center of a scheme by a group of people, such as the FBI, the Mafia, Con Edison, or General Motors, to persecute her, usually because she has some special importance. Hence, the description of grandiosity, namely the exaggerated self-importance assumed by thinking that the whole of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Mafia or both would be focused on her. Paranoids often feel that different groups of different people who are supposedly connected with each other are banding together to persecute them, hence the statement about pseudo-communities. For instance, a paranoid may think that his psychiatrist and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the Communist Party are connected in a scheme to kill him. Characteristically, the paranoid person’s intelligence is intact, and the behavior and emotional responses of the person are consistent with his ideas. The paranoid does not feel that his delusions are mistaken or wrong, and therefore does not seek or welcome therapeutic aid.
Scripts People Live Page 16