Individual Responsibility, Love, and Connection Beyond Idealism
The deciding factor lives within the individual, who knows no answer to their dualism. This abyss has suddenly yawned open before them with the latest events in world history, after humankind had lived for many centuries in the comfortable belief that a unitary God had created humans in his own image, as a little unity. Even today people are largely unconscious of the fact that every individual is a cell in the structure of various international organisms and is therefore causally implicated in their conflicts. The individual human knows that as an individual being they is more or less meaningless and feels themselves the victim of uncontrollable forces, but, on the other hand, they harbor within themselves a dangerous shadow and opponent who is involved as an invisible helper in the dark machinations of the political monster. It is in the nature of the political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything they do not know and do not want to know about themselves by foisting it off on somebody else.
Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections. This necessary corrective requires self-criticism, for on cannot just tell the other person to withdraw them. They do not recognize them for what they are, any more than one does oneself. We can recognize our prejudices and illusions only when, from a broader psychological knowledge of ourselves and others, we are prepared to doubt the absolute rightness of our assumptions and compare them carefully and conscientiously with the objective facts. Funnily enough, "self-criticism" is an idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice in people's dealings with one another. The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of human to human; it strives, rather, for the atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.
There can be no doubt that in the democracies too the distance between humans is much greater than is conducive to public welfare or beneficial to our psychic needs. True, all sorts of attempts are being made to level out glaring social contrasts by appealing to people's idealism, enthusiasm and ethical conscience; but, characteristically, one forgets to apply the necessary self-criticism, to answer the question: Who is making the idealistic demand? Is it, perchance, someone who jumps over their own shadow in over to hurl themselves avidly on an idealistic program that promises them a welcome alibi? How much respectability and apparent morality is there, cloaking with deceptive colors a very different inner world of darkness? One would first like to be assured that the individual who talks of ideals is themself ideal, so that their words and deeds are more than they seem. To be ideal is impossible, and remains therefore an unfulfilled postulate. Since we usually have keen noses in this respect, most of the idealisms that are preached and paraded before us sound rather hollow and become acceptable only when their opposite is openly admitted to. Without this counterweight the ideal goes beyond our human capacity, becomes incredible because of its humorlessness and degenerates into bluff, albeit a well-meant one. Bluff is an illegitimate way of overpowering and suppressing people and leads to no good.
Recognition of the shadow, on the other hand, leads to the modesty we need in order to acknowledge imperfection. And it is just this conscious recognition and consideration that are needed wherever a human relationship is to be established. A human relationship is not based on differentiation and perfection, for these only emphasize the difference or call forth the exact opposite; it is based, rather on imperfection, on what is weak, helpless and in need of support—the very ground and motive of dependence. The perfect has no need of the other, but weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with anything that might force them into an inferior position and even humiliate them. This humiliation may happen only too easily where idealism plays too prominent a role.
Reflections of this kind should not be taken as superfluous sentimentalities. The question of human relationship and of the inner cohesion of our society is an urgent one in view of the atomization of the pent-up mass man, whose personal relationships are undermined by general mistrust. Wherever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of de-potentiated social units. To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbor. But it is just this love for one's fellow human that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection. It would therefore be very much in the interest of the free society to give some thought to the question of human relationship from the psychological point of view, for in this resides its real cohesion and consequently its strength. Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.
These reflections are not intended as an appeal to idealism, but only to heighten the consciousness of the psychological situation. I do not know which is weaker: idealism or the insight of the public. I only know that it needs time to bring about psychic changes that have any prospect of enduring. Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.