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Law in Contemporary Society
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A True Test of Resolve-- By MikeCarson - Edited 1 June 2017 This course was as much about understanding subconscious thought as it was anything else. I saw in Veblen an argument that subconscious fear drives us. Over weeks I couldn't let it go. It felt immediately and intuitively true, and it seemed important. But while it the resonated with me, I wasn't sure where it should take me.I.I've always been pretty deeply uncomfortable writing in a first-person, self-reflective style. It feels self-indulgent—and besides, I've never found my self-analysis to age well in print. But the last two drafts failed in part because I didn't care to delve into my own emotional prospective on the subject matter. That approach made them read like tortured and equivocated answers to a question no one was asking. Which is buildup to saying, here is how I think that talk of the subconscious made me I feel: it made me worry that over time I've reinforced portions of my self-conception to protect myself from feeling weak, even doing so might well be causing me harm. It made me concerned that I've let myself internalize some values (albeit not all the same ones) that don't help make me better or more productive, out of a subconscious effort to protect myself from some kind of imagined violence. And it left me wondering about what it would even look like to remake these parts of myself, or whether that's the right question to be asking in the first place. To be clear, I don't feel disordered, or socially maladapted. I certainly don't think I'm remotely pathological. If some parts of the self-image I want to sell to myself aren't totally functional, I still feel productive and balanced on the whole. On the other hand, I do have difficulty writing a first-person essay without feeling preemptive shame at having to read it later. I have mostly failed to create any art in my lifetime more personal than a newspaper column with a firm news peg. I have sometimes (like some of Lawrence Joseph's lawyers) taken a perverse pride in being a professional hatchet man, and talked as though needing to feel good about the professional work you do is a personal weakness or handicap. And I've done those things even though I've known they're almost certainly bad for me. That part of me could use some work.II.At first blush, I didn't feel a lot of connection to the idea that I was well-described a a “risk adverse control freak.” It's not just that there's no day planner in my life; much of the time, there's no plan. I made a living as a campaign rat in part because I liked living a few months at a time, committing totally to a task at hand with no idea where it might bring me next. But I reconsidered that when I recently listened to a serialize podcast on Bowe Bergdahl,the young American soldier who walked off a military base in Afghanistan and paid for it by spending the better part of five years locked in a cage by the Taliban. In a portion of the piece, Bergdahl discussed his thoughts about military life: “I wanted to be a soldier, but I wanted to be a soldier back then. I wanted to be a World War II soldier. I wanted to be an 1800s soldier. I wanted to be a samurai soldier, a fighter, warrior. I wanted to be...you know, more than anything, I wanted to be a kung-fu fighter. Honestly. I love the idea of just, basically, your hands and that's it. You know?” In my previous draft of this essay, I mucked around with the idea that modern industrialized people carry around the vestigial fears evolved for a world more violent, chaotic and uncertain than our own. In Sgt. Bergdahl, I saw a young man who must have lived with that kind of fear writ large. By his own telling, both his enlistment and his desertion were conscious choices made in large part to live up to a sort of mythologized, stoic-warrior ethic he styled for himself. Bergdahl claims his motivation for walking off was to win an audience with senior military leadership in order to criticize perceived failures in leadership by his more immediate superiors. Perhaps. But the means he selected speak to a different insecurity: “Doing what I did is me saying that I am like, I don't know, Jason Bourne...I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing.” Bergdahl was so motivated by a fear that he wasn't strong and tough and competent enough, that he felt absolutely compelled to put himself into a situation that would absolutely prove it. Bergdahl makes it clear that insecurities were a fundamental part of the conscious choices that ultimately got him captured, tortured, and nearly killed. As I listened to the program, it made me deeply uncomfortable to hear the way he channeled that insecurity into a kind of impossibly dangerous test that he was sure to fail from the start. I also saw enough of myself in the compulsions of Bowe Bergdahl to make me want to look away. If we believe his story, then what is Bowe Bergdahl if not a control freak? What could show more dedication to needing control than doing something almost suicidally dangerous in order to demonstrate to yourself the deepest possible commitment to not questioning your own principles? That's the kind of control freak I worry about being—someone so afraid of controlling feelings of weakness and helpless that I'll feel compelled to walk off into the desert alone to avoid them. I have reason to think I can be resourceful and disciplined when I have a conscious objective. But so could Bowe Bergdahl. Ignoring fear or insecurity in the subconscious mind can be a true test of resolve. I hope to consciously strive to avoid taking it.
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