Thanks for your letters of August 24th and October 5th. I think your attitude toward the Center is a healthy one. You're certainly right to feel that you don't have to like everyone there, or like everything that goes on for that matter. You'll take part in the discussions when and if you choose to, and no one has the right to criticize your reasons be they stated or unstated.
Your questions about the future are very pertinent and probing. What would a saner, less ignorant and less immoral world look like? This question is a hot topic among political reformers who would like to assume that there's a straight line between A and Z and all you have to do to get there is to force society into the politically correct direction you happen to believe in. But for those of us on the psychological frontier, it doesn't matter at all what it would look like. The fact that it will be saner, less ignorant and less immoral is enough to believe in. Our job is to inch our way towards it, via piecemeal incremental improvements in our knowledge and ability. With enough respect for each other's growth process and pride in our own integrity, we'll get there. And when we get there it'll look better than anything we can imagine today.
Masculines in general much prefer dreaming about the future than tinkering with today. But the danger of our fascination with utopian dreams is that it may lead us to hate the imperfect humans with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our lives. Utopian contempt for the unwashed masses often leads to totalitarianism, and millions of people have been murdered for the sake of the unborn who would live in such a utopia, communist or otherwise.
Civilization is like a rickety ship at sea. We can fix and rebuild one tiny plank at a time, and thereby eventually replace the entire ship. But we can't build a new ship from scratch without drowning. Our job is to improve the quality of our lives so that we can set an example for other people when and if they chose to follow us. It's not our job, or even our right, to decide the time schedule on which the rest of humanity will improve itself. You say in your second letter, "I can not build a better world unless my own life is already in that better world." I would add that living our lives in a better world is exactly how that better world should be built. It's not built through legislation, political pressure, propaganda, diplomacy or advocacy work, but by people living their private lives better than they used to.
How would children be raised in a saner world? Responsibly, and with love. But children don't need as much creative psychological stimulation as do adults. It's enough of a job for them just to learn the adaptive skills of conventional social intercourse. They shouldn't have to worry about the fact that the adult world is fucked up in ways that aren't easy to understand and in some cases aren't even admitted, and I wouldn't go out of my way to expose them to the frightening and disorienting tragedies of the world at large. But they would certainly have more freedom and security to find out sooner what they want to do in the world. I doubt if they'll be jailed from 9:00 to 3:00 in concrete cinderblocks with sadistic tormentors as they are today. I'm a great believer in apprenticeships rather than factual memorization. Children could probably learn a lot from spending one day a week going to work for their parents and the parents of other children. Computers could teach them all the facts and writing skills they'd need. Human teachers would be reserved for practical lessons in love and power.
Why would some people choose to be "heterosexual?" For the same reason that they would choose to be "homosexual," ie. because something had scared them off an open-ended growth process, for the same reason that classically trained musicians think jazz is degenerate and jazz musicians think classical is dull. Isn't it time we enjoyed our sexual and celebrative capacities without worrying whether we were violating our agreement with ourselves to only appreciate one gender? I think it's always better to be able to appreciate and get involved with someone than not to be able to. People should have heterosexual relationships for the same reason they have homosexual relationships: because it satisfies their need to connect with someone of the opposite polarity, and because they have something to learn from it. I have a relationship with Jennifer because right now I have stuff to teach her and she has stuff to teach me. We just bumped into each other and found we each had something the other needed. Our plumbing had nothing to do with it.
Would a greater proportion of people be homosexual in a saner world? I would be very surprised if very many people in industrial countries fail to achieve at least one significant homosexual relationship in their lives. It will be recognized as a symptom of underdevelopment.
How would other scientific therapies dovetail with the Center's ideas? They won't need to. Any scientific therapy would inter-penetrate, fertilize and become one with the Center's ideas. There is only one human nature, and only one science of human nature. What can we learn, if anything, from the cornucopia of "New Age" therapies? Unfortunately, very little — no more in fact than we ever learned from the cornucopia of primitive religious superstitions concerning creation. They are little more than daydreams marketed by people who have yet to take seriously the real problems of the human race. For them, utopianism is just a hot new product.
I don't know anything about B. F. Skinner, but would be interested to hear what you learn about him. Paul's psychology is a kind of marriage of behaviorism with intuitionism, but either approach in isolation is utterly futile. And academics who think the two approaches are in conflict rather than being two sides of the same coin are imbecilic dogs chasing their own tails.
I've always liked you a lot, Mark, and respect your failed attempt to live up to high ideals by being an FBI agent more than most people at the Center are able to. I think it's great that you want to engineer an experimental community, but think you should start practicing these engineering skills on people who already believe in your ideals, ie. those of us at the Center who want to be in your sphere of influence. In any case, I think you and I will find a lot more to talk about in a more personal setting, and hope we can spend some time getting to know each another in the coming months.
Thanks for your very thoughtful letter. I agree with most of your conclusions about the Center as a historical force, and enjoy sharing your skepticism about the emperor's new clothes, especially as it pertained to the abilities of Paul's students to accurately reflect and represent what the man stood for. They not only didn't represent what he stood for, they were simply never very much like him as human beings. Paul loved meeting and helping new people. They were prima donnas who regarded new people as neophytes whose only use was to be hazed by us oldtimers with confusing and stressful mental games which had to be submitted to without question before they could gain admittance to the inner circles of our fraternity. Over the years this counter-productive selection pressure drove away the more intelligent and independent men and women and left us with increasing numbers of social parasites who had an ax to grind. I'm glad they won't be preying on us anymore.
I include myself among the prima donna class, by the way. I think it creeps up on you when you're not watching. It's a process of stultification and ritualization that probably has overtaken all psychological institutions that have ever been founded in the last hundred years, including the Jung Institutes and the Karen Horney Institutes and all the rest. Even Paul could be dreary on his off-nights! Maybe it's a credit to Paul's work that it couldn't coexist with this kind of falsification. We probably should be grateful there'll be no stuffy Rosenfels Institute to distort his memory.
Nobody has ever tried to make a videotape popularizing Paul's work, although he repeatedly asked Jurgen to do just that. Various kinds of polarity are very popular themes in aesthetic forms of many sorts, however. It's so common that it's rarely noticed. Every play of Shakespeare's has a major masculine figure and a major feminine figure. (Then again, every major psychological theorist claims to be well represented by the plays of Shakespeare!) Read Alan Watt's book The Two Hands of God for a conventional history of this kind of polarity. It's very hard to teach truly new psychological ideas through art. I'd stick to more ordinary forms of communication for such a task.
I love your idea that the feminines at the Center perfected their femininity while the masculinines perfected their masculinity — but boths camps never really came together to create anything more than the sum of these parts. "Wordy, intelligent feminines can talk their way out of true submission." And the wordy, intelligent masculines equally talked their way out of true dominance! How well you express the essence of psychological right when you make the effort.
The Center failed, there's no doubt about it. My basic position is that it's too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions about why it failed. Maybe we'll all have to live some other way for a few years before we come up with really useful ideas about this. It just hurts right now, that's all, and maybe it should. I'm in no hurry to explain the pain away.
Bob has told me that you're still interested in the Study Group as long as we relate Paul's works to those of other major thinkers. By all means, let's do it. I don't feel qualified to lead the pack in this effort, nor is my ego involved in "running" these meetings. Last year we took a break from Paul and read a short novel by Conrad. This year I'd like to try a non-fiction work. Would you like to lead a group on Walden Two? I guarantee that not many people in the group really know what Skinner stands for. At the next meeting we'll probably vote on what to read next, and I hope you can come and take part. Another alternative though would be to just start up your own group and keep us posted about it so some of us could attend. And if you do find truly greener pastures elsewhere, by all means tell me about them! (I've been searching for years and years.)
Your theory about the Leopold-Loeb case influencing Paul is interesting, but I honestly can't offer any corroboration. Paul admired Clarence Darrow very much and may have mentioned this particular case in passing to me, but he didn't seem especially interested in it. Although it is a case about homosexuality, and an odd coincidence that one of the boys developed his own theory of polarity, I think I'd have to say that, just as the devil can quote scripture for his purposes, good ideas can sometimes be found in the unlikeliest places and any such coincidence wouldn't necessarily mean anything. There are some terrific quotes in Mein Kampf too, but that doesn't men we need to credit Hitler with being the author of the ideas we live by today.
Paul developed his ideas about polarity over many years, observing and analyzing countless human phenomena, before putting a single word to paper. He would have to have been far more influenced by Jung than the Leopold-Loeb story, for the simple reason that Jung had so much more to say about it. He also read the complete works of Joseph Conrad and saw polarity everywhere in it. If you look at our web page called , you'll see that the idea of polarity really has been with us since the dawn of abstract thought, and it's quite impossible to trace its evolution in any precise or meaningful way. Although he didn't seem interested in the Leopold-Loeb case, Paul did speak quite warmly and openly of his memories of Clarence Darrow, as he did of John P. Altgeld (the Governor of Illinois who pardoned the Haymarket anarchists), and other great humanists of his time and place — including the historian Claude G. Bowers. Paul liked Bowers' nominating speech at the 1926 Democratic Convention so well that he borrowed its very last line and used it to conclude "Love and Power". "To your tents, O Israel!" has to be one of the oddest literary references in all psychological literature. Since you enjoy biographical research, if you can ever find the official photograph of Darrow's 75th birthday party that shows all of the attendees facing the camera you'll see an early picture of Paul — exactly where in that crowd he never said, however.
I, like yourself, was always fascinated by details of Paul's early life and influences and over a decade prodded him to write an autobiography. When he finally did he left out all the juicy tidbits that had intrigued me and stuck to the psychological core. That's where Paul really lived, after all, not in the newspaper headlines. In his adult life he stood above and beyond the circumstances of his time and place to gain a vista from which he could do his great work.