The Cry for Myth (14 page)
Authors: Rollo May
As one writer on the takeovers put it: “It is the American dream: for a kid from the Bronx or a boy from rural Wisconsin to sit at the very center of the turbulent takeover wars that are transforming Wall Street and corporate America, and make millions by the age of thirty-five.”
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Parallel to the financial boom was the rapid growth of gambling. “In Pennsylvania the lottery prize reached the giddy height of $115 million…. Once upon a time, mass irrationality was considered a menace to democratic government. But in this age of lotteries … mass hysteria is an important ingredient of public finance.” It is well known that gambling fleeces the poor more than the rich. Gambling capitalizes on the myth of Fortuna—that we can get rich through “luck.” And we can then live the life which those laughing rich people on television screens present so vividly to us.
Twenty-six states at this writing have state-sponsored lotteries,
and the number is increasing.
Newsweek
reports, “America’s gambling fever … is part of the weekly, even daily routine of tens of millions of Americans.” Lottery earnings have been growing an average of 17.5 percent annually. George Will points out rightly, “Gambling is debased speculation, craving for sudden wealth…. This age of lotteries” is a mass hysteria.
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In gambling and lotteries several powerful myths are expressed. The first is the
mother’s breast:
one needs only to open one’s sucking mouth and, magically, the breast falls in. Another is being fed by some great goddess who takes care of him or her in her hidden ways. In this sense the stated aim of this nation—to increase production—is powerfully undermined by gambling. The stronger the hope to win big on the stock market or lottery or betting on a football game, the less effort one will put forth in honest work. Then work becomes irrelevant: one will live, so goes the myth, by manna dropping from heaven, or more fittingly one lives by the effluence from the world of demons.
This is George Will’s statement on gambling:
Gambling fever reflects and exacerbates what has been called the “fatalism of the multitude.” The more people believe in the importance of luck, chance, randomness, fate, the less they believe in the importance of stern virtues such as industriousness, thrift, deferral of gratification, diligence, studiousness. It is drearily understandable why lotteries—skill-less gambling; gambling for the lazy—are booming at a time when the nation’s productivity, competitiveness, savings rate and academic performance are poor.
Underneath and covered over by the gleeful noises of the lotteries and the shopping sprees in America
is
a widespread psychological depression. This was uncovered by two far-reaching
studies extending over two years by the National Institutes for Mental Health. Something has happened since World War II. Psychological depression is now going on at a rate ten times as high as before World War II.
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Martin Seligman, one of the psychologists who performed the study, sums up its results: “If you were born in the last fifty years, you have ten times as much chance of being seriously depressed as you would if you were born in the fifty years before that time.”
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The inquiries in this study went on over two years; 9,500 persons were interviewed. The questions studied were whether the person had prolonged low moods, suicidal thoughts or actions, loss of interest in usually enjoyable activities, lack of motivation for extended periods, loss of appetite, and the psychological depressions for which lithium or similar drugs are prescribed.
This widespread epidemic of depression, Dr. Seligman indicates, has gone hand in hand during the past fifty years with a loss of psychological and spiritual guidance. The family influence has evaporated in a culture which has little belief in God.
There has occurred a bankruptcy of sources to which one, particularly the youth, could turn for solace or direction when he or she has had a personal failure. The person has only him or herself as the court of last appeal, and that, says Seligman, is a frail court indeed. We have already cited the rise in suicide in youth in the 1970s, and these studies put that dismal figure into its context.
As a scientific check against their own prejudices, Seligman and his colleagues studied two primitive cultures. One was the
Amish of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, who have no automobiles and have preserved an island of early nineteenth-century community with no influence from what we could call modem American society. The other was the Kaluli of New Guinea. The investigators found that in these societies a person goes through well-established social structures, consisting of myths and rituals when he or she has a failure or some personal loss. The breakdown in myths is made good so that the individual can pick himself up without inner loss.
The individual in our culture, however, when picking himself or herself up after a failure, has nowhere to turn except “to a very small and frail unit indeed: the self.” This again is one reason the profession of psychotherapy has grown so rapidly, though obviously this profession cannot be considered a sufficient answer to the epidemic of depression. American people, by and large, have few societal guides, as we have pointed out in earlier chapters—no rituals, no myths to give them solace in time of need.
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The sheer size of individual buying power, “the decline of the power of religion and the family and of commitment to the nation has weakened the buffering effect of faith against depression.”
Martin Seligman proposes the tentative solutions from himself and his colleagues. One “frightening possibility is that we will rashly surrender the sweet freedom that individualism brings, giving up personal control and concern for the self in order to shed depression and attain meaning. The twentieth century is riddled with disastrous examples of societies that have done just this to cure their ills. The current yearning for fundamentalist religion both in America and throughout the world appears to be such a temptation.” The flight into cults, which was so prominent, particularly on the west coast, is another example.
But Seligman proposes a “more hopeful possibility: a balance between individualism, with its perilous freedoms, and commitment to the common good, which should lower depressions as well as make life more meaningful.”
We are here emphasizing that one symptom of the wholesale condition that Seligman describes is our lack of viable myths and rituals.
It is imperative that we rediscover myths which can give us the psychological structure necessary to confront this widespread depression
. Otherwise we will never be able to control the devastating use of drugs.
Bill Moyers went into a section of New York City where one can at any time buy drugs, especially crack and cocaine, from boys on the street corner. There were no policemen around; the people told him that when one “cop” was shot several months earlier, there were a number of police force there for a few days, but they had left. Moyers was told by the boys themselves that they start selling cocaine and crack when they are about twelve years old. When there is a vacancy in their ranks, there is always someone waiting to take the missing seller’s place. This was the only job in the area. There were also several college students in the group gathered around Moyers. Later in the interview Moyers asked these boys point-blank why they sold drugs. Their answer was simple, “Money, money, money.”
They had learned that this was the aim of a considerable part of our society. On television they had seen Ivan Boesky, the in-trader, who was then in prison for embezzling many millions. Also they noted that those who get a million dollars are lionized and their pictures are saluted in the newspapers. These boys had noted that young people get their MBAs and make a million dollars before they are thirty; it does not seem to matter
how they got it. Moyers tried to learn whether they had any role models. In denying any such persons, the boys mentioned the Watergate affair, Boesky, North, and other such persons around the country. These boys were aware that the lottery prize in Pennsylvania had risen to $115 million, that half the states in the union now have this form of gambling, and that the number is growing.
By happenstance, just after the report of Moyers’ interview, photos in the TV news were shown of ex-President Reagan and his wife landing in the airport in Japan. It was announced that on the next day Reagan was to receive $2 million for two twenty-minute speeches. One wonders whether the young people had been right when they repeated their goals of “Money, money, money!”
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We have traced the original myth of individualism, which was so central for the early settlers of America, through Whitman’s poetry and the myth of Horatio Alger. These influences have surely formed and molded the myths and the way of life of our present decades. We will seek to clarify the forming and reforming of life in America which, in our consciousness, can re-form these myths in ways that will form the basis for our living constructively in the twenty-first century.
His life had been confused and disordered … but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
A
FTER THE ENDING
of World War I in 1918, there was in America a great deal of unleashed energy with no place to go. Everyone seemed full of free-floating passion to participate in the war effort, most of which energy was then left hanging in the air by the Versailles treaty. How was our energy to be expressed? A great deal of it was channeled into the amazing twelve-year phenomenon known as the Jazz Age.
This age of the nostalgic whining of saxophones was a time of rebellion against almost everything. It was the time when Prohibition and the Volstead Act made organized crime pay richly and sired a contempt for all laws and ethics in general. “Puritanism”
was a dirty word. The rebellion was most obvious in women’s styles: long hair went out and the French bob came in, and it is hard for us nowadays to recall the horror that first greeted this shearing of feminine hair. Women rebelled against ankle-length gowns, and suddenly dresses were above the knees, as in the John Held, Jr., cartoons. Along with the Charleston and ragtime, the flapper was in with necking and petting, the automobile furnishing a movable form of cover for this truncated sex.
Money flowed freely in the 1920s. In politics it was the age of Warren Gamaliel Harding’s presidency, which ended in utter disgrace, and the Teapot Dome scandal, which dwarfed the scandals to come until our present days. Blessed with President Coolidge’s proclamation “The business of America is business,” there was mad gambling on the stock market, the great extent of which was not recognized until that historic day, October 29, 1929, when the stock market crashed, the banks were closed, and the intense suffering of the Great Depression began.
In this Jazz Age we experienced a great surge of interest in “selling” everything, including ourselves. Books were published on how to sell your personality to employers and how to sell yourself to your lover and prospective mother-in-law. The distinction was never clear as to why selling
yourself
was good but selling your
body
on the street corner was not. Bruce Barton, a successful New York advertising man, wrote a book portraying Jesus as the Great Salesman,
The Man Nobody Knows
, which was read from coast to coast. Get-rich-quick schemes were spawned by the moment; almost everyone got burned purchasing Florida real estate which turned out to be soggy marshland. There were the cults: Aimie Semple McPherson, Father Coughlin, and so on.
I propose that the Jazz Age was the first throes of collapse of the American dream.
The structure of myths on which America had existed for four centuries was now thrown into radical transition
.
Such enlightened intellectual leaders as Frederick Jackson Turner, whose “frontier hypothesis” had been the chief formula for the myth of the frontier, seemed not to be aware of the import of the times. Turner believed that the midwestern state universities would save democracy by producing trained leaders.
I prefer to believe … that education and science are powerful forces to change these tendencies and to produce a rational solution of the problems of life. … I place my trust in the mind of man seeking solutions by intellectual toil … bold to find ways of adjustment … committed to peace on earth.
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Turner wrote these idealistic words in 1924, in the middle of the Jazz Age, with no foreshadowing of the imminence of the Great Depression and the radical shifting of the structure of myths on which America had been based.
In this Jazz Age was produced a work of art which chronicled the deterioration of the underlying myths and predicted the results of their collapse. This was the classic novel,
The Great Gatsby
, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is recognized as the voice par excellence of the Jazz Age. He carried the soul of this distraught period in his own handsome, lithe body and fantastically rich imagination. He had been named after a distant relative, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the American national anthem. In a house in St. Paul, Minnesota, which had been in his mother’s family for generations, Scott was brought up by an overdirective mother, his father being, in the eyes of his mother’s family, a failure in the business world. His mother lavished affection on Scott rather than on her unsuccessful husband.