Psychology and Other Stories (13 page)

Mr. Custard had made something beautiful, and while he'd been standing there admiring it, he'd been shot at by a crazy person.

“Life!” he muttered, almost tenderly.

A pair of headlights appeared on the horizon. He went towards them in slow motion.

Here, he thought, was something new.

“Fiction
is
psychology; psychology
is
fiction
!

Jim Bird

SUNDAY
.

HI THERE
, SHE THOUGHT,
I'm Margo Penn-Jennings (inquisitive pause) and I'm here for the (sardonic pause) self-help seminar.

She did not like the sound of this in her head. The tone of her inner voice was prim, nasal, and superior. As she crossed the hotel lobby and approached the check-in table, with its giant HEALTHY SELF banner hiding the legs of the women who sat behind it, Margo resolved that she would not say anything like this, but instead, simply, whatever popped into her head.

“Hi there,” Margo heard herself say, “I'm Margo Penn-Jennings and I'm here for the self-help … thing. Ha.”

You're an idiot
, her mind told her.

The women behind the table, in a flurry of uncoordinated activity, located her name on their list, had her sign in, produced a bundle of pamphlets and booklets held together with elastic bands which they called “the material,” and scolded her affectionately for being late. “You almost missed Jim Bird's opening learning.” They said the man's name like it was a single word, like he was a kind of bird—a jimbird.

“But …” She began rummaging in her purse for the timetable that would exonerate her. “The seminar doesn't start till tomorrow I thought.”

“Oh no,” said one of the women, “this is a spontaneous event.” She uttered these last two words with so little emphasis that they
sounded capitalized, as if “Spontaneous Event” were one of the fundamental kinds of stuff in the universe. “You can leave your bags.”

Margo entered the already hushed convention room and, with her dogged instinct for thrift, took a seat among the “better” ones near the front. There were many chairs still vacant. Evidently she was not the only one to arrive late.

The portable stage was also empty, and remained that way for ten more minutes. The audience did not seem to mind. Their coughs were politely muffled; their chairs creaked softly, as if they were only settling more deeply into them; no one spoke. Margo turned and looked around the room, smiling when others' eyes met hers. They all looked disgustingly normal.

At last a man got up on the stage, apparently to inspect the microphone. With a shiver of pleasant indignation, Margo felt sure that they were about to be told that the spontaneous event had been spontaneously cancelled.

“You've all made a mistake,” the man said, his amplified voice booming at them from every direction, making Margo jump. “You shouldn't have come. There's nothing wrong with any of you. Acknowledging you have a problem isn't the first step towards fixing the problem—it
is
the problem.”

The man on stage, Margo realized, was none other than the jimbird himself.

Pay attention
, she told her mind.

You shut up
, said her mind,
I'm trying to listen.

“You will become what you are.”

At nineteen, Jim Bird read these words and found a bitter solace in them.

He was, at that time, grappling with free will. This was, to him, no airy philosophical inquiry, but as pertinent as a speeding ticket.
He had treated a girl badly, and the question that weighed on him was whether or not he was to blame for his behavior—whether or not he was to blame for
who he was
, for he knew deep down that in his dealings with the girl he had acted only in accordance with his own wishes. The question was, therefore: Could he have wished otherwise? Could he someday
want
to do right, or was he doomed by a shabby character to act always in perfect self-interest? He hated himself for the way he'd treated the girl; but if he could not have acted differently, then surely it was pointless to hate himself.

Could he change himself? Could he choose who to be, or was his character immutable?

He found the answer he was looking for in Nietzsche.

The individual is, in his future and in his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more in everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him “change yourself” means to demand that everything should change, even in the past.

Because human beings take themselves to be free, they feel regret and pangs of conscience. But no one is responsible for his actions, no one for his nature. Judging is the same as being unjust. This holds equally true when the individual judges himself.

The sting of conscience is, like a snake stinging a stone, a piece of stupidity. Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: Remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.

Though this wisdom did not permit Jim to forgive himself or even stop hating himself, it did make him feel better. It was a kind of relief to establish, once and for all, that he would never be a better person, that he would never be able to rise above his despicable nature. In fact, admitting his worthlessness gave him a kind of intoxicating satisfaction. He had begun to
like
hating himself. “Whoever
despises himself,” as Nietzsche said, “still respects himself as one who despises.” This may seem paradoxical, but it is the nature of hatred: One always loves oneself for hating. It is
good
to hate evil, and that which we hate is always,
ipso facto
, evil. I have always thought “righteous indignation” to be a tautology, for the greater the indignation, the greater the sense of righteousness. As humans we may love, but it is only as angels that we hate.

This is why hatred is such a pernicious pleasure. The more despicable we make the object of our hatred out to be, the more saint-like we feel ourselves to be by comparison. Sometimes, to savor our righteous indignation even more piquantly, we will actually cooperate with our tormentors, and stick our neck under their bootheel. I met a woman once who, feeling she was being cheated by a shopkeeper, in a fit of rage threw down twice as much money as her bandit was actually demanding and stormed out triumphantly. She liked this story, which she told again and again with bitter satisfaction, not because it showed she had done anything particularly wise, but because it showed she had been
wronged
—gloriously, angelically wronged.

Hatred is as much self-aggrandizement as it is other-deprecation; and the strange paradox of self-loathing is that it engenders such self-respect.

This can operate the other way, too. Margo, attending Jim Bird's Healthy Self seminar years later, would write in her journal, “Of COURSE I hate myself. What self-respecting person doesn't hate herself?” If nobody's perfect, if all of us are flawed, then liking yourself can only be the most obscene arrogance. Whoever respects himself must despise himself as one who respects.

Jim Bird, at nineteen, felt that he had, as Nietzsche promised, become what he was. He was (as the girl he had wronged had told him) “a real shit.”

It was only years later, when his wife left him, that Jim Bird was at last able to stop hating himself.

“It's not about you,” she assured him with maddening benevolence.

“I am the only one responsible for my own happiness. I have to
choose me.
”

She had just returned from a self-help seminar.

She removed her belongings from the apartment with the precision of a surgeon excising a tumor, without disturbing any of his things—thus dispelling the illusion that their lives had become intertwined. He saw not respect but contempt in the way she left his things so fastidiously untouched. Even his books stood uncannily upright on the shelves, none toppling over into the vacated spaces.

But she had, he discovered, left behind (accidentally?) a few of her self-help books.

Instead of ripping them in half or throwing them out the window, he read them—and this, through the ravaging haze of his hatred, felt like the more destructive act.

Smile
, they said. This was the pith of their wisdom. Smiling was the panacea. The way to be happy was simply to
be happy.
We aren't unhappy because bad things happen to us—oh no. We're unhappy because we frown. So instead of frowning when bad things happen—smile!

Citing everyone from Milton to Emerson (but especially Emerson), these self-help gurus asserted that we only ever experience the world through our own consciousness. A man does not enjoy Paris, he
enjoys himself
in Paris. If the world seems gloomy to you, it is because
you
are gloomy. Events and circumstances are in and of themselves neutral; how else explain the commonplace fact that the same event or circumstance can make one man happy and another sad? Therefore it
is pointless trying to change the world. In order to achieve contentment, you have only to change your
response
to the world. When “bad” things happen, call them “good.” When life gives you lemons, visualize lemonade. When the world frowns, just smile.

Even if you didn't believe you were happy, you should go through the motions, act like you were, and eventually happiness would come to you. How this would happen was left mysterious, but often the faith was couched in a sort of magical thinking of the like-attracts-like variety: Happy people attract happy people, happy thoughts attract happy outcomes. This was the power of positive thinking, of mind over matter, of dreams over reality: If you only imagined it vividly enough, if you only desired it strongly enough, it would be yours.

And this kind of thing, Jim realized with growing horror, was infiltrating popular consciousness in countless ways. It was now considered bad manners to be or even to look unhappy, because it was supposedly within your power to be otherwise. Colleagues, students, and complete strangers had come up to him and told him to smile. “It takes less muscles to smile than to frown,” they informed him (thereby exhibiting in a single sentence (1) the egoistic conviction that personal happiness was the highest goal of human life, (2) the slothful belief that what was
easy
was always preferable to what was hard, and (3) further evidence of the inexorable degradation of the English language: they should, of course, have said “It takes fewer muscles to smile”). Athletes in interviews no longer attributed their successes to practice or talent, or their failures to bad luck or inferior skill; nowadays, it seemed, the winners were always those who had
wanted
it more. “We just went out there and gave 110 percent,” they shrugged, with the implication that the other guys must have given 109 percent or less. Even Bird's students lately seemed to believe that their grades should reflect not their performance but their desire or
the degree of their commitment. “But I'm
not
a B-student,” they'd say, after putting in what they felt was an A-student's effort; or, even more bluntly: “I really
need
this A,” by which they meant, of course, that they really wanted it—and wasn't wanting something badly enough the necessary and sufficient condition of getting it?

But the philosophy of self-help was not just silly, it was potentially dangerous. Self-help, it seemed to him, could actually do harm. It did this in two ways: it put too much emphasis on the “self,” and too much emphasis on the “help.”

By telling you repeatedly that (he recalled his wife's words)
you
were the only one responsible for your own happiness, self-help also implied conversely that your unhappiness was
your
fault alone. Never mind that your children were ungrateful or your boss an insufferable prick: if you were unhappy at home or at work, that was your choice—you were doing it to yourself. This was victim-blaming at its most flagrant. Now, instead of just being miserable at work, you were made to feel additionally miserable for
feeling
miserable. Furthermore, the absolute emphasis placed on “self” could only encourage meekness and docility. Don't rock the boat—it's not the boat's fault you're unhappy! This was, as Henry James said of stoicism, a philosophy fit only for slaves, for it taught men to embrace the status quo. But what if the status quo really were to blame? Self-helpers were told, when faced with injustice, to find inner contentment; but when confronted with a genuine evil, was it not suicidal to pretend that everything was fine?

“It is important to eliminate from conversations all negative ideas,” said Norman Vincent Peale, arch-prophet of positive thinking,