There exists no more difficult art than living. Seneca
Our planet is the mental institution of the universe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. Ray Bradbury
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Bertrand Russell
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche
Where to look if you’ve lost your mind? Bernard Malamud
Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? Susanna Kaysen
Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity. R.F. Kuang
It is perhaps an oddity (even by my standards) to write about madness as a tribute to Fathers’ Day. But madness now accompanies a broad swath of our personal, family, economic and governance domains and it is reasonable to ask if there are particular responsibilities that parents — that fathers — can exercise to help ensure that the music accompanying the sanity-deficient dance we now collectively perform, thereby giving expression to a range of social and personal pathologies, can be toned way down.
The motivation for this post is a book which I recently read again and which had a good bit to do with my own social psychology awakening, “The Sane Society” by Erich Fromm. The book is certainly dated in some aspects, still wrestling with outdated Freudian assumptions and advocating mostly conventional therapeutic options. But it also makes an important contribution to the creeping anxiety and “great fear” which characterize this moment, indeed has characterized many of our “civilized” societies and their institutions well before the inception of Fromm’s work (and my own earthly existence) back in the 1950s.
Most of us don’t need to be convinced about the collective insanity which punctuates our present. We experience the carnage of epidemic levels of predation, sexual and economic. We endure a system which stacks the deck against workers and in favor of oligarchs and corrupt officials, a system which has left many of us desperate for health care and other services all while we literally starve for connection beyond transaction. We daily witness the unleashing of bias and violence against people, even citizens, whose skin color and language preference is exploited by out-of-control enforcement agents. We recoil from seemingly endless armed conflict and rumors of more, as well as from faith traditions which are now as likely to justify the madness as demand the repentance for our most toxic actions and aspirations.
There is more, of course, both life affirming and life challenging. What interests me is that, 70+ years on, none of our current levels of insanity would be news to Fromm. Even then, he lamented the “lengthening shadows” over societies which have increasingly made human beings an alienated “appendix” to societies rather than being central to the creation of their meaning and value. Indeed, Fromm lamented traits of personality which made people “acceptable” in his time and ours – humans who “fit” without friction, who obsess over recognition and affirmation, who refuse to “stick their necks out no matter the provocation, people who are “well adjusted” in a way that reminds of the robots and AI which, despite the benefits, now seem to be pushing us further towards “the precipice of insanity” and further away from the human agency which remains our primary antidote to alienated living.
Fromm was explicit in his concern that, unless societies can transform material interests into respect for what he called “the fundamental facts of human existence,” such as our need for transcendence, relatedness and rootedness, that decay and barbarism were likely outcomes and that “blood and soil” concerns would crowd out solidarity and the quest for genuine security in a world which is literally ruled by (largely outmoded) economic indicators and priorities. Even back then, Fromm lamented the gaps increasingly separating knowledge and reason (let alone wisdom), the willingness of too many to sit back and let the world simply take its course, to reinforce and amplify passivity as a lifestyle in which “taking care of your own” is the only care you are ever expected to take.
Many of the fathers I know see these recurring warning lights and understand the threats they pose to the children they are trying to raise. They recognize that, quoting Fromm again, “ the aim of life is to live it, to be fully born, to be fully awake.” But these fathers also see the pressures emanating from an increasingly sanity-challenged society which deifies the economic, which reinforces the passive, which mocks the humble, and which sustains mighty divides of race and economic opportunity, religion and gender – divides which ultimately magnify insecurity rather than promote its resolution.
Fromm worried in his time about the idolatrous “blood and soil” concerns upheld by too many men, concerns which have only served to make prescient his “decay and barbarism” warning in our own, more immediate contexts. But he also worried about fathers who were seemingly, in his words, “along for the ride” of rearing children in this current time of creeping madness. Thankfully, however, many of the fathers I know largely recognize the need to model and promote a certain kind of courage and resilience in their children, helping them along the road to more effectively tolerating insecurity and to do so free of panic, free of pretense , and free of the life-denying consequences of the “great fear” which currently grips much of our individual and institutional expressions.
In these times, such is the opening portal to a very high calling, one which models a life engaged robustly, a life which eschews the paralysis of boredom, which upholds the ethical even while sailing across seas of corruption, which allows us space to find rest without resignation, which insists on agency to help mold a world fit for more — much more — than our borderline-insane pursuits and distractions focused largely on human consumption.
Fromm urged all parents, especially all fathers, to commit to raising children able and willing to use their skills and commitments in the service of life and not of destruction, alienation or even death. From my seat in the policy world, I believe that these contrasting ends remain fully relevant if we are ever to move our planet beyond its “mental institution of the universe” status. And from my even better seat in the human community, I deeply honor those fathers who help their children master “the difficult art of living” in all its aspects, in part by choosing life themselves.
In this sanity-challenged world of ours, this mastery might be the highest calling of all. Grateful to all the fathers who heed the call on this Father’s Day.
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