Grey Poop-On

I could never own a dog. As a child I loved my dog Riggins, a brown mutt named after the inimitable gridiron star John Riggins (inimitable in the sense that who else would pass out drunk at a State Dinner after telling Justice O’Connor to “loosen up Sandy Baby”). But dog ownership has evolved in the days since I grew up in rural southern Maryland, where dogs roamed free (and were stolen if they were purebred hunting dogs like Freckles, the Brittany Spaniel who preceded Riggins and hopefully enjoyed the rest of her presumed life as a proper bird dog). Dog ownership now requires picking up your dog’s shit with a bag wrapped around your hand like a glove, and then carrying said bag around the ‘hood with you like a Gucci handbag. I am decidedly not down with this, a stance only hardened by my recent stint walking Bo, my friend Jason’s beagle, whose poop I handled, bagged, and gallivanted with down the sidewalk.

The first problem is the handling. The texture of dog doody , combined, of course, with that unique scent, is singularly nauseating: the warm squishiness, or the warm firmness, depending upon the quality of the scat, was never intended for fondling. Holding dog poo in one’s hand is like cleaning cat pee off the floor with the sleeve of one’s shirt. That there is a layer of wafer thin plastic between skin and kaka detracts but little from the effect; remember, sex with condoms still leads to orgasms. Pawing pup’s poo-poo, baggie notwithstanding, still leads to nausea (when Bo pooped on the floor and wifey sent me to clean it up at 7am it led to some serious dry heaves- had I already had my Cap’n Crunch wifey would have had to clean up barf and feces- “Stays crunchy, even in dogshit!”)

But the larger problem is post poop-scoop. One can not maintain a baseline of human dignity while carrying around a bag of canine crap. One is immediately transformed from the master of a beast to the beast’s nanny. There is something amazing about changing your own child’s diapers; their shit literally doesn’t stink. But as close as I was to Riggins, and as much as Jason dotes on Bo, their shit is still nasty. Women were put on Earth to rule over men, and men are the boss of dogs. A man who carries around dog shit just got bucked down from sergeant to private, and a woman who carries around dog shit is akin to the Queen of England squatting in a port-o-jon; it just shouldn’t happen.

The French are reportedly shocked when they witness Americans walking around carrying bags of doggy-doo. Of course, the French pay minimum wage to immigrant labor to sweep up Parisian poop, but that aside, I am with the French on this one. Say what you want about the French, but those are some dignified folk. Their horror at our oblivious doggy servitude is enlightening. So I say raise a glass of Perrier, and let the shit fall where it may.

Review of Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco:

Eco is, at best, long winded here as he delivers the message that our obsessions come to rule us. In other words, you are what you think, so be careful what you think about. So if you spend your life searching for proof that Bigfoot is real, it really won't matter if Bigfoot is objectively real because your life is all about Bigfoot, which is as real as anything ever gets. I would have enjoyed Eco's take on this if only he had cut about two hundred pages.

Worms, Cells, and the Meaning of Death

There are two prevailing and contrasting theories of how cells die. The first, more comforting theory is that cells simply wear out from the rigors of life, and as wear and tear mounts become less able to fight off predators such as free radicals. Death appears here as an enemy at the gate, to be fought off in valorous combat until achieving the most honorable death possible for the Samurai, death in battle. The second, more troubling theory contends that aging and death are in fact preprogrammed into the cell’s DNA. This perspective essentially states “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

A 2008 Stanford research study, published in the 7/24/08 edition of the journal Cell, lends its weight to the latter perspective. The study looked at the impact of genetic programming in nematode worms, and found that the process of natural selection had resulted in genetic programming that predestined the worms to aging, and, by extension, death. A web article about the research, found at www.supercentarian.com/archive/genetic.html, explains the study’s key insight thusly: “key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake.” In essence, death becomes an existential dilemma for us precisely because it is in no way a dilemma for the process of natural selection. It is perhaps the greatest of ironies that our ultimate destiny is the result of nothing but an afterthought. (I have, of course, here made the leap from the death of cells to the death of cell based organisms; with the caveat that I am layman and not a cell biologist, we would appear to be on safe ground in asserting that the death of an individual human is intertwined with the death of his or her cells to a degree that makes this leap meaningful.)

We may proceed, with due caution but also with some degree of confidence based in scientific findings such as the Stanford worm study, in further exploration of the implications of our “planned demise from day one,” as one website’s description of preprogrammed cell death puts it (http://www.howstuffworks.com/). And if we are to proceed in such a fashion, then our first stop might very well be, yet again, at the doorstep of one Sigmund Freud. Because what the Stanford scientists and other theorists of preprogrammed cell death are telling us sounds remarkably like Freud’s most controversial theory, with apologies to penis envy, the death instinct.

Before discussing the particulars of Freud’s death instinct, it is important to pause for a moment in consideration of its singular lack of popularity. For really existing psychoanalysis, the worms at Stanford may be the bearers of bad news. Psychoanalysis would prefer to go about its business as if Freud had never postulated the death instinct. Psychoanlysis, like all the rest of us, is in flight from the specter of death; as David Loy explains, “our primary repression is not sexual desire but death, and that denial returns to consciousness in distorted, symbolic ways which haunt us individually and collectively.” (for this quote and a review of Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, see http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/padmas.htm) Psychoanalysis has repressed Freud’s death instinct, but, of course, the first commandment of psychoanalysis is the return of the repressed; those worms out at Stanford signal an opportunity for that return to emerge into consciousness from its current status as the unconscious urge towards compulsive repetition found in every form of death terror. Confronted with the science of preprogrammed cell death, psychoanalysis has no choice but to own the half of its legacy it has disowned, and the first murmurings of this reawakening to the death instinct can now be heard. (For an example, see http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=NP.006.0063A)

While psychoanalysis as a whole has repressed the theory of the death instinct, it is striking that the two most important psychoanalysts since Freud, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein (Jung’s and Adler’s respective breaks with Freud led them to found significant branches of psychology, but neither can properly be referred to as psychoanalysts), both embraced the death instinct. In an article on the web about the death instinct (http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos), Pierre Delion explains that “For Melanie Klein, a firm advocate of the existence of the death drive, psychic conflict is never a conflict between the ego and the drives but always between the life drive and the death drive. Anxiety is the immediate response to the endopsychic perception of the death drive. For Jacques Lacan, the death drive as something beyond the pleasure principle forms the best starting-point for introducing his concept of the ‘Real,’ in connection with the Imaginary and the Symbolic. He links to this the lethal dimension inherent in desire and jouissance.” It is my contention that Klein and Lacan achieved their theoretical insights precisely because they owned all of psychoanalysis, including the death instinct. It is my further contention that psychoanalysis has become marginalized as both a therapeutic practice and as a philosophical construct because it has only ever been, Lacan and Klein notwithstanding, half of psychoanalysis. As a mental health professional a week does not pass in which I do not hear psychoanalysis mocked by the phrase “So, tell me about your mother.” And rightly so, because psychoanalysis without the death instinct is a joke. Forget about your mother; tell me about your life in the context of your inevitable death.

To survive in any meaningful way, psychoanalysis must get real. Freud is, as ever, ready at hand with his reality principle, but we must be sure that our understanding of reality is shaped not only by our appreciation of life instincts such as libido, nor only by the demands of civilization as enforced by the superego, but also by their equal partner, the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes that “two kinds of pressures are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory.” For Freud, these dual processes are less than harmonious, as he sees “an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses.” Our neurotic inability to reconcile what Freud calls the “Vacillating rhythm” of life and death instincts is inscribed in the worst of human history, especially war. In a letter to Freud on the origins of war, Albert Einstein described our inability to cope with the death instinct succinctly: “Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.” (for the full text of the letter, see http://www.braungardt.com/Physics/Einstein-Freud.htm)

Zeroing in on exactly what Freud meant by the death instinct helps us see to exactly what degree the theory of the death instinct foreshadowed the theory of preprogrammed cell death. Per Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons- becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’” (emphasis is Freud’s) Freud’s assertion here that death occurs due to “internal reasons” is shocking in its prescience in relation to theories of preprogrammed cell death. However, his assertion that “the aim of all life is death” contrasts with the discovery that death is a mere afterthought to processes of natural selection. We are stuck with death not because it is the aim of all life, but because life only cares for the life of the species and cares nothing for the death of the individual. To correct Freud, the aim of all individuals is death, but, inevitably, life goes on.

But if we recall that the life instinct protects the cell up until the point that it has performed natural selection’s task, only then to succumb to the death instinct preprogrammed into its DNA , then the following passage just a few paragraphs later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates that Freud’s death instinct may account for natural selection after all: “The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organic shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to organic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” In short, Freud’s insight here is that the life instinct and natural selection are ultimately subservient to the death instinct’s agenda, in that a healthy organism will ward off external dangers in the name of natural selection, but ultimately in the service of allowing the death preprogrammed into the organism’s DNA to obtain. The death instinct has but one card to play; it must play it last and if it does it trumps all.

We continue to repress the death instinct at our collective peril. In the most literal sense possible, the only way forward for each and every one of us is though death. As Pema Chodron writes in her commentary on the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong slogans, “ Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.” And if Freud and the scientists at Stanford are right, it not only comes for us at the end, but is there with us every step of the journey; death is a part of who we are. In the same commentary, Pema Chodron counsels us to become familiar with death throughout life: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.” It is only by doing so that the death instinct can emerge from repression. It is only by doing so that we can remain sane in the face of our preprogrammed eath. The leap of faith here, to be watered by practice, is that underneath all that death terror is what Pema Chodron calls “the innate ability to let go and feel compassion for others.” I’d like to die trying.

The Dukolina Blue Heels

In the afterglow of Duke’s narrow national title victory over valiant Butler, whose talented and fresh-faced thirty year old coach Brad Stevens makes me feel ancient at just thirty-five, one fact has become unavoidable: while UNC and Duke may field two men’s basketball teams, they share one basketball program. UNC and Duke stand head and shoulders above every other college basketball program only because of each other. You may wish to cue up Grover Washington Jr.’s “Just the Two of Us” as we proceed.

The UNC-Duke merger occurred in 1980 when Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski, a budding coaching genius who could go toe to toe with UNC’s resident basketball demigod, Dean Smith. While Smith had ruled basketball’s best conference, the ACC, with an iron fist for much of the late sixties and then the seventies, he had remained unable to capture his elusive first national championship. It is no coincidence that within two years of Coach K’s arrival at Duke, Dean finally got the monkey off of his back, with a little help from a freshman named Michael Jordan, in 1982. With the encampment of Smith and Krzyzewski within a few miles of one another, the epicenter of college basketball, which had been floating in the ether after departing Wooden’s UCLA and landing briefly in Knight’s Indiana only to discover that the company wasn’t so great, planted itself firmly on Tobacco Road. It hasn’t left yet.

By 1986, fueled by competition with the very best, i.e. Smith, Coach K came into his own and led Duke to its first of what would become almost perennial Final Four appearances. It was as if Duke and Coach K had drafted behind Smith and UNC for a few years and then slungshot past them at the mid-point of the decade, with the pendulum reaching the outer point of its Duke-ward arc in 1991 and ’92, as Coach K claimed back-to-back national titles. Duke had pulled ahead.

But the pendulum swung quickly back the other way. And this time it was Smith and UNC benefitting from the thrill of the chase. Smith knew he had just about one lap left in which to catch Coach K, and this sense of urgency propelled Smith to make the final act of his legendary career perhaps its finest, with a second national title in 1993 and two more trips to the Final Four in ’95 and ’97 before calling it a day and leaving a program fully loaded for his ever loyal assistant Bill Guthridge to make his own Final Four run in 1998. And it was almost as if Coach K exited the stage in order to let Smith have his well deserved spotlight to himself, as Coach K endured his brief wilderness period, missing half the ’95 season with what was politely referred to as “exhaustion”, and which landed him in the hospital.

Needless to say, Coach K’s dark night of the soul was short lived, and by the time Smith had officially hung up his coaching whistle, Coach K was ready to take back what he saw as rightfully his. And as Carolina struggled to find its way in the post-Smith era, Guthridge went to two Final Fours in three years but nevertheless realized it’s no fun replacing God and promptly joined Smith in retirement, Coach K reasserted his will. A narrow Duke loss in the 1999 national final was followed up by Coach K’s third national crown in 2001.

Which point brings us to the most fascinating juncture of the UNC-Duke merger. When Guthridge up and quit Dean summoned another loyal assistant, and a bona fide coaching genius in his own right, Roy Williams. But Williams did the unthinkable and said no to the Godfather, preferring to stay in a house he had built for himself, so to speak, in Kansas. In the chaos that ensued Carolina hired a man in way over his head, Matt Doherty, and Carolina entered its own wilderness period.

Under Doherty Carolina was no longer able to function as UNC in the UNC-Duke rivalry; the Tarheels were too busy imploding. A surrogate was required in order to maintain the symbolic order that had come to govern the college basketball universe. Enter Gary Williams and his Maryland Terrapins. For one shining moment Maryland was elevated to the college basketball stratosphere, like a passenger getting bumped from coach to first class. A heartbreaking Final Four loss to sudden archrival Duke in 2001 was followed by Maryland’s triumph as the 2002 national champions. Believe it or not, Maryland –Duke was now the game in town, while UNC was busy simply trying to keep its dirty Doherty laundry out of the media.

Perhaps Maryland could have joined UNC-Duke and transformed the rivalry into a “trivalry”, but something strange and sad happened instead. Maryland, and especially its fans, became consumed by the rivalry with Duke rather than fueled by it. For a rivalry to thrive, beneath the pleasure taken in mutual animosity there must exist a foundation of tacitly acknowledged mutual respect. Respect and animosity are the yin and the yang of rivalry, and in this case Maryland had way too much yang. Maryland’s fans truly hated Duke, resenting Duke in a fashion that was toxic to the emerging rivalry. Perhaps Maryland had developed too large a chip on its shoulder from all those years trucking down to Greensboro for the ACC Tournament, which should have been called the State of North Carolina Invitational Tournament. Whatever the genesis of Maryland’s vitriol, they hurled it in heaping proportions at Duke; the profanity became so obscene that Gary Williams himself had to verbally reprimand the denizens of “Garyland” for their poor sportsmanship and unseemly behavior. The breaking point was perhaps when Maryland fans threw objects at Duke players’ parents seated in the Maryland bleachers. There is nothing left to say but that Maryland’s fans, and college basketball rivalries are ultimately about the fans, did not live up to the promise of the fledgling Duke-Maryland rivalry.

And perhaps that is for the best, as three is inevitably a crowd. Maryland faded into the background, courtesy largely of the recruits Gary Williams did and did not land, and fate reasserted itself, as always, to restore the symbolic order. After Doherty was mercifully canned, Dean swallowed his considerable pride and reached out again to his unexpectedly prodigal son, Roy Williams. As Williams later put it, he couldn’t say no to Dean Smith twice, leaving unsaid the fact that the Godfather’s house was now in rank disorder. Williams must also have been able to sense that Smith was on Alzheimer’s doorstep, and that this was his last chance to make things right with his mentor. Williams was basically the son who had refused to come home and run the thriving family business, only to see the business subsequently run into the ground by his inept cousin. Of course he came home.

Like Smith before him, Williams was great before locking horns with Coach K in the UNC-Duke rivalry, but like Smith he had never won his coveted national title before doing so. And while Coach K’s focus blurred just slightly as he spent summers coaching Kobe and Lebron on the US national team, Williams never had more to prove than he did to all those who thought he looked foolish in leaving Kansas the second time that Dean asked him. And in a blink the pendulum had swung again, as Williams led the the Tarheels to a national title in 2005, and again in 2009, while Duke was uncharacteristically mediocre by Coach K standards, and unable to get past the Sweet 16 several years running. Carolina had pulled ahead.

The pendulum swings quickest whenever one school seems to have obtained marked superiority in the rivalry. To wit, UNC, a popular pre-season Final Four pick on magazine covers for 2010, unaccountably fell flat on its face, finished close to the bottom of the ACC and failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament. The effect was so shocking that Roy Williams temporarily lost his mind and compared the Tarheels’ losing streak to the deaths of thousands of earthquake ravaged Haitians. Meanwhile, all Coach K did was guide Duke to its fourth national title while simultaneously ruining the end of the movie Hoosiers (Butler became less like Hoosiers and more like the first Rocky in which Rocky Balboa wins the day despite losing the boxing match to Apollo Creed). Consider the symbolic order intact, and the UNC-Duke merger stronger than ever (with yet another assist from Maryland, who stepped up in place of this year’s lowly Heels and upset Duke in the regular season’s final week to share the regular season title with the Blue Devils; if Maryland were to win an Oscar it would inevitably be as best supporting actor).

For now, what is good for UNC is good for Duke, and vice versa. No single team can be great every year, but the UNC-Duke program can. The rivalry cum merger has made Duke and Carolina greater than they could ever be alone, which is orders of magnitude beyond what any other monistic college basketball program can achieve. This is unlikely to change as long as Coach K and Ol’ Roy steer the ship. Don’t think for a second that Carolina won’t be back with full force next year, as their service to the symbolic order was fulfilled this year. The rivalry’s real test will come when either Coach K or Coach Williams departs. This will likely be harder for Duke, as UNC has already endured the trauma of Dean Smith’s retirement and come out the other side. I’d hate to be the man attempting to fill Coach K’s shoes. But, eventually, the symbolic order will assure that those shoes are capably filled. UNC will probably win a national title or two while things shake out, and, who knows, maybe Maryland will get invited to the prom one more time.

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (and the Price of Lunch is Your Free Will)

An old sign, commonly posted in public indoor spaces in the days when all men wore hats, read “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must.” This sign captures the reality of what we like to call free will. Like it or not, Freud’s breakthrough conception of the superego impinges significantly on free will, that notion that human beings are free at all times to choose. What Freud realized is that rather than roaming the range of existence freely like wild buffalo we are much more like cattle, free to graze as we choose within the given confines of our surrounding fences. Given the superego, the notion of free will must be replaced by what I would call zones of autonomy. And it is only because free will is shrunk down to zones of autonomy that we are collectively able to enjoy the fruits and protections of civilization. In essence, to participate in civilization is to be not free. This cost of doing business for the venture, civilization, which makes human existence possible is a steep price indeed. As always, you get what you pay for. The message at the core of Freud’s lasting philosophical statement, Civilization and Its Discontents, can be boiled down thusly: In order for civilization to function, it’s participants must sacrifice free will; this sacrifice makes us all neurotic.

One may sacrifice one’s free will to civilization in one of two ways. Minus the superego, whose emergence in the individual is never certain and is the result of what is best described as a moral education, the individual’s free will is almost inevitably curtailed by the state, whose “justice system’s” true function is to assure the ongoing viability of civilization in the form of the state. Those who exercise free will in opposition to the will of the state soon find this free will demarcated by prison walls (or, it is important to note, in the case of defiance of the state’s economic necessities via failure to manifest marketable skills, banishment to the varieties of Siberia that include urban slums). Paraphrasing Alcoholics Anonymous, stomping grounds of many a soul who has chosen free will over the law, the path walked without the superego will lead you to one of three places: jail or other institutions, hospitals, or your grave.

Conversely, if one is the recipient of a modicum of moral education, the thoughts and behaviors necessary for the smooth functioning of civilization are encoded in one’s psyche as the superego. The particulars of the superego will vary by individual depending upon the vagaries of his or her moral education. But you will always know if the superego is present and functioning effectively in the individual if he or she is generally managing to stay out of trouble. Those individuals who get into trouble due to the dictates of conscience, see Martin Luther King Jr. or the Berrigan brothers as examples of those jailed for acts of civil disobedience, have the most advanced superegos of all, and as such pose no true threat to the ability of civilization to function. In fact, those burdened with outsized superegos are perhaps the most important contributors to society of all, for by imbuing civilization with a semblance of justice they tamp down the collective neuroses resulting from the loss of free will. Just as in Animal Farm where all animals are equals, and some are more equal than others, in civilization, where none of us are free, some of us are less free than others. And they are irrefutably the best of us.

One of the superego’s craftiest maneuvers is in allowing us the appearance of free will in everyday life. As long as our thoughts and behaviors remain within the boundaries set for us by our respective superegos, we are free to think and do just as we please. I am free to go to the movies with my free time on Sunday mornings, or play tennis in the park. Countless little decisions are made by the individual from the seat of agency, the ego, each day. The sheer mass of choosing that accumulates from these unnumbered choices feeds the illusion of free will; if I am free to choose in this infinite variety of everyday moments I begin to have the emotional satisfaction as if it were the case that I am free to choose at all times. This effect likely keeps us all sane.

But what I am really experiencing are life choices made within the boundaries of my zones of autonomy. If one had an exceptionally rigorous moral education, the ferocity with which one’s superego wields the only weapon it needs, guilt, may discipline one well enough such that the great majority of one’s time is spent in the zones of autonomy, thereby amplifying the illusion of free will for the most moral among us. But while not all of us give in to the temptation to put our foot up the ass of our obnoxious neighbor, we all at least think of putting a well deserved foot up this neighbor’s ass. And because the superego monitors thoughts, and not just actions, we are all inevitably subject to its recriminations in the form of guilt.

And if you doubt the power of guilt to shape behavior, then it is time to take a long hard look at what is keeping you out of trouble. I have a close friend who I have known since childhood. I can vouch for the comprehensive nature of her moral education, which was of the progressive social justice Christian variety. She shared with me that what shapes her behavior is embarrassment. For example, she was recently embarrassed by a server at a local restaurant, and emphatically stated to me that she will never set foot back in the establishment, even though they have an amazing wine selection, because of this incident. Understanding embarrassment as simply being made to feel guilty for one’s behavior, it is clear that the feeling of guilt was so powerful for my friend that she will likely never again engage in the behavior that, rightly or wrongly, led to the feelings of embarrassment/guilt. But an even greater witness to guilt’s potency is the fact that she can’t even return to the scene of the “crime.” The restaurant will always be the site where she drowned in guilt. It is submerged forever.

I am certainly not immune to this. At work recently I was “embarrassed” by a colleague who happened to be coming down the stairs in the stairwell when I exited the stairwell via the door on the landing. I was in a funk that morning and didn’t notice that she was headed for the door in my wake, so I failed to hold the door for her. When we made it to the office she announced to anyone who would listen how “some people” were so rude that they couldn’t hold the door for those behind them (and yes, I did gently confront her- I am getting better at this kind of thing). Whether or not I deserved this rebuke or not, and for what it’s worth my wife gives me a free pass after hearing my version of events, my superego certainly took notice. I now wait approximately forty-seven seconds after opening any door before passing through, on the off chance that someone else might appear out of the ether and need me to hold the door for them. I am tempted to start wearing a doorman’s uniform to work. All that to say that when the superego talks, people listen.

Wittgenstein said “You can mistrust your senses, but you can’t mistrust your beliefs.” If you are blessed with a superego (and I do mean blessed; remember the alternatives), it functions as the ultimate belief which can’t be mistrusted. The superego bounds one’s choices in the same way that death bounds life. You can ignore the superego just as we often ignore death. But, like death, the superego inevitably comes knocking. Inevitably because the last time I checked nobody was perfect. And the superego demands nothing less than perfection.

So what does it mean for us that “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must,” i.e. those of you with superegos may choose to follow civilization’s dictates, and we’ll lock the rest of you up? The first step forward is always to get real about just where you actually are. As long as we cling to illusory notions of free will we shall remain lost in a fantasyland made out of the denial of our most profound existential dilemma. The dilemma common to every human being, male, female, etc., is that to enter through the gates of civilization, as we all must (language acquisition alone guarantees this entry), is to irrevocably forego free will in exchange for that shabby impostor I call the zone of autonomy. Every one of us is Meatloaf singing “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” And then we all do precisely that. What else is there to do?

Freud is a hero because he refused to flinch in the face of this defining existential dilemma. He saw no way out, and so he took none. His philosophy, and Freud was first and foremost our greatest psychological philosopher, owned this central problem of being human. He showed us exactly where we actually are, and he died a pessimist.

Unlike genius brother Freud, I am just folks. But like Freud, I too will someday die. And while I have begun to face the need to own where we humans actually are, I hope not to die a pessimist. There is a popular Buddhist book titled The Wisdom of No Escape. Freud showed us that there can be no escape from our shared dilemma. I turn to Buddhism to learn the wisdom inherent to this place we can not leave. I told my wife tonight that I believe that Buddhism is the “religion of last resort”, which is English for “the wisdom of no escape.” Pardon me while I remove my hat.