There is No Do

Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that “Hell is other people.” In the ensuing years it has become fashionable to explain that the majordomo of French existentialism was misunderstood; even Sartre joined in the act:

“‘Hell is other people’ has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.” (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing-jean-paul-sartre.html)

It is all well and good to hear what Sartre really meant. But what gets lost in his explanation is the tendency of language to escape intended meaning the second it leaves our lips or, as in the case of “hell is other people,” pens. Language, like one’s children, has a mind of its own, as does every member of the audience. So when, e.g., Shakespeare has Polonius utter “This above all: to thine own self be true,” The Bard very likely intended us to think Polonius a blowhard and, above all, an asshole. Instead, it turns out that Polonius rendered the founding statement of contemporary western civilization. (Making this, rather unsurprisingly, the age of the asshole, and, at best, a lateral move from what we smugly label the Dark Ages.) Just so, Sartre’s would be pithy synopsis of the intersubjective quality of human identity must instead be taken on its own terms, i.e. as an endorsement of the brute fact of social pain.

So, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” And if hell is other people, then it’s good to be king. Failing that, one can get by as an introvert. As to the former, I recall reading an interview with Baltimore’s king of guerilla cinema, John Waters, in which he explained that the very best thing about his success was that he no longer had to interact with anyone he didn’t want to, essentially supplying Sartre with the missing second half of his formula: “Heaven is the absence of others.” Alas, each kingdom can have but one king, leaving his loyal subjects stuck with one another. Except the introverts, because, as every introvert knows, “Heaven, or at least purgatory, is hiding in plain sight where other people don’t notice you.” While John Waters lives safely behind his moat, the introvert who works at Video Americain (Baltimore’s indie video rental shop, back when such things existed) hides safely behind the counter, from where she is happy to recommend a foreign film while practicing nonattachment, which is western Buddhist for not letting the customer who ignores her suggestions and instead rents Goonies, Gremlins, and Ghostbusters in nostalgia for the eighties and in celebration of the letter g know that he has cut her to the quick. As to those loyal subjects not equipped with the introvert’s native cloaking device, let’s call them every day extroverts, they make the best of hell by forming strategic alliances based on the foundational principal that the enemy of my enemy is my friend; the plot of CBS’ Survivor franchise could be boiled down to “Hell is other people.”

We are left with three primary social entities: kings, factions, and hermits. (Introverts are just public hermits, each introvert wearing the ring that binds them all, with its power of invisibility and all of the attendant side effects.) The people who are really screwed in such a landscape are what I would call the pure extroverts. Pure in the sense that their extroversion is untainted by strategy, because of the fact that they are Bizarro Sartres who find heaven in other people. Pure extroverts are this realm’s ultimate tragic figures, quickly becoming every faction’s sworn enemy. Factions operate by a very simple logic: you’re either with me or against me. And if you aren’t my enemy’s enemy, you are mine.

Roy Rogers’ declaration that he never met a man he didn’t like would seem to paint him as the archetypal Bizarro Sartre. Except that there can be nothing tragic about a man who had his own eponymous fast food chain. (Having your own eponymous fast food chain only to see it go bankrupt, a la Kenny Rogers and Kenny Rogers’ Roasters, is, however, almost as tragic as the end of Romeo and Juliet. Strange that Roy and Kenny share the same last name, as if Kenny’s explicit endorsement of sinful wagering in The Gambler symbolically crowned him in the villain’s black cap, in direct contrast to Roy’s virgin white, karmically sealing the fate of Kenny’s rotisserie while leaving Roy to continue raking in the cash as fast as he could get his burgers off the grill.) Roy Rogers was almost certainly an introvert, i.e. he never met a man he didn’t like because it’s hard to dislike someone who you do your very best to keep at arm’s length, often by being very nice to him. Note that Roy Rogers was famously nice.

A pure extrovert would never say “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Instead, she would say “I never met a man I didn’t love,” which guarantees the pure extrovert’s inevitable tragic demise at the hands of the factions, but also marks her as simultaneously damned and holy. Damned, because kings and (typical) introverts are too busy sealing themselves off from those they don’t want any part of to offer any help, and holy because “I never met a man I didn’t love” is just another way of saying “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Loving your neighbor as your self is, of course, impossible, which means there are no pure extroverts (though my Dad came close, as does my wife), which, ironically and paradoxically, means our only real purpose rests in the effort to become pure extroverts. (Or, for us incurable introverts, fearless and visible public hermits.) In the end, then, what is required is a reversal of Yoda’s famous credo: “Try. Or try not. There is no do.”