Dear Unknown Friends:

he lecture published here explains so much that people today want and need to understand—including the uproar, malice, and lies that have greeted the idea of making healthcare in America more available to more people. Eli Siegel gave this talk, titled Self as a World Problem, in February 1947 at New York’s Steinway Hall. The record we have of it is notes taken at the time, and what we publish is based on them.

Mr. Siegel is showing that economics and politics arise from the self, and until people understand the large fight that is in everyone, economics won’t be able to fare entirely well, nor will people go after justice with all of themselves. That fight in us affects centrally what we do as to every aspect of our lives—how we see learning, sex, listening, eating, new ideas, and what people other than ourselves deserve. It is the fight between the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it; and the desire to have contempt, get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

I’ll point to three huge matters that Mr. Siegel explains in this lecture—matters which, as I see it, no one else has explained. And he does so with the scholarship, clarity, and grace that always characterized him.

What Fascism Is

1) He explains what fascism is, and what it comes from in the human self. This is less than a year and a half after the end of World War II. And in the over sixty years that have followed, how Germans, ordinary Germans, could do what they did has been a subject of argument and has mainly seemed a staggering, horrifying mystery.

In this journal, in 1975 and ’6, Mr. Siegel would write:

It is clear that if you are impelled or run by contempt, you wish other people to be “inferior.” There was in 1930 a collective desire, caused by bitterness and the feeling of injustice, in many German persons, to see themselves as “superior.” This is contempt taking the world as stage and causing...much death, much suffering....

We have to understand contempt and anger in one person and many to understand Lidice, 1942. We have to understand contempt and anger to understand Franco’s bombing of Madrid in 1937....

Hitler is perhaps the greatest evoker of human contempt in history. [TRO 142, 165]

In the 1947 lecture he says (for example):

Fascism is the outward manifestation of the desire to be aloof from the world, to manage it and hate it, which is in everyone....The basis of fascism... is a kind of fierce narrowness.... And at a time of unhappiness, it can be encouraged.

A Furor of Now

2) In this lecture is the explanation of why people can be ferociously, even viciously, against something democratic, something that would benefit other people and themselves. I am not talking about any specific proposed legislation as I say that through this lecture one can make sense of the wild lies put forth at town hall meetings as healthcare reform is discussed. Through it, one can understand why, stirred up by talk show hosts, people are accusing the President of advocating “death panels” which will doom the elderly; why persons are trying to drown out, with shouted insults, anyone who tries to explain what the healthcare reform proposals really are.

Historians and persons concerned with social justice have often wondered: why do people make choices against their “own best interests”? Only through understanding contempt can we answer that question. For instance: there’s a feeling in many a person—deep, unarticulated even to the possessor of it, but intense—that if everyone has health insurance, oneself can’t be superior. The idea that everyone should have equal ability to see a doctor!: that can be horribly repugnant to someone who feels she’s important only if she can look down on others.

With our profit economy faring ill, people have not been able to get as much superiority from it as they once did: they can’t so easily look down by feeling they’re comfortable economically while others are not. So there is a fierce desire to make any attempt at justice to everyone look evil. One won’t come out and say, even to oneself, “I don’t like people being made more equal in terms of healthcare. I have to feel some people are inferior to me. I may have trouble paying for healthcare myself—but others should have more trouble.” Instead, they’ll say with pious indignation, “I don’t want a government death panel deciding if grandma should live!!” Contempt often covers itself with a lie like that and disguises itself as moral outrage.

Further, as many people have felt, much of the fury against healthcare reform is impelled or stoked by fury that a person of color is now President of our nation. That awful thing called racism is, too, a phase of contempt, described in a passage by Mr. Siegel I quoted earlier: “If you are impelled...by contempt, you wish other people to be ‘inferior.’”

3) The 1947 lecture explains too why people who are for justice can fight for it unsteadily; can often be dull, academic, and flaccid when they speak in its behalf; and, in certain instances, can switch sides, change coats.

Here, then, is a lecture—vibrant, kind, and great—that explains our current time, and humanity.

—Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

Self as a World Problem
By Eli Siegel

t is very difficult to think the present-day world consists of about two billion selves. When we look at the World Almanac and see the populations listed for Korea, Indonesia, Madagascar, it is very hard to think they are much more than numbers, abstractions. But the fact remains that in the world today there are two billion selves. If a person can see that the existence of two billion other selves is not an oppression, is not going to diminish him, but is an indefinite means of self-growth, the person will be at ease about it. If we see the world in its manyness as a friend, we can think, How wonderful that it is so complicated, so multitudinous. That is what Aesthetic Realism goes after. The unconscious feeling that the world is around to make us smaller is the customary feeling.

What is needed is to get some sort of coordination between the two most pressing problems: how to organize the world so it will be at peace, and how to organize each self so it will be at peace. Aesthetic Realism sees these as one problem.

Fascism Begins with Something in Self

ascism is the outward manifestation of the desire to be aloof from the world, to manage it and hate it, which is in everyone.

Looking at the Germans, who are interested in the weather and seem to be like us in so many ways, it is hard to think they could have done the things they did. What is the explanation? Is the production of the German Nazi a trick of evolution, something which a sporting Nature developed in one area, having no relation to the human beings of other areas? I don’t think so. I do not believe this of the country that produced Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel. The explanation is different. There is that in the human being which gets pleasure from another’s pain.

How has contempt come to take the form of exploitation, fascism, economic unfairness, landlordism at its worst, and the awful undemocracy in industry? These things didn’t occur without the possibility in the self of each person to welcome them.

Economics & Psychology Are Deeply One

f we don’t understand a Chinese self, a German self, our own selves, we won’t understand economics. A person is always a mingling of himself as individual and as in relation. Economics is the study of man collectively. Psychology is the study of man individually. Economics affects psychology, but psychology also affects economics. If we don’t see the interaction, we won’t understand either.

The self is a world problem because it is the accumulation of selves that runs the world. To see economic history as arising from selves, and as in relation to however else the selves may act, is to put psychology and economics together in a real way. A congressman is the same person when he votes for a vicious bill as when he gets a heart flutter and when he looks up a young lady in a little known part of Washington.

If sensible politics were to come to a self that wasn’t prepared for it, there would be some kind of rift. If there’s to be a fair world, it has to go along with the possibilities a self has for being in a fair world.

At the present time, most people are against the world. And the reason there’s so much political bungling is that, though people want to believe in justice, progress, and loving their neighbors, in a part of their mind they don’t know of, they are against these things. Even among workers, there is a desire for one person to feel he’s better than another.

Many of the Germans who went with Hitler in 1935 were persons who in 1925 had been politically progressive. It would be stupid to deny this. They didn’t believe completely in either.

Justice Is Aesthetics

n a completely just America, no individual would have any of his rights taken from him, and no individual could take away the rights of others—as monopolists are known to do. Government, therefore, is a problem in making a one of the individual and the collective. The individual phase of democracy is that no individual have his rights interfered with. But democracy also means rule by the people. Can the people make a man send his children to school? Democracy, if it were complete, would solve the problem of how to be fair to each individual and to all individuals, simultaneously. It is an aesthetic matter, because aesthetics consists of how to find a unity in difference; how to make many things work as one thing.

Every person has the problem of dealing with all other persons without losing any of his or her individuality. The only difference between psychology and economics is a difference of direction. Psychology goes from part to whole, while economics goes from whole to part.

Further, the self as such is a togetherness of one and many. In the self, integration would mean a kind of unity between our attitude to food and our attitude to logic, between how we see swimming and religion, between our memories and our bones. Then as we meet outside things, we must feel our self is fair to all the outside activity.

A poem of Walt Whitman, “When the Full-Grown Poet Came,” puts this problem from the point of view of the poet. He wrote it in 1891, a year before he died:

When the full-grown poet came,

Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,)

saying, He is mine;

But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;

—Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;

And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,

Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,

And wholly and joyously blends them.

In this poem, we have the political problem—which is also the aesthetic problem—outlined. By “the Soul of man,” Whitman means a something inward to which everyone must be faithful. “Nature” is the self as outward. The situation of being fair to both is what we all want to have. Whitman places this as a poetic problem, but certainly it faces all of us. It stretches out beyond the problems of sugar rationing, rent control, the atom bomb, and political organizations. In fact, the political problem is the aesthetic problem, and the ethical problem: politics should be a means of furthering individual intensity while furthering collective justice.

The artist, while standing up for himself as an individual, is saying: I can do good to every reader, listener, or seer of my work. By his very nature, the artist is personal and collective.

In Each Self

n each self is a desire for autocracy and a desire for democracy. If we feel our personalities are enhanced by the growth of other personalities, we are democratic. If not, we are unconsciously maharajas, dukes, emperors. If Louis XIV could have seen the French masses as being capable of voting, he wouldn’t have been comfortable being absolute monarch. Every self has the possibility of being a king by welcoming the royalty of other selves or by denying the royalty of other selves. In schizophrenia we have the ultimate in the desire for absolute monarchy. The neurotic is the wavering constitutional monarch.

Fascism can be a sort of tremendous hateful family arrangement: if you are not a Cabot—or a Rotkotsky, for that matter—you are inferior. So with Nazism: if you weren’t in the Aryan family, either you had to be managed or people should have pleasure in paining you. There is a provincialism to contempt. The basis of fascism, which is a kind of fierce narrowness, is in every one of us. And at a time of unhappiness, it can be encouraged. If we don’t understand contempt, we won’t understand fascism.

Contempt at its worst is very horrible; in its milder forms it can seem not so bad. However, although there is a quantitative and a qualitative difference between warm water and boiling water, there is also something constant.

The world is all that which can affect you. The big matter in everyone’s mind is: what attitude to take to what is not oneself, or the world. If the self is trying to feel that by welcoming more and more things it comes to its strength, it will want to find the world beautiful. But if we get our importance by diminishing and dismissing, we can’t see the world as good or just.

If people have decided unconsciously that the outside world is their enemy and the more they can despise and manage it the greater their own glory, how can we expect them to function sensibly as to economics? That is one reason it is so important for the self to be seen as a world problem. Persons who consciously talk progressively and who have unconsciously gone reactionary can’t be very efficient or wise. They will go towards insincerity or a kind of intense dullness.

If there aren’t selves who really think they can be happier in a better world, they won’t work well for it. Progressive politics—which includes Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Roosevelt—has often fumbled because not enough people have backed up the possibility of the world’s being good. To believe the world is good is a hard job. We must have the feeling that the more what’s not ourselves is good, the more we are good. If we don’t like the idea of there being other selves, that much we’re politically hampered.

The Purpose Is Happiness

he purpose of politics, economics, sociology, is to make people happy. Even the baby-kissing custom, with all its corruption, shows that you have to express an interest in other people’s happiness to run for office. When we vote, we are just as much interested in our happiness as when we go to the grocery store. Politics is a matter of people working as one to make all people and each particular person happier.

Economics has been psychologically unfortunate. Exploitation couldn’t have been if there hadn’t been that in people ready to use it. And to say there hasn’t been economic vanity among the poor is to do them no service. There have been situations among workers such as the butler’s looking down on the cook and the cook’s looking down on the scullery maid. Vanity and snobbery are present in every field.

To be wholly progressive would mean we had no contempt at all. Many people vote reactionary because only by siding with a certain party do they feel they will get revenge on the world.

We become ourselves by making an unconscious organization of all the people and things we have met—thousands and thousands of them. Some we have forgotten, some we met only for a moment, but they are all, somehow, somewhere within our bodies which we take with us when we walk.

The big job of aesthetics is to feel the interaction of self and otherness—to feel the self in its wholeness is the world in its wholeness. Most of us are afraid of the world. When we think of its variety, its immensity, we are scared. We want to love our neighbors—but so many neighbors?! So we become provincial. And the most vicious extension of provincialism is fascism. That is avoided in aesthetics, because it says the unlimited world is the unlimited self. The aesthetic feeling is the continuous desire to become more and more ourselves by seeing more and more of the world. If we can’t maintain this feeling, we are saying to ourselves, “Stop. Don’t grow.”

I think Marx made the same mistake as Freud. Marx was interested in all selves as apart from one self. Freud dealt with one self as apart from all selves. They both saw human beings too narrowly.

The world needs selves. Otherwise, I don’t see why evolution took the trouble to arrive at a particular self. The world wants to be seen. 

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