Dear Unknown Friends:

It is urgent at this time—at any time, but immensely urgent now—that America study the following explanation by Eli Siegel:

The greatest fight…in every mind…is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality. [TRO 151]

Americans were horrified recently to see, as we watched our televisions, an armed onslaught by a mob against the US Capitol Building. The violent effort at a coup d’état included ransacking, defiling; the stealing of documents; the hunting after legislators, while making overt threats against their lives; the planting of pipe bombs; attacks—with flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and other weapons—on the bodies and lives of law enforcement officers.

My purpose here is not to comment on actions to be taken by Congress and law enforcement. It is to comment on what Americans and all people need most to understand—including about oneself, so that justice can be loved and successful— not only on the streets and in the buildings of a nation but in the minds of her people.

Ethics & the Self

This periodical is in the midst of serializing a great 1974 lecture by Eli Siegel, Where Ethics Is. Ethics is about that biggest fight in everyone—between contempt and respect. Ethics itself is respect: Mr. Siegel defined ethics as “the study of what the outside world deserves from you.” Contempt, meanwhile, is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” We need to see how ordinary contempt is—and how hideous and dangerous. Contempt can be the quiet dismissive feeling, in the midst of a discussion, “I don’t have to listen to what that guy is saying—he’s not important anyway.” It can be a smug inward belittling sneer as one looks at a person and thinks, “I’d never wear a shirt like that—what a jerk!” It can be the feeling, “My family matters; those other families don’t.”

Yet contempt is also the cause of racism, in all its viciousness—because contempt is the feeling, If I can look down on what’s different from me—despise it, him, her—well, I’m Somebody. Contempt—human, ordinary contempt—is the source of every injustice, including the most massive. As a means to understand recent happenings in America, I quote the following sentences by Eli Siegel from issue 165 of this journal:

The greatest ugliness in self is the seeing of contempt as personal achievement….It was contempt which made for that awful mode of retaliation called Nazism….Hitler is perhaps the greatest evoker of human contempt in history.

The United States is certainly, and blessedly, not Nazi Germany. However, there’s no question that contempt was evoked day after day for the last four years. Persons heard—and read—from high places, an untrammeled belligerent sneering, and it was attractive to many. It enabled them to feel they didn’t have to put any checks on their despising; they could let go with contempt in an utter way.

This Was Encouraged

The contempt that was evoked and encouraged these years is: America should belong to only certain people, and we should look down on and hate others—and want to crush anyone who doesn’t see it that way.

Meanwhile, contempt always makes one dislike oneself. People can welcome contempt because they’re unsure and displeased with themselves, and for a while the having of contempt gives one a false confidence. But the upshot, while cruel to others, is also a weakening of oneself, a racking uncertainty, an increasing unsureness which one tries to cover up. That is because the deepest desire in the human self is not to have contempt for the world but to value it truly: our deepest desire is to like ourselves by being just to the world different from ourselves. —All this has to do with the tumult in America now.

Contempt Is Always about Truth

Central in contempt is how truth is seen. Contempt for truth has been present in humanity all these millennia. But again, in terms of statements from high places, contempt for truth took a gigantic form in America in recent years. And that massive, constant high-placed contempt for truth—that steady lying—emboldened the contempt for truth in others.

Contempt for truth comes to this: Truth is what I wish it to be, what makes Me important; anything else, I have the right to hate and declare fake. So we had an onslaught of lies, which were repeated day after day by social media and various television stations. Among them was the lie that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent—even though the courts again and again said it was not.

One of the matters throughout history that need to be understood is this: Why are people ready to believe lies—including those elaborate ones which are conspiracy theories? In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel speaks about the fact that our likes and dislikes, the choices we make, often come from a combination of something within ourselves and what’s encouraged by others, what’s fashionable in certain circles, what’s “in.” That can be so in how we meet a lie. Whenever lies are believed, it’s because they please something in self—the person “believing” them gets something out of them. At the same time, he or she may be encouraged by others to welcome lies—encouraged by what’s “fashionable” in a certain milieu, online or otherwise.

So what do lies appeal to in the self? They themselves are contempt, and they appeal to contempt in a person. For instance, the various conspiracy theories appeal to a person’s dislike of the world; to a person’s feeling the world is a mess—and it’s a mess that you don’t have to try to understand, try to make sense of. A conspiracy theory presents the world as fundamentally disgusting, a world you can hate and feel important hating; and you can preen yourself on feeling that you see the ugliness many others are too stupid or weak to see. In his Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes this about contempt: “To see the world itself as an impossible mess…gives a certain triumph to the individual” (p. 11).

Further: lies, including conspiracy theories, are substitutes for the need to know and keep trying to know, the need to understand, the need even to question oneself. The contempt in anyone hates to have to think and keep thinking. The dislike of thought, continuous thought, is tremendously frequent. But it is also tremendously dangerous. And again I quote Eli Siegel relating everyday contempt to national tragedy; he wrote in 1975:

When man gives up the right to understand and chooses loftily and secretly to sneer, the fascist way is being encouraged. When we use the word fascist, what we mean is the unwillingness to understand, as power. [TRO 111]

In a class of May 1975, he said this, so relevant to the state of mind behind various happenings in America today:

The desire of contempt is always to change into cruelty,…to make [something] unimportant or defeat it. Then you can say, “I laughed last.” Contempt is a way whereby the individual can get out of seeing a situation truly, because what you do is dismiss it or give it your own version.

Yet all contempt, in its foulness, would like to make itself look noble. That’s true of contempt in personal life and also in national life. For instance, whenever persons have wanted a nation to be owned by only certain people, they’ve presented themselves as patriots, even heroes. (We know that the Nazis presented themselves as patriotic, and courageous.) In everyday life too, people can try to make anything they do seem somehow justified, even noble. Take a wife, Dena, who spoke with scathing sarcasm to her husband and tried to make him feel worthless: she feels ashamed afterwards, but quickly tells herself—and her sister, who heard her—“I was standing up for myself, expressing my opinion! I’m no wimp!”

Profit Economics

A big impetus to persons’ welcoming lies and conspiracy theories is what has happened to the economy. Fifty years ago, Eli Siegel explained that economics based on contempt—on seeing other people in terms of how much profit one could get out of them—had reached the point at which it could no longer succeed. He explained that this profit-based economy would increasingly show its failure. And it has. That’s why over the last decades a smaller and smaller number of people own most of the wealth of this nation. Increasingly, millions of people have become poor, with all the anguish and hunger that the word poor takes in. The middle class has been steadily diminishing. The failure of profit economics affects people of every political view. In many, it encourages a readiness to believe conspiracy theories, for the following reason:

Whether one is enduring the horror of poverty, or is of the worried middle class, or even the worried once-upper-class, the economic turmoil of now has made for a big unsureness in people. It’s an unsureness, of course, about money as such—but sometimes it’s also about one’s very self. And the desire to get rid of unsureness through contempt is, as Aesthetic Realism explains, alluring. So there are persons who are trying to get to a fake sense of self and trying to wipe out any need for large thought, by finding things and people to hate utterly. Conspiracy theories and lies can provide these. And inexact unleashed anger and contempt, including cruelty and destruction, can give one the exhilaration of temporary—ever so temporary—triumph and “sureness.” It has been so in history.

Meanwhile, more and more Americans are coming to believe that our nation belongs to all its people—not just those who look like oneself—and that every American should be treated accordingly. This growing belief is a victory of ethics. And a reason some persons have become increasingly ferocious is: they hate that victory of ethics and are trying to undo it.

What We Need

I will say this simply: had America been able to study Aesthetic Realism these years, there would not have been the horrible attraction to lies; and the recent manifestations of contempt as cruelty would not have been. Instead, through Aesthetic Realism, the American people would have been understanding contempt and opposing it, including in oneself. Further, the very basis of Aesthetic Realism is this principle, stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” What America most needs to see and have is in that great principle.

For instance, we need an economy that is just simultaneously to all people and to each individual person. We need to see that being fair to the world not ourselves is the same as expressing and caring for our own dear self. We need to see that wanting to know accurately and deeply is the same as freedom and a good time.

This is the study of Aesthetic Realism. It should be America’s study.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Always: Ourselves & the World

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel is looking at statements in the book Ethics, by P.H. Nowell-Smith.

In the next passage, Nowell-Smith is speaking about the reasons people decide something is good or not. Plato and Aristotle, and, for that matter, St. Augustine, Epictetus, Epicurus, do not deal with the impingement, the oppression, by the conventional—that the reason people do something is that “it’s done.” That discussion later came to be; the 19th century was a big century for it: we do things because other people do them. It’s in the comic strip phrase keeping up with the Joneses. Nowell-Smith writes on page 172:

The criteria used for appraising are partly natural and partly conventional. In music, for example,…taste is…partly conventional in that it is not natural to like or admire a Bach fugue in the way that it is natural to like sweets or to love one’s children.

So if a person in the South around 1913 hated Black people very much, one can say that the reason was (it still is that): there’s a disposition to hate anybody who looks so definitely different from oneself. This can be not only in the South. The other reason is that in Georgia it was the fashion. And in Louisiana, if you didn’t hate Black people you were seen as having something wrong with you. So (using Nowell-Smith’s terminology) the first reason is more “natural”—that you’re suspicious of what is different from you. That goes on a good deal, and has to do with the history of nationalism. It’s present now. For instance, a Greek Cypriot knows that a Turkish Cypriot is quite different. One has the Greek Orthodox Church and the other Islam; and there are other differences. So the hate arises from something in the self, and also from something conventional, affected too by the history of Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey.

When a person begins to hate someone, the cause is clearly psychological. But every hate has to do with ethics too, and has a basis which, as Nowell-Smith puts it, is conventional and also deeper than that.

He writes about musical taste and convention. Right now there are twenty times as many people than there used to be who can listen to a Brandenburg Concerto and have a good time. Bach was seen by many as a person who didn’t tune his instruments too well. But at the moment, one does listen to Bach and quite honestly finds pleasure. The reason is, to be sure, fundamental: because Bach is a Musician. But also, there’s the feeling that it is “in” to like Bach.

When we talk about “in,” we’re in the field of convention—and there are two kinds: the iconoclast convention and the conforming convention. As a hippie might have said ten years ago, “When I’m among hippies, I act as hippies do.” It’s a paraphrase of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” So convention is a large thing. And I must say this: unless the economic convention that has been accepted all these years is not accepted any longer, the economic failure throughout the world will go on. You can call the cause bad ethics but you can also call it a convention.*

Fashion & Something in the Self

Another aspect of the matter is in a sentence on page 173:

Taste is dictated by fashion, not fashion by taste.

That is partly true. For instance, in 1910, when the split skirt was in fashion, persons who in 1880 would have seen the idea of wearing a split skirt as just impossible, changed. Once the most “important” people started wearing it—rich people and Radcliffe graduates—the split skirt came to be worn in not such large towns. Also the hobble skirt, which is one of the most interesting fashions ever. There was something people liked in being hemmed in—because wherever there’s fashion, there’s also something in the self that goes for it. While taste may be “dictated by fashion,” in fashion there is also something which has a beginning in it. When any person likes something, likes it so much as to wear it or to think it’s right, something of himself or herself is there.

Obligation & Inclination

The most cheerful thing Nowell-Smith says is on page 210. Sometimes it happens that a human being enjoys most doing what he most should do. That intersection, identification, oneness is possible. And it is what the human unconscious hopes for: that what we most want to do is what we most respect ourselves for doing. That is in this paragraph:

The logic of obligation requires a conflict between the obligation to do something and the inclination not to do it. But it is important to notice that this conflict is part of the general background of the concept of obligation and need not occur in every case.

What Nowell-Smith is saying—though in a very grudging way—is that occasionally inclination and obligation may be the same thing. That’s the best news human beings could hear.

The word obligation is a central one in ethics. Are we obligated to do something, and what is the source of the obligation? And what of the relation between inclination and obligation? People have said: I have to be there, I have to go there, I can’t do anything else but go there. I don’t want to, but, you understand, I have to go there. People have been affected by this constantly.

Yet these obligations are not the most grievous: it is the obligations we ourselves give to ourselves that we don’t know, which are the most corrupting and horrible—which have slipped into us and slipped about in us.^†

A purpose of Aesthetic Realism is to have you be critical of all the false obligations that you’ve assumed for yourself, to have you know them. When the phrase He’s his own worst enemy is used, what it means is that this person will give himself assignments, feel he has to do things; he won’t even know he is going through a discussion on the matter. And in the meantime, those obligations do not come from the central thing in him. They are falsely arrived at.