According to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, our basic human predicament is that we are “gods with anuses.” By this humorous phrase, Becker suggests that we are part material, instinctual animals, and part psychic, cultural, homo sapiens. Psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, makes a similar point with a different metaphor. According to Fromm, humans are “freaks of nature.” In The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, Fromm speaks of the duality of human beings as both “being with nature” and at the same time “transcending it.” Humans constantly straddle the tension of the “principles of action and decision-making” and “the principles of instincts.” The human’s higher order reasoning helps her organize her world to keep her safe from the physical dangers of starvation and harm. This same cognitive capacity makes it possible for the human to go “insane.”
To be human is to exist within nature yet to be alienated from it. Whereas other animals fret over predators, starvation or injury, humans, due to their elevated cognitive capacities, must reckon with the psychological possibility of insanity and the complete obliteration of meaning. Humans are bound to the same finite limitations as other animals yet have the mental powers to transcend the knowledge of their finitude. This predicament leads to what Becker calls “death anxiety.” We are cursed with the knowledge of our own inevitable mortality.
The human condition is a catch-22. This is the conclusion of Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and Danny Cho (Steven Yuen) in the hit Netflix series, Beef. The series begins and ends with a road rage incident. At the beginning, Amy and Danny chase each other through an upscale suburban neighborhood in southern California. At the end of the series, when their lives have been turned upside down, they meet again and chase each other off a cliff.
Throughout the series, both characters have tried to ruin the personal and professional life of the other. In the final episode, Amy and Danny find themselves stranded in a desolate location with no cell coverage. Instead of their usual tendency to attack the other person, the circumstances force them to come together in solidarity. After having ingested a poisonous plant, they both undergo an altered consciousness experience. Danny (who through the effects of the plant inhabits Amy’s body and vice versa) asks about her tatoo:
Danny: Yo, by the way, what’s up with your tattoo?
Amy: It’s the number 22.
Danny: Right, but why 22?
Amy: Did you know Joseph Heller titled his book Catch-18 but his editor arbitrarily changed it
to Catch-22?
Danny: Ow, ow, ow. No.
Amy: Well, for as long as I can remember, that’s what being alive has felt like. Can’t have form without space. Can’t experience light without dark.
Danny: We’re stuck.
Amy: Yeah, and any time you try to hold on to one thing it slips away.
Danny: I’ve never been able to describe this feeling inside of me, but I think that’s it. Catch-22.
Amy: Right? It’s like a void.
Danny: But not. It’s like empty but solid.
Amy: Yes, that’s right, Daniel. Empty but solid. Right under the surface.
Danny: You think other people feel this way?
Amy and Danny’s connection over their existential plight is the moment they finally simmer down and move past their beef.
***
One of the central principles of the left is the reality of a common humanity. Starting with Aristotle, it has been important to emphasize that humans are social animals. No person is an island. Sociability is the necessary context of our individuation.
As social creatures, humans evolved to thrive when they cooperate with each other. Standing against the the ideology of social Darwinism, anarchist and social philosopher Peter Kropotkin highlighted that our most advantageous evolutionary trait is our social cooperation. Through “mutual protection” humans progress into old age and share knowledge and resources to survive. The “unsociable species” Kropotkin notes “are doomed to decay.”
What might be another way to frame common humanity that is more effective in bringing us together in the face of our deepest divisions?
If we underscored our human nature as being a catch-22, caught between our animalistic and transcendent sides, we might better achieve the goal of bonding over the common humanity in each other.
***
The “hole” describes how unlike other animals, humans are never fully at home in the world. Even with our elevated cognitive capacities, we can’t escape our finitude or mortality. We continue to be gods with anuses. There is no way to escape the shit. This is a crucial requirement if there is to be a common humanity.
Although drawing from other thinkers, Todd McGowan argues that “we need a universality politics which takes the point of failure, or non-belonging, as its starting point.”
The failure or non-belonging that McGowan wants to make his starting point for a universalist politics is the rupture that results from our existential catch-22 as freaks of nature or gods with anuses.
One way to see this perspective is to contrast it with identity politics. The “inclusivism” of identity politics is its desire to convert the non-belonging to a type of belonging. Or to use another metaphor, the desire to heal the rupture created by our existential plight.
According to McGowan, inclusivism’s attempt to “eliminate non-belonging” is a fantasy to “create a whole without absence.” Inclusivism demands a “whole without a hole” while universalism “insists on the hole.”
The “hole” describes how unlike other animals, humans are never fully at home in the world. Even with our elevated cognitive capacities, we can’t escape our finitude or mortality. We continue to be gods with anuses. There is no way to escape the shit. This is a crucial requirement if there is to be a common humanity.
Far from being a reason to despair, our non-belonging /existential hole can be a way to reframe our common humanity. What we all have in common is that none of us are whole or at home in the world. We are all connected, not by a positive cooperative spirit, but through a common negative existential trauma and wound.
***
As a therapist, I utilize the model of self-compassion pioneered by psychologist Kristen Neff. One of the features of this approach is the importance of returning to a sense of common humanity.
Neff’s research is partly rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Returning to common humanity is returning to the foundational truth that life is suffering or dukkah. According to Buddhist and psychoanalyst, Mark Epstein, “the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of ‘pervasive unsatisfactoriness’.” “Pervasive unsatisfactoriness” is another way of framing our fundamental human condition. No matter how hard we try to belong or fill the lack, we will be left wanting.
There’s a Buddhist parable where a young mother carries her dead infant as she is desperately looking for a physician to bring him back to life. She runs into the Buddha, and he offers direction. He tells her to bring back mustard seeds from a family in the village that has not experienced death. The woman goes out and is unsuccessful in finding a single family who has not been struck by bereavement. In the process, the woman realizes she is not alone in her dukkah and ultimately finds a way to let go of her deceased child. She is confronted with a profound sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness in both her child’s death and realizing that this is the human condition.
The efficacy in this parable, is that the absence, loss, and pervasive unsatisfactoriness is precisely what brings people together through the shared trauma of being human. Suffering and loss are not dismissed or celebrated; they are experienced and accepted as the only way to be connected to the larger human story.
***
In Enjoyment Right & Left, Todd McGowan makes a startling claim. He says the “fascist or capitalist” is an opponent of a universalist project but not an “enemy to be eliminated.”
McGowan insists a true universalist politics always holds out hope the opponent will recant and come over to the other side. We saw this with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
On several occasions, protestors invited police officers whose actions they were protesting to join them in their political resistance. This was only possible, according to McGowan, “because the protesters viewed the police as adversaries rather than as enemies and because their position was universalist.” If the other side is deemed an enemy rather than an opponent or adversary, we dehumanize them and cut ourselves off from our shared existential plight.
***
The burden of being a self, a freak of nature from the earth yet alienated from it, can seem like too much to bear. Rather than accept our existential situation and progress in “positive freedom,” Fromm believes that many abandon their freedom. We would rather escape the responsibility of being a self than live consciously with the reality of our existential plight.
One of Ernest Becker’s central arguments is that much of human behavior is governed by an attempt to stave off our unconscious death anxiety. At one point, Becker writes, “culture is composed of the mechanisms of defense of an infant afraid of being alone in the dark.” This may be a hyperbolic statement, but it gets at something important. When we realize our existential catch-22, the fact that we are cognizant of our mortality and can do nothing to stop it, we devise all sorts of ways to evade this crushing reality.
Erich Fromm makes a similar point. In Escape from Freedom, he points out the “frightened individual” seeks someone or something to “tie his self to.” When the individual can no longer bear the weight of being a self, she tries to “frantically get rid of it” and to feel secure again by the “elimination of this burden: the self.”
The burden of being a self, a freak of nature from the earth yet alienated from it, can seem like too much to bear. Rather than accept our existential situation and progress in “positive freedom,” Fromm believes that many abandon their freedom. We would rather escape the responsibility of being a self than live consciously with the reality of our existential plight.
***
Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish journalist who was fired from her position for criticizing the Turkish government, highlights the importance of “befriending” our fears in these tumultuous times of global pandemic, climate crisis and rampant capitalism. Her last two books have been about the rise of dictatorships and the importance of rehumanizing our political activity. Temelkuran encourages an intimacy with fear to remember the common humanity of our political opponents.
Returning to Todd McGowan and his statement that a true universalist politics has opponents and adversaries but not enemies, we can see this in our current political climate in U.S. America. Living in Texas, it’s difficult not to see Trump supporters as enemies. That said, I am instructed by Temelkuran’s emphasis on the fearful humanity of our opponents.
One can oppose the fascism of Trump supporting neighbors, but at the same time sense the fear that governs their destructive ideology. In the face of economic and social precarity, Fromm believes that people would choose different paths out of freedom. One of these paths is authoritarianism. On this path, a person fuses with an authoritarian system of power, becoming passive and compliant. This is easily recognizable.
Temelkuran reminds us that befriending our fears is one of the only ways to become intimate with our common humanity. Is it possible to investigate the heart of an adversary and there recognize a shared struggle with our existential situation?
***
Netflix’s Leave The World Behind is an apocalyptic psychological thriller where a family weekend vacation is interrupted by two strangers at the door. The movie highlights the deep divisions in American society and portrays the dissolution of civilization through an orchestrated cyberattack that spells the end of the world.
Near the end of the movie, Amanda and Ruth (played by Julia Roberts and Myha’la, respectively) hide in a shed, seeking shelter from a mob of feral deer. Throughout the film, both characters collide on almost every ideological front.
After admitting to Ruth that humans, including herself, fuck each other over and perpetuate a mass illusion to rationalize this terrible behavior, Ruth responds:
I’m not down with most of the things that you do and say, but… this is the part of the Venn diagram where we overlap. I agree with everything you just said. But as awful as people might be… nothing’s gonna change the fact that we are all we’ve got.
This scene asks a poignant question: What might be the overlapping part of the Venn Diagram that people with opposing views share?
***
In Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution, Todd McGowan attempts to provide an answer. The struggle against oppression does not simply involve respect for otherness but requires that one “see the other’s alienation as the basis of the shared bond that exists.” Without this realization, it’s easy to imagine the other as whole, and this serves as the “foundation of the oppressive relation.”
One possible answer could be the realization of the fact that we are “gods with anuses” or “freaks of nature.” This alienation and self-division are a catch-22 that we can never fully transcend or resolve. The best we can do is to reconcile ourselves to our fundamental contradiction.
While this may be a tragic reality, it does not necessarily mean that it is pessimistic or devoid of hope. As Albert Camus once said, “we must live life to the point of tears.” While there’s no escaping our existential plight, we can live with eyes wide open and do the best we can to pursue the values of love, freedom, equality, and solidarity.
***
I am opposed to any fantasy that creates a category of people substantially separate from others. I refuse to call anyone this because to do so would be to imply that I am not a subject who shits. I do not believe that I am exempt from the anxiety and fear that fuels the atrocious positions of my political opponents.
I have a few young adult clients who would take issue with my argument in this essay. For them, those who disagree with their political vision are not simply opponents but enemies to get rid of. In fact, on more than one occasion, I’ve listened to these young men refer to their political adversaries as “pieces of shit.”
I may wholeheartedly disagree with my neighbors on the political right, but I refuse to refer to them as pieces of shit. This is not because I am worried about coming across as politically incorrect. When my clients refer to others as pieces of shit, I hear them saying they are immune from the atrocious beliefs and behaviors they accuse their enemies of. I am opposed to any fantasy that creates a category of people substantially separate from others. I refuse to call anyone this because to do so would be to imply that I am not a subject who shits. I do not believe that I am exempt from the anxiety and fear that fuels the atrocious positions of my political opponents.
Common humanity is an important element of the left. My argument is that common humanity should be interpreted less as a shared positive trait (e.g., reason or cooperation) and more as a lack that we tarry with. The shared existential dilemma of being gods with anuses can aid us in being more honest with ourselves and open to a human relationship with our political opponent.