Abandonment of Ideals, by Olavo de Carvalho

Abandonment of Ideals is a transcript of a lecture from the course “Introduction to Intellectual Life”, from September 1987.

Since, for the human being, all things are merely preannouncements, it is necessary that his spirit never rest. It is fatigue that moves him and prevents him from perishing; it kills him, so that he does not die. From this living that does not live, comes the potential possession, always potential, of everything that, being perfect, distances itself from our present situation and, thus counterposed to the horizon, indicates a path. The ideal “must be placed in another time or another space that is not the present and the immediate, in a future or in a more comprehensive plane of reality. The ideal is the presence of this future in the present, of this other space here and now. An incomplete presence and, therefore, dynamic and tensional.”

The Abandonment of Ideals

When words go out of fashion, the things they designate float in the abyss of nameless mysteries; and as everything that is mysterious and inexpressible oppresses and terrifies the human heart with a feeling of constraint and impotence, it is natural that attention ends up turning away from these nebulous and embarrassing topics. Because what disappears from vocabulary eventually disappears from consciousness: what has no name is unthinkable, what is unthinkable does not exist — such is the metaphysics of ostriches. Except that the thing deprived of the right to exist continues to exist in a kind of extraworld, unnamed and unnamable, all the more active the more secret, all the more fearful the more wrapped in the dark pomp of nothingness. The restriction of vocabulary populates the world with fears and omens. Deprived of the capacity to name, man is returned to all the terrors he imagined to be primitive but which are a pure creation of the most advanced and refined decadence: artificial barbarism.

If the nameless thing happens to be some elevated spiritual reality, a lofty value or supreme aspiration of the soul — one of those essential things that can be expelled from consciousness but not from existence —, it is natural that its obscure reincarnation assumes even more the features of the terrible, the formless, the monstrous.

It is something like this that happens with that thing designated by the word “ideal” — a word obviously out of fashion, whose meaning loses reality as quickly as blood flows from a decapitated body.

“Ideal” is the term used to describe the synthesis in which the idea of the meaning of life and the idea of the price of its realization merge into a single form and energy: a man is said to have an ideal when he knows in which direction he must go to become what he aspires to be, and when he is firmly determined to go in that direction.

As a complex of impulse and scheme, the ideal attracts like a magnet and coordinates like an axis. Through the unity of its form, it summons the synergy of willpower: the convergence of all forces to achieve the goal. Through its character as a synthesis projected into the future, it rises as a sovereign and neutral tribunal for the arbitration of all present conflicts, which are resolved and overcome there so that even the most antagonistic tendencies of the soul can converge into a single ascending impulse.

The ideal is therefore an indispensable condition for the cohesion of personality, which without it disperses into fortuitous aspirations and sterile efforts. Mirage and emblem, its vision energizes, elevates, and ennobles us, and it is always the reminder of its call that lifts us up after every error and disappointment. The ideal is the seed of youth and revitalization. It has a coordinating power directed towards the future, a healing power directed towards the past.

It is still through the force of the ideal that man transcends the dormant sleep of intra-organic subjectivity, false ideas, and aspirations that are nothing more than the passive secretion of physiology, in order to awaken to a world of objective realities discerned by intelligence and recognized by moral consciousness; thus, the soul frees itself from the dark well of isolated individuality to rise to the larger world of society, culture, moral life, the feeling of the universe, and the desire for God.

Without the synthesis that the ideal accomplishes between the impulse of universality and the interests of the psychophysical organism, there would be no way to make a man sacrifice himself, impose restrictions, contradict desires, and repress fears for the sake of some moral, social, or religious value in order to reach his full human stature and perhaps become greater than himself. But desire, which moves the soul, cannot be awakened by a mere abstract idea, no matter how true it may be; it needs plastic, tangible images that give it a foretaste of its objective. Nor does it move, except in the coarse man, at the mere appeal of an attractive image; rather, it waits for the intelligence to examine and approve the object as desirable and good. It is not enough for the goal to be true; it must be beautiful. But it is not enough for it to be beautiful; it must be true and just. The synthesis of this triple requirement, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral, is called the “ideal.” It reconciles in man the desire for self-assertion, self-defense, and permanence with the impulse for growth, self-giving, and self-transcendence. It gives universal meaning to individual tendencies and puts them at the service of that. Spencer spoke of “ego-altruistic” feelings, intermediaries between selfishness and altruism; in them, self-satisfaction indirectly becomes an occasion for benefiting others. The ideal draws a great deal of its dynamism from this ego-altruistic pulsation, in which a man’s happiness identifies with the good of others.¹ The ideal is like the fire in which egoism is transformed into altruism in the alchemical furnace of the soul, reflexive passion into reflective action.

But it is not only for this reason that the ideal gives strength, balance, and consistency to personality. The Jungian school was right in seeing in the ideal of the self a higher instance capable of absorbing and neutralizing the conflicts between the id and the superego, between the primary drives of the psychophysical organism and the schema of prohibitions and duties unconsciously introjected through imposed habit, later automated into a constellation of inhibitory routines. In fact, the higher, clearer, more intense, and beloved an ideal is, the more a man is capable of intelligently imposing sacrifices upon himself in its favor, bypassing the demands of the id; however, to the same extent, the ideal enables him to contradict, if necessary, the impositions of a purely external and conventional morality, to reform and elevate his standard of values, to overcome servile obedience to irrational repressive demands. Deprived of the ideal, however, man abandons himself to the blind struggle between selfish passion and fear of superego retaliation.²

Although born in our subjective consciousness, the image of perfection expressed in the ideal points to an objective quality: through the ideal, the latent qualities of man tend to orient themselves outward and transform into acts and works in the world. The ideal is the path by which individual aspirations for happiness are distributed in the already open furrows of external reality, leaving behind the realm of dreams and taking on a body in the larger stage of facts and things. Without a defined ideal, all the best aspirations are nothing more than dreams because there is no moral duty inherent in them that demands adaptation to reality, that limits them in extension in order to be realized in intensity. Only the idealistic man is realistic; the others are dreamers or cynics. Without a measure of how things should be, they see them as better or worse than they are.

Furthermore, for latent qualities to manifest, constant effort in a defined direction is required; without an ideal, effort is wasted on reactive, momentary, and unproductive gestures. The ideal is the compass that points to a firm and constant direction amid uncertainties. Therefore, the feeling of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and boredom that we experience when we betray or forget the ideal is the alarm signal that allows us to correct our course and rediscover the meaning of life. If meaning is what our life is oriented towards and towards which it tends with all its forces, then it must be placed in a different time or a different space than the present and the immediate, in a future or a broader plane of reality. The ideal is the presence of this future in the present, of this other space in here and now. It is an incomplete presence and therefore dynamic and tensional. Through it, we measure our approach or distance from the meaning of life. The ideal is the effective measure of existential time, the standard of intensity and depth of the significance of moments. Without the ideal, instants and places become homogenized in the mass of indifference after the brief casual excitement that makes them interesting. The ideal is the mainstay and strength of personality. To betray or forget it is to surrender, with broken bones, into the hands of contingency and absurdity.

However, when the betrayal is too severe, extensive, and deep, the alarm signal no longer sounds: the clamor of immanent moral consciousness has become so painful that the soul represses it, sealing it under the lid of the subconscious, while trying to invent all sorts of reasons, fictitious and occasional pretexts, to justify the malaise and boredom, or finds a scapegoat onto which it can pour its self-loathing. The repression of moral consciousness, as demonstrated by Igor Caruso,³ is at the root of many neurotic disorders. Neurosis relies on a complex interplay of rationalizations and compensations that completely distort the existential position of the individual, like a faulty compass. And since consciousness, by definition, is cohesion — com + scientia = reunion of knowledge⁴ — and a constitutive law prevents its parts from functioning separately, the defensive scotoma spreads to other fields and ends up obliterating the entire vision, even in areas that have nothing directly to do with the conflict that gave rise to it. The effort to preserve a minimal amount of realism necessary for social and practical life is hindered by the effort not to see a certain area, circumscribed as taboo; the resulting short circuit leads to a considerable loss of energy, weakening intellectual and decision-making capacity. The victim becomes increasingly inept at the act of humility that would restore the lost ideal and the meaning of life (to be humble is nothing other than accepting reality; as Schuon says, “to be objective is to die a little”).

In the psychology and psychotherapy of Paul Diel,⁵ divinity is the ideal image that directs all efforts towards the self-realization of man’s higher qualities. It matters little that, theologically, divinity is much more than this, because for the individual, the real and objective divinity is only accessible through his personal image of God, and it is precisely this image that must be the foundation of any religious teaching that is not mere brainwashing. Psychologically, however, the greatest interest does not lie in the theological truth of the image, but rather in its catalyzing action on the mass of psychic forces. Whether approached psychologically or theologically, the ideal of human perfection suggested by the image of the divine is the obligatory and universal goal of human existence on earth, and the loss of this ideal is, according to Diel, the cause of neuroses. The ideal of perfection can be corrupted or deviated fundamentally in two ways. Diel calls them imaginative exaltation and banalization. They are opposite, successive, and complementary processes.

Imaginative exaltation is a state in which the mind, enraptured by its ideal, identifies more or less unconsciously with it and attributes to itself the perfections that belong to it, as if it had already achieved them. For Diel, the quintessential symbol of imaginative exaltation is the flight of Icarus. The wax wings represent the power of the imagination, which can only lift an imaginary body into the air. The exalted individual mistakes potential for actuality, imagining that he possesses the perfections he aspires to. For this reason, his soul experiences, as in a shock of return, a feeling of strangeness and impotence in the face of a world that does not yield, as he expected, to his charms or powers. Cornered by the demands of reality, he further exacerbates his self-worship in the presence of a world he deems vile, petty, and incomprehensible, when in fact it is he who does not understand the world and, because he does not understand it, is powerless to act upon it. It is the syndrome of the “misunderstood youth” who, by the simple fact of having elevated aspirations — or aspirations that appear elevated to him — already feels ipso facto superior to his environment and therefore limited or coerced by the real or apparent pettiness of parents, school, society, employment, etc.⁶ He does not always express his feeling aloud; a vague intuition of the pathological nature of his condition can envelop this feeling in a complex web of disguises, mitigations, and rationalizations that are very difficult to unravel. It is also true that his depreciative diagnosis of the world around him may, in itself, be objectively true, with only the place and function it occupies in his soul being false, as the degradation of the world sometimes appears to him as a kind of corroboration of his own exalted qualities.⁷

Not rarely, the patient allies with other young people imbued with the same feeling, in search of support and confirmation of their complaints against the world. The community of feelings and the repetition of complaints, creating an atmosphere of intersubjective confirmation, seems to give real consistency to the distorted and subjective diagnosis that each group member makes regarding the state of the world, legitimizing their discourse against the mediocrity and rudeness of “outsiders.” “Being inside” the group is then a sign of a kind of election, proof of an exceptional and incommunicable quality. The feeling of having access to something mysterious, profound, and special can exacerbate imaginative exaltation to the point of causing a true rupture with the surrounding reality, incapacitating the individual for the fulfillment of the most elementary social duties.⁸ When imaginative exaltation reaches such profound effects, the patient was already on the brink of intellectual and social collapse, which they have probably been warned about by parents, friends, or a multitude of direct and indirect signals. These signals, in turn, sharpen the sensation of sinking into complete isolation and helplessness; and the premonition of abandonment, sometimes even of madness and death, contrasts so painfully with the initial flights of imaginative exaltation that the patient is tempted to urgently seek some kind of forced reintegration into the despised world as a lifeline.⁹ However, since this would imply the humiliation of retracting criticisms and renouncing affected independence, the mind can only achieve forced reintegration by resorting to the artifice of operating a reversal of values: instead of abandoning only the self-exaltation attitude and adopting a posture of humility towards the ideal, it will, on the contrary, disidentify from the ideal in order to abandon it without losing the feeling of its own superiority. It thus retains its self-exaltation, but in a form devoid of supposedly idealistic content and now adorned with a pose of down-to-earth “realism” and often even Machiavellianism, professional careerism, cynicism, materialism, etc. Diel refers to this attitude as banalization.

The banalizing inversion can only occur through a sudden mutation, long prepared in the subconscious. The process is well-known and was described by Pavlov long before Diel, in terms of its neurophysiological bases. The accumulation of contradictions necessary to sustain an artificial and false existential position leads to the proliferation of contradictory tensions and produces new, incomprehensible situations that exceed the organism’s capacity for rational response and adaptation skills. Numerous chains of conditioned reflexes that constituted the subconscious basis of behavior are broken, and the individual finds himself in a state of inextricable confusion. The sudden inversion of values can then occur because, as Pavlov demonstrated, "prolonged inhibition of acquired reflexes evokes unbearable anguish, from which the subject frees himself through reactions opposite to his usual conduct. For example, a dog will attach itself to a laboratory employee it detested and try to attack its owner, whom it liked."¹⁰ The tensions coming from various sides, imposing “intolerable tests” on the brain, then produce a protective inhibition that "disorganizes the acquired reflexes, destroys their most recent layers, and leads the subject to abandon his beliefs."¹¹ The technical understanding of this mechanism has allowed for its systematic use in brainwashing processes and “opinion reform” in the prisoner camps of China and the Soviet Union.¹² However, the same phenomenon, attenuated or disguised, is observed widespread in contemporary social life, thanks to the abuse of psychic pressures from propaganda, subliminal persuasion, psychic exercises, and pseudo-mystical experiences. It is now known that this mutation can affect not only this or that group of beliefs and attitudes but the entire personality; the astonishing growth in the incidence of these phenomena in the United States has led some psychotherapists to speak of an “epidemic of sudden personality mutations,” which may be the most serious chapter of social psychopathology known in the history of the West.¹³

The ease with which this process is triggered, even outside the realm of pseudo-mystical sects and all experimentation with psychic “powers,” can be explained by the fact that "when the brain is subjected to even stronger tensions, the phase of cerebral inhibition can be followed by a paradoxical phase. In this phase, weak stimuli that were previously inefficient can cause more pronounced responses than stronger stimuli."¹⁴ This means that a phase of tension accumulation is enough for the inversion process to continue operating in the subconscious, now driven by insignificant and occasional stimuli. Then, "in the third stage of protective inhibition, the ultraparadoxical phase, positive responses and behavior suddenly begin to turn negative, and negatives become positive."¹⁵ The changes of opinion in this phase, and the seemingly logical justifications that the patient offers to himself and others, are nothing but the external disguise of a process rooted in an overload of neuronal stimulation; they are a “dress of ideas” around reflex motives that remain subconscious.

In banalization, the individual then dulls his sensitivity to all deficiencies, injustices, and ugliness that, in his time of exalted idealism, seemed revolting and intolerable. Before, he only saw ugliness in the outside world and, as he did not see it in himself, he condemned it “from above.” Now, he admits them within himself, but since they are his own and he identifies with them, he defends them as signs of superiority; often, he affects an attitude of sovereign contempt for those in whom the old moral sensitivity still lingers, accusing them of being resentful, frustrated, or something similar, while delighting in his new state of the “adjusted” and, in his view, adult man. Banalization consists of this lowering of moral and aesthetic sentiment. It allows the individual to adopt as normal and indifferent attitudes and opinions that previously seemed immoral and despicable. Often, the mutation erases entire blocks of memory, so the individual, in order to maintain some coherence in his new pattern of behavior, ends up denying the most obvious and patent facts he witnessed. In his novel 1984, George Orwell describes a case in which, undergoing this kind of mutation, the very witnesses of an accused person’s innocence testify against him. The mutation can then result in the total atomization of behavior and, with the loss of psychic integrity, the dissolution of the most basic moral standards, leading to cynicism, amorality, shamelessness, sometimes accompanied by self-pity.

By analyzing Diel’s concepts with Caruso’s criteria,¹⁶ we see that the neurosis of the exalted idealist has its origin in pride because the ego, by identifying itself with the image of the ideal, attributes to itself, currently and effectively, qualities that belong to it only virtually and through mirroring. It is a form of self-worship. When theologians say that pride is the root of all sins, this is what they mean: the exalted idealist corrupts goodness at its very root, corrupts it to the extent that he has a selfish love for it. St. Augustine says that “all vices cling to evil so that it may be accomplished; only pride clings to good so that it may perish.” The transition from exaltation to banalization thus constitutes the change that brings about a complete reversal of values, placing evil in the place of good. In exaltation, real values are still affirmed, albeit in a distorted location; in banalization, the denial of values is itself affirmed as a value. Banalization is the most serious moment of the corruptive process. Of course, the diseased soul can only perform this transformation to the extent that it does not consciously recognize all the steps of the process and all the implications of its actions and decisions but gets entangled in a web of rationalizations and sophisms, aimed at raising before its own eyes a plausible simulacrum of innocence at the very moment when, betraying human vocation, it betrays the meaning of life.¹⁷

It is interesting to observe that when the patient goes from exaltation to banalization, he presents to himself the role of a realistic and “mature” man, adorned with an affected pose of security, intended to reinforce him in the new role. Hence, he is the last to realize that his apparent overcoming of youthful rebellion is accompanied not by an increase in balance and strength but by a decrease in intellectual capacities and a nervous degeneration similar to that observed in senile involution. In fact, one of the achievements that mark an objective evolution of man at the onset of adolescence is the transition from purely selfish and organic feelings to ideal or superpersonal tendencies: at this stage, "the individual experiences a feeling of imperfection, of insufficiency, and tries to go beyond himself, to give himself."¹⁸ The evolution of affective life "follows the order that goes from the simple to the complex: needs, egoistic inclinations, ego-altruistic inclinations, altruistic inclinations, ideal inclinations."¹⁹ However, in certain diseases of slow evolution, such as general paralysis in syphilitics and also in senile degeneration, a reverse movement is observed. Ribot writes: "The law of dissolution consists of continuous regression that goes from the superior to the inferior, from the complex to the simple."²⁰

“In some patients,” Challaye points out, "the momentary disappearance of ideal and altruistic tendencies, and even ego-altruistic tendencies, can be observed. This is particularly evident in most elderly individuals (except, of course, for superior beings in whom this sentimental degeneration may not occur). Their affective life becomes increasingly restricted. Impersonal feelings are the first to disappear. Then, various forms of sympathy; and needs (economic, organic, etc.) are the ones that persist the longest. The elderly begin to worry less about science and art… they become less generous… the emotions that persist for a longer time are linked to personal preservation, anger, and fear. Finally, the elderly may have nothing but needs; they regress to the state of small children."²¹

In the banalized man, the new sensitivity he develops towards his immediate material interests, coupled with the fear of loss and the growing disinterest in ideals, undeniably attest that what appears to him, or what he tries to make appear as transcendence, is actually a fall, a degeneration that extends even to the realm of the body.

From a causal point of view, both endogenous and exogenous factors come into play in the process of banalization. The endogenous factors—those already present in the individual’s soul at the moment the process begins—are the classic factors taken into account by current psychological analysis: hereditary tendencies, constitutional defects, childhood traumas, educational shortcomings, and so on. On one hand, these factors only play a predisposing role, which weighs nothing if not valued by the interference of exogenous factors; on the other hand, they are well-known in psychological literature.

The exogenous factors essentially consist of the stimuli provided by the surrounding society that either favor or disfavor the maintenance of ideals and human fulfillment. A society focused on the pursuit of a religious, moral, or cultural ideal, equipped with educational tools capable of enabling the human fulfillment of its members, undoubtedly produces a splendid flourishing of vigorous and rich individualities that, in turn, contribute to the progress and brilliance of society. History attests to such brilliant periods, such as ancient Greece under Pericles, the scholastic renaissance of the 12th and 13th centuries, the Spanish Golden Age, the Elizabethan era in England, the Western Caliphate under Harun al-Rashid, and many others. On a smaller scale, there can be short periods of moral and cultural vitality even in poor and isolated countries. Whatever we may think of the content of the dominant ideas during these periods, what matters is that they truly favor personality development. These periods do not always coincide with times of material wealth and progress; what characterizes them is not wealth, but the fact that economic tasks are integrated and transfigured within the broader framework of ethical or religious ends and values that guide social life as a whole.

Conversely, when society loses sight of universal values and principles and becomes entangled in the obsessive pursuit of immediate economic solutions, these solutions not only seem to multiply in the realm of facts but also invade the souls of individuals, occupying all the space that could be dedicated to ideal values. Automatically, individuals redirect their energies towards the pursuit of interests that conflict with those of other individuals and groups—with whom only ideal values could establish a basis for collaboration—and society disperses into an atomization that can border on anarchy, a war of all against all, and widespread disloyalty. It is evident that, in this case, the instruments for the realization of human vocation simply disappear from the social scene, leading sensitive ethical individuals, who cannot find avenues for fulfillment, to become a horde of failures and misfits. It is within this horde that false ideals, created on the spur of the moment to serve the interests of groups or organizations, find their most fervent recruits, offering them a mirage of values and a false promise of social adjustment and participation.

The situation becomes even more serious in totalitarian or pre-totalitarian states, where the mobilization of entire masses of the population to collaborate in the “solution” of economic problems resorts to the expedient of attempting to synthesize, for the benefit of the state’s goals or the political forces competing for power, both the imaginative exaltation and the banalization tendencies. Idealistic tendencies are channeled into mass movements—whether openly political, pseudo-mystical, or pseudo-cultural—while the promises of success in social and professional life circulated by the planners of the operation ensure an effective return of banalization tendencies in favor of the same objectives.

This has been observed not only in blatantly totalitarian states like the USSR and Nazi Germany but also throughout the Western world. The currently evident connections between certain pseudo-mystical sects and multinational organizations show that modern society has one of its main pillars in a complex “recycling” machine of youthful idealism, which first perverts it through encouragement of exaltation (by flattering the most absurd artistic, political, and spiritual aspirations) and then redirects it towards a banalized social framework. The most eloquent example is that of a young banker’s son who abandons the mediocrity of familial materialism to join the “spiritual teaching” of Rajneesh, only to be later “downgraded” by being mobilized to work in Rajneesh’s gigantic bank headquarters cleaning company. The number of these circular mechanisms operating in our society is extremely high. They operate ubiquitously and surreptitiously, first exciting, flattering, and perverting, and then diverting, recycling, and reusing for their own purposes all youthful ideals, even those that appear hostile to them. It is evident that, under these circumstances, a semblance of self-fulfillment tends to offer a false alternative solution to the conflict between exaltation and banalization tendencies. The soul, subjected to the overwhelming and multilateral pressure of forces that compress and dilate it through flattery or accusation, promises or threats, may cling to this semblance with all the fury and despair of a shipwrecked person. In a impoverished society strongly committed to proletarianizing all its members, in which all the instruments of spiritual and religious defense have been replaced by multinational pseudo-mysticism and all the instruments of cultural defense by the ubiquitous and haunting clamor of mass communication, in this society, the described drama reaches a maximum intensity that reveals nothing less than a tragic outcome, with the brutal dehumanization of the population and the reduction of social life to a blind game of petty interests secretly orchestrated and directed from the top by a sinister group of social planners.

By all means, this society will squeeze all budding talents and ideals between the two jaws of a vise, crushing and subjugating them to the prevailing bestiality.

However, despite massive pressures and alluring corruptions, human intelligence, by its very nature, remains essentially free and capable of objectivity and universality. And if it is true that "the moment will come when each one, alone, deprived of all material contact that could aid them in their inner resistance, will have to find in themselves, and only in themselves, the means to firmly adhere, through the center of their existence, to the Lord of all Truth,"²² it is equally true that it is solely within the hands of each individual to say to this seductive and threatening world: Latrare potest, mordere non potest, nisi volentem: “You can bark, but you cannot bite unless I desire it.” Even the most formidable pressures imposed by the universe of concentration camps on the human soul, in the most fearsome tyranny ever known, do not exempt man from his individual responsibility.

All those who still retain a grain of consciousness of the real and superior goals of human existence have the immediate and inescapable duty to study, understand, and unmask the mechanisms of the corrupting process described here in order to escape the false conflicts in which it ensnares us and the false alternatives it offers us.

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1. Challaye, La Evolución, la Espiritualización y la Socialización de las Tendencias, in G. Dumas, Nuevo Tratado de Psicología, trans. Alfredo D. Calcagno, Buenos Aires, Kapelusz, 1956, vol. VI, Chap. III, p. 76.↩

2. Regarding the psychopedagogical importance of the ideal, see L. Riboulet, Rumo à Cultura, trans. Maurice Teisseire and Antonio Fraga, Porto Alegre, Globo, 2nd ed., 1960, Chap. I.↩

3. Igor A. Caruso, Análisis Psíquico y Sintesis Existencial, trans. Pedro Meseguer, S.J., Barcelona, Herder, 1954, Chap. II.↩

4. Maurice Pradines, Traité de Psychologie Générale, 3rd ed., Paris, P.U.F., 1948, vol. I, I-1.↩

5. Paul Diel, La Divinité. Étude Psychanalytique, Paris, P.U.F., 1950, and especially Le Symbolisme dans la Mythologie Grecque, Paris, Payot, 1966.↩

6. It goes without saying that this feeling is widely exploited by opportunists of all kinds: the desire for approval makes young people particularly vulnerable to flattery, and the hypocritical flattery of youthful rebellion is now one of the pillars of politics and commerce.↩

7. It is interesting to compare this with the theme of the “degraded revolt against a degraded world,” as noted by Lukács and Goldmann in the 19th-century novel, where a whole gallery of exalted youth appears, such as Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), Julien Sorel (The Red and the Black), Lucien de Rubembré (Lost Illusions). See also Lucien Goldmann, Pour une Sociologie du Roman, Paris, Gallimard, 1964.↩

8. Much of the attractiveness of the Gurdjieff school, in this sense, lies in the atmosphere of “almost beatific secrecy” that surrounds the teachings of the master, as noted by Whitall N. Perry (Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition, Bedfont, Perennial Books, 1978). Gurdjieffian schools and similar ones have a whole refined technology for this purpose.↩

9. Similarly, various pseudo-mystical sects, as we will see later, have means of channeling these impulses of rejection of idealism for their own benefit.↩

10. Olivier Reboul, A Doutrinação, rev. trans. Heitor Ferreira da Costa, São Paulo, Nacional, 1980, p.88.↩

11. William Sargant, apud Reboul, loc. cit..↩

12. Ibid.↩

13. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Snapping — America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Changes, New York, Delta Book, 1979, especially chaps. 1, 9, 10, 11, and 12.↩

14. William Sargant, A Possessão da Mente. Uma Fisiologia da Possessão, do Misticismo e da Cura pela Fé, trans. Klaus Scheel, Rio, Imago, 1975, p. 25.↩

15. Ibid.↩

16. Caruso, loc.↩

17. I use the term “meaning of life” not in a vague and poetic sense but in the rigorous sense given to it by Viktor Frankl in The Will to Meaning, New York, New American Library, 1970.↩

18. Challaye, op., p. 77.↩

19. Théodule Ribot, Psychologie des Sentiments, cited in Challaye, op. cit., p. 78.↩

20. Ribot, loc.↩

21. Challaye, loc.↩

22. See “Quelques remarques sur l’oeuvre de René Guénon,” in Études Traditionnelles, 52nd Year, 1951, Nos. 293-294-295, p. 307.↩