The Dark Side of Self Actualization
Unlike my older siblings, I got bussed to a school on the other side of town at age 10 (1971) to a nightmarishly black school for a program of “school integration.” And after the Vietnam Draft was over in 1972, any communal enchantment and ease of Being that had been granted compensatingly to White men was revoked (the hippie stuff was over, over night) and a feminist program of overwhelming hatred for White men (in subtextual alliance with black power) was unleashed in torrents against White men.
Welcome to my teenage years as an Xer, the women you are born to love and are told are worth any sacrifice, the people (blacks) who are supposedly oppressed, underprivileged and under-represented.
After having my head torn off and scattered to the winds by a few of these lovely creatures who I attempted to have as girlfriends in the mid 80s, I was forced to consider my existential crisis.
And so it was upon Heidegger’s advice of setting my autobiography in historical circumstance and perspective, that I began to gain understanding and philosophical orientation.
Along with a yearning that there was something vital in the hippie movement for White males – which was not being respected by either feminists or traditional women, nor by society and the media at large – there was enough talk of “Being” and “Be-ins” in those times by stark contrast to the Vietnam draft and war, such that my own instinctual, childhood anger was re-invoked by the comparative conceit of the feminist complaints by contrast; and with Maslow’s story of Self Actualization looming central in America’s prized story of individual civil liberties and human potential, I was gaining a hunch that Maslow’s story of Self Actualization was the setting to re-examine gender relations and other social problems, to potentially re-negotiate them in an effort to make them more fair on balance.
I was looking at what was to me a gender conflict – particularly in motivational direction and requirement – between feminists and hippies, although nobody to my knowledge was looking at the hippies as a movement of particularly male concern, particularly White male concern, at its essence.
Nevertheless, as feminists had launched torrents of anti-White male critique, it seemed to me the place to begin was to look at its most influential literature.
This focused attention on three books: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, 1948; Sex and The Single Girl, by Helen Gurley Brown, 1962; and The Feminine Mystique, 1963, by Betty Friedan.
– books which I found readily on my boomer feminist older sister’s book shelf.
Now then, non-academic though the Brown book may have been, it provided a popular and highly influential launching pad for Cosmopolitan Magazine. While the de Beauvoir book actually provided the point of departure for Friedan’s book and later, Carol Gilligan’s “In a Different Voice”, 1982, which also needs to be discussed; however, this being just an overview of the transition from the Boomer to the Xer constellation, I will not detail the significance of the de Beauvoir, Brown and Gilligan books here as elsewhere.
What I want to mention at this point is jumping out of my skin with exhilaration when discovering that not only did Betty Friedan’s thesis hold that women needed to achieve the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, in order to achieve their liberation, but that she was actually a student of Abraham Maslow. Thus, my hunch was more spot on in relevance than I could possibly have imagined, and in many other ways as well.
Maslow’s construction of Self Actualization through a Hierarchy of Needs would show itself acutely relevant not only through gender relations with Friedan’s second wave feminism in The Feminine Mystique, but also with the issue of America’s promoted story as the land of opportunity, this human potential movement stuff facilitated through the concept of America’s Lockeatine Civil individual rights advanced over biological group patterns; but there is another, still deeper, historical relevance to the story of Self Actualization – it was a relevance that I’d forgotten until recently, and quite remiss as it is absolutely relevant when addressing the concern of instantiating systemic correctives of Western peoples and civilization: that is, the story of Self Actualization begins with Aristotle’s teleology and thus provides an an ancient gauge as where this tradition may provide traditional corrective to the Maslowian version and American permutation, and where it may need Post Modern corrective along with corrective of the Maslowian/ American variant.
As this American story of Self Actualization plays a crucial role in rupturing group patterns and self righteously disrupting correctives to their social systemic homeostasis – and indeed, invokes stasis correctives of reflexive reversal to social aberration by contrast to these compelled quests of Self Actualization – it is indeed, most relevant, beleaguered as we are as a species, a genus (White people), threatened with qualitative and quantitative destruction through the weaponization of anti-racism.
But relevant though my proposed project of re-tooling the story of Self Actualization is, it is only one important concern of White Post Modern corrective among many that I have brought to bear for the interests of the European species, and which the Boomers that I have been confronted with have either effectively ignored, swept it aside as unimportant or subject it to downright antagonism and disparagement.
It wasn’t just right wing and liberal boomers who had become stupidly accustomed to reactionary scientism, if not literal (yes) outright Nazism in reaction to the red-caping of Post Modern correctives, but also waiting internet bubbles of Millennials who were receptive to this reactionary take. The Boomer cancer metastasized to the Millennials as the Xer’s implementation of Post Modern corrective was effectively thwarted and bypassed.
The Xer corrective was first thwarted by decades of what is called “political correctness.”
This is a red caping of social corrective and social advocacy positions culminating in what has been perfectly described as “cultural Marxism”, i.e., where cultural Marxism and its international class warfare had stalled, it was transformed into anti-White Marxism by the YKW.
Recently, Paul Gottfried has been desperately trying to weaken this very clear and incisive concept of Cultural Marxism. This is worth noting.