Is there a primal place within us that is intentionally designed to be perpetually immoral?
Inherent immorality – The perpetually dark aspects of our human nature that we refuse to fully acknowledge, and that cause ongoing disturbances within our personal lives and throughout our societies. We’ve individually and collectively disavowed these aspects of ourselves through various psychological and sociological strategies, setting up an ongoing confrontation between our idealized versions of ourselves and the full reality of our human nature, which continues to operate in whole, despite our attempts to disown aspects of it.
Ambiguous immorality
Immoral has become a watered-down, inconsistently used version of a word that once evoked feelings of fear, shame, and guilt in our religious and social communities. There is no longer a collective consensus as to what it means to be immoral. Just about anything that conflicts with a person’s idea of good behavior, is often referred to or thought of as immoral, without any real understanding of what this word originally referred to. Google “immoral,” and you will see what I mean. Anything from voting for Donald Trump to watching the Superbowl is being referred to as immoral, and this also includes gay marriage, welfare, profanity, genetic engineering, sex education, lying to save your life, closing schools for Jewish holidays, and hundreds of other examples that span a wide spectrum of beliefs.
The dictionary explanation of immoral is just as ambiguous. According to the consensus of our modern dictionaries, immoral refers to situations and behaviors in the world that are judged to be bad according to a set of community or religious standards. To know what is specifically immoral within this context, one would need to consult “something” that explicitly articulates right versus wrong behaviors. There are several options in this regard, including the Christian bible, the Torah, the Talmud, other religious/ethical texts, or a jurisdiction’s extensive list of punishable crimes. These options provide religious or regionally based definitions of what immoral is supposed to mean, but they are not universally embraced ideas about immorality.
Flexible immorality
The most liberal citizens among us will point out that moral versus immoral is always an individual judgment, rather than a fixed absolute. That nothing is intrinsically wrong about any particular thought or behavior, and that if a divine spirit exists in the universe, it does not make judgments regarding right or wrong. Rather, it allows each individual to determine their choices and decisions, and ultimately deal with the results of those decisions, refining them in the future if necessary. Thus, according to this perspective, what you or I consider to be a positive or moral choice, may be considered to be negative or immoral by others, which is perfectly fine according to this theory, since each of us determines what is good versus bad for us. Some would say that deciding what is moral or immoral is not necessary at all, since we should consider only what serves us best, and consider everything else as irrelevant.
This flexible approach to the concept of immorality “seems” like an extremely liberating way to look at life, since it allows us the maximum freedom to pursue what we most desire in life, without fearing or feeling guilty about any possible consequences, such as hurting others, losing respect for ourselves, incurring bad karma, or angering God in some way. Not only that, but it “seems” to release us from our old religious conditioning regarding sin. Imagine Adam and Eve biting into that yummy fruit and then celebrating their nakedness with every kind of vile behavior, while God smiles down at his happy children, and promotes the serpent to the status of head therapist in the Garden of Eden, for his fine work in encouraging Adam and Eve to push beyond their boundaries, including the boundaries set by God himself. Sounds far fetched for a holy text, since it undermines any concept of sin, free will, and personal responsibility. Unfortunately though, it makes for an accurate metaphor for how “some” of us currently view immorality.
The past
Immorality once had the connotation of something intrinsically dark, repugnant, sinful, evil, or perverse that must be kept in the shadows, locked away, or completely exterminated from existence. The religious and social condemnations against being immoral or displaying one’s immorality, in thought or deed, elicited individual and collective fears of being irrevocably bad, being expelled or marginalized by one’s community, being punished by the authorities, or worst of all being subject to God’s judgement and wrath. This once powerful, demoralizing idea was used to influence political, religious, and other agendas through fear and the manipulation of feelings of shame and guilt. In fact, at one time, entire ethnic groups and races were considered to be immoral. The Jewish people were considered to be immoral based on their various traits, some of which were myths. This was the premise behind Hitler’s campaign to murder every Jew.
Persecutions and marginalization aside, our beliefs of the past recognized the possibility that a fundamental or inherent immorality existed within human nature, and that if we didn’t acknowledge it and control it, then it would undermine the positive values of a civilized, loving, and spiritual world. This belief still exists today within Christianity and Judaism, albeit in a less threatening form, as modern religion is more careful about not scaring away its followers. Christianity refers to this inherent immorality as original sin and Judaism calls it our evil inclination. However, our modern era of democratic ideals, capitalism, innocent until proven guilty justice, and reality TV has transformed the idea of immorality from something that was absolute, to something that is adaptable to personal or public opinion.
Immoral playtime
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. – Sigmund Freud
In the distant past, it was wrong to think about anything considered sinful and immoral, and a crime against God and community to act upon those thoughts. In the less distant past, when Freudian and Jungian psychology arrived on the scene, it became okay to think and imagine ourselves engaging in immoral behaviors, but generally it was wrong to speak and write about these thoughts and inclinations outside of the psychiatrist’s office, and always wrong to act upon any of it.
Today however, freedom of speech allows moral or politically correct citizens to speak about, write about, and entertain each other with their immoral stirrings, as long as they don’t cross the line into immoral behaviors in the real world. We enjoy provoking our most base thoughts, emotions, and instincts with fantasies that society forbids us to act upon, and this fantasizing occurs in the “approved” red light district of our society, which has become the Internet in all of its various incarnations, including porn sites, forums, social networks, chat rooms, instant messaging, web cams, and any kind of phone application that transmits through cyberspace. Every type of immoral behavior is written about, chatted about, romanticized, role played, and even solicited through these cyber channels, in a partially or fully anonymous manner.
The Internet has become our public sewer system for the collective immoralities that humanity craves to act upon, but chooses to hide from itself. It is the dirty elephant in the room, so to speak. It harbors the taboo stuff that we refuse to talk about or recognize in our offline lives, but which threatens to erupt into our real world, and does so at various times, at an increasing frequency. We pretend to be politically correct, moral beings in the so called real world, while feeding and teasing the hungry rats that troll around our dark, underground sewer system.
The Internet has its good points and provides many useful functions in our daily routines, but if we want to be honest with ourselves, then it is time to recognize what else is going on there and learn from it, as it will teach us about ourselves, especially the parts that we currently refuse to talk about in our public discourse.
Old school psychology and the modern approach
In the end, what we try to pretend is not a part of us will not agree to be, as Freud called it, ‘sublimated’ and redirected into civilization building. It looks for chances to get what it wants – directly. The more we repress our animal cores, the more restless they become, until they finally erupt in frustration driven violence and beyond-the-bounds sexuality – their last desperate measures for securing self-affirmation. – Douglas M. Gillette
In the Freudian sense of immoral, certain thoughts, desires, daydreams, fears, and fantasies may be considered as manifestations of an immoral mind, even if they never see the light of day in actual behavior. According to Sigmund Freud, each person has an unconscious, which is full of repressed instinctual aggression – the legacy of our primitive past; perverse sexual fixations that are considered taboo in civilized society; primal fears of authority and punishment; and old, forgotten childhood traumas that were once conscious, but pushed out of awareness by the mind’s inner censor or judge. This collection of unconscious, shadowy material, which often seeks expression through socially incorrect agendas, is what Freud thought of as the immoral unconscious or Id, and what Jung referred to as our shadow.
Freud, Jung, and other pioneers of psychology knew that suppressed or repressed aspects of our human nature and old traumas were the primary source of mental illness and antisocial behavior in the real world. For most people though, it was either too intangible or morally incorrect to accept that something unknown, immoral in nature, and not completely within our scientific control was lurking in our unconscious. Thus, the old school psychology (OSP) of Freud, Jung, and other psychology traditionalists eventually fell out of favor in most political, social, and scientific circles. Also, when psychology became the domain of the healthcare industry, the insurance companies drove another nail into the OSP coffin. Providing coverage for long-term psychoanalysis was not cost effective for insurance providers, and so cheaper, short-term behavioral therapies became the industry standard, especially for people who could not afford psychotherapy without insurance. The problem with behavioral therapy is that it is designed to adjust people, rather than discover and work with the aspects of their human nature that are seeking recognition, validation, and expression.
The OSP continues to thrive in the intellectual circles through an ongoing dialog and scattered therapy practices, but as a whole it is not the preferred mode therapy in the modern era. This is unfortunate, since OSP recognizes a fundamental truth about our human nature, which is that a significant portion of our inner nature operates outside of our idealized notions of morality, and it is not something that can be eliminated or kept away from the world through the short-term, behavioral therapies, medication, or anything else.
Modern psychology is no longer about understanding the so called “immoral” influences or shadows within our minds. Now, it is about behavior therapy, medications that numb or stimulate our brain chemicals, and repressive brainwashing techniques, otherwise known as positive thinking. When you go to a therapist who is set on behavior modification, the goal is to adjust your “malfunctioning” or “immorally” functioning brain to meet society’s standards of socially correct or productive behavior. Yes, this may seem to work for a period of time on the surface of our lives, but as Douglas Gillette implied, our animal or immoral cores will continue seeking self-affirmation, and most likely in toxic forms that offer the path of least resistance.
In the medical and pharmaceutical industries, the word immoral has been transformed into “official” labels for “manageable” mental health disorders, which are listed and clinically described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM is the psychology/medical industry’s directory of insurance industry recognized immoralities, which have been renamed and described as mental health dysfunctions, to be treated with tools such as behavioral modification and pharmaceutical grade medications. In essence, much of what we previously considered to be immoral, has become an amoral set of medical diagnoses, stripped of any considerations of morality, spirituality, religion, free will, karma, inner conflict, archetypes, primal instincts, etc. We’ve sanitized and euphemized our immoral thoughts and behaviors so that they sound like treatable mental aberrations, rather than something related to human nature that cannot be modified or eliminated. This is yet another way, on a collective level, to hide from the full truth about our human nature.
Writing about immorality
At the beginning of this essay, I coined the term “Inherent immorality” and presented my definition of it. I want to clarify that I don’t think of inherent immorality as evil, but as an aspect of our nature that conflicts with our notions of what we consider to be moral, even when there is an ambiguity as to how we should judge it. It is this gray zone or fine line that is often at the heart of our debates regarding new and old laws, justice, incarceration, capital punishment, obscenity, human rights, definitions of mental illness, ethics, the role of religion, spiritual ideas, and just about everything else that is important to our conception of what it means to be human, humane, and civilized. Having a firm grasp of what we consider to be moral behavior and blatantly bad or evil behavior is important, but it is just as important to acknowledge, discuss, and write about the gray zones, which are often the breeding grounds of the most toxic aspects of our lives and society, especially when we ignore or try to disown what is there demanding our attention.
Like most people, I don’t want to think of myself as being immoral in the traditional sense of the word, neither in thought or deed, but yet the word by itself provokes feelings in me of something dirty, yucky, repugnant, and guilt ridden; something that needs to be hidden in the closet with my other skeletons, or exorcised and then buried in a hole far away from my residence to avoid any final judgment. I’m sure this yucky, guilt ridden feeling is the result of old, religious connotations that were programmed into my mind as a child, and maybe this is the place to begin future discussions on this topic. The fear of being immoral is what inhibits us from talking and writing about it in public, and why it finds its way into our collective sewer of taboo topics.
The less foreboding image I have of immorality is very palpable to me. I visualize it as a dark substance, having an earthy smell to it…very old and musty, like a pungent, naturally occurring mildew or mold that has been growing for ages within me, slithering and oozing between myself and others, as we all share this common substance. A substance that is inherently immoral, in the sense that it is a fixed aspect of our human nature, existing outside of our conscious notions of morality, and beyond our ability to wholly transform or eliminate it.
What we cannot control, transform, or eliminate causes us distress. We like to think that we can place boundaries between what we like and dislike, and between what we want to keep and want to discard. However, our human legacy has taught us that there are forces in the world and in human nature that have been with us from the beginning of time, and to which we have little or no direct control over. Ideally, how we deal with these dark, human forces should involve an ongoing dialog that is inclusive of religion, psychology, sociology, politics, and the justice system. First however, we need to acknowledge, discuss, and tell stories about ALL that exists within our human nature, without being judgmental about it or scapegoating each other with it. We cannot deal with something that we refuse to recognize, talk about, write about, and take responsibility for on both a personal and collective level.
© 2016 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Notes from David 