Hear Little Man
By
RJ Robertson
Being
a person of small stature gives me a perspective that differs from the
conventional view of things from time to time. There might be some assets too,
but I can’t think of any. It has occasionally brought me some disagreeable
experiences, like needing to ask a taller person to retrieve a beer mug from
the top shelf, especially if that person is of the female persuasion. More
significant have been disagreeable events like I often had at conventions when
I was a professor. During breaks in the meetings I would sometimes be talking
with a colleague when someone else would walk up and begin talking over my head
to my interlocutor as if I weren’t there. I found this annoying, frustrating
and humiliating and for many years did not know what to do other than rage
inwardly and wait impatiently for the interloper to finish his business, or slink
sheepishly away. I don’t recall ever receiving any help from the person with
whom I had been talking. He might have assumed that, if I did not take any
corrective action, it must have been O K with me.
The
truth is: I didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I could pick up where we had left
off; otherwise I would look at my watch, make some excuse about having to be
somewhere else, and shuffle miserably away. This began to change after my
personal reorganization in my psychotherapy self-training group. It was to
become the more assertive person I had fervently denied until the members of
the training group would no longer tolerate the denial that they could see and
I couldn’t. It was the last and most important phase in my personal therapy,
even though that was not the intended purpose of the “family” training group. (I described this transformation in my memoir:
All My Life I’ve been Somebody Else.)
The way it showed up in the experience
at conventions was that when the interloper would appear and begin to do his
thing I would say, “Were you born so rude, or did you have to learn it?” I had
to speak this so loudly that it would penetrate his otherwise oblivion to my
existence. The interloper would then look down and notice there was another
person in the triangle, often apologize, and then he was the one to slink off.
I found it quite satisfying. My original partner in the conversation would
often grin and chuckle. At other times—when I felt he/she could have given me
some support with a discussion as important to him as to me—I would simply turn
and walk away. Often he would abandon the interloper and run to catch up with
me. I found that alternative quite agreeable too.
All
the above is simply preamble to the subject I really mean to discuss. It was the
background in my personal development that fired my interest in the lives of
“ordinary,” or “common” people—the ones whom Wilhelm Reich was addressing in
his book, Listen Little Man. Reich, unlike Freud—who believed only
wealthy people could afford psychoanalysis—opened his clinic in a working class
area of town and engaged in the treatment of ordinary, or common, people. In
the course of that work he believed he discovered some things about ordinary
people that accounted for why they were ordinary: they perpetuated their
condition themselves. Among “little people” there are invariably many who are
as smart, as gifted, as advantaged (to begin with) as those who rage out of
mediocrity to become part of the ruling class. What distinguishes them is singleness
of mind to become “somebody.”
I
have wondered why a population of a country would send their young people off
to fight a war in which they had no stake—as has happened over and over in
history. Reich provides a plausible explanation: they didn’t know, or hadn’t
recognized, that the people who told them what to do were no more qualified
than they, themselves, to decide how to live their lives.
Now
and then some writer or pundit points this fact out at least indirectly. I
remember an incident in an early scene in the first Star Wars movie. It is the only one that has stuck in my mind ever
since I first saw it: Obi-wan Kenobi is leading his apprentice, Luke Skywalker,
into an area controlled by the empire. I can’t remember why they were going
there, but that does not matter to this point. Luke raises the objection that
they don’t have the proper I D, so how will they persuade the border guards to
let them in. Obi-wan replies that they will tell the guards what they, the
guards, think they should do. You have to tell people like this what they
think, he explains.
Another
glimpse of the kind of phenomenon Reich was aiming at in his book is in A Nation of Sheep, published in 1961 by William
J. Lederer—co-author of The Ugly American.
He summarizes his analysis with these statements: “the Preface of this book
pointed out that in response to The Ugly American we received over 8,000
querying letters… from every corner of our country [that asked] ‘What can the
average American do about the frightful posture of the United States in foreign
affairs?... All of us instinctively sense that foolish errors are the cause of
our failures. However, few people angrily demand
that action be taken to correct matters… Instead they wring their hands
pitiably and bleat, ‘what can I do?’”
I
must confess that I am myself an example of this, not just in regard to foreign
affairs—that does require intense knowledge of what is happening world-wide,
and why, but in regard to the kinds of facts that almost everyone knows, like
the ever increasing evidence of global warming and its dire consequences, world
hunger while tons of food go into garbage dumps in our country every day, other
bad effects of world over population, and so on.
I
feel guilty every time I go somewhere in my car, because I know I am
contributing to air pollution and global warming. But if I gave up going to all
the places I need to drive to, it would be a huge change to my lifestyle. I
could no longer visit relatives, including our own sons and their families, or
go to other favorite activities like writing workshops or my old guys Thursday
night “Beer Night” group. Yes, I could get public transportation to some of
these venues, but it would take enormous amounts of time waiting at pick up
locations, and to many I could not even get public transportation. In theory I
could have done what a few friends have done—pioneering a self -sufficient farm
in an out of the way corner of Kentucky or southern Indiana to escape the
feeling of always having to depend on someone else for assistance or to tell me
the rules about how to act. It abandons all hope of having any influence on the
direction of our nation’s affairs by speaking up on the little I can allow
myself to have an opinion on.
So,
indeed, what is to do, beyond continuing in this funk? I need to give myself a
new insight like I recounted at the beginning of this story.
