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Half Actualized: Why getting better is getting slowed down

Posted on June 27, 2018

Written by Rachel Plett

Maslow’s Hierarchy is a triangle-shaped theory of psychological health. It’s probably popped up at least once in your feed, posted by one of your self-help guru friends. It starts with clean water and enough sleep, and ends with being the best you can be and finally founding that iguana cafe you’ve always dreamed about starting. You know, the one where folks can get a good latte and cuddle with big lizards at the same time. What’s less-known is that later in life Maslow added another tier to his self-help pyramid called self-transcendence. Props to Abe for adding the dimension of caring for others; but in asserting that caring for others comes after, or is morally superior to, caring for and discovering yourself, the man made a mistake. By defining self-actualization as a precursor to self-transcendence, Maslow reveals the ways in which his thinking is touched by his era and gender. All this would be NBD if this categorical error was confined to one humanist psychologist, however, this particular bias extends beyond psychology into our social, governmental and monetary systems, where it has had a profound impact on the ways in which we organize societies, governments, and markets – that is where things begin to get problematic.

Before getting into the history and economics, let’s take a look at the logic and assumptions behind putting self-transcendence at the top of the pyramid. Self-actualization is defined, simply, as the discovery and fulfillment of one’s talents and potentialities. It is essentially exploring and understanding what you’re good at and who you’re capable of being. Self-transcendence is doing something for the sake of someone else, or because of a moral/ideological stance; most moral/ideological stances are beliefs rooted in how one should treat “others.” There’s nothing in the definition of self-actualization that would make it a defacto precursor to self-transcendence. If anything, self-transcendence reads best as a subcategory of self-actualization; a good way to discover your talents and potential.

The issue with thinking about self-actualization as we currently do is that it’s regularly reinterpreted as self-interest – interest in one’s self, personal advantages, growth, and improvement. However, knowing yourself and looking out for yourself are not the same thing. Knowing yourself (self-actualization) is the goal; focusing on yourself (self-interest) and sharing with others (self-transcendence) are the parallel means of achieving that goal. In reality, everything we know about ourselves stems from our reflections on the other’s reactions to what we do. In the words of the excellent hippy Alan Watts, “Self and other define each other mutually.”

On an individual level, putting self-transcendence at the top implicitly suggests that meaning and the personal growth, joy, and satisfaction that comes with caring for others should be postponed until after one has hurdled a long (often growing) list of self-interested goal posts. This sets up a toxic “I can’t be good until I’m good enough” cycle.

It also contributes to a misalignment of self-interest and self-transcendence within society – where one is imperative and the other is impossible. The attainability of self-transcendence within society – more often referred to as altruism – is an ongoing debate that, all to often, elevates altruism to an unrealistic, unrealizable “God status” that one can’t, and shouldn’t be held accountable to. What is worse, some scoff at the whole idea as being a religious fantasy, a psychological balm devised to make this “dog eat dog” world bearable. By making altruism appear as something so unattainable or unreal, we say to each other that the best you can be is Kanye, while dismissing the path to becoming Mother Teresa, Ghandi, or MLK Jr. as impossible. So we reward absorption, enrichment, and dominance with our time, money, and attention, and wring our hands together in bewilderment, wondering why, with all this wealth, the world isn’t getting better faster.

Photo by Jose Martin Ramirez

One (if not the biggest) hindrance to this envisioned better world is the fact that we – western, politically democratic and economically liberal societies – have institutionalized the subordination of self-transcendence (caring) in relation to self-interest by relying, almost exclusively, on tax dollars and donations to fund the work and economics of caring. This institutional arrangement creates a perverse incentive system that puts economic quotas on caring and turns self-transcendence into a luxury experience reserved for the well-off, rather than presenting it as an inborn motivation that each of us should be rewarded for acting upon. The alliance of market capitalism and philanthropy is the institutionalization of the “do good after you’ve done well” relationship discussed earlier, and while the desire to recycle one’s excess should be lauded, there are a few issues that emerge from this arrangement. One of the most obvious being high net worth individuals, removed as they are from need and the social issues they aim to impact, generally lack the knowledge and on the ground insight to effectively impact the problems they aim to solve. Another issue is the fragmentation of the capital market that funds the caring economy. According to the SSIR, $390 billion in philanthropic donations are made annually, plus many hundreds of billions in government grants and contracts. However, because those contributions come from hundreds of different foundations, faith organizations, as well as state and federal governments, they create a capital market that is inherently volatile and subject to the whims and pressures of those with political and economic power, rather than being responsive to the needs and demands of the issues and communities actually being targeted. Finally, by setting up a system where the money for care work comes from donations or tax dollars, the system ensures that self-transcendent activities and enterprises have to survive on a trickle of the economic rewards generated by the provision economy, our self-interested endeavours, rather than growing organically to meet our demand for a better world.

If self-interest and self-transcendence are companion paths to self-actualization, and provision and caring are dual requirements for our health and wellbeing, how have we made it to 2018 with an efficient economic system for one and a proverbial cash pinata for the other? Part of the answer is the rise in monogamy and the domestication and disenfranchisement of women. This shift in norms and the social contract coincided with the rise of agriculture and private land ownership. Compared to the 300,000 years of humankind, monogamy is a relatively new social innovation. Current research suggests that monogamy did not emerge as a normative behavior until around 12,000 years ago; the same time society transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes to agrarian settlements. With this transition came growing obsession with the concept of property and women got folded into this narrative. With few exceptions, these emerging agrarian societies began to treat both women and land like assets; units of productivity traded among families rather than independent citizens. As financial and governing institutions began to crystallize, women were famously excluded from the conversation; they were denied the rights to representation, vote, and own property. Furthermore, as the delegation of the of society’s three fundamental activities – protection, provision, and caring – formalized, women’s biology predisposed them to become the primary participants in the caring economy. The benefits and injustices of this arrangement are hotly debated and not the focus of this article (many others have covered this debate and done it better). The focus of this article is the impact this arrangement has had on the evolution of our economic systems and financial institutions; what we’ve gotten right and what we’ve neglected to build in.

Photo by Rob Curran

Despite what the ideologues would have you believe, capitalism is not a natural order. It’s a social system that has evolved over thousands of years. From the first green revolution to the current data disruption, it has been enabled and renegotiated with every productivity evolution. Capitalism is a cultural system rooted in the need for individuals and investors to turn a profit. This system orchestrates a positive feedback loop where greater efficiency means more productivity (more stuff), lower prices, more demand, more money, and ultimately greater efficiency again. By design, capitalism rewards provision and motivates self-interest. It’s the best system we have for incentivizing increases in efficiency and productivity that make it possible to provide a growing variety of better quality products and services to global markets. This excess doesn’t always make it to where it’s needed, but it is produced and distributed at peak efficiency. This efficiency is a testament to the success of capitalism as a social system.

If all we required is provision to be healthy and happy, then capitalism is the only economic system we would ever need. For a growing majority, however, wellbeing no longer hinges on provision. Increasingly, our individual and collective happiness hinges on the opportunity we have to hope, find meaning, and forge durable connections; all outcomes that are tied to caring and self-transcendence. That we are drowning in an overabundance of products and options while fretting about the fraying edges of our social fabric, and struggling with loneliness, existential anxiety, and growing tribal animosity is a testament to the fact that uses for capitalism are limited to efficiency and provision and it is failing when it comes to incentivising and rewarding prosocial outcomes that are continually growing in demand.

Social liberals blame this unraveling on social media, and social conservatives point to the decline of family values, but everyone agrees that when both adults in a home “work”, time pressure and stress increase. But, there it is, in that word, “work.” We don’t see self-transcendence as a viable economic motivator. We don’t see care-work as work. We definitely don’t treat caregiving professions like good jobs and the reason for that is simple. The major formal institution that governs exchanges of the care economy’s value is marriage. In this system women and the value generated by the work they do, are traded as an asset between father and groom. But people aren’t assets, and being a care-worker should not economically shackle one person to another, nor should the economy that incentivizes this kind of work be confined by the profit motives of the provision economy and/or the political jockeying of political and religious leaders. Caring needs its own economy, one that can grow or shrink with demand; one that can take into consideration the idiosyncrasies of care-work that prohibit it from fitting comfortably into the dynamics of capitalism.

Traditionally, women have done most of the of the work in the care economy: caring for children; caring for the sick and aging, organizing communities, fortifying social safety nets and norms, and investing in education. In some cultures, if the productivity of one woman wasn’t enough you got another wife – in others, you bought a slave. Either way, the development of socioeconomic contracts that can efficiently broker the exchange of value within the care economy have been stunted by the fact that, for most of our history, care workers have been treated and traded like property. Even when institutions have stepped in, those institutions have been devoid of female leadership. Religious organizations like the Catholic Church were among the first to bring a formal structure beyond matrimony to the care economy; while nuns were the primary purveyors of care, women were barred from priesthood and therefore from the design process of one of the first civil society institutions. The same is true for government. At the time governments began establishing social programs women didn’t even have the vote, let alone equal representation in civil society and government. So, while the policies and norms were laid down for the system we have now, almost none of the primary actors informed or deliberated on the process. Man to man exclusion has led to demonstration, revolt, revolution, and war, and while this may have been disruptive and bloody, it has driven market economics of the provision economy to evolve in ways that the economics of the care economy have not.

The communist/capitalist debate is hack. Today, the majority of countries have mixed market economies – a mixture of command (government controlled) and market (privately held) structures. However, as we discussed earlier, the care economy is mostly a command economy with limited accountability to end consumers. There are other and better answers to the question of: “how do we incentivize self-transcendence and economically reward the work of caring?” (other than through taxes and tithing). Hope, generosity, empathy, idealism, love… These are all powerful, self-transcendent motivators. The fact that we haven’t designed an efficient system to tap into and empower them is proof of the limited amount of innovation and insight that comes from excluding more than half the population – the half tasked with self-transcendent work – from the design process; not proof that the motivation is not genuine or actionable. Self-transcendence is only second to self-interest because our founding fathers and famous philosophers wrote it to be so, while their wives were busy transcending themselves every day in caring for their families, friends, and community.

Give it a little time. Us ladies are just getting to the table.

GreenWar: Because the Earth is worth the fight!

Posted on June 25, 2018

Photos courtesy of GreenWar

Presentation by Selçuk Balamir, Mathieu Grosche and Shabnam Zeraati

GreenWar – Corporate Identity from GreenWar on Vimeo.

Wars have always caused major destruction and loss. But they have many positive externalities as well. We would not have tin cans if Napoleon had not urged his engineers to invent a way to conserve food. We would not have computers, if the Germans had not wanted to conquer the world. And even the internet was invented by the Pentagon.

So let’s face it: wars are here to stay. It is quite unrealistic to anticipate the end of wars in the 21st century. At the same time however, it is equally impossible to ignore the environmental challenges in front of us: if we expect to keep on fighting throughout this century, we cannot just sit and do nothing about the climate crisis, deforestation, disappearing species and so on.

Our sustainable military development company GreenWar is an innovative brand adopting a unique strategic position in the industry. We see ourselves at the crossroads of arms manufacturing and eco-design. We can help you make environmentally-friendly, energy-conserving, carbon-neutral, ecological conflicts.

But of course this does not mean the end of casualties. Quite the opposite actually! At GreenWar, we see well beyond the simple human criteria. We are in a global ecosystem where each and every being contributes to the cycle of life, where “human loss” equals “unleashing springtime”. Death should not be perceived as a loss, but as an essential part of natural cycles. Cradle-to-grave and all that.

For us “sustainability” means to satisfy the need of the present generation to wage wars, without compromising the need of future generations to wage theirs. At GreenWar, ecology is a war that never ends.

Photos courtesy of GreenWar

Here is our flagship product. Bullet for the Earth is made out of eco-friendly materials and it contains seeds that grow after use. Thus every shot gives a chance to make a tree grow. Would soldiers not be more motivated, if ammunition contained rare plant seeds? After all, they would contribute actively to the cycle of life. Enemies could become trees, a true benefit for all.

Many scenarios are possible; lost bullets, bodies left in battlefields and mass graves might all potentially give life to whole forests. An offshoot can also be sent to the soldier’s family along with his ID tag, making it possible to plant it in one’s garden, keeping the memory alive for generations. The seeds contained in the bullet are of different species. Hence a large variety of forests will take place after every war.

Next year we are launching our new product: seed bombs. Much more effective than individual bullets. Drop one and let a thousand flowers blossom!

Photos courtesy of GreenWar

We run a partnership programme with Monsanto, famous for their terminator seeds, to develop genetically modified seeds specially designed for particular conflict zones. India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, the Balkans… you name it. We make it.

We are also pleased to have worked with the Obama administration, which obviously did not impede the US war efforts, but nonetheless opted for more environmentally-friendly alternatives. I watched Mr. President himself give a little gesture towards Mother Nature: a fighter jet that runs on biofuels. Named the Green Hornet, it was Launched on Earth Day.

Fortunately, the US is not the only one seeking solutions! A few years ago, we were invited to this charming event at the European Parliament, the best place in the universe. It was such a timely initiative, considering that 2010 was the year of biodiversity.

However, I must admit that I was utterly disappointed when we were told that we should not expect fancy new weapons. Instead, the panelists spoke about awareness-raising campaigns reminding soldiers to switch off the light before leaving the room. If European soldiers are getting killed during convoys transporting bad, unsustainable diesel fuel to military bases, it is because of the unsustainable soldiers that forget to turn off the lights. Henceforth, the panelists agreed on the need to invest in renewables.

The world is a pretty dangerous place, but it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. We strongly believe that wars of the third millennium can be ecological, humanistic and poetical. Men should have no reluctance about going to war, they should have a good reason: ecology. Because the Earth is worth the fight!

MADNESS - July & August 2018 Sarah Osei-Bonsu

Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites ici? The French Army in Africa

Posted on June 1, 2018

Written by Sarah Osei-Bonsu, Staff Writer

On 5th April 2018, thirty Islamic State (IS )militants were reported killed in clashes with the French army in Mali. This followed intelligence of an armed terrorist group of an estimated sixty individuals positioned three kilometers north of the Nigerian border. This area has been a suspected haven of the IS and the French operation was allegedly an intervention to chase out these jihadist offshoots. The successful operation was not an isolated operation; in recent years the French army has expanded its military presence in Africa stating the primary objective to be fighting radical Islam. There are currently about 4,000 French troops stationed in Mali alone, and although their stated intentions might be good, their actions say otherwise.

The increase in terrorist attacks in Europe has generated a lot of public awareness and concern about radical Islamic terrorism manifested in Jihadist groups such as the IS. With France being one of the countries hard hit by terrorism – with the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in 2015 – it has also become one of the most decisive players in fighting radical Islam at its core, unafraid of using military action to do so, notably in the Sahel region of Africa. Under this pretense, France has led several military operations in the countries where it has military bases on the continent. It established Operation Barkhane in Mali in 2012 as a reaction to a Jihadist insurgency, but this has grown into a permanent counter-terrorism effort across Mali and several of its neighboring countries. This means that since 2012 there has consistently been French military action in the region. These kinds of operations are largely successful at fighting terrorism, however, even though they are seemingly for altruistic reasons, this French military presence has a darker connotation of a colonialist legacy and foreign disruption in Africa.

France’s colonial presence in Africa dates back to the sixteenth century. French imperialism and colonialism were very severe for those living in its African territories both in hard power and in soft power. Colonization ended in most of Africa in the mid-20th century, and decolonization in most Francophone countries had an understandably anti-France tone. Despite this, France maintained a military presence in many of these states, and continued to intervene in African states over the years following decolonization, with their military presence intensifying recently. This increased presence is often seen as a form of peace-keeping in that it claims to serve the interests of the local people by protecting them against Islamist groups. However, this is not wholly the case. Many locals support these militants as legitimate political groups because they often represent cultural minorities and oppose the (French-backed) government. At the same time, these operations are killing Malian civilians. French writer Raphael Granvaud, spokesman for the NGO Survie, says “It is clear that France’s military operations in Africa led to civilian casualties […] The French army is doing everything it takes to hide civilian casualties, this is why we do not know the exact number of civilian casualties caused by the military operations by France.” And Granvaud claims these are not the only crimes France covered up during its military presence in Mali, alleging that many cases of sexual and physical assault by French soldiers have also gone unreported. French claims of blamelessness have gone unchallenged by both the media and major international organizations.

Photo by Ken Treloar

As problematic as these allegations are, France’s military presence is supported by the United Nations and a wide network of bilateral military and defense treaties with African countries. It should be noted that these were initially given in isolated crises, for instance after Mali’s Tuareg rebellion in 2012. Six years later, it seems France has overstayed its welcome. In the name of fighting terrorism, French troops have remained in Mali and through continued military operations France is gaining (or shall I say regaining) political influence. This isn’t counter-terrorism, it’s neo-colonialism.

France does not have the leverage that it had on Mali in colonial times and the immediate post-colonial period, but it wants to remain a major player in the region. Counter-terrorism gives France a geostrategic stake in Mali once again. While there is a genuine interest on France’s part to fight terrorism in its military missions in Mali and neighboring African countries, this form of intervention coupled with the Franco-African history is worrying. Despite the increased military presence being supported by politics of ethics and diplomacy, these kinds of intrusions in the form of long-term ‘aid’ are damaging to Mali and the continent as a whole.

The French presence is actually destabilizing the region, by making local governments more dependent on their military support. While France’s counter-terrorism operations in the north of the country were in the best interests of the current regime, the government is suffering now as a result of it. Due to the fact that France is undertaking operations across the Sahel region, Mali is now feeling the spillover effects of insecurity, such as refugee flows. In Mali there have already been makers of destabilization like escalating levels of corruption, unemployment and low living standards. Incoming refugee populations place additional pressure on these infrastructures and systems in Mali, which are already deplorably weak. Many Malians are themselves being externally displaced because of these conditions, according to the UNHCR, the number of Malian refugees peaked to 145,000 people in 2017. And in 2018, Mali is the 27th most fragile state in the world. This insecurity keeps France in a powerful position in Mali and Africa. These states are becoming increasingly unstable while France progressively increases its presence; this looks more like occupation and re-conquest than neutral intervention.

What French intervention in Africa demonstrates is that good political intentions can often produce adverse effects. The bigger issue is about more than French military action in Mali; it’s how Africa has been, and continues to be, the playground for the West. African lives are lost as a result of this and the media doesn’t talk about it because it falls within the bigger picture of the West’s vendetta against Islam. Africa offers a spectacle for the moral endeavors of the West but we don’t stop to look at the long-term consequences of such intervention, and refuse to acknowledge that Africa is still being subjugated because of it. The problem is not that France has returned to upset the power balance in former colonies, but that it never left. This perpetual presence of the former colonizer means decolonization never completely removed the top-down power structures, and that France still has the power to do whatever it wants in Africa.

Christian Hazes TWISTED MORALITY - June 2018

The Gateway Kingdom

Posted on June 1, 2018

Written by Christian Hazes, Staff Writer

It was a bold move from Emmanuel Macron to visit Morocco as the first Maghreb destination, shortly after having been elected president. Macron’s predecessors frequently opted for visiting Algeria first, instead of its long-standing regional rival Morocco. Both countries constituted the invaluable core of the French empire in North and West Africa and the post-independence relationship between colonizer and colonized has been complex and often ambivalent.

Nevertheless, Macron’s choice to promote Morocco to France’s first state visit destination is not totally a surprise. Aside from some periods of accumulating tension, France and Morocco have always been on good terms with each other. This relationship caused both countries to substantially influence one another in an abundance of facets.

French involvement in Morocco is especially evident and worth taking a closer look at. The former colonizer, who granted Morocco independence in 1956, remains Morocco’s largest trading partner as well as its chief investor. Two fitting illustrations of France’s endeavours are the recently erected Renault fabrication plant in hub-city Tanger, and the establishment of a Moroccan equivalent of the Train à Grande Vitesse. This high-velocity rail service is the commencement of fulfilling Morocco’s wish to modernize its infrastructure. The “fastest train in Africa” will make traveling by train in Morocco considerably less time-consuming. Macron has vowed to ensure France’s commitment to the Moroccan cause of realizing economic emergence, industrial development and the implementation of political and institutional reforms. A logical consequence is that France has the honor to call itself Morocco’s paramount bilateral donor.

When it comes to the political sphere, one does not have to search long to unveil French influence. Strong Franco-Moroccan political ties have the by-result of spawning a growing stream of concerns regarding the return of ‘Françafrique’. French general consulates are in abundance in Morocco, a phenomenon not quite unique to the country. The extensive network of French embassies and consulates across much of Africa is a remnant of colonial times. Less overt, or obvious, instances of the French finger in the political pie of Morocco are the joint action programs on climate change, combating terrorism, and the growing presence of French cultural institutions.

Even the more trivial Moroccan domains couldn’t escape the French claws,inevitably bearing the mark of its former colonizer. During a meeting in Marrakech, I asked a young Moroccan sports journalist who had just recently launched the site League Live for his opinion on the fact that many football trainers for the Moroccan squad are born and raised Frenchmen. He confirmed that the Moroccan football federation has a tendency to appoint French trainers, but that it doesn’t stop there. French staff is also deployed to train the Moroccan youth squads. Not merely in the light of the national squads, but also concerning that of the Moroccan clubs. As expected, the French style of playing has now become the status quo in Morocco.

Not unimportantly, when asked for Morocco’s chances at surviving the group stage of the upcoming World Cup, the journalist advocated for discarding the French way of playing. Instead, “parking the bus”, a highly defensive tactic that aims at conceding as few as possible goals, ought to take precedence.

Is France driven by genuine goodwill? Or are there underlying motives that hint to self-interest? A mixture of both? Could that be possible?

Like any other country, France craves expanding its operations into broader markets, and Africa is the “new” El Dorado. The continent’s riches, when it comes to natural resources, attracts an abundance of foreign partners. Morocco possesses a great deal of natural resources itself, such as phosphate reserves and fish, but the kingdom is also seen as a potential portal and connector to the African hinterland.

Photo by J. Audema, 1905

During colonial times, the French only shared their hegemony on the African continent with the British. Now in 2018 a lot has changed. France’s near total domination has vanished into thin air. With Germany, the United States, and most notably China and India joining the fray, France has receded substantially compared to their position only a decade ago. France’s deteriorating competitiveness is a chief culprit, which is mostly due to the floundering French economy. The economically booming states of China and India easily outgun France when it comes to financial means. But it is primarily the former Francophone Africa turning its back on France that proves to be fatal for the latter’s languishing domination in Africa. From Senegal to Madagascar, they yearn to reduce their dependence on Paris. This also explains why many African countries turn to non-French investors and benefactors.

It is, in addition to the already strong bonds, Morocco’s envisaged role as the gateway to the new El Dorado that explains France’s reinvigorated interest in bolstering its partnership with the kingdom. In 2013, King Mohammed VI explicitly stated that the African continent is Morocco’s top-priority in light of international relations. The kingdom’s expanded political and economic footprint in Africa marks the inception of a new era in multilateral collaboration between Morocco and the other, predominantly Sub-Saharan, African states. Morocco’s recent return to the African Union and its accession in some regional cooperative pacts couldn’t have a better timing.

Obviously, France cannot miss out on this opportunity. France’s narrative is one that emphasizes the shared quest that both countries are to embark on: pursuing joint interests, involving multiple facets of life.

Former French Prime-Minister François Mitterand stated in 1957 that “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21th century”. The daunting fear of losing Africa is still relevant to contemporary France. This says a lot about the current relations between the two. Although de jure decolonized, Francophone Africa is still of the utmost importance to France. Plus, it remains connected to its former colonizer as if nothing has changed ever since the struggles for independence were ultimately rewarded with independence.

Admittedly, France preserves various and important stakes in the cultural, political and economic ties between Africa and the self. But this is nothing in comparison with the power and status that it once enjoyed in the African Backyard. Regardless of the still evident French influence, it is slowly waning.

It is the latter and a hint of optimism that make me conclude that the fear that Mitterand voiced is finite.

Laura Alexander TWISTED MORALITY - June 2018

Highsmith’s Heroes and the 26-Hour Moralist

Posted on June 1, 2018

Written by Laura Alexander, Staff Writer

The police in the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 about a man seen prowling in the dark, night after night, the red glow of his cigarette floating along the back streets. He would pace for hours, heading nowhere in the starlight that hammers down through the thin air of the mesas. The police were not the only ones to wonder. At the national laboratory some physicists had learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with twenty-six hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs.

Chaos, James Gleick

People’s actions have an internal consistency that can almost add up to a moral system. Consider Genet and Dostoyevsky, who constantly return to the morality of one’s actions being judged internally, where the greatest punishment is shame, where its opposites are honor and pride. Shame that can attack you, physically like heartburn, years after the act, shame you can learn to masochistically enjoy. And, most importantly, shame that isn’t distributed in proportion with, in the eyes of the world, are your biggest sins.

So it is with the men that Patricia Highsmith uses as her heroes, especially of her most famous, Tom Ripley from the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. When Highsmith’s heroes ever feel a drive to do ‘the right thing’ it is in the way a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. That story about the mathematician (Mitchell Feigenbaum) who decided to live on a 26 hour sleep cycles and cycled in and out of sync with everyone else, is very like what Highsmith’s characters do morally.

Their guide is the construction of this internal logic, the threading of these deeply individual networks of values, motivations, principles, desires, memories, that hides in plain sight because most of the time is doesn’t lead to any action so particularly extreme. Except when it suddenly does. In The Thief’s Journal Genet takes pride in his triumvirate of anti-virtues; treachery, theft and homosexuality. “There is a relationship among them which, though not always apparent, at least, so it seems to me, recognizes a kind of vascular exchange between my taste for betrayal and theft and my loves.” Vascular – related to the blood vessels, the arteries and veins of the circulatory system of the body. That is, something self-enclosed, something that must only be consistent with itself to survive. This is true of all theories, whether they’re ideas of moral philosophy or the standard model of particle physics. It’s also true of these networks of values and morals which could be called a ‘self’.

In The Talented Mr. Ripley, we get to watch the construction of a ‘self’ taking place. We follow Ripley over the course of five books, though between the end of The Talented Mr. Ripley and the beginning of Ripley Underground a lot has happened – he’s consolidated his fortune, got married, settled down in a country house in France – his character is in place and fully formed by the end of the first. We see him first as a drifter, a formless mass of vague malevolence and resentment. Over the course of the book, Ripley acquires what we might call a self – the things he will do and the things he will not do and the reasons for them. All this adds up to a unified personality that he doesn’t have at the beginning. Can we break down how he does this? Perhaps. In three points.

Photo by Srikanta Hu

First, Ripley superficially finds his self, by becoming an expat who can live in luxury; to be alone it helps to be foreign and self-sufficient. Ripley makes himself a sauntering, loping, slouching, rootless cosmopolitanism – I like these words very much, like the way of moving they suggest, both physically and metaphorically. The term ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, was originally used by the Stalinist regime against Jewish intellectuals as in ‘a rootless cosmopolitanism which is deeplessly repulsive and inimical to Soviet man’, that is repulsive to the great healthy mass of heroic workers. There are certain props that set the scene again and again, the trappings of Highsmith that make her so deliciously filmable. The sun, certain types of clothes, foreign languages, cigarettes, drinks. To what extent are these just visual tropes that Highsmith gets a kick out of and to what extent are they necessary for this kind of solitude? I have had something approaching this kind of solitude while penniless, but Ripley’s incapable of it.

Second, by trying on, and ultimately discarding, the identity of another, Dickie Greenleaf, who he first admires and envies, maybe even lusts for. Within 60 pages Ripley has murdered Dickie, and assumed his identity. There are resonances in the relationship between Ripley and Dickie with a particular kind of relationship between two men that shows up all over literature. We could call it the relationship between the charmer and the narrator. It’s a specifically male relationship, tinged with queer desire that’s never allowed to be exactly vocalised, between the inspiring figure who represents some more exciting way of being in the world, and the quieter friend who will eventually tell their story. A kind of murder through resentment seems sometimes to be inherent in all these relationships, even if it’s mostly metaphorical. The charismatic charmer must always be eliminated somehow in the end so that the shy narrator’s voice can be heard. Each version of the narrator begins to find flaws in the charmer, see the shallowness of their glamour and resent them always being the center of attention in what should be the narrator’s story. The train of thought that eventually leads to a murder in a boat begins with Ripley beginning to suspect he could live Dickie’s life better himself, that Dickie is not taking as much advantage as Ripley could of his privileges of wealth, of good looks, of charm. Even from when they first meet Ripley resents the fact that Dickie is a ‘lousy amateur painter’, finds himself ‘waiting for something profound and original from Dickie’ With Ripley’s murder and identity theft, Highsmith takes the dynamic to its logical conclusion. By the end of The Talented Mr Ripley, however, Ripley must discard Dickie’s identity and go back to living under his own papers, but with a self that has emerged crystallised from the experience of being someone else.

Third, and most importantly, by the act of committing murder. The key word here is committing, not murder. This is an act committed in knowledge of one’s total freedom, in which the culprit takes responsibility. Not responsibility in the sense of owning up and accepting the consequences but an interior responsibility that of not disowning the act, of facing up to the fact that you can’t ‘be pardon’d and retain the offence’.

The idea that such an act changes a person forever is an old existentialist theme. When I was younger I felt like I understood it because I felt I’d never made a decision and didn’t have a self. Now I’ve made decisions and have a self, and as a consequence I understand this idea less. It may or may not be true of life in general, but it does seem to be true for the kind of man made hero in a Highsmith book, and these actions are violent in nature (they don’t have to be). There are acts of violence that are sudden and life-altering, committed consciously but not exactly premeditated (less than three short pages sit between Ripley’s first thought of killing Dickie and him striking of the first blow), and since their culprits have no intention of taking the penalty for their actions, they come to live with the knowledge of their crimes without hypocrisy. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

There are other elements that push Ripley to become a full character by the end of the first book, but these three are most important. In all three aloneness is crucial, the changes that take place cannot even be communicated, let alone shared with others. Ripley’s actions take place under those special conditions of aloneness where one’s ‘self’ stops being reflected. That’s when internal moral consistency becomes the thing. Highsmith’s heroes live with one foot in this world of moral self-sufficiency and one in the real world, where there are bills to be paid, high-quality suits to be bought, and an image to be kept up.

Highsmith’s heroes are still able to live in this real world, even in the most high-class social world. Instead of forgetting all about it, or glorying in their renouncement of it they take pleasure in drifting through it, and sometimes out of it.

For all the social connections he eventually develops, Ripley’s character exists in isolation, revealed in full only to the reader through Highsmith’s close third person. Ripley is not like anyone else morally, his way of seeing the world appears similar to the majority enough to be able to hide, while his otherness lies just far enough below the surface to be ignored by everyone, even his wife (who doesn’t know or pretends not to know he’s a criminal).

The heroes of Patricia Highsmith who follow closely behind Ripley, are always alone. Entirely, metaphysically alone. For them, human contact only makes sense at the most trivial level or on the grand existential level of the internal emotional logic. The whole fun of a Highsmith book is that these conundrums are played out under the veneer of pulp.

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