While reading a book concerning Freudian thought, I came across the following quote from philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear:

“A battle may be fought over Freud, but the war is over our culture’s image of the human soul. Are we to see humans as having depth—as complex psychological organisms who generate layers of meaning which lie beneath the surface of their own understanding? Or are we to take ourselves as transparent to ourselves?”

Reading that line, I made the connection that the theme of many of my own columns, perhaps most vehemently those regarding service activities such as the Krispy Kreme Challenge or Shack-A-Thon, is a variant of this “cultural war.” In my columns, I argue for looking at the root of problems—whatever conceptual apparatus one may adopt for that!—and targeting these fundamental structures. Those service activities cannot, even over time, make enough of a dent to justify engaging with them instead of efforts that can actually solve the problem.

This line of reasoning—I think it’s fairly simple—is frequently misunderstood. It is sometimes responded to by constructing straw men, such as responding to me as if I were arguing that courses of action are by themselves “good or “bad,” while I’m always only looking at the opportunity cost of choosing one over the other. Other arguments frequently hold null intellectual weight in rational debate, such as the “ask the families” card. (Error: Anecdotes have no place in proving hypotheses.)

I’ve been baffled about whether such misunderstandings occur out of an inability to think critically or out of a jingoistic and/or sycophantic attachment, whether conscious or unconscious, to something one can associate oneself with.

Now, these are qualitatively two different explanations: The former is a mere surface-level explanation (“Well, the guy’s just stupid”) while the latter digs a bit deeper (“Ahh, he might have done that to fulfill a desire to…”). Both these reasons are possible. But not, someone else may contend, if I include the possibility of unconscious motivation in the latter explanation.

This person, in reference to the quote above, would be denying the complexity of humans.

But if someone could hold the view for the human mind that the only phenomena that exist—or at least the only ones worth examining—are those that are clearly apparent and reject the possibility of latent processes, that person could also extrapolate such a conceptual framework to other aspects of reality; for example, to society at large, believing that there aren’t complex systems at play beneath the plain and obvious.

So, there’s also a third possible explanation for misunderstandings, not just of such columns, but of all systemic analyses: because of a certain perception of what reality is like, there is a psychological block that prevents people from going along with any explanations that rely on a critique of the underlying workings of society. Thus necessitating, as a defense mechanism, the type of ridiculous, vacuous opposition described above.

The view that human acts are rational-intentional is very deeply embedded in our culture, stemming from Enlightenment thought and continuing to form the basis of today’s neo-liberal economics. The assumption that underlies it, that nothing exists beneath the surface, could very well get extrapolated to society at large. And this could lead to the automatic rejection of critiques that connect the invisible norms of our society—such as how people are classified and the simplest conceptions of what value is derived from and how people are classified—to the overt problems we face.

So, perhaps, for a significant part of our society, if critiques based on Marxism, queer theory, etc. are to be even unconsciously considered, maybe the simplistic myth about the human mind that conditions our thinking has to be repaired. Hence the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis and other systems of thoughts that present a complex picture of each person.

There’s almost always something beneath the surface: For instance, there could well be something more to these very words than superficially appears. In this age of rampant anti-intellectualism that genuflects to social entrepreneurs and Malcolm Gladwell, using macro-level conceptual apparatuses to argue for the importance of systemic analyses is of utmost value. But to use them, maybe a return to Freud is necessary, to show the viability of penetrating, comprehensive conceptual apparatuses in the first place.