Cash is God: American Profanity
Don Draper and the American Sacred Void
The land of ‘God’s own People’ was founded out of the political foment in the birth of the modern era. American government is created on the philosophy that the rational, small ‘s’ self, Homo Economicus of Adam Smiths conceptualization. Homo Economicus is the entity that will pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is single irreducible unit at the base of our most fundamental political doctrines in the United States.
This was a tremendous achievement and leap forward in the latter part of the 18th century. With the enlightenment, the average citizen was able to exercise his individuality in earnest for the first time political equality with his Democratic will. This was achieved through many bloody revolutions – mainly the English, American and French. 2/3 of those revolutions saw kings beheaded in the name of the ‘Will of the People’.
Yet as the latter half of the enlightenment rolled on, history began to show us that the enlightenment was not an all-encompassing rapture that would forever remove humanity from its basest impulses. Instead, the despots and tyrants of the world learned to use the scientific method as means to pursue the most vile and evil campaigns of conquest and destruction as yet seen in human history – a la Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, among others. Both these regimes drew much of their doctrine that would justify the torture and death of millions of people from of materialism, science and rationality.
And still, the arch-nemesis of the most strident enlightenment thinkers, Religion, did not disappear from the human race as the tenets of empiricism became more instantiated in society. Instead, the masses kept on believing. But now they were also inundated with the benefits and obvious power of a materialistic, positivist world view that greatly improved material living conditions globally as well as ushered in the modern political era.
Yet Nietzsche hit the nail on the head, for the west at least, when he proclaimed God was dead. Though God was most certainly not, the binding moral compass that guided the many millions of souls of the west through religious life was. In its stead has been a compilation of materialism and spirituality that is both confused and tepid.
In the United States, God was replaced with the almighty dollar. With the death of Western Religious life, the only viable, robust means of filling this void was through capitalism. This insight is not then a jumping off point for the virtues and necessity of Marxism.
In fact, Marxism as a philosophy is directly a manifestation of the death of the Western Religious life, as any astute student of human religious psychology will see from the numerous pillars of human connection that the ideology fulfills. Capitalism does just the same in America for Homo Economicus. One ideology is collectivist, one is individualist respectively at core. They are both based on the denial of the human religious life and the conceptualization of human beings solely as Homo Economicus.
Paying homage to our venerable Jungian roots at HEMM, the quickest way to understand how an ideology is embodied is through its archetypal expression in cultural artwork. The best representation of Homo Economicus at its apotheosis in modern pop culture is Don Draper, of the AMC series Mad Men.
The psychological acuity of the writers behind Mad Men is truly astounding and is a testament to their prowess. They expertly capture the ‘splitness’ of Don’s psychology, and thus most all-American men, particularly of the boomer age group.
Split-ness in this sense is the internal self-division of Don. On one hand he is a successful, vaunted, desired ad-agency exec who portrays the image of the American Dream throughout his life. A beautiful, barbie-doll wife, two thriving kids, a swell house in the suburbs and high-powered career in the city are all his. He has it all, he is living the dream.
Yet below the surface there is much more to Don than originally meets the eye. He is someone who’s come from deep poverty and a broken home. He’s experienced abuse and war trauma. He’s a womanizer who is deeply insecure in his relationship, unable to stay faithful to his wife and be there for his kids. Don Draper isn’t even his real name; he has an entirely separate family on the other side of the country.
He copes with the deep anxiety of living a lie, a ‘split’ life’, through womanizing, boozing & workaholism. This is the case for much of the men of his generation and the subsequent generations of American men have reacted against or refined this archetype in various ways.
But what is most striking in this split in his personality and what would ameliorate the pain in Don’s life, as well as much of modern society, would be a reckoning with the reality of man not just as Homo Economicus, but man as a Religious being.
This more holistic view of humanity, which is a post-enlightenment perspective, is captured in the work of seminal religious historian, Mercia Eliade, by his concept of the Sacred and the Profane.
Don inhabits the world of the Profane. Western man has been trapped in the profane ever since the enlightenment killed God. The revolt against the sacred dominating and domineering over the profane was for too long the main ill of western society. This was initially addressed first by the Reformation and Renaissance, then brought to full fruition by the Enlightenment.
Yet as we marched down from the misty, obscuring mountains of mysticism that simply justified tyrannical monarchies throughout much of western history, we have lost our connection to the necessary and sustaining Religious life that was also a part & parcel of Western Culture. This is the domain of the Sacred.
The Sacred is where the religious life is, at best, the realm where the universal is able to relate and be integrated with the personal. Human beings are self-conscious animals that are able to experience the profound ecstasy, mystery and existential terror of being alive on a floating rock in space. Yet we still need to go about our days improving our lives. In order to do this with our deepest capacities engaged we need to have moments of deep transformation that the Profane, small ‘s’ self, Homo Economicus aspect of our being is unable to provide.
In Jungian parlance, this would be the contrast between the Persona and the Self. The Persona is the culturally approved and prescribed attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that govern our ability to get along in society to secure our daily bread and eventual thriving over time. It is an essentially materialistic entity.
The Self is the transpersonal aspect of our being that intimates with the Sacred, a Soul or other Universal forces that go beyond time and space of immediate historicity. The self is the conduit by which each historical epoch is filled with the ideas that define it brought onto a personal level. In other words what the Religious life used to fulfill through Myth, Symbol and Ritual.
This took the form of the Catholic Church in varying manifestations for much of Western History. This institution was the vessel by which individuals could collectively deepen their relationship to the divine and the community, being ushered into more profound states of consciousness through a lifetime, from infancy onwards to death.
Modern western society has totally secularized our lives, with good reason, though they have thrown out the baby with the bath water. By leaving no room for the Self and the Religious life in modern society, we relegate all our spiritual potential to the dust bin. This modern attitude is rife with consequences.
Because, as we see through Don Draper’s journey, he is unable to take deeper responsibility for the myriad crucibles of suffering that he experiences throughout his life. Thus he is forced to compensate this pain these unintegrated transformative experiences engender through myriad addictions and immature relationships. This is the case for most modern Americans, men and women, indeed most citizens of the broadly western world.
It is a human universal that societies have rituals throughout life’s stages to make room for the sacred in each individuals life. Some examples would be the vision quests of Native Americans, Walk-Abouts of Aboriginals and the various celebrations of the Judeo-Christian monotheistic religions. But due to the undermining of the sacred by the Enlightenment, these rituals are no longer working the way they used to. The need for Sacred states of consciousness to instantiate the ability for individuals to interface with deeper and more profound levels of reality throughout a lifetime is as critical to human thriving as is having shelter, community and earning of one’s daily bread.
In fact, not undergoing this process is a chief source of the myriad diseases of despair and political turmoil proliferating throughout much of western society currently. Like water that has been displaced, this fundamental human drive will not disappear simply because we’ve denied it’s traditional path. Like a river, it will find its way, slowly carving a new channel over time. It would be best to harness this natural force as opposed to pretending it’s inexistence.
This is why Don Draper, in the last season and indeed the last episode, pursues the Sacred. He goes to a California eastern spirituality retreat in the mold of the Esalen Institute and tries to attain enlightenment. His big break through is a combination of Coca-Cola’s new TV ad and world unity – ‘I’d like to buy the World a Coke’.
This cross-pollination is only natural in a man who has been taught his whole life to commodify everything, even the Sacred. Perhaps if America can wake up to the fundamental necessity of Religious Life and the Sacred for its own sake, Americans could come up with something better for the world than carbonated sugar water.