The Master

In The Master (2012), Lancaster Dodd tells Freddie Quell, the man whom Lancaster wants to cure of alcoholism and mental illness, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” Given Lancaster’s presumption of infallibility concerning knowing that every human soul has been reincarnated even for trillions of years, the end of the line would more fittingly be, “I am a man above all (others).” With regard to being a physician, Lancaster comes up short because he underestimates the medical severity of Freddie’s alcoholism and his likely psychotic mental illness. Upon being released from jail, Lancaster should realize that Freddie’s rage and temper-tantrum in his jail cell evince mental illness of such severity that it is lunacy to suppose that the patient can be cured by walking back and forth in a room between a wall and a window and being sure to touch both, and by saying “Doris” over and over again in a dyad with Lancaster’s new son-in-law. In fact, Lancaster actually encourages Freddie’s alcoholism by asking that Freddie continue to make his “potion,” which contains paint-thinner filtered through bread. It is not Lancaster, but his wife, Peggy, who puts a stop to the “booze.” From her sanity, both that of Freddie and Lancaster can be questioned. That Lancaster is the Master of a religious cult, or “movement,” renders his mental state particularly problematic.

Lancaster is perhaps at his best as a writer; he is at his best in his second book, in which he subtly but importantly switches the question used in his hypnotic method to imagine your past lives from recall them. In being a religious leader claiming even to know that he and Freddie had worked together in a European army running supplies in a past life, Lancaster demonstrates the danger that can beset the human mind when it ventures into the domain of religion, wherein certainty is posited for that which only belief, and thus faith, can reach. That anyone would even believe that the embodied souls alive have had past lives for trillions of years even though the species has been around for only 1.8 million years demonstrates just how alluring, and thus mentally powerful charismatic leadership can be. That Freddie and Lancaster’s new son-in-law went to the hotel room of a man who had just been critical of Lancaster’s claim at a gathering at a private home and physically beat up the man testifies to just how dangerous charisma, or “gifts of the spirit,” can be.

In the 20^th century alone, Adolf Hitler, who led Nazi Germany, had incredible charisma, such that the Germans continued to follow him blindly, albeit with severe consequences if they objected outwardly to Hitler’s autocratic regime. At the same time, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt also had tremendous charisma, with millions of Americans tuning in to hear his Fireside Chats on the radio. Decades later, John F. Kennedy had Camelot-tinged charisma, and still later Ronald Reagan, a former actor, could deliver lines dripping with charisma. In the domain of religion, the Bible warns of false-prophets, whose charisma, like that of Jim Jones, who secretly served poisoned drinks to his followers because he deemed that the world was about to end, enabled the atrocity. That a religious leader can be so wrong yet still have devoted followers is portrayed in the film, whose A-list of actors gives it its emotional depth, which, by the way, is typically felt by followers of charismatic leaders.

At its core, the film is a picture of the human mind’s vulnerability when we enter the domain of religion. Unfortunately, this vulnerability tends to be invisible to the collective unconscious of humanity. In making such a blind spot transparent, raising it to the level of consciousness, the medium of film can serve a very important function for our species, and even contribute to its religious and political development, both of which have been retarded and thus kept from progressing. The mind’s innate susceptibility to religious lunacy as primped up as truth as if on stilts and thus untouchable can be grasped just by examining the substance of Lancaster’s teachings without the entrapment of narrative and charismatic characterization.

The first glimpse of Lancaster’s perspective comes when he officiates his daughter’s wedding on a boat: “as long as you hold these bodies, in this life, you may kiss the bride.” Lancaster goes on to give an utterly nonsensical speech at the reception, yet everyone in the room applauds. As a critic later says (before being beaten up), “Good science allows for more than one opinion. Otherwise, you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult, is it not?” It is as if out of Lancaster’s sheer act of will serial reincarnation is created. Beyond the metaphysics of the human soul, Lancaster conflates religion with science. Of his dyad-based “method” by which participants can have bad memories from their past lives erased, Lancaster claims that some forms of Leukemia can be cured. He explains to his now-shocked critic, “In going back over past lives, we may be able to treat illnesses that started thousands, even trillions of years ago.” Doing away with negative emotional impulses from this and past lives can cross over onto medical science regarding the bodies that each of us “inhabit.” Even Freddie supposes himself to think scientifically; without a doubt, Lancaster considers himself a scientist.

Even though Freddie’s childhood had been horrendous, with his father having died a drunk and his other being committed for psychosis, facing Lancaster in the next jail-cell, Freddie glimpses the Master clearly. “You’re making this shit up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” As if a schizophrenic whose knowledge of other realities cannot be shaken, the Master replies, “I give you facts.” So it is a fact that, as Lancaster tells a women whom he has just put under hypnosis, “Our spirits live on in the whole of time, exist in many vessels through time.” Even the hypnotic time travel back to past lives is presumably a fact, and thus to be deemed to be effective, without any empirical evidence, in capturing the mind’s fatal flaws to correct the mind back to its inherent state of perfect, while, Lancaster insists, “righting civilization and eliminating war and poverty, and therefore, the atomic threat.” This is the Master’s project, supported by a religious metaphysics of the human soul, or spirit, embodying trillions of bodies through time. The astute reader may recall Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence.

Perhaps when Lancaster first meets Freddie and believes that the two have met, it is because both men “connect” in having similar mental impairments. It is ironic that even though Freddie is the “identified patient” in the film, it is he who laughs off Lancaster’s claim of having recalled that both men had run military supplies together in another lifetime. That Lancaster changes his method in his second book from recall to imagine may just be an attempt to grow his movement by making it more credible, or he may have been coming to question even his own access to metaphysical truth. Such truth would have it that Lancaster and his followers were all about the human imagination, which, if so, raises the uncomfortable question of whether religious myth itself is so too, once the metaphysical and historical stilts are removed. Yet distinctively religious meaning, and thus truth, can be distinguished from these stilts and, as such, be unthreatened by the role of human imagination in clothing such meaning. 

Properly classified in terms of its distinctive genre, religious truth can be understood to not be about history, metaphysics, or medical science—claims of those domains are off-limits to the religionist; otherwise, conflicts and quagmires with the latter domains are inevitable while the innate fauna of the religious garden are obscured and overlooked. Were Lancaster to simply state that he uses hypnosis to get his patients to confront painful memories by imagining the latter to be safely distanced psychologically in “past lives,” then his medical practice would not be polluted by the assumed religious garb of infallibility, but then the film would not be such a good demonstration of one of the major lapses that is triggered in the human mind when it enters the religious domain: the deactivating of the mind’s ability to self-check, as in thinking, have I gone too far, maybe I’m wrong, so I should be more circumspect, for I am human, all too human.

The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

From the very start of the film, it is clear that the Nazis place no value on human life per se. Hitler’s second priority in coming to power was to clear Eastern Europe of the Slavs to make room for Germans to spread out from Germany. It follows that the lives of the Albanian inhabitants have no value to the Nazi commander in the film. That Nazi soldiers are shooting down the street at whomever is using chalk to draw a partisan resistance symbol—a star—on buildings makes the point clear enough that human life means nothing. The stress daily on the villagers must be tremendous. The filmmaker’s use of lighting to build tension and sound to magnify the hard claps of shoes on cement provide the audience with the sense that life under such a totalitarian German occupation is indeed harsh. The literal translation of the film, “The Bride and the State Siege,” alludes to the severity of the onslaught.

The combination of a totalitarian regime and a wholesale disvaluing of human life by the oppressors is indeed a toxic cocktail. That the Nazi’s extermination of 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe (not counting those killed on the battlefield) and the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—not exactly Kantian facts of reason—came after the European Enlightenment (of reason) does not bode well for human civilization. Moreover, that the twentieth century included two world wars does not bode well for Hegel’s theory of a trajectory through history of an increasing spirit of freedom. Two world wars seem like more than a momentary regression, and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin should not be left out in making the claim that the sordid twentieth century was not just a regression. Perhaps it is not God that is dead, as Nietzsche has been interpreted as claiming, but, rather, Hegel’s optimistic theory, given the statis of human nature even given the gradual process of natural selection.  

The Enlightenment should not have been taken as a panacea. Reason, even cleverness, can be employed in evil designs. Hannah Arendt, who wrote from her experience as an observer of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claimed that the Nazi bureaucrat simply didn’t think; he was simply working out train routes and schedules so as to maximize a commodity that had to be transported. Yet Eichmann did think for himself when he violated Himmler’s order not to make the Jews in Hungary march to a death-camp in Poland, and this is what got him convicted by the Israeli judges. The thought that many of the Jews would very efficiently die of attrition en route appealed to the value that he put on business-like efficiency. Given the goal of exterminating Judaism in Europe, it was reasonable to violate an order so a more efficient option could be taken. So it is not the benching of reason that accounts for the mass murder; quite the opposite. Bureaucracy, it should be pointed out, is based on reason rendered as structure and procedure, and it is not contrary to reason to suspend a procedure in order to put in place a more efficient remedy.

Lest it be concluded that Nazi Germany was the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, the passions were also involved. Eichmann hated Jews, and his strong emotion was backed up by the Nazi social reality in which Jews were portrayed as sub-human, even akin to rodents. This message was clear in the Nazi propaganda films in which Jews are likened to the rats that spread the plague over Europe in the fourteenth century from China. Both Hume and Adam Smith posited the imagination as playing a role in the social realities we come up with to order the world. “Confronted with the vast and seemingly chaotic complexity of the world in which we live,” one scholar on Adams explains, “we feel an instinctive need to impose some sense of order on our perceptions, and it is our imagination that enables us to do so.”[1] The social reality evinced in a leader’s vision and propagated through speeches and film can satisfy what for Victor Frankl is our innate need for meaning. Although he showed at even the victims in the concentration camps had that need even as they were starving, it is no less true that the Germans, and indeed, any human being, seeks the order that a social reality can provide. The role of the imagination in the crafting of a social reality means that subjectivity is salient. Hence Eichmann was not a mere, unthinking bureaucrat; he was a warm-blooded human being whose subjective emotions were nestled in the Nazi social reality in which Jews were vermin. This likeness is made explicit in the film, Inglorious Basterds, when the SS officer explains how he approaches hunting Jews by thinking like a rat does.

In The Bride and the Curfew, the Nazi commander applies his hunting skills to snuffing out the resistance. Although he does not view Shpresa as a rodent, it is clear that he puts no value on the lives of any of the villagers, including hers. In complete contrast, Shpresa provides a light on the human condition. Her message is the following: My life isn’t mine anymore; it no longer belongs to me; it serves the ideal of freedom, which includes a free Albania. Even though she is living in constant danger, she embraces an ideal even to her own detriment. Whereas the Nazis are acting in line with their primitive instinctual urge of aggression, the young woman is willing to override her urge of self-preservation—an instinct that Hobbes claims in Leviathan is primary. Whereas the Nazis can draw on a collective social reality to base their subjectivity, Shpresa is virtually alone in making her decision to place freedom above even her own life.

She has but her own subjectivity on which to base her choice, hence, as Sartre points out, the gravity of her choice is weighty. She does not appeal to God or even to authority or tradition, although there is a hint of the later in her mention of free Albania. Conforming to the Nazis would obviously be more convenient, though she would not thereby make use of their social reality. She embraces the hard responsibility that lies in making a choice that goes against the grain. The story-world of the film, the Nazi-occupied Albanian village, is the antithesis of freedom, and so she stands out in belonging to the ideal. Villagers do come to her aid, specifically in getting her out of town as if she were a bride, but the decision is hers alone, and must ultimately rest on her subjectivity. The film thus evinces the existentialist philosophy.

Perhaps the main question in the film is whether human beings are willing to assume the responsibility of making difficult choices when they have nothing to fall back on but our own individual subjective experience, without even the order-conferring comfort of a societal social reality. In their dependence on a social reality provided by Hitler, the Nazi subjectivity is hardly such a feat. Although it is easy to beat up on the Nazis, the implication that relying on the vision of a leader evinces weakness may not be so convenient. Heidegger, after all, advocates an authentic life over one lived out in conformity. Nietzsche tells his readers not to be Nietzscheans; rather, have your own ideas. These are difficult words for people living in an age in which we are such organizational creatures and we pay such attention to the politics of our leaders.

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[1] Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), p. 66.

Jobs

Typically as a company transitions from an enterprising, creative new venture to a large organization to be managed, a staid CEO replaces a visionary founder. In the case of Steve Jobs at Apple, the very nature of the man’s vision was not only inherently at odds with the status-quo underpinning of a large organization with a budget, but also essential to the company’s business model. Hence, the company, including its shareholders, paid a price for years for jettisoning Jobs. The film, Jobs (2013), is centered on the distinctiveness of Jobs’ vision. Although the film also hints at why this distinctiveness is such that the company would (and did) lose as a large organization after making the typical founder-to-CEO transition.

On the surface, Steve Jobs’ vision was to create new products that people could use. In fact, Jobs wanted the invented products to play a ubiquitous role in people’s lives—even being a virtual extension of their arms. Considering the Apple phones, laptops, ipads, and ipods that resulted from this vision after its initial desk-top computer manifestation, Jobs turned out to be incredibly successful. Perhaps the lesson we can draw is that it takes a lot of time for a different vision of society to come to fruition. Besides the sheer time it takes to invent and implement a product that is radically different, the tyranny of the status quo in institutions as well as a society itself acts as a solid counter-force that holds the process back—especially from one invented product to the next on the long way to the vision being realized.
The vision was so massive in terms of how much it would change society, including what people do on a daily basis, and so different from the status quo societally that the normal transition from a founder to an organizationally-ensconced CEO threatened the realization of the vision from being accomplished. As if this problem were not enough, the film shows the viewer just how much of an asshole Jobs could be (someone actually calls him that in the film). More typically of a founder, Jobs also tossed out the strictures of budges on a regular basis. In the film, he says that the next product line should risk the whole company, presumably because of the sheer "differentness" of the next invention. In fact, he also says that he wants different, not just better. So rather than assume that the company’s focus should be on an incrementally better version of the Apple II desktop computer, he pushed the untested Macintosh project, to which he had been tasked by the CEO, into front and center for the company even though that project by its very nature as radically new needed more money, staff and time (including a two-year extension on the delivery date) than the board could accept. At the time, seventy percent of the revenue was coming from the Apple II, so why not act like a company in business and focus on the winner rather than an untested product line?
Yet to Steve Jobs, the very point of Apple (and perhaps any company) is not finally to maximize profit, but, rather, to build something that will not only be useful, but will change society. It was the status quo and its sycophants that Jobs pointed to as the societal sickness. The year 1984 would not reflect George Orwell’s book, 1984, which describes an autocratic, totalitarian society. Apple would see to it that a different society would exist—different to not only the status quo prior to 1984, but also a future in which people do not have the ability (and thus freedom) to express themselves as unique (and free) individuals. Jobs wanted employees whom society viewed as crazy for thinking outside the box—even questioning societal assumptions. This included thinking outside the organizational box—even questioning organizational constraints that enforce the status quo. HR departments don’t usually seek out such people to hire. The distinctiveness of Job’s vision thus meant that the company could not be run as other companies—those that are inherently ensconced in the societal and even organizational status quo. In fact, large corporations even unwittingly promote and enforce the societal status quo because they can make a lot of money in it.
How to break the natural law of founder-to-CEO transition in organizational lifecycles by retaining a founder’s power while still giving some heed to financial constraints is the question that the film does not answer; Jobs is simply replaced, then let back in again. The vision gains new force, but what of the running of the large organization viably so it can continue to deliver financial resources for different, rather than just better, projects that are untested and by their very nature long in gestation? In short, what if a founder’s vision is not so easily replaced by an organizational mission that everyone pays lip-service to but in actuality ignores? Apple depended on Jobs not only because of his inventive brilliance, but also the very nature of his distinctive vision.