"We destroy and we create. Without destruction there is no creation. Let those who praise life know that they praise equally the destroying and the creating. Monuments of murder and spires of devotion rise side by side, reach up to heaven.
"We come now to a time when our capacity to tear down dazzles our capacity to build.
"Conscience is the mandate of the group installed in one beating heart, enforces murder and brotherhood with equal authority.
"Hydrogen warheads sleep lightly in underground nests."
So writes Allen Wheelis, a wise psychoanalyst and philosopher whose elegant writing stands apart from the work of others who deal with the mysteries of human nature. In this heady tome, he begins with commentary on our capacity for self-deception and the manifold ways knowing who we are is complicated by our belief in the fictions of our society about money, achievement, and happiness. In a section titled "The Ways of Power," Wheelis deals with the hold groups have upon us, our reliance upon social creations which explain how things work, and the role of power and sovereignty.
The lure of security and order is so strong in our lives that we are willing to give away certain freedoms to attain them. In the name of various ideals, the sovereign state does terrible things with our money. Wheelis observes: "A truly Christian position calls for the abnegation of power, requires one to give all he has to the poor, to be meek, to love his enemy, to turn the other cheek. A measure of the instinctual force of the drive for power is given by the rarity with which such an ethic has in fact been practiced." And when push comes to shove, the state uses warriors to talk about conscience, and when draft resistors claim a higher authority for their nonviolence, the states sends them to jail.
In a section that Wheelis calls "the Ways of the Heart," he examines desire, fidelity, loss, and love. He sees desire as a powerful force in people's lives that can lead them to cast aside family, friends, career, honor, and even life itself. It is "endless and unappeasable, is the most intense when most forbidden, and is never far from despair." Love is worth all the energy it takes to maintain. Wheelis is a meaning-maker par excellence.
