Social Masks and Suicide

 Only a deposed king, Blaise Pascal noted, is distressed not to be a king. Most of us are satisfied by lesser honors. It's all about our expectations. Obama is pleased to have served two terms as President. Trump is unhappy to have served only one. Unlike Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton, I am content to have served none. We judge happiness by our expectations. "Who would think himself unhappy if he had only one mouth and who would not if he had only one eye?" (Pensees 117) 

          A success in life (such as a play well directed) makes me happy. It creates a flush of well-being, an inner glow. I circulate after the show shaking hands. I go to bed smiling. But it also stimulates me to create a new norm, to raise the bar. If I'm not asked to direct again, or if I do and the production is mediocre, I feel bad. Even equivalent success on the next play comes only as a relief, not a blessing, because it is expected. It's the new normal. If I depend on dramatic success to make me happy, if I don't have a basis for contentment independent of all possible theatre, then only an endless accumulation applause can ever keep me happy, and this can't happen in the real world. Like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, I'll find myself running to stay in the same place because my expectations keep catching up with me. I'll be like a king who is less fortunate than most of his subjects because his happiness depends on their obedience. As Ramana Maharshi said, "There is no happiness in any object of the world" (p. 14)

          No lasting happiness, that is. There is temporary glow from objects that make us feel lucky. I sometimes play the slots at  casinos, where all I expect is a bright, jangling spectacle and cheap drinks while the few dollars I have budgeted evaporate. So I didn't understand when a woman asked, "Do you feel lucky?" on the shuttle to the Grand Casino in Gulfport, that lavish casino-on-a-barge that Hurricane Katrina slammed onshore in 2005 because politicians restricted gambling to boats. I lost for an hour on penny slots, walked around a little, and dropped five dollars in a dollar machine. Once it was gone, I'd be done. 

The Grand Casino in 1993

          Over the next few pulls, I lost down to two dollars, built up to seven, and was losing again when the machine went wild. Suddenly, it registered over three hundred. Trembling, I located the payout button, and three hundred "silver dollars" clanged into the steel tray. Clang-clang-clang. One at a time. I can still hear them. They rang in my head for days. It was the sound of lucky. For several days I felt special. Sexy. Happy. Blessed. Alive. If a drug giving this buzz were as cheap and harmless as caffeine, I'd be a user. I understood gambling addiction. It's the archetype of all the successes that make us suddenly happy but then less happy if we try to normalize them. I knew better, and cashed in. We become addicted to pleasant things and despair when, inevitably, we lose them.

Years ago, one of my students was the son of the administrator of the county hospital that, according to the local paper, was in financial trouble. The father shot himself in the parking lot. It was very samurai and made no sense to me. I assume he'd been fired, but a job isn't a life. Hell, I've been fired. Even supposing the worse--for which I have zero evidence--that, say, he had embezzled to pay gambling debts and expected years in prison, he still had a lot going for him. Prisons are full of people--over two million at recent count--living from day to day. Even if the father didn't score a Martha Stewart lockup, he was qualified to help in the clinic or, at least, the library. When he got out, he'd have decades of life expectancy. Even if nobody would trust him with money, he had the brains and education for a decent job. If his future was worse than death, most of us should kill ourselves. 

           Clearly, the man had constructed for himself a more rarified norm--poured himself into the highfalutin mold of hospital administrator, doctor, and community leader--addicted himself to a six-figure income and kowtowing colleagues--so that falling from this public identity killed him. He had lost himself in his persona, his public face.

Persona (Greek for "mask") is Carl Jung's term for the social roles that we all play. I act differently as a professor, a father to young children, a husband, a lifelong best friend, a stranger in a bar, an acquaintance at church, a director, a customer, a committee member, a committee chair, and so forth, and people react differently. If two people spend a lot of time together, they create interacting personas, and if the relationship is severed, they mourn these dead parts of themselves. Unengaged personas define loneliness. Not to have a flexible repertory of personas is to be socially maladapted, and not to have comfortable ones can be traumatic. 

But personas are shells of identity, managed more-or-less consciously by what Jung calls the ego. Ego, put simply, is anything we would predicate--even secretly--to the pronoun I. Any sentence, in the form of "I am," "I did," "I remember," or "I like" describes the ego. Naively, we could call this the "inner self" or the "executive function," the free-will-claiming me accessible to ordinary introspection, but this oversimplifies. Current psychology understands the ego as pushed about by forces beyond its conscious control. A recent favorite of mine is the modular theory of mind that sees the conscious self as a consensus-taker and confabulator of policy presiding over a bevy of separate "modules" that represent competing strategies for coping. 

Ancient Greek actors with their masks (personas)

In any case, a persona (such as medical administrator as a set of semi-habitual actions and reactions in and around a hospital) is only one mask worn by that administrator's ego, even if an important one. Actors in Greek tragedy remain themselves as they change masks to play different roles. The ego performing a role subsists as the set of memories, preferences, relationships, and alternate personas (the administrator did have a son) and should continue to exist grounded in its own existence, independent of the opportunity to act out any particular role. Even if a play closes, the actor lives on. 

          But, of course, having a beloved persona ripped away, which happens in the death of a spouse, causes grief. I have to assume that my student's father was deeply insecure, that his innate sense of contentment and self-esteem (what the hedonic treadmill theory calls his "subjective well-being set point") was depressed, so that he depended on professional success to blunt this depression. He leaned hard on a flimsy guardrail over the void.

Jung warns of the danger of identifying the ego with any of the non-ego functions--becoming roles that we play or other fragmentary clusters of impulses that aren't ourselves--and in this story we have clear case of persona-identification. I wondered if the man thought all future sunsets would be ugly, all future sex dull, and all of next year's movies bad, but the death of a beloved self can apparently drain all the pleasure from life if you take it for your real self.

Another suicide in another parking lot almost thirty years later but only a few miles away makes even less sense to me. Jimmy (not his real name) started teaching about the time I did at a community college where all the faculty knew each other, so we became friends--at least the kind of acquaintances who stop to chat when they meet. I went with him once to look at a building he was thinking about buying and, in those early years, found him an open, friendly, unassuming fellow. Early on, he declared that his goal in life was to become a millionaire. His method was to buy old houses, rehab them, and rent them. His wife was a school teacher, so they lived off her income while he bought real estate with his. Jimmy drove around what his children called "Daddy's old truck," his own handyman and rent collector, cutting costs to invest more. As soon as he had a downpayment, he'd take out a mortgage on another property, covering the mortgages with rent and his salary until, after a few years, he was a slumlord. By the 1990 recession, when we were still colleagues, Jimmy was into the stock market enough to joke about big paper losses in a crash. He was department head, still teaching, and still, I think, his old self.

A few years later, I moved to Kentucky, and the last time I saw Jimmy was on a nostalgic tour of the campus about 2005. He was the only old friend I could find on campus that afternoon, sitting behind a neat desk in his office. At the time, I was performing in Kentucky as Banjo Bill, hawking a music CD, and he smiled and suggested hiring me to perform that summer for his "investment group" retreat on the Gulf Coast. Sure, I said. I doubt I'd have delivered the show he expected (it would have been a lot of pressure) but nothing came of it anyway. I think it was like "I'll see your music CD and raise you one investment group." But the takeaway was that Jimmy had changed. He was a slick, gray-templed, animated Madame-Tussaud waxwork of himself. Seal-like. Artificial. Friendly, yes, but a half-step back from real. Maybe he was happy, certainly composed, but he was a construct. It was the coif, the suit, the composure, the gravitas--a transformation I later saw in a theatre friend after he was elected to the legislature. Jimmy had arrived. He still taught classes, but glowing behind him was a mound of money. He was a millionaire. And now, I am pretty sure that he had dissolved into that role.

In 2008, early in the Great Recession, a mutual friend emailed me that Jimmy had handed the semester's teaching schedule to an assistant, walked out to his car, and shot himself in the head. At age 62, with over thirty years under the same system I retired from, I know that Jimmy could have retired with almost no pay cut (given social security), and gone bankrupt if necessary without losing his pension or his house--not to mention his wife's retirement. Maybe there was criminal malfeasance, but nothing ever surfaced, and it doesn't sound like Jimmy. What makes sense to me--though I know nothing really--is that he must have rashly leveraged investments from his group, expecting a bull market to make everything good, and then the recession exposed him. He must have blown his investment group's money. But suicide over that embarrassment tells me that Jimmy had sold his "soul" even in the ordinary sense of his ego. He had ceased to see himself as his mother's son, his wife's husband, his children's father, or his memories' repository and become a persona that invested money.

Sadly, I could tell two more true stories about men (it's seldom women) whose paths crossed mine in the same town. A local boy worked his way up to president of the local bank only to be fired when it merged. He burned to death in his car the very day his severance pay ended--a suicide, the insurance company charged but couldn't prove. He stood to lose a historic home and return to low-paid clerical work. Then there was the defrocked president of the local college who promoted a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme and then, hours before he had to report to prison, ran a rental car into a tree and shot himself after the airbag saved his life,. There must have been something in the water.

The moral is obvious. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul?" (Mark 8:36) Often quoted in the narrow context of Christian salvation, this applies more broadly. Or we could speak of selling identity "for a mess of pottage" (Genesis 25:29-34). A function of religion is to ground us in our being, to connect us with value in existence that is sufficient in itself, not based on possessions or honors. This is implicit in the credo that God is love. Returning to Pascal in the Pensees, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room" (136). Happiness is seeing each day, no matter what it brings, as a blessing. It is seeing I am as sufficient reason to exist.

References

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Translated by A. J. Krailshheimer. Penguin, 1995.

Marharishi, Ramana. Who Am I? Ramanasramam, 2019.