Recovering The Self

The Hollow Culture

Bonnie Spence, Ph.D.

"Man is the only animal that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it." - Mark Twain.

I am feeling a need to start this article with a few powerful quotes that illuminate the issues that I will be attempting to clarify.

The first passage is part of one of my favorite poet's work titled The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot wrote:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. ALAS!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

The other passage I would like to begin my article with was written by my favorite author, Scott Peck, M. D., from his book In Search of Stones. This short passage is from the chapter in the book on death .

"But the BIG terror is not the demise of my work; it is the death of me. I believe in an afterlife. I can even give a half dozen different, fairly cogent reasons for this belief. But believing is not the same as knowing, and at the very core of my being is the unmitigated terror on nonbeing. Call it narcissism; call it attachment, call it the survival instinct; call it whatever you want, but the plain fact of the matter is that I am terrified of dying. It is not that my body will cease to exist; it is that I will cease to exist. There will no longer be any Scott Peck. There will be nothing. No matter that is probably an illusion, it feels that when I die, I will be face-to-face with the abyss of nothingness." (p. 198).

I truly believe that the inhumanity that people give to each other stems from their own fear of death. I feel that the culture has deep contempt for three things: poverty, aging, and emotional disabilities. Poverty and aging are seen as disabilities. I have seen poisonous acts performed on two people in my life which are of such severe magnitude that they both have Severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). My last article in RTS Journal (Vol. IV, No.2) detailed some of the violence I saw directed against my disabled daughter. The kids at her high school found out about the hospitalization at UCLA that she had lived through, and about the inaccurate diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia she was given. They taunted her for four years, and called her a "Psycho". She hid in the bathroom at lunchtime for all of the four years she was in high school. Those medical diagnoses follow people throughout their entire life.

After high school, she got an apartment where she was tortured for her real disability, which is an anxiety disorder. I informed the apartment manager of her disability before she moved in. After I told them, the predators emerged, just as they do with the aging. The man that ran the elevator, cornered her, and read the bible in her face, and was very aggressive with her. She was afraid of him, so she walked the four flights of stairs to her apartment which damaged her back physically. The man, who lived just below her, whose advances she had rejected, began pounding on the ceiling every time she walked to the bathroom, because he said it woke him up. The neighbors complained if they heard her crying, and the management refused to assist her with these assaults. As I stated, emotionally disabled people are rejected just like the aging are rejected in this culture. They tried to get her evicted, so I hired an attorney, who took the story to the Fair Housing Board. She was terrified, but she was not willing to leave her home. The Department of Fair Housing was appalled by the story, and said it read like War & Peace:

"We usually don't take cases, but this is too egregious so we are taking it on."

They told the owner of the building that if they bothered this young woman again, there would be some serious repercussions for them. She lived there for five years, and it brought some stability into her life. I grieve for her lost childhood, and the inhumanity that gets directed at her when people can tell she is severely emotionally disabled.

Ironically, her stepfather's life was destroyed by age, poverty, and genius. Geniuses are considered to be outcasts in this culture; geniuses are often rejected, labeled as eccentric, and people envy their superior intelligence. Envy and jealousy can often lead to homicide. With regards to these often dangerous combinations, we need to look at what happened on April 2, 2012 at Oikos University in Oakland, California. E. Goh, 43 years old, killed seven people at this Christian nursing school. He said he felt teased and humiliated about people making fun of his age, and his Korean accent. This is an example of our culture's intolerance for aging and disabilities. This man had a lot of emotional problems with anger, and the school was aware of it. Once again, the school should have seen his pain and stepped forward instead of expelling this man because of his angry nature. He got into a fight with the school about his tuition being returned, and he became murderously angry, and appeared in a classroom and killed seven people. Just like the tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when an angry young boy killed 32 people and wounding 17 others, nobody was paying attention to this tormented soul's cry for help.

I would like to elaborate on a situation with my husband that was a perfect storm because it hits the issue of aging, poverty, and the disability of having a genius I.Q. Eighteen years ago, I met a man who I could tell was very gifted, but he did not recognize the magnitude of his gifts. Since I tested IQs for fifteen years, and taught the theory of intelligence at a local university, I knew he had a genius I.Q. He was working as an engineering technician and doing small jobs for different companies, but I could tell he wasn't feeling very fulfilled. He had built a laser in his garage at sixteen, which was in a house in the projects where he lived in Culver City, California. His family lived in poverty. He went to sleep hearing gunshots at night. When he wanted go to college, there wasn't much money, but luckily somebody from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, saw his laser and admitted him to the college. His father was able to scrape together enough money from his social security to allow him to attend the college. He had very low self-esteem due to the poverty and the insecurity about being rejected over his high I.Q. Therefore, sadly, he did very poorly as an undergraduate, and felt very isolated.

I felt touched by his gifts, and I felt he should be helped to actualize his abilities, and contribute to the culture. I asked him if he had a dream and he said he did have a dream; he said he would like to go to a particular university (whose name I will omit), to receive a graduate degree. He said that he did not think he would have a chance to be admitted because of two reasons: one reason was that he had only got a 2.0 grade point average at Harvey Mudd College; secondly, he felt at 35 years old, he was too old to start graduate school as the other students were in their early twenties. I told him that he should take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and apply even though his GPA was so low. I knew that he would score very high on that exam due to his intelligence, and I knew that private schools make exceptions around grade point averages if the person is particularly talented. He really didn't have a family to support him, as he had no siblings, and his parents were very old; his father was 55 when Charles was born. I felt his was thrilled when he got his acceptance letter after he received a score on the GRE of over 700.

I was disturbed by the supervisor that he was assigned to since the man demanded that he quit his job immediately and come over and start helping in the Physics lab. Charles told him that he had already made a commitment to stay at this company over the summer, and he felt it was immoral to not honor that commitment. He stated to me that he felt very insecure about being the oldest student that was accepted into the Physics Department that year, and he was five years older than his supervisor.

I told Charles that his supervisor was a sociopath, in that he was telling him to abandon the company that he had made a commitment to stay with over the summer. I said this same unethical behavior could someday be directed towards him; I was correct. He and his supervisor were both working on sequencing DNA. Charles felt he was on the road to being able to sequence DNA 100 times faster than science was able to do at that time. It became clear to me that his supervisor wanted Charles in his lab because of his superior engineering abilities. The man received tenure partially due to Charles's extremely gifted work in his lab. The professor then refused to help Charles with his candidacy, which is a Master's degree at that school. The supervisor was convinced that Charles would fail his Master's examination because he was receiving no help. Charles managed to pass the exam with flying colors on his own. However, I felt fear and deep anxiety because I sensed the man wanted to get rid of Charles before Charles figured out how to do the sequencing of the DNA. After all, who remembers who Einstein's adviser was?

I met Charles's professor, and I was not happy with the evil I sensed from him; he spoke in a condescending manner to Charles. I told Charles this man wants to assassinate you. I advised him to get the PhD as soon as possible and not focus on the DNA experiment, which was raising this man's rage. He did his dissertation on a more benign subject, and moved quickly. One professor, 'The Father of Gene Therapy',...