Category Archives: Shame

T.P. Two

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Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs

I am still perseverating on the question… why toilet paper?

What came to my mind in thinking about the power of TP was Maslow’s hierarchy. This is a familiar (and very American) pedagogical tool. It is American in its blithe promotion of “self-actualization” as an ultimate goal. Nevertheless, it is a tool that can help privileged, self-actualizing American college students understand why so few very poor people are sitting next to them in class. Very poor people are too busy trying to feed, shelter and protect themselves. Such basic activities limit one’s ability and predilection to ruminate on Dostoevsky’s place in world literature.

In thinking about Mazlow’s hierarchy I realized that every level is linked by toilet paper. This is the power of TP; it is intimately rolled into our most basic physiological functions. Its very personal role is to keep us safe from the microbially dangerous waste we privately produce. In so doing, TP also sets the stage for us to experience the love and acceptance that accrues to those who do not waft of excrement. From social acceptance follows self-esteem and once we have reached the ledge of self-regard, it is but a small leap to the apex of “self-actualization”.

When something like the COVID pandemic strikes, Mazlow’s pyramid makes more sense upside down. Our lives are no longer safely arranged. Our “base” needs are no longer afterthoughts. They loom large. Will our “base” needs be met? If they are not met, who will we be? The weight of our biological vulnerability presses down. Can we bear it?

We are not masters of the universe, we are virus bait.


The Two Ply Veneer

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If you lack a Hobbesian view of human nature, you are going to be late to the pandemic hoarding party. You are going to be without toilet paper.

That’s what I told myself standing in Safeway staring at the empty shelves, feeling slightly embarrassed… as if I had missed some obvious social cue. Why toilet paper? The Google offered some insight:

Stocking up on toilet paper is … a relatively cheap action, and people like to think that they are ‘doing something’ when they feel at risk.” This is an example of “zero risk bias,” in which people prefer to try to eliminate one type of possibly superficial risk entirely rather than do something that would reduce their total risk by a greater amount.

The Everett Herald

These days the the greater risk is going to the grocery store in the first place.

Given the amount of uncertainty in which we were swimming…self quarantine? lock down? days or weeks?… adding a little buffer stock to one’s cache of TP was rational. The effects of mass buffering however were empty shelves. For Americans, empty shelves are eerie and portentous. OMG …my neighborhood cornucopia is empty of that which can clean me…toilet paper, disinfectants and hand sanitizers. What will I be deprived of next? This is how an end-times shopping spree gets its start.

Few people appreciate how much retail inventory is “just in time”. I did a stint with Kroger a few years back (All praise the UFCW!) The only real storage space in a grocery store is the shelves. The corporate computer knows how much of any product will be (normally) needed in each store each week. Toilet paper takes up a lot of shelf space and sales are normally not volatile. In a well run store, there is only a two day supply. It is only when people get irregular that the supply chain falters.

More from the pandemic prison later.


Reality Bares its Teeth, Postscript

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During the post screening discussion of Grizzly Man, the anthropologist in the room asked “What kind of society produces a person like this?” Indeed…where is “self-invention” most valorized? Where is the mythology of the “rugged individual” still a folk notion with sway? Almost two hundred years ago, America’s radical individualism greatly concerned De Toqueville. He observed of Americans that:

Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine their whole destiny is in their own hands.

The atomism of American society that so bothered De Toqueville in 1735 has only grown more pronounced as industrialization eroded social bonds and lately neo-liberalism has conflated economic choices with “freedoms” (See my post here.) . Without communal resources to shape and limit self-determination, the American self coexists with a gnawing spiritual hunger the cure for which is often sought in bizarre self-invention, the blandishments of the charlatan or the fantastical pursuit of wealth or fame. Timothy Treadwell is a very American creation.

We have turned out a rich, a capitalist nation, a nation of worshipers of Mammon and hypocrites to all other Gods. . . . When our moneyed classes, especially during the Secession war and the great tidal wave of immigration of European laborers, found out that living and gathering riches on the half-paid toil of workers was a pleasant thing they had no further scruples. . . . They seemed as one man to adopt Vespasian’s famous maxim, “ill-gotten gains do not stink.” . . .

Even those of the disinherited class who gathered no capital, did not give up the hope that they might become capitalists… No one seemed to entertain for a moment the thought: who, is to furnish half-paid labor, if all are to be capitalists?… Our press, our pulpits, our popular orators are so utterly ignorant of real political economy that, whenever an Astor, Stewart, Vanderbilt or Stevens dies, they preach the gospel that every young man may, by following their shining examples, become a millionaire. This superstition dies hard, and this reason alone sufficiently accounts for the slow progress of our new scientific and practical efforts at organizing a labor party on just principles.

Source: “Facts to be Considered,” unsigned editorial, Labor Standard (New York) 16 June 1877.

Real Life Bares its Teeth

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Recently, I watched Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man as part of the New School for Analytic Psychology’s Film series. Herzog tells the story of Timothy Treadwell who spent 13 summers camping in the backyard of Alaskan grizzly bears. At the end of his 13th summer, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were eaten by a grizzly. Herzog’s documentary stitches together interviews with people who knew Treadwell, Treadwell’s own video selfies and readings from Treadwell’s journal. I saw the film weeks ago and I am still trying to psychically metabolize the dog’s breakfast of emotions it left in me.

Dog’s breakfast part one…
To be perfectly candid, I was mostly repelled by Treadwell. In his last summer in Alaska, I saw him as a vain 46 year old man with a blond Prince Valiant haircut. I watched him giving 1200 pound grizzly bears names (like “Rowdy” and “Mr. Chocolate”), and, from very few feet away, baby-talking to them as if they were skittish Schnauzers. Treadwell was not an autodidact naturalist (like Audobon or Darwin) trying to add his own field observations to the store of human knowledge about grizzlies. Though he filmed himself “living with the grizzlies” and cast himself as their friend and protector, he had no real interest in the bears except in so far as they related to him.

The bears tolerated him for 12 full summers. What I would view as indifference on their part, he took to be growing acceptance. He seemed to see himself as the producer, director and star of his own reality TV show (Timothy’s Love for Bears?). To hear him tell it, his was a grand enterprise. He returned every summer to “protect” the bears (in the protected enclave of Katmai National Park?). He details on camera the terrible damage a bear could do to him and goes on to make the claim to his audience that his campsite is the “most dangerous place in the world”; a secret place to which he alone has earned access. He preferred his summers with bears to life with people and was known to greet the odd human trespasser into his summer territory by huffing and bluff-charging like a bear.

He films a chilling fight between two male grizzlies over a female. Immediately afterward and only 20 yards away, he films himself reassuring “Mickey”(the losing bear), that he, Timothy Treadwell, was not going to try to take the female for himself …”yet”. To how many other creatures on the planet could such a thought occur? He so desired to be absorbed into Ursine Nature that he talked as if the timeless boundary between human and bear was a mere social convention subject to change.

Part two…
Though it is a struggle for me to excavate some more generous insights, I do have some. (more about that in part 3…).
Prior to his rebirth as grizzly man Treadwell had been another rootless American youth, fruitlessly seeking stardom in Hollywood. Painfully rejected on the cusp of stardom (he believed he just missed being cast on “Cheers”), drink and drugs almost killed him. He attributed his sobriety and recovery to his connection with the bears. He had found a higher purpose. Wouldn’t we all like a calling which is a union of our values, our passions and our action in the world? Treadwell found his calling. His affection for the bears, however bizarre by my lights, seemed genuine. He lived the way he wanted to live. Though he clearly desired recognition for his “work” (he appeared on David Letterman twice), he did not monetize his calling. There is something in all that to admire.

Though he left us over 100 hours of video footage, perhaps his major accomplishment was that he survived his own naivete for almost 13 summers. And for that, he earned a Wikipedia entry and was “immortalized” by Werner Herzog. One comes away from the film suspecting that Treadwell would have been satisfied by this legacy.

part three…

There is (and was) an undertow of shame to my reaction to this film. I am repelled by Treadwell’s delusive self-invention because it triggers a shameful memory of having lived a delusion of my own. As with Timothy, conversations with myself about the risks of my delusion went unheard. Such superficial rationality is swept aside by the overwhelming pull of one’s fantasies possibly coming true; the tug of life as you always imagined it. My delusion (All Grief Annealed in the Fountain of Youth?) did not put anyone’s life at risk but its shattering demise felt like a kind of death. As Timothy Treadwell found out, all delusions are death defying until they are not.

Simply put, “shame erupts because one is simultaneously “oneself” and something else”. We are beside ourselves and we don’t like what we see. We are not as smart as we think we are; we cannot control what will happen next; we are not as moral as we like to think we are. Though our consciousness is how we experience the Divine, our conscious self is both captious and credulous, determinate and inconclusive. We sidle away from the examination of our limits until Real Life bares its teeth and shreds our illusions. Part of me is sad for Timothy Treadwell. He was bereft of the communal resources needed to help him shape and find the limits of his self-determination. As a consequence, the death of his delusion was horrific. We are all profanely, shamefully mortal whether we cop to it or not.