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ing that in the fullness of time its gross national product would be so impressive. Perhaps
he is already turning his attention to China, India and Brazil, countries which as far as af-
fluence goes seem to be rising rapidly in the most-favoured-people-under-God stakes. The
Almighty may be a more fickle being than Americans suspect. It may be that the United
States's favoured-nation contract is running out, and that the Creator will be reluctant to re-
new it. It is also not clear whether countries need to have nuclear weapons to be acceptable
in his sight, though it probably does no harm.
The Perils of Idealism
Ideals are what the will aims at, and the United States is an idealist nation in a double sense
of the word. It is strongly committed to certain lofty goals, and it is idealist in the philo-
sophical sense of believing that the mind creates reality. There is a connection between the
two, since if you pitch your ideals as high as America does, you will need nothing short
of an all-powerful mind to achieve them. The former kind of idealism is commendable but
also cruel. Men and women need goals to aim at; but if these ideals are unrealistic, all they
will do is rub their noses in their failure to attain them. The result will be self-hatred and
abysmally low self-esteem. There is something terroristic about such idealism, as there is
something terroristic for Freud about the superego. For Freud, the superego is not only vin-
dictive but obtuse. It punishes us with obscene delight for falling short of ideals it should
know we cannot achieve.
The enemy of the superego is comedy, which accepts our frailty and deficiency with a
wry shrug. It converts feeling bad about ourselves into laughing at ourselves, which is not
the most popular of American pursuits. We are indeed defective, but this is in the nature of
things. It is also bound up with what is precious about us. The spirit of comedy is the spir-
it of forgiveness. Impurity is to be relished as well as put right, whereas the puritan mind
refuses to accept anything less than perfection. This is one reason why it is so allergic to
the material, a messy phenomenon which can never be wholly mastered by an idea. It will
always come seeping out over the edges of our schemes, like some ghastly piece of ecto-
plasm.
It is tragedy, not comedy, which holds that the truth about men and women stands re-
vealed only when you purge them of their everyday habits and press them to an extreme.
This, too, is a typically American article of faith, though without the tragic implications.
Real human beings are those who push themselves to a limit. You will know who you really
are only when you are up against the wall. Life is a race, a trial, a competition, a set of
hurdles, and to succeed in it you must be constantly on your toes, in moral training, per-
petually at your best. To march on the spot is to fall behind.
That the superego is so implacable is why St. Paul thinks that the Law is cursed. It can
only show us where we go wrong, not inspire us to do right. Those who languish in the grip
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