WEIGHING THE RISKS OF DECISION MAKING
I was up early today for my morning bike ride. I nodded to the gate guard of our housing area as I peddled past. He waved back with a decided lack of enthusiasm. A quick glimpse inside his little house revealed a thermos and a small electric heater, glowing red.
What an incredibly dull job, I thought. Sometimes I see him stealing a glance at a magazine or sipping tea. Otherwise, its wave, wave, wave into oblivion. Monotonous? Maybe. But as I peddled my way down the street, I got to thinking.
Working as a gate guard has its points.
No hassles. No boss breathing down your neck. No subordinates to keep in line. No deadlines. No pressure. No decisions to make. Just wave and salute. Wave and salute.
A friend of a friend spent time as a monk. Although he quit after a year, he could understand it as a way of life. It definitely had its points. Your day is structured. You don’t have to decide what to wear, what to eat or what to do. There are no risks to take or decisions to make. No expectations to meet. Your day is precisely scheduled. Life is peaceful, predictable and orderly. There are no identity problems. You know who you are and what you are doing. Life has a pleasing and reassuring rhythm.
One of the primary appeal of cults like the Moonies and Hare Krishnas, is that they offer refuge and respite from a demanding world. New adherents are treated like children under the leadership of a charismatic god/father figure who structures their lives. Commenting on the Father Divine cult of the 1930s, Reverend Eugene Callendar, said, “Father Divine relieved his follower of any sense of responsibility for their lives.”
That’s what cults do.
New cult members are inundated with love and attention, what Moonies call “love bombing.” The cult becomes their new family with the messianic guru as the father/god figure. New recruits are treated like children. Willa Appel, author of Cults in America, points out that Moonies christen the newcomers with baby names. They hold their hands, give them extra portions at meals, and provide them with kiddie food, milk, cookies and ice cream. A young cult follower remarked, “At the beginning, when I got in, I had this feeling. I just want to be led. I just want to be told what to do.”
“We used to even ask the leader’s permission to get a drink of water,” said Allison, a cult member. “But it felt very comfortable.”
They don’t want to be free, they want to be told what to do. People who had been stumbling through life are relieved of the burdens and responsibilities of living. They become children in a loving family. When they join, “There is literally no time to think, no time to assess alternatives, and no decisions to be made.” New cult members are required to give themselves up – body and soul – to the guru. They give up their freedom in order to be free of themselves, free of their past and free of the burdens of making decisions.
Appel wrote, “New converts are admonished not to ask questions but simply to obey.” In a powerful indictment of Western society, Appel wrote that cults provide, “…what parents, schools, and traditional social institutions had stopped providing – structure, purpose routine and order.”
Substack Sidebar
We assume that all people want freedom. Slaves escaping through the underground railroad prior to the Civil War, were escaping to freedom. When East Germans breached the Berlin Wall, they were escaping to freedom. And so it is with escaping from prison, and from an abusive relationship. These are physical escapes. But from a psychological perspective, counterintuitively perhaps, some do not want freedom; they want in psychologist Erich Fromm’s classic phrase, to “escape from freedom.
For some, freedom is a burden. Freedom leaves us exposed. Freedom allows us to choose spouses, jobs, friends, places to live, and lifestyles. If our choices fail, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Overconforming also relieves us of the burden of freedom. Again, no decisions to make; we do and think what everyone else in our subcultural group do and think. In the 1930s, the German people felt failed as a nation, especially after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. Consequently, they transformed their country into a nursery school, where the children followed the father figure into death. Nazi Germany was a cult writ large.
One does not have to become a monk or join a cult to escape from life’s burdens. A one-hundred-year-old turpentine worker named James Baxter, had this to say about the beauties of solitude. “It was hard work in all kinds of weather, but I liked it. Me and some of them big, old rattlesnakes out in the piney woods growed old together. It was lonely, but peaceful.”
The common denominator is relief from decision making. Every decision we make has a consequence, sometimes negative. If I wear the blue suit, will it seem too dressy for work? If I invest this money, will I lose it? If I marry this person, will I be happy? If I don’t study for the test, will I fail? If I eat this ice cream, will I put on weight and get high cholesterol?
In the Japanese schools on Okinawa, (where I lived for seven years) and in many private Catholic schools in the states, students wear uniforms. Imposing conformity eliminates decision making and reduces peer pressure to dress outrageously or provocatively. Similarly, the military life reduces decision making with its orders and uniformity.
There is, I believe, a child in us that never goes away – a child who would like to lay down his burdens and just rest. A Christian song says just that.
I cast all my cares upon you.
I lay all of my burdens, down at your feet.
And any time, I don’t know, what to do.
I just cast all my cares upon you.
Sometimes when the burdens of freedom get us down, we feel an urge to give it all up to the head monk, a cult leader, a spouse, a boss, a teacher, a parent or God, someone or some thing to tell us what to do and provide guidelines. I went to summer camp for twelve summers. Every day was structured. After breakfast was clean-up and inspection, followed by baseball, arts & crafts, general swim, lunch rest hour, volleyball and boating. The next day would be another mix of activities. After dinner free play and evening activity. We didn’t vote on activities, nor did we want to. Bugles throughout the day provided the rhythms of our lives. Every so often, in my subsequent life, after a long day of work and its attendant decision-making, and the burdens of responsibilities weighing me down, I have the feeling that I’d like to be a camper again. My baseball cap and mitt hanging on nails. The day structured. Three meals a day prepared right on scheduled. Nothing to worry about. Just tell me what to do.
Meanwhile, my morning bike ride was full of decisions: Should I go? It might rain. Should I wear my jogging suit or shorts. Should I take the route with the hills or the one with many intersections? Should I even bother at all, or get working on this week’s Substack?
Or should I just become a monk?
I waved at the guard as I peddled back into the neighborhood. “Have a good day,” I said somewhat enviously.
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Ha! I was just writing to my brother this morning that I am tired of responsibility and duty and obligation. Not the same thing, I know, but there is a part of me that wants to disappear into my own world. You know? Like a hermit? Find a tiny shelter on the coast and give it all up.
I could be a cloistered person - lost in silence, chanting, meditation, repetitive work. But I would probably last less than a week. 😂
I recall reading long ago that a part the human brain has the "Executive" function. It does volition. It decides what you do. In some people it is underdeveloped or missing. Those people prefer to be controlled. I think the classic, real zombies were created by some kind of deprivation (involving being buried alive for a while) that destroyed the executive brain function.
Maybe whether you have a strong executive function or not is one of the things that contributes to your decision to be left or right, to want to be controlled by government or to want to be free to control yourself.