The vexing illusions that shape our life

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Somerset Maugham’s amusing short story A Marriage of Convenience nicely illustrates our contradictory beliefs about love. The man in the story is told by his superior that he will be given the job of governor of one of the French colonies on condition that he finds a wife within a month. 

He posts an ad in the newspaper and receives over 4 000 letters in response from women from all walks of life. The man wonders how he will find the woman he is destined to be with amid all these letters. 

Most of us believe that one cannot fall in love, except with a person of one’s choosing. The intuition is that an arranged marriage is one where love is the exception rather than the rule. How could you possibly fall in love with a person you’ve been forced to be with by your parents or family? 

Nothing reinforces the point more strongly than dating apps, such as Tinder. The man in the story has as many options to choose from as the dating app user. We believe that it’s an essential ingredient of love to freely be with the person we are with.  

And yet, nothing seems more contrary to our idea of falling in love than freedom of choice! Who doesn’t know the following kind of story? 

A young man and woman meet quite by accident on the streets or in a café or restaurant. They start a conversation and end up spending the day together getting to know each other. A bond spontaneously develops. An intimacy arises. It’s as if they are the only two people in the world. It’s now evening. He walks her back to her apartment. They kiss in front of her door. 

A few months later they are married. What started quite by chance becomes, in time, something very different. They feel as if they had been destined to be together, as if their encounter was neither the product of chance nor the result of a free choice, but a preordained necessity, fate. 

The effect of ideology is exactly the same. A man’s nationality, sex, race, religion and the like are contingent facts related to where he was born and it is by chance that he was born then and there. He could have been born elsewhere and elsewhen. 

Some time passes and, as a result of the education he is given at home, at school and at church, having learnt to sing the national anthem and Shine Jesus Shine, and how to behave like a “good boy”, he starts to think that his nationality, sex, race, religion and the like are necessary features of his personality. He recognises them as the expression of his substantial self. The ideological illusion takes place right here where he takes contingent features for necessary ones, where the accidents of his birth become the expressions of his essence. 

It doesn’t help when teachers and parents keep reminding children who they are, “You are African,” “You are Christian,” etc. On the contrary, it is then that the ideological effect transpires. Once children respond with, “Yes, I am that,” the accidents of their birth are transformed as if by magic into something else. The features of the culture they were born into become the defining features of their self. They think that they have always been what they are now owing to a retrospective illusion. 

Is this a necessary rite of passage into society? Is there no way of entering society except by falling prey to this ideological illusion (from which one may — or may not — subsequently awake)? 

Education at home, at school, at church, etc, is an instrument of socialisation. It is how humans from infancy onwards are trained and taught to behave and readied to become members of society. The education we give our children is a function of the society we want to live in. The fact that education produces illusions like the ones described doesn’t speak in favour of the society we have or want to have.

There is a related issue worth raising. In one of his seminars, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan

says that entering society depends on a forced choice, on the same kind of choice the street mugger gives his victim: “Your money or your life?” If you choose your money, you lose both your money and your life. If you choose your life, you lose your money. The point is that you are not given a real choice. Either you lose big or you lose small. In both cases, you lose something. That is what psychoanalysis teaches us. To enter society is to sacrifice a part of yourself. It is to give something up. 

In truth, of course, one doesn’t give up anything. The point is that socialisation from infancy onwards has the effect of bringing about a sense that something is lacking in one’s life. One goes through life feeling that something is missing, something one cannot quite put one’s finger on. 

Human life revolves around filling that lack. It consists in going through the experience of being unsatisfied by the next best thing or lover or friend that comes to fill it. One loses nothing on entering society, but the feeling that something is missing haunts us until the very end — another illusion it seems that we cannot dispense with and that marks the human condition.

The point I want to insist on relates to what I said a moment ago. Society demands of its members to freely choose what is given to them anyway — I have not chosen the country I was born into, but I have a duty to love it and embrace its laws or else it’s a fine or prison or worse. Again, we have a forced choice, yet one that performs a trick on the mind almost as powerful as witnessing water turn into wine — the forced choice turns what is almost an accident of nature (the fact that I was born here) into the product of my choosing and free will. 

One is trapped from that point onwards. One is fenced in behind the flag, defending it with one’s life, ready to die for the nation or the cause it defends, freedom, justice and the like. The big question is whether human life is bearable without such illusions. I am inclined to think not.  

Rafael Winkler is a full professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.