Becker

"I also know that differences in talent are not so biological or hereditary as conservatives often want to make out. Nor is freedom to obey and to delegate one’s powers as free as they like to imagine. Sure, society goes on because of a silent accord by the majority that they prefer structure to chaos, and are willing to be lulled to sleep because of the security and ease it offers them. But it also holds over their heads the ideology of death, power, immortality — just as shamans and kings once did — and dominates them with it. The sophisticated Marxian question has to be asked in each society and in each epoch: how do we get rid of the power to mystify? The talents and the processes of mesmerization and mystification have to be exposed. Which is another way of saying that we have to work against both structural and psychological unfreedom in society. The task of science would be to expose both of these dimensions. One of the reasons for our present disillusionment with theory in the social sciences is that it has done very little in this liberating direction. Even those intelligent social scientists who attempt a necessary balance between conservative and Marxist perspectives are amiss in this. If we read the last three pages of Gerhard Lenski’s important book Power and Privilege, we get a vista of the future — but it is such a slow, patient, scientific future, still unrelated to the pressing problems of an insane world. All he seems to want to present us with is an indefinite program extending far into the unknown future, devoted to patient checking, refining, extending the blend of conservatism and Marxism. I am hardly saying that social theory should stop dead and not be perfected; what I am saying is that a general critical science of society that unites the best of both wings of thought is a present reality, and need not be delayed. We have, as of today, a powerful critique of hero systems, of systems of death denial and the toll that they take. It is a toll of unfulfilled life based on a continuing denial of social justice; it is a toll of internal victimage based on the inequality of social classes and the state repression of freedom; it is a toll of external victimage that helps siphon off internal social discontent and transform,  magically, social problems into military adventures. Whatever form of government uses victimage, the use is still the same: to purify evil social arrangements, distract attention from the failure to solve internal problems. Scientists must expose these things from their own scientific forums. In science, as in authentic religion, there is no easy refuge for empty-headed patriotism, or for putting off to some future date the exposure of large-scale social lies. I don’t see why conservatives and radicals could not unite on such a science, if their sentiments are where their words are. Both believe in free public information, increasing the awareness of the masses as well as their responsibility. Both wings of thought agree on limiting the authority of the leaders, exposing their talents for mesmerization and their shortcomings. This is, after all, the dearest and grandest feature of a democracy, that it tries to keep these critical functions alive. The problem has always been that the leader is the one who usually is the grandest patriot, which means the one who embraces the ongoing system of death denial with the heartiest hug, the hottest tears, and the least critical distance. As Zilboorg pointed out so penetratingly, the leader lives with his head full into the clouds of cultural symbols; he lives in an abstract world, a world detached from concrete realities of hunger, suffering, death; his feet are off the ground, he carries out his duties much like funeral directors and men who perform autopsies or executions — in a kind of emotional and psychological divorce from the realities of what he is doing. 28 The result is that the leader is actually in a state of limited responsibility to human beings in this world — and what power he has in this state! The whole thing is lopsided and rather eerie — like compulsive neurosis or psychosis, says Zilboorg. Words, symbols, shadowboxing — no wonder so much pulsating life is so serenely ground up by the nation-states''.