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Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride–the old Seven Deadly Sins name things that make us stupid.
And maybe our best protection against their power is knowing their names, so that our simple brains can guess it’s time to fight back when we see one of them kicking down our mental doors. |
Why is there no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. Schlesinger?
“You like me, you really like me!” may be an inaccurate quote of Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar speech, but it’s a dead-on reflection of Sin #8, a craving at least as deadly as anger or avarice, much stronger than pride. The craving (O, junior high school!) for Popular Kids to pull us into their clubhouse–and backing that up, the fear that if we displease them we’re pushed out forever.
Maureen Dowd never names Sin #8 in her scathing review of Schlesinger’s memoir, but she scalpels its diagnostics like a surgeon:
Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures…
Over decades of friendship with Henry Kissinger, he only slowly fathoms the diplomat’s “overpowering ego” and Machiavellian ways. “I like Henry very much and respect him,” he writes in 1969, “though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley.”… By the time of Watergate, Schlesinger deems Kissinger “one of the most disgusting figures” in the Nixon White House.
Yet when Gerald Ford takes over and Henry asks Arthur to lunch at the State Department, our diarist overcomes his distaste…. Kissinger .. tells Schlesinger that Nixon was sometimes evil and lazy (with the work habits of Hitler) and a liar and obsessed with destroying the reputations of the Kennedys, and that he had Howard Hunt forging documents proving that John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. “He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president,” Kissinger says. “But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.” Schlesinger doesn’t press on the “slightly homosexual”; he deems Henry “a highly intelligent and charming man.”
Is there one word strong enough for the stupidifying power of Sin #8?
“Conformity” is far too bloodless. It doesn’t capture the craving, the intoxication, the horrible fear of ending up shut outside if you don’t “go along.” Sin #8 needs a new name and maybe “Junior High School Sin” is ugly enough to deserve it.
It may no coincidence that so many whistleblowers have been outsiders whose keeping quiet could never have won them acceptance into the exciting secrets of the Big Boys’ Clubhouse.