The courage to be one’s self is scarcely admired as the top virtue these days. One trouble is that many people still associate that kind of courage with the stuffy attitudes of the self-made men of the late nineteenth century, or with the somewhat ridiculous no matter how sincere “I-am-the-master-of-my-fate” theme in such a poem as “Invictus.” With what qualified favor many people today view standing on one’s own convictions is revealed in such phrases as “sticking one’s neck out.” The central suggestion in this defenseless posture is that any passer-by could swing at the exposed neck and cut off the head. Or people describe moving ahead in one’s beliefs as “going out on a limb.”
People lack courage because of their fear of being isolated, alone, or of being subjected to “social isolation,” that is, being laughed at, ridiculed or rejected. If one sinks back into the crowd, he does not risk these dangers. And this being isolated is no minor threat. Dr. Walter Cannon has shown in his study of “voodoo death,” that primitive people may be literally killed by being psychologically isolated from the community. There have been observed cases of natives who, when socially ostracized and treated by their tribes as though they did not exist, have actually withered away and died. William James, furthermore, has reminded us that the expression “to be cut dead” by social disapproval has much more truth than poetry in it. It is thus no figment of the neurotic imagination that people are deathly afraid of standing on their own convictions at the risk of being renounced by the group. What we lack in our day is an understanding of the friendly, warm, personal, original, constructive courage of a Socrates or a Spinoza.
To plan, dream, and imagine fine works is a pleasant occupation to be sure… But to produce, to bring to birth, to bring up the infant work with labor, to put it to bed full-fed with milk, to take it up again every morning with inexhaustible maternal love, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in lovely garments that it tears up again and again; never to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life, and to make of it a living masterpiece that speaks to all eyes in sculpture, or to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music—that is the task of execution.
The hand must be ready at every moment to obey the mind. And the creative moments of the mind do not come to order. . . . And work is a weary struggle at once dreaded and loved by those fine and powerful natures who are often broken under the strain of it. . . . If the artist does not throw himself into his work like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock . . . the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent. . . . And it is for that reason that the same reward, the same triumph, the same laurels, are accorded to great poets as to great generals.* We now know through psychoanalytic studies, as Balzac did not, that one of the reasons creative activity takes so much courage is that to create stands for becoming free from the ties to the infantile past, breaking the old in order that the new can be born. For creating external works, in art, business or what not, and creating one’s self—that is, developing one’s capacities, becoming freer and more responsible—are two aspects of the same process. Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom, and that, as we have seen in the Promethean and Adam myths, may involve considerable inner conflict.
Thus vanity and narcissism are the enemies of courage. We define vanity and narcissism as the compulsive need to be praised, to be liked: for this people give up their courage. The vain and narcissistic person seems on the surface to overprotect himself, not to take any risks and in other ways to act as a coward because he thinks too highly of himself. Actually, however, just the opposite is the case. He has to preserve himself as a commodity by which he can buy the praise and favor he needs, precisely because without mother’s or father’s praise he would feel himself to be worthless. Courage arises from one’s sense of dignity and self-esteem; and one is uncourageous because he thinks too poorly of himself.
Vanity and narcissism—the compulsive needs to be admired and praised—undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own. In the Japanese movie Rashomon, the husband and robber fight with complete abandon when they themselves have chosen to fight. But in another scene, when the wife screams taunts at them, and they fight because of their compulsion to live up to her requirement of their masculine prowess, they fight with only half their strength: they strike the same blows, but it is as though an invisible rope held back their arms. When one acts to gain someone else’s praise, furthermore, the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness: otherwise there would be no need to prostitute one’s attitudes. This often leads to the “cowardly” feeling which is the most bitter humiliation of all—the humiliation of having co-operated knowingly in one’s own vanquishment. It is not so bad to be defeated because the enemy is stronger, or even to be defeated because one didn’t fight; but to know one was a coward because one chose to sell out his strength to get along with the victor—this betrayal of one’s self is the bitterest pill of all.
There are also specific reasons in our culture why acting to please others undermines courage. For such acting, at least for men, often means playing the role of one who is unassertive, unaggressive, “gentlemanly,” and how can one develop power, including sexual potency, when he is supposed to be unassertive? With women, too, these ways of gaining admiration militate against the development of their indigenous potentialities, for their potentialities are never exercised or even brought into the picture. The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions—not obstinately or defiantly (these are expressions of defensiveness not courage) nor as a gesture of retaliation, but simply because these are what one believes.