"There, but for the grace of God, go I." I don't know when I first heard that, but it was many decades ago.
From time to time, we are reminded of its truth.
I begin with an example of poor timing. KISS lead performer Gene Simmons, on July 31, gave an interview. This part was picked up by the media on August 1.
I don't get along with anybody who's a drug addict and has a dark cloud over their head and sees themselves as a victim. Drug addicts and alcoholics are always: "The world is a harsh place." My mother was in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. I don't want to hear **** all about "the world as a harsh place." She gets up every day, smells the roses and loves life. And for a putz, 20-year-old kid to say, "I'm depressed, I live in Seattle." **** you, then kill yourself.I never understand, because I always call them on their bluff. I'm the guy who says 'Jump!' when there's a guy on top of a building who says, "That's it, I can't take it anymore, I'm going to jump."
Are you kidding? Why are you announcing it? Shut the **** up, have some dignity and jump! You've got the crowd.
By the way, you walk up to the same guy on a ledge who threatens to jump and put a gun to his head, "I'm going to blow your ****in' head off!" He'll go, "Please don't!" It's true. He's not that insane.
People are different. This is a fundamental premise of libertarianism. Simmons is a libertarian. He has neglected the principle of differentiation. What does not overcome one person can debilitate another.
The world was shocked at what happened to Williams. I had no idea that he was this well respected worldwide. Literally all over the English-speaking world, the news of his death spread.
Like almost everybody else, I regarded Williams as the funniest man per minute I had ever seen. There was only one person I ever saw who came close: Jonathan Winters. The two were close friends. Williams acknowledged Winters as his model.
Winters also suffered greatly from psychological problems. But he never lost his sense of humor, not even at the bottom.
At the height of his success, in his early 30s, Jonathan Winters voluntarily committed himself to a private psychiatric hospital."At that time they didn't have a label for me. I said, 'What the devil, I know I'm not schizophrenic; I'm not catatonic," Winters remembers.
So he asked for a diagnosis. He repeats the doctor's answer in a coy tone: "It would only upset you." Winters replied, "I'll tell you what's upsetting me is the cost of this place."
Now he knows his diagnosis was bipolar disorder, but there were no effective medications for it back then. Winters says he declined the electroshock treatment that doctors said would erase some of the pain he was feeling.
"I need that pain -- whatever it is -- to call upon it from time to time, no matter how bad it was," he says.
He recalls joking pointedly with his doctor about keeping in touch with the demolition experts he'd served with in World War II.
"I have contact with them," he'd solemnly say.
The doctor, puzzled, would ask, "What's the story?"
"They would visit you," Winters would say, again solemnly.
"They would visit me?" The doctor would ask, still puzzled.
Then, the kicker: "Yeah, there'd be just the one visit."
It sounds like the kind of joke that might prolong your stay in an institution. Winters left the hospital after eight months.
Somewhere, deep within a troubled personality, he came up with the funniest unscripted routines that anyone had ever seen until Williams showed up.
Winters was able to overcome the dark forces in his life. Williams was not.
Williams' form of humor always impressed me as being manic. There was a kind of mania to it. What I did not suspect is that he was manic depressive. People now call it bipolar disorder. When coupled with drug addiction, followed by alcoholism, it proved to be uncontrollable for him. He did control it for a long time, but in the final hours, he lost control. The human mind is complex. Addictions are complex. We know that relatively few people who suffer from addictions ever get over them, and the programs that help people get over them usually involve making a public admission that the addict is not over them. This is why people call themselves recovering whatever's. They don't use the word "recovered."
We know that some people just cannot seem to lose weight. I have seen a statistic that about 95% of people who are overweight cannot take it off and keep it off. This sounds suspiciously close to Pareto's 20% of 20%. I don't think we blame severely overweight people for being overweight. We feel sorry for their condition, and we are glad we don't have it.
I suspect that part of these problems is biochemical. People who become addicted disrupt their bodies. It is possible that the combination of chemical disruption and the effects on the brain that drugs and alcohol have combined to produce a potent package of self-destructive behavior.
Occasionally, we read about somebody who goes through a fundamental change in his life, and he breaks the addiction overnight. He just doesn't feel the temptation to return to it. We don't hear about it often, but sometimes we do. I have heard people give this testimony with regard to a religious conversion. But I have also heard testimony on the other side of the ledger, in which the person says he has not fully escaped from the affliction, despite his conversion.
I suppose Williams will go down as the most famous manic-depressive of this generation. His manic humor coupled with his suicide indicates the highs and lows of this psychological condition. The funniest man we ever saw was among the most depressed men we never saw until the end. I sense that this extreme contrast is what captivated the minds of millions of people when they heard about it.
With respect to addictions, most people who recover, do so in an environment of other people suffering from the same condition. In this sense, shared experiences do help. This presents a real problem for people who get addicted to behaviors that are illegal or are so morally reprehensible that support groups do not exist. Some of these people wind up at some point in institutions for the criminally insane. Sling Blade dealt with such people.
There is a real problem for people who suffer from bipolar disorder, because the medications that deal with this condition can put a ceiling on the highs as well as a floor under the lows. Somebody like Williams earns his money, and even defines himself, by his public performances, which were made possible by his highs. How does he give them up?
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
One aspect of this whole story interests me, because it is close to an area of study that I've been interested in for some years. The field of behavioral economics has come up with one important law: most people fear an economic loss more than they lust after the same level of gain. They will not risk losing $100 in order to gain $100. This is not true of entrepreneurs, but is true of almost everybody else. There is a significant fear of loss that motivates people.
It is clear that Williams suffered from this to a catastrophic effect. He was rich. His divorces left him much less rich. At the end of his life, he worried about the fact he was going to have to sell a property so valuable that it is probably worth almost $30 million. He was obsessed by the fact that he could no longer afford to maintain the property.
The average person looks at this, and thinks to himself: "If I had that much money, I would never worry about losing a $30 million property." But the problem is this: when you have that much money, and you earned it personally, and you are 63 years old, the threat of the loss of that property can be psychologically debilitating. It is not a matter of the dollars involved; it is a matter of the loss of face, of self-definition.
If Williams was worried about having to go on Social Security, then he was truly insane. I don't think that was what bothered him. It was the high/low aspect of it. He had been up so high, and now he was going to be forced to admit to himself and the world that he had descended from that high. The fact that he was still higher than almost anybody else -- in terms of his humor, his wealth, his legacy, and his public perception -- did not comfort him sufficiently. His fear of loss overwhelmed him.
This is sinful behavior. This is a lack of gratitude. This really is the worship of Mammon. I define Mammon as follows: "more for me in history." It is not just money, although it is usually related to money. It can also be related to fame. Williams had a potent concoction of Mammon: fame, success, money, and a reputation for being a generous person. He had lost money, and might lose some more. At 63, this is normal. American men retire at 63. Every retiree looks at the future and knows: it's time to cut back. Williams could not cope.
Again, the mind is a complex thing. We don't really know what goes on inside another person's head. This is obviously true of manic depression. We don't understand their highs; we don't understand their lows. His highs were very high, and his lows were obviously very low.
Howard Ruff told me this story. This was during the phase of my career when I worked for him: 1977. He described an experience he once had when driving. He had an overwhelming desire to drive into the side of an overpass. Maybe it was a bridge. I forget what he was going to drive into, but I remember that he had this urge to smash into it. He said that he figured that the impulse was biochemical in origin. He told himself to ignore the urge. He said that this was what saved his life.
When we speak of telling ourselves something, we are acknowledging that we really do have two minds, ethically speaking. We really do have light and dark sides of our personalities. Ruff had been trained long enough as a Mormon to know that suicide is wrong. His instincts were to overcome the urge to driving into the overpass. He gave himself a reason for not doing it, which was based on his limited knowledge of biochemistry and its effects on behavior. But, ultimately, I don't think it was the biochemical argument that saved him. What saved him was an ethical worldview that is fundamentally opposed to suicide. Biochemistry was the rational explanation that he gave to himself, but I think what saved him was deeper seated than a superficial knowledge of biochemistry.
My non-professional guess regarding Williams is this: he had no deep-seated ethical commitment against suicide as a way of escape. He had no equally deep-seated commitment to living as a way of service. Yet he was a gifted servant of millions of people.
When we are under pressure, we resort to deep-seated beliefs about what is right or wrong. Sometimes we don't have much time to justify our decisions. We say that we make them instinctively, but that has more to do with habit than instinct. Habits are built up over a long period of time. Habits make a difference. My guess is that his addictions undermined his ethical habits. We speak of addiction as a habit. It really is a habit. It is a habit that replaces other habits.
This is one more reminder: if you see yourself falling into a habitual pattern that is self-destructive, reverse it as soon as you can. Habits become self-reinforcing. You need to change a bad habit before it becomes self-reinforcing.
Now, having read this, watch this. It is from one year ago. This is truly depressing. And funny.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.