Objectification

One of the saddest things I see in my life is that people of great prosperity often have really
lousy lives. From my perspective, what poisons the well from which we draw the water of life is
that we have a hard time seeing other people as whole creatures; we only see the parts of them
that interact directly with our own lives. We don’t think of Mrs. McGillicuddy as a warm, loving
human who cannot let a creature suffer. We think of her as the crazy lady with the 45 cats. All
we see is the part of her that interferes with our lives, even if it’s only a small part of who she is.
We refer to this in our pop-psychology way as objectification. The usual meaning of the word
has come to mean the fact that men have a hard time seeing women emotionally and
intellectually, because they are so visually delicious that I just can’t help staring. Oh-oh, did I
say that out loud?
Of course, this is unfair to me. Yes, I see women as desirable, but I don’t see them as only
desirable. Objectification does not only mean, linguistically speaking, the reduction of a
particular being to the status of an object or thing. It also means that the person or thing is the
object, or target, of a particular emotion or thought. My beloved Andrea is the object of my
romantic yearnings. I have objectified her in a good way. This is as it should be.
So before we go any further, I’m going to ask you to get over your problem with the word
object. If you are an object to me, you are the object of a particular set of thoughts and
motivations.
There are, therefore, good and bad objectifications. There is the dehumanizing objectification
and the humanizing one. When I objectify Mrs. McGillicuddy, I can reduce her to the status of a
thing without a life, a being, or a Way, or I can objectify her as a human, and make her the object
of a passion, such as the passion for Fairness, Justice, Love, Respect or Desire, five of the Great
Aspects of Fun.
When I gave her the name Mrs. McGillicuddy, and mentioned her 45 cats, you immediately
had a picture of her in your head. The question is, does the picture only deal with the part of her
that interacts with the outside world, or does the picture include the part of her that lives inside
that darkened house with all those cats? Did you see a cranky old lady putting out bowls of milk
and attracting diseased strays to her neighbourhood, or did you see a lonely widow whose
emotional dependence on those strays is what keeps her going between bouts of watching soap
operas on TV and anxiously awaiting those much-too-rare letters from the daughter who left
home decades before? Did you see someone who just bumps into your life and knocks things
over, or did you see her as a human?
To live in fun, I believe you have to see her whole. In fact, you have to see almost everyone
as whole. Occasionally you will make the acquaintance of someone who has no positive
intentions toward you and who will take advantage of you in any way possible. Go ahead and
objectify these people as less than human – they are unreachable with love. And don’t think that
you have to walk down the street every day showering affection on everyone you meet. You will
make more enemies than friends in that way.
No, what I’m saying is that to build truly meaningful relationships with people with whom
you interact on a regular basis, you must treat them whole, and objectify them as objects of Fun.
So what does this have to do with Mrs. McGillicuddy?
It’s about practice. Perhaps her stray cats are ruining your garden, and this is the only way in
which she interacts with you. You have every right to attempt to keep her world apart from
yours, that is, keeping her cats out of your garden. To do this, you do not have to objectify her
negatively. You can maintain a perspective of her as a fully human entity. In my opinion, your
eventual negotiations with her over the subject of kitty infestation will go more successfully as a
result. But that’s not the only reason.
Watch ordinary people when they’re driving their cars. Many of them curse and swear,
consigning other drivers to the depths of hell for the unspeakable crime of lousy judgement. One
driver objectifies all others, reducing them to less than human status, and therefore makes them
objects of a passion as well, that of anger. Every time he or she does it, they’re training
themselves. You can either believe that a human has made a mistake, or you can assume that
the object is an idiot, and is beyond redemption. You are practicing objectification in the
negative sense, and getting better at it all the time.
To be perfectly honest, I treat all other drivers as objects to a certain extent. It is a sad truth of
motor conduct that the stupidest driver can easily kill or main the smartest driver in the world.
You have to objectify people a little. How to do it without dehumanization is the challenge.
Dehumanization goes on all the time. It’s the essence of competition and violence in our
world. War and terrorism can only take place within a process of dehumanization. Theft, rape
and bullying are all processes of dehumanization. They are anti-Fun in the purest way. To
humanize somebody is to wish Fun upon them. To dehumanize somebody, by definition, is to
wish to remove Fun from their lives. If I am only an object to you, a source of that which you
can take from me, I am not human. You have taken away my right to Fun, an Aspect of which is
personal security.
A terrorist can only destroy the lives of innocent victims because he believes them to be less
than human. He defines right humanity as his version of humanity exclusively. Someone who
wishes to use me as a political tool has reduced me to the status of a thing. A terrorist cannot
look his targets in the eyes and believe that they have lives.
We all know people who are emotional terrorists; people who reduce us to objects in their
lives, and if we are objects of their passions, their passions are likely anger and greed. People
who use their anger to attempt to force other people to modify their behaviour are objectifying
their victims, in the same way, albeit on a smaller scale, as those terrorists who bomb buses or
nightclubs. True, sometimes anger is righteous, and even the most righteous people sometimes
lose their cool because of it, but there is righteous anger and there is manipulative anger.
Love and family are two of the most Fun things there are, and they are frequently poisoned by
objectification. I had a yelling problem for a long time. Part of it was bipolar intensity and lack
of perspective, and part of it was the fervent desire that I could manipulate the situation and the
object of my passion with a display of force and implicit violence. One of the problems with
being a man is that you’re the biggest ape in the house, and have a natural (but not Righteous)
feeling that you can run things your way. You know that your anger is dangerous, and you learn
to use it in bad ways. You may, eventually, come to treat the members of your family and circle
of acquaintances as objects: people who are there to respond to your needs and emotional
condition at any given time. They are both objects in the way of things, and objects in the way
of targets.
That’s the worst thing a human can do to another human, and I have been guilty of it. Don’t
think that I let women off the hook, though. Women have their own means of objectification.
They often treat men as emotionally inferior creatures, when in fact we are simply not women.
Some of the women with whom I’ve had relationships reduced me to thing status in this way.
Men often don’t have the techniques to respond clearly to such objectification. I said earlier that
I wanted you to get over your inhibitions about the word object (to treat it objectively), and that’s
one reason why. Women as frequently objectify men as vice-versa. But men must acknowledge
that as the big muscle half of the relationship that they are capable of being dangerous, and learn
accordingly to humanize, even when angry.
It’s easy to avoid dehumanization, even if it isn’t always easy to control your temper. You
must acknowledge that even those of us who do not live in Fun are capable of it, and that by
bringing Fun to the world, you are improving the chances that they will eventually come to live
in Fun. Negotiating with Mrs. McGillicuddy about her 45 cats in a humanized way will
inevitable bring a little Fun into her life in the form of respect, will improve the state of Fun in
your life, in the form of Righteousness, and will improve the world in general by raising the
overall Fun Quotient one tiny notch.
You know what made me think of this? Of course not, but I’m going to tell you.
I know a man who earns a great deal of money, who lives in a fancy place, who eats fancy
food, who drives a fancy car and is generally not only fancy in his life but schmancy too. He has
everything going for him except perfect health. He has that one thing which is the greatest joy of
living, and of which I am always two smidgens envious: he has children. He HAD a family, but
through a long process of learning to objectify people, he has lost that precious thing. He uses
his anger in a manipulative way, and the love he feels for his offspring is lost in the hurricane of
anger that escapes his mind. He dehumanizes his children, seeing them not as persons, but as
objects who interact with his life. He is his own worst enemy, and he has thrown away the thing
that I would literally have given up a body part for.
Even so, I refuse to dehumanize him. Whenever I hear of his latest exploit, I feel his pain.
He does not live in Fun, despite the advantages of his life, and I do, despite the disadvantages of
mine. I feel sorry for him, and hope that he will one day learn to treat people as fully human.
I know that in some ways my philosophy of life may seem self-contradictory. I believe, as
I’ve said elsewhere, in the great power of I Don’t Care. On the face of it, I Don’t Care, when
applied to a human, would seem to be dehumanizing. I don’t agree. I can wish you all the Fun
in the world, while refusing to allow myself to respond to your negativity. I’m not treating you
as a thing when you yell at me, I’m just treating you as a fully-human idiot. I accept that you do
not live in Fun, because people who live in Fun don’t yell. I aim to get through the second half
of my life not yelling at people, because Fun is my watchword, and it behoves me to act on that
which I speak.
I’ve read, in my various researches, a lot of psychiatric flotsam and jetsam about what makes
or breaks people’s lives. Not living in the here and now, being detached from their spiritual
selves, not believing in God or Dog or whoever, not having a good enough sex life…blah blah
whatever.
I think the thing that above all else makes or breaks people’s lives is the process of
objectification, positive or negative. Fun is all about relationships. Sure, some of the Great
Aspects, like Happiness, can be said to be individual things, but the majority of the Great
Aspects, such as Compassion or Justice, have to do with the relationships between people, on
various scales. To reduce the human relationship to the status of an object relationship is to limit
the possible value of the Great Aspects of Fun in your life. Every time you dehumanize someone
or some group, you have limited the capability of your own being to attain True Fun.
On the other hand, the process of positive objectification, that is the process of making others
the objects (targets) of positive passions can only enhance the fun and Fun of your life. If you
are the object of my Love, you may reject it or accept it, but either way, I get to feel Love, and
my Fun is enhanced.
Therefore, I wish to state emphatically, right now, that even if I am not ready to love Mrs.
McGillicuddy whose cats are digging toilets in the petunias, I am willing to accept that she is a
valid object of my passions (my sacred desire to enhance the fun of the world), and that she is
not an object (thing) in my world.
Just please…keep those damn cats out of my petunias. What am I already? An object?