Everything Is F*cked

The Classic Assumption
Once,  when  asked  about  his  drinking,  the  musician  Tom  Waits  famously
muttered, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” He
appeared  to  be  hammered  when  he  said  it.  Oh,  and  he  was  on  national
television.
4
The frontal lobotomy is a form of brain surgery wherein a hole is drilled
into  your  skull  through  your  nose  and  then  the  frontal  lobe  is  gently  sliced
with an icepick.
5
The procedure was invented in 1935 by a neurologist named
António  Egas  Moniz.
6
 Egas  Moniz  discovered  that  if  you  took  people  with
extreme anxiety, suicidal depression, or other mental health issues (aka crises
of  hope)  and  maimed  their  brain  in  just  the  right  way,  they’d  chill  the  fuck
out.

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Egas  Moniz  believed  that  the  lobotomy,  once  perfected,  could  cure  all
mental illness, and he marketed it to the world as such. By end of the 1940s,
the procedure was a hit, being performed on tens of thousands of patients all
over the world. Egas Moniz would even win a Nobel Prize for his discovery.
But by the 1950s, people began to notice that—and this might sound crazy
—drilling a hole through somebody’s face and scraping their brain the same
way  you  clean  ice  off  your  windshield  can  produce  a  few  negative  side
effects.  And  by  “a  few  negative  side  effects,”  I  mean  the  patients  became
goddamn  potatoes.  While  often  “curing”  patients  of  their  extreme  emotional
afflictions,  the  procedure  also  left  them  with  an  inability  to  focus,  make
decisions,  have  careers,  make  long-term  plans,  or  think  abstractly  about
themselves.  Essentially,  they  became  mindlessly  satisfied  zombies.  They
became Elliots.
The  Soviet  Union,  of  all  places,  was  the  first  country  to  outlaw  the
lobotomy. The Soviets declared the procedure “contrary to human principles”
and claimed that it “turned an insane person into an idiot.”
7
This was sort of a
wake-up call to the rest of the world, because let’s face it, when Joseph Stalin
is  lecturing  you  about  ethics  and  human  decency,  you  know  you’ve  fucked
up.
After that, the rest of the world began, slowly, to ban the practice, and by
the  1960s,  pretty  much  everyone  hated  it.  The  last  lobotomy  would  be
performed in the United States in 1967, and the patient would die. Ten years
later,  a  drunken  Tom  Waits  muttered  his  famous  line  on  television,  and  the
rest, as they say, is history.
Tom  Waits  was  a  blistering  alcoholic  who  spent  most  of  the  1970s  trying  to
keep  his  eyes  open  and  remember  where  he  last  left  his  cigarettes.
8
 He  also
found time to write and record seven brilliant albums in this period. He was
both  prolific  and  profound,  winning  awards  and  selling  millions  of  records
that  were  celebrated  worldwide.  He  was  one  of  those  rare  artists  whose
insight into the human condition could be startling.
Waits’s  quip  about  the  lobotomy  makes  us  laugh,  but  there’s  a  hidden
wisdom to it: that he’d rather have the problem of passion with the bottle than
have no passion at all; that it’s better to find hope in lowly places than to find
none; that without our unruly impulses, we are nothing.
There’s  pretty  much  always  been  a  tacit  assumption  that  our  emotions
cause  all  our  problems,  and  that  our  reason  must  swoop  in  to  clean  up  the
mess.  This  line  of  thinking  goes  all  the  way  back  to  Socrates,  who  declared
reason  the  root  of  all  virtue.
9
 At  the  beginning  of  the  Enlightenment,
Descartes  argued  that  our  reason  was  separate  from  our  animalistic  desires

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and that it had to learn to control those desires.
10
Kant sort of said the same
thing.
11
Freud, too, except there were a lot of penises involved.
12
 And  when
Egas Moniz lobotomized his first patient in 1935, I’m sure he thought he had
just  discovered  a  way  to  do  what,  for  more  than  two  thousand  years,
philosophers had declared needed to be done: to grant reason dominion over
the unruly passions, to help humanity finally exercise some damn control over
itself.
This  assumption  (that  we  must  use  our  rational  mind  to  dominate  our
emotions)  has  trickled  down  through  the  centuries  and  continues  to  define
much of our culture today. Let’s call it the “Classic Assumption.” The Classic
Assumption  says  that  if  a  person  is  undisciplined,  unruly,  or  malicious,  it’s
because he lacks the ability to subjugate his feelings, that he is weak-willed or
just  plain  fucked  up.  The  Classic  Assumption  sees  passion  and  emotion  as
flaws,  errors  within  the  human  psyche  that  must  be  overcome  and  fixed
within the self.
Today, we usually judge people based on the Classic Assumption. Obese
people are ridiculed and shamed because their obesity is seen as a failure of
self-control.  They  know  they  should  be  thin,  yet  they  continue  to  eat.  Why?
Something must be wrong with them, we assume. Smokers: same deal. Drug
addicts receive the same treatment, of course, but often with the extra stigma
of being defined as criminals.
Depressed and suicidal people are subjected to the Classic Assumption in
a  way  that’s  dangerous,  being  told  that  their  inability  to  create  hope  and
meaning in their lives is their own damn fault, that maybe, if they just tried a
little harder, hanging themselves by the necktie wouldn’t sound so appealing.
We see succumbing to our emotional impulses as a moral failing. We see a
lack of self-control as a sign of a deficient character. Conversely, we celebrate
people  who  beat  their  emotions  into  submission.  We  get  collective  hard-ons
for athletes and businessmen and leaders who are ruthless and robotic in their
efficiency.  If  a  CEO  sleeps  under  his  desk  and  doesn’t  see  his  kids  for  six
weeks  at  a  time—fuck  yeah,  that’s  determination!  See?  Anyone  can  be
successful!
Clearly, it’s not hard to see how the Classic Assumption can lead to some
damaging  .  .  .  er,  assumptions.  If  the  Classic  Assumption  is  true,  then  we
should be able to exhibit self-control, prevent emotional outbursts and crimes
of  passion,  and  stave  off  addiction  and  indulgences  through  mental  effort
alone.  And  any  failure  to  do  so  reflects  something  inherently  faulty  or
damaged within us.
This is why we often develop the false belief that we need to change who

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we are. Because if we can’t achieve our goals, if we can’t lose the weight or
get  the  promotion  or  learn  the  skill,  then  that  signifies  some  internal
deficiency. Therefore, in order to maintain hope, we decide we must change