“Nature was nothing and nurture was everything.”

The collapse of the Sullivanians and what that teaches us about the idolatry of placing ourselves above nature

My Saturdays begin with a cup of strong coffee and the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. I subscribed to the digital edition because I need it to write my Substack and the WSJ throws in the Saturday print edition for free… and it is a revelation! Unlike the NY Times that tells readers what to think, the Review section of the Saturday WSJ takes seriously the battle of ideas and presents a wide range of fascinating book reviews, long form essays on history and science, and deep engagement with arts and culture.

Yesterday I was fascinated by a book review of “The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune” by Alexander Stille.

From the article:

In 1957, Jane Pearce and Saul Newton — a Texan and a Canadian, middle-aged and married — decided to open the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis on West 77th Street in New York City. Pearce was a trained analyst with a medical degree from the University of Chicago; Newton, who lacked such bona fides, seemed to be riding her coattails into the profession. The couple was inspired by the American neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan and his White Institute on the Upper East Side. Sullivan believed that patients had the ability to transform their personalities even later in life, through new experiences, and that their analysts should give them active counsel — a major break with Freud’s ideas. Pearce and Newton took these convictions further: Why couldn’t the therapist offer a fundamental restructuring of a patient’s life?

As so often happens with communes, things started promisingly enough with otherwise lost people finding connection and a sense of meaning in their lives. And then absolute power corrupted absolutely and things went off the rails.

Pearce and Newton held that the nuclear family was the wellspring of most mental-health problems, with the mother a particularly poisonous influence — and so they set out to replace the family unit with a communal society under [their] therapeutic direction.

The Sullivan Institute soon became a sex cult where the leaders told the followers who to have sex with, who they could procreate with, and the children from these forced arrangements were separated from their parents and raised by the commune or sent away to boarding school.

But here’s the sentence that stood out to me and the reason I wanted to write this article. The leaders of the commune were guided by the belief that:

“Nature was nothing and nurture was everything.”

And that got me thinking about other attempts I’m familiar with where people seemed to believe that through sheer force of will they could remake society in their image. (The next section is going to bounce around a bit — think of it as a mosaic rather than a logical proof.)

Left revolutionary political movements (from the Bolsheviks through Mao and the Sandinistas) sought to create the “new man” and “new woman” in service of the revolutionary “new society.” I welcome reform, heaven knows I’m always advocating revolution myself. But it seems to me that revolution should include an understanding of and engagement with human nature rather than the hubristic notion that there is no human essence.

Religion has been with us since the dawn of civilization. It seems to provide comfort and meaning to people. Yet, just within the last two hundred years many people in mainstream society and most left revolutionary political movements have thought, ‘nah, we don’t really need that at all.’ I’m not convinced that this has left us better off (as I will discuss more below).

I taught in Cambodia in 2012 and it made a big impression on me. The Khmer Rouge government (1975 - 1979) got rid of money and private property and wanted all children to be raised collectively on cooperative farms. More than four decades later, Cambodian society is still living with the scars of that disastrous, genocidal, social experiment.

Many American Communist groups in the 20th century also seemed to believe that the leadership should be allowed to arrange marriages to serve the collective.

Foucault took these ideas further by arguing that nature is nothing, thoughts are reality itself.

The cult EST (Erhard Seminars Training), that later became The Landmark Forum, had many of the same problems as the Sullivan Institute. The essence of Landmark training is that “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless” (so create whatever reality you want).

The modern progressive movement takes this further by conflating biological sex with socially constructed gender (that I’ve written about before).

The book and film series The Secret operates from the belief that our thoughts create reality.

In many ways, the iatrogenocide also stems from this ideology of human will superimposed onto nature. The vaccine program is thoroughly postmodern at this point. It is guided by the notion that ‘vaccines work because we believe they work.’ Believing makes it so. And anyone who is not a Believer must be shunned in order for the magic juju to work. To the Cult of Vaccine, data does not matter, thinking creates reality, and so everyone must get with the program or we’ll all die.

But I’m still left mulling the question of WHY? Why go to all of this trouble of creating communes & cults, obliterating god, completely rearranging society, or stealing everyone’s kids? Fighting against billions of years of biological evolution is arduous and usually ends in ruin.

I get that conventional wisdom is often wrong about human nature. But that simply argues for reform and a deep ongoing discussion about human nature, not getting rid of the concept altogether. And yes there is always a demand for these new approaches because so much remains unknown about the human condition and people experience so much existential misery that they often seek out new answers. Of course I support positive thinking and know from experience that positive self-talk helps one to achieve one’s goals. But for me ideas must always be in dialogue with reality/nature/the material world not supersede it.

I think that the desire to re-create society in one’s image is a form of idolatry. “Nature is nothing and nurture is everything” gives one the illusion of control. But more than that, it puts proponents in a position of playing god. As Susan Faludi once said, “People would rather have the illusion of control than see the world as it really is.”

But the thing is, when one kills god (and the humility that comes from realizing that we are not the highest level of existence) — through science, cynicism, dark philosophy, or some combination thereof — that’s not the end of the story. Something else invariably takes its place. A Sex Cult. The Vaccine Cult. Moloch in all its forms. Capital. Communism. Progress. Fascism. Ideology. As Forrest Maready says, “human beings are designed to worship something.” All of these other approaches give one the illusion of control but they get the hierarchy wrong by placing humans above nature when in fact we are a part of nature.

It seems to me that it is far better to surrender to the mystery than to try to control something outside our grasp.

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Blessings to the warriors. 🙌

Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏

Huzzah for everyone building the alternative economy our hearts know is possible. ✊

In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.

As always, I welcome any corrections.

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