People need not have attended top-tier educational institutions to have been exposed to the dominant culture’s canon of literature. Consequently, millions of Americans have heard the most cited Shakespearean quote: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Even students who once sat in one-room, ramshackled schoolhouses, sharing dilapidated books in the Deep South more than one-hundred years ago were exposed to it. My first time: at age six while watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
There is perhaps no more fundamental, probing, self-examining query anyone can make than pondering that line, because “to be” not only speaks to the future outcome of self, but also the current examination of self. In the shadow of “to be” is “Who am I?”
This is why Shakespeare’s line from the first scene of Act III in Hamlet is the most quoted line from all the bard’s works. None other fully crystalizes the most fundamental aspect of the existential angst that inhabits the minds of all people, consciously and subconsciously, and that permeates the systematic structuring of all societies. Even people living in cultures and communities who have no knowledge of Shakespeare are answering “that” question daily.
It is now, “at this very hour”, to quote Frederick Douglas’ Fourth of July speech, more than any question being proposed through the cacophony of citizens across our nation, clamoring for answers about the state of the nation, that this question is of grave importance to be addressed. Even beyond our domestic and worrisome concerns regarding the erosion our democracy and the encroachment of totalitarianism, who we are is an increasing vexation for the global family of nations. American democracy, long self-touted as the most successful model in the world, is viewed as a virulent disease of conscience; a pestilence on basic morality; a pox on the just order of a civil society. This further imperils who we are at home and abroad.
Our kryptonic aversion to history is expediting the depletion of the “super” in the power of a patriotic integrity we once more proudly hailed. George Santayana, in his book, The Life of Reason, gifted us another often repeated quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This caution has been ignored more than heeded. Mark Twain postulated a possible reason: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The meaning of that is that rarely do events repeat in exactly the same manner, but instead the patterns that recreate the circumstances of repeating problems are cyclical and recurring.
Xenophobia, economic uncertainty, anti-intellectualism, rational evasion, hate mongering, the dispensing of existence, the concentration of wealth, the otherism demonization of minority groups, the rise of religious authoritarianism — these are all aspects and elements of the patterns that keep afflicting humanity with the rhyme of histories through the centuries. It’s what we are suffering from now, in the United States. Mein Kampf as Project 2025.
Carl Jung, who founded the school of analytical psychology, said that the most terrifying thing to do is to accept yourself completely — the unmasked, unvarnished, unconcealed totality of self. This speaks to the “Who am I” dilemma in Shakespeare’s quote. The word “terrifying” stands out most to me, in Jung’s assertion. I focus on it because of something James Baldwin once addressed, when he referred to being terrified by the moral apathy and the death of the heart of the nation. He spoke of being terrified and not angered by this disposition of White America, because of what he saw was consequential to terror. As Baldwin pointed out, to which I completely agree, anger is an emotion that predicates that the person or people anger is being directed at know what they have done or are doing to provoke the anger. They are aware of their causality.
On the other hand, to feel terror is to confront a person or people who have totally suppressed, abandoned or lost the willingness or ability to comprehend the nefariousness, sinfulness and wickedness of their conduct. They then replace that void, their moral apathy, with a catechism of thought that creates an infrastructure of belief, that whatever they think and feel towards those they oppose is righteous, virtuous and essential. It is then that such people become what Baldwin accurately calls “moral monsters”. Their social perspective sees and engages with no empathetic, sensible, just, principled or humane gradient whatsoever. Consequently, they are able to inflict the most egregious atrocities and abominable conduct unimaginable by those unlike them: street gangs, drug cartels, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, the 9/11 attackers, Boko Haram, ISIS, the WPK. As Baldwin also concluded, this leads to the formation of delusional identity that is operationally immoral and functionally inhuman. When such people become the influencers of society, the rulers of commerce, the architects of education, the drafters of legislation, the commanders of military, and the administrators of a government, the death of the heart is no longer a metaphorical diagnosis. It becomes policy.
This is where we are at, right now, in our United States. People who are operationally immoral and functionally inhuman are in control of our nation, and are categorically dehumanizing anyone and everyone who is not recognized by them as worthy. Look at other moments in history when this has occurred: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. What follows, as policy, is that domination is used to impose and institutionalize supremacy; eradication is reasoned to establish and maintain stability; and violence is justified to establish and enforce both domination and eradication. This is the pattern recognition playing out before us, in our country.
Now that we see it, our “To be or not to be” moment is clearly before us. We, the people not the Administration or the Republican Party or the MAGA acolytes — or The Democratic Party, we must answer “that” question. Our nation, regardless of its complex, convoluted, contradicting and contemptible inception, was based on an ideal concept of a nation whose fellowship was predicated upon equal recognition and not one forged by royal lineage, caste hierarchy, tribal ethnicity or religious allegiance.
This idea of America that has long been promoted as a more perfect union, and through the propaganda of patriotism, it has been a theoretical that many people have been convinced is an actual, for them. But it isn’t. It hasn’t been. Until it exist for all, it exist for none. If what has been taking place on the streets of Minneapolis isn’t convincing proof, nothing will be. Being White no longer offers full protection, immunity and exoneration from what being White has meant to the union. The romanticism of America is the other side of an identity coin we keep reflexively flipping, whenever the tail side lands to reveal what Jung meant about the terrifying thing of completely accepting yourself. This is a coin we must chuck into the bottomless well of our historical prevarication. We must no longer bet the fate of our fortune of who we are, as individuals, as a people and as a nation on its every turn and toss. I urge that we not consider it more noble to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. We must find the courage to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them, end them.
Finally, to quote a more contemporary poet, philosopher and psychoanalyst of sorts, I reference Tupac Shakur: “Real eyes realize real lies.” To answer that question Shakespeare proposed, we must be truthful about who we’ve been and who we are and accept it completely. Only then can the answer to “Who am I?” become what America has never been.