For What Does Your Worldview Overcompensate?

On Theology and Psychology

There’s a folkloric saying that Breslov Hasidim are obsessed with joy because they are depressives; Karliner Hasidim are obsessed with controlling their emotions because they are angry; and Chabad Hasidim are obsessed with nullifying their egos because they are ego-maniacs.

The (reductive) sentiment behind the saying is that a person’s theological or philosophical focus reflects a person’s core struggle. We value and esteem that which is most difficult for us.

Extending the idea, and risking offense in the spirit of playfulness, we might argue that Reform Judaism’s obsession with “choice” is born from an experience of a lack of free-will. The more deterministic and fatalistic one feels the universe is, the more one will posit individualism and agency as the goal.

The reduction of religion to social justice may be born from an inward struggle with power, an uncomfortable recognition of one’s own capacity to be tyrannical. As Nietzsche said, “distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is strong…”

If I scan my own obsessions, I’d say that I often argue for the importance of uncertainty. Mine is a postmodern worldview in which truth and goodness are often indeterminate, contestable, fragmentary, conflicted. I love novels and films with multiple points of view and no single Archimidean point. If I apply the same psychological lens on myself, this might mean that my core struggle is with certainty; I have a strong intuition of good and bad, true and false, but for a variety of reasons seek to avoid accepting that knowledge.

In any case, the exercise reveals those who speak often of doubt to be believers at heart and those who espouse great faith to be great doubters at heart. Consider Descartes—who doubted everything and in so doing found one thing indubitable, his own doubting self.

What’s the worldview that reduces worldview to a psychological theory of overcompensation all about? Probably the fact that the world is messy and challenges a sense of control. Psychological models are socially acceptable transitional objects.

Those of us who struggle with being irreducible seek a little reductionism to balance ourselves out:)

While the theory has a humorous and naughty edge, it also has some deep explanatory power. How will you use it? What insights into your own orientation does it afford?

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