Slater notes poetically (Slater, 1970/1976, p. 19) that we are “perturbed by our inability to anticipate the consequences of acts, but we still wait optimistically for some magic telegram, informing us that the tangled skein of misery and self-deception into which we have woven ourselves has vanished in the night.” Thus, even when we appear to be engaged in action that is founded in an internal locus of control, there is ultimately a reliance on some external mediation (the “magic telegram”) that will either solve everything or tell us that we did “the right thing.”
According to Philip Slater, it gets even more complex. We are actually drawn into our inability to solve problems. With the help of our media, we are fixated on disasters, crises and doomsday scenarios. We slow our car down to observe an automobile accident and spend a few extra minutes watching the replay of a dysfunctional government hearing—or even a replay of 9/11. In recognition, at some level, of our ambivalence regarding that which is unsolved, we assign blame for the failure of resolution onto those people and parties who are “responsible” for the failure. We are disgusted with our own fascination and find it “easy to project our self-disgust onto those who do the confronting.” (Slater, 1970/1976, p. 23).
We have another option, according to Slater. We can simply run away from the problems that confront us. He observes that the founder of American society (who have replaced the native American population) could always escape a problem (such as urban pollution or corruption) by moving West. The “new frontier” would be free of pollution and corruption (until we begin polluting and corrupting this new frontier). Even the migration to the North American shores was based on an escape from the unsolved problems (such as religious repression) that the immigrants faced in Europe (or other regions of the world).
Slater proposes that those who pushed away from engagement in their home country “were not personally successful in confronting the social conditions in their mother country but fled in the hope of a better life. By a kind of natural selection, America was disproportionately populated with a certain kind of person.” (Slater, 1970/1976, p. 20). This “kind of person” was someone who assumed that everything of importance was out of their control (external locus of control) and that the one act of control that they did possess was escape and moving away from the problem. There was also the option of discarding those items or issues that are problematic or burdensome.
We live with what Slater calls the “Toilet assumption.” (Slater, 1970/1976, p. 21) We flush our “unacceptable” behavior down the toilet. We throw that which we wish to ignore into the trash (whether this be a partially consumed product or an entire ethnic or racial community). When the trash has accumulated, we move on to another part of the world—leaving the trash to rot back in the community we left behind. I find evidence of this when I take a train in California or the Eastern United States. All of the unwanted debris has been left beside the railroad tracks: old cars, oil cans, used lumber or steel beams . . . and people (living in tents located by the tracks). We use, misuse, throw away and leave behind. Like the American in Slater’s myth, the trash never really is abandoned. The vermin (be they problems precipitated by the trash or the trash that remains in our heads and heart) never go away. We are left alone, surrounded by our trash.
