Whadda Ya Mean Your Not Sure?!?!

The self-assured man. The confident, take-no-prisoners approach to life. We know it well. Some of us live it. Others live with it. And still others see it portrayed in the movies via the psychologically narrow portrayals of the hero who doesn't bat an eye, questions nothing, but just does. The pure doer. The man of action.

Though a sure stereotype the 'pure doer' has more than his share of problems--as well as generating much the same for others. The pure doer--with American President George W. Bush certainly standing as a prime example (so much so that he is almost a caricature of the overly self-confident man, the one presuming absolute knowledge in the face of a world rife with uncertainty, incompleteness, and relativity--read Heisenberg, Godel, and Einstein lately Prez)--is the one who doesn't waver; though perhaps he ought to. The pure doer is the total opposite of someone like Shakespeare's arche-character, Hamlet. The pure doer has no time for questions, no time for self-reflection--which last I checked was one of the chief characteristics of being-human, the capacity for reflection.

What if the pure doer, the heroically self-confident and self-assured, is under the sway of, and allegiant to, a primarily animalistic tendency--meaning, a far more base evolutionary impulse that we could say verges on the in-humane? The one who just does without any inclination to doubt the course of one's actions is, like I said, the obverse of Hamlet. That Hamlet who has become a sort of modern archetype of the human psyche in light of our ever-increasing knowledge of the world: our knowlede of how and where paradox reigns; of how and where contraries are inherent in almost everything we do; of how and where no 'thing' seems solid or certain; of how and where all that we commit to seems to come with an almost terrifying cost, the awareness of which freezes us in near total impossibility. Like Hamlet. Not unlike Hamlet.

The pure does just does, though. This is why the pure doer is one whose life is not unlike a 'bull in a China shop.' As the more reflective former Secretary of State under President G. W. Bush put it, 'If you break it you fix it.'

The heroic archetype---the complex of the pure doer acting on us psychologically--is awfully naive though. There is a sense that if one just charges in then everyone will gladly welcome us, bow down before us, praise our very name. The heroic complex, in the current world of increasing awareness of relativity is a complex that is more and more problematic each and everyday. It is a psychological complex fitting for emergency situations--when urgency of action is paramount. But as a form of politics it makes life hell for more people than it could ever be said to save.