EMPIRICAL FACTS ABOUT ASSURANCE
It is, I fear, an empirical fact that we need assurance constantly. If any one idea of the whole of the Freudian corpus has become commonplace in the modern world, it is that a child needs its mother’s assurance, that cuddling and cooing to one’s baby, that physical proximity to it, are of extreme importance to the baby, who would soon panic without it.
Whether we call this infant-sexuality or the need for security matters here not at all: no one denies that the mother offers her child assurance at every step and that this is essential for the child’s well-being.Experience shows that industrial workers are in need for assurance too, that this need can be easily undermined by minor but noticeable modifications of their surroundings which lead to repeated disappointments of their expectations.
It is an empirical fact that by regularly disappointing an individual’s expectations we can render him a nervous wreck: people who blow hot and cold, who seemingly erratically offer good or bad will to their associates and dependants are known as holy terrors. Inquisitors and Brainwashers of all sorts tighten their screws on their victims by making their violent shifts more systematic and damaging. These cruel instances show how much stability is important for normal human beings if they are to lead normal smooth lives.
Stability is not here any inflexibility. The disappointed expectations that fall into pattern and elicit well prepared responses are in no way unnerving since a higher-level pattern of satisfaction and disappointment can help. And patterns can also be disappointed and altered, but not so rapidly as to shatter the process of readjustment. That is to say, a most important aspect of stability is not only that of satisfied expectation, but also of rational adjustment to unsatisfied ones. Hence both stability and rationality are important for human well-being, as far as experience can tell us. All this, to repeat, is widely accepted as empirical facts.
Hence, the inductive mood seems to be of the essence. And it seems to be there, to this degree or that, in stable modern enclaves. Hence, the question, can we reconcile this stability with the utter lack of expectation on the large scale, the utter agnosticism with which we have started?
IV.