Eliot Spitzer. Margaret Seltzer. Misha Defonseca. The 2008
University
of Memphis men’s basketball team. What’s been absent
from the coverage of these recent examples of self-destruction is even
the slightest recognition that for all of us the force for good can
convert so frighteningly easily into the force for ill, that our
deepest strength is indivisible from our most embarrassing weakness,
that what makes us great will inexorably get us in terrible trouble.
Everyone’s ambition is underwritten by a tragic flaw.
We are deeply divided animals, and we are drawn to the creation of
our own demise. Freud: “What lives, wants to die again. Originating in
dust, it wants to be dust again. Not only the life-drive is in them,
but the death-drive as well.” Kundera: “Anyone whose goal is ‘something
higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of
falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the
voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the
desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
And the more righteous our self-presentation, the more deeply we
yearn to transgress, to fall, to fail. Because being bad is more
interesting/exciting/erotic than being good. Even little children,
especially little children, know this: When my daughter, Natalie, was
3, she was friends with two girls, sisters age 3 and 4. The older girl,
Julia, ran away from her mother, for which she was reprimanded. The
younger girl, Emily, asked why and was told that running away was bad.
“I wanna do it,” Emily said.
Eliot Spitzer needed to demolish the perfect marble statue (that
extreme moral rectitude) he’d made of himself. The “memoirist” Margaret
Seltzer wanted so badly not to be the person she was
(upper-middle-class girl from the Valley) that she imagined herself all
the way into strangers’ lives, and cared so much about bringing
attention to those lives that she phrased it as memoir, because very
few people care about novels anymore. Misha Defonseca, author of
Surviving with Wolves—pretty much the same thing. The
2008 University of Memphis men’s basketball team was so obsessed with
denying that they couldn’t shoot free throws that, of course, in the
championship game, they couldn’t shoot free throws.
We all contrive different, wonderfully
idiosyncratic, and
revealing ways to remain blind to our own blindnesses. Richard Nixon
had to undo himself, because—as hard as he worked to get
there—he didn’t believe he belonged there. Bill Clinton’s fatal
charm was/is his charming fatality: His magnetism is his doom; they’re
the same trait. Someone recently said to me about Clinton, “By all
accounts he could have been, should have been, one of the great
presidents of the 20th century, so it’s such a shame that…” No. No.
No. There’s no “if only” in human nature; it’s all one brutal feedback
loop: When W. was a young man, he said to Poppy, “Okay, then, let’s go.
Mano a mano. Right now.” The war on terror is the not so indirect
result.
In short, what animates us inevitably ails us. That fine edge gets
harder and harder to maintain.
When our difficult heroes (and all real heroes are difficult)
self-destruct, watch us retreat and reassure ourselves that it’s safer
here close to shore, where we live. We distance ourselves from the
disaster, but we gawk in glee (the cheers and champagne that
spontaneously broke out on the floor of the NYSE when word came of
Client Number 9). We want the good in them, the gift in them, not the
nastiness, or so we pretend. Publicly, we tsk-tsk, chastising their
transgressions. Secretly, we thrill to their violations, their (psychic
or physical) violence, because through them we vicariously renew our
acquaintance with our own shadow side. By detaching, though, before
free fall, we preserve our distance from death, stave off any serious
knowledge about the exact ratio in ourselves of angel to animal.
In college, when I read Greek tragedies and commentaries upon them,
I would think, rather blithely, “Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely
symmetrical: Whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—” What did I
know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what
powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death
sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they
send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the
curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a
setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your
eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you
are. 
David Shields’s most recent book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, was published by Knopf in February.