If you want to know what the ancient Greeks believed, you should read The Iliad. If you want to know what Americans believe, you should go to the cheapest local barber.
I suppose if time travel were available to you, you could skip The Iliad and go straight to the ancient Greek version of barbers, which was probably a gymnasium, or maybe even just a barber. Koureus.
Probably skip the theorizers and the historians. They are too clouded by anachronistic thinking, ideological capture, and the effort to differentiate themselves from peers. The actual feelings of a place are best articulated by the people who live and die and work in that place. You get the best feel for it when they don’t think they’re being watched.
Maybe it’s something, too, that barbers touch and groom normal people, relaxing them into revealing the texture of their unconscious. Therapists listen more often to naval-gazers with expendable income trying to uncover “trauma” or force some other pseudo-rite. The barber holds the heads of ordinary people, speaking spontaneously while being petted, with no goal in mind, and so she naturally learns to talk to Americans in a pleasing way.
My barber is a Pentecostal woman named Tiffany. She charges $15, will sell you a cold Diet Coke, and keeps signs around that say things like “Only God can judge me.” If I were to bring her some kind of familial complaint, she would listen and tell me some variation of “you gotta do you,” or “they gotta do them.” If I’m nervous about something in the future, she’ll tell me to be myself. If I’m feeling ashamed of something that happened in the past, she’ll tell me not to worry so much about what people think of me.
The consistency of this advice, the inability to stray from it at all, is kind of incredible. You never hear anything about how you have a responsibility to your family or your nation over and beyond your personal freedoms. Only that you’re both entitled to your pursuit of happiness, and if you don’t agree, well, you’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Tiffany was cutting my hair cut just the other day when an idea uncurled out from my own unconscious: the dream of total freedom from others is the foundational lie, to put it bluntly, that our entire society is based around.
It also occurred to me that it is the central reason it’s so difficult for moderns to understand what’s going on in The Iliad: the ancient Greeks had no conception of this freedom from the constraints of social status. For them, as Simone Weil pointed out, that entire poem is about force. All men were equally subject to force. Men with a lot of power were able, using their temporarily elevated status, to smash through the barriers of other people, who bowed to them and conformed to their will. This power comes and goes by the whims of the gods, who pick who they like for reasons mostly unknown. Even the most powerful men will eventually submit, if not to the force of others, then to the force of nature, which will take them inevitably to Hades. For the ancient Greeks, force permeates every level of reality: social, biological, and natural.
Americans believe most deeply in total freedom from that force and all other limits, which blinds us to certain realities, like appreciating The Iliad. An American wouldn’t readily admit, say, that the mere proximity of one man to another is an imposition of his will. But this is made obvious when you realize that, for some reason, you cannot behave the same way in your bedroom when someone is in it.
