David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

A local New York paper tried to close the play. Their fellow was outraged, finding it politically incorrect, in which he was, astonishingly, acute.

Now, the plot thickening, the Village Voice asked me to write an article on the play’s politics. I wrote them an essay titled “Political Civility,” which laid out my views as above. I knew, however, that the Voice (a) has always been the voice of the Left; and (b) that they, over the years, had generally accepted my work only kicking and screaming. So I schemed to ensnare them. I began my essay on civility and consideration with an anecdote about the Village Voice .

Norman Mailer reviewed the first production in America of Waiting for Godot in the Village Voice . He called it trash. He went home though, and thought about it and returned to see the play again. He recognized it now as a work of genius, and bought a page in the Voice renouncing his review, and praising the play. I began my essay with this anecdote.

Aha. The Voice took the bait and published the article. They, however, retitled it “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.” The New York paper, enraged, rereviewed my play, giving it a worse notice than the first time around, and I was embraced by the Right.

Then I was asked to write a book on politics. And, in the words of Gertrude Stein, so I did, and this is it.

2

THE AMERICAN REALITY

It was observed, and I cannot remember by whom, that “like all prolific writers, he was very lazy.” This is certainly true of me. I am prolific, and look upon my lengthy and various credits as must an inveterate debtor look upon the completed list of his obligations: it fills me with shame. Why? Perhaps because none of it felt like work, but like escape. What sort of sick fool would need to still so many terrifying thoughts by so much production?

In any case, I have been granted the dispensation to spend my days making the unpleasant pleasant.

By whom was I granted this right? By the society in which I live, which found my works sufficiently diverting to pay me to sit alone all day and continue as I had begun.

Leisure for reflection, somewhere near the end of a long career, leads me to thank God for allowing me to live in a society sufficiently free of Governmental control to allow the citizenry expression of its true diversity, which is to say, diversity of thought.

For, certainly, my works do not please everyone. But I, discovering that which does not please, am free to chase the market, to persist as before, or to desist entirely. I am, in short, free to fail, which means I am free to succeed, and, if successful, to enjoy any particularities which such success might confer upon me.

This is not only the American Dream—but the American reality, my growing realization of which prompted me to write this book.

I spoke with my first conservatives at age sixty. My rabbi, Mordecai Finley, a centrist, and a founding member of his temple, Endre Balogh, took the time to talk to me. I was impressed not by their politics, which, at the time, made to me no sense, but by their politeness and patience. They gave me a book, and the book was White Guilt , by Shelby Steele.

It brought to mind an old Providence, Rhode Island, answer to a difficult question, “What do you want, the truth, or a lie . . . ?”

Having spent my life in the theatre, I knew that people could be formed into an audience, that is, a group which surrenders for two hours, part of its rationality, in order to enjoy an illusion.

As I began reading and thinking about politics I saw, to my horror, how easily people could also assemble themselves into a mob, which would either attract or be called into being by those who profited from the surrender of reason and liberty—and that these people are called politicians. My question, then, was, that as we cannot live without Government, how must we deal with those who will be inclined to abuse it—the politicians and their manipulators? The answer to that question, I realized, was attempted in the U.S. Constitution—a document based not upon the philosophic assumption that people are basically good, but on the tragic confession of the opposite view.

I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he inevitably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.

The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others. 3

I saw that I had been living in a state of ignorance, accepting an unexamined illusion and calling it “compassion,” but that there were those brave enough to work their way through the prevailing slogans of their time, and reason toward a consistent, practicable understanding of human relations. To these, politics was not the manipulation of the ignorant and undecided, but the dedication to the defense and implementation of just, first principles, for example, those of the United States Constitution.

I saw that to proclaim these beliefs in individual freedom, in individual liberty, and in the inevitable evil of surrender of powers to the State, was, in the general population, difficult, and in the Liberal environment, literally impossible, but yet men and women of courage devoted their lives and energies to doing so, undeterred not only by scorn but by despair. 4

I will now quote two Chicago writers on the subject, the first, William Shakespeare, who wrote “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink”; the second, Ernest Hemingway, “Call ’em like you see’em and to hell with it.”

3

CULTURE, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, THE AUDIENCE, AND THE ELEVATOR

Culture predates society, as it evolves before consciousness.

Consider, Friedrich Hayek writes, an unwritten law that is universally accepted and practiced and that both predates and gives rise to verbal codification: in a potentially violent altercation, the party nearest his opponent’s home will withdraw.

The Culture, of a country, a family, a religion, a region, is a compendium of these unwritten laws worked out over time through the preconscious adaptations of its members—through trial and error. It is, in its totality, “the way we do things here.” It is born of the necessity of humans getting along. It does not come into being because of the inspiration, nor because of the guidance, of any individual or group, but it evolves naturally: those things which work are adopted, those which do not, discarded. This evolution has been referred to as “social Darwinism,” but, as Hayek teaches, it is not. Darwin observed that the individuals of a species which were better fitted to their environment throve and interbred, thus strengthening their particular adaptation. Those without the effective adaptation died out.

But the evolution of a culture takes place not through the disappearance of those lacking a beneficial adaptation and the interbreeding of its possessors, but through imitation . That culture which has discovered a beneficial adaptation is imitated by those cultures which perceive its worth—the possessors and nonpossessors of an adaptation do not compete on this basis—all may adopt the beneficial behavior and thrive.