Dignity in the Time of the Toads
In what follows, I’m going to use parable to make my point because I want to focus on principle rather than individual personalities. Okay, with that brief preface out of the way, let’s begin.
What is obsequiousness good for? It doesn’t seem to have much utility. In fact, obsequiousness harms everybody and everything it touches; it leaves permanent damage everywhere, from those who dispense it to those who accept it, and to all the organizations and institutions contaminated by it.
Unfortunately, obsequiousness is having an insidious cultural moment. Just look at the abject pusillanimity displayed by many prominent technology CEOs, only too willing to compromise themselves and their organizations in groveling supplication. And for what? It brings to mind the quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: that a cynic is the type of person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
As I observe our current olympiad of bootlicking, I am reminded of a novel, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, written by Graham Greene in 1980. Doctor Fischer usually isn’t cited as one of Greene’s most revered novels, but it has much to recommend it, especially in today’s bleak climate of pervasive fear and loathing.
The Dr. Fischer of the title is an exceedingly rich man, the result of his invention of a popular brand of flavorful toothpaste. In Geneva, the not-so-good doctor holds notorious dinner parties where he relentlessly and savagely humiliates his rich guests, sycophants who abjectly accept the abuse and ridicule as the price of remaining on the doctor’s guest list.
Why do they do it? Why do they absorb the abuse without protest? The answer is as simple as it is demoralizing.
Gourmet Meals, Bitter Feasts
The dinner guests subject themselves to debasement to ingratiate themselves to the misanthropic Fischer, who dispenses extravagant gifts at the conclusion of each meal. Fischer’s rules of engagement are straightforward: If a guest acquiesces to abuse for the duration of the evening, he or she receives a lavish, personalized prize. To get the prizes, however, guests must offer absolutely no demurrals and no resistance to Fischer’s psychological and verbal onslaughts, which remorselessly exploit his guests’ individual foibles and insecurities.
Fischer is a cruel despot, but his abhorrent behavior is abetted by the complicity of his dinner guests. They don’t have to accept his abuse, but they submit unreservedly so as to qualify for his sneering benefaction.
The doctor’s daughter, who begins a courtship with the novel’s narrator, a translator at a chocolate company (well, the story is based in Switzerland), refers to the dinner-party guests as “the Toads,” by which she presumably means toadies.
In hosting his sadistic dinners, Dr. Fischer conducts a dark experiment, designed to determine just how much degradation and humiliation his rich guests are willing to accept in exchange for the opportunity to accrue more riches.
The “bomb party” of the novel’s title occurs in the final chapter, which recounts a lavish outdoor dinner party at which each of six guests will select a wrapped package (cracker) from a tub. Every package except one contains a check for a vast sum of money. As for the last package? Dr. Fischer informs his guests that the final package contains a bomb that will blow the recipient to pieces.
Will the dinner-party attendees participate in the macabre exercise? I will only reveal that it all ends badly, though not necessarily in the way you might imagine.
Refuting the Misanthrope’s Contempt
Dr. Fischer despises his guests. He makes a distinction at one point between what it means to hate and what it means to despise. Hatred, he explains, is exemplified by an intense dislike, a revulsion. Conversely, when you despise someone, you feel contempt and scorn toward them; you perceive them to be beneath you. In the experiments, Dr. Fischer haughtily corroborates his assumptions; the guests, through their slavering sycophancy, validate his grim theses.
Dr. Fischer has a compulsion to induce subservience in his guests — to see them as he believes them to be, without a shred of dignity or integrity. I wonder, though, whether that was what he truly wanted, or merely what he expected. What he actually needed was for his guests to defy his assumptions and to disprove his theories. He needed them to prove him wrong. He needed, and perhaps wanted, one of his guests to summon enough decency and integrity to bring an end to the theatre of cruelty.
My point is, a misanthrope doesn’t only hate others: he also hates himself. He hates what he is and what he has become. Even so, he might entertain a flickering hope that others might yet restore his lost faith in the decency of humanity. He secretly — though he would probably never admit as much – wants you to fight back, to show him that there’s an alternative to merciless contempt.
Every time we succumb to the cruelties of the misanthrope, we debase ourselves and degrade the world around us. Being a toady — a toad, in the words of Fischer’s daughter — is to be less than human.
In everything we say and do, we choose whether we want a better or a worse world. You can say no to obsequiousness and servility, and you can say yes instead to dignity, empathy, and integrity. In doing so, you’ll prove the misanthropes wrong, and perhaps you’ll even cause them to reconsider their brutalist worldview.
One final comment: Some will complain that this is a political commentary. It’s nothing of the sort. My objections are ethical, not political. There’s a difference. My hope is that most readers will know how and where to find it.