Indecisive Men — What Is the Cause?

First presented in a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City

The blade of certainty and the smoke of doubt.
— Eli Siegel, “Prosody Is Ours”

The way men are decisive and indecisive has confused and even tormented us—it did me. I learned there can be a good kind of indecision in a man that comes from his desire to know, the thing in him that doesn’t want to sum things up in a quick way.

But I had an indecisiveness that was troubling. I could agonize over important decisions like whether or not to take a new job, and also about seemingly small things like what to choose from the menu in a restaurant or even what pair of shoes to put on in the morning. Once, I stood in front of the closet for ten minutes not knowing what to wear, feeling like I was in a whirl and also stuck.

The education of Aesthetic Realism understands the cause of this debilitating indecisiveness. In a class for consultants and associates, Ellen Reiss, the Chair of Education, explained:

The big reason people have trouble as to indecision is the underlying indecision as to which represents them: respect or contempt. People don’t want to make up their minds about that. And while you don’t, you can have all sorts of casualties—you can decide and not decide in bad ways.

I am very thankful for what I’ve learned on this subject because it changed me centrally and made me so much more sure of myself—something that’s possible for every man.

The Biggest Decision

I learned that the biggest decision we make is about how to see the whole world. Our deepest desire, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world, to respect it on an honest basis. But there is a fierce drive in people for contempt, the desire to make less of everything, and we think this will make us important.

Growing up in Miami, I wanted to respect things as I did a science experiment for school comparing household disinfectants. I followed the teacher’s instructions, carefully sterilizing petri dishes, growing the same kind of bacteria in each one, and then seeing how various disinfectants worked on the bacteria. Every day I noted down any changes and took photographs to document what I saw. I felt proud as I tried to be exact.

But I had the debate Eli Siegel described in a lecture:

At any moment, no matter what it is, we are deciding whether we are going to see the fact that we are surrounded by ever so many things we don’t know, as good for us or bad for us. We may not be aware of this…but…we are deciding at any one time whether it is good for us to be angry, to be sulky, to be uninterested…to think things are dull.

I remember countless Saturdays moping around the house, wasting the whole day not deciding what to do. My mother would suggest one thing after another: “Why don’t you call your friend Matt and see what he’s doing?” “No, I don’t like Matt any more,” I answered in a kvetching, miserable tone. “How about Rusty?” “No, I think he went to the movies already.” I ended up doing nothing except tormenting my mother, and didn’t know something in me actually preferred being in this murky, indecisive state. With all my complaining, I was having the victory of contempt, feeling nothing could make me happy.

Indecisive Men: Because We Have Two Minds

“Do you think making up one’s mind is a delightful process?” Eli Siegel asked in a lecture. And he continued:

Just watch people making up their minds what movie to go to or where to go for the summer. It can be very difficult…The result is that we come to have two minds, because a mind that hasn’t been made up is a mind in two…you can’t give your entire self to either side: part of you goes this way and part that way.

This explains a crisis I was in at Syracuse University in 1973. I was a theatre major and had always wanted to be a good actor. This, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, came from the desire to respect the world: An actor tries to get inside the feelings, the hopes and fears of a character different from himself, to take on the way he moves and speaks.

I was offered a part in a new play that would premier at the repertory theatre in town, with the hope that the show would go to New York, and I was thrilled. But the play would open at Christmas-time, and that meant I wouldn’t go home to Miami for vacation. I began to feel a tug: How could I pass up the approval and presents I would get during the holidays? I also worried, could I really play the part? With every day I felt more and more indecisive. Three times I went back and forth between telling the director yes, I would take the part, then, very agitated, saying I had changed my mind. Finally, in desperation, I called and said I just couldn’t do it. I went home that Christmas, utterly ashamed of myself, feeling like half a man.

That decision haunted me for years—I felt searingly that I had been untrue to myself. Through Aesthetic Realism I learned about the central fight in me and every person, which this instance represented. One part of me wanted the width, the respect, the care for what’s different from oneself that acting stands for. Another part wanted to love just myself, to be flattered and made important just because I was me, which was contempt.

In Aesthetic Realism classes, Ellen Reiss has asked me questions that have educated me so deeply, such as: “Do you think everyone has some fight between whether they should see great meaning in what is outside of them or they should be made much of?”; and “Do you think as you show real care for what is not yourself, something in you says, ‘Come home, come home’—the ego Lorelei?”

Something in me did say that, and I am so lucky to know about it! That is the wonderful thing the education of Aesthetic Realism provides—it enables us to articulate what is impelling us in any specific decision, enables us to ask, “Will this have me like the world? How? What in me might interfere?” Asking these questions cuts through the murk a person can feel, giving him new clarity and pride.

A Classic Movie about the Biggest Decision

In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the chief character, George Bailey, played with beautiful rawness and depth by Jimmy Stewart, comes to be in the fight of his life about the biggest decisions: Is this a world we can honestly like? What should I value most in myself and other people? This film has been loved since 1946 because it gives dramatic, outward form to the interior struggle, the indecision in people about those questions; and it also presents, with toughness and true sentiment, a vivid fight between the desire in a person to have good will and the ill will encouraged by profit economics.

The film is a mingling of the everyday and the supernatural. As it begins, we learn that George Bailey of Bedford Falls is in a desperate state and needs help. He is assigned a guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody—who is shown George’s whole life through a series of flashbacks. We see George as a boy, saving his younger brother from drowning when he falls through thin ice on the pond; then, working at the local drugstore, George boldly stops the elderly druggist, Mr. Gower—who is distraught and has been drinking— from accidentally sending pills with poison to a sick patient.

Right from the start, George is undecided about what represents him. He wants to be kind, but also has big plans to travel and make lots of money, and when he talks about it he gets puffed up and has contempt for what he sees as the hum-drum Bedford Falls. “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet,” he says when he’s a young man, “and I’m going to see the world.”

George works at the Building & Loan company his father founded, which enables people with modest incomes to buy homes. But George feels this is small-time and won’t make him a success. Just before he goes to college, he says to his father:

GEORGE: I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office…I want to do something big and something important.

That night, George’s father has a stroke and dies, leaving the fate of his company to the board of directors. One of them is Mr. Potter, a vicious, rich man who wants to disband the company because it is competition for the decrepit homes he rents for high prices. George is ready to let the business go under.

But when Potter talks with blatant contempt about George’s father and the people of Bedford Falls, George makes a beautiful decision, saying:

GEORGE: Now, hold on, Mr. Potter…my father was no business man. I know that…But…he did help a few people get out of your slums…Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter…they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community…People were human beings to [my father], but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a richer man than you’ll ever be!

The board is swept, Potter is voted down, and the Building & Loan will survive—with one hitch: George must be its president. Reluctantly, he takes the job, never going to college, and in time a community of beautiful homes is built where people can live with more dignity.

What Men Learn in Aesthetic Realism Consultations

Michael White is a 22 year old actor living in New York City. He told his consultants he wanted to learn how to see his father and his girlfriend better, and also to understand why, as an actor, he felt he couldn’t get deeply within a character—he “just scratched the surface.” As he learned to have more respect for the world, he felt something new. He was proud as he told us:

Michael White. The last few hours I had a really great time studying for an audition I have tomorrow…I saw some things in my own past that relate to the character I’m going for. It feels good.

Consultants. What is the principle behind what you did today?

Michael White. I’m not sure.

Consultants. Well, do you think you’re trying to see as deeply as you can the relation between your own experience and something that’s completely outside of you—the character? Do you think whenever you act it’s always you and not you?

Michael White. Yeah, it’s got to be.

Consultants. It’s self and world coming together in a pretty elemental way?

Michael White. Oh yeah—that hits me in the center.

Later, Mr. White said he was troubled by how he could be itchy to fight with people. “I have these little scenarios in the subway or at work,” he said, “pictures in my head of arguing with someone.” Mr. White had that “underlying indecision” Ellen Reiss described about what represents us—respect or contempt. His consultants said:

Consultants. You have to see the pleasure a person can get from fighting something. It can seem painful, but there’s a tremendous pleasure if a person can beat out the world.

And we asked:

Consultants. Do you think you’re having too much feeling these days? And the other self is saying “You’re liking things too much. You’re giving yourself to the character. You’re having more feeling for your girlfriend, and your father.” Do you have to get back and show that you’re in control?

Michael White. Yeah!

Consultants. There’s an enormous pleasure being able to despise, kick, beat anything we want. And then there’s the pleasure of having the world inside of one and trying to be fair to it. This fight goes on in mankind, it goes on in you. And we’re trying to describe it so you can make better decisions.

Michael White. Thank you—I want to!

Nothing Is Good Enough to Have You

A big place I was indecisive was in love. I was elusive and teasing, and, although I wouldn’t have put it this way, mean. I would be in relation to a woman who, at first, I saw as wonderful. But soon I worked to find a flaw that began to loom large, and I had doubts if this was the girl for me.

What was behind this, Ellen Reiss explains in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1279, as she describes an Aesthetic Realism class discussion in which a man said he was troubled by indecisiveness. Ms. Reiss asked:

Do you think if you decide on something you are saying it is good enough to have you, and you would like to feel nothing is good enough to have you?

And I felt described from within by what she explained next:

A person can feel he has given himself to the world above and beyond the call of duty by having to do with people at all, maybe marrying someone, giving careful thought at work; and you have to put your foot down somewhere! So people put their foot down against a world they dislike by not making decisions—by not commending the world through solidly accepting something in it.

In the film, George Bailey has this fight, and we see it when he visits Mary Hatch, played movingly by Donna Reed. He cares deeply for Mary who is lovely, smart and also a good critic of him. But George sees her as a small-town girl who will tie him down to Bedford Falls forever. In a sulky mood, he goes to her house, walks by, hesitates, comes back again—and all the while Mary is watching him from her bedroom window above:

MARY: What are you doing, picketing?

GEORGE (stops, startled, and looks up): Hello, Mary. I just happened to be passing by.

MARY: Yeah, so I noticed. Have you made up your mind?

GEORGE: About what?

MARY: About coming in.

Mary is glad to see George, runs downstairs and opens the door.

MARY: Well, are you coming in or aren’t you?

GEORGE: Well, I’ll come in for a minute, but…(he goes in).

MARY: Would you rather leave?

GEORGE: No, I don’t want to be rude.

MARY: Well, then, sit down. (He sits, uncomfortably.)

George looks at his watch and is about to leave when Mary’s mother leans over the banister and asks what does George want.

GEORGE: Well, I…

MARY: What do you want?

GEORGE (indignant): Me? Not a thing. I just came in to get warm…You know I didn’t come here to…to…

MARY (rising): What did you come here for?

GEORGE: I don’t know. You tell me. You’re supposed to be the one that has all the answers. You tell me.

MARY (terribly hurt): Oh, why don’t you go home?

GEORGE (almost shouting): That’s where I’m going. I don’t know why I came here in the first place! Good night!

Once when I was seeing a woman but felt, as I put it “hesitant,” Ms. Reiss asked, “What is pushing you toward the lady?”

Bennett Cooperman: Me.

Ellen Reiss: Do you like that? Do you make it clear that something is driving you to be in her company and you like it?

Bennett Cooperman: No.

And then Ms. Reiss asked this question which had my life in it:

Is Bennett Cooperman on this earth to use himself to honor things or to be urged, sought, with him aloof?

That question has so much in it. The desire to be aloof had always made me ashamed of myself, and learning about it through questions like these freed me to see what I really want. It makes me very proud to say today that I love my wife, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, so much. Meryl’s keen, wide perception of things, her kindness, her humorous and friendly criticism of me—including where I can be wrongly indecisive—make me so happy.

In the movie, George storms out of Mary’s living room, but just then the telephone rings. So they both can hear the conversation, in a famous scene Mary holds the phone between herself and George. It’s Sam Wainwright, who tells George about a job in plastics in Rochester that could make him rich, saying, “I’m letting you in on the ground floor.” But standing so close to Mary, George’s real feeling begins to emerge, and the more Sam talks the less George hears him. Finally, he drops the phone, grabs Mary and says:

GEORGE (fiercely): Now you listen to me! I don’t want any plastics! I don’t want any ground floors…I want to do what I want to do. And you’re…and you’re… (He pulls her to him in a fierce embrace).

George has made up his mind—he needs Mary to be more himself.

And a decision that will affect their whole lives takes place on their wedding day. On the way to the train for their honeymoon, George and Mary see crowds of people outside. There’s been a run on the bank, and Mr. Potter, knowing the Building & Loan is on shaky ground, has offered people fifty cents on the dollar if they take their money out of it. George jumps out of the cab and speaks passionately to the worried men and women who say they need their money to live.

Then Mary holds up a roll of bills—her and George’s honeymoon money—and calls out:

MARY: How much do you need?

GEORGE: Hey! [we] got two thousand dollars!…This’ll tide us over until the bank reopens…How much do you need?

The Building & Loan is saved! George and Mary never take their honeymoon cruise, but we see the pride they feel because they made this decision in behalf of fairness to people.

Later that night, when George opens the door to his home and sees his new bride, she has such a radiant look of deep sweetness and loveliness, it takes your breath away.

The Main Decision: Can We Like the World?

George Bailey never gets to do the things he felt he wanted so much, travel and make a lot of money. And so all through the movie he doesn’t really make up his mind: Has the world given him what he wanted or rooked him? Did he take care of himself by being kind to the people of Bedford Falls? Should he be grateful for his life?

A showdown occurs when, through various mishaps, the Building & Loan is about to collapse. It is Christmas eve, and at his wits end, George goes home to Mary and his four children. He is tortured, and here, Jimmy Stewart’s acting is at its height—he shows George’s desperation with sheerness and subtlety. I believe what he does in this scene, and often throughout the movie, is explained by what Ellen Reiss writes in The Right Of:

Decision and indecision are opposites that may torment people in their lives, but in every work of art they are one and make for beauty. They take the form of sharpness and vagueness; that which is firm and that which wavers; the definite and the tremulous.

You can see that relation of sharpness and vagueness, the firm and the wavering on Jimmy Stewart’s face. One moment he is furious, the next he’s shaky, ready to give up, and these things interchange with great sincerity. Stewart, as actor, didn’t “decide” what the emotion should be in a way that would be two-dimensional. He lets the emotion take him, affect him—it’s ephemeral, wavering, the way people really are.

George Bailey goes to the bridge, ready to throw himself into the water and end it all. But just then, a mysterious and friendly forces intervenes, and he is stopped. And as he looks at the world around him, and sees the familiar town and faces of people, he is tremendously grateful. As the film ends, we feel he sees his life has real meaning, that he’s had a good effect on many people who love him for it, and that this is worth everything.

That is what Aesthetic Realism can enable people to feel on a completely logical basis. It’s what Michael White felt when he wrote to us, “I’m extremely excited by the world that’s opening up to me, or I should say that I’m opening up to. I feel very fortunate to be studying Aesthetic Realism, it’s enabling me to see so much more than I saw before.” What’s the best decision anyone could make?— to study this great, kind education!