You’re at a party, happily chatting with a stranger who’s easy-going, funny, and intelligent. You’re having a great time. In passing, you make an off-the-cuff joke about Marxism. Suddenly, the entire mood shifts. The stranger frowns and tenses up.
“Why would you say that?”, he says. You laugh nervously.
“Do you think this is funny?", he splutters.
Congratulations! You’ve just met a “Serious Man”. They’re everywhere; they live amongst us, and they are all, according to de Beauvoir, living an inauthentic life.
A Serious Man is someone who sees one area of life as so unimaginably serious that no one can, or ought to, question it. And it should definitely never be mocked. It might be “a father, a boss, a Christian, a Communist”, or anyone really. In each case, some topic is raised up to the “stature of an idol”. Everyone must take this idol seriously. There is no greater thing than this!
De Beauvoir noted, with irony, how easily the Serious Man mocks others’ idols. The atheist scoffs at the believer. The Marxist rolls his eyes at the capitalist. The old cynic laughs at the young romantic. It’s quite okay to ridicule others’ seriousness, but never one’s own.
The issue comes in how much of oneself the Serious Man invests in these idols. When he “puts all his eggs into one basket”, he develops a dependency on it. His identity is tied to it. And so he “falls into a state of preoccupation”. Everything is seen as a threat to his idol. He tilts at windmills and takes to the barricades. The whole universe is a potential challenge, and he sees insults and slights everywhere.
The Serious Man is a dangerous man. He’ll not hesitate to sacrifice anything — everything — to his idol. He ignores the value of other people because he sees his idol as the only “unconditional value”. Everything must bow before this god. Everything lives insofar as it serves the object of his seriousness.
Churchill once said, “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”. What better way to describe De Beauvoir’s Serious Man? At best, they can be a dull and broken record. At worst, they have the homicidal fanaticism that only unbending ideology can give us.