Evacuate

More recently, Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death (1959) suggests that anal personality traits not only characterize individuals in our society, but also characterize the society as a whole. He argues, drawing support from sources as Marx and Keynes, that many of our social ills stem from the essentially anal characters of Capitalism and Scientific Rationality.

In their pure form, these systems encourage materialism, mastery over nature, lust for power, irrational desire for luxuries, obsession with death, and alienation. Brown goes on to assert that if we changed our attitudes, if we sought not to rise above our bodies, equating them with excrement and death, but rather accept them and enjoy them, then the social problems he discusses, problems ultimately caused by repression, would disappear and humankind would be able to have fun, no longer obsessed by morbid interests in money, power, and status.

Science would seek unity with, rather than mastery over, nature and people would abandon uptight, competitive status-seeking and become naturally generous. The technology and social structures we have bought with centuries of paying the high price of anality, could be redirected to create a peaceful, life-loving world.

Brown sounds utopian, but Thomas More himself said some of the same things; in Utopia, the chamberpots are made of gold and silver because citizens hold these materials in such contempt. Similarly, Alan Dundes defends the notion of "national character" by supporting with volumes of evidence the idea that the German culture has a strong, deeply rooted anal personality, and that this understanding sheds lights on its art, science, and even its Nazi history, demonstrating one very high price of excessive anality.