Society and Dysfunction

on anxiety & modernity by isthmus nekoi

I still think about trauma these days, although I tend to think more about the anxiety spectrum. There is afterall, something very fetishized or at least, detached about anxiety. Anxiety is not an emotion oriented towards something present, but rather, is future oriented. Anxiety is our fear of the future. It is a ghost fear, a fetish fear, it is at once less present yet more pervasive than fear itself. It is fear intellectualized, no, grotesquely magnified beyond reason by a reason derailed.

Modern society has no roots, no history, no grounding. We drift in a perpetual freefall, this strange sensation of exhilaration, panic, and numbed boredom, that tight feeling in our chests, the wind in our faces. The dream and the nightmare of the modern man, his most deepest desire and most fervent fear, that which lies below our perverse fusion of lust, anxiety and reason, is the belief that he might actually be falling into something…

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Nice article!

It makes me think of certain people: Arnold Mindell, Paul Shepard, Derrick Jensen, etc.  I’m also reminded of someone like Carl Jung.

Both Jung and Reich were students of Freud and also both were interested in the significance of UFOs in terms of society.  Jung saw UFOs as a symbol of change, of potential.  UFOs became popular during a very traumatic era of world history.

I mention all of those people because they either have an alternative view on trauma or they see the problems of modern life as being part of a larger context.  Paul Shepard would trace the problems of society back to the beginning of civilization.  Along with Derrick Jensen, Shepard would say our traumatized state isn’t merely personal nor merely an issue of our human condition but instead about our relationship to the larger world.

That is where I see the ideas of Jung and Mindell fitting in as they present humans as being essentially interconnected.  The problems of society can be seen in the individual, and vice versa.

I would add that, similar to Shepard’s view, the Axial Age was a particularly traumatic shift in society.  That was the historical period when cultures were clashing and urbanization was developing.

The foundation of the modern self was being set at that time.  For example, religious practitioners of the time were attracted to a rootless lifestyle with ascetic monks and preachers who would travel from town to town.  Also, this is when people started idealizing a perfect world that was located elsewhere.  This world and human nature was flawed.

It seems to me that the industrial age and the 20th century international conflicts are the delayed effects of the Axial Age.  The ideals of that time (equality, freedom, etc.) took a couple of millennia to fully take hold.  But humans have never really adapted to this social change in a healthy way and maybe it isn’t even possible.  The human animal simply isn’t designed for modern civilization.

Of course, people are traumatized.  All of human society is traumatized.

Related to the above article, here are some additional thoughts from another blog and from a forum thread:

The Mad Liberation Front from the Red Star Cafe blog

With the exception of Freud’s eccentric disciple Wilhelm Reich, it was not until after WW II that a school of  psychology appeared that was willing to take Freud’s hypothesis of collective insanity seriously and to launch out along a different route. R.D. Laing, whose background was as much Existentialist-Marxist as it was Freudian, was among the first to assume an adversarial position on the issue of insanity.

Convinced that the mad, or at least some portion of those designated schizophrenic, may be a rare and endangered species desperately in need of protection, Laing argued that psychological breakdown could be the first step toward enlightened breakthrough. It might be an incipient assertion of true sanity by those who were still at least resilient enough to feel the pain of society’s oppression. It is therefore the psychiatrist’s responsibility to take the side of the mad against wrong-headed social authority.

“We live”, said Laing, in the midst of  “socially shared hallucinations…our collusive madness is what we call sanity”.

orwell’s 1984 and the early theories of wilhelm reich (starting post by peebo in a thread on the Wrong Planet forum)

it appears to me that one of the main premises of george orwell’s 1984 is the idea of sexual repression rendering the population open to oppression by the party. the repression of freely expressed sexuality by the party is clearly an overt theme in the novel. junior anti-sex league, winston and julia’s “subversive” affair, etc. this idea is very similar to the ideas put forward by wilhelm reich in his “the mass psychology of fascism”.

http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf

reich’s main point in this book is that oppressive fascist regimes are manifest only in situations where sexual repression is endemic in a society. he covers more than this, but this is the main thrust. i wonder whether orwell had been exposed to reich’s ideas, or whether they just came to a similar conclusion independently?

Morality, Politics, and Psychology

Below is a comment I wrote to a blog post on the website of my local paper.  In it, I’m pointing out the problems of ideology that lacks a larger context of knowledge.  I do think that sometimes its necessary to declare a moral principle as valid even if it affronts the commonsense of the majority.  This is the ideal of natural law which makes sense to me personally.  Besides, its what our country is based on and heck it’s even what early Christianity incorporated from the Greeks.  Morality isn’t an issue of majority opinion.  There simply are certain inalienable rights that democracy stands or falls by. 

However, I don’t think it useful to invoke universal moral principles in order to dismiss intelligent discussion.  Standing by one’s principles is important, but so is basing one’s opinion on facts and logic.  If the data (objective and subjective, scientific and psychological) seem to undermine the practical usefulness of a principle, then that is very important info to consider.

Why are Condoms a Liberal Idea? , by IowaArtist

My response:

I’ve always thought it odd that people support abstinence only programs when they’ve been shown to increase the rate of pregnancies. I think there are two reasons.

1) The attitude is ideological. It’s a principle they believe in so strongly that it would go against their sense of morality even to consider the practical implications.

2) Also, the fact that teens still get pregnant just proves their belief that liberals have undermined our moral society. The teens getting pregnant is the direct fault of liberals and so giving into the liberal agenda would be even worse.

They don’t consider the possibility that teens would have sex whether or not liberals had political influence. What they seem to believe is that if they hold onto their principles long enough then maybe all of society (including teen sexuality) will change to fit their ideological vision of reality.

Another important factor is that, because of chemicals in our diet, girls mature at a younger age than they used to. Also, college has become a necessity for more people than in the past and so people now marry much later. Many kids start having sexual urges at 10 or so when they lack psychological maturity and they’re not likely to get married until their late 20s or early 30s.

Considering those facts, is it practical to promote abstinence? How likely is it for the average kid to remain abstinent for the next 2 decades of their life?

In hunter-gatherer cultures, people marry as soon as they sexually mature. This is unimaginable in our society. It works for them because kids sexually mature much later with a non-agrarian diet. The problem with modern society is that it creates an unnatural situation, and so our moral ideologies become out of step with our own biology.

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There is another perspective to all of this.  Disagreements over such socio-political issues might not be all that directly related to either what is moral or practical.  Much research has been done on politics and personality.  The first two links are articles I just came across from The New York Times and the last link is to a post of from my Gaia blog in which I cover all of the research and theories.

Op-Ed Columnist: Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal, by Nicholas D. Kristof

Across the Great Divide: Investigating Links Between Personality and Politics, by Patricia Cohen

Politics, Personality, and Character by Me

It makes me wonder what actually motivates people.  Much of our psychological tendencies are based in genetics and some show as early as infancy (look at twins research for very clear evidence of genetic predispositions), but there are many other factors as well.  Here is one factor I mentioned in the comments in the above blog post:

An interesting complexity is the fact that personality correlates to party affiliation but not to party registration.  So, its possible that conformity to social standards of family and community may play a stronger role than does personality. 

How or rather where we’re raised is infinitely important.  My parents were raised in conservative communities and they grew up to be conservative.  However, they went through a slight liberal phase as young parents maybe because they moved to a more liberal community during a transitional period of their life.  This liberal community of my childhood had a strong influence on me and, along with my brothers, I became mostly liberal.  This shows that community may have more influence than family, and I believe I’ve seen research that shows peers are the most influential for kids (rather than what kids are taught and modelled by their parents). 

As examples, I’m a liberal child of conservative parents and  my dad is a conservative child of liberal parents, but my mom is a conservative child of conservative parents.  Personality might predict, though, to what extent one is influenced by other factors such as community and family.  My mom, according to MBTI, is and ISTJ which is one of the most conservative personality types and also the type that is most likely to follow authority (such as parents) without question or rebellion.  So, maybe it isn’t surprising that her views are more in line with her parents.  I’m an INFP which is a personality type that tends to have more of an independent streak than, for instance, an ISTJ.  But also INFPs tend to be more liberal. 

The question, then, is to consider why people end up with particular personality types.  Research has shown that certain traits are inheritable, but not all.  My parents are ISTJ and ENTJ, and so where did my INFP come from since the last two letters representing Introverted Feeling are completely opposite my parents’ shared Extraverted Thinking.  It still may be genetic as my grandmother (my father’s mother) seemed likely to have been an INFP.  On the other hand, one of my brothers has a personality almost exactly like my mom and yet the two are on opposite ends of the political spectrum.  I assume that is where non-genetic influences come in. 

To get down to one specific aspect of personality, Thinking vs Feeling in MBTI is very central to political attitudes.  Thinking types (especially Extraverted Thinking) fit the typical attitude of conservatism in which a principle is held as true no matter what.  Feeling types (especially Introverted Feeling), instead, are more likely to consider the people involved to make a decision.  Basically, its a difference of whether someone believes that people should serve their moral values or else believes their moral values should serve people. 

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This translates to the original example in that a conservative is less likely to change their attitude even when it seems counter to the evidence of how humans actually behave.  To the conservative, we should strive to live up to our ideals (even if it means failing) rather than to lower our ideals.  That is a worthy attitude in certain situations, but problematic in other situations.  An interesting additional definition of conservatism is a common belief that human individuals are limited in their ability to change and so in a sense conservatives are in certain ways more accepting (or rather more expecting) of people failing moral standards.  The fact that kids still have sex and get pregnant even when taught abstinence isn’t an argument against the socially conservative belief in abstinence.  For a conservative, that is besides the point or if anything proves their point.

The ironic thing to me is that teenagers don’t have sex because of moral failing but because biology drives them to do so.  It’s natural for animals to feel an instinct to procreate.  It’s how our species has survived this long and grown so large.  It’s a very effective instinct.  The ironic part of this is that the socially conservative attitude against pre-marital sex is also embedded in human biology.  Conservative beliefs, despite what some conservatives may think, didn’t fall from the lips of God.  Besides biology, there are also socio-cultural factors to no end.  For instance, Spiral Dynamics gives a detailed account of why certain values are held by societies during specific stages of development.  Or, as another example, the generational theory of Strauss and Howe seems to explain why certain values follow cyclical patterns of popularity.

I don’t mean to just pick on conservatives as we’re all equally influenced by factors we have little control over.  It’s the sad fate of being human that civilization evolves quickly and biology evolves slowly.  And it’s a major problem that modern civilization is so far out of sync with human nature… which applies to everyone whether conservative or liberal or whatever.  In this, the conservatives have intuited an element of our dire straights.  They are right in a sense that our human nature fails us in the situation of modernity, but it would be better to understand that it’s modernity rather than human nature that is the problem.  We have to either develop socially to a new stage more in balance with our own nature (and in balance with nature in general) or else eventually destroy ourselves. 

My criticism of conservatism is that their answer is unhelpful to say the least.  Social conservatism, as we know it now, is as mired in modernity as anything else… related to the idea that fundamentalism is a direct result of modernity meaning it isn’t actually a return to pre-modern values.  If looked at closely, the socially conservative ideals such as family values don’t fit the truly traditional values that we as humans held for thousands upon thousands of years prior to civilization (and actually they don’t even fit the traditional values of a few centuries ago).  If we’re going to attempt a revival of traditional values, then we should really take it seriously and revive hunter-gatherer lifestyle which is the only way to support values of the most traditional variety or at the very least return to an agrarian-based society of small villages and close-knit communities (from which America was first born).  The problem with Christianity is that its a religion that arose in an imperialistic society and in an urban setting.  It’s a religion very much of modern civilization.

I’m not dissing civilization, but humanity is now facing probably the largest obstacle it has ever faced.  We are in an unsustainable situation which is potentially an endgame scenario.  Derrick Jensen explains this all very well, but I hope that he is wrong that the only solution is for civilization to end.  Humans are innovative when the stakes are high.   I’m sure we humans will (eventually) give a noble effort in attempting to save ourselves from the predicament we created for ourselves… and we might even succeed to create some new form of society.  If future humans do succeed in not only surviving but thriving to boot, I suspect they’ll look back with bemusement at the idiocy of both liberals and conservatives.

Anyways, disagreements about the sexual proclivities of teenagers is the least of our problems.  I say let them enjoy their youth because they’ll grow up soon enough and realize the mess they’ve inherited.

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In case anyone is further interested in this subject, here is a post I made in this blog a while back:

Political Party, Morality, Personality, Gender