In many respects modern life in America has never been better. From healthcare to the economy, technological innovation like smart phones and handy gadgets of all kinds, people enjoy conveniences and opportunities unimaginable 25 years ago. And yet, many people are angry.
Civilization has always had its discontents. We all must give up some level of personal autonomy in order for society to function well, which is why we are taught to obey the laws and regulations that govern behavior. It’s the price we each must pay in order to live peaceably among one another.
Yet any system of social control produces side effects, symptoms of comfort or distress that are the inevitable result of conformance to the rules of society. To get along, we must repress urges and inclinations that are deemed improper, immoral, or anti-social, and repression always produces symptoms: physical, emotional and subconscious.
Addiction, loneliness, depression, suicide, self-abuse; all these are symptoms, indicators of the emotional difficulty people have conforming to the imperatives of social and cultural structure. When such symptoms appear, either collectively or individually, we identify them as problems to be solved.
Dead-end jobs that offer little more than scraping by, increasingly intrusive bureaucracy, invasive complex technology; these aspects of modern life can deaden the human spirit, which will nonetheless persistently find ways to express itself and which can never be completely suppressed. Such is the nature of symptoms. So too, feelings of alienation, helplessness, and futility are symptoms, and if predominant can become embedded within the fabric of society and personality, eventually morphing into a source of pleasure through ways of being that feel more real, energetic, vital, and alive…like anger.
Our American fixation on the pursuit of happiness doesn’t help. For many, the pursuit of happiness means trying to feel happy all the time, a misconceived path to certain disappointment. Such misconceptions can poison life, stimulating symptoms of emotional disorder such as paranoia, suspicion, rage, and violence. Under such a darkened psychological cloud, the at-all-costs effort to avoid becoming a victim becomes a pleasurable, energizing pursuit in itself. Victims thus become a lower caste, scapegoats, whose very existence demands aggression against them in order to affirm the security of one’s own higher position in society. The symptom thus becomes an emotional refuge.
School shootings, demonizing immigrants, race-baiting and the like are symptoms of emotional disorder, behaviors that vivify otherwise deadened lives. A search for motives is too commonly misplaced into a cognitive context, as if such behaviors are the product of reason rather than emotion.
At root is an emotional, albeit primarily subconscious, effort to transform unpleasant symptoms into feelings of pleasure, to turn discomfort into joy. Such is the complexity of being human, and explains why inhumane cruelty is so readily a part of our collective experience. In symptomatic acts of transformation, the tortured, angry soul finds relief in torturing others and attracts followers also seeking to avoid or relieve their own symptoms of pain, emptiness, and anguish.
So persistent is this unfortunate human vulnerability that entire socio-political movements have been built upon it, resulting in genocide, slavery, warfare and great suffering. It has alway been this way.
An angry mob storming the nation’s capital is a symptom of emotional disorder, an indicator that despite the unparalleled comforts and conveniences we enjoy, the psychological price we pay for civilization still remains high. So it goes, America.
Photo By Tyler Merbler from USA – DSC09265-2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98724490
