THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF MISERY - John Zerzan

Taken from "Future Primitive and Other Essays", published by Autonomedia 
in conjunction with Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
ISBN: 1-57027-000-7
Anti-Copyright 1994: may be freely pirated and quoted. The author and 
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Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the '60s-shifts that 
have not ceased, but have been forced in less direct, less public 
directions-Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man, described a populace 
characterized by flattened personality, satisfied and content. With the 
pervasive anguish of today, who could be so described? Therein lies a 
deep, if inchoate critique.

Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individuality's last 
remnants; but if this were so, if society now consists of the thoroughly 
homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the enduring tension 
which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more 
people I have known have cracked up. It's going on to a staggering 
degree, in a context of generalized, severe emotional disease-ease.

Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration 
would lead to revolt and to capital's downfall. Might it not be that an 
increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of 
revolt-indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance?

And yet it is obvious that "mere" suffering is no guarantee of anything. 
"Desire does not 'want' revolution, it is revolutionary in its own 
right," as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in 
Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired 
against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and 
enslavement remains widespread.

We know that behind psychic repression and avoidance stands social 
repression, even as massive denial shows at least some signs of giving 
way to a necessary confrontation with reality in all of its dimensions. 
Awareness of the social must not mean ignoring the personal, for that 
would only repeat, in its own terms, the main error of psychology. If in 
the nightmare of today each of us has his or her fears and limitations, 
there is no liberating route that forgets the primacy of the whole, 
including how that whole exists in each of us.

Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom-the madness of everyday life. 
Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral 
level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there 
left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety? 
Mental health epidemiologists suspect that no more than twenty percent 
of us are free of psychopathological symptoms. Thus we act out a 
"pathology of normalcy" marked by the chronic psychic impoverishment of 
a qualitatively unhealthy society.

Arthur Barsky's Worried Sick (1988) diagnoses an American condition 
where, despite all the medical "advances," the population has never felt 
such a "constant need for medical care." The crisis of the family and of 
personal life in general sees to it that the pursuit of health, and 
emotional health in particular, has reached truly industrial 
proportions. A work-life increasingly toxic, in every sense of the word, 
joins with the disintegration of the family to fuel the soaring growth 
of the corporate industrial health machine. But for a public in its 
misery dramatically more interested in health care than ever before, the 
dominant model of medical care is clearly only part of the problem, not 
its solution. Thus Thomas Bittker writes of "The Industrialization of 
American Psychiatry" (American Journal of Psychiatry, February 1985) and 
Gina Kolata discusses how much distrust of doctors exists, as medicine 
is seen as just another business (New York Times, February 20, 1990).

The mental disorder of going along with things as they are is now 
treated almost entirely by biochemicals, to reduce the individual's 
consciousness of socially induced anguish, Tranquilizers are now the 
world's most widely prescribed drugs, and anti-depressants set record 
sales as well. Temporary relief-despite side-effects and addictive 
properties-is easily obtained, while we are all ground down a little 
more. The burden of simply getting by is "Why All Those People Feel They 
Never Have Any Time," according to Trish Hall (New York Times, January 
2, 1988), who concluded that 'everybody just seems to feel worn out" by 
it all.

An October '89 Gallup poll found that stress-related illness is becoming 
the leading hazard in the nation's workplaces, and a month later an 
almost five-fold increase in California stress-related disability claims 
was reported to have occurred between 1982 and 1986. More recent figures 
estimate that almost two-thirds of new cases in employee assistance 
programs represent psychiatric or stress symptoms. In his Modern Madness 
(1986), Douglas La Bier asked, "What is it about work today that can 
cause such harm?"

Part of the answer is found in a growing literature that reveals the 
Information Age "office of tomorrow" to be no better than the sweatshop 
of yesteryear. In fact, computerization introduces a neo-Taylorist 
monitoring of work that surpasses all earlier management control 
techniques. The "technological whip" now increasingly held over 
white-collar workers prompted Curt Supplee, in a January '90 Washington 
Post article, to judge, "We have seen the future, and it hurts." A few 
months earlier Sue Miller wrote in the Baltimore Evening Sun of another 
part of the job burnout picture, referring to a national clinical 
psychology study that determined that no less than a staggering 93 
percent of American women "are caught up in a blues epidemic."

Meanwhile, the suicide and homicide rates are rising in the U.S. and 
eighty percent of the populace admit to having at least thought of 
suicide. Teenage suicide has risen enormously in the past three decades, 
and the number of teens locked up in mental wards has soared since 1970. 
So very many ways to gauge the pain: serious obesity among children has 
increased more than fifty percent in the last fifteen to twenty years; 
severe eating disorders (bulimia and anorexia) among college women are 
now relatively common; sexual dysfunction is widespread; the incidence 
of panic and anxiety attacks is rising to the point of possibly 
overtaking depression as our most general psychological malady; 
isolation and a sense of meaninglessness continue to make even absurd 
cults and IV evangelism seem attractive to many.

The litany of cultural symptomatics is virtually endless. Despite its 
generally escapist function, even much of contemporary film reflects the 
malaise; see Robert Phillip Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, 
Kubrick, Scorsese. Spielberg, Altman, for example. And many recent 
novels are even more unflinching in their depiction of the desolation
_and degradation of society, and the burnout of youth in particular, 
e.g. Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, Fred Pfail's Goodman 2020, and 
The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews, to mention just a few.

In this context of immiseration, what is happening to prevailing values 
and mores is of signal interest in further situating our "mass 
psychology" and its significance. There are plenty of signs that the 
demand for "instant gratification" is more and more insistent, bringing 
with it outraged lamentations from both left and right and a further 
corrosion of the structure of repression.

Credit card fraud, chiefly the deliberate running up of bills, reached 
the billion-and-a-half-dollar level in 1988 as the personal bankruptcy 
solution to debt, which doubled between 1980 and 1990. Defaults on 
federal student loans more than quadrupled from 1983 to 1989.

In November '89, in a totally unprecedented action, the U.S. Navy was 
forced to suspend operations world-wide for 48 hours owing to a rash of 
accidents involving deaths and injuries over the preceding three weeks. 
A total safety review was involved in the moratorium, which renewed 
discussion of drug abuse, absenteeism, unqualified personnel, and other 
problems threatening the Navy's very capacity to function.

Meanwhile, levels of employee theft reach ever higher levels. In 1989 
the Dallas Police Department reported a 29 percent increase in retail 
shrinkage over the previous five years, and a national survey conducted 
by London House said 62 percent of fast-food employees admitted stealing 
from employers. In early 1990 the FBI disclosed that shoplifting was up 
35 percent since 1984, cutting heavily into retail profits.

November 1988 broke a forty-year mark for low voter turnout, continuing 
a downward direction in electoral participation that has plagued 
presidential elections since 1960. Average college entrance exam (SAT) 
scores declined throughout the '70s and early '80s, then rebounded very 
slightly, and in 1988 continued to fall. At the beginning of the '80s 
Arthur Levin's portrait of college students, When Dreams and Heroes 
Died, recounted "a generalized cynicism and lack of trust," while at the 
end of the decade Robert Nisbet's The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy 
in North America decried the disastrous effects that the younger 
generation's attitude of "hanging loose" was having on the system. 
George F. Will, for his part, reminded us all that social arrangements, 
including the authority of the government, rest "on a willingness of the 
public to believe in them," and Harvard economist Harvey Liebenstein's 
Inside the Firm echoed him in stressing that companies must depend on 
the kind of work their employees want to do.

The nation's high schools now graduate barely seventy percent of 
students who enter as freshman, despite massive focus on the dropout 
rate problem. As Michael de Courcy Hinds put it (New York Times, 
February 17, 1990), "U.S. educators are trying almost anything to keep 
children in school," while an even more fundamental phenomenon is the 
rising number of people of all ages unwilling to learn to read and 
write. David Harman (Illiteracy: A National Dilemma, 1987) gave voice to 
how baffling the situation is, asking why has the acquisition of such 
skills, "seemingly so simple, been so evasive?"

The answer may be that illiteracy, like schooling, is increasingly seen 
to be valued merely for its contribution to the workplace. The refusal 
of literacy is but another sign of a deep turn-off from the system, part 
of the spreading disaffection. In mid-1988 a Hooper survey indicated 
that work now ranks eighth out of ten on a scale of important 
satisfactions in life, and 1989 showed the lowest annual productivity 
growth since the 1981-83 recession. The drug "epidemic," which cost the 
government almost $25 billion to combat in the '80s, threatens society 
most acutely at the level of the refusal of work and sacrifice. There is 
no "war on drugs" that can touch the situation while at the same time 
defending this landscape of pain and false values. The need for escape 
grows stronger and the sick social order feels consequent desertion, the 
steady corrosion of all that holds it up.

Unfortunately, the biggest "escape" of all is one that serves, in the 
main, to preserve the distorted present: what Sennett has called "the 
increasing importance of psychology in bourgeois life." This includes 
the extraordinary proliferation of new kinds of therapy since the '60s, 
and behind this phenomenon the rise of psychology as the predominant 
religion. In the Psychological Society the individual sees himself as a 
problem. This ideology constitutes a pre-eminent social imprisonment, 
because it denies the social; psychology refuses to consider that 
society as a whole shares fundamental responsibility for the conditions 
produced in every human being.

The ramifications of this ideology can be seen on all sides For 
instance, the advice to those besieged by work stress to "take a deep 
breath, laugh, walk it off," etc. Or the moralizing exhortations to 
recycle, as if a personal ethics of consumption is a real answer to the 
global eco-crisis caused by industrial production. Or the 1990 
California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem as a solution to the major 
social breakdown in that state.

At the very center of contemporary life, this outlook legitimates 
alienation, loneliness, despair, and anxiety. because it cannot see the 
context for our malaise. It privatizes distress, and suggests that only 
non-social responses are attainable. This "bottomless fraud of mere 
inwardness," in Adorno's words, pervades every aspect of American life, 
mystifying experience and thus perpetuating oppression.

The widespread allegiance to a therapeutic world view constitutes a 
culture tyrannized by the therapeutic in which, in the name of mental 
health, we are getting mental disease. With the expanding influence of 
behavioral experts, powerlessness and estrangement expand as well; 
modern life must be interpreted for us by the new expertise and its 
popularizers.

Gail Sheehy's Passages (1977), for example, considers life developments 
without reference to any social or historical context, thereby vitiating 
her concern for the "free and autonomous self." Arlie Russell 
Hochschild's Managed Heart (1983) focuses on the "commercialization of 
human feelings" in an increasingly service-sector economy, and manages 
to avoid any questioning of the totality by remaining ignorant of the 
fact of class society and the unhappiness it produces. When Society 
Becomes an Addict (1987) is Anne Wilson Schaef's completely incoherent 
attempt to deny, despite the title, the existence of society, by dealing 
strictly with the interpersonal. And these books are among the least 
escapist of the avalanche of "how-to" therapy books inundating the 
bookstores and supermarkets.

It is clear that psychology is part of the absence of community or 
solidarity, and of the accelerating social disintegration. The emphasis 
is on changing one's personality, and avoiding at all costs the facts of 
bureaucratic consumer capitalism and its meaning to our lives and 
consciousness. Consider Samuel Klarreich's Stress Solution (1988): "...1 
believe that we can largely determine what will be stressful. and how 
much it will interfere with our lives, by the views we uphold 
irrespective of what goes on in the workplace." Under the sign of 
productivity, the citizen is now trained as a lifelong inmate of an 
industrial world, a condition, as Ivan Illich noted, not unrelated to 
the fact that everyone tends toward the condition of therapy's patient, 
or at least tends to accept its world-view.

In the Psychological Society, social conflicts of all kinds are 
automatically shifted to the level of psychic problems, in order that 
they can be charged to individuals as private matters. Schooling 
produces near-universal resistance, which is classified, for example, as 
"hyperkinesis" and dealt with by drugs and/or psychiatric ideology. 
Rather than recognize the child's protest, his or her life is invaded 
still further, to ensure that no one eludes the therapeutic net.

It is clear that a retreat from the social, based largely on the 
experience of defeat and consequent resignation, promotes the personal 
as the only possible terrain of authenticity. A desperate denizen of the 
"singles world" is quoted by Louise Banikow: "My ambition is wholly 
personal now. All I want to do is fall in love." But the demand for 
fulfilment, however circumscribed by psychology, is that of a ravening 
hunger and a level of suffering that threaten to burst the bonds of the 
prescribed inner world. As noted above, indifference to authority, 
distrust of institutions, and a spreading nihilism mean that the 
therapeutic can neither satisfy the individual nor ultimately safeguard 
the social order. Toynbee noted that a decadent culture furthers the 
rise of a new church that extends hope to the proletariat while 
servicing only the needs of the ruling class. Perhaps sooner than later 
People will begin to realize that psychology is this Church, Which may 
be the reason why so many voices of therapy now Counsel their flocks 
against "unrealistic expectations" of what life could be.

For over half a century the regulative, hierarchical needs of a 
bureaucratic-consumerist system have sought modern means of control and 
prediction. The same consolatory ideology of the psychological outlook, 
in which the self is the over-arching form of reality, has served these 
control needs and owes most of its assumptions to Sigmund Freud.

For Freud and his Wagnerian theory of warring instincts and the 
arbitrary division of the self into id, ego and superego, the passions 
of the individual were primordial and dangerous. The work of 
civilization was to check and harness them. The whole edifice of 
psychoanalysis, Freud said, is based upon the theory of necessary 
repression; domination is obviously assisted by this view. That human 
culture is established only by means of suffering, that constant 
renunciation of desire is inevitable for continuance of civilization, 
that work is sustained by the energy of stifled love-all this is 
required by the "natural aggressiveness" of "human nature," the latter 
an eternal and universal fact, of course.

Understanding fully the deforming force of all this repression, Freud 
considered it likely that neurosis has come to characterize all of 
humanity. Despite his growing fear of fascism after World War 1, he 
nonetheless contributed to its growth by justifying the renunciation of 
happiness. Reich referred to Freud and Hitler with some bitterness, 
observing that "a few years later, a pathological genius-making the best 
of ignorance and fear of happiness-brought Europe to the verge of 
destruction with the slogan of 'heroic renunciation'."

With the Oedipus complex, inescapable source of guilt and repression, we 
see Freud again as the consummate Hobbesian. This universal condition is 
the vehicle whereby self-imposed taboos are learned via the (male) 
childhood' experience of fear of the father and lust for the mother. It 
is based on Freud's reactionary fairy tale of a primal horde dominated 
by a powerful father who possessed all available women and who was 
killed and devoured by his sons. This was ludicrous anthropology even 
when penned, and fully exhibits one of Freud's most basic errors, that 
of equating society with civilization. There is now convincing evidence 
that precivilized life was a time of non-dominance and equality, 
certainly not the bizarre patriarchy Freud provided as origin of most of 
our sense of guilt and shame. He remained convinced of the 
inescapability of the Oedipal background, and the central validity of 
both the Oedipal complex and of guilt itself for the interests of 
culture.

Freud considered psychic life as shut in on itself, uninfluenced by 
society. This premise leads to a deterministic view of childhood and 
even infancy, along with such judgements as "the fear of becoming poor 
is derived from regressive anal eroticism, Consider his Psychopathology 
of Everyday Life, and its ten editions between 1904 and 1924 to which 
new examples of "slips," or unintended revelatory usages of words, were 
continually added. We do not find a single instance, despite the 
upheavals of many of those years in and near Austria, of Freud detecting 
a "slip" that related to fear of revolution on the part of this 
bourgeois subjects, or even of any day-to-day social fears, such as 
related to strikes, insubordination, or the like. It seems more than 
likely that unrepressed slips concerning such matters were simple 
screened Out as unimportant to his universalist, ahistorical views.

Also worth noting is Freud's "discovery" of the death instinct In his 
deepening pessimism, he countered Eros, the life instinct with Thanatos, 
a craving for death and destruction, as fundamental and ineradicable a 
part of the species as Striving for life. The aim of all life is death," 
simply put (1920). While it may be pedestrian to note that this 
discovery was accompanied by the mass carnage of World War 1, an 
increasingly unhappy marriage, and the onset of cancer of the jaw, there 
is no mistaking the service this dystopian metaphysics performs in 
justifying authority. The assumption of the death instinct-that 
aggression, hatred, and fear will always be with us-militates against 
the idea that liberation is possible. In later decades, the death 
instinct-oriented work of Melanie Klein flourished in English ruling 
circles precisely because of its emphasis on social restraints in 
limiting aggressiveness. Today's leading neo-Freudian, Lacan, also seems 
to see suffering and domination as inevitable; specifically, he holds 
that patriarchy is a law of nature.

Marcuse, Norman O. Brown and others have re-theorized Freud in a radical 
direction by taking his ideas as descriptive rather than prescriptive, 
and there is a limited plausibility to an orientation that takes his 
dark views as valid only with respect to alienated life, rather than to 
any and all imaginable social worlds. There are even many Freudian 
feminists; their efforts to apply psychoanalytic dogma to the oppression 
of women, however, appear even more contrived.

Freud did identify the "female principle" as closer to nature, less 
sublimated, less diffused through repression than that of the male. But 
true to his overall values, he located an essential advance in 
civilization in the victory of male intellectuality over womanly 
sensuality. What is saddest about the various attempts to reappropriate 
Freud is the absence of a critique of civilization: his entire work is 
predicated on the acceptance of civilization as highest value. And basic 
in a methodological sense, regarding those who would merely reorient the 
Freudian edifice, is Foucault's warning that the will to any system "is 
to extend our participation in the present system."

In the area of gender difference, Freud straightforwardly affirmed the 
basic inferiority of the female. His view of women as castrated men is a 
case of biological determinism: anatomically they are simply less, and 
condemned by this to masochism and penis envy.

I make no pretense to completeness or depth in this brief look at Freud, 
but it should be already obvious how false was his disclaimer (New 
Introductory Lectures, 1933) that Freudianism posits any values beyond 
those inherent in "objective" science. And to this fundamental failing 
could be added the arbitrary nature of virtually all of his philosophy. 
Divorced as it pointedly is from gross social reality-further examples 
are legion, but seduction theory comes to mind, in which he declared 
that sexual abuse is, most importantly, fantasy-one Freudian inference 
could just as plausibly be replaced by a different one. Overall, we 
encounter, in the summary of Frederick Crews, "a doctrine plagued by 
mechanism, reification, and arbitrary universalism."

On the level of treatment, by his own accounts, Freud never was able to 
permanently cure a single patient, and psychoanalysis has proven no more 
effective since. In 1984 the National Institute of Mental Health 
estimated that over forty million Americans are mentally ill, while a 
study by Regier, Boyd et al. (Archives of General Psychiatry, November 
1988) showed that fifteen percent of the adult population had a 
"psychiatric disorder." One obvious dimension of this worsening 
situation, in Joel Kovel's words, is the contemporary family, which "has 
fallen into a morass of permanent crisis, as indicated by the endless 
stream of emotionally disabled individuals it turns over to the mental 
health industry.

If alienation is the essence of all psychiatric conditions, Psychology 
is the study of the alienated, but lacks the awareness that this is so. 
The effect of the total society, in which the individual can no longer 
recognize himself or herself, by the canons of Freud and the 
Psychological Society, is seen as irrelevant to diagnosis and treatment. 
Thus psychiatry appropriates disabling pain and frustration, redefines 
them as illnesses and, in some cases, is able to suppress the symptoms. 
Meanwhile, a morbid world continues its estranging technological 
rationality that excludes any continuously spontaneous, affective life: 
the person is subjected to a discipline designed, at the expense of the 
sensuous, to make him or her an instrument of production.

Mental illness is primarily an unconscious escape from this design, a 
form of passive resistance. R.D. Laing spoke of schizophrenia as a 
psychic numbing which feigns a kind of death to preserve something of 
one's inner aliveness. The representative schizophrenic is around 20, at 
the point of culmination of the long period of socialization which has 
prepared him to take up his role in the workplace. He is not "adequate" 
to this destiny. Historically, it is noteworthy that schizophrenia is 
very closely related to industrialism, as Torrey shows convincingly in 
his Schizophrenia and Civilization (1980).

In recent years Szasz, Foucault, Goffman, and others have called 
attention to the ideological preconceptions through which "mental 
illness" is seen. "Objective" language cloaks cultural biases, as in the 
case, for instance, of sexual "disorders": in the 19th century 
masturbation was treated as a disease, and it has only been within the 
past twenty years that the psychological establishment declassified 
homosexuality as illness.

And it has long been transparent that there is a class component to the 
origins and treatment of mental illness. Not only is what is called 
"eccentric" among the rich often termed psychiatric disorder-and treated 
quite differently among the poor, but many studies since Hollingshead 
and Redlich's Social Class and Mental Illness (1958) have demonstrated 
how much more likely are the poor to become emotionally disabled. Roy 
Porter observed that because it imagines power, madness is both 
impotence and omnipotence, which serves as a reminder that due to the 
influence of alienation, powerlessness, and poverty, women are more 
often driven to breakdown than men. Society makes us all feel 
manipulated and thus mistrustful: "paranoid," and who could not be 
depressed? The gap between the alleged neutrality and wisdom of the 
medical model and the rising levels of pain and disease is widening, the 
credibility of the former visibly corroding.


-------------------------END OF PART ONE--------------------
