I wake up every morning having to say to myself “I have not failed. I have not failed.”
And this applies whether I get up at 4:15am, as I sometimes do, and if I get up at 9am as I (rarely) sometimes do. It applies if I had a productive day the day before, or if I didn’t do shit but sleep off a hangover and watch a couple movies.
This is shame. That is what it is. Fear, shame, and anger all go together. If you are traumatized you can pick one and specialize in it, but they all tag team one another. As Bessel van der Kolk put it, it’s like an alarm you can’t turn off. You just get to choose what sound it makes, which is to say which emanating element you choose to most focus on and empower to rule your life.
Now that I put it that way, might one assume that the thirst for authoritarianism that we are seeing is quite pervasive in America and elsewhere is related to a desire to live in permanent fear and shame, rather than face uncontrollable anger? If true, one would predict continual rage to also be present in those wanting to be told what to do. And of course, that IS what we see.
And I was thinking about this the other day: being confronted with true emotional coldness is an assault of sorts, and most of us live with this coldness everywhere. Friendships are shallow. Parents are detached. The media we are addicted to is no more nourishing to the soul than Doritos are the body.
I propose most Americans, and many Europeans and others, are traumatized by alienating indifference. They don’t know how to feel or name their own emotions, and thus they fail to connect with others as well. This constitutes a sort of trauma, which does in fact lead to alterations in the limbic system. It leads to rage, shame, and fear.
And don’t we see much of that in our popular culture? The Squid game was equally suicide and homicide game. And it was both game and deadly serious. It was, I assume, fascinating in the way that a violent car wreck is, or a dead body seen anywhere. We don’t see death. We don’t see the realities of life. We don’t express our violence directly. There are no knife fights in the United States the way there stereotypically are in some Latin American nations. We hold it in. We soldier on in silence and solitude. All that has consequences.
You work all day, doing work you don’t really want to do, working for an overpaid idiot, and having to fight traffic both ways. And you want to see someone suffer and die when you get home. And you can. In endless variety. But the effect is never lasting. It never was even when human beings still sacrificed one another.
And here is the question that started this post, that led in unplanned directions: what sort of life do you live if you live in fear?
What I would propose is that a life lived in fear is no life at all. All people, when they are afraid, are alike. They are the same. All nuance is gone. All particularity of personality, all idiosyncrasy, everything that makes a person interesting, vivid, and memorable, disappears.
Maybe this is the link with masks and anonymity in our images of cult rites: everyone lives in fear, and thus they all have the same faces. They are merely recognizing this in outward symbolism.
A sacrificial rite is merely an enactment socially of a violence everyone in that society feels inwardly. Rather than a war of all against all (and yes, there is a whiff of Rene Girard in there), a victim is chosen, the sins of the collective attributed to it, and then it is murdered.
But this is inherently an imbalance. This is trauma, spread widely, and unmanaged. It is a patched together solution which barely meets the need, and is in most cases unstable.
What is the opposite of sacrifice? Community. True community consisting of individuated individuals, who are all capable of meeting their own emotional needs, and balancing their own personalities in ways which transcend any thirst for or need of violence.
Leftwing ideology is inherently a sacrificial culture. It is cruel by design, not flaw. It is the creed of the “faceless because they live in fear”.
I think there are some interesting ideas here. I repeat myself often, and I repeat myself often, but slowly I learn better ways of putting things, and slightly better frames with which to see what I am looking at.