Misery in culture: disappointment and depression.
By Tomás Núñez, ThD
In 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote his famous book The Discontent in Culture and already in the first line he denounced: “instead of the values of life, power, success and wealth, sought for themselves, are preferred.” Today these factors have reached such a magnitude that the malaise has transformed into misery in culture. The international conference on climate change (COP-15) in Copenhagen gave the most complete demonstration: in order to save the system of profit and national economic interests, there has been no fear of endangering the future of life and the balance of the planet already subjected to a warming that, if not addressed quickly, could exterminate millions of people and wipe out a large part of biodiversity.
The misery in culture, or rather, of culture, is revealed by two symptoms that can be verified throughout the world: widespread disappointment in society and a deep depression in people. Both have their reason for being. They are the result of the crisis of faith that the world system is going through.
What faith is it? It is the faith in unlimited progress, in the omnipotence of technoscience, in the economic-financial system, with its market, which would act as the structuring axes of society. Faith in these gods had its creeds, its high priests, its prophets, an army of acolytes and an unimaginable mass of believers.
Today these believers have entered into a deep disappointment because these gods have proven false. Now they are dying or have simply died, and the G-20 are trying in vain to resurrect their corpses. Those who profess this fetish religion now note that unlimited progress has dangerously devastated nature and is the main cause of global warming. Technoscience, which on the one hand has brought so many benefits, created a death machine that killed 200 million people in the 20th century alone and is today capable of exterminating the entire human species; The economic-financial system and the market have collapsed, and if it had not been for taxpayers’ money, via the State, they would have caused a social catastrophe. Disappointment is stamped on the perplexed faces of political leaders, who no longer know who to believe in and what new gods to enthrone. There is a kind of sweet nihilism.
Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche had already foreseen such effects when they announced secularisation and the death of God. Not that God is dead, because a God who dies is not “God”. Nietzsche is clear: God did not die, we killed him. In other words, for a secularised society God no longer counts for life or social cohesion. In his place came the pantheon of gods we mentioned earlier. Since they are idols, one day they will show what they produce: disappointment and death. The solution is not simply to return to God or religion, but to rescue what they mean: the connection with the whole, the perception that life and not profit must be at the centre, and the affirmation of shared values that can bring cohesion to society.
Disappointment is accompanied by depression. This is a late fruit of the youth revolution of the 1960s. There, the aim was to challenge a society of repression, especially sexual repression, and full of social masks. General liberalisation was imposed. Everything was experienced. The motto was “to live without downtime; to enjoy life without constraints”. This led to the suppression of any interval between desire and its fulfilment. Everything had to be immediate and fast.
This resulted in the breaking of all taboos, the loss of the right measure and complete permissiveness. A new oppression arose: having to be modern, rebellious, sexy and having to bare oneself inside and out. The greatest punishment is aging. Total health was conceived, and models of beauty were created, based on thinness to the point of anorexia. Death was abolished, turned into a horror.
This postmodern project also failed, because life cannot be done just anything. It has an intrinsic sacredness, and limits. If they are broken, depression sets in. Disappointment and frustration are recipes for aimless violence, for the high consumption of anxiolytics and even for suicide, as occurs in many countries.
Where are we going? Nobody knows. We only know that we have to change if we want to continue. But we can already see everywhere sprouts that represent the perennial values of the human condition: marriage with love, sex with affection, care for nature, win-win instead of win-lose, the search for “good living”, the basis for happiness, which is today the fruit of voluntary simplicity and of wanting to have less in order to be more.
This is hopeful. In this direction we must progress.
Be the first to comment