Civilization And Its Discontents

The feeling of happiness produced by indulgence of a wild, untamed craving is incomparably more intense than is the satisfying of a curbed desire.”

There is nothing quite so wonderful as indulging a deep urge. Such satisfaction is hard to obtain by the sublimated, restricted, socially acceptable use of a person’s energies. Even though indulgence can lead to recriminations from others, the intensity of the pleasure of abandon tempts the perpetrator to further excesses.

“The religions of humanity, too, must be classified as mass-delusions. […] Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion recognizes it as such.”

Religion, even with its high price of obedience, is a salve to many, granting a (false) sense of belonging and protection from the evils of life. Its benefits are so alluring that people will hold steadfastly to their beliefs rather than invite the chaos of doubt and uncertainty.

“We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love-object or its love.”

Falling in love can be ecstatic, but the person we love is inevitably flawed and weak, unable to provide the kind of certainty we crave. Love relationships thus provide both the pleasure of affiliation and the anxiety of loss.

“The man who is predominantly erotic will choose emotional relationships with others before all else; the narcissistic type, who is more self-sufficient, will seek his essential satisfactions in the inner workings of his own soul; the man of action will never abandon the external world in which he can essay his power.”

Human beings cope with the self-versus-others conflict in a myriad of ways, some so extreme as to cause more pain than they assuage. As we struggle, our various solutions can become fixations that shape the personality. We may set aside all other options to double down on a single coping strategy, causing the neurosis to more deeply embed in the personality.

“Laying stress upon importance of work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work he is at least securely attached to a part of reality, the human community.”

To work cooperatively with others, we must curb desires, repress anger and resentment, and make sacrifices. Yet productive work provides many benefits and emotional satisfactions. Thus, for Freud, work is one of the strongest methods to align people’s needs and desires; work is a meeting place where individuals find pleasure worth the price of social conformity.

“The great majority work only when forced by necessity, and this natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems.”

Not everyone finds work so satisfying as to allay the urge to rebel and reject conformity. As a result, the tension between individuals and society persists, leading to financial difficulties, addictions, and even violence.

“It was found that men become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideals, and it was supposed that a return to greater possibilities of happiness would ensue if these standards were abolished or greatly relaxed.”

Much of humans’ search for greater personal freedom involves striving for the right to behave oddly. Cultures tend to disapprove of non-standard lifestyles but sometimes must yield to the intense drives people express, lest social unrest result.

“[…] [P]ower over nature is not the only condition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of civilization’s efforts, and there is no ground for inferring that its technical progress is worthless from the standpoint of happiness.”

Despite all that science and technology have achieved to alleviate human suffering, many people are still unhappy; thus, they may conclude that the blessings of advanced civilization have failed them. Science, however, makes no guarantees about its possible benefits, and there are paths to happiness other than through technical advances. It’s therefore unwise to disdain modern culture simply because one still suffers, since abandoning progress will merely set humanity back to earlier, more miserable conditions.

“We will be content to repeat that the word culture describes the sum of the achievements and institutions which differentiate our lives from those of our animal forebears and serve two purposes, namely, that of protecting humanity against nature and of regulating the relations of human beings among themselves.”

Culture is the accumulation of commonly held beliefs and procedures designed to improve the participants’ lives even as it restricts them; culture generates advantages, or humans would reject it. Freud accepts this assumption as the basis of the individual-versus-society conflict.

“It is remarkable how regularly analytic findings testify to the close connection between the ideas of ambition, fire, and urethral erotism.”

Freud asserts, with quiet humor, that the taming of natural forces begins with boys’ acts of sexual dominance (e.g., in the case of fire, by peeing on it). Only when men become willing to sublimate their instinctual aggression—now learning to control fire rather than conquer it— can they reap cultural rewards.

“A great part of the struggles of mankind centres round the single task of finding some expedient (i.e., satisfying) solution between these individual claims and those of the civilized community; it is one of the problems of man’s fate whether this solution can be arrived at in some particular form of culture or whether the conflict will prove irreconcilable.”

Culture’s success at providing communal benefits worth the cost of suppressing individual instincts is still up for debate. Many social conflicts seem to be intractable, in part because advances in science and technology continuously generate dilemmas, so that humanity is never free of conflicts to resolve.

“The life of human beings in common therefore had a twofold foundation, i.e., the compulsion to work, created by external necessity, and the power of love, causing the male to wish to keep his sexual object, the female, near him, and the female to keep near her that part of herself which has become detached from her, her child.”

The family is foundational to human’s social organization, but family members also need to connect with and work toward common goals with people outside the family. Thus, people need culture, insofar as it enhances their ability to associate with other families. When people denigrate culture, they ignore their overwhelming need for its blessings. To deny culture is, in some respects, to deny extended social interactions.

“[…] [W]e far too readily identify activity with masculinity and passivity with femininity, a statement which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal world.”

Freud is ahead of his time in suggesting that all human psyches contain both male and female aspects and that they can blend in different ways within individuals. His ideas chip away at old notions about sex roles as enacted both in public and in the bedroom.

“If the high-sounding ordinance had run: ‘Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee,’ I should not take objection to it.”

The old adage “love thy neighbor as thyself” rings false to Freud, who believes humans are incapable of loving another, a stranger, without a sense of that other’s worthiness of love. The prescription is an example of society going overboard in its attempt to curb aggression.

“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another. Their interests in their common work would not hold them together; the passions of instinct are stronger than reasoned interests.”

Without the rules and taboos of society, people would quickly fall into anarchy. The idea is that humans want community but cannot prevent their passions from destroying it outside the strictures of a common culture.

“Fate is felt to be a substitute for the agency of the parents: adversity means that one is no longer loved by this highest power of all, and, threatened by this loss of love, one humbles oneself again before the representative of the parents in the super-ego which in happier days one had tried to disregard.”

When disaster strikes, people tend to regress to an earlier emotional stage when parental figures protected them from harm. Adults don’t seek out their actual parents but instead invoke Fate or God, reasoning that the calamity is just punishment for breaking important rules of order.

“[…] [T]he price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.”

Guilt is society’s way of dissuading individual members from misbehavior, a kind of emotional potty training that ensures that people don’t make a mess of their social interactions.

“[…] [W]hen an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are transformed into symptoms and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt.”

Obsessions, tics, overeating, addictions, paranoia, braggadocio—these are all symptoms of minds busily repressing their deepest impulses, namely, sex and aggression. No one can suppress these powerful drives perfectly; their energies will leak out as odd, inappropriate, or self-destructive behaviors.

“Individual development seems to us a product of the interplay of two trends, the striving for happiness, generally called egoistic, and the impulse towards merging with others in the community, which we call altruistic.”

People need to be freely themselves; they also need to connect with others. These two opposing drives—for personal satisfaction and social affection—often collide, and balancing them makes up a large portion of the art of living fully and well.

“What an overwhelming obstacle to civilization aggression must be if the defence against it can cause as much misery as aggression itself!”

Societies face a potentially insurmountable task in trying to tame citizens’ wildness. The penalties for anti-social behavior sometimes are large because the aggression and violence at issue can also be large. It can be a delicate thing to design punishments that don’t cause more damage than the crime, as for example with lengthy prison sentences that harden convicts and make them more dangerous when released.

“I should imagine that as long as virtue is not rewarded in this life ethics will preach in vain.”

While religion promises comfort in the afterlife, the pain of life happens here and now. Its urgency forces most people to seek immediate relief, especially when virtuous behavior does nothing to alleviate discomfort and when some—i.e., the wealthy—appear to have unequal access to paradise on earth. If delayed gratification cannot compete with actual agony, reality swamps the positive social effects religion offers.

“If the evolution of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization—or epochs of it—possibly even the whole of humanity—have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends?”

Just as individuals bend and warp under the pressure of socialization, so do entire civilizations under the weight of their own regulations. Cultured societies are capable of mass hysteria, witch hunts, organized cruelties, and wars; perhaps these are symptoms of the mental health issues of the patient we call “society.”

“The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the cultural process developed in it will succeed in mastering the derangements of communal life caused by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”

Freud ends on an ominous note, warning that societies may be unable to tame their members’ barbarities, and, in failing, perish. The death instinct in each of us wants to rise up and destroy those things that defy us; as modern life invents ever-new ways to frustrate people, they may turn away from the social contract and toward anarchy.