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How many times have your heard someone utter six of the most un-profound words of today in the hope of settling an argument? Or should that be ending it? No further discussion on the topic at hand required. Whew! Off the hook.
‘This is the twenty first century’!
If one takes into account comments on social media probably one time too many.
People have become high-novelty seekers, a trait common in borderline personality disorder, drawn to the faddish and exhibiting behaviours associated with it.
Add narcissism to the mix which is evident in the way people’s ignorance, experiences, likes, dislikes, and pet-theories have become the standard against which everything is measured.
The meaning of rational has been undermined by those who present as rationalists, subjectifying reason, and making it acquiescent to their worldview so ensuring the prevailing of an irrational rationality if you will.
Phillip Rieff, sociologist, cultural critic, and scholar of the renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, plotted Western culture as a progression through archetypes; the classical political man, the religious man, the economic man, and the final archetype of the psychological man.
It’s into the category of psychological man that contemporary civilisation fits.
First, a couple of his quotes;
*Religious man is born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.
*Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going.
Phillip Rieff realised half a century ago that we were- and are- in the midst of a revolution- a cultural and psychological one, or an anti-culture as he called it.
The rise of democracy and equality, the loss of authority and hierarchical order has produced a change in human character and the effects of this are; a blurring of –the –lines between the public and private spheres, an ‘ethics’ of entitlement and victim-ology, and a consumerist and popular culture.
Rieff uses the term; modern therapeutic culture- to describe a moral universe bred by modern democracy and dedicated to personal freedom as an end in itself.
This indigenous culture results in the total socialisation of man in a way unlike any society before it.
Rieff describes it thus; ……. Believing they are children of Eden, these emancipated democrats act out the latest script written for them by popular culture.
Psychological man is morally detached from communal order and rendered, at least in his own psyche, the free agent of his desires, the demigod of his Eros (life-force) and ambitions.
His relation to society is tepid, ambivalent, remote and unstable.
In previous social orders the cultivation of ‘self’ was devoted to something outside and higher than self, whether political, religious, or intellectual. Idealism is also understood in this context, and psychological man is lacking in such. Let’s be clear, humanism is not an ideal but an ideology. The modern world however, creates an individual for whom the highest ideal is the ‘self’. So at best the ‘modern’ is a narcissist, at worst, a hoodlum.
The therapeutic image of the modern individual as both victim and rebel against his own conscience provides the basis for Rieff’s sociological type of modernity.
He calls the modern man a contradiction, a creature of not finally satisfiable instincts, impulses, and desires, in endless tension with himself and society and tragically doomed.
All prior social societies served to draw the individual out of himself, the democratic order gives him reasons to retreat, where the forces of nature and society vie for supremacy, over a ‘tortured self’ in a battle that can never be resolved.
Rieff also speaks of the tertiary educated youth (collegiate young) being re-educated before being educated- re-educated being a euphemism for brainwashed.
He says; from these ranks the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler indwelling, his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualised with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none.
Sigmund Freud had an uncanny understanding of the nature of man, in particular relating to the problem of the ego, or self, and envisioned where society was headed in as far as the ‘future’ cultural revolution was concerned, as acknowledged by Phillip Rieff.
The point of departure for Rieff was that Freud merely accommodated the problem rather than dealt with it through psychoanalysis.
Through this accommodation Feud became what he disapproved of- the prototype psychological man.
