Recently I’ve been invited to speak on the radio station ‘Radio v Meste’ to talk about discontent in culture: What are the roots of this crisis and symptoms of a discontent? Could the conflict between a personality and a culture be resolved? This article is the result of research I did on the topic.
Recently I’ve been invited to speak on the radio station ‘Radio v Meste’ to talk about discontent in culture: What are the roots of this crisis and symptoms of a discontent? Could the conflict between a personality and a culture be resolved? This article is the result of research I did on the topic.
My first reaction when I read these questions was: what crisis? Isn’t it the best time to be alive, and is that not to a large extent thanks to our culture? Literacy is increasing, life expectancy is increasing, infant deaths are decreasing, and so is the amount of people below the poverty line. For the first time in the history of the 1st world, obesity is a bigger problem (literally!) than malnourishment. The years since the end of World War II have been the most peaceful years in the history of Europe. Humans are the only species who have untangled themselves from the forces of nature and achieved things that even a hundred years ago were unthinkable. Without culture this would have been unthinkable. Yet there are always people who see the negative side of things, and when it comes to culture, Sigmund Freud was one of them.
In 1930 he wrote a book called “Unbehagen in der kultur” – discontent in culture. It dealt with questions such as: Does culture liberate us from the hardships of living in nature? Does it civilise us? Or does it oppress us? Does it make us more human or does it hinder us in our happiness? My answers are yes, yes, maybe, both. Let me explain:
To start, we need to actually define culture. When I say culture you may think of things like literature, music, art. This is what I’d call active culture, or like Wikipedia says: “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement, regarded collectively”. It’s active because we have a choice to actively engage in it. We can choose to read a book or go to the opera and even watch Netflix – that’s culture too!
Then there is another sort of culture, which I call passive: It’s “the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society”. It’s basically the written and unwritten rules that restrain our basic instincts of lust and aggression. It defines how we behave and treat each other. Passive culture is involuntary, because we cannot go against it without the risk of being excluded from our social group.
Humans, or any other animals, do things for two reasons: to attain happiness and avoid pain. All of our actions can be reduced to one of these goals. The problem is that the world around us doesn’t care about our happiness, sometimes it even seems to sabotage it. Our planet wasn’t created for us to be eternally and everlastingly happy. We cannot be permanently happy, and therefore we look for ‘ersatzbefriedigung’, replacement satisfaction. Some even flee in addictions like drugs, consumerism, sex, work or even religion.
Even if we become happy, we can’t stand it very long. After some time we either want to be even happier, or something in the outside world takes our happiness away. Most of the time this is because something out of our control happens to us, or something is wrong with our body, or complications in our interaction with other people.
It’s our interaction with other people where passive culture comes to our aid. Our culture demands that we restrain ourselves for the sake of the greater good. Freud names two basic instincts: aggression and lust. If we were to give in to these basic instincts all the time, nothing would ever get done. Our written and unwritten rules are meant to balance our individual liberties on one hand and our safety on the other, and therefore the success of our cultural group. Without culture, we’d still be apes in the bush.
In essence, culture is the embodiment of the compromise that we need in order to live together. And for humans it’s impossible not to live together. With a few exceptions, humans thrive in groups, but only if the life in the group is somehow regulated. We carry this compromise inside us, because our basic drives of aggression and lust are kept in check by our upbringing so that we can enjoy the benefits of our tribe.
It is, however, important to find some vent for our drives. You can see in very restrained societies how the overly restraint leads to all kinds of problems. Look at the catholic church with its abuse scandals. Consider the rather prude Middle East which nonetheless tops the ranks for consumption of porn and lingerie. Many religions and cultures in general only permit heterosexual relationships, and anything that departs from that is a taboo, which can lead to issues.Or take the christian idea to “love thy enemy”. It’s not natural for a human to love his enemy, it’s natural for us to hurt and kill others if that serves our purpose. Humans are aggressive by design, because that’s what helps our survival. We are not by design tender and loving creatures who only use aggression when we are attacked. No, humans, when given the chance, will attack others if it fits their personal gain, including sexual satisfaction, taking advantage of people’s cheap labour etc.
So that’s why no society is always harmonious. Wherever people live together you have conflicts of interest, and it’s our culture that guides us in resolving these conflicts, to compromise. We can see this in Europe in the last 70 years or so, where the European Union has prevented its member states of going to war with each other.. The communists have tried to create a culture without private property. Why would you be aggressive towards somebody if there is no private property to defend, right? But the communists were wrong about that, because private property is only to some extent a cause of aggression.
So you could conclude that, yes, culture restrains us, and this restraint can cause some problems to us. But if the advantages wouldn’t weigh up to the disadvantages, we wouldn’t have it! If culture would really cause us so many problems, we would do without it and live like monkeys in the forest. Indeed there are people who think like this. There are people who think that our western culture in particular is an evil, patriarch, colonialist, capitalist derailment of human nature which destroys us from the inside, and the best way to resolve this is to “return to nature”. They have this romantic idea of the noble savage. But even Freud admits that we don’t really know if our forefathers were really much happier than us now. If Adam and Eve, just to name the most famous noble savages, were really happy living in nature, they surely wouldn’t have eaten the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Instead, because of them, we can now access all the knowledge in the world.. With an Apple!
So can we resolve the conflict between personality and culture? I think that is hard to answer in general. Different people feel this conflict in a different way, and different cultures have different “relief systems” where we can channel away our frustrated desires. Certain groups may be generally accepted in one culture while they are not accepted in another culture. In this case the solution may be to change the culture around you by moving to a different country.
Another solution that Freud mentions is intellectual or artistic activity. Freud is specifically talking about creative activity, so the act of actually creating a piece of art, but this is not open to everyone, not everyone is an artist. I’d like to extend this to just taking part in active culture by just consuming it. If you include sports and playing video games in active culture, then these are ways to channel away our restrained energies.
Another thing is that the consumption of active culture can be very consoling: the beauty of music or art or literature can and often is a compensation for the hardship in our life. And it does it best when it addresses our primal drives of lust and aggression. Look at movies, for example, one of the pillars of our contemporary culture. The most successful movies are either romantic love stories or movies where two opponents are fighting each other. So there is lust on one hand and aggression on the other hand, and if you want to write a real blockbuster you better make sure to have both! So we see that these primal drives have become part of our culture in a way that maybe it consoles us for having to restrain them.
In general, I think it’s a useful skill to actually know how to resolve the discontent you feel in life. Sometimes I have the feeling that people don’t really know what picks them up when they are down. Because we cannot be happy all the time (and let’s face it, most of the time we’re not) it’s important to know how to console yourself for the struggle that life just is most of the time. It may be smoking a cigarette, or playing the guitar, or eating chocolate, or even pray. It doesn’t matter what it is, but in my opinion everyone needs to find such things. Otherwise they are a nuisance to themselves and to others.
One aspect of culture that I haven’t touched on is identity. Both passive and active culture give us a sense of belonging to a certain group, and we can even change our belonging by changing our cultural expression to that of the group we want to belong to. For example changing our clothes to match that of our new host country, or learning its language and idioms. Not everybody wants to be unique, some just want to be exactly like everybody else so that they are more easily accepted, while others may reject the “common” and try to be as individual as possible. So it’s easy to see that one may feel less discontent with the constraints of our future than others.
When it comes to causes and symptoms of discontent, one thing that I consider a terrible shortcoming in our western culture, is our desire to be “perfect”, whatever that means. This desire for perfection is everywhere: we look for the “perfect” spouse, in the “perfect” house, with a “perfectly” manicured lawn on which one or more “perfect” children are playing, and for dinner we have a “perfectly” roasted turkey. This drive to perfection has led us to great heights, and very often we’ve come pretty close to perfection. When it comes to airplanes, cars, trains, buildings or other complex structures where safety is a concern, you wouldn’t want an engineer to strive for anything but perfection. However, on a personal level however our strive for perfection has also incurred great tragedies.
Think of all the cases of bulimia and anorexia, all the plastic surgery, all the rejected lovers who were just fine as they are but didn’t fit into the idea of being “perfect”. Our state of (dis)content, to use the term of this series, is closely tied up with (not) meeting our expectations. If we expect everything to be perfect, our expectations will rarely be met. I saw some time ago an advertisement of a clothing store that said something like “be perfect”, meaning that being perfect meant buying their clothes. So in an attempt to be perfect you may go to the store and buy these clothes. Or, and this is where the retail therapy comes in, you may feel unhappy and you buy the clothes (or the mobile phone) in an attempt to cheer you up. Of course it doesn’t work that way: you go home, stand in front of the mirror, you compare yourself with the pretty model on the billboard and come to the realization that you aren’t perfect. Or if you are, you would be perfect without the clothes too. Or maybe you shouldn’t aspire to be? Maybe you should cherish that stretch mark, that scar, the birthmark, the tattoo you regret, as a unique to you – something that is part of your history and therefore part of you. I dare say that more people are unhappy because they are not perfect than there are people who are happy
because they are. This feature of the human lot is carefully exploited by the media and marketing agencies in getting us to buy more and more things we don’t need and which don’t make us happy or content. After all, it’s easier to charge a premium for something that’s perfect than something that just fulfills its purpose.
And it gets worse: because we want things to be perfect, even when they are they don’t stay like that forever. There may be a chip off that plate, or a blemish on our guitar, a dent in the car or a crack in the screen of our phone. Because we want everything to be perfect, and hardly anything gets repaired these days, we replace things at an astonishing pace. The environmental costs of this consumerism is immense and there’s one very important thing that will be far from
“perfect” because of it: it’s the planet we all share and live on.
Another cause of discontent is the sheer amount of choices we have, compared to a century ago, in the amount of potential partners, places to live, things to eat, and so on. It is well known that an abundance of choice doesn’t make us happier. On the contrary, it can be intimidating sometimes. There are 57 varieties of Heinz tomato ketchup. Fifty-seven! How to choose? And when you chose one, how can you be certain that none of the other 56 varieties is actually better? That seems futile when it comes to ketchup, but what if you had 57 eligible partners in your local area, and you had to choose one? Potentially for the rest of your life? This topic alone could fill an entire broadcast, not even going into the many restrictions that culture places on whom we can and cannot be partners with. Many restrictions have been lifted in the 1st world, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it has introduced another problem in that it increased our choices dramatically.
In closing I’d like to say that, like many things, culture has both good and bad influences, but overall it benefits us. If it didn’t, we’d still be living in the forest like animals.