A Life Less Painful

Civilisation results from an increase in technology that allows one privileged class to dominate all others and perpetuate a whole lot of nonsense that contemporary morons and future archaeologists will call wonderful.  Sigmund Freud has said everything that I would care to say about civilisation in his book Civilisation and its Discontents. It was written near the end of his career, or should I say life, when he was at his most philosophical and, to my tastes, best. He summarised civilisation as the product of a reaction against nature, its harshness, with the end goal being a less harsh, or even comfortable life. But not surprisingly nature had a surprise in store for us. You might be able to take the human out of the jungle, but you would not so easily take the jungle out of the human. And hence the discontent. To live a civilised life, according to Freud, one must suppress ones most basic urges. I don’t speak for all men, but I think it is fair to say that sitting in a club paying ten dollars a drink, tolerating some shitty house music, listening to god knows what fucking blather from some woman for several hours with no guarantee of sex is sure to lead to discontent when you think that only 20,000 years ago all you had to do was chase her for a few hundred metres and rape her. I think we can say in this regard, at least, that women have done well from the spread of civilisation. So we (men perhaps more than women?) must forgo the immediate gratification of our desires so that we might profit from technology and therefore free ourselves from the dark horrors of the uncivilised world.

But let’s look at the word profit. Average life expectancy at the dawn of civilisation was, so we are told, about thirty-something years. Nowadays on average it’s approximately eighty-plus years. So through cooperation and the suppression of our most basic desires we now have an extra fifty years to wander around ignorantly. A blessing or a curse? And now, if we take the Freudian approach, which not so many experts do nowadays, and fair enough when you look at the nonsense he tried to perpetuate through his so-called dream analysis, but if we look at one of his sounder ideas, which is his theory of the cause of neuroses we see that if you push down on your basic desires, suppress them, they, like goo, will squirt out through the cracks, what might have been a horrifying gorilla like instinct to fight or fuck gets squeezed out as ticks, unreasonable fears, the desire to play with your own shit, the inability to have an orgasm, hate for other people, the need to switch off lights, chronic masturbation. And all those other characteristics that show up in the lives of modern people between our long bouts of disciplined cooperation. This is the price we pay for cars and plumbing and monogamous marriage.

We wanted a free and easy life far from the fear of the jungle and what we have is weirdness. If we define success as the reduction of daily fear and hardship, then civilisation has been successful and in the future it will be even more so. But Freud states the problem very clearly indeed; what we have done is traded gratification for the avoidance of pain. The modern life, civilisation, is designed not to gratify you, but to provide you with a life less painful. Indeed, if you look at the case studies of Freud’s patients you see a pattern of constant discontent. Civilisation and its discontents, but of course the discontent only comes to those who are physically or morally bound to observe its rules. Freud observed that amoral people were not as neurotic as moral ones, and anyone in contemporary times who has lived with a vegan can probably testify to that. Freud was not inviting amorality, but did question whether ones morals made any sense, and were not ultimately a cause of illness.

Which leads me back to my starting point, the ruling class. For Marx, or maybe I should say in Marx’s day, it was perfectly obvious who the members of the ruling class were and what they wanted and why they wanted it. Contemporary times are more complex and it’s a lot harder to see why certain rules are maintained and created and for what purpose. Morality, of the religious kind, i.e. rules maintained in accordance to statements unsupported by verifiable facts, e.g. if you murder you go to hell, is becoming less common and in its place we find ethics. Ethics is supposedly different from morality in that all parties concerned agree on shared values and decide what rules make sense in light of those shared values, i.e. no one here wants to be murdered, therefore we all agree that murder is unethical. However, centuries of religious practice has left behind habits of thought that still taint so-called rational ethics. Anyway, what civilisation needs is a set of clear objectives, there needs to be a collective agreement on what citizens value, but this is an impossible goal since we live in a time when most people don’t agree. So instead the laws tend to err on the side of caution by being conservative and usually very restrictive. And the old adage remains true, try to please everyone and no one will like it. And so civilisation, as always, plods along, a great moping mass of overworked discontents, stuttering with neurosis, surviving on gossip (disguised as serious news) of primitive behaviour, a rape, a murder, and big juicy bombing, and everyone says I’m so glad I’m a member of the big moping mass, it keeps me safe from the horror… The horror.