On Low Level Trauma
Maybe its the strange spectacle of the opening of parliament with all the trappings of the semi-feudal state ceremony on display, maybe its the Trump-Biden clown show over the pond, maybe its the ongoing carnage in Gaza, maybe its just as Sarah Kendzior puts it (‘Brenda and Dylan Are Dead‘): “Things are happening too much too fast” – but the feeling of being ill-at-ease and constantly under low-level trauma persists. It’s kind of all-pervasive. Insidious.
Maybe too its being exposed visually to so much violence. As Don DeLillo writes in ‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK’: “Violence itself seems to cause a warp in the texture of things.” Maybe it’s the background noise of poverty, both your own and others, and the general feeling of absolute precarity this gives us. Maybe its watching the Republican National Convention. Maybe its watching all of the kids from Youth Demand being rounded up by police under Section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (PCSCA) for “conspiracy to cause a nuisance”?
As Umair puts it: “You know this sinking “is everything over” feeling? From democracy to your life? THAT’S fascism. The emotional core of it, which is to terrorize you at an existential level. Stay strong and hang tough. Head in the game. That’s how democracy prevails.”
I mean, I’m kind of onboard with that.
Or, as the Paris based writer Justin Smith-Ruius notes in ‘Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy’:
“I feel as though I came out of the pandemic a different person than when I went into it. An important part of this experience is that 2020 was the year I finally understood that there are no grown-ups, that nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, other than looking to survive in a world that makes no sense … at some point around that time it hit me just how completely nonsensical the ideas and aims that human beings organize themselves around are and always have been.”
This idea of someone ‘in charge’ – this idea of the ‘adults in the room’ – is, I think, one of those ideas that has to be dusted down. I think its like one of those meta-myths that people like Dougald Hine and others have been saying for years: “this doesn’t really exist any more”. Things like “progress” or “order” or even “rationality”.
If you want any further proof that the idea of some measure of control or someone being in charge just look to the office of the most powerful man on the planet (possibly). If you were any doubt that Joe Biden definitely ISN’T in charge of America then look at these White House-issued instruction pictures taken from the wings of various stages, with pictures with the heading: “walk to podium”. This man is not in charge of himself, never mind the USA (chanting in my head).
Today we hear that Biden has succumbed to COVID as if God himself was a Trump supporter, which indeed these people think he is (Marjorie Taylor Greene says she saw an angel protect him):
Jesus Christ… pic.twitter.com/saklD6Vo8X
— Christian Nightmares (@ChristnNitemare) July 17, 2024
This week Joe Biden is being urged to withdraw from the ‘contest’. He is, nominally still the Democratic candidate but increasingly looks like, as Curtis Yarvin put it so poetically: “a grapefruit floating in spinal wine”.
This idea from Justin Smith-Ruius of people coming out of COVID changed is picked up in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (which I promise to stop going on about soon). Talking about Disaster Doppelgangers and Diagonalism she writes: “The economic incentives for this kind of online content go a long way toward explaining the breed of public figure who seems to have turned into a different kind of person during that first Covid year – more manic; angrier; more willing to burn bridges, to make outlandish claims, and to share unreliable and poorly sourced information … I could make a list, but I’m sure you are making your own in your head right now…”
We have. We are.
In Bram E Gieben’s The Darkest Timeline he describes this period as a moment of paralysis and decline in which ‘fear controls the narrative’. He quotes Henry A Giroux: “History as an act of dangerous memory is whitewashed, purged of utopian ideals and replaced by apocalyptic fantasies. These include narratives of decline, fear, insecurity, anxiety and visions of imminent danger, often expressed in the language of invasion, dangerous hordes, criminal and disease-infected others.” Yes we have reached peak-Isabel Oakeshott and these stories have become a surround-sound thrumming away in the background. In this context, history, or just memory is an act of resistance.
A good cure for this is to get out and do good things at a local level. Attend any event where small children are a feature. Help out at the local Gala day. Avoid screens. Re-calibrate.
Humans were not designed to be in anguish about about events 1,000’s of miles away, over which we have no control. Most people are good. Most people are kind. Most people are sane.
They may sometimes display good or kind behaviour, but most people are neither good nor kind – they fund unnecessary violence against non-human animals every time they buy food.
It’s also questionable whether most people are sane.
They may appear sane because they accept the societal norms they’ve inherited and which surround them, but those same norms are fuelling the climate and nature crises, as well as unprecedented levels of violence against other animals.
You are wrong Gavin. Very wrong. And you need to get out more.
The fact that you and I can have this exchange is because we are descended from a long, long, long line of humans who supported and cared for each other. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that cooperative, mutual support is the defining characteristic of our species; our “signature move”. We exist because others shared.
I want to believe what you’ve said, especially about humanity (“most people…”). After reading/viewing daily accounts of how the citizens of a certain country want to see masses of other people physically liquidated, I need to believe your words. At the least, you do remind us that we aren’t all monsters. That’s a good thing to bear in mind, as the mind bears what it can on the other side of the ledger.
I think we (some people) have an innate ability to compartmentalise events. Such that extreme cruelty being visited upon other people is tolerable because it’s not “real” in some way. It’s only on their “TV”, and anyway “these people probably brought it upon themselves”.
I am certain that confronted with an actual, real-life bleeding child, right in front of them, they would rush to help and feel a huge surge of empathy and care for their fellow human. It’s a failure of imagination and emotional intelligence. not the same as being evil (although it can allow evil to flourish).
@Wul, why should physical difference change our ethical response? Is the question philosopher Peter Singer asks students:
https://newint.org/features/1997/04/05/peter-singer-drowning-child-new-internationalist
@Wul, aargh, “physical distance” not difference. Soft keyboard autocorrect I blame. I expect you’re aware of Singer’s example of a child drowning in a pond nearby (with or without diffusion of responsibility), or facing death in another country. Why should physical distance change our ethical response? (I suppose non-human animals, another of Singer’s concerns, come in with ‘physical difference’)
I agree 100%
The point about the constant stream of bad news from across the globe that we can do nothing about is very well made. It fills our heads with trauma for no good reason at all. We cannot all take on all the sorrows of the world and then somehow think we should personally try and do something about them. It is madness.
@Niemand, yet it is ourselves who have nuclear weapons pointed at their children’s vulnerable skins. Ourselves who are arming their oppressors and violators. Ourselves who are blocking international efforts to hold their oppressors and violators to account, and to rid the world of its greatest threats. Ourselves who are allied to the world’s worst criminals (and joined with its greatest evil, NATO). We are the masters of war.
The British Empire has for centuries been global in outlook. It’s a bit late (in my view) to recant a globalist perspective. Our organisations sent out culture-destroying missionaries to this Vale of Tears. Tears which the British were rather adept in extracting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vale_of_tears
European Christianity has long viewed the world as its battleground (apart from a few quietist sects).
We may not have personal responsibility for the carbon output of the industrial revolution, or the warmongering of the British imperial state, or the ravages of colonialism and racialised chattel slavery that inflict miseries today, but we are surely collectively responsible for all its modern manifestations and ecocidal culture.
You know the (unfortunately gendered) song: how many times must a man turn his head…?
Collective responsibility simply through an accident of one’s birth? That is like original sin and I had enough of that as a youth.
And where would that idea end and what does taking (presumably) responsibility mean in practice?
There are some tangible things that I would very much not say we ignore – I am not advocating we ignore the things we can try and do something about but we simply cannot take it all on, even if one can trace the problem back to British colonialism. Trying to do so leads to paralysis.
@Niemand, collective responsibility if we aspire to be citizens, rather than subjects. The common soldiers in Shakespeare’s Henry V reflect on this.
“Ay, or more than we should seek after, for we
know enough if we know we are the King’s subjects.
If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the
King wipes the crime of it out of us.”
https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-v/read/4/1/
British imperialism continues today, albeit subordinate to USAmerican imperialism. People in occupied Palestine seem easily able to trace Israeli settler colonialism back to the British template. It’s nothing to do with inheriting sin. Citizens should hold their own rulers accountable (and not just at elections).
As the little piece of rock we inhabit travels about 1.6 million miles a day, at 66,627 mph, it is worth considering the universe is not duty bound to explain its existence. But perhaps we do – why do we?
Your comment has put me in mind of ‘The Galaxy Song’ from Monty Python’s film ‘The Meaning of Life’!
Message to self –
”Stop reading this gloomy , angst-ridden blog ! Go and do something positive – like read the Labour Manifesto … well , perhaps I judged you too quickly , Mike ! ”
Hi James – going and doing something positive is a great idea, not sure about the Labour Manifesto but I’ll give it a go! But seriously do feel free to respond to any of the points raised here : )
In episode 1.1 of Connections, James Burke describes, by way of technology traps and New York power outages, how our complex, fragile societies might fail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)#Series_1_(1978)
How can our societies build themselves up again (reboot) after these systemic (baked in) failures? When we don’t know how this, we’re walking over a dark ocean on cracking ice. Which is why some turn to self-comforting myths (the USAmerican ‘rugged individualist’ whose survival gear is made in Chinese factories, or God’s Chosen People, or the Self-Made Businessman channelling Coriolanus as if author of himself and knew no other kin, certainly not daddy’s inheritance).
Even the ‘dystopian’ science fiction I’ve recently seen/played is implausibly upbeat compared to more realistic projections (such as those written by survivors of world wars). Just like horror, War and disaster movies pale in comparison with real British or American history, climate-changed environments and actual ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
It’s really unhelpful to associate minions with yellow bean-people or henchmen with comic Bond villains. We need to understand the conditioning process of minionisation which enables leaders to command followers. As per nature, our hackable humans have predispositions for forming healthy bonds which can be exploited towards submission to authority, a weakness for alleged ‘charisma’, a desire to offload responsibility, and worse. Only a few may embody the Dark Triad personality traits, but since our culture rewards them, they are a few too many for our continued survival. Even if Biden doesn’t fumble the nuclear football or Trump hands the keys to Arnageddon to a true believer.
Your blog helped me make some sense of all the ‘crazy’…..I breathed a short sigh of relief….and then I read the comments…. they confirmed once more that the ‘crazy’ is indeed ‘crazy’…but hey! It’s Friday, we’ve always got the week-end to look forward to, wait….. I think that’s probably ‘crazy’ too!
Thanks Mary …
@Mary Mclernon, I would like to clarify that I had nothing to do with the ‘Largest IT outage in history’, despite how usefully it served to make my point about how vulnerable our complex, fragile societies were to systemic, baked-in failures.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/19/microsoft-windows-pcs-outage-blue-screen-of-death