Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents in 1929, and the book was first published in German in 1930 with the title The Uneasiness of Civilization. It is considered one of Freud’s most important and influential works, especially in the field of modern psychology. Freud founded the psychoanalytic theory of mind in the 1890s; he first used the term “psychoanalysis” in 1896. He proposed a “structural theory” of the mind in 1923, which included the id (wholly unconscious, instinct-driven, and containing material later repressed), the ego (partly conscious, containing defense mechanisms and logic-based operations), and the super-ego (also just partly conscious, containing the conscience as well as unconscious guilt feelings). I’ll discuss these concepts more below.
I chose to do a blog post on Civilization and Its Discontents for two reasons: I was craving something heavier on philosophy than spirituality, and Freud was an atheist through and through, and didn’t seem to have a spiritual bone in his body, either, far as I can tell (granted, I’m no scholar). He viewed religion as infantile, a continuation of the childhood need for a father’s protection, an example of mass delusion (more on that later, too). My other reason for choosing the book was that I knew it would contain some fascinating insights into this civilization’s current state of discontent and would provide me with some really fun stuff to rant about. Its primary theme is the irreconcilable conflict between mankind’s instinctual drives and the restrictions imposed by civilization. Freud presents his exploration over the course of eight elegant chapters, altogether totaling a little over one hundred pages.
I’m going to dive in with Chapter 2, which tackles none other compelling subject than the purpose of human life. After observing that you never hear anybody pondering the purpose of non-human life, Freud determines that only religion can explain the purpose of human life—albeit in a way that Freud himself would not accept—and instead suggests we look at mankind’s behavior in order to deduce our primary goal, intention, or purpose. He asserts that lasting happiness is our goal, defining happiness in relation to what he calls the pleasure principle: we seek to attain pleasure and avoid pain. But this whole “program” runs totally counter to how the world—nay, the universe—operates.
Freud goes on to expound on what exactly threatens our ability to attain happiness and the ways we defend against or cope with those threats. Regarding where these obstacles, hindrances, and antagonists come from, he names three directions: our own bodies, the external environment, and other humans. Our bodies get sick, for instance, and break down over time, and can be a source of uncomfortable sensations, pain, and even agony. Wild animals, weather systems, and other climate-related phenomena necessitate various forms of protection and shelter, which are sometimes no match to nature’s hurricanes, heat waves, blizzards and wildfires. And then: other people. Jean-Paul Sartre said, in his play No Exit, “Hell is other people.” Writing fourteen years earlier, Freud would’ve concurred. He said that the suffering caused by other people is probably the most painful of the three. And while we might think it should be more avoidable than that which comes from the natural environment or our own bodies, it is actually just as inevitable.
I wonder how much less people-caused suffering would happen if we didn’t so often assume that it shouldn’t? If we were as put out by a rainstorm as we are by people behaving badly, or in ways we wish they wouldn’t—or if we took that rain storm as personally offensive to us—just imagine how absurd that would be! And maybe it’s just as absurd to be personally offended by other people’s behavior. Maybe expecting people to never misbehave—and today this includes, just as an example, the behavior of not getting vaccinated—is just as unreasonable as expecting the sky to be blue all the time, or the oceans always calm. And maybe even our attempts to punish people for bad behavior would be comparable to punishing wind for becoming a tornado, or snow for becoming an avalanche, or, to use a body analogy, a certain cell for multiplying too quickly.
I think the Roman Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, whom I talked about in an earlier blog post, would agree. In the book Meditations, Marcus repeatedly says that we shouldn’t be shocked or offended by any other person’s behavior. “Of course that’s how they’re going to act,” he basically says. They are simply playing out their role, exactly as it was designed for them, and you are playing out your role, too, and all you can do is try to calmly reason with them. But if they won’t listen to reason, forget about it.
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Faced with threats to our happiness that come with our own corporeal systems, natural environments, and other people, we all find ways to protect ourselves or just plain cope with the stress of it all, of constantly having our hand smacked away in its reaching for pleasure or the absence of pain. One such technique that Freud mentions is the use and abuse of intoxicants, which he blames for a significant waste of human energy that could have been put towards somehow improving the world. Which isn’t to say he thought we should set out with the intention to improve the world. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, didn’t write Walden as a means of making the world a better place, but I’d argue that it did make the world a better place, because before he wrote it, the world did not contain Walden, and after he wrote it, it did. Much to our good fortune, Thoreau did not waste any energy on intoxicants, unless you count fresh air and birdsong as falling under that category.
What Thoreau and so many others have done with their writing and other forms of art is what Freud called sublimation, wherein certain instinctual goals are transposed onto a process that won’t encounter as much resistance from the external world, and might even be valued there. The novelist, for instance, turns a fantasy into something meaningful. Freud includes scientists in his brief discussion of sublimation, although I’m not sure what “crude and primary” instincts they're satisfying by solving problems and discovering new truths. And Freud concludes that, while sublimation is more sustainable and satisfying than taking drugs, its intensity is still too mild compared to satisfying a primary instinct. Also, sublimation is not an option for everyone, because not everyone is an artist, scientist, mathematician, etc.
Another way that people try to cope with the frustrations of civilization—which Freud defines, by the way, as “the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations”—is to make love their central focus. Romantic love, familial love, platonic love, love of God—although that would fall under the category of religion—whatever love a person has access to, that becomes the most important thing to them, the thing they think will bring them happiness. But Freud says that instead of defending us against suffering, our love renders us more defenseless than ever. Because one day our love will either not be returned, or our loved object will disappear (assuming we ourselves don’t disappear first) and we will be even more “helplessly unhappy.” Of course this begs the question of how Freud defines love; he seems to be referring to more of a codependence than what Anthony de Mello, for instance, saw as love: “To see something as it really is, not how you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves.”
Another coping mechanism Freud cites—and the last I’ll mention—is something that seems to be happening a lot in American politics right now: the creation of an alternate reality. One essentially “recreates the world” so that all of the actual world’s most challenging aspects are erased and replaced by others that better conform to one’s own desires. Trump supporters who still cling to the lie that Biden didn’t win the 2020 election come to mind. And certain anti-vaxers—not all of them, mind you—some people are just plain scared of it and aren’t advertising it to the whole world all day every day—but those more vocal, belligerent anti-vaxers who think there’s some kind of conspiracy going on—also come to mind as an example of people who have set out in what Freud calls “desperate defiance” of a reality that is “too strong” for them. He would also include religious groups as an example of this type of “mass-delusion.” And “no one,” he says, “who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.” He also has no doubt that this particular method for attaining happiness will ultimately fail.
Indeed, none of the coping and defense mechanisms Freud explores in Chapter 2 of Civilization and Its Discontents are truly viable means for attaining all that we desire. But is happiness even a matter of such all-encompassing attainment? Freud says it’s a a question of “the economics of the individual’s libido,” or life force, and that every person must discover their own particular path toward “being saved.” We must each take into account the extent to which we can be satisfied by the external world, the extent to which we can separate ourselves from it, and how capable we feel of transforming it to better suit us. This trifecta reminds me of what Eckhart Tolle says in The Power of Now, which mirrors in reverse what Freud asserts. Tolle says that in any challenging situation, we have three choices: we can try to change the situation, we can leave it, or we can accept it. And if we can’t change it or leave it, we absolutely must accept it. Refusal to accept what can’t be changed or left is, Tolle says, a form of insanity.
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In Chapter 3 Freud further expounds upon the obstacle of civilization at large, which, again, he defines as "the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.” He also asserts that civilization is characterized by an appreciation for order, cleanliness, beauty, and the encouragement of what he calls man’s “higher mental activities,” including achievements in science, art, religion, philosophy, and our ideas of how we might be perfected as individuals, as a society, and as a species. Civilization in large part consists of the demands we set up on the basis of such ideals.
Freud also emphasizes another defining characteristic of civilization: it establishes regulations around how people relate to one another, from our relatively benign, implicitly enforced codes of social conduct to our institutional systems of punishment for bad behavior like theft, rape, and murder. In its focus on how people relate to one another, civilization prioritizes the group over the individual. To quote Freud, “The replacement of the power of the individual by the power of the community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.” This seems quite obvious when you think about it, but in America right now, it would appear that many people are under a different impression. They believe it is far more civilized to prioritize their power as individuals. What should be seen (at least in my view) as privileges are defended as rights. But to be civilized in a Freudian sense, people must restrict their individual desires and impulses—the selfish fulfillment of which could bring them great satisfaction—for the sake of those around them and for the optimal functioning of society as a whole. To live only for oneself is to live unrestricted. So in this way, civilization requires psychological and emotional maturity from its members. “[Its] first requisite,” Freud says, “is that of justice—that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favor of an individual…The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization.”
And yet we all crave individual liberty! We long, perhaps every day, to satisfy powerful instincts that civilization has forced us to renounce. Indeed, civilization is synonymous with precisely this renunciation. Through suppression, repression, and other avenues, our urge for freedom is perennially frustrated. And most of us, I’d argue, are wholly unaware of this primal frustration. Or we attribute our discontent to other things; we blame our hips, our wrinkles, our spouses, our houses, our wardrobes, our jobs. We keep cranking out new inventions and upgrading our technology, but we’re not any happier than we were before, say, the airplane was invented. Have smart phones made us happier or given us more freedom? And I mean freedom in the existential sense? I’d go so far as to say that smart phones have restricted us even more in that sense, because most of us feel like we have to have them. And anything we feel like we have to have is actually an obstacle to our true freedom. Not to mention their addictive qualities and how we’ve lost the invaluable ability to do nothing, to be without entertainment, something to consume.
I love reading older books that comment on mankind’s technological advancements. Like in Walden, when Thoreau rants about trains and how they go too fast (about thirty miles per hour in his day). In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud also mentions “the railway,” this time in relation to the telephone. He acknowledges the genius of the telephone and how it allows a person to hear a loved one’s voice from far away, but says, “If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.” It’s a great example of how our inventions create the need for ever more inventions. And it touches on what I see as a significant problem about our modern way of life: everyone is so far flung! Because we can move far away from wherever we grew up—thanks to plains, trains, and automobiles—we do. I did it myself once for four years, living in Tucson and Albuquerque. And even now that I live in Asheville, I’m still a 5-and-a-half hour drive away from my mother, an hour less than that from my dad when he isn’t on his boat exploring some waterway or other, ten hours away from my older sister, twenty-one hours away from my younger sister, and my step-dad who isn’t technically still my step-dad but will always essentially be has lived in Germany for the past year and will be there for another one. Not to mention friends who are scattered across the country. I’m certainly not saying that everyone should live their entire life wherever they happened to grow up; I just think it’s sad, the distances we’ve come to take for granted. Our motto as a species should be something like, “Because we can, we do, and because do, we have to keep doing.” Or maybe more simply, “Because we can, we can’t not.”
And if you trace every invention back far enough, you’ll probably find that each one was inspired by our supposed “need” to exert control over nature, including space and time. Time’s a big one. What percentage of our technology has been an answer to the quandary of how to save time? And what does that even mean, to save time?
A few weeks ago I interviewed my former linguistics professor, Walt Wolfram, who’s eighty years old and still teaches at NC State, and he talked a lot about technology. He recalled the early days of his linguistics research and how he’d have to go to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (I believe he lived there at the time) and spend hours poring over censuses to find the information he was looking for, information he could locate within minutes today from the comfort of his own home, thanks to the internet. Being able to conduct research faster obviously means that one could theoretically write and publish an article or book faster, but once they’re done with that project they’re just going to move right on to the next one—assuming they’re driven to do so. They’re not necessarily going to appreciate the amount of time they “saved” by not having to go to the Library of Congress, and then put that time toward rest and relaxation. And if they genuinely enjoy the work, maybe they don’t even need rest and relaxation. But what ultimately results from “saving time” is increasing the amount of work we do—or for some of us, the amount of things we create. And where good art and literature and helpful medicines are concerned, I’m not bashing such an increase. But at the same time I don’t think more is actually better. Indeed the “more is better” mindset is deeply problematic, and the faster we’re able to do things, the faster we need to do things. We’d probably be better off as a species if we were more patient, and all of our time-saving inventions have made us less so, which clearly contributes to our overall discontent.
Freud calls our various technologies “auxiliary organs,” which seems a prescient phrase especially when considering smart phones, how most people always have them either on their person or within arm’s reach. And then there’s the ultra-futuristic—which will probably seem quaint in no time—Google Glass, the result of a mission to produce a ubiquitous computer, this one in the shape of eye glasses that allow for hands-free work. (That’s another thing we like to free up, aside from time: our hands. But aren’t idle hands the Devil’s plaything?) And many people seem to agree that we’ll all soon have computer chips in our heads—not implanted their via a nefarious vaccine, either, but by our own volition and choice. Auxiliary organs, indeed. And unlike the ones that Freud had in mind in 1930 when describing mankind as “a kind of prosthetic God,” ours have “grown on to” us and have no intention of letting go. And yet, in becoming ever more God-like, we’re no closer to fulfilling the purpose that all our inventions supposedly serve: lasting contentment, happiness, liberty, ease.
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Regarding Chapter 4 of Civilization and Its Discontents, I just want to point out what Freud has to say about love and work. I once read years ago, in a book or article I’ve now forgotten, that when asked what the most important things in life are, Freud responded, “Work and love.” Not only are those two things worth prioritizing in life, but they are, according to Freud, what comprise the foundation of human communal life. Our compulsion to work—itself driven by the demands of the external environment and our body’s demand for sustenance—and our unwillingness to be separated from beloved people, be they our sexual partners or our family members—especially our children—are what made communal living feel natural and necessary. “Eros and Ananke,” Freud says, “[or] Love and Necessity have become the parents of human civilization, too.”
I’d argue that the problem with modern civilization is that we’ve become too separated from the necessity of our work. Ancient man had to build a shelter or die from exposure. Modern man works a nine-to-five to make money to pay for the rental of a shelter. Ancient man had to hunt for food and skin it, clean it, and cook it over fire, or die of starvation. Modern man works a nine-to-five to make money to buy food at a grocery store. And of course much of time these nine-to-fives are themselves unnecessary, in that they fulfill no essential need of society, and in some cases are downright harmful. Imagine if we got rid of the cruise ship industry, for instance. What life-sustaining needs would go unmet, and how much better off would our oceans be?
But Freud uses the phrase “our compulsion to work,” which makes me think it’s more than the demands of nature and our bodies that thusly compel us. And clearly that’s true, at least for those among us who work more than we actually need to, either because we genuinely enjoy it or are using work to avoid being still. And as a society at large—as a system—one could argue we’re obsessive-compulsive about work. I know that not everyone works a nine-to-five, but forty hours a week is still what we typically consider a full-time job—what we consider normal. But what if it’s actually symptomatic of a disorder? What if working forty hours a week is comparable to having to flip the light switch fives times with every use? Who decided that eight hours a day, five days a week, was normal? It’s probably safe to assume that people who stood to make a lot of money off of other people working forty hours a week are the ones who decided that was normal. But if it were just twenty hours a week? Manufacturers would manufacture less, so there would be less to buy. Sounds pretty good to me. And meanwhile people could spend their time doing things they enjoyed, which might, for some—perhaps even many—look like another kind of work—but it would give meaning to their lives—what peace literacy advocate Paul Chappell, whom I’ll write more about below, would call “epic purpose,” which is something most people severely lack. I myself work fifteen to twenty hours a week at my career job—which luckily pays very well—and choose to spend the rest of my time on other projects that are work in and of themselves—including this radio show—but that enhance my life and bring me great satisfaction. Everyone should be able to work twenty hours a week and live comfortably on their earnings. If we’re going to be so absurd as to place a dollar amount on time and energy—which is what work is: the giving of one’s time and energy—we should consider more seriously what those are actually worth. I think that just showing up to a place and staying there for an hour is worth at least twenty bucks, and that amount should significantly increase based on the intensity of the work expected.
But alas, I’m not in charge.
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I’ve made my way up to Chapter 5 of Civilization and Its Discontents, wherein Freud explores what he calls mankind’s “inclination to aggression” and the “primary mutual hostility of human beings.” This inborn aggression and hostility are what force civilization to constantly expend a large amount of energy, as it must be on guard against this perpetual threat of disintegration from within. If we look at civilization as a body, we can see individual human beings as cells or molecules. And when those cells start attacking each other—which, according to Freud, they’re always desperately wanting to do—the civilization gets sick and maybe even dies.
Of course one could argue that human beings are not inherently aggressive and hostile. All of my favorite spiritual traditions echo the belief that we are loving awareness through and through. But then if you look at history, it’s full of bloodshed, often on a massive scale. But it’s also full of profound cooperation among humans, a cooperation that has enabled us to last as long as we have on a planet that we’re really not designed very well for if you think about it, hairless, furless freaks that we are. So maybe it’s both: we have aggressive tendencies on one level, and on a higher level we ultimately occupy the loving observer perspective. It’s just that many people are oblivious to that perspective and identify with their aggressive self. And who’s to say that civilization isn’t responsible for our aggressiveness? And therefore how insane is it that the task of civilization is to subdue and hopefully eliminate that hostility?
And how, indeed, does civilization attempt said elimination? Freud provides as an example the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” which he argues is an utterly unrealistic expectation of human beings. He rails against the notion, saying that he is not going to love anyone who has not earned his love in some way, who does not therefore deserve it. If I just love everyone willy-nilly, that would devalue my love for friends, family, and romantic partners. He goes on to point out that his neighbor doesn’t seem to have an iota of love for him and shows him no consideration, so why should he be expected to do so? Freud says that this commandment runs entirely counter to human nature, and for this exact reason, its repeated use is justified by what he calls the “cultural super-ego” and “has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others.”
I agree that it’s probably too much to ask of your average person, to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think a lot of the people who argue that we should all wear masks and get vaccinated for the sake of our fellow man need to check their moral superiority, and I believe that the primary reason most people wear masks and get vaccinated is to protect their own selves, first and foremost, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. And I’m not saying that those of us in the mask-wearing, vaccinated club aren’t partly engaging in those behaviors as a way to protect others; I’m just saying that it’s not our primary reason for engaging in those behaviors, and if others do not want to engage in those behaviors to protect their own lives, so be it. “But they’re putting my safety at risk,” you might say, “by not wearing a mask and not getting vaccinated.” Yeah, well, welcome to civilization.
And also in regards to loving thy neighbor as thyself, I’d argue that we don’t really love ourselves to begin with, and therefore how can we really love our neighbors? Moreover, to actually love someone in the way that most people think of love, we have to know that person. And how many of us really know our neighbors? And now I’m thinking of the word “neighbor” literally, as a person who lives in our neighborhood. My paternal grandmother was a prolific diarist in her younger years, and in reading the diaries she kept as a girl growing up in the 1930s and 40s in Harriman, Tennessee, I am struck by how often she was out in the neighborhood, playing with other kids, and by how often her parents would “go calling” on other neighbors, visiting with them over coffee and cookies. We don’t live like this anymore and it’s a real shame, especially for the kids. It’s incredibly difficult to love someone you do not know, and therefore cannot understand.
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Freud makes a distinction, though, between opposition and enmity (enmity being hatred, basically), saying that we can be opposed to someone—or more specifically, their ideals, ideologies, agendas, etc.—without hating them. He says that opposition “is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.” Which implies that we’re looking for reasons to hate others, which in turn implies that we enjoy hating others. And on some level I’d say this is true. I’d say this is why Donald Trump became so popular: he gave people permission to hate. And hatred is easy. Hatred means you don’t have to listen or try to see things from someone else’s perspective. It means you don’t have to learn anything. Loving, on the other hand, takes humility and critical thinking, which, granted, are two characteristics that aren’t inherent to most large groups of people. Freud refers to “the psychological poverty of groups,” and I love this phrase. For a psyche to exist at all, there must first be a mind, and groups are mindless. There’s no there there.
In the November 2021 issue of The Sun magazine, there’s an interview with peace educator Paul Chappell, who says that aggression and violence are forms of expression. He attributes much of human rage, cynicism, mistrust, and ruthlessness to what he calls “tangles of trauma,” and that mankind’s various psychological wounds are being weaponized now more than ever before, with social media playing a huge role in this weaponization. Tangles of trauma get expressed in the guise of extremism, racism, domestic violence, addiction, and other problems. Chappell quotes Book 17 of the Iliad, wherein Zeus says, “There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.” Just being human might be traumatizing in and of itself. Unlike other species (as far as we know), we are aware of our own mortality, and this alone creates a lot of anxiety. On top of that, Chappell says, we have to learn how to be human. Our powers of self-awareness and our perspective on the future require that we don’t just operate on instinct alone. We need guidance in navigating all that we know about ourselves and the nature of life. And much of what we need help with is how to live peacefully with other humans, which we aren’t taught how to do, Chappell says, in any formal and consistent way.
The truth of this is undeniable. Imagine how different civilization would be if we emphasized the importance of getting along with others as much as—or ideally more than—we do reading, writing, and arithmetic? The art of peaceful cohabitation—essentially, the art of living—should be part of the core curriculum at every educational institution on the planet. And I’ll add that child rearing should be another part of it. Even if people have no intention of procreating, they should be taught how to effectively communicate with children, because as adults we are all responsible, to varying levels and degrees, for the psychological welfare of younger generations. It blows my mind that I need an advanced degree and a professional (not to mention expensive) license—the maintenance of which requires extensive continuing education—in order to be a psychotherapist, which involves listening to someone talk for an hour a week and hopefully having something of value to say in return—but anybody—regardless of education or experience—can raise a human being. I’m certainly not suggesting that people should have to apply to be parents, or that there’s any ethical way to prevent unfit parents from having children. I’m just saying that child rearing should be taught in schools. And expecting parents should be required to take advanced-level parenting classes, and until their child is eighteen they should be required to meet continuing education requirements.
Not that any of these ideas are worth a damn in the end. As I said a couple weeks ago in an episode about yoga, I’ve come to the realization that it’s pointless to talk about how “the world would be a better place if…”, because clearly the world is not supposed to be a better place. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud allows for the possibility of our finding ways to improve the world we’ve created, but he says, “perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform.” He’s referring to acceptance here. Every potential solution for improving things on a grand scale necessarily involves that the vast majority of people adopt a given new behavior. If everyone did yoga every day, the world would be a better place. If everyone recycled, if everyone drove less, if everyone had a garden, if everyone quit social media, if everyone were in therapy, if everyone ate less meat, if everyone were vaccinated… But everyone doesn’t do anything unless they perceive they have no choice in the matter. We’re all different, with different personalities, world views and value systems. That’s what makes us people. And so the “human problem,” if you will, is utterly unsolvable.
But it’s still so fun to try!
In Chapter 6 of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud revisits a concept he’d introduced in an earlier work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle—the notion of the death instinct, or Thanatos, which opposes the life instinct, or Eros. The death instinct seeks to dissolve units of living substance and “bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state.” The push and pull of these two instincts, Freud says, can explain all the phenomena of life. He borrows a phrase from Goethe, saying “little children do not like it,” the idea that humans are inclined toward aggression, destruction, and cruelty. We were made in God’s image, right? So how are we supposed to reconcile the existence of evil—which Freud says is “undeniable”—with the omnipotence, benevolence and perfection of God?
Freud sees human aggression as the main representative of Thanatos, the death instinct, which “shares world-dominion” with Eros, the life instinct. So this idea supports what I said earlier, about people being both naturally aggressive and the essence of love—which is the essence of life. Civilization, therefore, “presents the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.” Having both giants, life and death—and all the other dichotomies that come to mind: good-bad, day-night, hot-cold, fast-slow, easy-hard, sacred-profane—is the definitive characteristic of the human experience, and, for that matter, every being’s experience on this planet.
Freud contends that civilization is in service of the life drive, and mankind’s aggressive instinct is in service of the death drive. He says the primary means with which civilization opposes aggressiveness—aside from extolling you to “love thy neighbor as thyself”—is through a process of introjection or internalization. Essentially, the anger and hatred we feel for our parents and other authority figures who prevent us from having our “first…and most important satisfactions” cannot be directed at those figures for fear of their resulting wrath, so we must direct those hostile feelings back on ourselves. And through this process, our conscience develops. I’d like to know what Freud would have to say about children who do consistently express anger and hatred at their parents. Are they less likely to develop a conscience and experience guilt?
He devotes Chapter 7 of Civilization and Its Discontents, to the concepts of conscience (synonymous with super-ego) and guilt, which results from having a conscience. In most of us, Freud says, the super-ego is as harsh and aggressive in its dealings with our egos as we ourselves would like to have been with various authority figures. We internalize those authority figures in the form of our super-ego/conscience, and our ego then experiences guilt, and a need for punishment. Furthermore, Freud says, our guilt is an expression of our ambivalence: we love life and yet, on some level, we also want to destroy it. Nowhere is this conflict more problematic than in our attempts to live together, both in romantic and familial units and even more so in larger ones.
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Chapter 8 concludes the book, with Freud asserting that advances in civilization necessitate a diminishment of human happiness, which is inversely proportionate to a heightening of our sense of guilt. The more guilt we feel, the less happiness we experience. Freud says a civilization would probably be “most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual.” And by “successful” I think he mostly means efficient, running smoothly. With this notion he harkens back to the beginning of the book, which identified happiness as the primary purpose of human activity. He suggests it shouldn’t be, if we want civilization to flourish.
Moreover, just as the demands of our super-ego are often too severe in their goal of depriving the id of satisfaction, the ego of happiness, the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego also lack consideration for the actual mental constitution of human beings. Our egos do not possess total control over our ids, but the super-ego—both on the individual and cultural level—assumes that they do, as with the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” And just as we must sometimes defy our super-egos—which might look like behaving badly—so too must we occasionally rebel against the expectations of civilization. “The fateful question for the human species,” says Freud, is whether and to what extent our cultural development can have mastery over our aggressive, self-destructive instincts. He attributes our general unrest, unhappiness, and anxiety to our knowing, on some core level, that we could easily exterminate ourselves by enlisting the forces of nature over which we’ve gained so much control. The atom bomb is the most concrete and potent example of our destructive potential, but there are many others, including our very own instincts.
