Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020815
Systemic Dysfunction
Abuse
Umair Haque ... The Abusive Society ... Why Abuse Seems to Reach Into Every Corner of Modern Life
Peter Burgess
The Abusive Society ... Why Abuse Seems to Reach Into Every Corner of Modern Life
Image Credit: Allison Bailey on Twitter
I’d love to have kids. I don’t have kids. If I did, I’d be worried about them. Abuse, it seems, reaches crookedly into every tiny nook and cranny of life. We discovered that the hard way, from Weinstein to Spacey to Cosby to all the predators yet to be named. But what does that itself begin to hint at? An abusive society.
Let’s chart the journey of an average American. They’re born. Thanks to a deficient healthcare system, that costs around $20,000, where in most countries, this most basic of human rights, reproduction, is free. That tiny fact will play a theme in the story I’ll tell: the struggle to exist creates an abusive society, where people forever crave what they can never have. We’ll return to that.
Soon enough, our average American goes to school. Schools where rules about bullying and harassment simply don’t exist like they do in other rich countries, and even many poor ones. Schools where mass shootings and metal detectors are commonplace. Where disciplines like ethics and civics and economics and politics aren’t really taught, where the basics of science and art and literature must be fought over.
The child is taught in all these ways to feel afraid, hostile, anxious; to be confused, unsure, hesitant, about what it means to be a child, to be an adult, to be a person at all; that everything seems always to be a perpetual battle — not what a child should be taught, which is that his or her world is a gentle, safe, happy place, which can be explored and challenged and even upended, and things will still be alright.
He or she is left with a red-light sense of danger and caution. Here we begin to see the first great failure of American life: a failure to civilize, which we will pursue, but first let us discuss what it really means.
To mature and to become an individual the child must feel that the world is a safe place. Not a womb — but not a war zone either. But the world this child is in not a safe place. It is a jungle of thorns, which he or she cannot navigate. So the child remains stuck, at an infantile stage of development, and he or she will need constant approval and validation just to shore up a fragmented and weak sense of self, always now seeking a father or mother figure, his or her whole life long — and, because they themselves feel so weak inside, usually they will be drawn to the outwardly strongest, most bombastic, one they can find. This is the first of three great dilemmas of living in an abusive society, and it will set the stage for our average American’s life.
It’s time for college, for this average American. They don’t have rich parents, so immediately it costs them crippling lifelong debt. But that’s just the beginning. College life centers around fraternities and sororities, and to join one, one must be hazed, often viciously. Why do Americans need them? Because they are always seeking powerful, protective mother and father figures, craving safety, to make up for the basic absence of a safe world they have suffered from early childhood.
If you think I exaggerate, consider: this strange and costly structure, university life revolving around fraternities, simply doesn’t exist in any other society in the world, nor in history — it is as if one must be beaten into a gang simply to be educated. And yet, because it is centered on these organizations, which themselves center on politics, power, and parties, not education, college in the US is notably poor. Again, ethics, politics, economics, literature, and so on, simply aren’t part of most mandatory curricula — and so the failure to civilize, which produces a feeling of an unsafe world, continues.
Only now it’s growing: after being relentlessly hazed, bullied, and attacked, right from childhood into early adulthood, our average American is beginning to internalize all that abuse. What else can they do? A profound loss of the integrity of the self is what abuse genuinely is: the internalization of the harm that has one been done to one, over and over again, until one believes that one has deserved it, needed it, earned it.Abuse is a cycle, a burden passed down through the generations: no one is born an abuser. And so it’s at this moment, I’d guess, that the American psyche turns genuinely abusive. First, our average American needed safety in the arms of a father or mother figure, to make up for an unsafe world — and now they begin to believe that there exist good reasons that they needed to be abused, and thus, that they should and must behave abusively, too.
What are those reasons? Probably something like these. That to succeed, one must be more ruthless and merciless than the next person. That one’s suffering is a measure of one’s weakness, and therefore suffering must be erased and denied, not felt and understood. That one’s purpose in life is to amass power and privilege, no matter how barren or empty one feels inside. They are the prices one has learned that one must pay in an unsafe world, not for safety, warmth, security, which are by definition impossible to find, but just to exist at all, protected, at least, by their abusers.
And so now the second dilemma of the abusive society arises: one must abuse people to earn a sense of self, just to feel protected, but the price is happiness, because happiness comes from the strength and quality of one’s relationships, and in this mode of relating, one has no genuine relationships — only absences and emptinesses, voids and lacks of seeing and knowing people as people.
Let’s continue the story of our average American. If they’re lucky, they get some kind of professional job at a corporation. An accountant, a programmer, and so on. But what happens at these jobs? Well, the latest economic research tells us something very interesting: the jobs that contribute the least to society (that in fact destroy value, but we don’t need to gild the lily), like hedge fund managers, earn the most, and the jobs that contribute the most, like teachers, earn the least.
So now our American faces the third great dilemma of the abusive society: if they wish to earn a decent middle class living, they will have to seal a deal with the devil, and begin contributing less to society. But of course the price is that life loses meaning, because meaning is earned by what we give to people, not merely what we take from them. And so the price of this dilemma is that the world has finally been proven to be not just unsafe, but empty, hollow, a fraud: to earn protection, this time, he or she has had to give up on the point of life itself.
Now where is one to find the sense of meaning that one has lost? Where is one to find the sense of safety one has been craving all one’s life? Well, our average American is probably going to turn, now, in midlife, to religion. If relatively poor, perhaps a megachurch, if relatively well off, maybe Buddhism in designer yoga pants — maybe even QAnon. But religion is religion. And yet while religion does indeed give us meaning, again, this strikingly odd institutional structure — megachurches and corporate chains of yoga studios — simply doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It therefore tells us that something deeper is going on than religion. Our average American is still desperately seeking the sense of safety he or she has craved, and never found, since childhood.
Let’s take stock of the life of our average American now, at midlife, where I’ll end my essay. They began their life being failed in the most basic way: being stuck, trapped, imprisoned, as children, in an unsafe, precarious world. They then sought safety in the arms of mother and father figures their whole lives long. They sought it not in people, but in mega institutions, which at least gave them a basic sense of safety, if not actual security: first fraternities and sororities, universities, then mega corporations, and megachurches. All of these have served the same function, really: to make life in an abusive society not livable — for that it can never be — but at least tolerable.
But there is a strange and terrible social price: the need for protection in a world where one cannot have safety creates mega-institutions, but the men who control them are then free to become predators, voracious abusers. Just like mafia bosses, they turn protection into victimization. That is precisely what we see in America today.
Let’s put that in global perspective. At every stage of life, our average American has only been desperately craving safety, and safety only means this: that one has the right to exist. Americans don’t have any rights to exist: rights to healthcare, higher education, retirement, and so on, that the rest of the rich world does, enshrined in constitutions, safeguarded by institutions, like Britain’s National Health Service (which is now being gutted because of Britain’s own folly, but I digress). Who can blame them then for fleeing like the frightened little children they have always remained, into the arms of mega institutions, whether corporations or fraternities or churches?
A flight to mega-institutions is one solution to an abusive society. But it is a poor one, because it seeking the protection of one’s abusers, not from them, and thus licensing them. And so it can only ever be a palliative, like taking heroin for the pain of being abused all one’s life long. What Americans really need is to fix the cycles of abuse that have driven them to seek, and yet never find, safety in the unsafe world they themselves have created. To undo the predatory ways of being that they came to call wise and just and true, but in fact, were only ever the lament of the hurt child, begging, just for an instant, to be held, to be known, to be loved.
Umair May 2021