Yesterday's
article on the disengagement of half of the US population has me
wondering, again, whether the cause of this, and some of the other
strange manifestations of our time, is stress
-- too many people jammed unnaturally close together struggling over
scarce resources and enormous and conflicting psychological pressure,
much of it stemming from causes that no one has any real control over.
I think Canadians and Europeans live in a somewhat kinder, gentler
society where these pressures are less pronounced, but I sense some of
the 'anomie' I referred to here as well, especially in our young
people. I wonder whether it is behind the kind of mindless violence
that boils over in English soccer stands, in the poor, segregated
French suburbs, and perhaps even in the furious outrage of a billion
struggling people over a bunch of cartoons.
I wonder, too,
whether Americans' insatiable appetite for more and more violent films
and 'reality TV' that wallows in and laughs at the most extreme forms
of human misery (both of the inflicted and self-administered variety --
these 'idol' elimination programs revel in cruelty and ridicule far
more than they celebrate any kind of talent) are outlets for this growing detachment that requires more and more powerful shocks to register above the numbness. The media pandering to this accelerating tendency seem to be trying to address not attention challenges caused by information overload, but an attention deficit caused, perhaps, by an unwillingness to even register information that is seen as utterly meaningless and relentlessly boring.
A while ago I threw out the idea
of a magazine that would suggest possible individual actions at the end
of each article and would allow you to detach, organize and file the
articles you were personally acting on. While I still see this as
valuable for the socially and politically engaged, I now wonder whether
half the population would see this as a preposterous exercise in
self-delusion and personal hubris.
I find myself suffering from
mild symptoms of this attention deficit: Lack of concentration, to the
point I now find reading a complete work of fiction intolerably
frustrating. And a constant restlessness during social events (I find
myself 'browsing' the crowd in an often futile search for a
conversation that can hold my focus). Some people tell me I have
developed an annoying habit of not looking at people while I'm talking
with them, as if something more important is preoccupying me. I notice
these symptoms, and more pronounced, jarring ones as well, in others,
especially young males, for whom conversations seem like a
discontinuous mental journey in and out of reality, as if they're
engaged in a constant internal struggle for any kind of connection and
attention.
I wonder if this disengagement isn't symptomatic of a more profound underlying problem of dissociation in our culture. Dissociation is generally a defensive reaction, to trauma or chronic stress or extreme anxiety, a coping mechanism. In advanced cases it can lead to psychopathy,
where the person emotionally distances him/herself from the
consequences of his/her actions, becoming wildly impulsive,
remorseless, deceptive, easily bored, and prone to blame others (this
diagnosis has been, quite seriously, made of George Bush, whose
inability to string together a coherent sentence is attributed not to
illiteracy but to dissociation). Dissociation isn't always the result
of some extreme childhood abuse or injury, or severe post-traumatic
stress. It can result from much subtler, but chronic stresses -- the
kind many of us face in our modern world every day. |
11:02:50 AM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
