Civilization is a fragile thing, a truism that many find hard to recognize when they are in the middle of the most successful civilization man has ever devised, but a truism nonetheless. Civilization depends on the ability of its citizens to control their most primitive instinctual drives in order to maintain a large and productive social structure. As an obvious example, if too many people decide that when they are angry they are not only free to feel the urge to kill, but are free to act on the urge, no body of people will ever be, or remain, civilized.
Until fairly recently, in historical terms, the will of the monarch (emperor,, dictator, etc) was the motive force of civilization; essentially, "might makes right". The founders of our civilization knew that their job was to ensure that the mighty would be limited in their ability to aggregate powers in order to prevent a cultural "repetition compulsion."
Civilizations are also never static; the best to be hoped for is a relatively stable dynamic equilibrium between all the chaotic forces that comprise a culture. In any system which depends on a dynamic equilibrium, changes (perturbations) are typically incorporated into the structure until, at some unpredictable point, a threshold is passed and the system undergoes a chaotic, and often catastrophic, reorganization to a new level of organization. We have seen this recently in the Ukraine, where in a brief period of time, the fear of the oppressor collapsed to the power of the people (in the face of the oppressor deciding not to massacre their own). In the individual, a similar rapid reorganization takes place when a transformative interpretation (usually, only after weeks to months of preparatory interpretations) is "suddenly" understood; the person understands his past and changes his perceptions of his world, in the light of new insight. A positive therapeutic example might involve a person who finally, emotionally, "gets" it; he suddenly realizes that he was slacking off at work because he unconsciously was identifying his boss as his domineering father, and was covertly locked in battle with his imagined oppressor; once the insight has been incorporated, he can then work to be freed of the need to continue the fight. While the entire process can take years, the moment of insight, where things "fall into place" takes an instant.
These considerations relate to a number of current issues. Our society is grappling with some significant issues which involve the tension between civilization and the individual passions of its members. Because of the "butterfly effect", systems in dynamic equilibria can change suddenly and unpredictably once a threshold is reached. Those of us who live in the system will often not recognize when the threshold is hit; often it is only in retrospect that the changes generated by the "paradigm shift" are appreciated. The automobile revolutionized our lives and its effects are still resonating in our culture, but it would have been hard to predict this outcome from the invention of the first car in the 1890's.
Psychoanalysts, though typically fairly libertarian in outlook, also appreciate the value of conservatism; interpretations work best when the ramifications are as fully explored as possible before the comments are presented. (In other words, we interpret defenses against "knowing" and understand their function, before we interpret [uncover] the meme being defended against.)
I plan on further exploring the interactions between the personal (desires and passions) and the political (our system of disparate peoples living together) and how the stressors we face our impinging on our civilization in my next posts. Unconscious processes and unintended consequences abound.
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