I've recently been considering the strange new public narratives taking shape in the US. The reds now suggest that complying with covid measures is symptomatic of something they're calling mass formation psychosis, which isn't really a thing. The blues are now saying that the reds want a civil war. Viewing current events through either lens seems absurd. Although society does appear to be gripped by a peculiar madness and militias are stockpiling weapons, framing this in terms of mass psychosis and war doesn't capture what's actually happening.
To me, it makes more sense to look at these things as emergent properties of a larger societal transformation, driven by technological advancement and the decomposition of unsustainable systems. This transformation naturally increases both the complexity and the chaos in our everyday lives, leaving many people feeling confused and looking for someone to blame. The media keeps trying to re-purpose old stories to these new circumstances. It's reds versus blues, they say. Democracy is in danger, they warn. And yet, these versions of the truth miss the real point, that everything has started to shift and we're poorly equipped to make sense of what that means.
Some parts of this shift are more clear than others. Ecologically, it's a shitshow. There's climate change, a mass extinction event, microplastics everywhere, and toxic chemicals in the food and water. Socially, it's more ambiguous. The decline of organized religion alongside growth in reactionary fundamentalism has left more and more people spiritually unmoored or absorbed by extremism. Changing norms around sexuality and romantic relationships have left traditional stories about these subjects behind. Having a single job that could support a family throughout an entire career was normal for a long time. Now, this idea is just a quaint relic of the irrelevant recent past.
Society's transformation is most evident around the new technologies that we've recently put in charge of our lives. Much of our experience is mediated by these technologies. Electronic devices have become cybernetic appendages. I experience my own computing devices as a nest that always surrounds me with communication channels and information sources. This nest is comfortable, so I rarely leave it.
It feels less comfortable to be beholden to the stupid computer systems of big companies. Keeping track of account details for a hundred different systems is burdensome. Being spied on by data profiteers is disappointing. Getting hacked is no fun. These things are new, they're lame, and they aren't going away anytime soon.
A 1973 Stanford Research Institute study, later published commercially as Changing Images of Man , anticipated many aspects of the societal transformation that we're now in. It compared the transformation to a psychological crisis on page 205:
"We have earlier noted that societies in transformation bear a certain resemblance to individual behaviors accompanying a psychological crisis. The dislocation known as a psychotic break is sometimes brought on by the total unworkability of the person's life pattern and belief system, such that the whole structure seems to collapse and need rebuilding. Prior to the crisis the person, to a disinterested observer, is seen to be engaging in all sorts of irrational behavior in his frantic attempts to keep from himself the awareness that his personal belief, value, and behavior system was on a collision course with reality. Under favorable circumstances the individual goes through the crisis, uncomfortably to be sure, and restructures his life in a more constructive way. In an unfavorable environment, of course, the episode can escalate into a catastrophe. In the case of a society a parallel condition to the psychotic break can occur, with a relatively sharp break in long-term trends and patterns. The analogues of irrational individual behavior may appear (social disruptions, violent crime, alienation symptoms, extremes of hedonism, appearance of bizarre religious cults, etc.). Massive denial of realities may occur (e.g. with regard to exponential increases in population or energy use). The society may go to extreme measures to hide from itself the unworkability of the old order and the need for transformation. The transformation itself, like the psychotic break, may come almost ineluctably-and as with the individual, favorable and unfavorable outcomes are both possibilities."
Society has been in perpetual crisis since the pandemic began. If that's the part of the transformation we're in now, we face an important choice: constructive healing or catastrophe? The media will always tell us stories about catastrophe. What we really need are stories about constructive healing.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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