Human beings love drama, ruining things, and causing chaos.
We seek out conflict and problems. And we do so simply because they give us something to do.
The human mind has an incessant need to seek out action. Nothing is more boring to the mind than a static life.
It’s an old idea that, in our day and age, finds its modern expression in the words of Slavoj Žižek.
All other animals seek consistency in the order of things. They have a set of ideal conditions, and they seek that state. When they achieve it, they do not wish to stray far from it, and if by chance they do, it is never by their own design.
We humans, on the other hand, take great joy in melodrama and disaster, and we are never content to remain still, motionless, or without stimuli that “take us out of our state.”
Sigmund Freud referred to this latter concept as the death drive.
The death drive is our need to self-destruct and to wage war.
It is the same need that drives us to watch a couple—who are very happy and in love—argue, or to knock down a sandcastle on some beach.
It is that part of us—that impulse—that guides us and drives us to drink, lie, steal, or simply annoy the world, just because it’s somehow fun to do so.
For Žižek, this desire to explode is the hallmark of freedom—or at the very least, the need to feel free in some way.
He also posits that the death drive is a self-sabotaging structure, representing the least possible freedom.
When all is said and done, it turns out to be behavior that is disconnected from a utilitarian and rational mode of survival.
We humans are ill-adapted beings, perpetually—or at least most of the time—dissatisfied, provocative, and natural destabilizers.
We constantly need an enemy. This often leads us to look for a common enemy—as we see in many societies today—what is known as a scapegoat. This is a topic I’ve addressed here before, and it’s covered in this post, in case you’d like to read it.
And Nietzsche argues that in times of peace and tranquility, the warlike or military man ends up attacking himself.
That’s why, when we don’t have problems in our lives, we end up creating them.
And when we have nothing to destroy, we destroy ourselves.
What a strange species we are, don’t you think?
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Source for this post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
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