Neurotic Age Part 1.2
What do we really want to get out of being Online?
This post is slightly over the word limit I set for myself, but also it’s my birthday today so your gift to me is reading an extra 400 or so words. As I’ve said, if you know anyone you think might want to subscribe to this, please let me know, and I’ll add them.
If you missed last week’s post you can read it here. The basic idea is that neurosis, really just an overarching name for all sorts of mental illnesses like social anxiety, depression, etc. develops in people with damaged self-esteem. Neurotics have a “basic anxiety” they feel that begins from growing up in an unstable, chaotic, or competitive environment, one in which they don’t believe they can trust the adults in their lives. I then said that when you look at the environment that millennials and now Gen Z have grown up in, it’s not hard to see the way that capitalist society has created the kind of conditions that grow that basic anxiety.
My therapist recently told me about the way that Jaques Lacan talks about anxiety. We feel anxious from knowing that someone (either another person or society or culture) expects something of us but we don’t know what. He says it’s like going into a cave and seeing a giant female praying mantis. You know that you’re in a praying mantis costume, but you don’t know if your costume looks male or female so you don’t know if the praying mantis will cut your head off or take you in. Pretty big consequences. So you have to do what you can to figure how you’re seen and act accordingly. If they praying mantis sees you as male, you need to be ready to fight. If female, you should be ready to be loved. I don’t know about you but I’ve always assumed that every time my boss calls me it’s to fire me. Whatever that impulse is, it’s the basic anxiety.
Basic anxiety, and the neurotic ways of dealing with it, are what you’d find in a culture and economy of difficult to discern expectations in which failure to comply with those expectations and act accordingly feel like life or death.
According to Horney, in order to cope with this basic anxiety, people develop what she calls neurotic tendencies. No one has these 100%. There are no pure neurotics which is great because it means we aren’t enslaved to those tendencies or the anxiety that provokes them. One of Horney’s points I find really helpful is that while these tendencies develop along similar lines in people’s behavior and psyche, they’re still highly particular to an individual, their upbringing, and culture. Basically you’re not stuck repeating the past.
Horney writes that we can best understand these strategies very broadly as movements toward, against, and away from people. Each movement has its own set of values.
The movement towards people says, “I feel terrified that something will destroy me, but if you like me you’ll take care of me so I have to do whatever it takes to get you to like me.”
The movement against others says, “I feel terrified that something will destroy me, but if I have the power to dominate others, they can’t do that.”
And the movement away says, “I feel terrified that something will destroy me so I have to do whatever it takes to get out of here.”
All of these movements are compulsive. They feel automatic. They’re extreme, and they’re in conflict with one another. Neurotics cycle between them in order to compensate for ways they fail in one, but their conflicting nature means that they just add to the basic anxiety. They provide a bit of relief in the moment, but at the long term expense of the further withering away of self-esteem and actual confidence.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be liked, wanting to win, or wanting to withdraw, but neurotics don’t do these things because they want to do them. They don’t have the capacity to want to. They need to do these things. Think about the difference between someone running through your neighborhood on a jog to get some exercise and someone sprinting down the street because a psycho with a knife wants to skin them alive. The latter may appear like the former, but eventually they’ll diverge in their actions. The terrified person will duck into an alley, will push people over to get them out of the way, and will likely burn out much more quickly than the guy going out for some exercise. That’s what happens with neurosis. As Horney writes, “All neurotic trends at bottom are defensive moves.”
The other thing that sets these apart is that neurotics don’t even know what they really want is safety against insecurity. I’m pretty new to learning about psychoanalytic or psychodynamic thought, but I have found the idea of unconscious desires very helpful. The basic idea is that we don’t always know what we want and sometimes we say and think we want one thing when in reality we want something else.
Here’s a simple example of what this could look like.
Think of a couple in which the husband unconsciously worries that his wife will leave him and he would feel a devastating humiliation he believes he’d never recover from. He has to do whatever it takes to make sure she stays and that she likes him. Again, all of this is unconscious. You ask the husband and he’d just say he acts towards his wife because he loves her. Because of their disposition, this guy tends first to move towards people and makes himself compliant to whatever his wife wants. He never stands up for himself, never wants to raise a fuss because the slightest hint of confrontation sets off alarms in his head that she’ll leave him.
Maybe he grew up in an environment in which conflict led to desertion and so he learned that he should avoid it at all costs since it would inevitably mean devastating humiliation and loneliness. When he was in 6th grade he used to get into arguments with classmates that disrupted the class. He learned that this was unacceptable behavior, and that if he kept it up he’d get suspended, if he got suspended he’d fall behind on his grades, and if he fell behind on his grades he wouldn’t get a good enough job to have enough money live on. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic about this. That’s more or less the message kids receive about their behavior and its consequences from their first few years alive. When you grow up believing that everything you do matters in terms of getting a job, you’re set up to view every social interaction as a high stakes competition with dire consequences.
This guy’s wife asks more and more of him thinking that her husband enjoys helping and supporting her because he loves her. He rarely expresses what he wants and when he does he quickly gives it up if it conflicts with what she wants because he’s acting based on the fear of her leaving him instead of his own desires that he has with confidence. He eventually comes to resent her because he (rightly or wrongly) feels taken advantage of, but he never expresses this since confrontation sets off his basic anxiety that she’ll leave.
That resentment builds up and sometimes turns into a movement against his wife in which he wants to assert his power over her to prove that he’s not helplessly compliant.
One night a conversation about something arbitrary turns into a fight lasting several hours. He won’t let his point go even though they’re just talking about the quality of a TV show they both watch or where to go for dinner. At some point the argument becomes less about the substance and more about winning. In that moment he feels like he has to assert himself and be right because he’s trying to compensate for feeling like she takes advantage of him. He won’t let it go, but doing so upsets his wife which then makes him worried that she’ll reject him. Now he’s trying to allay his fear of being weak with his fear of not upsetting his wife. The two movements are opposite one another. You can’t hug someone and fight them at the same time.
Because he lacks the self-esteem to listen to how he upset her and apologize or to hold onto his views but calmly come to a place to agree to disagree, he moves away and shuts down emotionally, and doesn’t bring it up again. But that makes him feel more resentful. He blames himself entirely for everything, but that makes him want to win power again. In all of this, he feels like someone else holds all the power over his well-being. He only has the esteem of others instead of self-esteem, but others could be like that praying mantis, and he has to constantly worry about how they see him.
That cycle above (with some variation) is how I lived most of my life to varying degrees. Let me tell you it’s painful and confusing.
Now if you ask this guy or anyone with these tendencies “Do you treat people this way because you love them or because you’re scared they’ll leave you and that would make you feel terribly humiliated and lonely?” They’d of course say it’s because of love. That fear of rejection and its motivating force in their life is unconscious. They don’t know what they tell themselves and are very afraid to find out.
But when you look at the way their actions cash out, the extreme inconsistencies, they don’t look like love, and that’s because what they really wants is to feel safe and they’re very, very scared.
So what’s the relevance to all this? Think about how confusing and extreme those movements are with that guy and his wife and how it looks inevitable that they’ll have some very real challenges in their marriage to say the least.
Now think about what it’s like logging on to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Is it that dissimilar?
Isn’t the newsfeed both a stream of articles, comments, and posts meant to garner likes and positive engagement from people you care about or posts decrying the stupid, backwards, hypocritical politics, beliefs, or convictions of The Bad People?
Think about the person that in that anti-racist facebook group. The one that completely berates and belittles themselves as soon as any black person tells them they have something they need to learn about racism, and at the same time they’re writing a post to the rest of their friends that starts, “OKAY LISTEN UP WHITE PEOPLE…” They get in an argument with their uncle and that friend from high school they haven’t seen in 7 years, and it means a lot that the black person that educated them on anti-racism likes their replies and not those of their opponents. Then they put their phone down and get back to work. Towards, against, away.
Think about the tweet quoting the guy everyone in your feed thinks is an idiot. It’s a signal to your followers that you’re compliant and acceptable with them, and a movement against the Twitter Idiot. Then in 15 minutes there’s already too many tweets to keep up with. Towards, against, away.
I feel like there’s something similar going on with the 35 post instagram stories with a series of stats and information and some “Listen up y’all…” about whatever’s going on politically. I’m not really on youtube, tik tok or reddit, but I imagine a similar dynamic going on there as well. It’s both movements at once, and the speed with which social media platforms move posts and the ease with which you can either block people or put the phone down, it’s also a constant moving away from.
I’m running out of words here, but in the next few posts, I want to explore the way that social media platforms developed at a time of growing economic inequality and precarity. It certainly feels like an interesting coincidence that we’re seeing such intense extremities in the way people treat one another, in politics and culture, and the rise in prominence of social media platforms. Facebook opened to the public in 2006 but really didn’t establish its dominance for a few years later. The Blogging and message board culture of relative stability became more about engagement. What does engagement mean? I think it’s the extremity of these movements towards, against, and away from as relief from the basic anxiety.
The result is that what appear as extreme, sudden changes in morals, convictions, politics, and personality, might be better understood as extreme movements towards groups that appear to offer safety, against groups that appear to threaten it, and away from everyone when those movements result in contradictions that can’t be remedied.
Holding convictions, acting on principle, deciding who to like and not like require a sense of security and enough self-esteem to face fear that neurotics haven’t developed. To stand up for yourself requires you to have a self to begin with. Its this developed self that neurotic defenses make impossible. Social media platforms seem to have tapped into the feeling of relief those defenses provide. But that relief’s temporary and, and like the situation with the guy and his marriage above, they only makes things worse. You can’t hug someone, fight them, and run away from them at the same time, and if you try, you’re only adding to the conflict you feel in yourself, a conflict that only you can resolve for yourself.
Over the next two to three weeks I want to write a bit more about what this looks like online, and then from there turn to why it feels increasingly difficult to just Log Off. It’s not just that social media offers the psychic relief of neurotic defenses, but if you get good enough at it, it could offer financial and material relief too. That seems like it might be a real problem.