Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[Jin+Guice]

Lol, green smoothies are the most modernist solution... I think the best critique of post-modernism is that it still relies on modernist structures to function and is therefore still subject to modernist problems.

I also believe that a lot of modernist problems could be solved with pre-modernist lifestyles (note: not green smoothies or the affect of pre-modernist lifestyles) but I still eat cake, drink beer and sit around a bunch, and more to the point, grew up in a modernist society, so I'm going to have some modernist problems. I also buy into the idea that a lot of modernist problems are caused by things like emotional repression and social alienation and that modernist solutions are no the be-all-end-all they make themselves out to be. But PoMos armed with these beliefs can me just as dogmatic as your regular run of the mill Mos. Personally, I'm drinking green smoothies (from the trash) and still using western medicine as I see fit.

eta: Sort of my whole point is that modernity gave us a ton of great stuff and then a bunch of bullshit and all of it creates a bunch of problems unique to modernity, some of which are a bunch of bullshit and some of which are from the stuff we'd probably like to keep.

[7Wannabe5]

There were spiritual orgies based on ecstatic cake eating long before Modernity. The same humans who banned cake eating for being too indulgent followed up this bit of fun by burning witches at the stake. Their bias is towards confirming their anti-pleasure quest for the purity of immortality which is actually death in life. IOW, they don't like to mess with the messy.

[Stasher]

Thank-you all for such a great discussion on Modernity, I lack the level of sophistication to bring more substance to the discussion or examine at the level you are all at but I can certainly grasp it and visualize what is being shared. It is discussion like this and journals like yours J&G that make me happy and grateful that I am back frequenting the ERE forums.

[Jin+Guice]

Modernism, Safety Needs and Fear

I am using a modified (by me) version of Maslow's (extended) Hierarchy of Needs. The modification I'm using removes "safety" as an individual need level that follows physiological. Instead I assign "safety" to three different systems: physiological (somatic), emotional and cognitive.

I explain this in my post of useful models titled "Important Concepts."

I believe modernity creates an environment our fear system is not calibrated to handle. People are adaptable, they can and do adapt to physiologically survive; however, they don't emotionally or cognitively thrive.

I think this is why we look back to simpler societies with fondness. We imagine those people to live in societies where their impulses, emotions and thoughts are in alignment and easily make sense.

In a more complex society, our impulses, sensations and emotions often don't make sense. All of these influence our fear system or our sense of safety in ways that are confusing. I believe this makes alignment between our sensations, feelings and thoughts difficult. We experience sensations and feelings that don't make sense in the context of the modernist environment and have trouble correctly assigning meaning to them. This leads us to mistrust ourselves.

For example, the physiological need of food. Someone in a simple society gets what they need from their immediate environment. They may still fear hunger, but they and their tribe are responsible for every meal. If the environment runs out of food, they run out of food. This makes sense emotionally and somatically. Someone in a modernist society acquires food from a store. Food has always been in the store. However, if they run out of money or food fails to arrive at the store, they run out of food. Even though a modernist alive today is much less likely to run out of food, the fear of running out of food makes much less sense to our emotional and somatic system. Anyone feeling anxious?

Somatically our impulses don't always make sense in the modern environment. If we hear a loud noise and jump, we often feel silly. Perhaps we lose face in front of our friends. Yet this response is programmed into us because a loud abrupt jarring noise used to be a good signal for danger.

Socially and emotionally we live in a confusing society. In a simple society we know, to some degree, everyone we interact with. These people form our in-group, which we fear getting kicked out of. Ostracization often means death, but interactions are, for the most part, predictable and under our control.

Compare this to today where we frequently interact with people we don't know. We fear losing face in front of strangers, but this fear is confusing as strangers have little to no impact on our lives. If one of our friends alienates themselves from our friend group, they can move onto another.

Our in-groups are both too large and ill defined. We don't have real interdependence with anyone, instead relying upon the vast impersonal network of monetary interdependence that is the globalized market economy and impersonal group identity markers such as ethnicity, nation of origin, sexual orientation, political belief or type of employment. While this system vastly increases our economic efficiency, it removes our perceived control over our ability to meet our own needs as well as our interdependence on our social and community groups. I believe this causes us to feel anxious about our material needs and alienated from each other.

Our intellectual and aesthetic environments are stifling. We are often in situations which are horrifically boring and/ or aesthetically unpleasant. We interact with people superficially discussing details of each other's lives we don't much care about as we subtly jockey for social status. We do jobs that are on the one hand too demanding and soul crushing and on the other hand not intellectually, emotionally or physically stimulating. We work in ugly offices and factories with poor lighting, either moving our bodies not enough or moving specific parts of our bodies repetitively in ways that are physically damaging. This leads to a situation where we learn to mute and ignore our internal physical sensations, our emotional worlds and stifle our intellectual and creative abilities.

Collectively these are detrimental to our internal regulation systems. We don't know where our resources come from, who to trust or how and why we should value ourselves. We aren't taught to interpret our impulses, desires, emotions and sensations or to think about what they might be trying to tell us or how we could assign meaning to them in a way that we can make sense of. We instead exist in an environment where they don't make sense, and learn to repress them in ugly and intellectually stifling environments from an early age.

Parents, teachers and community leaders fail to understand how the emotional regulation system of young children, who depend on them for survival, function, meaning that most if not all modern society members undergo emotionally stifling and confusing circumstances before they are able to take care of themselves or have developed cognitively. We receive no education on how to assign meaning to different bodily sensations or how to emotionally regulate. These circumstances coupled with continued somatic and emotional information that don't mesh with the modern environment virtually guarantee that the majority of modern populations regularly experience confusing physiological sensations and emotional dysregulation that they aren't capable of making sense of or understanding, much less taking ownership of or regulating.

Further contributing to our numbness, we carry out most of our day in aesthetically ugly environments that aren't cognitively stimulating. Somatically, emotionally and cognitively, the default mode that modern society puts us in is "off." When we do experience stimulation it is confusing, causing us to either become dysregulated by overwhelming feelings (anxiety) or dysregulated by muting and disconnecting from confusing feelings until we don't feel much of anything at all (depression).

Prior to the past few decades most believed that emotions and sensations were unimportant, something best muted or ignored. It has recently become popular to over-identify with emotions, holding others accountable for our emotional state and learning to exist in a state of emotional helplessness. This helplessness is used to justify not holding oneself accountable or one's life or actions. Still, we fail to ask the difficult questions about where these sensations and emotions come from, what they might be telling us, how to regulate them and how to take responsibility and exhibit some amount of control or predictability over our own sensations, emotions and impulses.

[7Wannabe5]

Hanzi suggests that "shame" is the emotion best associated with Modernity. This makes good sense if you also accept "guilt" as being the emotion best associated with Traditional-level society. "Guilt" having to do with what you did or didn't do to fulfill your duty towards others within your set role in society. "Shame" having to do with what your did or didn't manage to accomplish for yourself as an individual towards success/linear-progress. What I like about the more functional aspects of the Post-Modern is that the pioneers or early artists and philosophers of the post-modern were towards "shameless" and/or the "ridiculous." It's only as any level moves from art-> philosophy->entrepreneurial/activist->politics->median morality that it begins to form its own rigid shell. Modernity/Liberalism became our median morality "Equality of opportunity. Do what you like as long as it doesn't harm others at the boundary determined by law/rights." only in the 1960s/70s.

The second emotion well associated with Modernity would be "alienation", but this would be more towards the juncture with the post-modern, because "alienation" is often suffered by those who don't suffer "shame" due to lack of success within the individualistic paradigm of the Modern. It's entirely possible to "hop" right over the "shame" and "alienation/meaninglessness" associated with the Modern for the same reason it is entirely possible to "hop" over the emotions most associated with previous levels, even though Modernity is the water in which we mostly find ourselves swimming. In simplest terms, you can mostly skip over the Modern, and right off of the Monopoly Game Board itself, if/when or to the extent that you are okay with being/becoming a Beautiful Loser and/or joining the Hipsters/Hippies/Hackers at Level Green on the cusp of Yellow. Further interesting note would be that Hanzi was dead clear on the point that you really can't achieve Level Yellow/Metamodern if you don't yet accept Level Green/post-modern. You can't skip right from Orange to Yellow, because you'll basically just find yourself doing something more like Super-Orange.

[Stasher]

Now that is a thought provoking essay to start the week off with J&G , thank-you for taking the time to put these thoughts into words.

[Ego]

I believe modernity creates an environment our fear system is not calibrated to handle. People are adaptable, they can and do adapt to physiologically survive; however, they don't emotionally or cognitively thrive.

How well does this jive with the fact during the sustained Nazi bombings of UK cities known as the Blitz, asylum admissions went down significantly and many long-term patients actually improved? Also, the Orson Welles quote, "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

[AxelHeyst]

The environment JnG is referring to is not the intensity of wartime/disaster response et cetera, which actually one might argue has *more* similarities to environments our fear system IS calibrated to handle. I think JnG is referring to 'normal' everyday modern life, the circumstances the lucky amongst us spend the vast majority of our time in/trying to construct meaningful existences out of.

[Ego]

I think JnG is referring to 'normal' everyday modern life, the circumstances the lucky amongst us spend the vast majority of our time in/trying to construct meaningful existences out of.

Exactly. So it begs the question of whether some of Maslow's lower level needs MUST remain somewhat UNsatisfied to reach higher.

[AxelHeyst]

Sure, there's clearly something to the idea that a perfectly comfortable all-basic-needs-catered-to society is maybe actually a really bad idea. I think this jives well with the picture JnG is presenting, which is that modern society creates a situation where we're very mis-calibrated to our environments. Some of our needs are perhaps overmet, while others are undermet, we're told implicitly that one method should meet ALL of our needs (which it in fact doesn't), this confuses us, and get all twisted up inside our comfortable prisons.

One solution is to dip in and out of basic-needs-being-unmet state, sort of like when you come to dad with a banged knee and he hits your other one and growls "There, now you've got something to cry about". Never get too comfortable, seek discomfort, etc.

I wonder if an alternative (or perhaps parallel) strategy is to recognize the needs that modern society isn't very good at addressing, like aesthetics, emotional, cognitive, even spiritual needs, and pursuing the fulfillment of those needs with tools other than the ones that society hands to us (acquisitiveness). This might be eu-stressful-challenging territory that provides us with outlets for creative self-expression, stoke, interest, passion, etc without needing to flirt with the precipice of going wanting of basic 'lower' level needs.

In other words, maybe we're just really bored. Running out of food or safety is not-boring and inspires us to levels of creative self-expression. That seems kind of like reverting back down a level to hop up two levels. The parallel/alternative approach is to unlock behaviors/tools/support structures that shove us up/out into these unknown methods of needs-fulfillment out beyond the fringes of modern acceptable society.

I'm not sure about this parallel strategy, but it sure seems like there are plenty of stories of individuals who lacked for nothing and got to the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy anyway, so it's not like physiological-needs deprivation is a strictly necessary step. If it indeed isn't necessary to intentionally resource-constrain oneself, and if leveling-up-and-out of the trap of Modernity is generally learnable, it has my attention.

There are, of course, consequences to being wrong about this either way.

[ertyu]

Socially and emotionally we live in a confusing society. In a simple society we know, to some degree, everyone we interact with. These people form our in-group, which we fear getting kicked out of. Ostracization often means death, but interactions are, for the most part, predictable and under our control.

Compare this to today where we frequently interact with people we don't know. We fear losing face in front of strangers, but this fear is confusing as strangers have little to no impact on our lives. If one of our friends alienates themselves from our friend group, they can move onto another.

I experience this precisely in reverse. I feel very little control when it comes to interactions with immediate family. There is nothing I can do to make them get therapy, interact in functional ways, be interested in me as a person, be emotionally supportive, you name it. My head's gone soft banging it in the window panes from how hard I've tried.

When it comes to strangers, I have more control. With distant strangers, one can use social scripts. This increases predictability: if I approach you in such and such polite way, I will likely achieve the objective of our goal-related interaction (have you give me that form, have you explain the steps to follow when purchasing property, have you perform a service for me in exchange for cash, etc.)

I also have more control in terms of keeping myself safe emotionally. I still can't make anyone provide emotional support of care, but I can see who is open to the types of interaction I want and is conversely interested in what I have to give in terms of emotional support, and I can lean into those interactions. They are interactions on my terms, rather than on the terms of generational trauma.

I also dgaf about face when it comes to strangers. Indeed, big cities, which abound in strangers, is where you'd find all the pierced weirdos w the green hair, small towns increase conformity and are thus hell on earth. It's small communities where face matters: reputation matters when you have repeated games. I really don't understand the whole "traditional societies are nice" thing. They aren't nice. You can't be a self there. All you are is subjugated to the ego needs of those above you in the pecking order and to the opinions of others. There's a reason why we atomized as soon as economics allowed us to do so.

[Jean]

@ertyu
We need interdependencies, but most relationship are pita.
Traditional societies provided the interdepency, but at the cost of people not needing to be "nice" (i lack a better word, nice isn't very close to what i mean)
Vivian Dittmar wrote a book about how to form interdependency that don't suck. Its quite good i find.

[jacob]

Exactly. So it begs the question of whether some of Maslow's lower level needs MUST remain somewhat UNsatisfied to reach higher.

As an adventure traveler, where traveling somewhere to figure out how to find housing, where to find food, or even engaging in slightly risky situations, is part of the adventure, it makes sense that lower needs should remain somewhat unsatisfied. Otherwise, there's no adventure. Eliminating them also makes it harder to stay sharp for the next adventure.

OTOH, if you're a researcher or a visiting scholar, who does much the same thing in terms of finding housing and food when it comes to extended foreign visits or relocating to a new country every few years, those unsatisfied lower needs are a distraction that takes the mind away from the actual research. Safety concerns such as cancelled funding or the government looking over your shoulder to check what you're saying or thinking is even worse. Depending on how bad it gets, such concerns and unsatisfied needs may even prevent higher stages. If funding is cancelled, the researcher is no longer concentrating on curing cancer. They're concentrating on job ads and where to go next. (Or perhaps they divert a significant amount of their mental energy developing a new system of personal finance, so they don't have to worry about money anymore ) If people are shadowed by government agents, they're not having creative insights while they're walking through campus. They're looking over their shoulder. And so on.

This is just one example. I don't think that somewhat unsatisfied food, housing, and safety issues helps someone working in daycare take better care of the children. Conversely, Sparta famously separated the young boys from their family, made them go hungry so they had to steal food to survive, and they made them fight each other. This made for tougher soldiers. OTOH, Sparta didn't exactly leave any kind of intellectual or artistic legacy for the world.

Returning to the researcher. In order to do good research, it's important that Maslow's "higher level needs" remain somewhat unsatisfied. There must be some innate curiosity to create the mental tension that makes the researcher obsess about whatever kind of science they're doing. They might be working under a very large umbrella of "curing cancer", but what they're really doing is probably looking at some kind of specific folding of a protein that most people including other researchers have never heard about. A small piece in a giant puzzle. It takes a special mind to identify with such a problem. If they someday decide that their research is unimportant (like I did), this releases all tension and it becomes pretty much impossible to progress. Researching is not like digging a hole with a shovel that can be picked up and used at will. It's a state of being. Research is the actualization of the scientifically prepared mind. There are, of course, other kinds of actualization. This is just one example of the kind of actualization that is hampered by having to deal with physiological needs.

It would help the conversation if we got rid of thinking of this in terms of higher or lower needs. I mean, obviously, there's a ranking---it's harder to think about mathematical theorems when one is hungry than it is to think about food when one still hasn't solved the theorem---but when that ranking is voluntary as it is in a rich society. When one is hungry because one wants to seek out new food vendors or one becomes temporarily "homeless" because one wants to go on an adventure in a new country, it's different from when needs are forced.

I should also note that in terms of societal problems, it's a lot easier to get people to think about food (or toilet paper) or safety than it is to get them to think about math, poetry, or lunar exploration. To get people to the former focus, all one has to do is to "burn the barn down". This will definitely get those who otherwise obsessed about their status or relationship anxieties or whatever focused on what really matters, like "when are we going to run out of toilet paper". On the other hand, reducing people to more basic needs also mean that less basic needs go ignored. It's harder to "build a new barn" that gets people interested in the arts, sciences, whatever, ... If students are chronically hungry, they're not learning the multiplication table. If they're not learning that, then mental calculation will not become part of their framework, and they'll grow up to make stupid choices that hurt themselves as well as others. They will definitely not become the next Fields medalist or build a society that's based on reason instead of gut feelings.

To me, the societal question is whether to let society actualize like "Spartan boys" or "Greek boys". Or to extend it, consider when girls were added to the workforce and the educational ranks. This basically doubled the nation's reservoir of manpower because previously the women were prevented from doing what they could have done instead of being forced to tend to things like housekeeping and cooking food---shelter and food.

Same here. Is society losing actualization potential because it has convinced a large fraction of humanity that a/the most worthwhile focus is to drive an expensive car or---for those who are not into cars---compete on who can afford the exotic vacations? Or are we missing something that otherwise could have been if that focus had been more nuanced? Or on the flip side, is allowing people to buy any expensive car they want but at the same time creating more expensive cars for others to be jealous about creating status anxiety that doesn't need to be there?

I don't think the solution to the "modern society"-problems of actualization is to reduce us to physiological needs like food, shelter, and safety, but to demonstrate more options beyond "the pursuit of materialistic status". IOW, if people are whining about their "struggle" because their next paycheck is not enough to afford the iPhone 29 that ads tell them will complete their life ... I don't think the solution is to go hungry for a few days or have their roof cave in during a storm in order to develop some gratitude for their life. I think the answer is to go beyond the status and economic success that is currently advertised as "the good life".

[Jean]

@jacob
One could socially pressure them into gathering every week to say thank you together.

[jacob]

@jacob
One could socially pressure them into gathering every week to say thank you together.

Sounds like a nightmare...

[Jean]

People did it for centuries, and it wasn't horrible.

[suomalainen]

Counterpoint - see, e.g., the inquisition, the crusades, burnings at the stake, child sexual abuse and so on.

[suomalainen]

I think this is why we look back to simpler societies with fondness. We imagine those people to live in societies where their impulses, emotions and thoughts are in alignment and easily make sense.

This is a common cognitive bias, well-researched and well-debunked. I think you’re making lots of assumptions that there was a golden age way back when and now everything is shit. I’m more anxious now about losing my job and not getting a paycheck and having to ask friends, family, strangers or the government for food than I would have been had my entire society been staring down the barrel of a famine and everyone dying together? What?

Socially and emotionally we live in a confusing society. In a simple society we know, to some degree, everyone we interact with. These people form our in-group, which we fear getting kicked out of. Ostracization often means death, but interactions are, for the most part, predictable and under our control.

Compare this to today where we frequently interact with people we don't know. We fear losing face in front of strangers, but this fear is confusing as strangers have little to no impact on our lives. If one of our friends alienates themselves from our friend group, they can move onto another.

Fear getting kicked out is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy fucking worse than fear of some stranger silently judging you. The former includes a massive roll of the dice. Chief is an asshole, you’re raped every day. Chief isn’t an asshole, you may be happy. Stranger is an asshole? Turn around and walk away. Those prior-life frictions had massive costs, which ALL inured to the benefit of the leadership.

What modernity has done is democratized selfishness and optionality at the cost of “togetherness” and forced identity. Narrowness aligned to the leader’s vision has given way to “a whole new world” for everyone else. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on where in society you sit.

We receive no education on how to assign meaning to different bodily sensations or how to emotionally regulate.

Implies ancient peoples knew of and taught these things widely. Why assume that ancient peoples not gonna people?

Your post makes more sense if I read it replacing “most” and “we” with “I”, in which case I can relate to your struggles in finding your tribe in this cornucopia of tribal options now available. Paradox of choice and all that.

[AxelHeyst]

This is a common cognitive bias, well-researched and well-debunked. I think you’re making lots of assumptions that there was a golden age way back when and now everything is shit. I’m more anxious now about losing my job and not getting a paycheck and having to ask friends, family, strangers or the government for food than I would have been had my entire society been staring down the barrel of a famine and everyone dying together? What?

I think the key word in JnG's post was that we "imagine". The point (as I see it) isn't that pre-modern societies were better, it's that in certain ways they were less confusing, because it's more or less how humans human'd for a very long time.

A major point about the difference in felt experience between modern and pre-modern societies is that anxiety and fear had a different flavor and tempo (makes sense that it would be, as these societies operated very differently). In modern societies anxiety is chronic and vague, whereas the anxiety or fear associated with impending famine is acute and precise. This difference is interesting and might help us make some sense of our current experiences.

I don't see anyone boostering neo-primitivist lifestyles in this thread. I do see a fair amount of "stop boostering neo-primitivist lifestyles" responses. I think people are inferring something that JnG is not actually implying. Easy to do because a lot of people speak too admiringly about pre-modern societies without engaging with the anthropological research or common sense. Maybe I'm wrong, though. JnG, do you think there was a golden age way back when?

I do think it's useful to look at non-modern societies we have some information on to understand the situation we are in better, which is what I think JnG is doing.

[suomalainen]

I think it’s exactly the imagining with fondness that sets up such a comparative (imaginary) analysis as problematic.