From Anxiety to Anguish

While mass protests in some countries have brought down governments, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States highlighted issues like inequality for a time, but now seems to have faded.  There remain plenty of reasons to be outraged, but Americans, on the whole, tend to be politically passive.  Richard Eskow notes that difficulties faced in isolation tend to turn the anger inward leading to a sense of learned helplessness.  Michael Learner has written about what he calls "surplus powerlessness".  There is the Marxist theory of alienation.  Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explain how power is maintained through the manufacturing of consent.  Chomsky gives credit to the ideas of Alex Carey whose posthumously published book is titled Taking the Risk out of Democracy.

There are a number of ideas for helping us to understand what is going on and for learning how to take political action.  But it is an enormous project.  It's hard to feel up to the task within our daily routines.

I recently read Robert Jensen's Arguing for our Lives.  Jensen seeks to promote critical thinking around economic and ecological issues.  He writes

We are most anxious when we cannot find a way to make sense of what's happening, and when we feel as if there is nothing we can do to change our circumstances.

And so understanding is a start toward overcoming this anxiety.  He says our best hope is to transform that anxiety into anguish.   It's not that we should now be unhappy all the time--Jensen says anguish is more of a deeper grief over our collective condition.  He mentions wondering whether humans are an evolutionary dead-end (which appeals to my cynical side).  And yet we still have choices and hard work to do.

But I will suggest that whatever that work is, it should be done out of anguish. Anguish is not something to run from, but something to embrace.  When we are stuck in anxiety we find it hard to act, to do what is needed to move forward. Embracing the anguish of our age allows us to make clear choices about the path on which we want to move forward, even if the destination is unknown and the journey uncertain.

Not many people want to think about things like climate change or inequality (our book club never met).  It is depressing and we all know how many distractions our consumer culture serves up to help us avoid facing a pervasive anxiety.  I'm not sure how a great number of people can move from anxiety to anguish, but perhaps thinking about some ways to do that is a place to start.

Update (December 11):  Global warming is having an effect on the mental well-being of indigenous people and will likely touch most of us in a similar way.  The new type of sadness has been called "solastalgia"--homesickness when you are still at home (after so many changes from how it used to be).

Update (December 20):  The anguish of a poet.