Sounding the Alarm
Exposing yourself to media accounts of current events will likely leave you with the impression that the world you live in is a dangerous place, that living there means living on the brink of disaster. Consider, for example, the following:
“Condo Buildings Are at Risk. So Is All Real Estate” [2]. This headline tells us that the collapse of a building in Florida means that none of our homes are safe.
“Only Congress Can Save Voting Rights Now” [3]. This headline tells us that if Congress does not act immediately, the right to vote in America will no longer exist.
“Climate change is frying the Northern Hemisphere” [1]. This headline invites you to contemplate your future living in a frying pan.
Of course, those who write the news and craft headlines would insist that they are attempting to make people feel unsafe because they are unsafe, and only by being made to feel unsafe can they be motivated to do what must be done to make the world a safer place. Yet, while it may be true that people are unsafe, it may also be true that those who write the news are drawn to their chosen profession because they need others to feel the urgency, to share with them their unsafe feeling and that, if no one acts immediately, disaster is inevitable. Their mission in life is to sound the alarm; if they don’t no one will: “If not you, then who. If not now, when?”
Anxieties intense enough to demand immediate action suggest the presence of a link to primitive experiences.
Anxieties intense enough to demand immediate action suggest the presence of a link to primitive experiences. Those have been registered in memory and fantasy. The response to threatened wellbeing early in life tends to be poorly modulated partly due to the fact that no alternatives are available to the unmediated expression of anxiety in the attempt to convey distress to those who alone can alleviate it. This suggests that, on an emotional level, messages intended to sound the alarm are meant to promote regression to more primitive levels of mental functioning. The goal of regression, in turn, is to activate a process experienced early in life that, at the time, had the capacity to bring about the desired result: to control the environment in a way that adapted it to the child’s need. Central to this regressive movement, then, is the need for control.
We will find evidence of the presence of a powerful impulse to control when those who seek to heighten anxiety express themselves in the imperative mood. They do this most notably by telling us what “must” be done. In using this language, they are not offering advice or helpful suggestions for solving problems, they are trying to get us to appreciate the urgency of the moment and force us to do what needs to be done as they see it. Something must be done, and it must be done now. The peril is great. It is imminent:
[T]he president must let [Senator Joe] Manchin know that the filibuster cannot take precedence over voting rights. [4]
America faces cascading crises. Democrats must act. [5]
The Democratic Party Must Harness the Legitimate Rage of Americans (Schwarz).
That we are operating on the level of fantasy when this occurs should be apparent once we acknowledge that, for example, in reality neither the president nor congress have to do any of the things they are told they must do.
When solving problems is taken to mean using aggression to exert control, we can feel assured memories of early experiences and fantasies spawned by those memories have come to be attached to contemporary events and political processes. That we are operating on the level of fantasy when this occurs should be apparent once we acknowledge that, for example, in reality neither the president nor congress have to do any of the things they are told they must do. The term then indicates the presence of regression to a condition in which control over needed care was exerted through intense displays of distress. In the adult world this regression takes the form of an impulse to transform a wish into an imperative: to use words to make a fantasy real. This makes political intervention the employment of something akin to a Jedi mind trick.
In the child’s world, solving problems that cause anxiety means finding a powerful figure capable of providing us with what we need and forcing that figure to pay attention.
In the child’s world, solving problems that cause anxiety means finding a powerful figure capable of providing us with what we need and forcing that figure to pay attention. In the adult world, solving problems that cause anxiety does not mean finding a powerful figure and exerting the kind of control over that figure that assures he or she will pay attention to us. But we can always interpret our adult predicaments through our child’s eyes and understand the solutions in the way we did early in life. In other words, the goal of the rhetoric is to establish, or possibly reestablish, a relationship with the source of the good things and of the feeling of security in the presence of that source. This special relationship sought after in the act of saying what the powerful figure must do is essentially one in which need controls gratification.
Central to the transition to adulthood is the growing capacity to manage disruptions in our relationship of dependence and care, a relationship in which being paid attention to plays the central role. Our capacity to tolerate these disruptions depends on the degree to which we have internalized a relationship in which the availability of the things we need felt secure. The result of internalization is to make the inner world a safe place to be. What you find or do not find when turning inward determines the intensity of your anxiety and the urgency of your need. In other words, it determines the magnitude of the ratio of anxiety linked to a real threat in the outside world to the total anxiety experienced.
The capacity to take the time to think about problems makes thinking about problems that cause anxiety a possibility. Thinking before acting may lead to an interpretation of the problem at odds with the emotional interpretation that prompts the call for immediate action. It may, therefore, be experienced as the enemy of doing what needs to be done, or at least what we assume needs to be done. The flight from thinking promotes use of institutions, including government, as mechanisms for externalizing problems. This means to seek to resolve problems in the inner world rather than reality-based problems outside, in other words to alleviate anxiety as an end in itself. Containment and thinking can make possible a transition from anxiety associated with the residue of bad memories to anxiety about real present-day threats to our wellbeing.
But, in the end, and for the foreseeable future, we must not only do what we can to weaken destructive forces in our world, we must also live with them, a message lost when politics moves into the imperative mood.
As serious as the problems we face may be, they are not going away because we act on the urgency we feel about them and attempt to convey that urgency to others. There is typically little that anyone, including the president, can do to make them go away right now. The president may of course, together with congress, be able to shift the direction in which we are progressing, slow down harmful forces so the damage they are doing will be less than it otherwise would be, or deal with their adverse effects when they cannot be avoided. But, in the end, and for the foreseeable future, we must not only do what we can to weaken destructive forces in our world, we must also live with them, a message lost when politics moves into the imperative mood. Refusing to accept that you must live with the bad thing will not prevent it from happening any more than accepting that you will have to live with it is what caused it to happen. But insisting that the trend be reversed now can lead to a flight from thinking and with it results as bad or worse than those our actions are meant to prevent.
Those in the imperative mood are in the business of rebelling against reality and the limitations implied in it.
Those in the imperative mood are in the business of rebelling against reality and the limitations implied in it. Living in reality means accepting the loss of the omnipotence associated with the power of need to secure the needed object. Yet, it is the capacity of citizens, individually and collectively, to tolerate loss that determines the fate of democracy, which is, after all, a system organized around the principle that those who lose elections will accept their results. Put another way, democratic institutions depend for their survival on the capacities of citizens to accept and live with the reality principle, something it would be foolish to assume is inevitable. Indeed, assuming the inevitability of the connection of the individual to reality is itself an indicator of a weakness in the individual’s ability to accept the reality principle.