Progressives and the Death Instinct
Introduction
There are impulses in the psyche that drive people toward death and destruction, sometimes toward others, sometimes toward the self, and sometimes toward both others and the self. Freud wrote about these impulses, first, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in other works such as Civilization and Discontents—emphasizing the unconscious urge to move toward, what Freud called, the death instinct.
These primal urges take place in all sorts of forms and something I will be writing about over the next several weeks. For instance, what motivated a group of ten and eleven-year-old girls in Arizona to try and kill a boy classmate and then pretend he committed suicide?
The girls’ plot was foiled by classmates who overheard the plans and told “school officials,” according to an article in People. The plan was quite elaborate. The girls would lure him to a bathroom. One would bring a knife, another would be on the lookout, another would stab the boy to death, and another would write a fake, suicide note. The girls would wear gloves to avoid leaving any fingerprints.
Supposedly, the boy “cheated in a relationship,” and the girls took it upon themselves to exact their revenge in a way that does not seem to shock our modern sensitivities anymore. What motivates this type of behavior, at the age of eleven?
Competing tensions—the passion to preserve life and the urge to harm and destroy— are happening all around us and have been since Cain killed Abel. For Freud it was Eros, the life drive, and Thanatos, the death drive, that symbolized these deep human tensions. These stories are warnings about the importance of the life-instinct and the impulse to—instead—encourage the death instinct.
To Freud, people have an unconscious drive toward destruction competing with a real urge to preserve and encourage survival, reproduction, and pleasure (see Beyond the Pleasure Principle). These competing drives are part of human nature but one that should be minimized in a culture that wishes to thrive.
In our modern world, compassion often moves us toward moral obligations and toward institutional reactions that hope to help those who are suffering. Tending to the mentally-ill and drug addicted, for instance, is a moral good. The intended good, however, can easily become compartmentalized and corrupted so that pain and suffering become institutionalized in such a way that it leads to the destruction of those it intends to help and the innocent bystanders around them. When the drug-addicted and mentally-ill are allowed to live on the streets and use government assistance to continue their addictions and systematically come in-and-out of mental health services, people suffer—including those in communities who are robbed, assaulted, and raped. Many institutions also prosper from those who are addicted and mentally ill in the form of agencies that profit from the cycle of addition that leads people to repeat their addictions; only to return again to agencies who profit from their return.
There are personal and cultural forces at work that have moved individuals and societies toward the death instinct in so many areas of life and over thousands of years. It really is a type of zeitgeist with varying degrees of authority and potency, where equality and law and order (moral obligations) are obfuscated for selective reasons.
When moral obligations become selective they become—instead—a type of existential perversion to justify actions that cause harm to some while others prosper. In certain instances, these actions begin as reactions for failures to exercise moral obligations. Laws, for instance, that worked to prevent sexism and racism in society were needed and are still needed. But what happens when those necessary laws become existential perversions? These are not simply specific to sexual perversions—which are actively at work corrupting the life force. These are perversions by institutions to reframe equality as something selective and not a moral obligation to protect all people.
When desire becomes a mania, it’s easy to see how an individual’s instinct to destroy is leveraged by the sound of institutional refrains. A person can engage in a type of extreme, excessive reaction, a mania, that seems justified when there are supporting entities around them that allow it.
There is a corruption of the life force (Eros) at the expense of self and/or others that comes in all sorts of forms. Think of suicide or mass shootings or an attempt on a President’s life as very different actions married to a type of death instinct, with some meant to destroy self and other actions meant to destroy others and the self.
Individual Actions as Cultural Practice
The impulse of four eleven-year-old girls to kill a boy is an example of a reaction that is so intense that it is a complete perversion of the life force at the individual level. For certain peoples, however, there is a type of cultural justification when the desired target of pain and suffering fits into a specific profile; toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, the manosphere, and mansplainers—to name a few.
When a cultural psyche is promoted to determine who are the recipients of human kindness and who are the recipients of pain and to what degree, certain actions suddenly do not seem so strange anymore. These sorts of practices seep deeply into the human psyche and make hurting another person or the self, for whatever reason, personally and socially acceptable in the minds of those looking to justify their actions. (We certainly saw this in America’s history when it came to the lynching of black males. Black females too were lynched, yet the overwhelming majority were male because killing males is—in the eyes of the manics—more acceptable.). I cannot compare the actions of the four girls to the lynching of thousands of black males, but we can look at the craving to hurt males as an afterthought in the cultural psyche.
The human psyche and the cultural psyche are aligned, particularly when it comes to harming males. Of course, females too are perpetrators and victims of the death instinct, so they are certainly not immune to the dysfunction of the drive toward death; although, it really is not in their nature as bearers of life nor is it in the nature of males as instinctively drawn to protect women and children. But this thought will be saved for a later article.
While males are the primary victims of these impulses, as males are more likely to be victims of violent crime and self-harm, the death instinct takes no prisoners. Some will argue that males commit more violent crime, but that does not mean male victims—at the hands of females or males—are lesser victims. We see the drive toward male death in infanticide, the deaths of despair (suicide, overdose & alcohol deaths), war, and in various facets of our cultural practices. Males are not the only victims of course, but our cultural and institutional practices to overlook male pain regarding boys and regarding men has certainly become a more accepted cultural practice in the West and, arguably, a personal impulse that drives the justification of the death instinct.
If boys and men are toxic, stupid, and worth throwing rocks at (metaphorically), what is to prevent little girls from taking actions into their own hands or academics from writing about male wickedness as part of boy nature.
In August of 2015, Lauren Kelley released “America Has a Rape Problem and Kate Harding Wants to Fix It” in Rolling Stone. Kelley’s article was about Kate Harding’s new book at the time, where Harding warned that “every American boy is at risk of growing up to become a rapist.” (Notice the emphasis on American as part of the argument that falls neatly into the settler-colonialism oppressor/oppressed model). Harding’s perversion struck me as–perhaps–the coldest and most untruthful statement of boys I’ve ever read. Boys, in the mind of Harding, are essentially defective from the start. That narrative has been saturated into Western thought before and after Harding in all sorts of ways, and even commoditized—not only by Harding and the media but others as well.
The slogans above and below come in t-shirts and books. Truly, what parent in their right mind would allow a child to wear such a shirt? Could you imagine if the t-shirt read “Girls are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them?” There is little doubt a boy would be removed from school for such an action. But wearing the shirt should have never been a thought in the first place.
Todd Goldman, who created these logos and books, also made slogans about girls as well, but they tended to refrain from violence and offered up some type of redeeming quality, even if taking pokes at objectification.
But the commodification of male hating is happening, not as simple rants of frustration but institutionalized attempts in academia, media, and government to redefine the nature of male as something worth hating. There are forces at work to capitalize on pain and minimize the importance and uniqueness of male nature. The war between Eros and Thanatos is institutionalized.
The reaction to this, very recently, has been for men to look for alternative outlets in media that do not present them as defective. For doing so, the progenitors of male hate are worried men are entering a type of manosphere, as if there is an alternative to the progressive ideologies of our time. Males are further removing themselves from the academic, media, and government institutions that have abandoned them and aim to—in many ways—harm them. There are those, for instance, who want to use Title IX laws to create discriminations, for men at first but now for women as well. Laws that prevent due process or put due process in the hands of bureaucrats is dangerous. Laws that deny binary differences also put people in danger and compromise opportunity and fairness—moral obligations.
These types of cultural practices come from decades of acceptable prejudice about male nature and, recently, the aversion to recognizing sex-difference. The cultural decision to restrain male nature and ignore the civil rights of males while also denying sex-differences is a perversion of the life force.
The decision, for instance, to reframe health rights as women’s rights and not human rights with distinct male needs and distinct female needs relies on institutional capture, special interest, and—in many instances—the instinctive nature of men to sit quietly and assume the role of protector even when the instance does not call for it or denies their basic human dignity. Running into a burning house to save a woman and child is different from recognizing policies that look to protect the health and well-being of females and policies that do not look to protect the health and well-being of males.
And when that desire becomes too intense at the institutional level, it becomes something so radicalized that moral obligations are perverted and selective equality and prejudice take hold.
The Institutional Impact on the Masses
Cultural prejudices have penetrated, not only the individual mind, but the cultural centers of the West to justify all sorts of actions whose underlying principals are tied to Thanatos.
The coordinated actions of thousands of individuals on college campuses across the United States to engage in anti-Semitism—with the indulgence of leadership—is a mania so intense that it radicalizes and justifies a cultural depravity. That depravity at the institutional level feeds into the cultural psyche and a destructive zeitgeist. (I cannot help but think of the young couple Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum.)
Existential perversions are, very often, presented as the reactions to the limitations society imposes on people. But what happens when individuals within institutions tacitly exercise pain and suffering? When they decide that the prevention of their desires is a right to implicitly encourage pain and suffering? Even if that pain and suffering is not physically direct, people exercising these actions (often in the form of policies and from positions of authority) have a deep knowledge about its consequences. They fail to righteously act because their actions are tied to personal gain at the expense of others or they are too deeply rooted in ideologies that embrace oppressor/oppressed narratives. In these narratives, the death instinct reigns supreme because those in authority are not looking for life; their ideologies are centered around destruction for some at the benefit of others. (Some of this has to do with institutional capture and power, to be discussed at a later time.)
When certain peoples become the target of others, allowing those peoples to thrive becomes antithetical to the personal interests of those who seek to divide. These perversions are ubiquitous and are reactions and promotions of the death instinct.
When we allow institutions that create a type of cultural psyche to selectively determine who are the recipients of human kindness and who are the recipients of pain and to what degree, we’ve lost our way as a culture. There are practices that seep from the institutions and spill-over into the human psyche so that hurting another person, based on his immutable characteristics, physically and through social practices and government policies seems personally and socially acceptable.
In the case of boys and the case of men, the decision to exclude males from human kindness—unless they make certain concessions about male nature itself— is tantamount to a drive toward the death instinct we are finding in progressive thought, culture, politics, academia, and media.
There is a spiritual sickness in our culture, but there is a more deep and profound desire and need to promote the life-force and America needs to tackle it head on.
Great piece, Sean. Fatherhood is about the life instinct. Will you be talking about how today's myriad hatreds of men serve strategically to disqualify us for equal parenthood, an equality many women might wish to avoid?