The Worship of Wonderful
It seems to me this is one of our biggest problems. It is certainly one of my biggest problems – and this give me the right to be an expert on the subject. One of its main problems is its shadow side – the impulse to destroy whatever is not wonderful. This explains the most important and fundamental impulse of our time – to destroy the world, and ourselves with it.
Wonderfulness is something we invented ourselves, and only exists in our minds – which are, and always will be a mess – and therefor far from perfect. We have to live with this – and carefully work around our built-in problems. Which are getting worse and worse, as we keep making our world more and unworkable.
I believe all our problems could be solved except for one thing – we don’t really want to solve them, because we demand everything (the perfect state of being) or nothing! And will be perfectly happy if we end up with the nothing – because that will prove how inadequate the world was. How it could not meet our infantile needs.
This ties in with an article in the NY Times yesterday The Psych Approach:
In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.
In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.
I have never taken this test – but I have been in plenty of therapy, which included, in one case, a series of lectures on the Dysfunctional Family. In group therapy we were all asking “Are there any functional families?” We were assured that they did exist, but in our population (the kind that made their living) they were rare.
I would expand the dysfunctional family to include our dysfunctional workplace – the elephant in the living room that no one wants to see – but is certainly there, and shitting all over the place.
It takes a strong person to cope with this workplace, and people like me are not strong. The result is a wide range of mental and physical problems.
I ended up in a hospital, unable to talk coherently, a victim of a temporary brain hemorrhage. Which, fortunately, I recovered from enough to allow me to get out of the country, and go somewhere were people weren’t treated so badly.
I see I have digressed; I started to talk about wonderfulness – and its built-in opposite: awfulness.
I think the worship of wonderful reached its peak in my parent’s generation – right after WWII. For them, it was embodied by Science – which kept making things more and more wonderful. And making them richer and more powerful. Another article in yesterday’s Times When Growth Outpaces Happiness, the Chinese are finding the same thing – being rich and powerful doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t even come close.
But no matter, we are on our treadmill, running after the ultimate carrot – the Wonderful. Embodied now in all our smart things – even as we get dumber and dumber. And more and more destructive.
great post!
I think a lot of the dysfunctionality at home is transmitted from a dysfunctional workplace. The latter is a more dangerous evil.