Psychology has developed for so many years, why is mental illness still on the rise?
This is a question I saw someone ask before, but it's actually a particularly good question. Many people try to answer, and there will be different answers from different fields. I try to help understand the phenomenon by proposing the possibility of an explanation from a perspective that I have not seen for the time being, but the phenomenon itself must be the result of multidimensional complex factors, not the result of a single cause. Therefore, it is only a perspective establishment, not an expression of some kind of causality.
Capitalist patriarchy
I attribute a lot of this phenomenon to capitalist patriarchy.
In this day and age we often criticize patriarchy, but there is a very objective reality that we need to understand that isBefore this era, patriarchy was never a "problem" in society, and it was not even an "obstacle". Before modern capitalism, the factors that caused social instability in all forms of human civilization came from the "social distribution system", not from "social relations".
Needless to say, the West was not too much higher than the barbarian tribal civilization before the modern era, of course, it had a lot of bright spots, the origin of modern civilization was there after all, so there were also many prototypes of modern thought, but before the 16th century, the medieval West, compared to the brilliant civilization of the Arab world on the side, was like a firefly. Looking around our eastern land, behind the change of dynasties, most of them are the shadow of the geographical change factors of the earth's small cold period or the active period. Whether it is Chen Sheng, Wu Guang, Hong Xiuquan, these relatively failed cases, or really successful cases such as Zhu Yuanzhang or Liu BangIn the end, the social revolution launched from the bottom still maintains the original social relations after success or partial success, because the relations of production determine social relations, that is, we often say that "the economic base determines the superstructure".
What was the structure of the economy in the last era? That's itThe land rent economy, which relies on land as the core means of production, extends the social relationship of 5,000 years of dynamic equilibrium between local ethnic groups and centralization. Under this social relationship, the power structure of people is determined by it. The cause of all social changes is the turmoil brought about by the rigid imbalance of the "distribution system", and the center of the turmoil is always about the land. Wang Mang, the only one who wanted to move this social relationship, not only failed but also carried thousands of years of infamy. What is land? The land is the life of "people". This is also the big difference between the fundamental ethical support of the legal philosophy behind the law of the sea system and the civil law system. For the Chinese, the meaning of land is rich, thick, and closely related to people. For thousands of years, people have struggled around a point called "Whose land does it belong to?" This is a philosophical question about the interpretation of natural powers. So, people need patriarchy, which determines the legitimacy of all political and social power over land.
This sounds abstract and understandable. For example, the Mongols invaded and established the Yuan Dynasty, even if it is only 97 years old, we still think that it is an indispensable part of Chinese history, and it is listed with the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing dynasties? It's because it's legitimate. In the end, it inherited de jure orthodoxy, not the Southern Song Dynasty (disputed here). On the other hand, Mongolia had already left the "Mongolia" when Kublai Khan accepted the orthodox Confucianism of China, completed a series of standard procedures such as receiving seals and worshipping the heavens, and established a civilian-bureaucratic system based on Chinese Confucianism. So when we look at the map of the Yuan Dynasty, it does not include several other khanates that hit Europe. Both the Yuan and the Qing had to construct a legitimate and orthodox empire according to the original social relations, otherwise it would not be possible to complete its rule without that "orthodoxy".
So without this patriarchy, Chinese civilization would have collapsed long ago. So from here we also see what is patriarchy? It is the hidden power structure that determines what is "orthodox". And this power structure is derived from the social structure produced by the economic structure. Therefore, for 5,000 years, in fact, no matter the continents of the East and the West, modern civilization has been unable to develop modern civilization, but modern civilization has come from a small island on the "edge of the world", that isThis is because the economic structure with commerce and trade as the core has broken the economic structure with land as the core factor of production.
Cixi must not have understood that those foreign devils came to China thousands of miles away, and the Eight-Nation Coalition Army knocked down Beijing, just to grab some incidental requests to open ports to do business. Here is a completely different understanding of the world, understanding politics, and understanding the underlying logic of society.
So we have to mention, what is the difference in the underlying logic here? Why was capitalist patriarchy able to replace the patriarchal system of ancient societies and change the whole world?
The answer may be surprisingly simple: capitalist patriarchy allows people to dream.
A "dream" concocted in batchesIn today's world, the general emphasis on dreams, goals, and ideals, everyone is Xi to it, and since elementary school, teachers have asked everyone "What is the dream of growing up?" ”。But in the pre-modern era, dreaming was an extremely scarce ability, so scarce that once an ordinary person had a "dream", he would even be frightened to the extent of panicking.
On the one hand, the class solidification of pre-modern social relations was more serious than it is now, and even if ordinary people had "dreams", it was difficult to realize them, and there was almost no way to realize them. Our imperial examination system did provide some avenues for class transitions, but education was a very expensive affair at the time, and even a family could only support the most gifted child in the whole family. So in the end, the so-called "poor students" were not the sons of peasants, but the product of the struggle between the local tycoons and the bureaucracy and aristocrats. The humble door is not the door of a poor family, but the door of a large family without titles and official positions. Ancient laws often stipulate that the identity of different classes, the decoration of the door railing, the size of the house, the sedan chair for travel, and the clothes worn are not allowed to cross their class identity, otherwise it is a kind of trespassing, so it is called Hanmen, because the class status is not high, for example, no matter how rich Li Bai's family is, as the son of a businessman, the career can only be a tragedy. In this kind of class solidification, people cannot have dreams, because dreams mean class revolution - that is devastating, either you go to reform or you go to rebellion, it is a matter of fortune, and it will not be possible to produce a proud man with the right time and place for hundreds of years.
Dreams, on the other hand, are scarce in their own right. We now generally believe that everyone has dreams and should have dreams. But in human nature, having a dream is a luxury. It's like the expansion of human tribes and groups, often by a small group of people breaking through the unknown, or even being forced to leave the original tribe and go to a new realm. The underlying logic of human survival has always struggled between curiosity and fear. But for most people, its division of life is to maintain the stability of the entire tribe, and the millions of years of evolutionary development history stipulate the distribution ratio of the "group function" of the entire human race, and maintain the basic division of labor in the human social structure.
The unusual ambition, desire, and thriving curiosity of the population itself is under-represented in the group, because these attributes also mean instability and destructiveness.
I'm not denying the importance of "dreaming" here. There is no doubt that in the modern era, the potential of human beings has been almost maximized. A large part of this is due to the fact that "dreams" provide enough internal tension to develop their potential. Because "I want", coupled with "possible", has created the technological breakthrough of modern mankind and the geometric growth of overall wealth.
But at the same time, "dreams" have always been closely linked to "failure", and what is even more terrifying is that after experiencing the high-spirited spiritual power provided by early capitalism to all mankind, after encountering the "bottleneck of technological development", more dreams are no longer a purely spontaneous dream facing a blue ocean, but more of a "dream of mass concoction".
Why is it a dream of mass production? It is a culturally oriented desire for "success", rather than a natural curiosity and desire to conquer. Its fundamental dynamics are very different. When we think back, our first-grade teachers would ask, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" Listen to the children's answers – did anyone say I wanted to be a farmer? Did anyone say I want to sweep the streets? Did anyone say I want to be a security guard? Did anyone say I want to play every day? Even ask yourself, can you accept your child's answer?
Our definition of "dream" often has the connotation of real success, while the cultural definition of success is relatively narrow. And there is another very important reason here, that is, because the abstraction of labor by capitalism has erased the differences of all labor - no matter how interesting your work is, how much you enjoy it, but the social evaluation system is only "how much is a month?" ”
So,What we dream is often not a real dream, it is not a point to the unknown territory of human beings, we need to face danger and failure all the time, and bear the risk of failure all the time and the emotional impulse at any cost. Rather, it is a rationally packaged "desire of the other", yes, our dream is not a dream, it is "the desire of the other".
Therefore, the characteristics of capitalist patriarchy have changed from "pushing people to dream" to "creating dreams for people" to maintain its own ideological stability. Because if people don't dream, there will be no "consumerism", people can't define their lives by consumption, people can't fulfill their "dreams" by chasing wealth production, then the whole cycle of economic growth will be broken - the advantages and disadvantages of capitalism come from the same point, that is, growth, without growth, it has no future. (That's how the bubble came about).
So, when it comes to the stage of financial capitalism, it does not hesitate to create bubbles to create success. "Success" is further narrowed to a view of consumption, and further stripped away from the relationship between human creative activity and it- It doesn't matter what you create, what matters is whether your lifestyle is enviable, famous, profitable, and whether you can provide an idealized object image for others to project their desires.
The Great Other Law of the Capitalist Patriarchy – CompetitionMichael Sandel is a left-wing scholar in the United States, and one of his books is called "The Arrogance of the Elite," which I recommend to you. Here, he points out the key to a social contradiction, and it is also a bug in modern society - that isThe pitfalls of the merit principle
It seems that the merit principle has become a common consensus in modern times, that is, there is a default reciprocal option - if everyone can compete fairly with equal opportunities, then the winner should be rewarded. This is the ideal of capitalism, and it is also the ethical core of meritocracy that most modern societies agree on.
However, this seemingly fair view of success has precisely created at least the ** of American society, the arrogance of the elite and the resentment of the people at the bottomThis makes successful people really believe that their success comes from their own efforts and their own efforts, and they do not see that the proportion of timing and luck in a person's life far exceeds the so-called "hard work". It is precisely this that makes those who "succeed" unconsciously despise those who are less fortunate and unqualified than themselves - it is precisely the social tear that has brought too many "irrational" and "populist" talk show actors-style political amateurs to power in Western democracies.
In fact, the source of all this lies in the uneven distribution system of resources in social practice of meritocracy disguised as "fairness". So Sandel even called for the children who simply drew lots to decide to go to school at each university than the current meritocracy system. Because your class was born, the resources you were born with determine your upper and lower limits. The same is a scumbag, the children of the poor can only go out to work, and the children of the rich go abroad to study and pack. The children of the poor are at most high-level migrant workers, while the children of the rich can go to various prestigious schools, and they can already obtain the favor of various large enterprises or the resources to start their own businesses in advance in school - this is class solidification.
There used to be a very popular saying on the Internet, called "The efforts of several generations of my family, why should I easily lose to you for ten years of hard work". This sentence reveals a certain difference in political ideals, that is, whether to choose "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome", which is also the different tendencies of Eastern and Western cultures.
The pursuit of equal opportunity is to emphasize competition, which is also advocated by modern society. And equality of results is the communist ideal, the abolition of private property and the abolition of class differences. And given that our political practice tends to be biased towards the mean, there is neither complete social Darwinism nor complete egalitarianism. Our political ideals hope to find some kind of balance in between, and then constantly revise to bring society to a point where the majority of the population is satisfied.
Personally, I am inclined to trust our ability to practice politics, and the 5,000-year-old civilization must have its own special ability to find an exit in a difficult and confused situation. But one thing we need to understand is that there will be victims here. We have never lacked the victims of the times, nor have we lacked the profiteers of the times. To a certain extent, all policies will not be a kind of deduction of absolute rationality, because absolute rationality often also contains absolute evil (such as the Soviet Union), and we are more of a policy tendency of "clear direction and constant adjustment, big mistakes and no small mistakes", so it must be lagging behind, not completely forward-looking. (It's not so much the chess game of the big country, but the moving of the big country, if you are interested, you can take a look at Mr. He Fan's "Variables" series).
In fact, there can be no completely and absolutely fair competition, and it seems that absolutely fair results cannot be achieved, and these socio-political ideals, to some extent, can only be approached by constant practice. But from the root of the big picture,If the "principle of merit" is not **, in fact, it is difficult for the social form to undergo major changes
Let's take education as an example. It is difficult to imagine a form of education that is "not based on grades". It's really unimaginable, and even if it is, the resistance from all parties in society is too great. The school itself is in the sequence of competition, the parents themselves are in the sequence of competition, the local education bureau is also in the sequence of competition, and even the country is in the sequence of competition in international relations. You say kids don't compete, is it possible? That's why there is the above sentence "The efforts of several generations of my family, why should I easily lose to you for ten years of hard work". Otherwise, how can a child's education and training expenses be as high as one million a year? How much does it cost for a year, but what a rural family can't earn in a lifetime. They feel that they can send their children to a township compulsory primary school a few kilometers away, and they can imagine the education expenditure of one million a year? On the other hand, do those parents who are involved in education dare to give up? Don't dare, because they come from the sequence of competition, they know the result of the failure of the competition, and they can't take the risk. And those caught in the middle can only be forced to follow suit. It's as if everyone has turned on one"Ant Death Vortex"., keep rolling into the center. So, this is really not a question of educational philosophy, I believe that we do not lack educators with conscience, but the facts are in front of us, the competition for resources between urban and rural areas, and the siphoning of resources from cities to rural areas is not competition? There is competition for resources between schools, and if your school does not do well, there will be less funding next year, and the principal will have a lot less opportunities for promotion, can this not be competitive?
Involution is a passive, unavoidable occurrence. And that's itThe Great Other of the capitalist patriarchy dictates – you have to compete, and if you don't compete, you hurry up and get out of the game, don't show up in our modern society. You become a homeless person, you live a poor life because you are a failure, and you should take full responsibility for your failures - this kind of social Darwinian social resource allocation is the best solution.
But is it true? This places individual free will in a position of absolute justice. And the so-called patriarchal law is that you have to believe that it is true, even if you know that it is not true, you still have to defend it. Because the cost of violating it is too high for an individual to afford. This is called the law of the Great Other, and you can only follow the law, not disobey it.
So thousands of troops and horses went to cross the single-plank bridge, and below it was a man-made abyss.
Capitalist patriarchy in psychological counselingFrom this perspective, why does the more psychological counseling develops, the more mental illness increases?
Because there is also the shadow of this patriarchy here - every individual is a condensed social system. The inner part of the individual is full of sliced social contradictions, don't say that someone really sees through it, you are still living in this social situation, you can't get rid of the expression of this contradiction in the individual.
Whether it's a psychiatrist or a counselor from all walks of life, who is not in the competitive sequence? Not in the competitive sequence, ** so many classes? Not in the competitive sequence, ** so many "big coffee teachers"? WhileAs long as we are in the sequence of competition, we will all face the anxiety caused by the implicit laws of capitalist patriarchy, which cannot be escaped.
Because it is not a simple matter as a moral superego, but a "desire of the other" and at the same time a "gaze of the other". For example, if you don't sign up for classes, you don't supervise, you don't have personal experience, do you dare to be anxious? But when you sign up for classes, you find a supervisor, and you participate in personal experiences, you don't feel anxious? It will only be more anxious, like anxious about money. The profession itself is an anxious one. Because it is a profession that is gazed—the gaze of the Great Other provided by the industry, the gaze of the object provided by the visitor, the idealized gaze of the Other provided by the social group. You can't deviate from this law of competition, because this is the industry, and this industry is based on the law of the free market and the principle of merit.
Even the counselors themselves are in the anxiety provided by the secret law, so which of the various visits from all walks of life in the real society can really escape the fate of competition? No one is better than the other.
A society that is constantly involuted will inevitably continue to create "people" who are torn apart by internal tension. The rise of the psychological counseling profession itself has an inherent mission to repair this kind of torn crack - it is not that it cannot break through its own context, it can, but it must serve an ideological law - to maintain people's dreams, to maintain the balance of people's internal tension, and to maintain people's basic ability to withstand tension.
Dream-competition-internal tension tearing-internal crack repair, this seamless cycle has brought about the rise of the industry, in fact, it is also the social mission of the industry. But in fact, all problems are not individual problems, they are all social problems. Because man is a product of society, the smallest model of society. For example, we now always talk about how the family of origin is, do you know the "three difficult times"? Know the "90s wave of layoffs"? Do you know that "those who sweep away gangsters and eliminate evil should be fast, strict, and severe"? What stage does not bring a lot of mass trauma? On a deeper level, when the basic form of a society takes a huge turnBetween those who have received a large number of era dividends and a large number of era eliminators, how many cognitive anxieties have spread and expanded while being rigid and fixed.
A dream is a fragile and fragile thing after all. It's like looking at how many children in the first grade of elementary school are answering "I want to be an astronaut when I grow up", and then looking at the number of people in the world who can really become astronauts in space, even if the ground personnel who build rockets are counted, what percentage can there be? What's more, the narrow definition of success makes many people hold that fragile dream all the time and struggle in society.
So I never encouraged my son to have a dream, I told my mother, you just make this plan, and in the future, this kid will go to a vocational high school, and then go to work in the factory. So what? It's not like you can still eat and have a house to live in. The bottom line we can manage is here, don't kill people and set fires, morally turpitude, what kind of development can we develop in the future world, in fact, we can't control it, just like she couldn't predict me today back then, and I can't predict him in the future.
In this era, people must first learn to "accept their fate".We now often use a mindset called bottom-line thinking when building business models. Can this project be done, throw away all flashy self-imagination and moisture data, such as how marketable it may be, such as possible viral development, etcIn the worst case, look at the investment-to-return ratio and development path inside.
But this is completely different from the way people think more than ten years ago, when it was called online thinking. Whether this project can be done depends on the possibility, whether it has a possibility, whether it is possible to become a giant, whether it is possible to change people's consumption Xi, even if there is a 1% possibility, then do it. Opportunities don't wait for anyone, opportunities are fleeting. This is called suffocating the bold, starving the faint-hearted. I used to be stuck in a traffic jam on the highway and then there was a lot of traffic in the emergency lane next to me. I didn't pay attention to this phenomenon at first, but then I found it strange because it was often the old cars that overtook the good cars. Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and the most inferior must be Volkswagen Touareg or Fiion.
After thinking about it for a while, this should be a common, epochal characteristic of people who buy these cars - if you don't try, don't break through the next limit, how do you know it can't be? What if the emergency lane is not blocked? - And, I can't accept that I am slow enough to slow down others, because you are not slow by a beat, you are slow by stacks of RMB, and time is moneyOpportunities are grabbed, not waited for. But in this era, it seems to be different. Because the risks brought by "possibility" are getting higher and higher, the returns are getting smaller and smaller, and the class barriers are getting thicker and thicker. When you start a business, unless you are a revolutionary product that may gain the favor of capital (and at the same time be subject to the rules of the game of capital), the chances left for you are very small. Because the gap in the market is getting smaller and smaller, more and more emphasis is placed on accurate consumer portraits and accurate consumer needs, which is called segmentation. From the Internet industry, to new channels, to traditional industries, everyone is emphasizing subdivision and subdivision, precision and precision.
Why? Because big dreams can't be done, let's dream small ones. That thing is too difficult, what to change the industry, set off a lifestyle revolution, this kind of big word no one says. No one believes it anymore, the brand on the street, is there still one of you missing? The most precious thing for modern people is attention. How much fragmented information runs through the already overloaded cerebral cortex every day? There are not so many blue oceans in a flattened world, and even if there really is a blue ocean, big capital will pour into it all at once and change the entire pattern. The way the world creates wealth is through poor information and resources. With more information and resources, there are more natural opportunities. The reason why capital abandons entities is because entities are a kind of solidification of information and resources, which cannot meet the fundamental needs of rapid expansion.
A world where there are not so many opportunities is naturally a world that cannot accommodate so many "dreams", and a world that cannot accommodate too many "dreams" must also be a world full of stumps and broken arms.
On the one hand, the capitalist patriarchal law allows everyone to participate in the sequence of competition, and on the other hand, the whole world is becoming more and more narrow in the path of opportunity, which makes everyone feel suffocated and torn. Can you get out of it? Hard. Really don't go to work and go back to the village to farm? So what was the purpose of passing the 985211 exam in the first place? Isn't it just to fly on the branches and be a phoenix one day?
As a result, modern people are generally struggling - they want to study but can't study with peace of mind, they want to work but can't work with peace of mind, and they can't do things with peace of mind. Yes, the common suffering of modern man is that there is never peace of mind.
But the premise of peace of mind is to accept fate, if you don't accept fate, how can you put your heart in place? But capitalist patriarchy says "if you accept your fate, you are a loser", "if you don't work hard, you are an evader", "you have to be positive, you have to be enterprising, you have to continue to dream!" ”
Accept your fate, it's a big difference in this life - this sentence sounds like a "loser's declaration", right? However, the premise of wisdom is often to be at ease first, so there is a saying of "living in peace". Even if you compete with peace of mind, you can really tell yourself that "I guess this is the character of my life, anyway, I have to fight with others, I have to fight if I am tired, let me die in the arena" - Wouldn't it be happy to have a horse leather shroud! What is sudden death at the age of 30? I'm having a good time!
But it certainly won't work for most people, just a tiny fraction of people's life needs. In the past, whether it was religion or Buddhism, those so-called "superstitions" were often to give people a place to put their hearts - I could not compete, I could jump out of the Three Realms, I could live in the world of God - but these paths were disenchanted by Enlightenment rationalism.
So what is left of modern man? There is still an anxious and confused soul left, struggling with the figuration of this world.
Statement**: The author is on the left, invaded and deleted