Is the United States suffering from a clinical depression? The USA Today says yes. The commenters at Eschaton, where I found the story, have a lot of reasons why. You don't need to read them to know what they say though: Endless War, no shared sense of sacrifice or purpose; torture; the GOP's constant threat of attack, which carries the subtext that we are unable to respond or rebound; intractable mood in D.C.; Dems refusal to lead; growing income gap; health care crisis; mortgage crisis; the soul-crushing nature of consumerism. But those aren't the reason we are despairing. Rabbi Michael Lerner, a recent guest on Bill Moyer's Journal, gets it right:
DR. TIMOTHY WEBER: Calamity and disaster, threats, potential disasters, war. This is how they [Armageddonists] said it would look and this is how most people see the world today.
BILL MOYERS: It seems to be on the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES playing out what they've read in the Bible.
RABBI MICHAEL LERNER: I think the dispensationalists are onto something. They have a sense, they just have the wrong analysis of why it's all going to end.
BILL MOYERS: But what do you mean they're onto something?
RABBI MICHAEL LERNER: They are onto the growing depression that people are feeling, a deep emotional depression in the United States -- a lack of any hopeful picture of what the world could be. And that failure is not a failure of dispensationalists, it's a failure of the mainstream political framework in this country that-- to address the major questions facing the world in the 21st century.
Horrible events and daunting challenges hit every generation but every generation isn't faced with a complete lack of leadership to navigate through the challenges. And not only are we missing a King or a Roosevelt (Eleanor or Franklin), we are saddled with leaders who actively cultivate feelings of hopelessness and despair because depressed people do not have the will to act. Please remember Dr. Renata Brooks' article, A Nation of Victims, which described this strategy and predicted a National Depression almost five years ago:
Poll after poll demonstrates that Bush's political agenda is out of step with most Americans' core beliefs. Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush's most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower.
Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his extensive studies of "learned helplessness," showed that people's motivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment. Learned helplessness is exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing.
Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He uses pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from feeling they can solve their problems.
It's probably also covered somewhere in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. It's certainly a corollary of her theory of economic shock therapy.
Until a leader emerges, I think the answer is in the cliche "Think globally, act locally." I may be able to put a post together one day about that. In the meantime though, there's another way to feel better and it's brought to us via TheDailyShow.com.
The good people at Viacom (the market triumphs!) have made available nearly all the video from ten years of the Daily Show with John Stewart. So we get this:
And this:
And like chicken soup, this post and TheDailyShow.com won't cure the National Depression or my incipient one but they can't hurt, which makes them better than just about any other news you'll get today.
Comments