Live your dreams, The American Dream; happiness
Freudian aspects of modern American culture, and a bridge to Freud's insistence that happiness is the purpose of our lives, as revealed by our behaviour
The previous post swerved into a strange condemnation of American categories and the hold they have on our thinking, their influence and lure. This was a little beyond my conscious intention. I ended up by contending that, in a sense, modern American culture has also been deeply Freudian, which was also a claim I found myself making that surprised me a bit. Do I mean it? If so, how? I think I do. But what do I mean by that? It’s less a claim about the – also hugely significant – influence of expressly Freudian assumptions on public opinion, propaganda, spin, public relations, and advertising (Edward Bernays). Nor is it a claim about the (pretty big) influence of Freudian orthodoxy on postwar psychiatry, and of course on American psychoanalysis (complex, factional). What I’m asserting is that its 20C culture has at certain moments and in certain ways been pervasively and diffusely Freudian, for the following two reasons: dreams, and happiness.
Firstly, 20C American culture has been Freudian for the central value it accords to the irrational and the unconscious, via the injunction to ‘live your dreams’, as part of ‘the American Dream’ (with the irony that adherents to the injunction regard it as also being rational, as well as the only way to live, as well as being the way to live freely). The individual intuits something ‘deep inside’ herself – beyond reason – and ‘living your best life’ in alignment with this ‘extrareasonal’ or ‘infrareasonable’ gut feeling *is* the practise of freedom.
It’s also been a key way in which living individuals get to feel good about behaving in this dream-led way, because it is so powerfully culturally aligned, and has a whole normative and material feedback and reward structure attached to it. Americans can go about their idiosyncratic dream-living-practice safe in the knowledge by doing so, to the hilt, they are contributing to a cultural synergy which works (alongside the Adam Smith Handjob canvassed earlier) to procure the greater good and manifest (individual)freedom-as-(cultural)destiny. In other words, ‘living your dreams’ is also partaking of living The American Dream, which is also (notionally) the lynchpin norm of *all* America’s diverse communities, suspended as they have been somewhere between Martin Luther King Jr’s avowal and Nike’s slogan.
For the many strands of American Protestantism that co-emphasise positive thinking, getting rich through capitalism, and the movement of the Holy Spirit in all of this (through all of us, moving ‘in’ us), those who truly believe and ‘go with their gut’ are, moreover, apt to have a showering of success, riches, and eternal life bestowed upon them. So like, why wouldn’t you just do it and have a dream? (Surely Scott Morrison’s ‘If you have a go you get a go’ is the Willy Lomax in Cronulla version of this). Donald Trump, massive Norman Vincent Peale fan.
Secondly, American culture is Freudian insofar as it contends that the purpose of all this living-dreaming *is* happiness, which is somehow the goal and the meaning, or whatever you ‘get’ when you live your dreams ?successfully? (Can one live one’s dreams badly… can one merely suck at living one’s dreams? Is the problem of the American loser just that he was really terrible at living his dreams?) There are a few variants: living your dreams *is* the (only?) path to happiness; striving for happiness (even if you don’t achieve it) is the only/better way to live (and perhaps the only way one can say one wishes to live…), and everyone should keep striving (without sick pay or health cover). Meanwhile the culture’s great exemplars, the most heroic individuals are those who lived their dreams, achieved the greatest happiness (and had the best lives in the world [because American lives are the greatest, taking place as they have in the greatest country on earth, etc]), and were happy they did so. (We need only look to Kanye West and Elon Musk to see how one can also be a cracked narcissist and behave like a rude, mad toddler [and not even seem happy], years after your best ideas are done, and also be hailed as a genius for all this). Then if you want to take this further, you have cocaine and Ayn Rand to give you enough dopamine squirts and hagiography to see yourself as the hero whose dreamy dreaming is actually carrying everyone else for doing this. The little people, they owe you for who you are; you, you not only gave birth to yourself, freely, you dreamed yourself to Titanic greatness.
And yet, capitalism. To coax a few themes from the previous post back in here, this dreamt-of happiness can only be achieved through the realms of work (accumulation), play (consumption), and community (worship), all of which are fundamentally capitalist in the US, which capitalism assumes us to be both rational choosers producing the greater good through the selfish pursuit of our own interests (neoclassical economics and the dominant strands of behaviourist psychology) and/or irrational rubes and dupes whose attention and behaviour are fundamentally manipulable using a range of evidence-based techniques that can coax monetizable needs and wants from us, like milk from a dairy cow’s udder (advertising, marketing, behavioural design). And, as also mentioned in the previous post, most of these well evidenced, highly developed techniques work best when beyond conscious attention or ego control: by tinting our phenomenology (like shopping malls as designed environments); by manipulating ego (in the knowledge that it can be so massaged); or by operating with the unconscious – for instance, by fucking with our dreams or appealing to unconscious triggers that pinch the dream titties of the norm norms of happiness. This is pretty well known and used to be openly professed. As Stanley Resor, then President of J Walter Thompson, said in 1959:
“When incomes rise, the most important thing is the creation of new needs. When you ask people, ‘Do you know that your standard of living will increase by 50% over 10 years?’, they haven’t the faintest idea what that means […] They don’t feel the need for a second car unless you remind them forcefully of the fact. This need has to be created in their minds and you have to make them realize the advantages a second car will bring them. At times they are even hostile to the idea. I see advertising as the educative, activating force capable of bringing about the changes in demand that we need. By teaching many people a higher standard of living, it increases consumption to a level commensurate with our productivity and resources (in Gorz, Ecologica, 104).
Thus, in 20C and 21C American lives where people have to work (long hours under shitty conditions) in exchange for money (or starve); where people must consume to get their needs met (because no one can or does produce their own subsistence), and must consume excessively so ‘the economy’ remains profitable enough not to cause a recession; where most free individuals must drive huge distances in bad traffic to get their needs met and their wants seen to, and work all the more to pay for the cost of all of this commuting (because of the structure of the built environment), there is also the individual-and-cultural belief that ‘all of the above’ is the co-pursuit of one’s dreams, The American Dream, and happiness. This is the life, huh?
Here's a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't worry, be happy
In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double
Don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy now
don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
Ain't got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed
Don't worry, be happy
The landlord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate
Don't worry, be happy
Oh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh don't worry, be happy
Here I give you my phone number, when you worry, call me, I make you happy, don't worry, be happy)
Don't worry, be happy
Ain't got no cash, ain't got no style
Ain't got no gal to make you smile
Don't worry, be happy
'Cause when you worry your face will frown
And that will bring everybody down
So don't worry, be happy
Don't worry, be happy now
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
Now there, is this song I wrote
I hope you learned note for note
Like good little children, don't worry, be happy
Now listen to what I said, in your life expect some trouble
When you worry you make it double
But don't worry, be happy, be happy now
don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
don't worry, don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, don't do it, be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) put a smile in your face
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't bring everybody down like this
don't worry
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) it will soon pass, whatever it is
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) don't worry, be happy
(Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh) I'm not worried, I'm happy
For a bit more than 3/4 of the population, this is then re-moralised by involvement in sectarian faith communities, where happiness-seeking, dream-living individuals become groups once more, and find meaning by worshipping together, usually in a socio-culturally insular milieu (which in many sectarian cases excludes the broader community, sometimes by regarding it as a set of immoral outsiders or apostates). At the same time, these faith-based insular communities also ‘embrace’ these outsider-others as insider-Americans living the(ir) liberal-national dream of happiness and believing in the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and freedom.
To which, a part of me just types: do we really need to wonder that much why America seems like such a crazy and fucked up country, why Michael Jackson, and why its suicide rate has risen by almost a third since 2000 (Jackson, Post Growth, 50)? And/then/but: if it is so messed up, why does it persist?
For the most part, all of the above are deeply ingrained cultural settings: strong preferences underpinned by widely held norms that are not easily amenable to change, even in the unusual situation that large numbers of people suddenly realise they dislike and so contest them (slavery, segregation, racism, abortion). And wherever cultural factors are in play, thus where we have ‘culturally normal’ behaviour, we always have to countenance the fact that many people sincerely and deeply believe that wouldn’t have life any other way (even if they could, which they may believe they couldn’t… they also wouldn’t…). Culture is nearly always proud of itself; even (especially!) cultures of shame and silence are fucking stubborn about keeping things as they are.
As with the previous post, we could follow 90s-00s Zizek here and have a broadly Lacanian analysis of how this works (and for ‘whom’), what’s ‘in it’ for any given culture’s adherents, based on fantasy, ideology, and enjoyment. But if we step back to 1930, and Lacan’s ultimate influence in this, how can we see an earlier incipient social theory of ‘all of the above’ operating, and how does Freud urge us to think about dreams and happiness working for all of us, in the midst of this? Moreover (and to foreshadow the concluding critical questions I wish to reach): do we humans want to be happy? Is happiness the purpose or meaning of life revealed by our actual behaviour? Is it really what animates and motivates us, deep down? And: at all times, in all cultures, by (m)any people(s)? Is this a cultural situation…. did Freud describe 20C American culture… did he describe Viennese culture; does he describe how most people live and desire and what gives shape, form and sense to their lives and pushes and pulls their behaviour?
Before it gets too long, before I start editing, I’ll leave today’s post with the following long quote by Freud, which the next post will analyse closely. (Refer back to the earlier posts I did on Freud’s reading of religion in C&ID if you wish to remember his contemptuous view of it).
“Again, only religion has answer to the question of the purpose of life. It can hardly be wrong to conclude that the notion that life has a purpose stands or falls with the religious system.
We will therefore turn now to the more modest question of what human beings themselves reveal, through their behaviour, about the aim and purpose of their lives, what they demand of life and wish to achieve in it. The answer can scarcely be in doubt: they strive for happiness, they want to become happy and remain so. This striving has two goals, one negative and one positive: on the one hand it aims at an absence of pain and unpleasurable experiences, on the other at strong feelings of pleasure. ‘Happiness’, in the strict sense of the word, relates only to the latter. In conformity with this dichotomy in its aims, human activity developes in two directions, according to whether it seeks to realize – mainly or even exclusively – the one or the other of these aims.
As we see, it is simply the programme of the pleasure principle that determines the purpose of life. This principle governs the functioning of our mental apparatus from the start; there can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at odds with the whole world – with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. It is quite incapable of being realized; all the institutions of the universe are opposed to it; one is inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ has no part in the plan of ‘creation’. What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself. Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. Suffering threatens us from three sides: from our own body, which, being doomed to decay and dissolution, cannot dispense with pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which can unleash overwhelming, implacable, destructive forces against us; and finally from our relations with others. The suffering that arises from this last source perhaps causes us more pain than any other; we are inclined to regard it as a somewhat superfluous extra, although it is probably no less ineluctable than suffering that originates elsewhere” (14-15).