London's burning
By Mark Vernon on Tuesday, August 9 2011, 08:12 - In the news - Permalink
Many philosophers have argued that society is a structure for containing human desire, viciousness and aggression. Freud adds a novel twist. He argues that society doesn't hold the aggression in check. Rather it introjects it back into the individual. Destructive desires are internalised. Most of the time we 'put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other extraneous individuals.'
But it's a fragile setup. It holds for much of the time. But when upset, pent up aggression overspills, violence follows fast, and the structures of society that had seemed so strong dissolve like salt.
As my part of London effectively went into curfew last night, and we scanned blogs and exchanged texts to see how far the looting and arson had spread, the city felt like a case in point.
Comments
I agree with you Mark. I also wonder, in our reaction to what is going on, how our 'collective shadow' is being manifest. In essence, I wonder if these young people are, on the micro level, manifestations of some aspects of our national psyche which we do our best to mask using a significant amount of rhetoric and sophisticated psychological and political games. We are a violent society, we are a take what you want if you can society, we are a society whose successive governments have put own self-interest first irrespective of the consequences locally, nationally and especially globally. We do a very clever job hiding all of this, but ultimate we can only hide from it all for so long. Possibly, what is going on, is a rather violent exposing of us all to impulses that we have all worked very hard to cloak in darkness.
To put it another way, there's a lot of exploitation and greed around?