A profound unhappiness afflicts many people in Western societies.
I’m not talking here about people with very serious mental health problems, with records full of red lights, who we wonder what they were doing on the loose until a tragedy struck.
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Discomforts
I’m talking about another type of unhappiness, in fact several types, but I don’t have the space or the skill to catalog them all.
So I’m going with examples.
“Life coaches” are big business. People need to be told how to live.
People believe in healing crystals and all kinds of pseudotherapies which are pure charlatanism.
In bookstores, the sections devoted to esotericism seem more and more extensive to me.
TV shows like this Dr. Philwhere people talk about their “bugs,” abound.
We have never prescribed so many antidepressants.
Suicide rates remain staggering.
Psychologists are overwhelmed.
Were cases of road rage so numerous in the past?
The number of teenagers who feel bad about themselves, and who think that changing their sex is the solution, is growing exponentially.
Also look at the nature of certain battles waged by those who believe they are enlightened.
Being able to put an “X” on a driver’s license? Advancing “inclusive” writing? Hunting down bad words in old books?
The Trudeau government is funding a program that must ensure that the demining teams sent to Ukraine are “inclusive.”
Great crusades that move humanity forward? Really?
Each in their own way, Russians, Chinese and Islamists are convinced that our societies have entered terminal decadence.
- Listen to Joseph Facal’s column via QUB :
Comfort
I was turning all this over in my head when a reader I particularly like sent me a quote from the great Emil Cioran.
“Mental therapies abound among wealthy peoples; the absence of immediate anxieties maintains a morbid climate there. To maintain its nervous well-being, a nation needs an “object” for its worries, a positive terror justifying its “complexes”. Societies consolidate in danger and atrophy in neutrality. Where there is peace, hygiene and comfort, psychoses multiply.»
Reread these sentences carefully without making them say what they don’t say.
Born in a poor country, Romania, which then came under the communist yoke, Cioran tried to understand the pain of living in rich, educated, comfortable societies, where the poor from all over the world would like to live.
According to him, a society which does not face a tangible danger, which has met the majority of its vital needs, which has lost the sense of tragedy, which has become sated and indolent, will see individual anxieties multiply.
This is not about drawing the wrong conclusions. I neither idealize the past nor poor and warlike societies.
But honestly, can we blame him?