Breaking Free of the Culture Around You

In today's episode we discuss how you can come to understand the psychology of your culture, your society and your zeitgiest, and how this can help you when you are trying to determine your own values.

In particular we describe three virtues upheld by Western culture; Freedom, Happiness & Convenience, and we discuss the benefits and dark sides of each. 

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant general adult psychiatrist with a sub-speciality in addictions who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

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Transcript

This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry and related topics. Today we're going to be talking about understanding the psychology of your culture and your society, and how this can help you when you're trying to determine your own values. It's worth spending some time thinking about what are the distinguishing features of your time, of your zeitgeist? What makes your stage in history unique? 1s In the time and culture that you live in, which values are promoted and highlighted and idealized. Which values are denigrated or kept unconscious? What is the mythology of our time? What is emphasized by the mainstream consciousness is good, and to strive for what, on the other hand, is neglected. It's worth thinking about this because contrary to what someone might think, values are not always commensurate with each other. What I mean by that is different virtues imply very different ways of looking at the world, different ways of behaving, which can be contradictory to each other despite the fact that both virtues may be equally valid. People are often in the position when they have to choose between one virtue and another. This is the essence of an ethical dilemma. For example, in giving advice to a best friend, a person may have to choose between honesty and politeness. Both honesty and politeness can be virtuous and have their place. There are certainly situations where honesty is definitely the most appropriate option. For example, if your friend asks you if he should get behind the wheel drunk. There are times when there's more room for politeness and diplomacy. For example, your mother in law asks you how much you like her cooking. Of course, life is rarely so simple. Often we're thrown into scenarios where which virtue to prioritize is not necessarily clear. And that's before you even take into account any individual psychological issues or their conflicts. Throughout a person's life as they develop, and hopefully as they mature, they go through different phases and they develop their personal philosophy and their sense of morality. And the same thing is happening with cultures. Cultures go through phases and shifts, and within a given society, there's the perennial discussion. You know, what about our psychology? Should we keep what has worked well? What is worth preserving? This is the essence of conservatism. And on the other hand, people argue about what we should change. What should we let go of? What about our past is destructive and needs to be accounted for differently? This is the essence of being a progressive. By the same token, conservatives will generally be wary of the danger of new ideas or new ways of doing things and the chaos that this can bring. Neither of them are right. Of course, they are both right and wrong at the same time. This is why conservatives will tend to fight to preserve old societal institutions like marriage and the family, while progressives will tend to want to introduce new laws and new technologies like, for example, gay marriage or abortion, because they feel that's the way that society moves forward. So as we've just discussed, different values and virtues don't necessarily all pull in the same direction, but it's even more complicated than that because just like a person can become dysfunctional, so can a society in this context, by dysfunction, I mean not prioritizing virtues at all, but prioritizing vices like vanity, selfishness, the need for power and control, greed, or perhaps prioritizing one virtue in an unbalanced way at the expense of all other virtues. 1s Many people, and indeed many societies, experience problems and downfalls because they are corrupted by the darker aspects of their nature. In a world which is becoming progressively more secular, such discussions of morality appear increasingly archaic and irrelevant. But I would argue that these discussions on morality, in other words, how you should conduct yourself ethically, are becoming more important than ever precisely because the world, and particularly the West, is becoming more secular. 1s Just like a person you could meet in the street. A culture will have its own strange mix of virtues and vices of the functional and the dysfunctional. If you want to deal with a person in a sophisticated manner, you want to be able to get a good read over their strengths and their weaknesses, their virtues and their flaws. You want to have your eyes open to their dark side. And the same is true of institutions and societies. But this is much easier said than done. 1s So one question for this essay might be what distinguishes Western culture in 2024? What do we value and prioritize? What could be the dark side of some of our values? Today I'm going to be going through three examples. Number one freedom. In the West, we put a strong emphasis on individualism and individual freedom. That people should be as free as possible to live their lives as they see fit. This can manifest itself in different ways social freedom. Economic freedom. Freedom from tradition. Freedom from the confines of the family. People are freer than ever to choose whatever lifestyle they want. This has enormous benefits, obviously, and everyone needs some degree of freedom in order to be psychologically healthy. But as with anything else, the pursuit of freedom has a dark side. This sounds weird. What could the dark side of freedom be? When we fantasize about different forms of freedom like financial freedom, romantic freedom, geographic freedom, it feels like there could be nothing better. But staring freedom in the face can actually be a terrifying prospect, because with it comes infinite possibilities. And aside from being overwhelming to think about with infinite possibilities also comes the infinite possibility of making the wrong decision to pursue the wrong thing, and indeed, usually in any given decision. There are usually way more wrong answers than right answers. 1s As a result, freedom can paralyze us and cause us to stagnate. If freedom means we don't have to take any particular action, we might not take any action because any action will have downsides. 1s Many young people, for example, are putting off choosing and committing to a career because any one career can appear like a dark tunnel, a series of restrictions that will eat away from a large part of their life while closing off other options. Similarly, people are increasingly choosing not to have children or to have children later and later, and more and more in mainstream culture. Children and the responsibilities of family life are being seen as an encumbrance on a person's freedom, and the ability to get the most enjoyment and peace from their individual life. There's some truth in these notions, of course, and any real choice we make in life will, of course, restrict the freedoms we currently have. But these ways of thinking are relatively simplistic. They don't take into account the length and complexity of our lives and the complexities of the human condition. One not so simple idea that's worth considering, for example, is that what we think of as opposites are more connected to each other than we think. For instance, we tend to think of restriction and freedom as opposite to each other. And therefore if you reduce your restrictions in life, you gain more freedom and vice versa. But as we all know, if we stop the consider this long enough by voluntarily putting restrictions on yourself, you gain new forms of freedom in the long term that you didn't have before. For example, if you undergo the voluntary restriction of studying law for five years, you come out of the other side of that process with a new set of competencies, skills and opportunities that you would not have had before. You now have access to. In other words, you have lost some freedoms but gained others. By the same reasoning, if you spend the same five years indulging in your short term freedom and not imposing any restrictions on yourself, whatever that means for you, you come out of the other side having still lost some things like time, youth, energy, possibly health. Possibly you've also had rich and meaningful experiences, but you haven't necessarily gained any new freedoms or new possibilities for your life. Restriction, therefore, is the frame that makes our freedoms richer and more worthwhile. And while at first glance we may, in our time at least covet short term, simplistic forms of freedom as one of our highest goods. Freeing yourself of restrictions can often feel terrifying and unmoored. This is a feeling that would be familiar to people on the first day of their retirement, or three months after finishing university, when they're still looking for a job, or six months after impulsively divorcing their partner. 2s Our problems with freedom run even deeper than this. In that part of our zeitgeist not only demands individual freedom in terms of our choices, but freedom in terms of our core identity. We have forgotten that although identity is malleable, identity in large part is something that is given to you by nature and biology, as well as something that you need to negotiate with the community around you. We've become so appalled by the idea that we have a nature that we have to reconcile with, that biology influences who we are. For example, most people have trouble with the idea that on average, 50% of psychological traits like how hardworking you are or how emotionally sensitive you are or how extroverted you are, are heritable. That is to say, attributed to genetic differences rather than environmental differences. In a consumer based society where it feels as though the world is at our fingertips, any level of biological determinism feels very unwelcome. 1s This fact, of course, doesn't mean that you are doomed to play out the genetic script without any conscious influence of your own. But it does mean that we have predispositions, tendencies, traits, in other words, restrictions, and unless we come to grips with these, will be confused and disoriented. It will make us much harder for us to construct a life, because rather than constructing a life around, our nature will construct a life around our short term impulses or the influences of our friends and family, or the current trends of our time. 2s Number two. Striving for happiness. 1s Another good. Our culture prioritizes, implicitly and explicitly, the striving for individual happiness. Again, at face value, it's difficult to argue with why would we not, as a culture, have a drive towards greater feelings of well-being? And after all, the greater sense of well-being makes for a kinder, more compassionate person and generally a more compassionate, giving society. But there are some problems with the way we approach striving for happiness. Firstly, happiness is difficult to apprehend directly. Many people understand this as they mature as they get older. Happiness is not something that you can predictably will into existence, but rather happiness tends to be emergent. In other words, a byproduct of other accomplishments. Happiness also tends to be quite fleeting. And as Buddhism teaches us, sometimes the more you grasp for happiness, the more elusive it becomes. 1s Secondly, happiness comes in many forms. You've got feelings of enjoyment, security, compassion for others, self-compassion, contentment, gratitude, inner peace. But you also have more hedonistic pleasures. A lot of the happiness our society seems to steer us towards is less the happiness of enjoying what you have. What I would call economies, forms of happiness, but more the hedonistic pleasures reward based happiness. Happiness based around growth, happiness based on the promise of more to come in the future. The promise of more gold at the end of the rainbow. 1s These second forms of happiness are by definition more seductive, but at the extreme more dysfunctional. The kind of happiness that can leave you strung out and chasing the next high no matter what the cost happens to be. For example, persisting in your workaholism to get the next promotion, or substituting credibility for fame, or opening up a dating app when you're already on a date or becoming addicted to cocaine or gambling. 1s If and when something goes wrong while trying to chase these highs, and almost inevitably, something does, a person can be left depressed and despondent. If a person actually went against the culture and cultivated within themselves the capacity for those more economy forms of happiness, joy, gratitude, enjoying what you have, self-compassion that find themselves on a more sustainable path, and it actually be more sheltered from the ups and downs of life, rather than more vulnerable to the ups and downs of life. 1s The third problem with chasing happiness directly is that life is full of complications and difficulties. Therefore, when someone feels unhappy in a culture that prioritizes individual happiness and then markets it as being attainable, with many artificial examples frequently flung in our faces through the media, then we don't only have to contend with our unhappiness, but we also have to be made to feel like a failure and somehow unique in our failure. Despite the fact that unhappiness and discontent is hardly exceptional, but it's actually the norm for most people. 1s Number three. Convenience. The third and last example of something our culture prioritizes is convenience. That's something that is transmitted to us more implicitly, for example, via the service industry and advertising. Companies in general are aware that there is a natural tendency for people to want to expend less energy and therefore to choose the path of least resistance. As a result, products and services are designed and marketed in such a way so as to reduce the friction for the consumer as much as possible, and generally, products and services with the least friction are the ones that do the best. 1s This in many ways is a good thing because it allows us to reduce for ourselves a lot of unnecessary toil and suffering. But this one major problem with this, which is the following. In a capitalist economy, a person grows up constantly being bombarded by messages about how convenience is a good thing which should be sought out. Don't cook. Get your food delivered. Don't walk. Grab an Uber. Don't go out and meet people. Use a dating app. And as a result, we come to think of convenience as not just a tool, but a virtue in and of itself, something that should be sought for its own sake. Convenience has gone from being a tool to a value. This is importantly wrong because, as we previously discussed in another essay about fear and laziness, the human mind and body was not designed for convenience but for challenge. We are, however, designed to be seduced by convenience because in our ancestral environment, where energy was scarce, the ability to save energy could be life saving. In the short term, therefore, convenience can alleviate some of our tensions and difficulties. But we can fall under the spell of convenience in the long term. In the long term, convenience makes us weaker, sicker, less resilient, less effective in both the mental and the physical sense. Not having to do manual labor has made our bodies more fragile. Not having to solve as many mental problems has dulled our minds. This is not to say that we should denounce wholesale the convenience of modern society. Quite the opposite. We should make as much use of it as we can, but we should use it in a way that assists us, rather than a way that makes us dependent on it. 1s The convenience of modern society should be the support system which helps us move towards our worthwhile goals. And our worthwhile goals will almost certainly be extremely inconvenient to attempt to attain. And it's the inconvenience, partly, which makes the goal worthwhile. Because if it was convenient, it would be attainable by anyone without any effort. In other words, the best use of convenience is to help you pursue the inconvenient. For example, getting food delivered to your house because you're busy working on your PhD thesis. Using Netflix to switch off after a long day of work so you can relax before the next day. Using a protein shake after a hard workout. These are forms of convenience that can help push us forward. The trap that most people fall into is pursuing convenience for its own sake. Unconsciously, most of the time. But none of this is really captured by our societal messaging, because largely this is driven by economics and not driven by a higher order. Ethical principles. 1s This doesn't mean, of course, that you always need to be striving and toiling, but just to be aware that striving is something we're designed for. It's one of the things that contributes to a sense of meaning and contentment in our lives, whether that's designing a career, raising a family, or writing a novel, striving will look different for every individual. 1s There are other psychological issues we have as a culture we could talk about if we had more time, and maybe that would be expanded upon in future essays. And these include our disdain for tradition, the pursuit of fame for its own sake, our desire to have a painless existence which is in part related to our desire for convenience and our immense drive for control. 1s So to conclude, it's important to be aware that in any given moment in history, a society may possess a collection of virtues or sometimes ambitions, masquerading as virtues which can be unbalanced. And any goal or virtue can, of course, have a dark side. For example, the dark side of freedom is the terror of infinite choices, and that one becomes responsible for everything that happens to them. The dark side of convenience is dependence. The dark side of striving for happiness is that suffering makes you a failure. Every individual, group of individuals, institution, country or group of countries will have a philosophy, a way of looking at the world underlying its actions, whether this is conscious, explicit, or unconscious and implied. Usually it's a mix of both. These philosophies will be expressed through everything from advertising to mainstream film, to TV shows to government policy. Unconscious philosophies, whether in the individual or in the collective, are far more dangerous because unconscious philosophies tend to go unexamined and they have the opportunity to influence our behavior more surreptitiously. To continue your own development, your own individual growth. It's important to have a clear sense of the philosophy underneath your society and culture, so that you can get some degree of detachment from it. This will allow you to take and benefit from what is good about your society, and distance yourself from what is more dysfunctional. And of course, it will help you craft your own personal philosophy, your own system of values, which is the number one thing people need to buffer themselves against manipulation from outside forces. 1s And the last point would be do not worship at the altar of any one particular virtue. A sound system of ethics will need lots of different virtues, which are in tension with each other, and every situation you find yourself in will call for a unique combination of those virtues, sometimes a compromise between different virtues. 2s So I hope that was helpful. Whether you agree or disagree, my main goal with any essays to stimulate thoughts and conversation. If you have any feedback, you can email us at Thinking Minds podcast at gmail.com. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry and related topics. If you like it, there are a few ways you can support it. You can share it with a friend. Give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you happen to listen. Follow us on social media. Or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. In addition, I'm now offering one on one psychotherapy sessions online. So if that's something you're interested in. You can check out the email address in the description. Thank you for listening. 11s Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch. If you enjoyed the episode, why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? Because it really helps other people to find us. If you want to get in touch, you can find us on Instagram or Twitter, or you can drop us an email. And if you value the show more generally, why not bias coffee? Thanks so much.