2.3. The Compulsion to Repeat: the slave invisible cage
The automatist society manifesto
2.3. The Compulsion to Repeat: the slave invisible cage
The main disadvantage of slavery, whether classical or camouflaged in apparently free working relationships, is the causing a depressive psychopathological background. Between the simple depression of the fatalism specific to the classical slavery lifestyle, and the major depression that degenerates into suicide, there is a spectrum of intermediate depressions that are triggered by the slavery traumatic experiences. I showed in the first two entries of this series how the depressed slave preferred to get killed or sink into the fantastic world of heaven from the after death world rather than continuing to live as a classical slave. And the post-Constantine civilization knew to offer this illusory lure in exchange for a more careful selection of potential slaves that won’t initiate a future revolt with damages on both sides.
In addition to this help cry for liberation from the slavery chains, on the opposite side there is a slave conservative pulsion to remain chained into slavery. This pulsion dwells in each one of us's brain. It is the most important factor that contributes to the slavery consolidation and usage. The classical psychoanalysis has noticed this strange tendency that drew some patients to paradoxically relive a trauma that they experienced before. Freud named it "the compulsion to repeat". He noticed it in some patients who seemed to develop an opposite to phobia behavior after similar traumatic experience, a kind of paradoxical attraction to frustrating things, that some were previously experienced.
The phobia and the compulsion to repeat are at the antipodes one another. The first is an exaggerated fear as the other is a minimized fear, and even seduced by the potential trauma of a situation. If phobia has the disadvantage of generalizing traumatic appreciation toward harmless objects or beings, on the contrary, the compulsion to repeat has the disadvantage of constantly stepping into troubles. In the first case, the behavior is anachronistic because it sees terror where it is not, or exaggerates it. In the second case, the behavior is anachronistic due to the paradoxical inability to avoid traumatic factors.
The psychopathology used the poetic formula of "moral masochism" to describe it, because the subject ambivalently experiences the terrible terror of trauma through both fear and seduction in the same time. The fear acts by rejection and leaving, as the seduction acts by attraction. The pathological gambling is perhaps the best example in this case. The person with this disorder loses all its fortune by compulsive betting, until ruining, on the improbable odds. As the pathological gambler, the compulsion to repeat person cognitively (by superior mind) bets on the improbability for any trauma to produce. But, in the same time, at the profound psychological level, that person unbelievable bets on the probability of producing it. Engaging into the traumatic actions or into unlikely betting is caused by a paradoxical and self destroying need for trauma.
As the one dominated by the compulsion to traumatically repeat the slave is also embraced by ambivalence towards slavery after being released. In the not so pragmatic eastern culture there are proverbs like: "It is bad with evil but it is worse without it". But even in the very pragmatic western culture there is this one: “Nothing is bad without being good for something” We can see here a true poetic of attraction to "evil" throughout the world. This is not at all caused by the demonic human nature but by this dependence it gets towards its tradition. the compulsion to traumatically repeat is part of human adaptation to environment. Somehow, somewhere, at a certain point the individual will overcome the origin of the trauma and rise above it. The species will receive these victories. But the individual or several generations after him will be wasted in these trials.
The same thing happens to the slave. He is wasted in activities below the human spirit. The set free slave thus feels a strange ambivalence towards the slavery social status. On the one hand, she/he detests it, but on the other looks for it in a moral masochistic way. The explanation rests precisely in the transgenerational mental heritage that the subject wants to relive in a cycle: the parents, the grandparents, the grandparents, etc., were themselves slaves and their descendants do not know any other way of life. Like a cage bird that does not want to fly outside anymore, because it feels good there, the slave also has some comfort in executing orders and being valued by the master. The myth of the cave, narrated by Plato, perfectly describes this mental state. Because of this, the loss of work for the modern order executioner causes addition frustration to the social marginalization natural one that the marginalized unemployed person feels.
Despite an entire civilization that has formed after the slaves protests, the paradox is that the traditional transgenerational slave is so linked to the slavery that it can not totally escape it once it is formally and officially released. That is why, after abolition, many slaves remained servants to former and current masters. There are lots recorded cases like this after the slavery abolition in the US. The same thing happened in the late antiquity and after. As missing the image of the classical master power, the slave created the image of a cosmic megastar, a pattern for his ideal master that can not separate from: God.
As strictly psychologically analyzed, the mental construction of Christianity was a simple return to a more efficient master. The Catacomb Christian later buried its life into prayer and mysticism after its predecessors had buried their lives into taking their masters orders. Exactly after to the same mental pattern, the contemporary young naïve people behave. As shaped by consumerist values of sudden social upheaval, these people burry their youth for making a career, climbing up the steps of promoting or moving from one corporation to the other. The two mental states are the same. The difference between them lies only in the values that each social system cultivates: the Christianity promised a social ascension in an illusory after death life, that no one experienced and communicated to the entourage according to scientific rules. On the other hand, the corporatist mentality promises the social ascension through an illusory collection of unnecessary products and objects. The difference between the two cultural statutes lies in the degree of acceptance of the illusion: the first has a highly culturalist, abstract mentality while the other has a more mercantile, concrete one.
The "liberated" slave willingly remains in the master's yard, as the “free” employee, always consumes the same "else". They both seem to be governed by two completely different mentalities, conservative and progressive. But, in fact, they are the same thing: the classical slave just turned into a wage slave can not leave the subordination social state, as the wage slave either can escape the vicious circle of false paths choices. These multiple “choices” are actually the same option wrapped with different packaging.
The fleeing trauma has remained imprinted in the slaves' soul for many generations to that level that they alone can not release themselves. The pop star or VIP arrogance that most adolescents show actually counteracts this sense of social inferiority that they perceive inside themselves. The capitalist system knows so well to recognize the slave’s mentality exactly in these "class" actions, creating for these children big industries of exploiting their illusions. The pop culture does exactly this.
It is very easy to recruit servants from adolescents in return for more or less real fulfillment of their social ascension dreams. In the last decades, the new generations are being educated in the spirit of entertainment stars. This educational pattern has the role of preparing them for such a moment. On the on hand the contemporary slaves accept to work for money and look with obstinacy for jobs by virtue of habit and genealogical mutilation. But, recently, they do it driven by the need to travel, thus having the feeling that they can legally and ambivalently escape from the "workplace." Unfortunately for them, the more need for escape is greater and more satisfied by illusory models, the more slavish gaps gather around them at the factual level. The payment for their various holidays when they became tourists for several weeks in a year is made in fact with harder work during the rest of the year. That means a higher profit for the employer. And that is what was being pursued from the beginning.
The compulsion to repeat that Freud introduced, which draws the neurotic into the paradoxical trauma reliving, applies perfectly here as well. The democratic emancipation movements that began in France at the end of the 18th century once with the French Revolution, and continued in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, lamentably failed when the slave was given the absolute liberty. With this freedom the slave brought back the tyranny. This happened in the nineteenth century with Napoleon in France. This was the case in the 20th century with Nazism in Germany and Stalinism in Russia. In the same way, ignoring its rights that have been given to since the famous Universal Declaration, the modern slave preferred to return to his cave sooner than to know and assume those rights that its ancestors conquered through the heroism of rebellion. Of course, there are also notable exceptions in the great cultural and artistic figures, but they have not been able to decisively influence the political course of history. The capitalism has noticed this predisposition and thus has put pressure on politicians and legislation to camouflage those rights. So, at this point, someone from the bottom of the social pyramid must struggle hard to gain these presumably guaranteed rights, but none tell about.
The modern unemployed order taker has two variants of psychical evolution after resignation, depending on the intensity of compulsion to repeat: if this pulsion is weaker than that of master subordination anguish, then that person no longer accepts the return to the old job or a similar job, although the ambivalence of returning constantly produces confusion inside. Yet that person either changes its profession, or looks for all sorts of expression for the previously accumulated rage after this culturalist pressure. But its behavior constantly indicates frustration. Unlike the other case alienated person, that interiorly lives this drama, the frustrated person actively express itself, outwardly projecting this anxiety of compulsion to repeat. This person can become a political or environmental activist, a sports clubs hooligan supporter, or even engage in army or police to pour out its rage over an objective "enemy". The Explosive psychopath ("The Explosive personality disorder") is the long-term effect of this social reality.
In the other case, if the compulsion to repeat is stronger than that of master subordination anguish, then that person returns to the old workplace, possibly even apologizing. Some say that it "has got matured". After a period of "meditation", the upset order taker "comes to a head" and decides not to make other problems at work and to smilingly accept (more or less simulated) the orders coming from the hierarchical line. In fact, no maturation happens here and no lesson was learned. The reemployed order taker will resume its daily life from before the resignation with its insignificant banality. The return is explained by the fact that that person simply did not deal with the anguish that arose after the symbolic escape from the traumatic relationship with the master. The return to trauma is its moral acceptance in exchange for the harassment stopping that screams in the depth of its mind from the very deep transgenerationally inherited history.
"The maturation" is for this person only a kind of spiritual anesthesia that cuts out the childhood and adolescence dreams in favor of a conservative way of life. The Anankastic psychopathy (named "Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder" in DSM-V) is the reference of this psychopathological configuration. K. Marx has very suggestively described this state of mind through his concept of "alienation". The modern order taker is kind, good-natured and optimistic at the work place, but at home it becomes a mournful bummer, ready to find irregularities everywhere and always virulently criticize others after its workaholic habits.
In the following entry I will examine in detail the micro and macrosocial strategies to attract those with such a strong compulsion to repeat to recruit them into modern order takers.