We have all become passive-aggressive (and the cellphone is our club)

[publicduende]

L&G, I wanted to share ane extremely interesting article I saw posted on an Italian newspaper. Here is a decent English translation (courtesy ChatGPT + my own revision).

We have all become passive-aggressive (and the cellphone is our club)
by Carlo Bordoni

Social bonds have loosened, individuality prevails, and, as Durkheim warned, there is a risk of regression and disintegration of the community. And digital technology has become the new club

Has aggression increased?

"The Better Angels of Our Nature" is a book by American scientist Steven Pinker, published in 2011, in which he argues, as the title explicitly states, that our time should be considered the most peaceful in history. To demonstrate this, he provides extensive documentation of wars, conflicts, and genocides that have bloodied the past. So much so that looking back, one gets the impression that history is not made up of struggles for freedom, as Benedetto Croce claimed, but of an unbroken series of violent acts narrated by the victors, to demonstrate their power.

If Pinker is right, after millennia of civilization, we should be living in a peaceful world and not complaining about new conflicts, nor the increase in daily acts of violence. Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective, or a consequence of the information that makes us perceive, today more than yesterday, a crescendo of violence.

In the meantime, aggression is in the air: we feel it in the family and work environments, on the streets, and on screens. We breathe it in the forms of entertainment and experience a sublimated pleasure from it. We even have to deal with its passive variant, which leaves no bodily wounds, but cuts deep into our psyche, provoking negative emotions, causing suffering. A door slammed in anger, the refusal of dialogue, a gesture of annoyance, a sharp response, all leave a mark, abruptly cutting off the flow of communication.

Physical violence, verbal violence, passive violence. We are surrounded by violence, as it is part of human evolution, inscribed in the DNA of living beings, whom had to use it for defense, to overpower others and ensure survival. Perhaps it's inherent in human incompleteness, in its imperfection: Nietzsche defined man as an animal not yet firmly determined, whose evolution was still far off.

As highlighted by Norbert Elias, the long process of civilization has attempted to contain violence at least in part. Education is also repression, necessary for the formation of a good citizen, already anticipated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in "Emile" during the Enlightenment, a time when rationality was to ensure the stability of social order and adherence to laws. The repression of aggression, beyond being an ethical issue, has become an act of civilization.

Individualism, is it true progress?

Yet, aggression is always ready to reemerge, especially if individualism prevails.

In itself, individuation has positive characteristics. Indeed, one cannot deny that separation from the community, where individuality is blurred in the totality of beings, is not progress. All of human history is marked by the search for individuation and greater personal autonomy. From this perspective, individualism would be a step forward on the scale of emancipation, if it were not accompanied by instinctual regressions. In this painful contradiction lies the whole drama of contemporary times, divided between the need to evolve and the spirit of reconnecting to an unresolved past.

However, when social bonds loosen and anomie prevails, as Emile Durkheim warned, there is the risk of regression and disintegration of the community. Without rules, the worst characteristics of the human being prevail, its instinctive, not repressed or, if you will, not educated part. Aggression resurfaces, where community members, who previously shared existence peacefully, become potential enemies or dangerous competitors.

Individualism is recurrent and can transform into a social disruptor. Its recent history is indicative of how easily it can impose itself by seizing every opportunity. Perhaps the causes should be sought elsewhere. For example, in the early twentieth century with phenomenology. In this case, the responsible party would be Austrian philosopher Edmund Husserl, who brought the individual back to the center of the world. An operation already attempted in the Renaissance, where it took root easily, in the absence of scientific discoveries capable of demonstrating man's finiteness in the face of the vastness of the universe.

Husserl, however, returns to the individual the ability to judge the world, restoring the right to have one's own point of view. In short, things are not as they are, they do not have an objective substance. They are as we see them, they are subjective.

Phenomenology, if it has not managed to restore to man a central position in the universe, has, however, placed him at the center of his environment. It has recognized his full right to judge and make sense of things. A true revolution in thought. One, one might even say, responsible for a decisive egocentrism, a strengthening of individual value over the social. It thus ended up awakening the Pithecanthropus within us. That is, the obtuse, self-referential, presumptuous, and domineering side of the primitive being. He stepped back to a time before millennia of civilization taught him to respect others, to contain aggression, to develop civil behavior.

The Awakening of the Pithecanthropus

As long as this self-assertion remained on the psycho-social plane (the multiplicity of judgment, the democratization of the right to speak), the focus on individuality did not create major problems. But everything precipitated when the Pithecanthropus gained possession of a new club: digital technology. I use the term (somewhat incorrectly) of Pithecanthropus to indicate the typical attitude of an individual regressed to primal instinctuality, who feels he holds every right, who does not control himself, who uses violence against anyone who obstructs his path, who reacts with kicks and punches against those who reprimand him, who expresses a different opinion or challenges his dominance.

It's pointless to justify it: the atavistic fear of not being considered or feared, of being annihilated, is not enough to explain the severity of his behavior. Aggression has become a social problem. At the bottom of this instinctive explosion lies the claim of the principle of opposition. A principle that could be defined as natural, as it descends from the need for self-assertion, the spirit of criticism, the frequenting of doubt (which is always a sign of rationality). But it becomes pathological when it expands beyond limits and becomes a push for domination.

The Cellphone as a Club

Opposition, then, is no longer the affirmation of one's integrity and judgment capacity, but the denial of another's. It will be said that the cause lies in exacerbated individualism, in this social drift that has begun to develop from the crisis of mass society, from the desire to free oneself from stifling homogenization, from the unique thought through the disturbances of Bauman's liquid society. Apparently a condition of growth, but which - like all growth stages - goes through moments of difficulty, problems, contradictions.

The omnipotence of the Pithecanthropus technologicus comes from social factors (education, permissiveness, reduction of the principle of authority, presumption of knowledge). The ancients called it hybris and provided to punish it with nemesis, bringing excess back within just limits. To this has been added technological innovation, the exosomatic tool that, placed as an interface between oneself and reality, is a valid facilitator. It gives the impression of being able to achieve what one wants without effort and with only the intervention of will.

The individual thus believes he can influence others (and often succeeds in doing so) thanks to the power of his tool, a kind of extension of attributes that fear no failure, due to their artificiality. The Pithecanthropus of the third millennium, thus freed from the atavistic fears of the overpowering forces of nature and transcendental religion, believes he can afford everything. He is fully aware of the power conferred by technology, grateful to Prometheus' gift but unaware of Athena's, because science - as far as he is concerned - does not belong to him.

The New Solitude

Thus, the individual who regresses to a state of nature becomes a monad within a context he considers hostile, where he must defend himself from others and, if possible, dominate them. If not with force, then with personality, gestures, and actions. Therefore, he is naturally aggressive.

Have you noticed how the Pithecanthropus technologicus does not fear solitude? He locks himself inside his virtual hyperbaric chamber and interacts only with his technological object. He doesn't notice time passing. In front of or inside the screen, he is not bored; he uses it spasmodically to escape the attention of others and recreate his comfort zone anywhere. A portable comfort zone, equipped with every convenience, where the mind can converse with its alter ego, without fear of contradiction.

The regressed being, due to its mental rigidity, does not accept contradiction, abhors rejection, and becomes infuriated by an opinion different from his own. He becomes aggressive. If he cannot use his hands (being more advanced than his ancestor, the Pithecanthropus erectus, who used only physical violence), he resorts to more modest passive aggression. Unable to react openly, the passive-aggressive person operates extreme resistance, subtly expressing his opposition no less effectively.