I have been thinking a lot about how despite more people not liking Trump than ever, despite gas prices and grocery prices being higher than ever, despite implementing unpopular policy after unpopular policy, the Trump administration is still relatively popular with its base, still in office, and still able to travel through America without protests every single place they go. And it’s still somehow unclear which party might win the midterms.
There are two obvious reasons for this: One: action against the current regime is risky and often ineffective. The governmental backlash to the last decade-plus of protests has successfully kept most people in their place. No one wants to go to prison. Plus, more and more people have become convinced through that backlash that little they do will actually change things. And two: propaganda works.
But I think the biggest reason of all for our current stasis is that we’ve just kinda become used to it. If you look at authoritarian regimes the world over, people often stop caring not just because caring is dangerous, but because life is fine enough. Your existence might be a struggle in many ways, but as long as you still have any reason at all to keep going, then you’ll just keep going. And politicians exploit this fact to make life ever-harder, keeping society right at the edge of total destruction and chaos for their own benefit.
It’s like we’ve all become accustomed to living a life of golden handcuffs—goaded to keep going with little trickles of money and dopamine and promises of a better future. You always feel on the verge of leaving the depressing present, but then something else keeps you going—a new job, a new relationship, a new dream you can hustle for, a new medication, a new CBT workbook. Just one more day, then maybe things will change.
You don’t leave your job because it gives you money; you don’t leave your relationship because you generally like it and don’t want to be alone even if it has problems; you don’t attempt to change your behavior or circumstances because it would involve challenging your secure-feeling identity and selfhood; you don’t overthrow the government because you’re too convinced that if you keep doing what you’re doing, things will get better, or at least be fine.
And thus it is easy to become stuck. And it is even easier to remain stuck when you are able to justify your stuckness—justify it as safety, or responsibility, or just how you are. On a political level, the justification for this stasis is hammered into us through our propaganda apparatuses (media, social media, etc.).
But I’ve begun to wonder what functions similarly on a personal level. Without suggesting that therapy, or self-help, or even the idea of introspection are the same thing as a billionaire-owned fascist-supporting media platform, I think it can be useful to see these tools as similar potential sites of stasis-justification. And it can be useful to think about how all these things are related—what apparatuses in our lives convince us to live lives of golden handcuffs; to not leave relationships or bad jobs or bad environments, to not challenge the political status quo?
Therapy, for example, can be incredibly useful for untangling things so that you can move on from them, but, as I’ve written about before, it can also be used as a form of “introspective captivity”—a way to justify your own complacence and fear of change.