One of the most common but truthful throwaway lines we hear from all around us is “how crazy” people are or have become “with depression, suicide, and overdoses.” So says the Week magazine (Jan. 28, 2022). Only three generations ago, they used to complain about people being “too wasteful” or “too racist,” or something as concrete, and we would discuss or argue the subject. Today, they complain that people are “just crazy,” and we nod in agreement and proceed to give our own personal experiences to justify the subject.
No other nation on earth is so self-contradictory with two opposite images of itself: On the one hand, many Americans believe their nation is a perfect paradise with everything their heart desires available at the click of a button where “we can do anything we want.” On the other, for many Americans, their society is a living inferno not fit for human beings, and their Congress just installed a phone number, 988, as a nationwide “Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Crisis Lifeline.” How can these two contradictory self-images — swagger and helplessness — coexist unless America is indeed an infernal cauldron of turmoil? Materially, we are the greatest; spiritually, we live in hell “with depression, suicide, and overdoses” where “people are just crazy!”
Now, let’s think about something we don’t hear about any more, “the American Dream,” the traditional antidote to all that is gloom and doom in America. Today, except for the off-the-boat immigrants or Democrats in despair, the phrase is nothing special any more; it’s been just generalized into what we all expect in life, neither particularly “American” nor particularly “dreamlike:” To be a dreamer, just get on the internet.
The mythical “dream” has been largely abandoned as America’s endearing lore, partly because reality is unforgiving in that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Most working Americans have accepted this reality and have ceded the nation’s wealth to the rich while seeking their dreams in the lottery or fortunes in some lucky breaks with lawsuits. But on a national level, the dream has been turned into mass consumer fantasy, like opium, that’s cheap enough for most commoners to purchase and enjoy. In this fantasy life, they can easily imagine themselves as consumer-lords that can demand anything that’s delivered to them. The commercial pampering, although all schemed up by fake corporate love and propaganda, but scientifically constructed by mind specialists, still effectively pacifies most Americans in their fantasy world.
This fantasy solution for the masses, adjusting to reality with unreality, is quite cheap and easy. It is found in the around-the-clock supply of entertainment and distraction from the Hollywood-Disney-produced and Madison Avenue-advertised consumer products, delivered in TV programs and smart phone technology. This gives us the “imitation” success cheaply and easily, available to all. After all, in our fantasy life, such as in Marvel super-heroics, we are all muscular heroes; in Disney Main Street, America is filled with family sweetness and love; and in Wall Street myths, we are all just one step away from great fortunes. In this new American paradise, everyone gets his or her own Genie always obedient to command. This make-believe solution works much of the time, for most of us in America, to live in a hazy cocoon, as long as we can work, have incomes, and pay for our consumption.
Trouble is, we cannot simply live on the fantasy of entertainment all the time, however wonderful the supply is from Hollywood and Disney and Madison Avenue. We cannot just continue to live on fantasy without breaking down once in a while from our supply of entertainment and its addictive hold on our minds and moods. Accustomed to a life based on individual consumption from early on, we have never learned to get the truths about life from one another as neighbors, as citizens, and simply as fellow human beings, and live by a firm and steady set of moral principles. Neither is easy in an everyman-for-himself society. America has always been a nation of strangers, and more so in an era of algorithm in which we get only what we want, further isolating us from each other in our own individual fortresses. We walk a tight rope as we manage our lives between miserable reality and addictive fantasy, with mental-health pros under the rope with a safety-net to catch us (“call 988”) as a few of us fall off the rope. When this breakdown occurs, which is more often than we know, we are bandaged enough to return to our routines as workers and consumers.
Successful professional life now consists of those who supply fantasy, and those who fix insanity. One part of American society gives us our illness and another part of American society gives us our medicine, all professionally trained, thus making America a perfect dystopia (often confused as paradise) that is smoothly self-contained and self-correcting: Whenever you need a mental-adjustment, you have at least a dozen professional helpers, per each breakdown, eager to help.
Still, shuffling between reality and fantasy is not easy. Forced to alternate between the two worlds, however, most Americans work in reality and play in fantasy. Unlike the slaves whose life was at least consistently miserable, it is only in America today that we have the very onerous task of living like lords in our fantasy world but having to work like peasants in our real world of harsh economics and political powerlessness.
While on the tight rope, with the two sectors cooperating efficiently and effectively, America’s so-called “mental health” is held together and staggers forward toward its unknown tomorrow. When this chain breaks down, we go crazy — in politics, in family life, in relationships, in national character — in the form of “depression, suicide, and overdoses.”
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.