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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

America: Land Of Depression?

Les Murray, 'erocide,' and the 'desperate bored fatigue' of political activists
Australian poet Les Murray responds to works in the National Gallery of Australi

From the late Australian poet Les Murray’s memoir of depression:

I came to see that the tone of much in the Totalitarian Age that may now just be drawing to a close exactly resembles clinical depression. It is the secret co-opted fuel of many Causes, and is not exposed for what it is because it is as common, and exploitable, on one side of politics as the other. If, as shrinks tell us, a fifth of all people in this stressed age will suffer at least one depressive episode in their lives, there is clearly an enormous pool of potential recruits among people who haven’t identified the real roots of their trouble and so will reliably hate substitutes or near-enough versions. We’ve all observed the desperate bored fatigue which overcomes activists when any topic not on their agenda is raised, or the bristling that arises when playful spin is put on their obsessions. If you are energy-depleted, it’s natural that you will have time only for a manageable list of issues, insisting that all talk be about those, and in deadly earnest. At the heart of all the proclaimed love of abstractions and absolutes there is the characteristic inability to love actual persons, or to forgive them. Because they are usually the wrong persons, and we can only forgive as it were outwards, starting with those who are the real source of our pain. We have to identify these, and face our own actions in respect of them, giving ourselves and them the benefit of proportion. So far as we know, neither we nor they had lived before, or come into the world well prepared for what we’d encounter. We couldn’t always get it right the first time.

Via the Resident Theologian blog.

I liked that quote so much, and love Les Murray’s poetry so dearly, that I just bought the book on Kindle. Murray, you should know, had Asperger’s syndrome, which is high-functioning autism. He was, at least for a time, what we today call an “incel” (involuntary celibate). Murray later married and had five children. He was diagnosed at age 50 with clinical depression. Here are the lines in the book that precede what you read above:

The prime site of my illness, then, was sexual. Common enough. As I unearthed my buried troubles, I saw how closely bound up they were with features of modern society that I loathed, such as demonstrations, in which I always heard the echo of the schoolyard, or radicalisms which seemed to enlarge the schoolyard into a whole ideal world. In the chants of early militant feminism, I heard the accents of Taree High. In a column I used to write for the short-lived Independent Monthly, I coined the term ‘erocide,’ meaning the deliberate destruction of a person’s sexual morale, and speculated that we victims of that process probably outnumber all other victim-groups combined, but we will never rise up and demand redress. We are too deeply shamed, and too darkly aware that those rejected for reproduction or pleasure are scapegoats for the pain which sex entails even among the attractive.

Anyway, what if we are depressed as a nation, and have been for a while? What if 2020 is so freaking awful because the Covid-19 lockdowns have exacerbated our condition? What if one hidden wound in the body politic is sexual frustration — the frustration of those who cannot find connection with others, for whatever reason, and the misery of those who, seeking release, have turned to pornography, and seduced by the lie that it is an adequate substitute for bodily communion with a beloved, have become enslaved by it?

What would it mean for an entire civilization to commit erocide?

What if the militancy of activists, marching on the streets and through the institutions, is really a manifestation of desperate bored fatigue?

What if we want to burn it all down because it’s interesting to see things go up in smoke?

What do we do then? Thoughts, readers?

 

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