文档介绍：THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF MISERY
by John Zerzan
Taken from "Future Primitive and Other Essays", published by Autonomedia
in conjunction with Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
ISBN: 1-57027-000-7
Anti-Copyright 1994: may be freely pirated and quoted. The author and
publishers, however, would like to be informed at:
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Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the '60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have been
forced in less direct, less public directions-Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man, described a
populace characterized by flattened personality, satisfied and content. With the pervasive anguish
of today, who could be so described? Therein lies a deep, if inchoate critique.
Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individuality's last remnants; but if this were so, if
society now consists of the thoroughly homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the
enduring tension which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more people I have
known have cracked up. It's going on to a staggering degree, in a context of generalized, severe
emotional disease-ease.
Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration would lead to revolt and to
capital's downfall. Might it not be that an increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening
of revolt-indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance?
And yet it is obvious that "mere" suffering is no guarantee of anything. "Desire does not 'want'
revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right," as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on
in Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired against their own interests,
and that tolerance of humiliation and enslavement remains widespread.
We know that behind psychic repression and avoidance stands social repression, even as massive
denial shows at least some s