49

_p Good resolutions ... are simply
cheques that men draw on a bank
where they have no account.

p OSCAR WILDE

p The sense of contentedness finds, sooner or later, that there are other attitudes to life, that there is, in particular, a sense of wretchedness. Even if the consciousness of content is predominant, the absense of uniformity still remains to be explained. The question that must be asked is: If the given perception of the world is natural and true, how do other attitudes to life appear and how must they be assessed?

p From the standpoint of the sense of contentedness sense of wretchedness is nothing less than a generalised expression of individual disappointments, of frustrated hopes, in short, an anomaly, a false subjectivity, that does not lend itself to rational explanation.

p The sense of contentedness recognises, of course, that it is impossible to achieve absolute gratification, which it regards as something in the nature of a psychological analogue of God. Even by reducing one’s desires to a bare minimum one cannot reach the summit of gratification.

p While remaining within the bounds of common sense, it nevertheless considers that practically every individual can become relatively contented by undergoing, as we already know, moral rearmament. All that is necessary is to want! But then how is one to explain the anomaly of the sense of wretchedness, which did not desire or, perhaps, was unable to become contented?

p The method of looking for an answer to this question is curious, to say the least. The sense of contentedness 50 adopts the following line of reasoning. Since in every social environment there have in all ages been contented and discontented people, with this division not coinciding directly with their property status, roles, prestige and other social indications, and since there has always been a division into optimists and pessimists regardless of the changes in the social environment, a social analysis of the environment cannot be productive. Using data accessible to a direct empirical perception and leaving the social world aside, one must consider the bio-psychological factors of the sense of wretchedness. With the exception of extraordinary cases, the origins of this state must allegedly be found in the inherited bio-psychological make-up of the individual.

p It must be noted that while groping in the dark the sense of contentedness clings to a thread of actually existing links. It is quite probable that both the sense of wretchedness and the nihilistic world outlook of an individual have biopsychological roots, that in some way they are connected with his genetic make-up, character and temperament, especially with the ups and downs of his life. One does not need an analytic mind to draw the following conclusion: the individual consciousness takes shape under the impact of a practically infinite number of factors, each of which, however infinitesimal and insignificant it may seem to be, is a link in a complex chain of dependencies. It is unquestionable that there are people who are easily hurt and react painfully even to not very dramatic twists in life. Moreover, there are many who, having inadequate steeling and experience of life, find themselves unable to cope with complicated situations, lack the flexibility for deciding important practical problems, have an unsociable, difficult, quarrelsome and irritable disposition, and are beset with a spirit of contrariness. There are misfits or simply people seriously suffering from various phobias. To a depressed person suffering from melancholy everything appears joyless and miserable, and from whatever plane he regards life it is invariably gloomy. To people of this type their own consciousness is wretched in self-reflection. And this is how it appears to others.

p It cannot be denied that various circumstances affect, and very often quite seriously, the individual’s state of mind, bringing him to nihilistic and pessimistic generalisations.

51

p However, preoccupied with its quest for the causes of sham subjectivity, the sense of contentedness does not, and perhaps refuses to, notice facts of a contradictory character. For example, it does not notice that the link between unhappiness and the sense of wretchedness is neither direct nor necessarily of a strictly cause-and-effect nature. The sense of wretchedness and the nihilistic world outlook have a ramified system of roots, in which bio-psychological preconditions, personal experience or the whims of fate are by no means decisive, although they play a definite role.

p Actually, the task is to understand the essential interaction between bio-psychological properties and the social environment. But this is obstructed by the dogmatism of the sense of contentedness, which counterposes social to asocial being. The bio-psychological exists in man not as a natural, extra-historical property, but as something transformed and processed by society. This can easily be seen if we consider pleasant and unpleasant emotions, on whose operation much in contentedness or wretchedness depends. These emotions are not immediately linked with the nervous or endocrine system of our organism, although that would seem to be the case. While unquestionably giving convictions, thoughts and ideas a definite hue, emotions are themselves influenced by the latter. As a consequence, emotions may reverse. Is not man capable of heroically accepting death for the sake of ideals with his behaviour giving him a sense of profound satisfaction? Or, on the contrary, has not the sense of contentedness experienced how artificial joy and disappointment are created by manipulation and ideological indoctrination?

p The pleasant and the unpleasant have a complex ideological and psychological origin. Pleasure, joy, satisfaction and also the highest gratification (happiness), i.e., all the states towering above these emotions, are different reactions to the fulfilment (or anticipation) of the individual’s plans, projects and aspirations. They are by no means derived from physiology, from fossilised, unchanging human nature. They belong to the social community. Everything related to these hopes, traditions, reminiscences and ideals, everything that facilitates their realisation, is pleasant, while what obstructs them is unpleasant. Something is not alien 52 because it is unpleasant, but it is unpleasant because it is alien, because it is inconsonant with or even runs counter to our expectations, traditions, customs and preferences.  [52•*  The polarisation of emotions into positive and negative is the result of the individual’s life in society.

p The attitude of the sense of contentedness to sham subjectivity is not categorically negative. Because the myths round which the sense of contentedness revolves are unreliable, the creators of the sense of contentedness have to make provision for something in the nature of a safetyvalve. A second line of defence (much as preaching in a church has never made a lightning rod useless) is thereby created. The sense of contentedness is given a moderate, “sanitary” dose of pessimism and nihilism to make it immune against any overheating of contentedness. This shakeup even commands respect from the sense of contentedness, which is not in the least disturbed by its conventional cheerfulness. Although it accepts its prophets with open arms, it lends an ear to Cassandra. Injections of a critical attitude enable it to seem modern and acquire a certain respectability. But deep down it sees the worth of pessimism and nihilism (as, indeed, of everything else) only as amusements. If, as Johannes Becher ironically noted, it is convenient to be a pessimist, the sense of contentedness is eager to try this convenience.

p But this is not all. The nihilistic vision of the world tempts the sense of contentedness also because this vision sanctions its own cynicism. It would be hard to conceive of a happier justification of the entire system of hedonistic consumer guidelines of the sense of contentedness than that of regarding nothing in life as being worthwhile. If everything is vanity, then each can choose any orientation in life, and nobody can censure him for this or incline him to other preferences, for this is as natural as sand in the desert.

But, having diverted attention from how the sense of contentedness feels, it must be remembered that the main purpose of the injections of nihilism is to remove the danger that bourgeois social myths may be exposed. Here the 53 paradox is that anxieties and apprehensions are used to drive out anxiety, alarm and dissatisfaction. This is reminiscent of the motto of homeopaths: Like is cured by like. The injections we have mentioned represent a specially composed and processed set of sham anxieties threatening all the members of the “contented” clan. Capitalist society’s ideological machine carefully prepares this set and proliferates it in a package with bourgeois-optimistic ideas.