Creating Frankenstein
Fangry
You can read much more about this in I Want To Love But. Here’s a Ladybird book summary. It’s at the core of what’s coming next, so please bear with me and wade through it.
Our feelings and thoughts can create anxiety. That’s fine. They are supposed to. That’s how nature creates us. That anxiety summons an equally natural soothing wave, which always has potential to have the equivalent force to the anxiety.
This anger-soothing cycle is the engine of our individual lives.
Fear is not a natural trait. It is instilled in us though infancy and into adulthood. It is always specific. You always have fear of something. You can of course have multiple fears.
Anxiety is inside us always, and needs to be. You could live in a hermetic bubble, and anxiety would still be there. Fear is a facet of our relationship with the world. There would be no fear in that bubble.
Fear is a social construct. That which scares you may make another laugh. There are shared fears, because we live in a shared society: that’s what society is.
Anxiety, when sufficiently activated, rips through fear. We have some Experiences for that later. But that anxiety needs to be soothed. If soothing is not achieved, then anger arises. Anger is, in essence, a failure of soothing. Anger can be active in the rational part of our mind. Anger can build into rage. Rage is when we pass beyond the rational. This all mimics a toddler’s tantrum. The psychological mechanisms are different. So are the consequences.
When you experience un-soothed anxiety, you go into an Anger-Sadness / Rage cycle:
Pain is a place. Pain is failure of movement.
You are now in psychological Pain. The problem with Pain is that it is not a dynamic. It does not lead anywhere. It is a place. It is the hell where you can be: inside you.
If you look at the diagram above, you can see a dynamic:
You experience Fear: which is a construct of the mind.
Fear triggers your Anxiety (to go get it sorted)
Your Anxiety is not getting Soothed;
You escalate up into Rage.
Make no mistake, this is a seriously addictive cycle. It is exactly the cycle which has to be broken to help any addict.
To, as you feel it, break out of Pain, you can go in 2 directions:
Seek out Passive artificial soothing (drugs);
Seek out Active artificial soothing (violence and danger).
In both cases, you are searching outside yourself, for Soothing. But that is artificial soothing. Except in the case of unconditional reciprocal Love, it always comes at a price. It is insecure.
There’s the habits you can handle, and those that become addiction. It’s not the habit mindset that’s good or bad: it’s whether you can control it.
When your Security Slice is in harmonic balance with your other 4 Slices (Wants; Chemistry; Challenge; Empathy), then you can handle this. You are subduing your Empathy Slice and ramping up your Challenge Slice.
When, however, your Security Slice is undermined, you are in a seriously bad place. The difference between the state of 2 people’s Security Slice is, to put it simply, the chasm between the casual coke user and the person in Bedroom 3 at The Priory.
You can turn inwards, ideate yourself and do harm to yourself. That becomes your “fix”: your way of coping with pain. Most people turn outwards. They ideate something outside themselves. They can become addicted to the feelings which are generated by their relationship with that ideation. You can think of the word “worship”: that’s one sort of ideation.
If the object of that ideation is passive, then there’s a limit to how far and deep that can go. But if there is a human being, or group, on the other end of that ideation, that dynamic can become very powerful.
If you have a solo ideation, there’s a limit to how far that can take you. The limits depend upon your power in society. However, if your ideation comes to be shared by a group:
there are only cultural and geographical limits to how big that group can grow;
the potential power of that group has a tendency to test those limits;
you can get massive feedback of conditional soothing: you get to feel good, as long as you stay in the group.
These are the core idea of crowd, or mass, psychology. I’m just giving some bare bones, and locating these ideas in your own self-experience.
None of these are intrinsically “bad” things. If you are a reasonably balanced individual, you can participate in crowd dynamics, and it’s perfectly good for you.
But, if you are seeking artificial soothing from a place of pain:
loss of job;
loss of relationship;
unrequited Fear
then you will never have a shortage of places to find it.
If a human group is on the other end of that ideation, if they are actually manipulating it into mass communication, then things become seriously ugly, very quickly.
If your Security becomes undermined by Fear-stimulating ideas, such that you can’t self-soothe, then you look and act outwards. It’s both strange and rational at the same time, that people tend to look to the person who (as they are well aware) made them insecure-fearful in the first place: to take it away. To soothe. It’s like when you try to get back with an Ex, who you know is bad for you.
The last element. It’s not a cause, it’s an effect. When you become Fearful-Insecure, you always look outwards for soothing relief. But, because nobody outside you can give you genuine self-soothing, you act out Anger dynamics. Not immediately against yourself (you are trying to save yourself). Against others.
Religious zealotry; Stockholm Syndrome; Great Leader adoration: they are cocktails brewed from the same basic ingredients.
This is crowd psychology 101. When you map it onto covid Britain after 23 March 2020, it is obvious what you are going to get.
From: WORLDS ENDS: Coronavirus, Frankenstein and Other Monsters