Question: What happens when you shut down a culture for three months?
Answer: Rioting in the streets.
True, the trigger to our current epidemic of riots was the death of George Floyd, the unarmed black man who was held to the ground with a policeman’s knee to his neck. But this explosion of rage has to do with the pent-up frustration Americans of every race, color and creed feel because every form of cultural satisfaction has been suddenly removed for the past three months.
If you think you can eliminate every opportunity for self-expression known to man and not expect a consequence you’re kidding yourself. The value of things such as sports, art or shopping are finally being revealed by the rage currently expressed in the streets of nearly every major city in the United States. Here is why.
Society is based upon the control of our two most basic instincts: sex and aggression. At base, humans are animals driven by our need to procreate and our need to destroy things. As Freud explained more than 100 years ago, society is produced and survives based upon its ability to teach us to control these two drives. Most of us learn how to control these drives early on and eventually we “sublimate” our sexual and aggressive drives through sports, art or shopping.
Over the last three months all of these essential forms of sublimation have been promptly removed and thus our baser instincts have been bubbling up. All they needed was a match to produce an explosion. The match was provided by Police Officer Derek Chauvin when he ended the life of George Floyd.
This is why sports and art and travel and shopping matter. Without these man-made forms of expression we get closer to our animal nature, which translates into rioting in the streets or fornication in the park. Neither is a good idea.
Let us take the benign game of golf as a good example of how our sexual drive is sublimated and redirected.
A married man gets up very early on a Saturday morning, puts on the most attractive golf garb he owns and merrily drives off for a round of golf with his buddies. He attempts to approximate the most elegant looking golf swing he is able to muster and thusly off he goes down the well-manicured first fairway with a smile.
Now on the face of it, this has nothing to do with his sex drive right? Wrong. He appears to be unconsciously making a clever effort to flirt, woo and to finally dominate the woman in front of him, symbolized by the curvaceous lines, wonderful mounding, firm greens and attractive holes of the golf course.
Now let us say on this particular day he minds all his P’s and Q’s, stays focused and aggressive and voila he wins the trophy! Invariably at the trophy presentation he will hold up the trophy and give it a kiss. No one has to tell him to do this. He will do so automatically, even instinctively. For this trophy represents his baby, the child he created by conquering his new bride, the golf course he has just conquered. And no one gets hurt by this kind of activity. In fact his faithful wife who is still home, may be happy he is enjoying himself in an acceptable way.
I am sure you feel all this is silliness, but I assure you it is not.
At our base we are driven by our need for sex and the propensity to kill. And when our socialized means of expressing or sublimating these two drives are taken from us, we predict what we see today.
When our aggressive drives are not given a channel of expression through physical sports and exertion, we will often see acting out in the form of rioting or other forms of fighting. And when our sexual drives are not allowed sublimated expression, we predict that our libido will seek expression elsewhere. That may come in the form of more sexual activity at home or the more clandestine kind, otherwise known as adultery.
One way or the other, let us all hope and pray that our culture is given back to us soon and we can tee it up, sweat it out in yoga class or go buy a new handbag or sweater. And until that time we can expect to see more images like the CNN building being destroyed in Atlanta or other insane visions. Without a culture to contain and direct us, mankind has little choice but to revert to his or her more animal nature. Cultural activities have been developed over the last 6,000 years for good reasons and we now see what happens when these activities are taken from us.
