Neuroses
A strange thing happened to me when I boarded my flight to Germany. I began to feel terribly afraid of the people around me. Not in the sense that I felt in physical danger, but I felt judged, suddenly aware of my status as foreign, an outsider, one who did not belong. This may have been understandable had I come directly from America – if this was my first new country. But it wasn’t. I’d been traveling for months, and yet only now was I feeling this acute, intense insecurity.
What was going on?
It may have been an issue of language. I, after all, speak no German. But no, it wasn’t that. After all, it’s not as if I speak Thai, or Malay, or any of the other languages of the countries I’d just been to. Was it the people? Were the Germans more judgmental than the people of Asia? It’s true that they have that reputation, but I didn’t encounter it myself. In all my interactions with Germans, they were polite, compassionate, and as friendly and understanding as the people I’ve seen anywhere. Obviously there have been assholes, but there are assholes everywhere.
The honest truth is that I still don’t know why, in Germany, I felt so uncomfortable. What I do know is that it was not a pleasant experience. I was fortunate, or not, depending on how you view it, that I was able to stay with a friend. For the first few days, I was able to cocoon myself in his apartment, only venturing out to retrieve food items, though even these interactions were fraught with anxiety.
It’s actually strange to recall how these events played out for me. Take an example of one time when I went to a bakery to get some breakfast for my friend and myself. He told me ahead of time that they didn’t speak any English, but that it should be easy enough to order. I just had to get a laugan croissant and a pretzel for each of us. Zwei laugan croissant und zwei bretzel. Or something like that. If I failed to remember the words, I knew I could just point to the food items, as I have in numerous countries, and make myself understood. We weren’t talking about negotiating my way through a police checkpoint, or making an arms deal with a band of warlords. I was buying breakfast. But you wouldn’t have known it.
First I was too afraid to even enter the bakery. I walked straight by it, intentionally, telling myself that maybe that wasn’t the bakery he (my friend) was talking about. But I knew better. I turned around, gathered my courage, and stepped inside.
My hands were sweating. My knees were weak. My arms were heavy. Okay, you get it (at least, I hope you got that reference). Fortunately, there were a few others there, so I could blend in a bit and rehearse my impending performance. Or maybe that was unfortunate, given that they might see me stumbling to be understood, and judge me harshly. The place felt hostile, and my fight-or-flight response (really, let’s be honest, just my flight response) began to make itself felt. Only the fact that my friend was waiting for these items kept me in that store. Zwei laugan croissant und zwei bretzel. I repeated the sentence like a mantra. I could do this. This would not go poorly.
The woman behind the counter looked at me with a friendly smile and said something that I understood to mean: “can I help you?” I swallowed and forced a smile onto my face, and said my line. She looked confused. Fuck.
Fortunately, I’d planned for this. I’d located my items behind the counter, and I pointed to them each in turn, holding up fingers to tell her how many. She bagged them up and rang up the price, telling me how much. I, not knowing what number she’d just said, handed her a bill that I knew would cover the cost. She gave me my change and I left. I’m sure that no one else in the store noticed my presence in any special way.
This exposure, and the evident harmlessness of the event, along with the rational knowledge that nothing about this situation could harm me, were not enough to dispel the tension I felt. In every future instance in which I had to buy something and speak to someone, I felt the same sense of dread, of the desire to be out of there, that I felt in that bakery. Whatever my rational brain understood, it did not feel safe.
Maybe you’ve never felt the feelings that I’m describing. If so, it must seem insane to have such an experience. Even if it wasn’t insane, it was surely something that I just had to get over. Right?
The trouble is, these things can be incredibly difficult to get over. As pointed out in the movie A Beautiful Mind, it can be incredibly difficult to use your mind to solve a problem when the problem is in your mind itself.
Good Things Gone Bad
Why does this happen? Like most destructive tendencies, it has its root in a form of behavior that is helpful, or was helpful for our ancestors. Psychologist John Bradshaw points out in his classic book “Healing the Shame that Binds you” that, “our shyness is always with us as we encounter strangers or strange new experiences…Like all emotions, shyness signals us to be cautious, to take heed lest we be wounded or exposed.” What I was feeling, what many people have felt who experienced this particular form of neurotic behavior, was an exaggerated form of shyness. The unfamiliarity of the environment, and of the people, tricked the primitive parts of my brain into feeling threatened, in danger, under attack.
The problem is that this tendency can be maladaptive in the modern society. In the 21st century, we are participating in a unique condition in the human world – almost anywhere you can go in the world you will be safe. That is really a remarkable achievement of humanity, when you think about it. Consider: for all the rumblings about noble savagery and lost innocence in the modern age, in the jungles and steppes of antiquity you were more likely to murder or be murdered by strange people than to trust them, cooperate with them, or pass by them on the street. These days there is none of that. These days, I walk by people in Amsterdam, in Stuttgart, in Dublin, and know that except for a miniscule proportion of outliers (a proportion so small I have never myself encountered them), they will not try to hurt me. In fact, miraculously, almost all of them will try to help me, because we have realized we’d rather live in a cooperative world than in a competitive one.
“But Max, competitiveness is the essence of Capitalism. It’s the foundation of our economy!” This isn’t the type of competitiveness I’m talking about. What we think of as competitive is still cooperative in nature. All of our economic and social institutions are built on rules, and we all cooperate to the extent that we all follow the basic rules that underlie our society. We compete within structures. Obviously there are people who break those rules, who steal and murder, or commit fraud, but this is not the norm. If it were, we would exist in anarchy.
Our instincts have yet to catch up with the modern world. While the world around us is safe, while strangers can be relied upon not to murder us, our instincts can still misfire and, seeing an unfamiliar world, come to believe that we are under threat. It’s important to understand that in the primitive world speaking a common language and understanding the norms of a place was crucial to survival. These things signified group membership, telling others that we share a common interest and can support each other. Our need to blend in to a group, to find common ground with them, stems from this primitive instinct and its goal of getting others on our side. Absent the structures, languages, and faces we know, we feel likely to be exposed as outsiders and rejected, or even killed.
In the modern age this is ludicrous. A German bakery will take your money as long as they know what you’re trying to buy from them. But for our ancestors it was an adaptive mechanism.
There’s a second mechanism that evolved in us that was helpful for past humans but now tends to be maladaptive. This is our tendency to obsess over how we are perceived by others – our reputation – which can clearly and quickly become pathological.
Consider: our hunter-gatherer forebears lived their lives in small troupes of at most a few dozen individuals. Their entire lives would be spent in the presence of perhaps two of these groups, the one in which they were born and potentially a new one that they would join upon reaching adulthood (intermingling of groups was necessary to preserve genetic diversity, and is a well-known tendency of baboon troupes). Given this fact, it became a matter of personal interest to control one’s behavior so as to maximize the chances that this group – your only group – would accept you and allow you to stick around. To be rejected from this group was to die. Humans are not built to be alone.
In this ancient environment, conformity was crucial. Outliers could barely be tolerated, and the only time one could stand out or change things was if one had the strength to dominate the group (available only to certain alpha males) or if one had an idea useful enough to change the group’s behavior. Most behaviors, though, would not meet this criteria. The origin of our desire to “blend in,” to not embarrass oneself with bad dancing, singing, or fashion choice, indeed the origin of embarrassment itself, lies in this need to be accepted by one’s immediate group.
This was important to us ten thousand years ago. Now it hardly matters. For one thing, thanks to language and communication, we can find similarities and form group identities based on traits other than grooming, fashion, or dancing ability. Most of the modern movement known as Progressivism is based on the principle that groups composed of diverse individuals actually become stronger, as they are more dynamic and able to pivot and adapt to changing environments. And most of the resistance to such ideas comes from our ancient, built-in programming. The world of difference that exists between human beings is a source of infinite curiosity and horror, a description that matches quite closely what ancient aestheticians described as “the Sublime.”
Beyond subliminity, though, which is the feeling we have when we encounter something that strikes us as both novel and terrifying – the tension between our curiosity and our caution – lies a much simpler truth of the modern world: we can survive when rejected by the group around us. This is especially true when traveling, when in a place in which no one knows you or will likely see you again. We know this is true, and it’s a bit of common wisdom that “these people are never going to see you again, so let go!” Despite this knowledge, that lies in our prefrontal cortex, our conscious selves, we still feel acutely that ancient compulsion to assimilate. Most of the time this behavior is inconvenient, but there are situations in which it can be positively harmful.
When “Blending In” Becomes “Complicity”
Vaclav Havel, in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless”, touches on this idea. To be clear, he was writing not about neurotic behavior, but about the way that people succumb to totalitarian regimes, but I think it’s clear that the two behaviors are linked, which I’ll go into a bit more below. He writes:
“The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.”
What I was running into in Germany was not trivial, though it would seem that way if left unexamined. But the toxic shyness I felt was a built-in feature of the human condition. It was the natural result of the fact that I could not “merge with the anonymous crowd”. I was forced, roughly, into confronting my own identity as a mono-lingual American.
Now, I’m not going to be narcissistic here. I didn’t find much as I encountered myself – as I was forced again and again to inform people that I was not one of them. I could not speak, I could not do things that everyone else could do. Also, I’ve had this experience before, when I lived in Japan, and in other places. The question is: is this inconvenience a drawback of travel, or could it be a benefit?
In “Power of the Powerless”, Havel discusses a greengrocer who puts a sign in the window of his store that reads: “Power to the People!” This sign, he argues, is not placed there by the greengrocer in order to inform people of the man’s views on where power should lie in society. Instead, it is a signal meant to indicate to everyone – the people, the police, whoever happens to pass by – that he is not a threat. He knows the program, and he is complying.
To our ears, trained by years of political rhetoric emphasizing freedom and democracy, the greengrocer seems a pitiful at best, a complicit colluder at worst. He is either helplessly displaying the sign for fear of reprisal, or he is hiding behind it, too cowardly to stand for what he knows to be true: that the regime is corrupt and must be brought down.
But who among us has been in his shoes? Who has lived in a police state? We all like to imagine ourselves as Oscar Schindler, heroically standing for human dignity in the face of injustice. The simplest understanding of statistics, however, reveals that when confronted with situations like these, the overwhelming majority of us will toe the line rather than cross it.
We are built as social beings, programmed by our evolutionary history to conform and assimilate. In the struggle between our desire to be individuals and our need to belong, the latter holds more sway in almost every case. With this knowledge in hand, is there anything we can do to test ourselves? To prepare for such a nightmare?
Finding Yourself
It seems obvious to me that placing yourself in foreign territory offers the solution. The phrase “finding yourself” is trite, but when one thinks of it actually contains a grain of truth. If our lives consist, for the most part, of a continuous stream of displays of group solidarity and cohesion, what happens to our conscious experience when we can no longer make those displays? When we have no idea what those even are?
I can tell you: radical discomfort. A desire to run and hide. Frantic searches for the codewords and gestures that will allow you to pass as “normal” where you are. But also, if you look, and if you weather the hailstorm of anxiety that swirls around you, an encounter with freedom.
Havel writes, “Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity.” We all live in our comfort zones: we are surrounded by friends and family in a culture we know and understand, we feel safe and secure. At the same time, we sacrifice our essential identity, our freedom to be who we are, just like the greengrocer, not because we fear the strong arm of a brutal state, but because we fear rejection by those around us. This fear is so embedded in us that it is invisible, like a snake hidden in a hedgerow. If we see it, we can step around it and keep ourselves safe. We can preserve who we are, and our core beliefs, even in the face of social pressure or political upheaval.
If we never know it’s there, we will probably step on it and be bitten.