Eros, Thanatos, and Polarization

 

I want to talk to you about eros and thanatos, and the way they cause us to dance.

A century ago, in the 1920s, three forces came together. One was industrialization, allowing an explosion of manufactured goods to enter the marketplace. The second was the surge in popular media, with radio and cinema expanding on print media—something manufacturing companies wanted to exploit with a flood of advertising so they could sell their products. And the third was Freudian psychology, especially the belief in the power of the libido, of desire, of eros, in driving human activity.

The result? Something that came to be experienced as inevitable: a world in which people became immersed in advertising constantly seeking to stoke their desires. That could be direct: ads pictured luscious, dripping desserts, or displayed advertised clothing on beautiful, nubile bodies. Or it could be indirect: buy our pimple cream or automobile and you will be pursued by enraptured, aroused, sexy potential partners!

Freud had posited two basic drives: eros (the life drive) and thanatos (the death drive). In the 20^th century, advertising seized on the first to fuel the explosion of consumer capitalism. Thanatos was largely avoided, relegated to war propaganda and posters for horror films (and even then partnered with eros, with the monstrous other depicted looming over a scantily-clad, alluring young woman).

Now, a century later, we still live in a world full of consumer goods. But popular media have changed. We now spend large amounts of our time online, and are spoiled for choice in terms of what we view: movies and shows old and new, news or sports at any time on any device, and most of all, the vast sea of social media, with hundreds of thousands of content creators supplying endless videos and posts and streams for us to choose from. In all those contexts we still see ads, mass or bespoke, that seek to stoke our desires to push purchases. But now all must compete to get our eyes to view their ads. And that has led to the birth of the attention economy.

Now, here’s where things get interesting, in the interesting-times-are-cursed sense. Freudian psychology gave us a very complex theory of how eros and thanatos interrelate and function. But popular evolutionary psychology has simplified this crudely, saying that humans are driven by urges to “f*ck or fight,” and we always give our attention to fighting the things endangering us before getting around to sexytimes, because those who do not attend those drives in that order get killed by the lions, and don’t pass down their genes.

In other words, if what you want most is attention, then contemporary commercial experts claim you should employ thanatos to get it. Grab attention immediately with horror or outrage! Hold it by stoking the negative emotions: antagonism, fear, aggression, anxiety, suspicion, hate. That will activate consumers’ lizard brains and keep their attention riveted on the perceived threat.

After a century of acclimation to eros-driven advertising, we are very familiar with the problems it generates. We’ve heard endless critiques of the way consumer capitalism fosters those classic “deadly sins” of greed, vanity, lust, and gluttony, making us shallow and materialist, inflating our bodies with irresistible hyperpalatable foods, then plaguing us with anxiety over our body sizes and appearance so we will buy supposed miracle cures. We haven’t solved any of those problems, but at least we know how to recognize and critique them, and keep them somewhat at bay.

But the exploitation of thanatos is something novel to us, and we barely know how to notice ourselves being manipulated, let alone have familiar critiques to deploy against it. We just know that we find our time on social media simultaneously compelling and deeply disturbing. We are bombarded with things that outrage us: attacks on our deeply-held values, stories of people gloating at our pain, images of people engaging in terrible cruelty. These are wrongs that call out for righting, sparking in us flashes of a will to violence, or waves of fearful despair at our impotence in the face of injustice.

This thanatotic power can be used to do more than market goods. We have a president who has a genius for outraging the left and presenting the left’s wailing and gnashing of teeth as deserved vengeance to the right, using social media to make of himself a black hole for attention, endlessly drawing it in, to his political benefit. We have millions of people watching and posting offended comments on fake AI videos that exist entirely to exploit thanatos for monetized engagement. We have impenetrable algorithms steering our attention toward wherever the thanatotic impact is highest—often, the “culture wars.” And the result of all this is that we have an ever-greater share of the populace feeling we are heading for civil war.

We make attempts to ward ourselves against the thanatotic pit by chanting some basic incantations. “Don’t feed the trolls.” “Touch grass.” But these provide weak armor, because we so rarely recognize how we are being manipulated. Few of us understand how vulnerable we are to thanatotic urges, and how to resist. We are unfamiliar with critiques of the way the attention economy fosters the classic “deadly sins” of pride and wrath, or in more contemporary terms, narcissism, hate, bias, and the sadistic urge to vengeance.

When tempted to overshop, we know that the right thing to do is to establish a budget. We may always struggle to stick to a budget, because vast corporate enterprises are constantly pushing us to buy more things, but at least we know that budgeting is the countermove. When it comes to feeling surges of hate and disgust, there are countermoves available as well: compassion, empathy, charity, peace-seeking. What worries me most is how these are currently framed by many people—especially in online networks like the manosphere—as despicable weaknesses. The central aim of most world religions has been to foster these virtues, but in the US there are now some Christian nationalist leaders teaching that empathy is a sin—one causing people to tolerate others’ sins and support supposedly-destructive policies such as welcoming immigration and respecting trans people.

The thanatotic attention economy pushes division and hate. But domination of media by thanatos is not in fact new. Consider the terrible period in which wars between Catholics and Protestants rent Europe. Christians on each side justifying burning thousands of the other at the stake by reference to the very same Bible in which Jesus taught them to turn the other cheek if slapped rather than fight back, protect the oppressed, and practice universal love for all. But now there was a constant stream of pamphlets being printed, each demonizing the other side in the conflict and accusing them of atrocities and heresies and calling for retribution. All of us are all too capable of hating our enemies—but the outcome is much worse when people overtly embrace reveling in the suffering and destruction of the other side as moral righteousness.

And the only technology facilitating those religious wars between Protestants and Catholics was the printing press. Now we have much more powerful, sophisticated, algorithmically-driven polarization, generated in order to glue us all to our screens as they feed us monetized stories that make our hearts burn with outrage.

It’s terribly important that we build people’s ability to see how they are being manipulated, and be aware of the costs. For as long as we cling to the fallacy that we ourselves are too savvy to be manipulated, we are easy prey. And we need the populace to be aware that terrible outcomes arise when we embrace hatred and violence as moral righteousness. That way lie inquisitions and bloody civil wars.

The supposedly delicious tears of your enemies turn out to be a paltry reward when the reality hits that you are drinking the tears of your own siblings and have become a moral monster. . .

The countermeasures of empathy and charity and kindness can be very hard to practice—just like the countermeasure to overspending of sticking to a budget in the face of endless marketing is. But knowing that you need to actively seek to practice these virtues, because powerful forces will cause unfettered destruction if you do not, is vital.

Spread the word.