Obligatory Joe Cocker link :

Probably not the first time I have linked the late great Mister Cocker on this blog, and it surely will not be the last.

That song came up on my random shuffle MP3ing, and it got me thinking about the Seventies and how much psychological language ended up in the mainstream consciousness from all that group therapy.

Ever since Freud, there have been waves of pop psychology and self-help books and therapy trends that have not only advanced the science of psychology and its efficacy, but also advanced the public understanding of the everyday inner lives of their neighbours and themselves.

Part of me hates to admit it, but we really can’t think about something before we have the words for it. Without words, especially words for describing one’s mental world, the underlying realities remain nebulous, undifferentiated, and impossible to communicate to others. You can’t even discuss them with yourself.

And what you cannot communicate does not get treated.

So while pop psychology trends can be very irritating to those of us who have some sort of clue what we are talking about, and occasionally can even do some harm by giving people false hopes for a simple solution, or confuse them with false information, it is also the vessels by which people learn more about themselves and others.

The Fifties was a decade of optimism. Things are great, the future is bright, we have a heck of a good thing going here so don’t you dare rock the boat by being weird. Optimism and conformity were socially enforced, and the psychology of the time, on the surface, seemed to reflect this increasingly rigid optimism and the expectation that everyone would be happy to conform.

But under the surface, things were changing. The idea that anyone might become mentally ill through no fault of their own began to seep in. It was a feeble little thing at first, but it was there.

It was even possible, within very tight limitations, to blame society, or at least the local version thereof. Why, of course this man became neurotic. His bosses are working him too hard!

Then the Sixties came, and that enforced optimism started to crash and burn. Instead came the hard-drinking cynicism of the Mad Men era. The new consumerism turned sour in people’s mouths, housewives began really hitting the booze, and dreams died lonely and cold in the street. Psychology turned from being a matter of fixing the occasional broken unit to a secret world of therapy done on the down low for people who feel, deep down, that if having it all doesn’t make them happy, that means there is something wrong with them.

Then the hippies came along, and brought the sunshine back. And while they were somewhat successful in shedding conformity and expanding their minds (and hence the public mind as well), they had their own version of enforced happiness. Everyone was supposed to be groovy, and if you weren’t, you got left behind or even blamed for harshing the mellow.

That had to lead to the Seventies, when the fact that everyone was neurotic and messed up finally breached the surface of the public consciousness, and people developed and deployed this whole new language to describe all the ways in which their parents had messed them up.

Suddenly it was okay (in fact, practically mandatory) to have a therapist, to go to group therapy, to have strange aversions (or even stranger perversions) and people were more open about the fact that modern life does not make people happy than ever before.

It was, in many ways, a dark and cynical time. The sunshine high of the late Sixties turned into a decade-long hangover, and people turned to the cheap, the dirty, the easy to escape the pain. The world had come close to annihilation during the Cuban Missle Crises, MLK and two Kennedys were dead, Vietnam lingered on and on like a case of the flu. Crime rose as the hippies of the Sixties became the addicts of the Seventies, and everyone pretty much agreed that everything was going down the crapper.

Pessimism, like optimism, can’t last forever, and eventually people shook off the malaise and decided it was was time to pray to a new god : money.

I can only imagine how refreshing it must have been to stop pretending that you loved granola and brown rice and that you were actually much happier living in some shitty commune full of lazy self-indulgent hippies who, being middle class, had always assumed someone else someone else would be doing the actual work. To go back to that clean, exciting, unnatural world that the Sixties and Seventies had rejected, and really enjoy everything civilization has to offer.

The Eighties optimism was cynical and tough. It was not idealistic at all. The Seventies had seen a lot of dreams die and a lot of other dreams simply fail, and so the new optimism had to be based on the baser emotions of greed, envy, and pride.

It was, in some ways, a time of willful and dedicated spiritual bankruptcy, a rejection of everything you didn’t like in the world by slapping the cheapest possible veneer over it and a big sign that said “Don’t have to be sad about the world any more! We’ve made all the sad things go away by giving you the minimal excuses and obfuscations you need to justify your total selfishness and self-absorption! All people who try to make you think about sad things are just loser liberals who want to keep you from succeeding! Go ahead, be assholes!”

It’s a pretty big sign.

Hmmm. I started off planning to talk about psychological language and how profoundly it changes everyday life, and instead I ended up writing about decades and the zeitgeist.

Again I ask : why is it I never end up writing what I meant to write?

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me…. something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.