Let’s talk about the British Disease^[1], shall we?

I call it emotional constipation. People end up with all kinds of emotions they desperately want to express but cannot because, that would involve breaking a thin but incredibly strong web of unspoken and often unexplainable taboos that tell the person that this is something that Is Not Done and that to do so would be to pollute the emotional commons formed by these taboos that lets people pretend that everything is calm and wholesome and good.

And the thing is, they are not wrong. Public displays of emotion may well earn them the wrath and disdain of their peers. There is a feeling that to spill out one’s uncontrolled and deeply felt emotions in public is akin to soiling oneself and the person doing it should be equally ashamed of themselves for losing control and ruining the facade for everyone.

This is, of course, insane.

It’s insane because it’s inhuman. And unhealthy. We all know that repressing emotions rarely turns out well and that we should tell the ones we love that we love them more often and that expressing those emotions can make us feel a hell of a lot better.

But still, we withhold. Why?

Let’s jump into that rabbit hole.

We shall start with the base : fear. Fear keeps us from expressing our emotions.

But fear of what? Making oneself vulnerable, of course.

OK. But vulnerable to what? What is the malevolent force just waiting to takte advantage of this vulnerable moment to do us grievous emotional harm?

That’s where this gets tricky.

because if you asked someone if they thought there was some kind of force waiting to pounce on their every vulnerability, most people would find the notion laughable. At most, they would call it “life” or “the world” or “people in general”.

But we nevertheless believe in it, whether or not we even think it exists. We believe in it so strongly that we will suffer agonies of the soul rather than give it a chance.

So what the hell is it?

I think that the key here is our social competition instincts. We all know we have them but modern pluralistic society, where the vast majority of people are middle class and thus roughly the same in social standing, does a good job of hiding and discouraging these instincts.

There’s a reason why “social climber” is a derogative.

These instincts tell us that we always have to be on guard foir our social rivals and that we must be prepared to defend our current social rank to the death, if necessary, in order to keep the status that we have or some social rival will come take it from us.

And as I have said before, for human beings a loss of rank can feel like death. Worse than death, in fact, because you’ll still be around to suffer the consequences. Even the tiniest loss of perceived status can make us feel like our lives are on the line.

Hence all the microaggressions of middle class life, where everyone is competing for social superiority in what amounts to a ludicrously tiny arena.

But the size of the arena doesn’t matter because these social status measurements are all relative. It’s not a matter of climbing to the highest absolute height.

It’s a matter of climbing higher than THEM. You know…. those people. The awful people with their bad taste and poor manners who have the GALL to act like that might be better than us.

We hate those people. Even though they are more or less exactly like us.

And this is where all the fretting over who has the nicer lawn or who has the bigger TV or who gets that coveted corner office or who throws the cooler parties or who has the best toys.

And while it is the most visible in the middle class, it happens all through society. You could be living in a tent community for the homeless and people would be still be fretting over who has the nicer tent or who is better at finding stuff to sell or a million other petty things.

But it reaches a true fever pitch with the rich because they have so little else.  The entire lower portion of Maslov’s Hierarchy is so ridiculously well taken care of that for them, the bottom most level is the social level.

The rich end up structurng their entire lives, including how they raise their children, around these minute social distinctions. Generation after generation is raised wit the deep and certain knowledge that it is their job to contribute to the familys social status as much as possible and that is more important than absolutely anything else, including their own health.

My, I have wandered far afield.

Back to the point : we feel making ourselves vulnerable in part because, regardless of our actual situation,. our social instincts tell us to always be on guard against our social rivals who are just waiting for an opportunity to do us social harm and push us down so they can rise up.

Another reason we fear vulnerability, though, is that we really are vulnerable to emotional harm in these instances. We all have the same formative traumas where we made ourselves vulnerable to the wrong person and/or at the wrong time and been emotionally devastated by the result.

So there is real risk. It might not seem like a “real” risk to the thuddingly ignorant, but for us human beings, it is very real.

I seem to have come to two separate but not mutually exclusive conclusions.

Feel free to combine them in whatever proportions make the most sense to you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.