society stockholm syndrome

As I see more of the world, love more people, educate myself, as I become more familiar with the overwhelmingly complicated society we humans have built for ourselves, as I delve further into the trenches of the human condition, I am continually affronted with one simple truth: we are broken. We are born into a world that is trying to atone for the hurt bestowed upon their ancestors, a hurt that can be traced all the way back to Adam, a deficient that we can not pull, work, or will ourselves out of. And I think at some point we realize that the weight of this hurt is so much, and has influenced us so unalterably that we begin to look for things to, at the very least, distract us from the brokenness. And like Pavlov’s dogs that know no other master, we expect the same world that calls recognition to our imperfections to rectify our feelings of loss for the people we were meant to be. And so we develop society stockholm syndrome, for although it is the source of our pain, we also look to it as our savior. We expect it to give us deceptively achievable goals so that while we have delusions of accomplishment, just enough so that we desire to keep going, our work is never finished. We expect it to give us drugs, a cacophany of uppers and downers to alter our state and numb us in our grieving, to make the reality in which we find ourselves bearable. Because the world owes us. This is the least it could do.

The fundamental problem with this is that we are using logic to fight something illogical in its conception. We expect the world to be fair to us, when it has constantly showed us it is anything but. The problem is that we turn to the very thing that hurt us to fix us. A sick mind cannot fix a sick mind. Hence the tragedy that is reality. Despite priding ourselves as reasonable and sound people, we do the thing that defines insanity: completing the same action over and over expecting a different outcome. We constantly return to society, to Instagram, to Facebook, to the internet, to magazines, to politics, to institutions created by other broken humans to fix the brokenness inside us. It’s irrational. If we truly are looking for something to fix us and allow us to feel completely loved, we must look not only outside ourselves but outside the world we created.