Leonid Andreev
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Member # 282
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posted 25. May 2002 14:55
In my opinion, the socio-psyche of the human society comprises numerous envelopes hierarchically interrelated so that successively smaller ones are covered by successively bigger ones (by a “matryoshka” principle), or in a more complex way. For example, a psycho-social range of a generalized notion of “socioeconomic status” (or simply, “wealth”) is vaster than that of “faith”, whereas the latter is vaster than “race”, which, in its turn, is vaster than “nationality”. This is an example of a relatively simple hierarchical chain. Based on various genetic, physiological, ontogenetic, cultural, and other differences between human beings, there exist such psycho-social envelopes as “age”, “sex”, “sexual orientation”, etc., which are in a more complex way interrelated with the aforementioned major envelopes. In some instances, the differences result in polar psychologies, such as those of a healthy person and of an invalid; in other cases, they represent a more or less discrete chain as, for example, the differences associated with sexual orientation; or a continuous chain, as is the case with age-based differences.
Feelings of resentment, discontent, and aggression are as imminent for a human nature as, for instance, a desire to do the good. Roots of resentment in an individual psyche may not always be readily explained even by a professional psychoanalyst; in other words, they may be hidden somewhere at a physiological level. In the meantime, resentment is a grossly uncomfortable feeling, and the discomfort only grows if a person is unable to attribute it to a particular cause, or to label it, i.e. to “formalize” his resentment. In real life of an individual, formalization of resentment occurs spontaneously, oftentimes by subconsciously linking one’s resentment to such an opponent or enemy whose existence may best serve for justification of one’s resentment. This is, in general, how many of the physiological, personal, social, and political partialities are built and equilibrated. That is to say that the complexity of a human society is, in fact, much lower than it may seem to be.
My idea is that destruction of the hierarchically higher envelopes results in the increase of the role of the next nearest, smaller envelopes. That is how the end of communism has brought in the dramatic activation of Islamic fundamentalism. There are many other examples of reciprocal effects of the psycho-social envelopes.
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