Learned Helplessness and Niceness: Societal Humiliation Fetish
Learned helplessness is a biological condition that is created by inescapable stress. In this state, animals that would normally swim for hours will stop swimming after a few minutes and allow themselves to drown. They simply don't have enough mental or physical energy to overcome challenges.
— Ray Peat, Serotonin, Depression, and Aggression: The Problem of Brain Energy
About 1957, psychologists noticed that a rat could learn helplessness: if they held a rat until it stopped struggling, it would then die much sooner than a normal rat does when put into a barrel of water. They also found that they could immunize their rats against learned helplessness, by previously allowing them to experience success in a similar situation. The short-term learned helplessness apparently does something to block the efficient use of energy, so that the animal dies of exhaustion very easily, i.e., it has depleted one source of energy without mobilizing another.
— Ray Peat, Nutrition for Women
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Learned helplessness, as the name suggests, is the behaviour (or non-behaviour) exhibited by someone who has been ground-down, run-through, or endured life’s beatings to such a degree that their belief in any concept of self-efficacy or achievement is practically non-existent. This is to say, learned helplessness is an acceptance of powerlessness.
Anecdotally, I am witnessing learned helplessness proliferate throughout life to a degree I never could have imagined. At first I assumed that what I was seeing was a simple lack of competence, and that, people who are unable to, say, use a checkout machine, make a phone call, sign-off an email, cook a meal, lose weight, save money, or just learn anything, are possible victims of an educational imbalance, or that they just ‘never got taught that’, whatever that means.
This, however, didn’t sit right. What I noticed—and am continually, increasingly noticing—is that masses of people from all walks of life, all classes, and all backgrounds are unable to do really, really basic stuff. People in restaurants can’t hold a knife and fork, consultants can’t write a basic sentence, and some, it seems, can’t quite walk right. Why is this? Why is everyone so helpless?
Much like the two quoted examples of the helpless rats, everyone is stressed. But not just that, because everyone is also taught that stress (Read: unhappiness, misery, business, etc.) is correct. And that, if you’re stressed, you’re playing the game correctly. Societal learned helplessness is built on the following sadomasochistic syllogism:
To be normal is to be like everyone
Everyone is stressed
To be normal is to be stressed (helpless)
My working hypothesis, off the back of this syllogism, is that the very structure of our society is helpless. It is a helplessness that begets further helplessness. Except, we don’t use the term helpless; instead, we use one of the following: Teacher, Doctor, Specialist, Consultant, Institution, Establishment, Professional, Expert, Priest, Tutor, or just ‘someone who knows what they’re doing’. Our entire society is built around foregoing, handing over, and abstaining from responsibility, so as to be able to just be a little bit more comfortable for one more second.
The intention behind such ‘authorities’ is to have a specific, niche place to go to as to answer certain questions: Why did WW2 start? Why does my skin itch? Why is my car making that noise?, etc. These authorities (understood as such) proceed to not only speak, but simultaneously declare. Their word is final because it’s their word, and they are an authority. This might seem simplistic, but so too are the plastic, malleable, and ultimately innocent minds that are pushed through an accelerative thresher of such authorities from the day they’re born.
Life, from 0 to 18, is a case of being placed within ever-tightening constraints until one understands that it is their job to do what they do, and for everything else they must rely upon someone else, some-or-other authority.
However, we have all studied under countless teachers, and yet how many could even recite a poem or a historical date? We have access to Doctors and health specialists, and yet everyone is fat, sick, and tired. We have therapists, counsellors, and self-help books in abundance, and yet everyone is miserable and on the verge of tears. We have institutions, establishments, and countless training facilities, and yet everything is falling apart, and nothing is getting done. We have access to absolutely every answer we could possibly ever need, and no ability to ask important questions or figure anything out.
On a societal level—given even the aforementioned catastrophes—this might seem relatively harmless. But the fact of societal helplessness is a fact of conscious helplessness. Where there is a macro, there has to be a micro, as above so below. And so, if one feels helpless in changing their car tire, so too do they feel helpless in being happy. If one feels helpless fixing the printer, so too do they feel helpless in the face of life in general.
It’s just fear all the way down. But instead of a fear of a predator lurking in the jungle or a fear of never finding meaning, we now have a fear of putting the photocopier paper in wrong, or clicking the wrong link, or calling the wrong number. We have a fear of being anything other than what we’ve always understood ourselves to be, which, when one looks around, is closing in on a worn-out, tired, trembling, whiny, sad excuse for existence.
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We want to be liked because we are cowards. It’s not really because we are nice and caring, it’s because we cannot bear rejection, obscurity and loneliness. — Darren Allen, How to Be Unlikeable
There is an overlooked side to this helplessness, which is in a reciprocal relationship with it, namely, niceness. Niceness, that is, the ever-growing cult of liberal nice guys, nice girls, and general everything-will-be-okay-if-we’re-all-just-nice-to-each-other, is psychologically part and parcel with learned helplessness by the fact that if a child learns that asserting themselves results in punishment, withdrawal of love, or chaos, they adapt by becoming placating, agreeable, and self-effacing. The niceness becomes a rather pathetic and doughy survival mechanism.
The connection here is that the nice person has concluded that direct action on their own behalf doesn't work. They can't ask for what they want, can't express anger, can't set boundaries. Not because they lack the theoretical ability to do so, but because experience taught them these moves are ineffective or dangerous. And, even in moments where they must ask for something for themselves, they are beset by overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt, so much so that they often enter into a flurry of self-deprecating, superfluous, and borderline grotesque apologies.
So, what do they do? They route around the problem by trying to create conditions in which others voluntarily give them what they need, through being pleasing and unthreatening. So we end up with a structure where the person can't act directly (learned helplessness), experiences their own wants and desires as shameful, and develops niceness as a way of getting needs met indirectly while maintaining the appearance of having no needs at all.
Niceness isn’t kindness or care; it always comes with a hidden, unconscious transactional logic. Ask any woman why they find nice guys so utterly repugnant, and they’ll tell you it’s because they’re waiting for the But you said… moment, wherein Mr Nice, who bought them dinner, proceeds to call them a Fucking whore! because they won’t ‘put out’. Equally, ask any guy (who’s happened across one, as they’re a bit more uncommon) why alarm bells ring when presented with a nice girl and they’ll tell you it’s because they’re waiting for the ceaseless barrage of texts that begin with I love you so much and end with If I kill myself, it’s your fault!
This isn’t anything psychologically new, by the way. This is the return of the repressed. Anyone, with the most basic sense of intuition and awareness, can understand that if someone is overtly nice, then there’s a high chance they are covertly (unconsciously) cruel, violent, or angry.
So, not only is most everyone helpless, but they’re simultaneously nice about the fact they’re helpless too. Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s okay. Oh, not to bother! I didn’t need it anyway, and on and on it goes, increasing acts of self-defilement that border on a societal humiliation fetish. Now, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t seem like such a large issue when it’s just a case of someone not asking for a refund for their cold McDonald's order, being overly apologetic when they spill their drink, or not ‘making a fuss’ when an agreement hasn’t been upheld. These are all material and largely consumptive happenings that appear to be relatively harmless.
However, what’s underneath this—for you can’t have the blossoms of humiliation without the soil of ignominy—is a society that is apologizing for existing! Masses that are waking up every day and just feeling dread, feeling like a single misstep will lead all the authorities to point and laugh! The woman who is yelling Help! because her item won’t scan at the self-checkout is legitimately scared. The man who hastily says Can we do that?! to his date who has stepped off the nature trail is frightened. The young man who no longer even tries to talk to women is petrified of rejection. Because, in each case, an authority has been established and given meaning by those whose lives have become reliant on such guiderails to get around. Outside of such rails, well, what would they do? They might get in trouble! The police might come and take them to jail! The world might just fucking explode! and it will be their fault.
People are helplessly holding onto their suffering. It's no longer a sincere moan or authentic depression, but a cynical, internalized, helpless rage against nothing. Not particularly sad about anything. Not particularly excited about anything. Not particularly anything. Everyone is ontologically tired and cucked, in a way that only people who have stopped trying can be tired: a grey, horizonless exhaustion that mistakes itself for realism, transforming the person into a grey, inner-less realist, whose entire life is one sludgy day after another.
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…once, in the Greek New Testament class on Sundays, taken by the Head Master, I dared to ask, in spite of my stammering, what some parable meant. The answer was so confused that I actually experienced my first moment of consciousness—that is, I suddenly realized that no one knew anything. . . From that moment I began to think for myself or rather knew that I could . . . I remember so clearly the class room, the high windows constructed so that we could not see out of them, the desks, the platform on which the Head Master sat, his scholarly, thin face, his nervous habits of twitching his mouth and jerking his hands—and suddenly this inner revelation of knowing that he knew nothing—nothing, that is, about anything that really mattered. This was my first liberation from the power of external life. — Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries V1
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The worst thing one can do here is agree. Being antagonistic is usually unhelpful, too, but at least there’s some friction. Agreement, here, is a nice obedience to cynical reason: You know all of this, of course you do, the world is so agreeable and nice, so moronic! And now you know that, you’re above it, right? And you can just go on your merry little way, right?
But how many genuine examples are needed for one to internalize that they’re on their own, that no one is coming to save them?
How many more illogical and haphazard decisions before you notice your 'superior' is just an idiot? How many more times feeling exhausted after a conversation before accepting that your friends and family might just be using you?
How many more blood test results that say you’re healthy even though you feel like crap before you scrap Doctors?
How many more books until you admit you don’t even know what you’re looking for?
How many more purchases until you admit you have no idea what you want?
How many more arguments until you see you don’t love them anymore?
How much more suffering until you just give it up?