One Vote for This Age of Anxiety by Margaret Mead
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INTRODUCTION:
This essay is based on the account of, ‘ONE VOTE FOR THIS AGE OF ANXIETY’ by Margaret Mead in which she urged us to abjure the reality of this modern world. She is a famous scholar & anthropologist who wrote extensively about tribal people, American customs and Analysis on the Western culture.
Her essay is remotely based on a poem as in the very beginning of the essay she refers to W.H Auden’s who wrote this poem, ‘THE AGE OF ANXIETY ‘. It was W. H. Auden’s last book length poem, his longest, and almost certainly the least read of his major works.
The poem highlights human isolation, a condition magnified by the lack of tradition or religious beliefs in the modern age.
The essay is particularly focusing on how this modern society with its robotic nature is causing people to suffer and how anxiety is taking over all their senses. A society that has lost its way by developing a sense of danger or threat, of not being able to cope with what might happen. A ‘nameless dread’ that can take in every catastrophe imaginable.
… Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good …
Anxiety is the chief problem of the modern man. We have this false but popular belief that our age is particularly the age of anxiety while the other ages was were the ages of trust and confident direction. But actually no one who lived in those days has returned to testify how paradisiacal they really were.
Certainly if we observe and question the savages or simple peasants in the world today, we find something quite different. The untouched savage in the middle of New Guinea isnt anxious; he is seriously and continually frightened of black magic, of enemies with spears who may kill him or his wives and children at any moment, while they stoop to drink from a spring, or climb a palm tree for a coconut. He goes warily, day and night, taut and fearful. As for the peasant populations of a great part of the world, they arent so much anxious as hungry. They arent anxious about whether they will get a salary raise, or which of the three colleges of their choice they will be admitted to, or whether to buy a Ford or Cadillac, or whether the kind of TV set they want is too expensive. They are hungry, cold and, in many parts of the world, they dread that local warfare, bandits, political coups may endanger their homes, their meager livelihoods, and their lives. They are anxious about problems different than our but still the anxiety is there. As Freud says:
‘No Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.’
Not to mention our lives are full of anxiety about different issues and in different situations, inducing triggers. As noted, there are strong learned and environmental components to anxiety, some of which are surely brought about by our modern, affluent society; it’s all an issue of relativity.
The explosion of a bomb in the streets of a city whose name no one had ever heard before may set in motion forces which end up by ruining ones carefully planned education in law school, half a world away.
Or may be you just blew a job interview so badly you think that there is nothing you are qualified to do. You relive all your foolish contributions to the conversation and criticize yourself.
The anxiety attacks could be so automatic that it can be quite a skill in determining what they are. This is sometimes because you may have had negative thoughts for some time and thinking in this way can be very natural.
There are other times whereby we are fully aware of an anxious thought. Most times our negative automatic thoughts can be taken from the negative thinking errors and may be unrealistic expectations. Anxiety tends to be without focus; the anxious person doesnt know whether to blame himself or other people.
Various causes have been cited for uncertainty, anxiety and lack of confidence. Some are new, some have existed for a long time; some have been tested empirically, others are of a more speculative nature; but they are all part of more encompassing views of man and this modern society.
Out of this productive system of technology drawing upon enormous resources, we have created a nation in which anxiety has replaced terror and despair, for all except the severely disturbed. While we are digitally connected, we are less connected to each other.
Daily life is also less communal and collaborative particularly when compared with life a few hundred years ago. And yet, we all want to be accepted and liked. Being excluded from a group to which they want to belong is a real terror for many young people today. Millennial may call it FOMO (fear of missing out) also known as fear of being left out.
Added to this are fears about the future the questions like would we be able to find a good job, afford to live independently, buy our own homes, so we too can have marriages and families like