With his customary depth of insight, Gil Baile, in The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self, accurately describes our culture of hysteria and nihilism in which the person (grounded in relationships, transcendence, mission, history, family, community) has been replaced by the individual (isolated, uprooted from memory and hope, desperate) who, with delusions of autonomy, surrenders himself to the dynamics of mimetic desire, rivalry and violence. Crucial to his analysis is retrieval of the concept of hysteria which he detaches from its Freudian connection with femininity-sexuality-unconscious and redefines, drawing from Rene Girard and Balthasar, as the desperation of a post-Christian nihilism frenzied by the chaos of mimetic jealousy, insecurity, emptiness and rage. This essay will follow Baile's lead with a more Freud-friendly awareness of gender.
What is Hysteria?
Here we will accept a lay, commonsense understanding of hysteria as diffused, confused anxiety. It is an overwhelming experience of threat, vulnerability and powerlessness. The source is not specific and identifiable, but more confused and enveloping, for example in a panic attack.
As such it is more congenial to the feminine psyche which is organically/emotionally open, defenseless, vulnerable to invasion and violation. The masculine psyche/body is by contrast extensive, protruding, expansive, explosive. As such the male is more prone to rage at a specified target. This rage can target, catastrophically, the man's own self in the form of discouragement, self-hatred and despair. But in either case, the quintessential masculine response to threat is not hysteria but aggression. It is specific and targeted; not diffuse and enveloping.
It is clear that hysteria in its strong, pure form is common to women but rare among men. But Baile is surely correct to apply it analogously to a culture or society as it is largely a contagious or mimetic dynamic which engages men also.
Hysteria: Anxiety of the Feminine Unprotected by the Masculine
A marvelous statue of the Holy Family has a long, lean, lanky, and muscular Joseph cradling a slimmer, feminine Mary who is herself cradling the baby Jesus. This graphically shows the form of the human family: the needy infant requires the attention of the mother who herself, in a hostile world, needs the protection and provision of the man, husband and father.
What happens to a woman, with or without child, in this same hostile world, who is unshielded by a strong, loving man? She becomes hysterical: anxious in a global, paralyzing, enveloping, confused fashion.
World Without Fatherhood: Hysterical
So we can see clearly that a world bereft of fatherhood becomes hysterical. The anxiety of unprotected women and mothers infects children and eventually the social order including men who have been emotionally/spiritually castrated.
The West, since 1965, post Cultural Revolution, is best understood as a society without fatherhood. Paternity has been redefined negatively as toxic patriarchy, oppression of the weak by the strong. The sexual/gendered binary which supports every culture has been deconstructed into the androgynous, autonomous, isolated Self of "choice." With the demise of virility as paternity, as gentle strength, we fall headlong into hysteria.
The First Hysteric: Eve
Lucifer shrewdly found Eve, isolated from the masculine protection of Adam, and seduced her away from trust in our heavenly Father. "Surely he lied to you" the serpent suggests. Upon hearing these words, the unshielded and therefore vulnerable woman became suspicious, rather than trusting. She became hysterical. She found herself alone: away from her cruder, less vulnerable partner and suddenly distant from the Father. We can imagine her anxious imagination: "O my goodness. Maybe he is not a loving Father after all. He may have lied. He may be holding back from us real powers that he keeps for himself. I need to take things into my own hands and grab that piece of fruit and eat it." She "took control." Deprived of authentic authority as "sacred" she empowered herself. She deprived herself, Adam and our race of paternal protection. Lucifer's primary target is the Fatherhood of God but also all paternal images which reflect that.
Radical Feminism
Suspicion of men is the core of the second wave feminism of the 1960s. Ironically, it replicated the most toxic forms of male toxicity itself in its embrace of sexual promiscuity, careerism and abortion. It deconstructed the family, maternity and paternity.
Covid Hysteria
The recent crisis was actually two interwoven pandemics: the biological and the psychological. The emotional reaction of fear was itself a distinct crisis in that it exaggerated the actual threat. The prolonged closing of schools, Churches, and even parks all bespeak a globalized, irrational anxiety.
Trump Derangement Syndrome
While this condition finds a specific target or source, it generalizes itself into anticipation of global apocalyptic catastrophe. With his election in 2016 otherwise sound, grounded individuals succumbed to clinical quality anxieties about nuclear war, the end of democracy, unbounded racism, gun violence, and global warming. In fact the apparatus of government continued seamlessly; the economy flourished; an unusual period of global peace ensued; an accord was struck between Arabs and Jews; and the President was flamboyantly congenial to hostile regimes in China, North Korea, and Russia. Classic hysteria!
By contrast, the lunacy on the right is more one of rage than hysteria. Trump is a genius in arousing and channeling the populist rage at the powerful, liberal elite. His rallies are like sporting events: inflamed with testosterone-fueled combativeness.
Global Warming
Here again, a real problem becomes a trigger for exaggerated, enveloping anxiety. The imbalance, insobriety of some alarmists (think Al Gore) does not help as it provokes backlash on the right. There seems to be little confidence in our engineering ability to overcome the problems and optimize the opportunities. But more philosophically, much of the alarmism rests upon the secular denial of the Fatherhood of God and his providential plan for our lives and our world. The simple, childlike trust in God our Father puts our challenges in a different perspective. Creation, received as gift from the Creator, is an entirely different reality from a standalone universe. The later is viewed either in a secular, nihilistic perspective or else a vague, pantheistic, new-age, mother-earth romanticism. So we find again that absence of Fatherhood leaves us, especially young women, vulnerable to hysteria.
Black Lives Matter
Critical Race Theory and the obsession with "systemic racism" is a textbook case of hysteria in the absence of fatherhood. The core problem of the poor black family is the absence of the father. This is rooted in a "perfect storm" of catastrophes including: the destruction of the black family in slavery, a persistent Culture of Poverty, an unjust class system, the Sexual Revolution which magnified the weaknesses of black men, and a toxic institutionalization of dependency, entitlement, and victimization. The hysteria around racism and police violence flows not so much from the black community itself as from the limousine liberals who construe blacks as powerless, passive victims of the white oppressor. This narrative only increases the sense of emasculated powerlessness. Nevertheless, I have found in the black community, family and Church considerable resources of paternal virtue, serene trust, and filial pietas.
Contrary Reaction of Masculine Violence
Much like the anger of our own political right, our global ideological enemies are not paralyzed by feminine hysteria, but explosive with masculine aggression. The purest expression of this is militant Islam which combines polygamist misogyny with unrestrained violence. Obviously Putin's invasion of the Ukraine is paradigmatic of raging macho violence. But worse even than that is the steady, determined imperialism of the Chinese Communist Government.
Meanwhile, the West remains in large part paralyzed by the Culture War between traditional Christianity and a hysterical woke progressivism.
Moral Heroism of the Ukraine
A sign of hope...an exception to this bipolarity of powerless hysteria and manic violence...is the moral heroism of the Ukraine in its defense of their homeland. Interestingly, the Ukraine sits at the boundary of the West and the East. As such it is offering the world an alternative to the hysterical nihilism of the West and the vicious rage of the East: a moral revival of virility, courage, loyalty, and a willingness to suffer and die for the greater good. They offer us an iconography of the paternal as sacrificial, generous, selfless, and noble. They invite us to revive our own traditions ... family, Church, military, police, firefighters ... of the manly as protective and lifegiving.
Pietas
Wisely, Baile gives considerable attention to the crucial virtue of "pietas" which does not translate well into our "piety." It is a classic, Roman word indicating filial affection, gratitude, receptivity and loyalty to what is received from parents, family, community, country, Church and God. It is the sense of bonding with the past and the future. It is identity as personal and communal, neither individualistic nor collectivistic. It is engagement with a rich past and movement into a promising future. It is the current and concrete as open to the sacred, the transcendent, the supernatural. It is humility about one's own smallness along with magnanimity in loyalty to ones unique mission, great or small. It is the joy of being a very small part of a very large thing. It is the efficacious antidote to the hysteria of nihilistic individualism.
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