A Safe-Word Theory of Social Liberation

When stress transgresses tolerable boundaries during BDSM play — a sexual subculture juxtaposing power and dominance — there’s always a ‘safe-word’. One may simply say, “basket”, or whatever, and the atmosphere snaps from aggressive to supportive. Following the safe-word’s utterance, “The dominant partner may bring the submissive ice for any bruises, but it’s important to know that aftercare involves emotional care as well as physical”, writes GQ Magazine.

For life in industrial capitalist societies — a subculture also juxtaposing relations of power and dominance — there’s a neglect of safe-words. When life’s stressors transgress tolerable levels — people falling into insurmountable heaps of debt; single parents working interminable hours for their families; millennials trapped in jobs they hate to pay off predatory student loans; even that unstated malaise of modern living, where we yearn to ‘soul search’, but rarely find the time or money for it — no matter how heavy the physical or emotional burden, these trenches rarely offer a way out. One cannot simply say “basket” to an oppressive livelihood.

Perhaps, a safe-word in American capitalism is “wealth”. With wealth, one can afford to quit an undesirable job, leave an undesirable relationship, or reconsider an undesirable life. But wealth, as we know, is not widespread:

Neither, then, are safe-words. Without sufficient wealth, ‘opting out’ is rarely feasible. Our lives harden into fixed games we’re forced to cope with, or…what?

“Just work harder!” goes the American mantra. That swathes of humans living in both the wealthiest time and nation in history have little choice but to persist in vitality-draining drudgery, feeling trapped in their toil, seems odd.

The adjacent narrative of aggregate, statistical progress further confounds this state of affairs. Things today are the best they’ve ever been, Steven Pinker shows us. We live upon the crest of progress’ ever-upward slope. Improving health, poverty-reduction, and leisure time (a contentious point) trivialize modern complaints of exhaustion, angst, and meaninglessness.

As evidence-based as optimism might be, something’s missing from this portrait.

We might expect, or at least hope, that quantifiable progress implies immaterial counterparts. Though Pinker speaks of ‘happiness’, long-term statistical measures of well-being are notoriously suspect, especially across time and culture. We cannot reliably compare our own happiness to 1950’s America, let alone hunter gatherers. But we can speak to our own, and the scene is troubling.

Self-reported happiness remains unchanged since the 1950’s; social trust in America is eroding (curiously juxtaposed with surging nationalism); and mental anxieties, along with their pharmaceutical dependencies, are at record highs.

From D. G. Myers, Psychology, 11th Ed. (Worth Publishers, 2015)

Most troubling might be the violation of the premises Pinker himself lays out for progress to flourish:

“And this story [of progress] belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity, to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being, for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition.”

Suicide rates rose 24% from 1999 to 2014. Increasingly, humans living at the supposed peak of progress are choosing death. Largely during the same timeframe, wants surged in prominence over abundance, driven by an economy thriving upon inculcating desires into consumers, siphoning abundance for shareholders.

What’s going on? Something insidious is occurring, and whatever the statistics of society today compared with history, it’s problematic.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://selfscroll.com/a-safe-word-theory-of-social-liberation/

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