Why Anxiety?
Spinrad, William
SUPPOSE one were to pose the question: why is anxiety so endemic to our current national life? The most likely response would be a supercilious shrug: naturally, anxiety must be the...
...they are still struggling to maintain a subsistence level or, at best, attain minimum com fort...
...92...
...In certain circles it may now be bad taste to own a conspicuous Cadillac when everyone else owns a Buick...
...All it takes is "just a little more money...
...Today, however, it has begun to dominate those who should be the proponents of other values—the intellectuals...
...The traditional values of social idealism either seem out of reach or a result of large-scale impersonal operations...
...Gabriel Kolko's examination of the actual income situa tion [DISSENT, Winter 1957] supplies part of the answer...
...Some would add self-evident political explanations— the threat of Communist totalitarianism, the perilous state of domestic civil liberties, or both...
...And even when people have certain kinds of "rock bottom" security, such as pension plans, guaranteed wages, and tenure in bureaucratic organizations, they naturally want more...
...All this does not imply that most Americans are motivated solely by the desire for money...
...Only a few are likely to succeed...
...Between the generalized statements of the economists and the daily life problems of obscure individuals there is, perhaps must be, a wide gulf...
...Most people, therefore, get their desired material goods only at the cost of mortgaging their futures with consumer debts, which means not only material probems but psychic insecurity...
...Other interests are important...
...But in deciding why anxiety seems so prevalent these days, the most compelling analysis, reluctantly accepted because of its unheroic implications, stresses the apparent paradox of personal economic worries during the greatest production boom in history...
...Yet money worries are hardly con fined to them...
...But the current obsession with money is too widespread and profound to be blamed merely on memory traces...
...Others would stress the uneasy search for spiritual roots or the prevalence of anti-intellectualism...
...Samuel Stouffer's inquiry into attitudes towards Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, based upon interviews with a representative national cross-sec tion in the spring of 1954, included the question: "What kinds of things do you worry about most...
...One can anticipate an automatic ob jection to the use of these findings...
...The most likely response would be a supercilious shrug: naturally, anxiety must be the common state of those who have lived through upheaval, destruction, dislocation...
...But since we do not have a genuine economy of abundance, the necessary money is often not there...
...THIS IS AN AGE of plenty, or rather, it seems to be...
...di rect, pointed questions would probably have brought out more...
...All the material things that can make life enjoyable and which the titillation of mass advertising never lets you forget, appear within easy reach...
...By contrast, almost everybody spoke of personal problems, and almost half emphasized economic worries...
...Their anxiety is not merely a sign of a generalized social malaise, but of very real immediate problems...
...Meas ured by such phenomena as the public apathy towards the "McCarthy question," what people do seems to jibe with what they say...
...Now, too many of the men of ideas and sensibility have been snugly fitted into Talent, Inc...
...But this type of conformism can lead to more anxiety than the former overt competitiveness...
...By its very nature, this objection cannot be an swered with any finality, but it is note 91 worthy that no observed behaviour con tradicts these verbal statements...
...Thirdly: the possession of material goods remain the dominant motif of our ethos...
...Secondly, economic insecurity itself remains a frightening prospect, no matter how sanguine the professional economists may be...
...Income, however, remains the one thing that people think they can still do something about...
...Only ten per cent said anything that could be classified un der the headings of world problems, civ il liberties, communism, etc.—the "big issues...
...The dogged efforts of the rest to climb a greased pole must generally result in perpetual anxiety...
...Yet, since our economy remains inequitous and perilous, this represents an illusion...
...Despite the publicized religious revival and the anti-materialistic pos tures of both the slick and the sensitive, having money is still the basic standard by which the worth of persons is judged...
...But the initial, spontaneous replies stand out...
...For both intellectuals and others, the transcendent evaluation of money involves a lapse into an obvious, "residual" style of living as a substitute for abandoned goals...
...How can such things be in our affluent America, where almost every thinker, re gardless of political stance, speaks of a "Society of Abundance...
...Until psychoanalysts' files offer some contrary data, it would seem that, despite the recent years of prosperity, the most common cause of anxiety remains the fear of not having enough money...
...Unquestionably, the depression trauma would remain with us for a long time in the best of circumstances...
...The argument will be that the responses re flect the accepted formula of what one should worry about, rather than the real, often hidden, common anxieties...
...In the 1930s, interestingly enough, this was the area that appeared least open to personal control...
...In the 1920s they provided a critical perspective upon the money mania...
...A possible explanation is that it is all a cultural lag—a lingering of earlier attitudes into a time when they are no longer appropriate...
...The dread of not having the "right" income may torture the suc cessful even more than the deprived...
...The inevitable outcome is, to use Philip Rahv's language, "the embourgeiossement of the American intelligentsia," generating an appropriate "spiritual torpor...
...When further prodded, a much larger proportion (about a third) expressed some disturbance over world affairs...
...This has, of course, been the popular American formula since way back...
...As it happens, whatever relevant em pirical data we have, that of the opinion polls reveals something quite different...
...Many Americans are sim ply not so well-off as advertised...
Vol. 5 • January 1958 • No. 1
