From Prophets of Deceit (Lowenthal & Guterman, 1949, 2021) pp14-17
The Individual in Crisis
The analyst of agitation now faces the problem: Are these merely fleeting, insubstantial, purely accidental, and personal emotions blown up by the agitator into genuine complaints, or are they themselves a constant rooted in the social structure? The answer seems unavoidable: These feelings cannot be dismissed as either accidental or imposed, they are basic to modern society. Distrust, dependence, exclusion, anxiety, and disillusionment blend together to form a fundamental condition of modern life: malaise.
When we define the discontent utilized by agitation as malaise, we are, so to speak, on our own, for we cannot justify this definition by explicit references to agitational statements. It is a hypothesis, but it is a highly plausible one because its only alternative would be to see the maze of agitational statements as a lunatic product beyond analysis. Moreover, it helps to account for certain recurrent characteristics of agitation: its diffuseness, its pseudospontaneity, its flexibility in utilizing a variety of grievances, and its substitution of a personal enemy for an objective condition.
The agitator does not spin his grumblings out of thin air. The modern individual’s sense of isolation, his so-called spiritual homelessness, his bewilderment in the face of the seemingly impersonal forces of which he feels himself a helpless victim, his weakening sense of values-all these motifs often recur in modern sociological writings. This malaise reflects the stresses imposed on the individual by the profound transformations taking place in our economic and social structure-the replacement of the class of small independent producers by gigantic industrial bureaucracies, the decay of the patriarchal family, the breakdown of primary personal ties between individuals in an increasingly mechanized world, the compartmentalization and atomization of group life, and the substitution of mass culture for traditional patterns.
These objective causes have been operating for a long time with steadily increasing intensity. They are ubiquitous and apparently permanent, yet they are difficult to grasp because they are only indirectly related to specific hardships or frustrations. Their accumulated psychological effect is something akin to a chronic disturbance, an habitual and not clearly defined malaise that seems to acquire a life of its own and that the victim cannot trace to any known source.
On the plane of immediate awareness, the malaise seems to originate in the individual’s own depths and is experienced by him as an apparently isolated and purely psychic or spiritual crisis. It enhances his sense of antagonism toward the rest of the world. The groups in our society that are at present most susceptible to agitation seem to experience this malaise with particular acuteness, perhaps precisely because they do not confront social coercion in its more direct forms.
Although malaise actually reflects social reality, it also veils and distorts it. Malaise is neither an illusion of the audience nor a mere imposition by the agitator; it is a psychological symptom of an oppressive situation. The agitator does not try to diagnose the relationship of this symptom to the underlying social situation. Instead he tricks his audience into accepting the very situation that produced its malaise. Under the guise of a protest against the oppressive situation, the agitator binds his audience to it. Because this pseudoprotest never produces a genuine solution, it merely leads the audience to seek permanent relief from a permanent predicament by means of irrational outbursts. The agitator does not create the malaise, but he aggravates and fixates it because he bars the path to overcoming it.
Those afflicted by the malaise ascribe social evil not to an unjust or obsolete form of society or to a poor organization of an adequate society but, rather, to activities of individuals or groups motivated by innate impulses. For the agitator, these impulses are biological in nature, they function beyond and above history. Jews, for instance, are evil—a “fact” that the agitator simply takes for granted as an inherent condition that requires no explanation or development. Abstract intellectual theories do not seem to the masses as immediately “real” as their own emotional reactions. It is for this reason that the emotions expressed in agitation appear to function as an independent force, which exists prior to the articulation of any particular issue, is expressed by this articulation, and continues to exist after it.
Malaise can be compared to a skin disease. The patient who suffers from such a disease has an instinctive urge to scratch his skin. If he follows the orders of a competent doctor, he will refrain from scratching and seek a cure for the cause of his itch. But if he succumbs to his unreflective reaction, he will scratch all the more vigorously. This irrational exercise of self-violence will give him a certain kind of relief, but it will at the same time increase his need to scratch and will in no way cure his disease. The agitator says keep scratching.
The agitator exploits not primarily the feelings generated by specific hardships or frustrations, but more fundamentally those diffuse feelings of malaise that pervade all modern life. The malaise that is experienced as an internal psychic condition can, however, be explained only by the social process in its totality. Such an explanation, following the classical method of articulating causes of discontent in universal and verifiable terms and then proposing definite methods to remove them, is beyond the resources of the agitator.
Here the agitator turns to account what might appear his greatest disadvantage: his inability to relate the discontent to an obvious causal base. Although most other political movements promise a cure for a specific, and therefore limited, social ailment, the modern agitator, because he himself indirectly voices the malaise, can give the impression that he aims to cure some chronic, ultimate condition. And so, he insinuates, while others fumble with the symptoms, he attacks the very roots of the disease in that he voices the totality of modern feeling.
Because the malaise originates in the deepest layers of the individual psyche, it can appear to be an expression of frustrated spontaneity and essential spiritual needs. The agitator, implicitly working on this assumption, thus claims in effect that he represents the most general interests of society, while his opponents, who concern themselves with such limited, specific matters as housing or unemployment or wages represent only selfish class interests. He can excoriate the others for their seemingly materialistic attitude because he, on the contrary, has at heart only the nation and the race.
He can thus identify himself with any symbol suggesting spiritual spontaneity and, by extension, with any symbol suggesting that he strives to gratify suppressed instinctual impulses. He can appear as the enemy of those unjust constraints of civilization that operate on a deeper, more intimate level than those imposed by social institutions, and he can represent himself as a romantic defender of ancient traditions that today are being trampled by modern industrialism.
This alleged spirituality is vague enough to include or exclude anything at all, to be dissociated from history and to be associated with the most primitive biological instincts. In its name the agitator can appeal to the Promethean energies of sacrifice and promise to satisfy the essential needs for participation in communal life, for spiritual security, spontaneity, sincerity, and independence. He can easily switch from money and unemployment to spiritual matters.
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