Autonomy, Privacy, Tragedy
individualism's dark trifecta?
This is a repost of a popular post from last year.
America lets its citizens walk inadvertently into any number of life traps, all alone in a way that would mystify the elders of a pre-1940 world and utterly confuse members of nonliterate tribes. Careers are chosen without access to relevant information. Workplaces selected where leaders abdicate responsibility. College binge drinking goes socially unchecked and leads to alcoholism. Marrying ‘charismatic’ men who turn out to be violent abusers.
This is the hidden downside of American individualism. We get to choose our own life traps without interference. No one sets the trap for us.
Choice plus Permissibility. When we set both to their maximums, there is something about these two social variables. Combined, they unconsciously tempt us to believe that we will have enormous control over most aspects of our lives. If you take into account the massive amount of technological convenience we take for granted in urban America, the illusion of control we often perceive is understandable, yet truly aristocratic.
This common belief in personal control sets up most members of highly individualistic cultures (or subcultures) for continuous, learned disappointment and feelings of helplessness (when unrealistic objectives go poof).
It also causes us to over-rely on our individual impulses and judgment when making huge life decisions. It causes us to keep critical supervisory agents (friends, parents) at arms’ length when we should be doing the opposite.
The relative disappointment from overly solitary decisions that went south hits hardest among the maximally ambitious among us, often professional over-achievers. Those, like me, seeking the most control over our existence and circumstances will be most disappointed with reality as it unfolds. However, this cadre is a small niche of Americans. We should just get off the never-ending achievement train and relax.
But the fundamental weakness of (autonomy + permissibility) reveals itself in the sheer number of adults (mostly women) who walk straight into unhappy and abusive marriages and can not extricate themselves alone. The legal ease of no-fault divorce in no way makes it easy to extricate oneself from these relational tarpits. Social permissibility does not equal perceived possibility.
When combined with a privacy-obsessed society hellbent on maintaining ‘appearances,’ the cultural inability to know or supervise our loved ones whom we do not live with unleashes a playground for abusers that used to be restricted to the cavernous mansions and chateaus of the aristocracy (with all their ‘Epstein-ready’ rooms).
Here is an exhausting story from my research that didn’t fit into my final book. It’s a painful tale of dating and marriage gone awry in the Baby Boomer heyday of the 1970s through 1990s. Warning: this is a disturbing story.
Christine - b. 1958 - Southern New England
[pseudonym, interview edited for clarity and impact]
Christine: …My first boyfriend…was a little bit late, you know, age 15 or 16, but that turned out to be a disaster. But as they usually do, you know?… I started college [1976] right after high school and then dropped out. I ended up leaving [home], put my poor mother through holy hell, and ended up moving in with [the boyfriend]. There was no heat in the apartment! I mean, I was doing some things I shouldn’t done, you know, partying…just a horrible year. And then I snapped out of it. Went back to college for 4 years. But I had a tough year. I don’t why or what it was with that first boyfriend.
JR: What was going on?
Christine: I must have been rebellious. And I think I wanted to party all the time. I'm not Miss Innocent, but that’s not like me or even my kids. My own kids drank and stuff, but they didn’t do anything like [what I did].
JR: How did your parents react?
Christine: Oh, awful. My poor mother! I mean, she was crying and trying to meet me and call me, and I just didn't want any part of anything…She was so upset about it, and I don’t blame her. If my daughter ever did that, I’d be a basket case. I just feel so bad for what I put her through. But like I said, it was about a year, and then I don'tdon't..I just kind of snapped out of it and got back on the right path. Thank God!
JR: Did you dump the boyfriend?
Christine: Yeah, I did. I left the apartment we were living in. We had a dog. And I came back a week later to go in to try to find something. He had left and left the poor dog there! The dog was there for a week without food, skinny as a rail. I can remember walking in and seeing trash everywhere because the poor dog was hungry and was eating the trash…But that just flipped me out. You know… seeing something like that, I just was so angry. And then I took the dog. I couldn’t take him home at the time, so I, you know, took the dog to a shelter right there because I was back living at home.
JR: So what was the initial attraction? Do you remember?
Christine: I think it was probably just that he was paying me attention, maybe, you know. and it was my first one, and just, you know, he was good-looking…. And I think he’s the one that exposed me to all this stuff…[hesitates], you know, smoking, drugs, bongs, different things with weed, and you know, and all that party lifestyle, you know - Sleep late. Stay up all night.
Maybe you missed it. The part where Christine briefly describes her mother reaching out to talk 1-on-1 and getting rebuffed?
So what? You say. Young adults do this sh*t all the time with their parents, especially in the 1970s when ignoring your parents was thrilling and tantamount to a mass cultural movement.
1-on-1 confrontations.
Throughout my research on older Americans’ life decisions, I kept noticing a very American theme. When confrontation happens in our personal lives, it’s almost always in the form of 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 interactions. Only at work do we seem to risk having an entire room of people line up in disagreement with something we said or did. But even then, modern HR quickly breaks conflict down to 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 conversations.
I want to make a humble observation because no one in social science has, to my knowledge, explored this issue quantitatively, aside from the narrow context of intervention with alcoholics.
Groups of five or more adults confronting one person with their bullsh*t are highly persuasive. I learned this in my business career when mid-level folks had to confront a CEO or top executive with a false assumption they were clinging to or out-of-line behavior. The staging of group conflict in America today seems restricted to ‘offi’ial’ or ‘ureaucratic social spaces where everything is pre-cogitated and well-staged. (This is part of our civilizational orientation to professionalizing everything in life).
But I can think of precisely no instance in my personal life where five or more people confronted me (or anyone else I know) about anything…except when I lived in India.
The presence of a de minimus, aligned social group staring at you is compelling. It has a primitive effect on your brain. The group forces you to listen harder, even if you don’t like what you’re hearing. After all, they could tackle you at any moment.
Christine, like many of us, did not have access to this kind of confrontation when the first failed relationship occurred, and she also did not have access to it when her marriage quickly became a horror screenplay.
When I asked Christine to divide her adult life into stages that meant something to her - one of my standard interview questions - she listed out three stages pivoting around a fundamental trauma:
My horrible marriage
Recovery
New Boyfriend
Christine’s long journey to find a healthy romantic partner has defined her life more than a career or child-rearing. And, remember, this is the country where romantic marriage is the ideal, not some marginalized, insurgent rebuttal (i.e., urban India).
Why does this go so wrong for so many in this country?
Christine: All 20 years were horrible. It was a horrible marriage. He was extremely abusive. So that was pretty bad for my kids and for me…I married in 1983. So I was 25. We were supposed to get married in ‘81. I even had a ring. Then, I didn’t hear from him for a whole weekend. He had ended up with this other girl for the weekend. So yeah… while we were engaged. So we broke it off. I lost so much weight because I was so upset. I couldn’t eat. You know, couldn’t get any food down. I was beside myself, and people thought I was anorexic.
So finally, I started to get over it and started to go out [dating], and of course, one night, I was out, and he came up to me and said he wanted to get back together, and that was it. And I did. Like an idiot. And everything went downhill after that, just when I was starting to get things together again. I should have just said “no.”
We got married two years later…And the abuse started on the honeymoon.
JR: Were you ever hospitalized?
Christine: No, no. But I had a lot of bruises and things like that. But not just physically violent. If he didn’t like what I gave him for dinner, he’d throw it across the table. Even when I was eight months pregnant, he took the food, and, I think, it was pot roast, and he threw it at me. He’d throw anything, like a bouquet of flowers my mother gave me. He’d smash my son’s things. Yeah, he was..he was a mean person…
…He tried anger management, but I think it’s like five percent of the people change, they say.
JR: Oh, your ex-husband went to anger management?
Christine: Yes. because that was one of the stipulations after we were separated. We left so many times, apart so many times…We used to go to my mother’s, my kids and I, in the middle of the night…
JR: Was there an attempt at a more severe intervention?
Christine: I didn’t tell everyone everything that went on. I hid a lot of it. So, my Mom would be almost like the peacemaker…like she could change him. It took me years to figure that out, you know. You think you can [change them], but you can’t.
JR: How often were you being hit?
Christine: It would be a cycle, maybe every other week, maybe every 9, 10 days. There would be a happy period. Then it would start to build up, and then after that, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I won’t happen again.’
It was always my fault. ‘Why did you do that to get me so upset… If you hadn't done that, I wouldn’t have done this.’
JR: Did he ever receive any psychiatric diagnosis?
Christine: He went to a psychiatrist. At one point, they said he was bipolar. I think they put him on lithium, but I blame it more on just being…I don’t know, if I want to say narcissistic. I don’t know about that. But just more someone who is angry, and someone who couldn't control his emotions and had to take it out on everybody else, for whatever reason, you know…
You know, he was a police officer, and he used to arrest people for the things that he did. You know what I mean? I mean, he used to arrest people for domestic abuse. That was a part of his job.
…
JR: You said on your survey that you went to therapy, correct?
Christine: Oh, yeah, I’ve been. I went to a social worker who was great as I was going through the separation. Yeah, after we separated. Yeah.
JR: Did anyone in your life suggest that you get that kind of official help during the abuse?
Christine: I didn’t tell anyone. I hid it…I didn't want anyone to know. And then, one day, after we got separated, I was with another one of my friends, and we walked into a variety store, and I was on the front page of the paper.
‘Police officer arrested for domestic abuse.’
I hid it because I was embarrassed. I wanted everyone to think I had a perfect life…and, you know, I thought I loved him…I think I was too afraid to be alone…
[The abuse] happened very infrequently in the beginning. I mean, when we were dating, it didn’t happen, and [my Mom] loved him. He was a nice guy, son of a state rep...You don't want people to know about it. You see your friends all in happy marriages and stuff. And then, after a while, I was like, I won’t do it anymore. That was it. And I told my story and told everyone about it, and then it was all over.
Why does it take twenty years for our society to intervene in broken, abusive marriages like this? A so-called modern society?
While shame about abuse is cross-cultural, its permissibility AND its ability to remain hidden varies a lot. America does not legally or culturally permit spousal abuse, but it also has one of the most privacy-intensive settlement patterns in the world, backed up by laws and regulations and our Constitution.
So, there is no logistical way to surveil young marriages to discover abusers early on. Our society places the burden, as with Christine, entirely on the victim or, in her case, her son, who was the one who called the police on his own dad at age 16, which then led to state intervention, social work intervention, and Christine’s psychological breakthrough in 2003.
Discovering abusers in America relies heavily on members of tiny nuclear families pulling the fire alarm. The rest of us only have access to a ‘performance’ of how things are going ‘at home.’
How incredibly backward in a society that has achieved so much else. We have slipped backward compared to many preliterate societies where people dwelled in large extended families or even in open-air circles (i.e., the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon). It’s hard to abuse your wife when your relatives are sitting or sleeping nearby. It is not impossible, but if abuse starts, it will get dealt with very quickly in societies where privacy is not valued.
After my interview with Christine ended, I thanked her for her candor and time and promptly collapsed on my couch, utterly devastated by her testimony, testimony to the darkest possible side to American individualism and its obsession with privacy, [performing a happy life to neighbors and the shallowness of adult friendship (that it too becomes an audience for fake performances).
Romantic autonomy seems great at first glance, but without surveillance by your close social network, it is not hard for the unwary and inexperienced to find themselves in a horror script.
We can do better as a society.
Hey there, reader! If this content fires up your brain, please order my new book : Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents!
Here’s a 65-second book trailer to tease your brain even further!
Fascinating, illuminating. Makes a lot more sense than the predominant explanations of family violence at the moment. Where I live the current explanation is that it's all due to inequality between the sexes, to sexist attitudes.
But I'd love to know what about when it's all reported, everyone knows, the police get involved as per in the example above... and the woman STILL goes back????
This is very relatable, though my situation was a bit different since I was an outcast who moved out of my parents' home at 17, cut off from any further support, once I refused to conform to or tolerate their rigid Evangelical religion and the abuse that came along with it. Normalized abuse was the only family model I had to follow, so I married my first boyfriend the day after my 20th birthday soley for survival reasons, including because getting married was the only way I could access financial aid for college since the state assumed my parents should help pay for my education.
Also raised in an Evangelical household, my spouse was already abusive before we married, but it was within the normalized range of abuse I'd grown up with, and since financially I didn't really have any other good options apart from "get hitched," I said "I do."
We were together for 16 isolated, hellish years. I had no family to turn to and very few friends. I lacked any capacity for discussing the reality of my home life with anyone. I finally got out while my two kids were little. Something in me knew I didn't want them growing up in the kind of household I'd grown up in. Also, as a queer person, I was suffocating in a toxic patriarchal cishet relationship.
And that has me thinking about the added complexity of being queer in an individualistic society that prizes privacy, because on the one hand, both privacy and self-determination have been critical to whatever level of queer liberation we've managed to obtain, but we still often suffer isolation from supportive community and have discomfort with honestly discussing our relationships when they aren't healthy (often worsened because of the stigma of being queer). Lots to ponder here, but these are my preliminary thoughts.