When discussing societies, we often describe how our society influences us, whether it be the kind of music we listen to, the food we eat, where we live, or how we “chose” to behave. We study how different items or ideas flow between cultures and know that cultures change with time and are influenced by other cultures around them. While we often look at how the society changes us, we hardly ever take this information and talk to people about how this is affecting us internally. However, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Sigmund Freud do discuss some of the difficulties that may arise when an ideal that doesn’t match your personal beliefs is pushed onto you. Margaret Mead discusses in her book, Sex and Temperament, that people are molded by their society to behave in a certain way. We see that the Mundugumor put an emphasis on being very aggressive and violent people and all of the Arapesh are calm, content and non aggressive people.
Neither of these societies have specific gender roles meaning that whether you are a male or female in this culture does not determine what you do or how you behave. The Mundugumor people teach all of their children to be aggressive and violent including the females, who in our culture would be seen as irrational and crazy while the Arapesh will raise all of their children to be content and non-aggressive including the males, who in our culture would be seen as feminine or gay. She explains that people are conditioned at a very young age to fit into their society and when they have learned the norms, they will then condition others around them to do the same.
They may accomplish this by making fun of them for being different, by isolating the person who doesn’t “fit in” just by not speaking to them, avoiding them entirely, and by disciplining them by saying things like “that’s not what we do” and “learn how to behave”. These phrases are even more important in societies that have clear gender roles. Mead explains that unlike the Mundugumor and the Arapesh, who do not have gender-specific roles (pg.280), there are societies that do, such as America and Europe. These societies tend to use phrases such as, “don’t act like a girl.” and “don’t you want to grow up to be a real man like daddy?” when trying to discourage little boys, and say “little girls don’t do that.” when trying to discourage little girls. (pg.297) These ideals aren’t pushed by just family members or friends, the entire society including media, advertisement, and people’s peers have been shaped to push these cultural ideals onto all children, in fear that the child will be made fun of or hurt due to inconstancies with their society.
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A great example of this is looking at school aged children and listening to them say these same exact things. Boys in school will use words like “fag” or “gay” to insult another boy who may be acting “feminine” and they may also bully him, tell him to man up and beat him for “acting like a homosexual”. Girls don’t escape this either. They may get called “tomboys” or “dykes” by other girls for acting “masculine”, they may be bullied and called lesbians before they have even had the chance to understand their own sexuality. These gender roles go throughout the entire society, pushed down generation after generation, with a few modifications based upon new ideals or concepts entering in and are held in place by most people in that culture. We see it in politics, religion, art, and stories all over the world. Likewise, Benedict discusses in her book, Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest, the two types of cultures, Dionysian and Apollonian.
The Dionysian cultures have the “psychology of excess”, dance to achieve ecstasy, and enjoy chaos. They tend to use drugs or intoxicates, dancing, and fasting to achieve a new state of being outside of the one they are living in. On the contrary, the Apollonian cultures are reserved, family-oriented and do not like excess. They prefer to be down to Earth and the only times intoxicants are used is when trying to catch a liar. She discusses how the Zuñi (an Apollonian society) will give a man the drug Datura by mouth, in small quantities, and will then lead this man into a separate room where the he will listen for the incriminating name from the lips of the man who has taken the Datura. The small amount is given because the person is not supposed to be comatose. The man who has taken the Datura will walk around the room in a sleepy state and in the morning and will have no memory of what happened the night before. (pg. 252)
In these societies, just like in Mead’s book, we see punishment for going against what everyone else wants. In an Apollonian society, if you bring intoxicants in and us them for reasons other than to serve a greater good to the society, you will be punished. However, in a Dionysian society intoxicants are welcomed and are part of the everyday experience. With this same reasoning, if you are passive and unaggressive in the Mundugumor culture, you may be considered weak. If you are aggressive in the Arapesh culture, you may be seen as rowdy and steps will be taken to calm you down. But do we ever really think about how changing one’s nature can affect them? We see that everybody wants to fit into their society and that punishment will be used for the people who go outside of the socially acceptable boundaries but what about the people who cannot help the way they behave? We know that sexual orientation is very important in a lot of cultures.
When someone falls outside of what is socially acceptable, they may be told to change (“You are just confused”) and can be bullied by the entire society for this. They may sincerely try to change by having sex with members of the opposite sex or they may just pretend to not have these feelings and will shun themselves for even thinking about having a relationship with someone of the same sex. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud speaks about how suppressing one’s libido, or the driving force of behavior, can lead to sublimation of instinct. Sublimation of instinct is when you use this libido for something different than the original form.
He states that “A person who is born with a specially unfavorable instinctual constitution, and who has not properly undergone the transformation and rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensable for later achievements, will find it hard to obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if he is faced with tasks of some difficulty. As a last technique of living, which will at least bring him substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness—a flight which he usually accomplishes while he is still young.” (page 55)1 So why do we suppress our libido? Because our society tells us what we can and cannot enjoy.
The longing to sleep with multiple partners is suppressed by society telling us we must be monogamous even though our animal instinct is completely against this. Our longing to speak our minds and stand up for what we believe in is suppressed by the ideal that we must act professionally and be respectful of others. We restrain ourselves from fights because we can be seen as criminals. We even restrict ourselves from eating delicious foods because our religion forbids it or culture says we need to be on a diet. We only do these things to fit into the society we live in. On the topic of religion, he says that “Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner -which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence.” (page 56)2 But while we have seen that this outside pressure to conform can lead to discontent in life, it is not all bad. From this pressure, we redirect our wants and needs, and in turn we create art, religion, music, inventions, infrastructure and even complete civilizations.
According to Freud, we go through many stages of civilization all of which begin with making the Earth serviceable to humans. The first act of civilization started with the use of tools including fire and with this, we began controlling nature. Humans continued this trend and were soon able to regulate the flow of water from rivers, allow people to bring water to new areas and to start the process of agriculture. We then began to grow as a civilization and later came to be in control of motor powers beginning with control of the air and water by which we created aircraft and boats, the invention of these lifted our limitations of travel. Humans then created telescopes and microscopes that lifted the limitation that our own eyes had places onto us and we could not have achieved any of this without a pressure from our own societies to reach higher levels. Last but not least we must include the relationships people have with other people around them.
Freud states that this is important because “human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains untied against all separate individuals.” (pages 63 -71) But with all of these achievements also comes disappointment and the more we try to fix these problems, the more civilization we create, and with more civilization comes more problems. To explain this cycle, Freud beautifully says that “If there had been no railways to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him.
What is the use reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?” (page 61) In all three of these readings we see that we change ourselves and everything we would naturally do to fit into the society we live in. We never want to be seen as less than others or even less than human for doing what we love to do or “we’re born to do”.
For Margaret Mead, we understand that gender roles can play a big part in your behavior within societies that accept this way of living. In these cultures, if you do not conform to the gender roles, or roles you have been assigned by any means other than skill level, you will be harassed, made fun of and even physically punished for not behaving “the way you should”. For Ruth Benedict, the societies she has studied for her paper have 2 kinds of psychological types, Apollonian and Dionysian, and are very different from each other in how they chose to live their lives. If you are from an Apollonian culture, you shun excess, are very family oriented, and are level-headed. If you are from a Dionysian culture, you embrace excess, dance to induce ecstasy, and can be described as adventurous.
If you do not fall within these constraints in the society that you live in, you can be punished, made fun of, or shunned. Finally, Freud explains that when you do conform to these societies and suppress your natural libido, you put yourself into a vicious cycle of: suppression () innovation civilization | suppression / etc. In this cycle, the more you suppress your libido, the more “life energy” you have to use towards other activities. The more emphasis you put on inventing, experimenting, friendships, and religion, the more we build up a civilization. This civilization then puts more restrictions on what we are allowed to do and then you have to refocus what you wanted to do onto something different. We always try to cope with the pain of suppression by creating a better civilization, but in turn does it really make a difference?
References
- Social influence and conformity in online social networks – National Center for Biotechnology Information
- Conformity and Culture: A Meta-analysis – American Psychological Association
- Gossip influence and propaganda: Social dominance orientation influence, gossip transmission, group membership and propaganda acceptance – Academic Journals
