Things We Do Not Tell Ourselves

All cultures and subcultures have their myths. Many of these revolve around exceptionalism, around the things that make that culture special and unique. They become incorporated into the psyches of those who grow up in or adopt a culture or subculture. It is terribly hard for us to escape them, many never even try, and the effort can never break all the vestigial connections. One reason might be because every myth of this sort has its shadow, a negative impression, an ill-perceived set of Things We Must Not Tell Ourselves. In breaking free of the myth, we must confront those Things, but it may be that we never see or understand all of them, or at least not well enough. 

In America, those Things long included our racism and gender prejudices, the causes of the Civil War (which for a century must not be spoken lest it break the Union apart again, and which still seems to hold some threat), the reconstruction of religion by capitalism and nationalism, the depth of our effects on our environment, and of its effects on us. There must be many others, but that list will do for the present, as it is a list of the Things that large parts of the American body politic have awakened. 

As we begin to tell ourselves about these Things, there are dangers. One is from those who still will not acknowledge them, something we often see in the denialism of the Far and Alt-Right, but also in the simple actions of Boards of Directors to protect their economic hegemony. An interesting things happened this week when JP Morgan issued a report on the economic and existential risks of climate change but then drew back from it, indicating that it was an independent report and not a "commentary" on the bank and its behavior (which has been to poor money into fossil fuels investments). The Guardian notes that metadata in the file indicates that it originated with JP Morgan's Executive Director, that is from the very top. Perhaps this is an example of a corporation beginning to tell itself unpleasant things. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. 

That is not the only kind of denialism about which we need to worry as the Things surface around us. One is that different people will focus on different Things and still deny others. A lot of that seems to be going on in the Democratic Party right now, where part of the Party is looking at unpleasantness about race, gender, climate, and capitalism, while another part does not want to does not want to look at the Things about capitalism, and would rather not look too closely at climate or one of the others. The Republican Party is officially refusing to look at all of those, though it is clear that there are very real fault lines under the surface on the first three. 

We need to start asking ourselves harder questions. It appears that subcultures are forming, or have formed, around different positions. What myths are they creating, and what Things are they burying so they will not need to face them? What dangers do those repressed facts and ideas hold? Will they prevent necessary compromise? What will they prevent us from seeing? 

We also need to ask what remains unseen, what has lurked in the American psyche for decades or centuries but not yet emerged into the light? What is still there from earlier subcultures? Of course the cultures and subcultures of other nations and religions have their own Things. Some repress more than we do, others less, and they are repressing other things. Perhaps each nation even has its own style of not telling itself things. Sometimes it seems so when we look at the way things are denied in Russia, or China, or predominantly Arabic countries. Maybe we can better see our own denialism better by holding them up as mirrors? Perhaps we need to watch too that, in our globalized communication ecology, we do not begin to adopt styles and even the Things of others. That may actually have happened in the past two centuries as Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu Fundamentalisms have arisen and taken on a very similar cast and set of values. 

We need to figure out the Things We Still Do Not Tell Ourselves, what new Things we may be adding, and how we are changing the ways we do not talk about them. We are facing existential dangers with division and a lack of clarity because of what we do not know about ourselves. Our cultures remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. We may no longer be able to afford that, may no longer have the time to discover those things that divide us.