Brian Holmes on Thu, 12 Oct 2017 10:45:19 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> What does a systemic crisis feel like?


This article, in all its candor and systemic brutality, gives you pretty good idea:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-severe-anxiety.html

The interesting point of this article is that it focuses on the experience of psychic dissociation, registered as "anxiety," that now apparently afflicts over 40% of American teenagers. Small wonder, given that their utopian society is now explicitly faced with its dystopian contradiction. However the same article concludes with maybe the most willfully stupid thing I have ever read - as though everything were fine, no, isn't that true, come on, get with it?

"[Anxiety] has an evolutionary purpose, after all; it helps us detect and avoid potentially dangerous situations. Highly anxious people, though, have an overactive fight-or-flight response that perceives threats where there often are none."

Right, yeah, good luck in the twenty-first century.
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