The Vast Holding Pattern of the Middle Class Mind
As a body-based therapist observing current events through the lens of Reichian psychology, this year has granted rich pickings. The worldview and prospects of the middle classes, seemingly so unassailable a mere five years ago, are under threat like never before. And, as that happens, all the energy and emotion suppressed beneath the vast holding pattern of the middle class way of being is becoming mobilised and proceeding to explode out in all sorts of unpredictable directions.
Growing up in the sixties and seventies, it always seemed to me that it was the working classes, those who worked with their hands, who were under threat from automation. Soon, no one would need to fix cars or cut hair. We would have robots for that stuff. Meanwhile, us middle classes could continue to spend our days leisurely pontificating on how the world should be. It hasn’t gone that way.
Whilst generally sceptical about LLMs and robots, it is clearly the middle classes, those who work with their minds, who are being made redundant. Yes, you can make a robot that will cut hair. But it will cost more than what a hairdresser will charge for several lifetime’s work. And who really wants to have their head assailed in this manner? Manual labour turned out to be way harder to replace that thinking labour.
And into the background sense of unease that this has created in the middle class mind, one vast spanner has been hurled in the form of Donald J. Trump. He has proven a lightning rod for all the suppressed emotionality of middle class America and their counterparts in Europe. Trump will deport all immigrants. He’s a populist lunatic. Nazi Germany is coming back. And we, the middle classes must nobly defend our lands from this foul invader who has seduced the working classes, poor morons that they are, though we’re not allowed to actually say that.
Witness Whoopi Goldberg’s recent prime-time meltdown where she claimed that Trump would break up interracial marriages, and myriad related scenes.
The sense of abject horror that the middle class mind experiences at the continued rise of Trump has little to do with the man himself, I submit. Rather it is the mobilisation of the cauldron of energy and emotion that, on a deeper level, their middle class-ness has kept suppressed. It is an elephant in the room.
The way of being that has sustained the West in the post-war period - the sense of knowing what is best for people and the world - is being broken open. It is a vast holding pattern - a group belief in how things should be - that has been held in the prefrontal cortex of hundreds of millions of people for decades. It is coming to an end. And as it does so, these people begin to experience all the horror and craziness that their way of seeing the world has kept suppressed.
A century ago, poet W.B. Yeats famously prophesied this coming era.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Yet, Yeats’ vision of disintegration to me is merely the first sense of the mobilisation of all that suppressed feeling, by no means an reliable prediction of what will actually happen.
The world is changing. We do not know what the future will look like. We do not know how we will be. To a mind that has learned to rigidify itself and hold tight, this is deeply scary. But that fear is internal. It is not Trump that is doing it. He is merely a lightning rod for change.
Not knowing how the future will be is scary. I find it so. But it is good to keep breathing and to acknowledge the inner aspect of what is happening, rather that simply projecting our fears upon the world. Like this, we retain our humanity. What is happening is a great opportunity for the middle classes of the world to live more in the moment and to appreciate each moment. We no longer need to hold the great plan in our mind, believing ourselves charged with knowing how things should be. We can start to really live again.