Civilization and Its Discontents quotes

If we wish to deprive even the ordinary man, too, of his religion, we shall clearly not have the authority of the poet on our side. We will seek to get in touch with the meaning of his utterance by a special way.

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks.

We cannot do without palliative remedies. We cannot dispense with auxiliary constructions, as Theodor Fontane said. There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratifications, which lessen it;

we are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts, much less intensely states in themselves.[7] Our possibilities of happiness are thus limited from the start by our very constitution.

It is much less difficult to be unhappy.

Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction;

When a large number of people make this attempt together and try to obtain assurance of happiness and protection from suffering by a delusional transformation of reality it acquires special significance. The religions of humanity, too, must be classified as mass-delusions of this kind.

Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion recognizes it as such.

I do not suppose that I have enumerated all the methods by which men strive to win happiness and keep suffering at bay, and I know, too, that the material might have been arranged differently.

The weak side of this way of living is clearly evident; and were it not for this, no human being would ever have thought of abandoning this path to happiness in favour of any other.

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love-object or its love.

But this does not complete the story of that way of life which bases happiness on love; there is much more to be said about it.

As a goal in life this aesthetic attitude offers little protection against the menace of suffering, but it is able to compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty produces a particular, mildly intoxicating kind of sensation.

There is no very evident use in beauty; the necessity of it for cultural purposes is not apparent, and yet civilization could not do without it.

The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions in which things are regarded as beautiful; it can give no explanation of the nature or origin of beauty; as usual, its lack of results is concealed under a flood of resounding and meaningless words.

When any choice is pursued to an extreme it penalizes itself, in that it exposes the individual to the dangers accompanying any one exclusive life-interest which may always prove inadequate.

Just as a cautious business-man avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Success is never certain; it depends on the co-operation of many factors, perhaps on none more than the capacity of the mental constitution to adapt itself to the outer world and then utilize this last for obtaining pleasure.

When the faithful find themselves reduced in the end to speaking of God’s ‘inscrutable decree’, they thereby avow that all that is left to them in their sufferings is unconditional submission as a last-remaining consolation and source of happiness.

And if a man is willing to come to this, he could probably have arrived there by a shorter road.

[4] 1927. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.

But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves.

Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times.

However, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this evolution will not come to an end in A.D. 1930.

The end-result would be a state of law to which all—that is, all who are capable of uniting—have contributed by making some sacrifice of their own desires, and which leaves none—again with the same exception—at the mercy of brute force.

The liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture.

It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it. Liberty has undergone restrictions through the evolution of civilization and justice demands that these restrictions shall apply to all.

… compulsion to work, created by external necessity, and the power of love, causing the male to wish to keep his sexual object, the female, near him, and the female to keep near her that part of herself which has become detached from her, her child.

Eros and Ananke were the parents of human culture, too.

The first result of culture was that a larger number of human beings could then live together in common.

If he behaved differently, if he showed me consideration and did not molest me, I should in any case, without the aforesaid commandment, be willing to treat him similarly.

If the high-sounding ordinance had run: ‘Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee’, I should not take objection to it.

And there is a second commandment that seems to me even more incomprehensible, and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is: ‘Love thine enemies’. When I think it over, however, I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition.

As long as these undeniable variations have not been abolished, conformity to the highest ethical standards constitutes a betrayal of the interests of culture, for it puts a direct premium on wickedness.

One is irresistibly reminded here of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was being discussed; the speech of a member who had passionately supported its abolition was being applauded with loud acclamation, when suddenly a voice was heard calling out from the back of the room, ‘Que messieurs les assassins commencent!’

The bit of truth behind all this—one so eagerly denied—is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their …

… object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.

Homo homini lupus; who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?

This aggressive cruelty usually lies in wait for some provocation, or else it steps into the service of some other purpose, the aim of which might as well have been achieved by milder measures.

and it is quite intelligible that the attempt to establish a new communistic type of culture in Russia should find psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois.

One only wonders, with some concern, however, how the Soviets will manage when they have exterminated their bourgeois entirely.

If civilization requires such sacrifices, not only of sexuality but also of the aggressive tendencies in mankind, we can better understand why it should be so hard for men to feel happy in it.

when deprived of satisfaction of it they are ill at ease. There is an advantage, not to be undervalued, in the existence of smaller communities, through which the aggressive instinct can find an outlet in enmity towards those outside the group.

It is always possible to unite considerable numbers of men in love towards one another, so long as there are still some remaining as objects for aggressive manifestations.

I once interested myself in the peculiar fact that peoples whose territories are adjacent, and are otherwise closely related, are always at feud with and ridiculing each other, as, for instance, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North and South Germans, the English and the …

In actual fact primitive man was better off in this respect, for he knew nothing of any restrictions on his instincts. As a set-off against this, his prospects of enjoying his happiness for any length of time were very slight.

Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for a measure of security.

We will not forget, however, that in the primal family only the head of it enjoyed this instinctual freedom; the other members lived in slavish thraldom.

This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and so the evolution of civilization may be simply described as the struggle of the human species for existence.[22]

And it is this battle of the Titans that our nurses and governesses try to compose with their lullaby-song of Heaven!

[19] The contradiction between the tireless tendency of Eros to spread ever further and the general conservative nature of the instincts here becomes very noticeable; it would serve as the starting-point of enquiries into further problems.

The tension between the strict super-ego and the subordinate ego we call the sense of guilt; it manifests itself as the need for punishment.

Civilization therefore obtains the mastery over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by enfeebling and disarming it and setting up an institution within their minds to keep watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.

As to the origin of the sense of guilt, analysts have different views from those of the psychologists; nor is it easy for analysts to explain it either.

it merely prates that the harder it is to obey the more laudable the obedience. The fact remains that anyone who follows such preaching in the present state of civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage beside all those who set it at naught.

What an overwhelming obstacle to civilization aggression must be if the defence against it can cause as much misery as aggression itself!

‘Natural’ ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here beyond the narcissistic satisfaction of thinking oneself better than others. The variety of ethics that links itself with religion brings in at this point its promises of a better future life.

In this connection, perhaps the phase through which we are at this moment passing deserves special interest.

Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man.

They know this—hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension.

It offends too in not preparing them for the aggressions of which they are destined to become the objects.

Sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation is as if one were to equip people going on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian lakes.

One can clearly see that ethical standards are being misused in a way. The strictness of these standards would not do much harm if education were to say: