Complaining

The socioeconomic state and outlook of the majority in the United States are not glowing. There are complaints of high personal debt due to student loans, over-leveraged mortgages and unemployment. Yet a majority of Americans often vote against their own interests when electing public officials, who determine much of the quality of their lives. 

Complaining without action is a form of masochistic masturbation. It is a symptom of depression or delayed development. Nothing can impede personal or social progress as much as an addiction to help-rejecting complaining.

We hear help-rejecting complaining from Washington daily. It has become a political tactic of conservatives and progressives, confined in the cage-fight of a professional two-party political class. Both parties say, "We have a perfectly adequate solution to Problem X, but they won't...." This form of complaining by way of childish manipulation is appropriate to an elementary-school playground, not to a democratically elected political body. 

What is the root of this help-rejecting complaining? Well, in the individual, it is usually indicative of delayed development and/or depression. It is childishly narcissistic behavior, the behavior of the helpless and dependent, who feel under-nurtured and incapable of moving forward with their own problems. The complainer rejects the help of others, because he/she is too fearful to trust anyone since he/she cannot trust him/herself.

Zooming out to a whole society which displays this form of help-rejecting complaining in favor of polarized politics and religious zealotry offers a disturbing perspective on the U.S. and other developed democracies, like Greece. Are we all reaping the effects of post-911 fear? Is our surrender to government obsessions with security over human rights leading our societies into a form of mass regression?

On the level of practice, I have had to deal with my own plaintive nature from an early age. I was burdened with intelligence in a religiously and sexually repressive family. Learning to formulate and verbalize complaints against a system which felt oppressive to my nature became a survival mechanism for me in my family system and my working-class environment. My fist was already shaped to hold a protest sign by the time I embraced the peace movement in the 1960s. That personal movement from complaining in a position of frustration and anger to protesting with others for actual social change was my salvation as a gay man and budding secular humanist.