Losing Face

Two days ago I reported on some new research about depression. The studies purported to show that depression, in many but not all cases, is signaling that something is wrong. It is telling you to set things right.

In the post I noted that depression signals a social dislocation, a disconnection from other human beings, and that it should be resolved by reconnecting and establishing fruitful contacts.

Most everyone agrees that there is too much depression around. The promise of Prozac has not been borne out.

One understands that the currently fashionable explanation of this problem blames social media and gadgets. Children, especially, spend so much time on their gadgets that they have lost the habit of getting along with other children.

Among its proponents are NYU professor Jonathan Haidt and UC San Diego professor Jean Twenge. I refer to Judith Warner’s counterpoint in her review of Haidt’s new book. She argues that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Warner is not persuaded that Haidt has overcome this objection.

So, allow me a different thesis. Consider the analysis offered by famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. You know him because you know his book, Bowling Alone.

Now, Putnam did a study of multicultural communities, where people of different ethnic backgrounds live in the same neighborhoods. The study is called E Pluribus Unum. The analysis might apply to schools where the bureaucratic grandees believe that there is a special value in mixing children from different cultures.

Putnam discovered that the people who live in such diverse communities tend to hunker down, tend not to get along, tend to avoid each other. Hmmm. Perhaps that is why we suffer from a generalized sense of disconnection.

If people are going to connect they must be playing the same game according to one set of rules. If there are multiple sets of rules you never know which is which, who you might or might not be offending. Ergo, you will withdraw, perhaps into a club where everyone speaks the same language and observes the same customs. 

Add to that the chance that different people have been admitted to a group according to different standards, thanks to affirmative action policies or diversity quotas. When different states declare that aspiring attorneys no longer have to take the bar exam, it is creating two classes of lawyers. The chances of them getting along are diminished.

And of course if different people have different pronouns, different forms of illiterate expression, you are most likely to hunker down, because it is not worth the trouble to remember each person’s different pronouns. It is easier to retreat and withdraw into social media where the risk is lesser.

In other words, social disconnection is built into the current mania about multiculturalism. And if social disconnection is built in, so is depression.

None of this should come as a surprise. As we have noted, the psycho world does not care about social connection. In the most flagrant sense, it tells people, over and over again, not to care about how you look to other people. You should care, it says, about how you feel about yourself.

It’s a formula for social disconnection, for ignoring other people and for not caring about looking good to others. Looking good to others is a moral category. It might include your appearance, whether you follow the dress code and practice good grooming, but it refers primarily to your moral character. And that means whether you are trustworthy, loyal, reliable and decent. That is, whether you are a credit to your community.

So, therapy culture has undermined your ability to get along with other people because it told you to forget about your reputation, about how you look to other people. It is a decisive error.

When you are considered primarily to be a social being, what matters is less your psyche and more your face. That means, you face in both the literal and figurative senses. Dare I make the most obvious observation, namely, that you never see your face directly. You can see its reflected image. You can judge how other people react to you, but you cannot look yourself in the eye.

I have written extensively about face, in my books Saving Face and, The Last Psychoanalyst. See also Tasha Eurich’s book, Insight.

So if you are more worried about what you can get away with than about doing the right thing in order to have a good reputation you have bought the therapy culture.

Within this context depression is redefined as-- losing face. Curing depression involves saving face. Simple and easy, don’t you think?

To make matters slightly less easy, I am obliged to inform you that in Asian cultures there are two forms of face. You lose face when you cease to be a member in good standing of a community. But you also lose face when you lose status and prestige within the community.

If you care to complicate the issue, I would add that you can lose face for belonging to a family where one member has disgraced himself. Losing your good name is like losing face.

One reason we are motivated to do the right thing and to maintain a good reputation is that we share our good name with other family members, even with members of our community. And, at times, we are depressed because we belong to a community whose leaders have embarrassed themselves.

As for the question of cure, consider it this way. If you failed at a task, the cure is success. If you get caught with your pants down, the cure is to pull them up. If you have bad manners, the cure is good manners. If a member of your family has been identified as a scoundrel, you will either need to disassociate yourself from him or persuade him to change his deviant ways. 

But then, if someone disrespects you, insults you, offends you… this causes a loss of face. It requires a response, one that will save face. He is obliged to demonstrate, by his actions, that he is not defined by the demeaning insult.

If people disrespect you, you need to respond by acting like someone who respects himself. 

Rarely do our psycho therapists recognize that the problem here lies with what the philosophers call other minds. Changing behavior must be consistent. Getting it right once does not count. You need to change the minds of other people, to change the way that they see you. 

Among the things you do not do is-- trying to figure out why you failed or why you have bad table manners. Blaming it in your mother does not improve performance and does not teach you good manners.

The same problem exists when you have been traumatized. You will note that the new group of trauma doctors, the ones who recovered and repackaged the Victorian notion of conversion hysteria, do not acknowledge that it’s one thing to remember what happened and quite another to erase it from the minds of other people.

If you have forgotten the trauma, and other people know about it, they might look at you with pity. To disassociate yourself from a trauma you will need to erase it from the minds of other people. This tells us that sharing the information with lots of other people is a losing strategy.

I am happy to inform you that I have some free consulting hours in my coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.