American Fiction: Mapping Suburban "Pafology"

the burbs engender psychological malaise

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What I love about American Fiction is the way it pokes fun at the absurdity of suburban (assimilated) white morals. While I agree with Alex Perez’s contention that the film does not truly challenge the woke hegemony, it still is a highly entertaining and enlightening film. The main character humorously changes the title of his book from My Pathology to My Pafology, “translating” it into AAVE in order to win over his white liberal publisher.

Part of the film’s genius is in its ability to provokes (upper-)middle class white liberals to examine their own “pafologies.” I hinted at some of these pathologies in my piece for Mere Orthodoxy, and in this piece I’d like to expand those intuitions by digging deeper into the dysfunctional psychological tendencies that the suburban ethos tends to give rise to.

Of course, we are well aware of the evils of “white fragility”—which causes white people to get defensive (and usually start crying) as soon as they are confronted with their racist tendencies. Let me first say, this is a real thing. I’ve seen it done…and I’ve done it myself. But my fear is that the way contemporary SJWs wield this accusation to gain the moral upper hand in arguments with whities is painfully shallow and reductive. This “sin” is more a sign of psychological instability than moral failing.

As I tried to convey in my review of You People:

“White tears don’t move me,” so the saying goes. Just as Ezra’s mother’s tears did not move his black American fiancée, they shouldn’t move us…but instead should provoke laughter and ridicule. The solution to her white fragility is not necessarily to “do better” and—driven by moralistic fear—educate herself on avoiding microaggressions (while perhaps not being a life or death matter, would surely be something worth her time).

Rather, the solution to white fragility is for assimilated whites to recover their roots, to reestablish a foundation for themselves in their ethnic heritage. Such a foundation, which will surely provide them a more nuanced and complex sense of culture, relationships, morality, psychology, and reality in general, will enable them to enter into more meaningful and substantial relationships with people of other backgrounds.

White fragility is one of many pathologies that suburbanites (of all races, colors, and ethnicities) are prone to. 

Existential origins of suburban malaise

Suburban psychological malaise is the result of the ontological and aesthetic grounding (or lack thereof) of suburban life. The suburban landscape and the lifestyle it engenders values comfort, respectability, predictability, and is averse to risk, friction, and the spontaneous. The harsh truth is that this suburban ethos is dead-set on negating the tides of the real—which are rarely predictable, comfortable, or risk-free. Thus, suburbanites are ill-equipped to confront reality, both on a pragmatic and existential level. They lack the framework to make sense of the chaos and suffering that life brings them.

The predominance of modern sexual history is not patriarchy but the collapse of the old extended family into the nuclear family, an isolated unit that, in its present form, is claustrophobic and psychologically unstable. The nuclear family can work only in a pioneer situation, where the punishing physicality of farmwork keeps everyone occupied and spent from dawn to dusk. The middle-class nuclear family, where the parents are white-collar professionals who do brainwork, is seething with frustrations and tensions. Words are charged, and real authority lies elsewhere, in bosses on the job. Marooned in the suburbs or in barricaded urban apartments, upwardly mobile families are frantically over scheduled and geographically transient, with few ties to neighbors and little sustained contact with relatives.

Two parents alone cannot transmit all the wisdom of life to a child. Clan elders – grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – performed this function once. Today, poor inner-city or rural children are more likely to benefit from the old extended family or from the surrogate family of long-trusted neighbors, since working-class people are less likely to make repeated moves for job promotions. The urban child sees the harshness of the street; the rural child witnesses the frightening operations of nature. Both have contact with an eternal reality denied the suburban middle-class child, who is cushioned from risk and fear and who is expected to conform to a code of genteel good manners and repressed body language that has changed startlingly little since the Victorian era.

-Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps

Elsewhere, Paglia writes that while suburban culture may be affluent, it’s “spiritually empty. The attractive houses of the Columbine killers are mere shells, seething with the poisons of the isolated nuclear family and its Byzantine denials…Bourgeois ‘niceness’” she concludes “is its own imperialism.”  

Italian psychoanalyst and philosopher Umberto Galimberti’s observation of the shifts in the nature of his patients’ struggles as time has gone on echo Paglia’s assertions about the suburban child’s “lack of contact with an eternal reality”:

Young people today,” he claims, “are not well, but they don’t even understand why…In 1979 when I began working as a psychoanalyst, the problems were grounded in emotions, feelings, and sexuality. Now they concern the void of meaning…provoked by nihilism. They lack purpose. For them, the future has changed from promising to threatening.

- Umberto Galimberti, Corriere della Sera, September 15, 2019

Similarly, Christopher Lasch points to the way that the therapist who “saves” the patient’s feelings has replaced the priest who saves the believer’s soul.

Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the "psychological man" of the twentieth century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it. Therapists, not priests or popular preachers of self-help or models of success like the captains of industry, become his principal allies in the struggle for composure; he turns to them in the hope of achieving the modern equivalent of salvation, "mental health." Therapy has established itself as the successor both to rugged individualism and to reli-gion; but this does not mean that the "triumph of the therapeutic" has become a new religion in its own right. Therapy constitutes an anti-religion, not always to be sure because it adheres to rational explanation or scientific methods of healing, as its practitioners would have us believe, but because modern society "has no future" and therefore gives no thought to anything beyond its immediate needs.

-Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

The advent of anti-depressants threw a wrench in this shift from the religious to the therapeutic, creating a lucrative market that profited off of suburbanites’ disillusionment with the real.

In America, in the 1960s, there was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs. Behind what looked like a confident individualism that was rising up throughout America, there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside…There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness. And he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings. He was called Arthur Sackler. Sackler had trained as a psychiatrist, but in the 1950s had turned to advertising drugs and medicines to doctors. And more and more of the doctors he talked with told him about people from the suburbs coming to them with vague feelings of anxiety and fear... ..something the doctors didn't know how to deal with.

And in 1963, the company Hoffman LaRoche hired Sackler to promote a new drug called Valium. He offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way to treat these inner anxieties, and he said it wasn't dangerous or addictive. Valium became an amazing success. By 1971, it was the most widely prescribed medication in the western world. Hoffman's plant in New Jersey turned out 30 million pills in 15 hours–enough to satisfy global consumption for just five days. Valium had touched on something inside human beings, but nobody knew what it was.¹

-Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, episode 3

Suburban Solipsism

One of the primary results of suburban existential despair is a solipsistic relation with reality. I’d insist that this fixation on the self, and incapacity to be in relationship with that which is external to the self, is better labeled as solipsism than—as Lasch would call it—narcissism. While I agree that it is inextricably linked to pathological narcissism, the term “solipsism” reflects the extent to which this condition is more the result of a pathology than of moral failure. I will emphasize, however, Lasch’s insistence that this condition is not the result of excessive self-love. Rather, this fixation on the self is the result of a lack of self-love, a lack of character and personality.

This fixation is a means to distract from the fact that the individual feels their personality and experience of life to be quite empty. This condition is particular to suburbanites because suburban life, by its nature, does little to force its inhabitants to build character. The lack of roots, spontaneity, tradition and culture, risk and violence, art and natural beauty, unchosen familial ties and social friction, make it hard for us to develop a well-rounded personality.

The solipsistic suburbanite filters their relationships with others and the world around them through the lens of the self. The point of departure is always the subject rather than the object in question. She fixated on questions like: how do I look, what do they think of me, am I doing it right, why are they doing this to me? There is a perpetual oscillation between egotism and self-doubt or hatred. Relationships and work are projections of the self, not spaces in which I come to understand an objective entity outside of me and establish a bond with it.

We see this especially when it comes to school and work. I learn, I work hard, because I want to prove my worth—not because I am interested in understanding the logic or function of a concept/object/task. Thus our frequent burnouts, mental breakdowns, and divorces.

We also see this in the eating disorders that plague suburban (mostly) girls, whose point of departure when encountering beauty is—rather than to appreciate it as an objective ideal in itself—to compare the extent to which one measures up to it. As Paglia says, “I don’t have to be beautiful. I can love [beauty] in someone else…To be in the presence of beauty…a beautiful object, a beautiful person, a beautiful magazine, a beautiful picture…to me, this is spiritually transformative.”

Moral Anxiety and Suburban Sycophancy

The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil — but so does conservatism these days, when evil is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising political forces united only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the now rote use by politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label “bad guys” for jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy movie.

-Camille Paglia, “The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil”

The rationalistic, predictable ethos of suburban life shields its inhabitants from moral gray areas, inclining them to conceive of good and evil through a quasi-Manichaean lens: people are good or bad, on the right or wrong side of history. All one must do in the face of social issues is to simply choose the higher moral path. Virtue signaling and other public displays of one’s moral uprightness bank on this uncomplicated view of human nature—which has no space for concepts like Original Sin, or the primal urges of nature which cause us to behave irrationally and destructively.

Suburbanites are desperately afraid of being in the wrong morally—thus our oscillation between extremes: in one moment, we are virtuous advocates for all things good and just, the victims of the evil oppressors who have conspired throughout history to silence the truth…the other, we are plagued by guilt, self-doubt, and shame for our complicity in the oppression of others.

Taking her cues from Lasch, Anna Khachiyan expounds on the psychological roots of middle class suburbanites’ impulse to engage in advocacy for the oppressed, using Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as her specimen: “Beware,” warned Khachiyan, “of the manipulativeness of affluent college students who were neglected by their parents, who turn everything into a stage for their psychodramas.” Khachiyan marveled at how long the glamorous congresswoman “rode the wave” of her shtick as a working-class Bronx girl when it seemed clear to Khachiyan, “based on the way she enunciates and the vocab she uses, she’s a middle-class person.” She went on to describe AOC’s rhetorical style as “that kind of shrill, grade grubbing, teacher’s pet type that we all know and love that we all encountered in our school days.”

“I think that all millennials,” continues Khachiyan, “especially the ones that are drawn to political involvement or activism in this day and age, contain shades of sociopathy [and narcissism],” especially those of us who were “overly empowered in all the wrong ways by neglectful parents and educators. Neglectful,” she clarifies, in the sense that our parents were “too self-involved to truly pay attention and instill values” in us. “So they told them how great they were and bought them shit and invested in their education…It’s a very American style of parenting [that] has spawned an entire generation of these people.”

Khachiyan distinguishes her non-American upbringing from the Congresswoman’s, focusing on the vastly differing ways their fathers’ early deaths shaped their growth. “I look at somebody like AOC and think, ‘wow, you’ve learned nothing from this earth shattering experience that should remind you that you are ultimately unimportant.’ And that the only way to live is in service of other people.” She contrasts authentic service to those in one’s immediate surroundings–offering examples like caring for her newborn baby and her boyfriend or becoming a reliable friend–from a “rhetoric of altruism” which is the projection of a “need for attention and validation onto other people in the guise of pursuing social justice or a moral crusade.”

If we can’t claim minority status (or if we aren’t minorities and can’t manage to come up with a convincing case of how we actually are part of a minority group—see the numerous suburbanites who suddenly discover they are neurodivergent, queer, nonbinary, etc.) are quick to flaunt our ally status. If we are white, we love to tell everyone about our white privilege, and how bad we feel about it, and how we are ready and willing to silence our own voices in order to amplify those of BIPOCS…turning a blind eye to how insulting our patronizing attitude toward BIPOCs can be. If we are straight, we (and by we, I mean women…if you’re a straight man advertising your allyship with queers, skrrrrt) love to tell everyone how accepting we are of the gays.

Straight female allies to gays take umbrage at the horrifyingly backward attitude of those who think sodomy is a “sin,” finding themselves incapable of comprehending how anyone who hasn’t came around to accept homosexuality as a normal fact of life in the 21st century. Their sycophantic musings are symptomatic of their psychological maladjustment…their fawning over gay men often being a cope for their fear of rejection from straight men. Desiring attention from “safe” men, they acquire gays as they would an accessory from Claire’s, frequently remarking how “fabulous” their best gay friend is, appropriating Black Drag lingo (“fierce!” “slay queen!”), and asking them for fashion advice.

The codependent f** hag+sassy gay friend combo—which is now a staple in suburban high schools—is a dysfunctional inversion of the gay man+gay icon pair, which is a sign of both psychological and spiritual vigor and maturity—characterized by the man’s reverential devotion to the beauty, strength, and wit of his iconic idol…his “queen” or “motha” (whether a celebrity or a powerful female family member, mentor, or friend). Surely the latter duo is more common in urban than suburban settings.

The flipside of this sycophancy is victimhood—the incapacity to own up to one’s moral culpability in a conflict and place the blame on themselves. Both of these postures are two sides of the same coin, stemming from the desperate fear of acknowledging one’s moral defects, of being on the “wrong side,” and ultimately of acknowledging that one is not God, and is rather in need of God’s salvation, which no amount of good intentions can earn you.

Paglia points to the sexual naivete of suburban middle class girls as a prime example of this, stating:

The sex education of white middle-class girls is clearly deficient, since it produces young women unable to foresee trouble or to survive sexual misadventure or even raunchy language without crying to authority figures for help. A sense of privilege and entitlement, as well as ignorance of the dangers of life, has been institutionalized by American academe, with its summer-resort give-the-paying-customers-what-they-want mentality…

White middle-class girls at the elite colleges and universities seem to want the world handed to them on a platter. They have been sheltered, coddled, and flattered. Having taught at a wide variety of institutions over my ill-starred career, I have observed that working-class or lower-middle-class girls, who are from financially struggling families and who must take a patchwork of menial off-campus jobs to stay in school, are usually the least hospitable to feminist rhetoric. They see life as it is and fewer illusions about sex. It is affluent, upper-middle-class students who most spout the party line – as if the grisly hyperemotinalism of feminist jargon satisfies their hunger for meaningful experience outside their event-less upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one.

This simplistic, Manichaean attitude is exacerbated by the general weakness in young people’s education in history, producing what Paglia calls a kind of tunnel vision that only sees the present:

“Presentism” is a major affliction—an over-absorption in the present or near past, which produces a distortion of perspective and a sky-is-falling Chicken Little hysteria. Fifteen years ago, after I gave a lecture at Yale in which I lamented the increasing loss of knowledge of the past, the chairman of the history department told me of his surprising difficulties in hiring young faculty. Specialists in medieval history were frustratingly rare, and even in American history, he said, there were few graduate students concentrating in anything before the Civil War. This collapsing trend is alarming, to say the least.

-Camille Paglia, Interview in The Observer²

Suburban Rage

Lady Gaga—despite being an unassimilated Italian-American girl from New York—wrote what may as well be the anthem for suburban youth: “I live for the applause, applause, applause, I live for the applau-plause, live for the applau-plause.”

Suburbia is parasitic on consumer capitalism—not just economically speaking, but metaphysical speaking. Things and experiences have value in as much as they are rendered consumable commodities. Thus, natural beauty, experiences that are inheerently meaningful in themselves, indepoendent of some manufactured, artificual value, are useless. The design of the neighborhood and its houses, its zoning policies and intricately organized spaces of leisure and community—devoid of any whiff of spontaneity—are a clear indication of this.

The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls “a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,” is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile–the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance - has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever wider dispersal.

Within this process various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around “distribution factories”—giant shopping centers erected in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking space. These temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they have engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the point of consuming itself.

-Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Accordingly, our actions and accomplishments are only valuable if they garner us applause, recognition, and praise from onlookers. Good morals are a commercial commodity that have a transactional value. If we are not patted on the back for a job well done, we are prone to seething with rage, feeling that our hard work was wasted…it was all for nothing. A job well done, of course, has no value in itself. Nothing has intrinsic value in suburbia. Gratuity, true charity, does not exist.

Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his "grandiose self" reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.

-Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

Thus why we often “Lasch” out when we feel ourselves to be underappreciated or are not awarded a golden star.

Alas, what are we poor suburbanites to do? In the face of such a devastating diagnosis, it would be easy to continue living in denial, or to find a way to leverage all of this to our advantage by claiming victim status. But perhaps we might start by praying, asking to Almighty to have mercy on us for being such insufferable little snowflakes, and begging him for salvation—perhaps through the form of an intentional community, a decent psychoanalyst, or maybe just a dose of common sense?

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1. Curtis continues

The new wave of feminists pointed out that far more women than men were taking Valium. They said the drug was being used to blot out the feeling that millions of women were having that there was something badly wrong with their lives. That when they did what they were supposed to do, it didn't bring the happiness they had been promised…But Arthur Sackler suspected that the drug had touched on something much deeper, that the women who spent their days alone in their new suburban homes were in a kind of laboratory of the future. They had discovered before anyone else the underlying weakness with the new individualism–that you were free, but you were alone. Women told researchers, "I feel empty somehow," or, "I feel as if I don't exist." And Sackler knew more and more men were also beginning to take the drug. The women had just got there first.

2. Paglia continues this point in an interview with Jordan Peterson:

CP: By reducing all hierarchy to power and selfish power is utterly naive, it is ignorant. I say education has to be totality reconstituted, including public education, to begin at the most distant past. So young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created in which they inhabit, can understand what marvelous technological paradise they live in and it is the product of capitalism, of individualism, of innovation; mostly it is the product of Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the past and also talk about war because war is the one thing that wakes people up. War is the reality principle. My Father and five of my uncles went to WWII; my Father was part of the force that landed in Japan (paratrooper) at the time of the Japanese surrender. A couple of my uncles got shot up. When you have the reality of war, when people see the reality of war; Berlin burned to a crisp; starvation and so on. Then you understand or appreciate these marvelous mechanisms that brings water to the kitchen or turns of the light on when you flip a switch.

JP: For me, and I guess I have somewhat of a depressive temperament, one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything works. It's so unlikely to be in a situation where our electronic communication works, where our electric grid works and it works all the time, 100% of the time. The reason for that is that there are mostly men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces repairing this thing which just falls apart all the time.

CP: Absolutely. I said this at a debate in Toronto several years ago. I said there's all this invisible infrastructure and these elitist professors sneering at men maintaining everything around us. This invisible army that feminist don't notice. Nothing would work if it weren't for the men.

JP: They regard as oppressive. A professor is someone who's standing on a hill surrounded by wall which is surrounded by another wall which is surrounded by another wall - its walls all the way down. And he shouts "I'm brave and independent!" The fact that people aren't on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have central heating and air-conditioning and pure water and reliable food. It's just absolutely unbelievable.

CP: People use to die from the water supply that was contaminated from cholera. People don't understand or appreciate clean water, fresh milk, fresh orange juice and all these things. These are marvelous.

JP: All the time. CP: Yes, all the time. Western culture is so dependent on this invisible infrastructure; we heading for an absolute catastrophe. When Jihadist figure out how to paralyze the power grid the entire culture will be chaotic, you'll have mobs in the street. Within three days, you’ll have interruption of the food service; there'll be no way to communicate. That is the way Western culture is going to collapse. We are so interconnected and now we are so dependent on communication and computers.