20th Century Europe Self Destructed in Wars and Revolutions Essay

Introduction

Wars and revolutions have a great impact on populations, their values and traditions, faith and self-identity, self-identification and happiness. these conditions led to the loss of faith and confidence. Depression and anxiety were caused by deaths during war and economic crisis, social instability and political changes. Thesis Devastation and deaths, slow economic development and political instability led to the loss of faith in Enlightenment ideals and anxiety experienced by many people.

Main text

Economic anxiety did the most damage to self-confidence. The traumatic price rises constituted the most severe shock to the world economy since the early 1930s.

People were afraid of instability and poverty. Following Freud: ‘In little altered form, the sensory material of anxiety which is operating behind the sense of guilt, is itself a punishment” (Freud 101). Revolutions and wars caused affective instability, anxiety and depression, concentration difficulties, aggressive fantasy, morbid ideas, and tendencies both to withdraw and to act out continue despite intensive treatment. When a person withdraws, he/she tries to renew himself and to figure things out: how to get along with others, what others feel about her, and how to control herself. War depression made these things difficult for a common citizen. Citizens seemed to try to make others match their moods rather than try to adjust their moods to others. Self-control is a major concern for people; they constantly seek internal equilibrium and a way in which to relate to others (Mckay et al 234).

War horrors and losses did not people a chance to be mentally healthy and happy. The loss of faith is caused by disorders as a mixture of normal feelings and mood swings. It is a disorder of extremes and contrasts that affect the individual’s developmental, educational, and personal pursuits. Adolescents, particularly, may manifest the disorder in developmentally unique ways, and their educational and personal endeavors are impacted significantly in ways that relate to their age and stage. Such signs represent the duality with which the individual struggles, including dramatic motoric, cognitive, and emotional shifts. Borowski depicts experiences of a man: “I escaped from the ghetto and spent the entire war hiding in a friend’s house inside a sofa” (172). The argument against innocence is by no means a modern one. Indeed, one need only look to Genesis for a powerful refutation, wherein the rebellious angels could rebuke an order as perfect and divine as God’s own.

It seems that Conrad, Freud and Borowski do not believe in progress and rationality because of social degradation and loss of civilized values. Conrad and Freud underline that with the public making more specific demands, policy experts should also lose some of their influence. In the face of powerful pressures from public opinion, policymakers will no longer treat experts’ judgments about the workability of policies as a decisive consideration in choosing them. In fact, the integrity of expert advice will also suffer. While on the anagogic level Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness is a type of questing god, on the level of a particular bank and shoal of time he is a sort of Macbeth displaced into the power struggles of the late nineteenth century.As such, he is also a parody of Matthew Arnold’s man of culture, obviously lacking the spiritual authority Arnold assumed accompanied “culture.” Kurtz’s culture, like the principles Marlow talks about, flies off at the first good shake, leaving an unaccommodated man who gives the lie not only to the notion of the saving powers of culture but to Rousseau’s optimism concerning the nature of man. In fact, while challenging the traditional certainties of the nineteenth century, Conrad’s portrayal of Kurtz’s inability to live outwardly from a firm core of being, from a “deliberate belief” as Marlow puts it, anticipates with amazing accuracy one of the most prevalent symptoms that psychotherapists have encountered in recent decades.

After wars and revolutions core manufacturing industries also declined, and as they did, manufacturing jobs vanished forever. Now, growing anxiety and shrinking institutional confidence undercut the ability of policymakers to defend themselves against challenges to their policy power. At the same time, changing circumstances and public concerns allowed new political claimants successfully to insist on new conditions for policymaking (Mckay et al 236). Policy information and access became more widely available. As power became more dispersed and its exercise more conditional, the policy process became more tentative. The very conditions placed on the exercise of political power, then, contributed to a sense of gridlock that further undermined confidence in government’s problem-solving capacity (Mckay et al 238).

In the book The Heart of Darkness, Conrad portrays a crisis of rationality and civilized values. The fundamental tension underlying man and civilization is the pleasure principle vs. the reality principle. The former is based upon man’s natural tendency toward pleasure. In early development this tendency is manifested in an instinct to separate the unpleasant from the ego and attribute it to some external object. In normal development the instinct is mitigated and controlled by experiential knowledge which teaches that some pain originates from within while, similarly, the source of pleasure is often not ego but object. The boundaries of the primitive pleasure principle are rectified and, says Freud, “In this way one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development.” (Freud 34).

Powerful deflections, says Freud, “cause us to make light of our misery.” The chief single deflection for Kurtz was undoubtedly the all-engrossing search for ivory, a job at which he proved an enormous success. What the wilderness whispered to Kurtz was the truth that civilized men “moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors” (Conrad 72) had long ago ceased to hear: that man’s principal ambition is pleasure and, if left unrestrained, he will do anything to obtain it. Irreconcilable is the ineffable darkness into which Kurtz has peered; knowledge of the unknowable, the numina, too great for mortals to withstand. Conrad questions: Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath” (101).

Summary

In sum, the authors portray that reality is too strong for a common man. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion.

By The belief that one can successfully shut out reality, and reality here is the incontrovertible opposition of primitive (natural) instincts and the compelling social structures of modern Western man. The philosopher’s vision of natural man has, over the ages, assumed a variety of forms, but generally speaking these forms can be categorized into two antithetical and irreconcilable visions of human nature: one which holds that man is innately good, the other that he is innately sinful.

Works Cited

Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Penguin Classics, 1992.

Conrad, J. Heart of Darkness Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 1999.

Freud, S. Civilization and its Discontents. W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.

Mckay, J.P., Hill, B.D., Buckler, J. A History of Western Society since 1300 (9th Ed). Houghton Mifflin College Div; 8 edition, 2005.