Transformations of the Existential Vacuum through Time
The View from Oregon — 323: Friday 10 January 2025
No social order satisfies everyone. This is, or ought to be, an axiom of political thought. However, a social order may satisfy different persons of different proclivities to different degrees. This is an overlooked aspect to history, since dissatisfaction with a reigning social order is often a driver of historical change, and this vindicates Eric Voegelin’s claim in the opening line of The New Science of Politics such that, “The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.”
The whole art of a functioning social order is to make it satisfying enough for enough people for a long enough period of time. The threshold of sufficient satisfaction is unknown, and governments throughout human history have experimented with every imaginable variation on the theme of the satisfaction of populations. There’s no one way to get it right, and most social orders repeatedly revise their distribution of resources in an attempt to optimize satisfaction within a social order, though optimization of satisfaction is never the sole concern of a society, however obvious it may seem that a satisfied population will redound to the benefit of a society. The broadly-based satisfaction of a population is balanced against the central project of the society, which may absorb so many resources that the distribution of remaining resources that would satisfy the population become scarce and distribution of resources becomes a challenge. However, the central project provides meaning, purpose, and engagement for the population, and, since man does not live by bread alone, this too is a way of satisfying populations. Ultimately, what this means is that the resources generated by a society are partly channeled directly toward the satisfaction of the population, and are partly channeled into the central project, which is an indirect way to contribute to the satisfaction of a population.
Individual variation means not only physical variation, but also behavioral and temperamental variation, and this in turn means that different individuals are satisfied with different lives. A given social order offers a variety of satisfactions, and different individuals draw different satisfactions from one and the same social order. The more variegated a social order, the greater the variety of satisfactions it can offer, and therefore the variegated social order is likely to satisfy the varieties of wants and needs of a population, thereby securing some degree of stability for itself. But the variegated satisfactions cannot come at the expense of the basic needs of a population. If too many people are hungry, they will riot, and this will destabilize the society both for the hungry and the well fed.
We can imagine a society that satisfies all and only basic needs, but nothing else besides. Would this be sufficient for social order? Perhaps for a certain kind of social order, but we have to deal with the ambiguity of what constitutes a “basic need.” We’ll all be on board with recognizing the lowest tier of Maslow’s pyramid of needs as basic needs, but, as I noted earlier, man does not live by bread alone. Something more is needed, and in many cases this is what a central project supplies to its society. Many feel that human beings need love and companionship to lead a healthy life, and certainly these things are important for a fulfilled life. I would be willing to argue that human beings also crave intellectual stimulation as well. Aristotle began his Metaphysics asserting that all men by nature desire to know, and, even for other species, zoos have come to realize that the environments in which they house their animals should provide for some rudimentary level of intellectual stimulation, especially for those animals with larger and more complex brains. The pursuit of a central project can be a source of intellectual stimulation that engages the talents of the most highly functioning individuals in a society and points them in a common direction.
Of course, many people fall through the cracks of a society. We see this now in the US with the rising homeless population. These are the people who have simply given up on the ordinary business of life. Many of them are alcoholics and drug addicts, and from the perspective I am here adopting this is theoretically interesting. Some individuals — certainly not all — are willing to go without the basic creature comforts in life, i.e., are willing to go without having their basic needs met, if they are able to continue in their addiction. However, dropping out of society in the Western world at the present time has reached such a level that we cannot attribute all of this, nor can we attribute the rapid rise in homelessness, strictly to alcoholism and drug addiction. Except for a brief period of prohibition, alcohol has always been available, and there have always been individuals who were willing to throw their life away in exchange for alcohol. If addiction is to explain the current condition of large US cities, then we have to ask why this problem did not manifest itself earlier in US history. Because it may be true that the majority of homeless are alcoholic or drug addicted, but it would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to conclude that an individual is homeless because they are alcoholic, or alcoholic because they are homeless. There may be, almost certainly are, cases of individuals who destroy themselves through addiction and end up on the streets, but that is not a universal explanation. It is just as likely that someone’s life has entered into a tailspin and, winding up on the streets, they end up drinking to dull the pain of their condition.
Victor Frankl was working on what I take to be the same problem manifested under different conditions during the middle of the twentieth century. Frankl said that many of his patients were plagued by what he came to call an existential vacuum, that was characterized by a lack of meaning. I think this is an important insight, but its formulation lacks detail and would greatly benefit from more careful formulations. The rapid rise of urban populations after the Second World War led to problems of urbanization that were never before experienced on a scale that came to characterize the large populations of growing cities. The problem was there before, but it hadn’t reached critical mass. Then, in the post-war period, it started to manifest itself. This was the age of beatniks, the earliest manifestations of drug culture and youth culture, and Rebel Without a Cause. Frankl was there to identify and describe the earliest species of the genus of the rot that infects mass industrialized societies. But I honestly believe that people just got sick and tired of talking about things like this, and it did become rather too omphaloskeptic to be taken seriously for any period of time. Fashions change in psychiatry no less than in hemlines and tie width, and the shrinks moved on to other matters.
But the problem didn’t go away. A social problem with no solution continues to brew. It might not always be obvious. If a society passes through a period of prosperity, both wealth and the wealth effect may paper over the problem for a while. But it always manifests itself again. What Frankl called the existential vacuum has waxed and waned in American society since the post-war period, taking different forms in each generation. The current form is dropping out of society so completely that one ends up either homeless or utterly dependent upon some charity or some individual who is unwilling to give up on the individual in question. The task of supporting someone who has checked out of society is probably as exhausting as taking care of a family member with Alzheimer’s or dementia, meaning that most individuals lack the saintliness to devote their lives to the care of others, but there are always a few exceptions who are willing to do this. I have met some of them. The safety net for giving up on life, then, is much too small for the current need. And a social safety net, by which I mean programs run by the government to supply services to those who have given up, and not the loving care of family or saintly individuals, supplies only those basic needs I mentioned above, that in and of themselves are a necessary precondition of life, and which are not in and of themselves sufficient for life.
Many traditional religious charities furnished not only the necessities of life, but also food for the soul, as they saw it. This was and is an admirable ambition, but, once again, it requires a saintly disposition to provide these services, and, even if the services are provided, not everyone will respond to them. The individual variation I mentioned above that characterizes all populations, and which is the ultimate driver (along with a selective environment) of natural selection, means that only a few individuals will find this particular combination of basic needs and religious comfort sufficient to pull their life out of a tailspin and to pick up the pieces.
Somewhere I don’t recall, within the last few weeks, I read a post on social media that said the luxury beliefs of today are in part the result of failed luxury beliefs in the past. I believe the example illustrating this idea was the former luxury belief that mentally ill persons ought not to be warehoused in institutions, therefore institutions were shut down and now a prominent part of the homeless population consists of the mentally ill. The current luxury belief is to allow these people to go about their lives and pretend that they aren’t miserable living as they are. This is part of what I trying to get at, but it’s more than failed luxury beliefs. The changing luxury belief example highlights trans-generational social dysfunction. I submit that the existential vacuum that Frankl found in his mid-century patients was not a modish flash-in-the-pan (and I can imagine some dismissing it in this way), but rather the tip of an iceberg, an earlier manifestation of a trans-generational social dysfunction that is not getting better because nothing has been done to address the root cause.
If science was not as vulnerable to fashionable ideas as it is, and if good ideas could be recognized and made the focus of a scientific research program, we might make more progress than we do. Imagine a counterfactual history of psychiatry in which the existential vacuum was taken seriously, and by now we had several generations of both theoretical development and empirical studies. We might have a body of knowledge today that could make a contribution to the betterment of lives. Whether or not the interventions implied by the research would get at the root cause is another question, and an important question, but there would at least be a better understanding of the problem. A society that understands it problems but fails to act, still may have the opportunity to act tomorrow, if tomorrow isn’t too late. Without that understanding, any action is pointless.
I can think of at least one scientific parallel. Since conservation biology was first mooted by Michael Soulé it has been in steady and continual development for decades, and there is now a respectable body of knowledge about conservation biology. Unfortunately we can’t always act on the science of conservation biology because it’s so tied to political and economic interests, and the science itself is politically compromised, but still the knowledge amassed by conservation biology is impressive, and there are successful cases of bringing species and ecosystems back from the brink. Environmental mitigation has some remarkable successes under its belt. So it is possible for a new idea to gain traction, become the focus of a research program, and make a measurable contribution to society. What I am suggesting is that this could be true also for psychiatry and the treatment of mental illness, but there are many hurdles that we may not be able to clear.
Recognizing a good idea in psychiatry is probably more difficult than in biology, and this is a problem of fundamental importance. I say “fundamental” because there are foundational disagreements over almost everything about the human mind — what it is, what makes it tick, what satisfies it, how it can be motivated, and so on. With the mind up for grabs, treatment of mental disorders is also up for grabs, and also vulnerable to fads, fashions, and bad actors. A society that has a functional and reasonably adequate central project will not suffer from this problem, or will not suffer as much from this problem, because to have a central project is to have agreement on fundamental issues, such as the constitution of the human mind. If everyone is on the same page, the solutions can be fundamental and comprehensive. The populations upon which these fundamental and comprehensive solutions are enacted start out with as much individual variation as any population, but the solution will not only solve the problems of those who recognize and accept this as the solution to their problem, but also those who don’t recognize or accept the solution will be culled from that society. With everyone, or almost everyone, on the same page, this culling will garner the approval of the society that so culls its members. Whether you regard that as a blessing or a horror, this is what consensus looks like.
