Uncomfortably Numb
The pain of living a life so alienated from what is natural and pleasurable exacts a psychic cost: numbing. Most of us, winners and losers alike, are profoundly unable to grasp the severity of our loss. Numbness in turn produces amnesia about what a fully human life would be like, and even a fear of remembering. We internalize the ethic of productivity, the constraint of patriarchy, the imperative of success, the drivenness of modern life, the obligations of machismo, the laws that prevent our achieving for ourselves what the powerful achieve at our expense. We become complicit. And so we leave unopposed the world that injures us, restructuring ourselves to appease the Powers we depend upon. To achieve peace with the world, we declare war upon ourselves.
Andrew Bard Schmookler
The Parable of the Tribes: The problem of power in social evolution