I wonder about that. Freud, albeit completely ridiculous, had a certain capacity for insight at times. He said that depression is anger turned backwards. Anger, of course, being expressed through action. Whether it's yelling, fighting, confronting someone, it is a feeling we get when we're threatened. Either physically or emotionally. So depression must derive from inaction. I don't think it's because we choose not to do anything, but rather because we can't do anything.
This could go a long way to explain a lot of our anthropological behaviours. Such as religious ceremonies and rituals. Perhaps that was a way to allow action in a situation that was otherwise hopeless. But when did depression begin?
I think, obviously, that it's probably been there for about as long as humanity has been sapient. But I'm not sure it was always a chronic thing. If you lived in a nomadic tribe, then you spent your whole life doing things. You had a wide range of options. You could hunt, you could gather, you could build shelter, you could move on, you could always try to affect your situation. I have no doubt the nomads were depressed at times, but I have my doubt it was an extensive or permanent condition. Because they had far more capacity to act.
It is in the modern large scale societies that I think depression becomes a phenomena due to all the artificial limitations that keeps us from acting. Whether it's laws, codes of conduct, regulations, or even economic limitations. If we have a problem, a lot of the time we can't just go out and solve it.
Because it's illegal to hunt without a weapon and license that costs more than the food itself, or too expensive to move on, zoning laws and private property certainly keep us from building shelter. We have no real capacity for immediate action to fulfil our needs. There's always a middle man involved to exploit us. Everything is a prolonged process of checks and balances, and the process is usually so exhaustive in itself that we lack the ability to go through once we've been granted the opportunity by our rulers. This creates a general hopelessness, in which problems are always haunting us in the back of our minds. This, I believe, is when depression happens.
I know doctors and people with depression will be quick to point out that depression doesn't always have a cause. But I'm not talking about depressive episodes, but rather the origin of depression itself. Anger is an emotion that, when in context of an oppressive society, demands rebellion. It demands confrontation. It demands you to break down the barriers between you and your ruler. To fight for your own needs. To demand to be heard, to demand justice. So it's no coincidence that we live in a modern day society that hates anger.
Anger issues, anger management, angriholics, all kinds of nonsensical words to basically articulate the inconvenience the bourgeoisie when presented with a dissatisfied workforce. Depression is a mutated emotion, created by the stigmatisation of anger. When you're told to scream into a pillow to feel better, then of course it won't. Because that's an action without result. On the other hand, punching someone in the face who mistreats you does make you feel better. Because that's what anger demands.
Richard Spencer is a good example of this. The bourgeois politicians were outraged, but the general population and a lot of public figures applauded this outcome. Because our society is an angry society, that demands rebellion. To a lot of people this represented a much needed result. For once someone wasn't screaming in a pillow, or muttering anger alone, or complaining to a friend. They were actually creating a result.
Year in and year out throughout childhood, we have no permission for anger. We're not allowed to scream and shout at the authority figures in our lives, or disobey them, or leave when they mistreat us. We're conditioned to be silent and obedient. We're told this obedience will pay off. But when it doesn't, we get angry, but by then we're so far integrated into bourgeois morality that any action is so self destructive by its punishment, that the self destructiveness of depression seems preferable.
When Marx talked about religion, and articulated it in his passages about the opium of the masses; He remarks on how religion is 'the sigh of the oppressed being'. I dare say that the modern sigh of the oppressed being is depression. It's just that. A sigh. A mild, inoffensive expression tolerated within the boundaries of social and legal conduct. An expression with no result. Which further spirals the oppressed being into a much longer cycle of mutated anger until it begins to surface without cause.
And I think that's where depression begins. Depression is the toxin the brain releases when we let an abusive boss walk home unharmed. When we let a politician declare war on its people. When we are too afraid to act on our own because the police is in an organised collective. When we pay our taxes for the benefit of the rich. When we have medical expenses demanded just for the way we were born. When racism, sexism, genderism and other injustices go unpunished; When the bourgeoisie stare us down, and we fall to our knees. Depression is a fatal emotion, because it stems from a subconscious that's been domesticated by its rulers.
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