LogFAQs > #983611405

I was directly responding to paerarru and their post, so in that context it made sense imo. I wasn't applying it to society as a whole necessarily, but rather how individuals moralise complex situations into simple binary dichotomy, firstly because they're unable to grasp the nuance or make sense of the complexity of a situation, secondly because of the need to protect the ego from harm.

The in-group bias/tribalism, as an extension of the paranoid-schizoid position, leads people to judge anyone who doesn't agree with them as "bad", while anyone who agrees with them is "good", and that these two states are irreconcilable, and there is no in-between. This is also how we seemingly justify doing bad things ourselves, while not recognising them as bad.

The depressive position in object relations theory has nothing to do with actual depression, same as the paranoid-schizoid position has nothing to do with Schizophrenia or Schizoid Personality Disorder. (not sure how the term "famine" is related but feel free to elaborate.) It describes the way we view and perceive the world. It's only when we begin to recognise that people are both "good" and "bad" simultaneously, and once we recognise that bad also exists within ourselves as well, that we develop a more mature perspective on the world. This is the depressive position.

The way that individuals think on a "primal" level, as paerarru put it, definitely impacts society as a whole and affects the moralising narratives that we tell ourselves. In fact the paranoid-schizoid position is especially useful in understanding how a whole society or social group justify genocide, starvation, crimes against humanity, and other forms of organised and systematic violence that they perpetrate against others, because none of this is even possible without the separation of 'good' and 'evil'. How do you justify bombing little children, while at the same time claiming to be the most moral army in the world? You have to separate good and bad while projecting all of the bad onto the 'other'.

So part of my earlier point was that fear causes us to regress to these more primitive mental states.

On the subject of mental health though I recommend the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. As someone who suffers from a personality disorder myself I found it especially interesting how trauma affects the brain and nervous system.