Yes, the noun “obsessionism“, the art of obsessing, is a neologism, but the concept is so important to get a full picture of animal psychology… that it deserves a name!
Understanding human psychology is always an exploration in what makes sense. Obsessionism makes sense. Could it affect Artificial Intelligence? Yes, and there has been examples. Another reason to assess the concept.
Human beings have hard lives: they are born, often apparently in pain, and it doesn’t improve much thereafter, pain being all too much of a life-long companion, and then human beings decay, in the most optimal case, that’s called graceful aging, and thereafter they die, often in great pain.
How to stand this sadistic circus called life? Prehistoric man didn’t have the time or inclination to ask such a question. Struggle for life occupied every instant. But modern man doesn’t have to work and fear all day long, and the question of what the human condition is for, and why it should be suffered, arises naturally. Such is a new fate attached to civilization.
To make the human condition bearable, a measure of apparent control has to be acquired. By inventing for oneself, for one’s own brain, tasks which are supposed to dominate the universe with their importance, but tasks which one can master as a human being.
Take an example I encountered. A youngish man, with a brain tumor. He was successfully operated on, but if the cancer comes back, he is done for, because he can’t be operated again. In one of his properties, an apartment, a little leak came from above. Then what does he do? He becomes obsessive about it. He can’t live like that, it’s the neighbors’ fault… He goes and disturbs the neighbors, brings them down to his apartment, shows them the damage, explaining to them his life is ruined… All of this because of a wet spot not even a foot long…
Now apartments in a building are separated by common areas. So the victim of the leak has to contact building management, which in turn calls a plumber. However that would not create the obsessive distraction of a grudge, or conflict with the neighbors… An excellent way to forget about one’s brain tumor.
Having obsessions about ridiculous matters is a drug which alleviates the pain the human condition suffers from… absent immediate tasks at hand. True, if one fighting against, or fleeing from lions, one suffers from no existential pain, no vague a l’ame, no depressive condition, no pessimism, no angst, etc.
Obsessionism can go from the small and puny, obsessing about fashion, crumbs, or body fluids (as in the famous movie Doctor Strangelove), to the most massive conflicts, such as the Nazis with their Lebensraum, or their alleged victimization at the hands of the Jews, or Putin’s denial that Ukraine is a nation. Or then the obsession of many religious sects for killing heretics, namely people like them, close at hand, with a difference. Neighbors are best for being victims of obsessions…
Psychoanalysis was long obsessed with Freud’s silly penile obsessions… Or the obsessions of others too: because if one wants to be obsessed, nothing is better than a pre-packaged obsession.
Absent external business, minds invent for themselves cognitive and emotional fields in which to deploy passions. So, for example, racism is generally a product not just of tradition, but also of obsessionism. For example Gaza is organized in such a way that obsessing about Israel comes naturally…
It’s high time to be obsessed by obsession, because obsessiveness obsesses best about man-made conflicts.
Want peace? Analyze obsessions and why the obsessed obsesses, deep down inside! Right, human brains are made to be busy… so giving the opportunity for mental activities worthy of human beings is how to fight obsessionism. (That’s how appeasement itself can be a source of conflict!)
Obsession with mountains is particularly rewarding, as an existential distraction, because, when one is in the mountains, with their abysses, storms and avalanches, one’s life is quickly so obviously on line, that all of one’s brain gets mobilized. So one replaces one’s sad human condition with a desperate, literal clinging to it… Thus transforming what was unbearable with what one desperately wants to go back to, all the worth in the universe… It could be as simple as something flat to lay on…
Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 