Human resilience

I have two things to write about today: firstly human resilience and apathy, and secondly about class, conspicuous consumption and my personal experiences.

Human resilience is noted in the news every day, since it makes wonderful 'human interest' stories, and is a very common topic for fiction (and, of course, biography, of which there is far too much nowadays). It is the capacity of humanity to deal with adverse events. Usually the news and fiction describe events that would be unusual or extraordinary here, and invite us to respect and admire, and depending on the person, support the humans who are demonstrating such spirit. You can think of your own favourite example. Do it now.

Resilience also has a more narrow psychological definition (
http://www.nh.gov/safety/divisions/hsem/behavhealth/documents/loss_trauma.pdf), which is the ability to deal with adverse life incidents without psychological trauma. This is in contrast with recovery, which involves short-lived trauma but a return to normal. As the references artical makes clear, psychology has rather ignored the subject of resilience, regarding it as pathological. Normal people do experience terrible grief and are unable to function at first, but normally recover. Psychology can help accelerate recovery, and cause recovery in those unfortunate individuals who experience chronic symptoms (post-traumatic stress disorder). This chimes with popular culture, which suggests that normal, healthy and balanced people feel everything, preferably deeply, but 'recover'.

The article takes issue with psychological opinion because psychology has ignored resilience, and treated resilient and recover-ed/ing individuals as the same. Apparently resilience is often far more common than recovery. Resilience appears to be normal, especially for life-threatening and dangerous events such as assault and robbery. People achieve resilience in different ways, which in other situations could be maladaptive.

I started thinking about this subject earlier today because it occurred to me that resilience and apathy are two sides of the same coin. What we laud as resilience in bad situations is exactly the same thing that we decry as apathy in others. I have for some time now mentioned to people when the subject arose that I have found that people with bad childhoods tend to fall apart when they escape from those situations. I have known a number of people, with whom I have had personal and in-depth conversations, who had very unpleasant childhood experiences. I have known many people count me as such a person... Such children display hard-working and high-achieving personalities: we were successful at school and maybe at university. But as such people reach a stage at which one would expect them to bloom, nothing much happens. It is my belief that it is the resilience that allowed them to cope that also causes them to fade when the problems are gone. Even the dull life of mediocre achievement seems good enough compared to their past experiences. This is almost certainly not conscious: it must be in the stress responses, or lack of them, that make motivation hard when life seems relaxing.

I think that it is vital to realise that it is the same character trait that is simply useful in one situation and maladaptive in another. I will quote the article itself for support:
'...whereas those who cope well with bereavement are sometimes viewed as cold and unfeeling, those who cope well with life-threatening events are often viewed in terms of extreme heroism.'

All I set out to do here was contrast our opinions of heroes and villains, as has also been done in fiction in the past. Heroes rise above trauma to defeat villains, who are cold and unfeeling and cause trauma. But both have a heroic nature: they are resilient. Both also are socially maladapted: they are emotionally distant. The article explains other mechanisms for resilience other than distance, including arrogance. That seems even less appealing.

Similarly, we admire the starving orphans in India who scour rubbish tips for a fe rupees worth of goods. They have resilience. And yet we despise our own citizens who take no interest in political issues and not only ignore the plight of those starving children, but ignore even political opportunities in this country. I want to suggest that those two things are the same: it is all resilience. I am a resilient, hardy character. Personal things don't change me. I once knew a singularly unpleasant person, and had a discussion about whether I could best be compared to a giant oil tanker, splitting the waves of positive and negative experience, or a little coracle, remaining afloat even as I rode them. I stick with the tanker metaphor, although she did her best to sink me, just to experience the thrill of power over my emotions. Making me feel bad was apparently better than not affecting my feelings at all. I wonder if I'll ever understand love...
Opposites attract, so I suppose if I end up with one person, it'll be someone who really does experience every little thing as great and important. That way the two of us will have a balanced view of life.
Enough of me, though.

Yesterday I caught the end of the film 'The Truman Show' on television. The whole world watched a dramatic ending on television, and the final scene showed one man asking another "see what else in on". Humans can have incredibly moving experiences and recover. It could be a terrible tragedy, such as the death of one's family and the loss of one's legs, which a few years on has someone saying "I'm just as happy as I was before", as has been shown (I think I've linked to it before: a study asked lottery winners and new paraplegics to rate their happiness some time after the event, and paraplegics were very marginally happier, although the two groups were almost identical). But that exact ability to cope with disaster is the same ability to cope with triumph: we treat those two things just the same.
Humans can have incredibly moving experiences, that we might hope would reform their natures and make them better people, and they remain the selfish and thoughtless creatures they have always been.

Faced with this incredible inertia of human character, it's no wonder that rulers, teachers and philosophers the world over have given up on improving the human condition; hermits left humanity behind, their misanthropy only the result of long experience of sharing wisdom and finding it squandered. A villain is merely a hero who has known humanity for too long. If people are selfish and stubborn, and generally cope with any situation, why not oppress them instead of helping them, if one has the power?

It is not enough for us to be resilient. What separates a hero and a villain is not their character, but their situation. A heroic nature that is rich and powerful will be a villain, without the principles and conscious effort to restrain himself. If I ever earn much money, it only then that I should be judged. I deserve no respect for enduring an unpleasant childhood quite yet. We need to respect Stoic principles of thought and conscious self-control and improvement, rather than subconscious resilience. Every human is resistant to change, and has a natural tendency to revert to human nature, for both good and ill. This resilience is only respectable when it is harnessed and controlled: when a person has the insight to improve himself when change is good, control himself when selfishness is tempting, direct himself when thoughtlessness is normal and resist change only when it is harmful. It is self-control and self-direction that needs our praise, and not every instance of resilience fits that description.

It is the triumph of free will over instinct; of thought over human nature, that we should pursue and acclaim.