Addicted to Grievance
This article was first published in the Minden Times in September, 2024.
A psychiatry professor from Yale named (perhaps inconveniently for googling) James Kimmel has determined that the brain circuitry activated by a sense of grievance are very similar to those activated by addiction to substances. The brain gets as much pleasure planning revenge for injustices, real or imagined, as it does anticipating its next hit of opioids. Very scary thought.
Kimmel’s work is foundational to a book called the Age of Grievance written by Frank Bruni, a regular writer for the New York Times, who expounds further on the social feedback loops that nurture and accelerate grievance, especially but not exclusively social media. This has become pivotal in political warfare. Evidence of this mechanism in action? Americans had their Jan 6 attack on the White House, Canadians had our three-week ‘Freedom Convoy’ occupation in Ottawa.
And, on a daily basis, we have evidence that politics has indeed become warfare – in the rhetoric in Question Period, at news scrums, wherever microphones or TV cameras are present. It’s a problem. We need leaders who drive looking at the road ahead, not the carnage in the rear view mirror.
We also need a society that practices at least a modicum of civility so that politicians – and others who service society in other ways – are not under constant attack, which activates their defence system, and probably also lights up their grievance circuitry. Because the grievance mechanism works whether or not the injustice is real. So everybody can feel hard done by all the time. It can be – perhaps has become – the attitude du jour.
Beam me up, Scotty! This is not the world I want to inhabit.
So how can we mere mortals begin to turn this thing around?
Well, interesting you should call us mere mortals, because recently I was indulging in a re-read of Robertson Davies, whose writing puts me in mind of a bird’s nest, a well-constructed cozy little home comprised of a melange of sticks and stuff that is occasionally pokey in uncomfortable ways.
In What’s Bred in the Bone, Davies closes each section of his protagonist’s life story with a conversation between two non-mortals, the Lesser Zadkiel who was the Angel of Biography, the keeper of life stories, and the Daimon Maimas, who explains how he guided the life of the mortal who’d been assigned to him, Francis Cornish. He rejects as sour milk the idea of guarding his mortal: no, his job was to curate the difficulties that befell Francis so as to urge him gently toward being the best man he could be.
Tough love writ celestial, I’d say.
And quite possibly the cure for what ails us. The Daimon’s specialty was creativity; he curated the circumstances that had the potential to teach Francis something useful about who he was, pointing the way to finding his purpose in life. He presented the opportunity; it was up to Francis what he did with it.
Davies was a staunch Protestant who was cynical about religion, so he doesn’t go all bible-y about ‘to whom much is given, much is expected’, but that’s clearly understood. Francis was born to privilege, but also to a fairly messed-up family (the Daimon at work) and left to the care and nurture of a colorful cadre of individuals who were not born to privilege but nevertheless made a life of meaning, the pokey sticks of which Francis’s nest was made. None were heroic. None were perfect. All were striving, more or less, to make the best of what they were given.
That – okay, work ethic-y -- approach to life didn’t leave much room for judgement: you do your best and presume that others do likewise, and if they don’t, well, they’re the poorer for wasting the life granted them. Call me old-fashioned, but meaning and purpose is what gets me out of bed in the morning and I can’t see a lot wrong with it.
Even if I don’t understand or agree with the purpose of the other. There’s probably a Daimon at play there, and taking advantage of creativity is something you do, not something that happens to you. And who am I to know, let alone judge, the details of the challenge others face? The Daimon Maimas had to think quite hard to recall the details of what he’d conjured and why and how it all worked over time for Francis.
So whether we understand brain circuity or not, the scary thought that feelings of grievance are addictive need not be a death knell for civility and civilization. It’s not the first and won’t be the last addiction our society flirts with. It can be the one we embrace – or at least accept -- as an opportunity to find a way to be our own best person.
