Death Wish, Watch Function, and Our Security Mania (article)

Neither I nor my teachers in psychoanalytic training were ever fans of the idea of a universal death wish. When you turn to Freud’s writings you discover he overwhelmingly focuses on death wishes against fathers, mothers, uncles, sisters and other specific individuals. I decided long ago that I would have to turn elsewhere to explain why suicide is so much more prevalent than homicide in our society and why we are obsessed with bad news and danger. Mass media news programs have 20 negative, violent items for every happy news item; and now there has been a proliferation of news sources on cable television with others rushing to emulate CNN’s great success with a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week news format. All of this news gives us things to worry about while it also reassures us that we are alive and well in our homes, unlike the people in the news. Numerous additional elements are involved including voyeurism and the pleasure one feels at the displeasure of others, what the Germans call Schadenfreude.

News Coverage of the TWA Flight 800 crash on July 17, 1996, off Long Island serves as a good example of the focus on danger, tragedy, and bad news. Reputable news organizations, such as National Public Radio’s Lehrer News Hour, even abandoned their scheduled news and devoted their entire program to the tragedy. The night before, radio coverage of the New York Yankees baseball game was interrupted by Curtis Sliwah and the ABC news staff who gave news coverage to speculations and the eye witness accounts of people who saw very little. For those of you who do not know the name Curtis Sliwah, he is head of the Guardian Angels (a New York City subway vigilante group) and a talk radio personality who fabricated attacks on himself to increase his ratings. The real issue is, why do we, the listening, reading and viewing public, focus so on these tragedies? Clearly, there are many reasons (for example, we could have been on the plane), but I will focus on one that helps to explain this behavior over time.

For tens of millions of years our human and primate ancestors needed to know about danger and to work together in order to survive. Food and shelter came after the needs of survival in the face of common dangers, which no one individual could overcome alone. For example, individually we humans cannot see behind ourselves. To survive, our ancestors had to be vigilant, to keep watch: I call this the “watch function.” Despite our much-talked-about individualism, we still look to each other in

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times of crisis. Television and other means of mass communication have created what Marshall McLuhan called the “global village.” Crisis restores our sense of community in a world of anomie.

As I learned over 20 years ago from one of my teachers of psychoanalysis, disruptions always take precedent over the official program because that is what our emotions are focused upon. Terrorists rely on this process to disrupt our peace of mind and no amount of security will stop their inroads into that peace. To reassure ourselves, as well as for protection, we now have car alarms, computer passwords, doormen, an enormous number of keys, metal detectors, police, a record number of young men in jails, security guards and security systems. Though the crime rate, especially in the New York area, has been going down for a number of years, the security industry is booming. These days it is not uncommon to see people frantic because they are excluded by the forgetting of passwords or the loss of keys and ID (identification) cards. Status is some organizations is determined by the level of security clearance. At a minimum, these systems create an enormous inconvenience.

Before proceeding, I want to clearly state that there are lots of real dangers in this world which we must guard against; my focus here is on how we process them and allocate our psychic and physical resources.

At my college, located across from a horse farm in a beautiful and relatively safe environment, I start my day at 7:30 A.M. waiting for a security guard to view me on the video monitor and to “buzz me in” to a parking area. Next, I wait for a security guard to let me in to a computer room (with only one old computer!). Soon thereafter, I discover I am locked out of using the office computer because I don’t know the secretary’s newly installed password. Then I am barred from photocopying a quiz because the electronic key to the copying machine is locked up. To get on the Internet I must provide one password, to get my voice mail messages I need another password, and to access student records I need two separate passwords! My office, filled with valuable books and a number of items worth stealing, is on a busy corridor. Yet the campus is so safe that for 25 years, whenever I am on campus, I have left my office door unlocked without ever missing an item. Lest the reader credit the safety of my office for 25 years to the security measures I am lamenting, I want to note that most of these are very recent innovations. Their introduction leaves me feeling more intruded upon than safer.

As much as “security” is reassuring, it also costs an enormous amount of time and inconvenience. When we empower gatekeepers (doormen, police, secretaries, security guards, and others), we risk being shut out or, at the minimum, kept waiting. On occasion, we discover that the gatekeepers act more like our masters than our servants. For example, when I have worked on Sundays a particular security guard has been offended by my very presence since at times of low activity he gets the feeling that he “owns” the place. I understand the feeling because I remember having it, though not expressing it, when I was a night security guard while working my way through graduate school.

Ramapo College is strapped for money partly because the State of New Jersey spends about three or four times as much on jails as on higher education. When the college was conceived in the late 1960s, the State spent approximately the same amount on advanced education as on jails. The tragedy is that every dollar spent on a jail helps make it more likely that a troubled young man will learn how to become a professional criminal and be incarcerated for the next 20-30 years. On the other hand, every dollar spent on higher education makes it more likely that young men and women will be productive taxpaying citizens. In my view, a reversal of the proportion of money spent on education and incarceration would improve our society. A valuable though small step in this direction is the college’s mentoring program which takes young men off the streets of Newark and helps to educate them, starting in high school.

Though I am keenly aware of the dangers in our world and quite vigilant, I am concerned about the growth of industries sometimes based on unrealistic fears. I wonder how we can apply our psychohistorical knowledge to better understand these issues. I also keep in mind that there is only complete security in the grave.

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