After a time, my reaction to this comment on my trauma post was “What’s so ‘great’ about ‘the Great War’ anyway?”. Not much—I suggest. Well, he calls it “the Great War” to suggest it was a great thing, just like the men who fought it (who didn’t complain—apparently, just sparked the Russian Revolution and WWII; so not beyond reproach, as it turns out). Well, perhaps he just means “big” but from the context I’d say not—it’s about how you can’t criticise them or “the Greatest Generation”. In fact, “the Great War” is just a phrase invented by journalists—just like “the war to end all wars” (another lie).
The comment begs the question—the men who fought World War I and World War II were traumatised. As such, the comment illustrates the original point: if you say people are traumatised, all you get is denial or reaction formation. “They never complained, they just got on with it.” Well, who built this world that currently has so many problems? The people who “never complained and just got on with it”—talk about the blind leading the blind; to be blind is a virtue in this worldview—some of us would like to remove the blindfold and see. So perhaps the post-war generations decided to create societies that replicated their trauma and so re-traumatised the next generations? It’s possible—unless you think they’re beyond reproach, unless you’ve taken them as your gods.
As I said in the original post, the problem is that the left has monopolised “trauma” as a concept—what they mean when they say it is “narcissistic display” to gain power over other people. In response, conservatives just lock down against the manipulation. People never talk about real trauma; if you show weakness, humans just attack you for it—so the trauma that is displayed, mainly by the left, is faked “acceptable trauma” not real trauma. Hence the actual problem goes unaddressed.
The commenter zeros in on “lack of positive outlets”—probably with himself in mind; he’s sure he’s a good person—if only he were allowed a bigger platform. The type he really has in mind are impudent manipulators and liars who push people over in the mud and then say, “Oh, did that hurt? Life’s hard, eh? You should just get on with it like I do.”
It contains resentment—resentment is a right-wing emotion. “We have a problem here.” “People in the past just got on with it.” (metacommunication: “Shut up—I’m not interested.”). Resentment and emotional manipulation. In fact, the way to improve the world is not “positive outlets” but to remove the bad—in particular, to remove the thorn that is still in the lion’s paw so it can heal. Until we identify the thorn, nothing will improve—until we admit the problem, we can’t remove the thorn. People will just be told to “get on” and walk on the injured paw—until the thorn has dug right in and poisoned everything.
As an aside, I’d like you to consider that what has happened post-1945 is highly abnormal in human history—mass immigration, mass pornography, mass transgenderism, mass divorce. Wars have been fought for generations—the world wars traumatised people because they used the masses and put them in industrial meat grinders; humans are built to fight, but not like that.
However, they are built to fight. What has happened post-1945 is much more abnormal—Satanic, in fact—and so, arguably, much more likely to traumatise people; it has involved considerable lies, double-binds, and gas-lighting (not least because the mobilised “state of emergency” war economy never stopped after the wars but instead grew—and a war economy is a lie economy; we are in permanent mobilisation to solve various “crises”—and each solution makes the problems worse). Bottom line: Westerners are traumatised and because our societies worship victimhood they are calibrated to create trauma—to create high-status people; and until the thorn is identified it will continue.