How do we best understand the relationship between politics and anxiety?
Nick Dorzweiler, professor of the practice of political science and women’s and gender studies at Wheaton College, delves into this.
Faculty Bio:
Nick Dorzweiler joined Wheaton College in 2015, after completing doctoral work at Northwestern University. His research is guided by an overarching interest in the history of the social sciences and its impacts on political life beyond the academy. Nick has published on topics including the politics of popular culture, the history or the social sciences, democratic theory, feminist pedagogy, and the development of Critical Theory in the American academy in outlets such as Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Polity, Constellations, New Political Science, and The History of the Human Sciences.
Nick is a passionate teacher, and has developed courses at Wheaton that span the fields of international relations, political theory, and women’s and gender studies. In each of his classes, Nick seeks to uncover the history of our present in order to encourage his students to think deeply about who we are, how we got here, and where we can go – both as individuals and as members of larger political communities.
Transcript:
We live, we’re told, in an age of exceptional anxiety – a “polycrisis” of political polarization,
economic uncertainty, environmental collapse, and rapid technological change. But this isn’t the
first time Americans have felt this way. In the late 1930s, the US faced a similarly overwhelming
slate of challenges, from the Great Depression to the rising specter of world war to dizzying
technological innovation.
My research unearths a provocative but forgotten effort to manage Americans’ collective anxieties during this period of deep social and political uncertainty.
In 1939, the influential political scientist Harold D. Lasswell created Human Nature in Action, an
NBC radio show that presented itself as an entertaining self-help program on how to manage
personality quirks and get along better with others. Behind the friendly advice, however, was a
far more ambitious mission: training citizens to adjust themselves to their anxieties before they
could be expressed in in ways that Lasswell thought were pathological. This included everything
ranging from individual expressions of sociopathy to mass revolutionary uprisings.
In uncovering this remarkable effort to manage citizens’ mental health, my work explains why
one of the most famous scholars of the twentieth century believed the public needed this program
of mass psychotherapy – and why the nation’s largest broadcaster agreed.
Yet there is contemporary relevance here, too.
Indeed, the propagandistic methods Lasswell felt he needed to use to achieve his objectives suggests we may need new ways of understanding the relationship between politics and anxiety.
While Lasswell hoped to create a society free from anxiety, I draw on insights from existential psychiatry and related scholarship in humanistic psychology to argue that a more realistic – and democratic – approach is to nurture an appreciation for certain experiences of anxiety as inevitable yet also meaningful components of living in a world defined by pluralism, freedom, and growth.
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