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Mass society, with its demand for work without responsibility, creates a gigantic army of rival, envious siblings. Their chief conflict is characterized, not by oedipal rivalry, struggling with the father for the privileges of liberty and power, but by sibling envy directed at neighbors and competitors who have more than they.
-- Alexander Mitscherlich, Society Without the Father (translated by Eric Mosbacher)
Kierkegaard considered the present age to be one of thought, brooding, and considering, rather than action: “This reflective tension ultimately constitutes itself into a principle, and just as in a passionate age enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so in an age which is very reflective and passionless envy is the negative unifying principle.”
In the sibling society, people adopt false selves in order to be more like one another, in order to be invisible, agreeable, and passionless. “Go along and get along.” There is very little praise. “People come and go in the Tate,/Saying Michelangelo is not that great.”
Some falsify the self to bring it in line with the irresistible sibling unreality. When people talk, they talk of personal failures, but usually avoid other deep anxieties, for example, over the fate of children or of the earth itself. Oprah Winfrey does not offer shows titled “People Who Fought for Wetlands and Lost.”
-- Robert Bly, The Sibling Society
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