Freud and Mill on society's effect on individual psychology

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY and the BELIEFS of FREUD vs. MILL

The relationship between man and society has interested philosophers for thousands of years. On one hand, civil society needs structure and government institutions. They protect every individual from the abuse of the weakest by the strongest and from mob rule. On the other hand, the need to fit into the structure of society might also be responsible for many of the psychological problems experienced by people. Liberal philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, believed that the state is a protector of the individual but that the very fact that people in society disagree and have so many different ideas and beliefs are the most important reasons that civil societies grow and make social progress. To Mill, civil society grows and evolves because of the need of government and of society to find ways to give everybody what they want and to solve the conflicts that come up when people disagree. Mill argued that the form and structure of political institutions and government and law all owe their development to the nature of the conflicts in society that they must solve.

Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud, suggests that civilization may also have a very negative affect on people in society, even if the political institutions and government and social structure do provide certain protections and other benefits. According to Freud, there is a very big price paid by the individual for these benefits. To Freud, a lot of the psychological anxiety and other problems that people experience are actually the direct result of the need to fit into the institutions and social expectations created by civil society.

Analysis of Mill's Position

In 1859, John Stuart Mill authored his classic work, on Liberty. That same year, he also published his beliefs about why Western imperialism over the rest of the world was justified in hi a Few Words on Non-Intervention. In that work, Mill tried to give logical reasons to explain why the highly developed nations such as Britain and France were morally justified in taking over foreign lands that were already occupied by native societies and peoples. He was presenting his ideas as a response to other writers and philosophers who had questioned why Britain could just take over and control the societies of some of the foreign lands that they conquered by force. In on Liberty,

Mill tried to explain the difference between government suppression of individual rights and the proper role of government and the need to provide some social control to protect the rights and privacies of all members of society equally. Mill's analysis in on Liberty was more successful in some ways than in others. It was successful at making the argument that people in society deserve some protection from all sorts of "harms" and not just murder and other obvious physical harms. It was less successful at giving a logical way of drawing appropriate lines between what types of harms the government should protect people from and what kinds of harms the government should not protect people from if that means limiting the rights of others.

For example, Mill does succeed in proving that people have rights against economic harms and against certain types of harms from actions committed against them only indirectly (such as being lied about publicly). But Mill does not give any way to treat those kinds of harms differently from the "harm" caused by someone publicly expressing a very unpopular view that might offend many people. Today, we would consider public defamation to be a "wrong" and we would allow civil damages in a suit for defamation of character; but we would not censor "offensive" speech promoting atheism or polygamy on the steps of City Hall just because many people in society might consider it "harmful" to hear it. Mill provides no way to tell the difference between those types of "harms."

One might argue that Mill's other work from that same year, a Few Words on Non-Intervention, has even worse philosophical problems. For example, Mill just refers to the native peoples on some foreign lands as barbarous and then he uses that convenient characterization to argue that Britain did not have to follow moral rules about taking control over those societies by force. According to Mill, the only "justification" needed by the British is that the lands in question were occupied by barbarians and not by civilized peoples. Mill also argued that one of the recognized reasons that modern nations respect one another's boundaries and rights is the notion of reciprocity. That means civilized nations all agreed not to interfere with one another, and even to help protect one another against others who violated those agreements. Since the uncivilized foreign people could neither threaten nor protect other nations from violations of international agreements or laws, Mill considered them not to have any of the same rights to have their boundaries recognized by those nations that were cooperative on the international level.

This position is inconsistent with his other claim in the same work, that the rights of all "civilised" societies to national sovereignty prevent other from launching military force against them unless that force was justified because it was strictly for defensive purposes. He suggested that it was immoral for nations to interference in the foreign affairs of other nations for aggressive purposes. In this way, the weakness of a Few Words on Non-Intervention is similar to the weakness of on Liberty: the main philosophical distinction (between justified defensive foreign interference and unjustified aggressive foreign interference) is valid; but there is no basis provided by Mill for understanding how he defines "aggression" and "defense" in ways that support his conclusions about so-called "barbarous" or "uncivilised" but Mill relies only on his description of them as being "uncivilised."

Mill's only justification for ignoring the rights and will of uncivilised peoples is that they could only benefit from being taken over by more advanced societies. Mill cites the Ancient Roman conquests of Dacia, Gaul, Numidia, and Spain and asks, whether it can possibly be claimed that any of those civilizations suffered because they were taken over by superior civilizations. Mill provides a historical account of the ways that those nations benefited afterwards by sharing the culture and other social developments of the nations that conquered them.

According to Mill, these barbarous nations "… have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government are the universal rules of morality between man and man." That means that "superior" nations such as Britain could freely invade and dominate foreign lands even if they were already occupied if those native societies failed to meet the standards defined by Britain for what is a "civilized society." As long as they did not actually slaughter those populations the way Columbus and the other Spanish conquerors did a few centuries earlier, there was no moral reason that Britain should not just take over those nations as though they were unoccupied.

This position obviously goes together with Mill's belief that social and political progress come as the result of the natural conflicts and differences in desires among people in society. Mill's view was that modern nations such as Britain had already developed all of the necessary social structure and institutions to take care of the natural "barbarous" human beings that exist in the wild. In other words, the native peoples living in those barbarous conditions had not yet evolved enough to enjoy all of the benefits of civilized society. Mill's argument is that since there can be no question that civilized society in preferable to uncivilized society, and that life for people living in a civilized is much better than life for people living in a barbarous society. So, Mill believed that ancient Romans and the modern British were both morally justified taking over the native societies in the lands they conquered as long as those foreign peoples still lacked civilization. Therefore, to Mill, not only is civilization beneficial to mankind, but it is so beneficial that any society that lacks modern civility can be freely taken over by the more developed nations that are more civilized.

Personal Response and Conclusion

There is great value as well as some weaknesses in the positions of both Mill and Freud. Mill's view that the most important function of modern society and of government is to protect individuals from harms caused to them by others is valuable. That is a belief that is consistent with personal freedom and rights because recognizes the right to be free from threats from others. Mill's analysis might have failed to fully define the rights to which we are all entitled but it fully supports the idea that people are much better off living in civilized societies than they would ne fending for themselves in the wild.

Freud's position also has tremendous value, such as in the idea that some of the psychological problems of people are caused by society. However, Freud's view of the relative uselessness of the Golden Rule may be less helpful, because it assumes that the rule cannot be enforced effectively by modern social institutions. In that respect, Freud's analysis might fail because it assumes that the only way a person can benefit from living in society is by following the Golden Rule blindly. Mill would argue, successfully, that it is unnecessary for every individual to love every other individual, as long as government can guarantee the equal protection from the selfishness of people toward one another if they do not genuinely "love" one another in their hearts and minds.