ABSTRACT
The Brexit vote; the election of Trump; the upsurge of European nationalism; the devolution of the Arab Spring; global violence; Chinese expansionism; disruptive climate change; the riotous instabilities of the world capitalist system—all these events share a common denominator: they are less a failure of policy or politics and more a complex social psychological reaction (mostly negative) to globalization and our global commitments; the results of which presently threaten our survival. As this introduction explains, this study overcomes a major limitation in the literature: based on a critical reading of Freud’s Civilization and its discontents (1930) it constructs a complex social psychology of how people, the world over, are addressing globalization. More specifically, drawing on the latest advances in the cognitive, social and complexity sciences, it constructs a global model of defiance and the triangular tensions between nostalgic retreat, global aggression and civil society, as manifested across the global web of life—from nostalgic resentment and global fear to heterosexist-patriarchy and LGBTQI issues to revolting elitism and neoliberal aggression to racism and ethnic-nationalism to the death instinct and ecological aggression. All to reveal how globalization and its discontents manifest the darker reaches of the human psyche and its conflicted relations with others and itself.
