ABSTRACT
The prospect for happiness in our new globalized world, despite all of its advances, is no less difficult then it was in Freud’s time. In fact, in very concrete ways, the job of advancing human rights the world-over is actually beyond the pale of anything previously expected of civilization. As such, and at least for the foreseeable future, global civil society and its oceanic awareness is a chimera. But why is such a promise impossible? For Freud, it is not only human resistance to society (as explored in Chapter 3) but also the nature of human nature. Despite all of our global advances, we (humans) still struggle with our primitive global fears, in-group/out-group competition, instincts (i.e., sex, rage, aggression, death, etc.), cognitive biases, emotional distortions, a resistant to making sacrifices for others, a preference for kin and kind over strangers, xenophobia, and a nostalgic desire to retreat from the present to some nonexistent past. If, then, we are to make any progress in terms of global civil society, we need to address these social psychological concerns; hence the purpose of this chapter: it builds on the concept of global fear to examine the current phenomena of nostalgic retreat and the social psychological reasons why people presently struggle to embrace their global commitments.
