Psychoanalysis begins with a joke that only works because it fails: the patient arrives burdened with paranoia, anxiety, and unhappiness, and the doctor replies that this is simply the human condition. (Cure denied.) The moment this is understood, the structure collapses. The consulting room becomes a mirror, not a remedy, and what it reflects is not pathology but pattern. Identity, decomposed into ego, superego, object relations, and internalised authority, reveals itself as a negotiated truce between incompatible forces, but only under the rubric of scientific materialism and its characteristic deterministic overreach. This framing is not false, but partial. It flattens experience into mechanism, compresses interior life into functional components, and mistakes descriptive reduction for ontological truth. Suffering is not an error. It is the baseline. Buddha’s life meets Ned Kelly’s: life is suffering, such is life. And in that collision, clarity emerges. To see this is not resignation. It is release.
Capitalism does not create this fragility. It exploits it. It converts lack into motion, insecurity into fuel, dissatisfaction into perpetual demand. Desire becomes a treadmill, comparison a reflex, jealousy a scheduling system, sorrow a commodity. The economy does not grow by resolving tension, but by maintaining it at just the right amplitude, keeping subjects permanently unfinished, always approaching fulfilment at the precise speed required to never reach it. Contentment is structurally dangerous. It halts circulation. So the culture teaches longing, rehearses envy, scripts insufficiency into everyday perception. Sorrow sells because it moves, and what moves begins to feel like truth. Understanding this is the cure, because it breaks the spell. Not by eliminating suffering, but by removing its authority.
Daedelus Kite 