Our Culture of Dysphoria

The following post has been brought to you in part by:


Click here to find out if Havidol® is right for you!

What aspects of western dominant culture are the most insidious and pose the greatest challenge to the church? I often hear that it is evolution, gay rights, abortion, and the prevailing doctrine of "tolerance." Someone with more patience than me can wade through the ocean of misconceptions and erroneous interpretations at work in the current debate over these issues. However, I would like to suggest an often overlooked aspect of our culture that seems to be a greater challenge than the above hot-button issues, and that is this this culture's cultivation of dysphoria (A state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life. The opposite of euphoria).

In the early years of the church Christians would actually prepare themselves for various kinds torture in order to confess Christ even under the most grueling of circumstances. Such stories of Christians resisting threats of excruciating torture stands in stark contrast to the stories of many western Christians who find it almost unbearable to be in a state of discomfort.

We do not have to look far to find examples of the fact that our current economy is contingent upon a society that is compelled to buy products that avoid discomfort and promise a life of ease, comfort and convenience. This compulsion to buy such things is provoked by the cultivation of dysphoria. Why else would I be compelled to buy a remote control that does much more than merely control my tv from a remote distance?

So what? you might ask. Well, this might sound redundant, but if we continually make choices that avoid discomfort, then it seems to follow that we are going to be predisposed to make choices that avoid discomfort. This cannot be good. Again, this is in stark contrast to early Christians who put themselves in positions that made them endure discomfort, pain, and even the threat of death so as to predispose themselves to not be as influenced by those things. That is to say that while the early Christians were predisposed to resist coercion even under torture, contemporary Christians are predisposed to be persuaded to do some pretty stupid things with nothing but the threat of discomfort.

If western Christians were transported to the time of Nero, what would it take to get us to deny Christ - threaten to withhold a side item from a the menu; threaten to withhold drugs for our attention, mood, or weight disorder; threaten to make us be seen in clothes from 80's?