PU #254 - UNRESOLVED - Why We’re Still Struggling With Collective Trauma
I have written about this before but with the recent remembrance events for 9/11 coinciding with my reaching the 2001 section in David Sedaris’ first collection of diaries and his own memories of the time bringing it all back, I couldn’t help but return to the thought: on September 11th, 2001, many of us across the world watched thousands of people die on live TV. Many more watched the deaths on replay later. We watched the deaths, and we got no help at all to deal with it.
It would be weird, right, were I to witness a murder out on the streets and then just get back on with my life without properly dealing with the trauma? To just put it behind me, bar maybe the new wearing of a small badge on my lapel to reassert some desperate confidence in the symbols of my old life, and an annual pledge that I will “never forget” the awful events that I saw and cannot forget.
Of course I’ll never forget it — what I saw would imprint itself on my soul for the rest of my life. I watched someone get killed!
We understand now that soldiers returning from our two World Wars weren’t simply “shell-shocked”, as we so quaintly called it, but utterly messed up with the significant trauma of witnessing so much death and destruction and having their own lives be in constant jeopardy. We recognise, now, the need for a proper debrief for those returning from conflict. Therapy. Counselling. Time to recover. But not then.
Having lived in the world before 9/11, I believe I can say with some authority that the world started to lose its collective mind in the weeks, months, and years that passed those tragic events. Weeks, months, and years that also coincided with the rise of the internet and the internet’s ability to polarise and outrage, spreading misinformation, hate, and horror quicker than at any previous point in human history.
Was it the internet? Or was it the internet put into the hands of a deeply traumatised public still reeling from the massacre they watched on TV?
The sort of massacre people in other parts of the world were well used to. The type of thing they had historically been privy to the live show of. Bombs dropping on their homes, the bodies of friends and loved ones strewn bloodily across the rubble that once was their neighbourhood. In some ways it was a sign of our privilege that so many of us had managed to avoid seeing something like that for so long.
But we did see it:
Buildings falling with people still inside.
The ones who jumped before the buildings fell.
The ones in the planes, phoning their loved ones in terror as they saw from the windows their fate.
We saw it all.
And all the wars that followed.
The rendition and torture.
The further attacks.
The decapitation videos online.
For many years, teaching ethics to thirteen year olds, I used to ask my classes to admit if they had seen any of those beheading videos people were sharing on the internet. Too many young hands went up, and so soon I stopped asking.
They too had seen a murder, shared to them innocuously through their phones. Watched it along with music videos and videos of animals doing hilarious things, and then got off the bus to school and went about their lives. No therapy. No counselling. No acknowledgment that they had just witnessed somebody really die. Keep calm and carry on.
And the world got worse. Angrier. Irrational. Self-destructive.
If one of those soldiers returned from war and showed these same behaviours, what would we say?
If our friend who had witnessed a murder on the streets began to act uncharacteristically angry, irrational, and self-destructive, would we perhaps suggest they speak to a professional about it? Someone who could help them work through what they were feeling?
And then, of course, the world shut down in 2020. More deaths. Less visible — we didn’t always see the bodies — but we sure saw the statistics. The fatal curves on all the graphs. The shocking images of intubated patients. The empty streets. The sounds of ambulance sirens blaring eerily into the too-quiet air. The eerily empty funerals.
And we lost our real-life connections to each other. Our physical spaces. Our previous way of life.
Meanwhile some discovered that they hated the partner they were now trapped inside a bubble with. Others discovered they hated their kids. Worse still, many discovered the person they shared a life with was violent, or drunk, or cheating on them, or any number of horrors that they were now locked down with.
Many discovered they hated their jobs; the way they lived their old lives.
Others discovered they loved their jobs and now missed them dearly. Their colleagues. Their friends. Their favourite haunts: pubs, restaurants, places to socialise and feel free.
Another mass trauma suffered collectively, yet alone.
And instead of reckoning with it, we re-opened the world as soon as we could, racing back to normal without looking back. Without confronting the trauma. Without speaking of it again for fear it might come back.
We put it behind us.
And the world got worse still. More angry. More irrational. More self-destructive…
All that time on our computers, living virtually and falling down rabbit-holes. Our minds co-opted and colonised by algorithms designed to encourage sensationalist clicks-for-profit and gather data on us to be sold to the highest bidder. Our dependency on tech normalised and embedded just in time for the advent of AI a few years later. The ever-present large language models that are impossible to avoid by design, encouraged to let them do even more of our thinking for us.
Again — our returning soldier, our friend who witnessed a murder: we see them start to retreat more and more from the world, spend more time in isolation, talk to artificial chatbots and imaginary friends instead of other people, find themselves distracted to the point of obsession by niche ideas and conspiracy theories… Do we think they are dealing with their trauma well? Do we not all agree that they need help?
It remains my conviction that life in 2026 can only be properly explained as the psychological consequence of multiple generations now suffering deep and unresolved traumas from a range of violent global shocks that we have utterly failed to create the appropriate structures for us to process healthily. That we are acting out in dangerous ways and normalising our pathology because we have still not collectively dealt with witnessing mass-murder on an unprecedented scale and living through a terrifying and life-altering pandemic (not to mention coexisting uneasily every year of with the clear growing evidence of widespread ecological collapse and there being no clear plan to deal with that either).
Until we take such traumas seriously, therefore — until we get ourselves the help we collectively need; a truth and reconciliation commission for the last quarter of a century — it is my sad conclusion that we will continue to spiral only deeper and deeper into the abyss.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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