Perhaps you’ve heard the song Behind Blue Eyes by The Who. If you’re unfamiliar, The Who is the band that enables Horatio Caine to make puns about murder while simultaneously putting on or taking off his sunglasses. The song fits within the category of sad men being sad, but what makes it notable is that literally every single lyric is just the worst possible advice to follow whilst being a sad man.
Let’s go through it:
No one knows what it’s like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes
To start off, we have a basic paradox where if you’re relating to this song and taking its lyrics at face value, it already fails. By being able to relate to the song, someone besides the singer knows what it’s like to be the sad man. And like, tons of people have listened to and related to this song! I once heard in like a Ted Talk or something that depression is like a club with the most members in the world who don’t know about any of the other members. One of the best antidotes to depression is connection, and role modeling isolation, however valid it may feel in the moment, is so destructively counterintuitive!
No one knows what it’s like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies
Beyond the continued advocacy for self-alienation, we are now delving into the concept of determinism. I dislike determinism at the best of times, but using it to justify the hiding of one’s feelings as the only natural response to having those feelings is the worst. It’s the “I’m fine” where ‘fine’ is Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. I know talking about your feelings is like the reverse of conversion therapy, but being honest about them with other people is one of the only ways of processing and moving through them.
But my dreams, they aren’t as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance that’s never free
This one starts out okay, but then gets significantly worse. There is the initial recognition that hope can exist outside of the numbness associated with depression which is great! Thinking about the future lets psychiatrists know you’re not likely going to kill yourself! But then… we get to love being vengeance. Obviously our singer has experienced a lot of pain that he never let go, and positive feelings he once held have turned to bitter resentment.
People hold on to resentment usually because they believe that a personal injustice has been unpunished, that their pain is righteous, but that hurt only ever goes one way: inward. It’s not the heroic battle for good it purports itself to be. Forgiveness is great not just for social cohesion, but for the emotional catharsis that lifts the weight of that pain from our shoulders. People have a hard time with forgiveness because they believe the crime was unforgivably and biblically terrible or because forgiving someone must mean that you eliminate all established boundaries with them. However, your therapist will tell you that forgiveness isn’t always for the other person, but can be for yourself. The resentee usually isn’t even in your life anymore: it’s okay, my dude, let it go.
No one knows what it’s like
To feel these feelings
Like I do
And I blame you
Here our singer moves on to place the responsibility of his feelings on someone else. It would be nice if someone else could manage our feelings for us, but much like everything else in this song, believing this to be the case will make your situation significantly worse. Imagine going to the doctor’s office, and the doctor is late for the appointment. One person might be anxious because they believe bad luck leads to more bad luck; another might be frustrated because they managed their time well in being punctual, and now the rest of their day is going to be out of whack because of this; another might be relieved because they didn’t have an opportunity to emotionally prepare themselves previously, and now they have time to do so. The action of the doctor is the same in all three scenarios, but the emotional response is unique to the individual because we all have our own needs and contexts. The first needs reassurance, the second needs structure, the third needs reflection. Our feelings don’t come from the actions of other people, but are based on whether or not our own subjective needs are met. Other people can support us in strategies to meet those needs, but ultimately our needs, and therefore the causes of our feelings, come from within. There are an infinite number of ways to meet our needs, and if you’re caught up in blaming someone else for your emotions, you won’t find a single one because you’re not even looking at the right problem.
Our feelings, our reactions, our context being subjective doesn’t delegitimize them. Just because the whole world wouldn’t react the same way to something doesn’t mean that the feelings aren’t valid. Feelings are always valid because they’re reflective of needs that are or are not met. Strategies aren’t all valid in that they won’t all help, and the strategy of focusing outward on resentment and vengeance certainly doesn’t.
No one bites back as hard
On their anger
None of my pain and woe
Can show through
We’re back to hiding those tough-guy emotions, so I won’t repeat myself.
When my fist clenches, crack it open
Before I use it and lose my cool
When I smile, tell me some bad news
Before I laugh and act like a fool
And if I swallow anything evil
Put your finger down my throat
And if I shiver, please give me a blanket
Keep me warm, let me wear your coat
These last two verses are about the same, so I’ll do them together. This is when the song picks up, and you might expect some more informed lyrics to counteract all the bad advice that has been previously espoused. You’d be wrong. Our singer is still intent on having someone else manage his emotions for him. Not only does he not want to show emotions, but his ideal partner is the one where he doesn’t have to self-regulate whatsoever. This is an impossible standard to impose on anyone and will always be doomed to failure. He will return to the cycle of bitterness and resentment, and remain forever alone.
We got through it! What’s interesting about this song is that it was initially intended to be sung by the villain of an aborted rock opera that The Who tried putting together. The reason it would be awful to emulate is because you’re not supposed to emulate villains! Mystery solved!
Unfortunately, songs don’t come with warning labels indicating that their lyrics are meant to be villainous. The radio DJ is not going to outline, as I have, all of the proper ways to navigate depression prior to playing the tune; they’re just going to play it and cut to commercial. If you fast-forward to the early 2000s, the Attitude Era, when the wrestling was meaner, nu-metal was on the rise, and those with a propensity toward blue eyes began to be angry for what seemed like no reason, we have famed angry man Fred Durst covering this song with his group Limp Bizkit. The demographics catered to by Limp Bizkit are certainly different from those of The Who, and the tragedy of taking this song at face value becomes much more apparent. If you read the YouTube comments for the Limp Bizkit cover, you’ll see scores of people connecting to this through their own depression, or through someone they know who has passed away, one notably by suicide; you can plainly see that people are uncritically connecting to this song despite its concretely harmful message.
This isn’t unique to art. The villainous strategies to corrupt legitimate needs abound. Demagogues don’t provide warning labels either. The racist mass shooting in Buffalo was in response to real anxiety over the impacts of poor resource management on the future – a genuine cause for anxiety, but an obviously horrific strategy to meet the needs underlying that fear. Racism in general preys upon the need for security, reassurance, and belonging, and if it isn’t any of those needs, I bet there it’s one similar. The threats and fears may be real or manufactured, but the strategy to meet them is what is important. Sometimes the most effective strategy is to reevaluate the threat. Anxiety is not inherently intuitive, after all.
The thing is, though, Behind Blue Eyes is a great song, and it does connect very meaningfully to some very universal feelings of hurt and loneliness. There is a good reason why people respond to it the way they do, in the same way that people respond to racism or similar ideologies with equally terrible practical outcomes. It’s also why these ideas are so perniciously resistant to reason: they’re not based on reason!
A lot of the times people will convince themselves their beliefs are based on facts and logic because that’s far more modern than those rubes from before science was invented, but the same is true for all of us. Reason is a slave to the passions, after all. These people don’t need an argument, they need a hug and to be told they’ll be okay – even if, and perhaps especially if, an argument is what they’re clamouring for. We are driven by our emotions and our needs, that’s fine and valid, but we need to use our heads to arrive at strategies that will actually satisfy them lest we destroy ourselves or those around us.
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