"If human equality is to be forever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity."
George Orwell (1903-1950)
"That's the truest sign of insanity - insane people are always sure they're just fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit they're crazy."
Nora Ephron, Heartburn, 1983
Is the world sane or insane ? Trying to take a balanced view of human behaviour is fraught with problems. Which assumptions of normality should one hold in considering a global society ? Is it possible for the whole world to be insane ? Here we claim that not only is this possible, but to a large extent human behaviour must already be designated to be showing signs of pathological insanity.
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."Voltaire (1694-1778)
In systems thinking, any dynamic property found in a complex system at one level, can potentially also be found at other levels, so if it is accepted that an individual can be 'mad', then society in turn could exhibit the same effects. Insanity, under most definitions, can be regarded as behaviour that causes harm to the subject and/or to the society of which it forms a part. In other words it is people's inability, to distinguish fantasy from reality, to tell right from wrong, their failure to understand the true effects of their actions. Using the complex systems idea of fitness, raised previously in our metascience work, we can evaluate collective social behaviour based upon whether it acts to increase or decrease local or global quality of life for both humans and planet. When we do this some interesting results appear.
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The emphasis upon individuality, evident over recent decades, has usually been confused with a belief in selfishness. There is a large difference between having the freedom to make ones own decisions, and making such decisions in such a way that negatively impact upon others. In the first case we accept the desirability of being given choices, a say (if not a synergic veto) within our own lives, yet in the second we act to take that option away from others, by behaving in a way that closes down their choices, and they of course do exactly the same to ours. If we accept that other people deserve to make their own choices, just as much as we do, then wishing to control other people results in a pair of beliefs that prove to be contradictory and inconsistent. Whilst contradictory beliefs don't necessarily indicate insanity, they do point the way to such a disturbing possibility.
The "I'm all right Jack" attitude neglects the simple fact that we do not exist in isolation, we must coevolve with other people in our dealings with them. We cannot turn a blind eye to our effects upon them since they will not do so in return, and will invariably act in such a way as to retaliate for our negative impact upon their lives (whether real or imagined !). Depending upon our relative social power this retribution may be crude or subtle, but in either case will act to reduce our fitness - a negative-sum fitness effect.
"Psychiatry can be viewed as a methodology for the curtailment of the autonomous self-specifying feature of humanity. When an individual's specification of his own identity comes into conflict with ( no longer 'fits' with ) the range of identities offered by the particular society he constitutes, then he is defined as 'disturbed' . Whether or not he feels disturbed , others who are disturbed by him will make requests that he should be 'helped'. The implementation of psychiatric interventions (diagnosis, medication, hospitalization, surgery, etc.) are aimed at limitation of the individual's powers of self-specification. This is primarily achieved by transforming the individual into an 'allopoietic machine' by virtue of making a legally-binding diagnosis ( "schizophrenia", etc.) which effectively states that this person is disqualified from self-specifications and that we may ignore any such further inventions on his part. Asylums are full of 'patients' who have been ex-communicated from participating in the ongoing generation of the observer community's consensuality. Asylums are not social systems, since the members are legislated out of any true social existence."
Vincent Kelly, On the Subject of Autopoiesis and it's Boundaries, 1992
"This must be the context of our thinking - the context of human interdependence in the face of the vast new dimensions of our science and our discovery…the awful majesty of outer space."
Adlai Ewing Stevenson, Speech in Geneva, July 9, 1965
Our propensity to make single value simplifications in any situation, e.g. Catholic versus Protestant, Capitalist versus Communist, again assumes that all variables are independent. Yet we cannot attack an opponent without damaging aspects that we both have in common. These include the social infrastructure that makes up our towns and cities, the freedoms we both enjoy to make our own decisions, and the ability to travel without restriction. These losses, inevitable when conflict sets in, again show a strong negative effect upon our quality of life and overall fitness.
In a similar manner, the emphasis within science upon maths as 'truth' neglects all dimensions of value in our lives that cannot be forced into such numerical formulae. These missing dimensions of fitness lead to decisions being made on invalid and inadequate criteria. Decisions that canalize state space into options that bear little relationship to the real problems needing to be solved, just shows a divorce of mind from reality, and isn't that 'madness' ?
"Every bright spot the White House finds in the economy is like the policeman bending over the body in the alley and saying cheerfully: Two wounds are fatal. The other one is not so bad."
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
This isolationism is especially evident in the accountant focus underlying company decisions, where the 'money as king' belief neglects all effects upon the staff, upon customers, upon environment and even on the long term future of the company - in the interests of the here and now, one-dimensional, bottom line of profit.
The invalid linear assumptions endemic to economics, leads to financial behaviours that try to force the economy to conform to the formulae, rather than using formulae that accurately reflect the true motivations and behaviours of the business agents and investors. Taking theories that are known to be scientifically false and still applying them is not a sign of 'sanity'.
"What a chimera then is man ! What a novelty ! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy ! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe."
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 434, 1670
Half the world is starving, the other half are obese. Half the world wants peace, the other half are bombing each other to hell. We hype our political democracy, yet allow business dictators to enslave everyone. We say to our children, "tell the truth" and punish them when they don't, yet adults lie through their teeth endlessly and get away with it, scot-free. Schizophrenia or what ?
All the behaviours in this section are forms of the one-dimensional paradox.
"What is tolerance ? It is a necessary consequence of our humanity. We are all fallible, and prone to error; let us then pardon each other's folly. This is the first principle of natural right."
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
Kill, Kill, Kill
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
The use of lethal violence against others is endemic in our world, there has never been a time when there have not been multiple wars simultaneously raging across our globe, each of which is about (despite the associated rhetoric) little more than domination, imposing 'our' beliefs on others. But what is behind such destructive behaviour ? Why do people appear so threatened by other views ? There is a fundamental insecurity deep within us, an anxiety (because we cannot live up to our 'perfect' image of what we should be like), that takes the form of projecting our problems onto others and then trying to eliminate them by force, we hope to cleanse ourselves thereby... But we can never do that, we cannot 'bomb' our own fears, since those problems are self-created by our society, thus even when one 'enemy' is dealt with the problems are still there, and another mythical enemy must be then found, else we would be forced (horror of horrors) to face our own reality. This 'transference' is well known, a so called, 'mental illness', and it has now become a social one - one that we can only 'treat' by eliminating our insane society...
Big Brother Knows Best
"The crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilization is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism."
H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
The religious fundamentalist approach, currently in vogue, equates 'Big Brother' with God (e.g. Christian v Moslem) and strangely (!) both sides claim God is on their side, whilst they mass murder the other. Given that both Gods are supposed to promote love, and not genocide, this is a rather delusional justification for Evil v Evil. In the materialist version, the God is either 'Capitalism' which can do no wrong in fighting (the other) 'Socialism', which can do no right (or vice-versa - to taste). The similarity of these two mind/matter types should not go unnoticed, and unsurprisingly both are often held by the very same people (in all four destructive combinations)... All such attempts to portray both themselves and another group as being what they clearly are not, constitute demonstrations of paranoia.
Political Correctness
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Here we have prejudice disguised as its opposite. By persecuting people for free speech (one of the key props of civilisation and democracy), i.e. for holding different views, for daring to express 'criticism', we have a return to those days of "I'm never wrong" arrogance that saw 'blacks' regarded as non-human, 'women' as idiots and so on. Only the labels have changed here, these self-righteous hypocrites now regard all their opposites in exactly the same intolerant way, disenfranchising them, based (it seems) upon little more than psychopathological class-based hatred - by people under denial of their own 'anti-prejudicial' prejudice ! This form of prejudice deliberately misinterprets what anyone says or how they behave, in such as way as to generate perceived insults and conflict, so as to give them an opportunity to vindictively persecute their 'victims'. It is the ultimate in paranoia...
Workers Unite
only the slime of a new bureaucracy."Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
In this version we have the equivalent Marxist idea of 'capitalists' and 'proletariat', two disjoint classes, one owning all the 'means of production', one 'alienated'. This, coupled with an unscientific view of history as deterministic - following a 'inevitable' trajectory to a communist 'utopia', pits man against man in a very simplistic and naive revolutionary dynamic - which acts to destroy all that currently exists in a magical wish fulfilment, the hope for a unachievable future of unending 'equality' (i.e. static, diversity free, conformism). It is not that the 'alienation' portrayed does not exist, the problem (as in all these views) comes from the paranoia of casting entire groups as 'implacable enemies' who must be destroyed.
Big Sister Knows Best
the characteristics of the thing they oppose."J. S. Habgood, Archbishop of York, 1986
Within the feminist version of this dogma we have the embedded idea that "All Men Are Bastards" and similar generalisations. Given that all people are different anyway, and that most of the world's women voluntarily choose to associate with men (no surprise there...), then the claim is an obvious paranoid delusion. All such claims, whoever makes them, suffer from the same form of insanity, the inability to see variability where it really exists, that damaging obsession of 'black and white' thinking, of forcing reality into opposing 'us' and 'them' boxes, when it just won't fit !
Animal Righteous
George Orwell, Animal Farm, ch. 10, 1945
The latest example of this sort of delusion comes from the animal rights movement. Here again we have a group proclaiming 'rights' for some, whilst practicing violence on others. Not only do we have here the paranoia, but we also have self-delusion and self-contradiction, since the people they persecute, 'humans', are animals too ! And the rights proposed by these people must surely depend upon the complexity of the creature, otherwise bacteria would have a perfect 'right' to kill them ! As humans are the highest creatures we know, then they must have the highest rights, and so suffer the highest wrongs - from their hypocritical supposed 'protectors'.
"Children and fools want everything, because they want wit to distinguish; there is no stronger evidence of a crazy understanding than the making too large a catalogue of things necessary."
George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, Advice to a Daughter, 1688
In so much of our world a further obsession rears it ugly head, that is the desire by some people to control and possess everything. This megalomania (or 'paranoid grandiosity') takes the form of a centralisation complex, a need to personally assume all power over all actions; to rule, regulate, interfere and boss everyone and everything, as seen in global trade bodies like the WTO and in EU bureaucracy. That this contradicts the 'democracy' under which we claim to operate should be clear, that it contradicts the 'Law of Requisite Variety' which says that it is actually scientifically impossible to control everything, is however largely unknown. Locals, in this view, are ignored; dissenting views are suppressed; and we have a 'nanny state' where everyone is treated as incompetent children. Yet the people that do this, those that grab such 'power', are in fact very infantile, and are themselves unable to cope with losing 'control', with uncertain choice, or the idea of evolving personally, they cling to a static 'baby' world. And we call them 'superior', rather than 'mad' !
"The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."
John Maynard Keynes, Essay in Persuasion, pt. V, 1931
The love of money is a phenomenon not only of misers but of banks and corporations. By looking closely at the the banks, which were set-up originally to 'distribute' and 'look-after' money, we can see that their obsession to forever take more from their customers is a strange fetish, and shows that they are living a contradiction. In psychiatric terms, a 'fetish' is a pathological compulsion about a material object, so it seems to apply here. Corporate directors also seem to have this obsession and cannot seem to ever get enough 'money', continuing to seek more and more - even when they have more 'money' than many small countries. Such behaviour really does exceed the boundaries of sanity.
"Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness."Confucius (551-479 BCE), The Confucian Analects, bk. 14:36, iii
The 'Compensation Culture', now out of hand in the U.S. and rapidly approaching that in the U.K. and elsewhere, commits criminal offences by penalising people for minor oversights or errors (committed however unwittingly) with massively unjust punishments, out of all proportion to the often imagined 'crime'. Stealing from the people at large in this way, in order to compensate individuals who have erred by their own 'free' decisions, is a sign of total psychological imbalance. It is a culture that assumes the 'victims' have no responsibility at all for the effects of their own actions, but also assumes that, paradoxically, people that have no say in those actions must take total responsibility for them ! A bigger example of an illogical insanity and divorce of belief from reality would be hard to find (even amongst the collection outlined in this document...).
"In a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish."
Learned Hand (1872-1961)
Whilst foolish or greedy people may pursue such claims, the real culprit is a 'Law' without any sense of balance, justice or intelligence; staffed by 'judges' who represent nobody, and care little for the society on which they impose such one-dimensional abstract and unethical judgements - divorced of all common sense and contextual relevance. In short these people have taken total leave of their senses. Very few of these cases should ever come to court at all, and if they do only 'nominal' compensation is ever appropriate for such trivial 'offences'. Those people who 'try it on' to get something for nothing should be regarded as criminal (as should their on-the-make lawyers...), and those unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions should be regarded as insane.
"I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning."William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Lear, King Lear
In yet another reversal of sanity, practised again by judges, we have the incredible spectacle of 'victims' being jailed or fined for resisting criminal activity or even for helping the police, whilst the 'criminal' is regarded as having suffered a 'rights' abuse ! Does the victim not have far more 'rights' than the criminal then ? Did the criminal not surrender his 'rights' when he spat on society to commit the crime ? Rights do not protect people from their own wrongs, such an idea is a complete nonsense, and for judges to 'interpret' the law in such a way is so obnoxiously perverse as to be regarded as demented.
"In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly."Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Fear blinds us to many things. If politicians fear our world then they will monitor nothing 'real', refuse to accept feedback, and take an 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude. In other worlds they will inhabit a world in denial, unable to accept what they see, unable to take responsibility for the fact that they created this world by their forcibly imposed follies and that they own its resultant problems.
"If you think the US has stood still, who built the largest shopping-center in the world ?"Richard Nixon (b. 1913)
"Shop till you drop" - what a phrase, and what does it say about the attitude of our society ? More, more, more, is the behaviour of a compulsive, but then what ? In a 'throughput as a God' society where the problems of Malthusian growth are ignored, such a compulsion must be regarded as a sign of severe psychological damage, an empty lifestyle that cannot, ever, be filled by 'things' - despite the overpowering 'delusion' that it can.
"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
What is one to make of a society whose prime obsession seems to be to take whatever exists and then to trash it, dump it, waste it ? A 'disposable' society, a society of planned obsolescence, of unreparability, is a society that is trashing itself; by taking what works and 'replacing' it we have a never satisfied, never happy, never-ending search for what is already there, a psychological blindness to reality that must be regarded as psychotic.
"There is inherent in the capitalist system a tendency toward self-destruction."Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, ch. 14, 1914
An old joke showed a person sitting on a high tree branch and sawing it off between themselves and the trunk... In a world where the humans tolerate endless pollution and poisonous waste, create global warming, engender resource depletion and generally harm the entire planetary ecosystem by their greed, we have a similar scenario. Self-destructive behaviours are bad enough, but suicide is surely a prime indicator of insanity...
"Bread of deceit is sweet to a man;
but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel."The Old Testament, Proverbs 20:17, 900-200 BCE
In any society, if we are to work together then we must trust each other. So what can we think of a way of life that glorifies lying ? In 'spin' obsessed politics, in 'hype' obsessed advertising, in the unauthorised 'bossy' behaviour of 'public servants', even in the 'half-truths' of the scientific world, we tolerate misinformation and deliberate distortion of the facts; we allow the perpetrators of such acts to not only survive but to thrive and to have positions of power over us. We live in a 'cardboard cutout' world, a world obsessed with shallow 'image', in a fantasy caricature of massive proportions. Only corruption of our sanity could allow such a state to prevail for more than a short time, and yet it has. We now live in a 'make believe' world of 'poser' lunatics where everyone distrusts everyone else, and with good reason, because nobody will ever tell the truth - they are in fact often persecuted, by the liars, for doing so !
"After all, what is fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
What is it about modern art that has seen the love of beauty replaced by a "shock till you drop" attitude ? In this 'violence everywhere' approach, we find the use of hate as a crowd puller, an obsession with the animal urges, with sewage or garbage or dirt, with entrails and decomposition. This reminds one of that pathological compulsion to wash endlessly, or to try to cleanse oneself of ones fears by facing them every day. But to claim that this is 'Art' debases the very word. Such 'creations' (or should we call them 'destructions' ?) do not uplift humanity, they demean it, they depress and reduce it, and serve only maybe as a forced 'rub their faces in it' reminder that there is a reality, and it's not so nice in parts - for people so alienated and so occupying their own, advertisement created, fantasy world as to already be considered mad. But aren't these artists (and their backers) just as mad also ? In a natural world so radiant with beauty, are they all so unimaginative and deluded nowadays that they can only see the opposite ?
"To see you naked is to recall the Earth."Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
Given that we are all born nude, and that clothing is constrictive and necessary only in extreme weather conditions, then the whole idea that we indoctrinate kids that their own bodies are 'nasty' or 'sinful' is very strange and pathological (thanks to sadly misguided puritanical Christians & good-old Freud !). Nudity and sex are not connected, so the idea that they are is yet another delusion. We can have sex clothed (many seem to prefer it, thinking it more 'erotic' !) or we can refrain from having sex naked (many think such open intimacy is the basis of real love and sharing, e.g. nudists).
"If it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it
from one damned good-natured friend or other !"Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
Some of the sillier views today however regard any form of love as a type of 'sexual abuse'; thus parents can't cuddle their own children, neighbours can't help a crying local child, strangers can't show friendship to anyone 'under (an arbitrary) age' in any way whatsoever, for fear that some idiot will 'shop them' to the self-righteous as 'abusers' or 'paedophiles'... Protecting kids from love in this way is actually subjecting them to massive hate, if you don't wish to love them, or fools prevent you from so doing, then what do you imagine the kids think ? "Everyone hates me" of course, and the result ? They hate, quite understandably, everyone else in turn in retaliation - throughout their entire lives. Thus such mindless dogmas socially create, by standard positive feedback processes, the very psychopaths that they wrongly think already exist everywhere (based upon the rare, but much media hyped, instances of social 'nasties'). They don't, but they will now, thanks to the insanity and paranoid suspicions generated by such 'protectionist' dogmas !
"O we can wait no longer,
We too take ship O soul,
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for unknown shores."Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Passage to India, 8, 1855-1892
The comfort blanket is a great help to many kids. Fear of the unknown, those horrid monsters under the bed, makes life for many young kids so stressful, especially when the adults that are around them like to upset them with nasty 'stories' and exposure to TV horrors ("it's such fun to see the 'terror' on their faces !"). When they 'grow-up' one would think that such fears are past, but no. Early experiences traumatise our worldviews, and if we fear what we have never really seen but merely imagined, then we will fear what opportunities we really have available, but have never imagined. Thus, when we have a problem, new solutions are not actively sought, cooperation is not actively sought, we shy away from the very idea of being creative, of doing what we have not been told to do, what might be 'dangerous'... We have been taught, in fact, to always run away. Such socially induced psychological damage hardly suggests that those adults involved in driving it are 'sane'.
"The poet is in command of his fantasy,
while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy."Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950
In any bad situation we will look to invent an 'out', an escape. Rather than solving the inherent problems, we resort to fantasies, whether these be future utopias, afterlives, reincarnation or whatever. None of these 'solutions' provide that 'out', they do not 'solve' the current problems, just put them off, they conceal them. The problems still exist because our past values and lessons have been ignored, the need for balance has been ignored. People that are incapable of learning from their mistakes are perhaps regarded as psychologically inadequate, but maybe really they are mad ?
"Man is what he believes"Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
It would be hard to argue that an individual who behaved in all the ways outlined here was acting in a sane manner. These charges against modern society, raised also by other people over many decades, seem pretty conclusive. The pathological nature of the illness is shown by the inability of rich nations and groups to ever accept the collective effects of their actions, to accept that they do have a major problem. Without the acceptance of a problem, a cure to any form of addiction cannot be obtained. So, how does the Jury find ?
Guilty as charged, the patient should be committed.
They already have been ?
But I'm still sane ! Let me out..........................
Oh, I see...
Earth is the Galactic Council's designated loony bin !
On the edge of the Galaxy, where they can do little harm...