The television, the police, prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories serve to reinforce the power of the few and to coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal and degrading “rational” system. The goal of sexual repression is that of producing individuals who are adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all the misery and degradation.
The masses are enslaved. The structures of civilization that nurture us with the food we need from the grocery stores simultaneously threaten us by keeping such items under lock and key to be exchanged for money.
We live in an age of anxiety in an insane world where we witness the vulgar, wealth-warped values of the mall-rats. Have we been trained to repress our desire to see the malls and their rats (consumers) destroyed because we have been brainwashed into identifying ourselves as consumers, even if we suck a very minimal amount of milk from Mother Culture’s teat? Do we repress our hatred of the gorts because we have been guilted into believing we are also gorts?
Are we so easily bought and sold? Those who do not buy into the consumerist materialism may be shunned, mocked, and eventually totally marginalized by way of criminal prosecution or psychiatric diagnosis. Freud’s enthusiastic endorsement and use of psychiatric vocabulary for denigrating people place him in the mainstream of psychiatric thought: invalidating human beings by psychiatric methods.
Whereas man’s inhumanity to man was once legitimized by appeals to God, now it is legitimized by appeals to Health. The psychoanalytic description of hypomania and hysteria is but a semantic revision of a demonological one.
“The states of possession correspond to our neuroses … In our eyes, the demons are the bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed.”
~ Freud
I am seeking a broader cultural-historical-economic perspective of the psychiatric industry. What is called “mental illness” (or “psychopathology”) emerges as the name of the PRODUCT of a particular kind of relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. (Szasz 1970) There can be no doubt that the business-as-usual work ethic of most jobs and careers have detrimental effects on our mental health. The only way to minimize the damaging consequences of living by the wealth-warped values of the mainstream corporate mind-
**** is to rebel. The art of rebelling in a consumerist culture is to consume as little as possible, from fashionable clothes to automobiles to alcohol to psychiatric medication to organized religion.
From early childhood on, we are bombarded with meta-narratives which try to explain just about everything that happens in the world. Being incredulous toward meta-narratives means you doubt them, you disbelieve them.
What are the meta-narratives of our age? Marxism is a meta-narrative that attempts to explain and describe reality in terms of economics and class struggle. Psychoanalysis is a meta-narrative which tries to explain and describe reality in terms of internal psychological conflicts. Rational Science in general is a meta-narrative which believes all phenomena can be understood objectively.
All meta-narratives are rational. They are reductive in that they try to explain everything. Are we to resent the masses for being so manipulable? Sorry Microsoft, manipulable is a word. Microsoft is wrong as usual.
In Fydor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is considered an “idiot” only because he does not hold any grudges. Made ridiculous, insulted, jeered at, even threatened with death by Rogozhin, “the prince” forgives. As if he had an inkling of the suffering that underlies aggressions, he ignores them, withdraws, and even gives solace to those who have abused him.
I want to be done, once and for all, with any perspective (like Marxism, Psychoanalysis, or Rational Science) claiming that history is moving in some preordained direction, or that all events can be understood as part of some causal chain of events. Psychoanalysis may be an instrument of control that doctors and professionals use to make people conform to the repressive rules of modern society.
My insights put me at odds with the masses who are driven by semi-conscious fears and mass hypnosis (television, standard education, church). Viewing virtually no television whatsoever, I have somehow managed to tune out of the frequency of the masses. I have reached a much deeper frequency, one that is connected to older cycles, older rhythms. There are others tuning into frequencies at this depth as well. Our energy-fields make contact … Our energies commune on a level hidden in plain view. We don’t have to hide. We are invisible.
The “beyonder” is constantly cross-examined, constantly subjected to interrogation. At times the Beyonder loses patience with all this, and demands to be left alone, passing from one code to the other, deliberately scrambling the codes by quickly shifting from one to the other according to the questions asked, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next.
I heard a “mental health professional” ask a client, “And how do you feel when you start drooling from being over-medicated?”
What kind of assanine question is this? Why not stop taking the
**** medication when the side-effects are worse than the symptoms the medication is suppressing? I have long ceased believing in the ego. They are trying to
**** me over again. They are trying to
**** us over. We must not delude ourselves. Freud never liked schizophrenics or manics or psychotics, and those employed in hospitals and treatment centers don’t like their clients there either. Freud didn’t like resistance to being oedipalized, and tended to treat his clients/patients like lab animals. I have seen this in the way some “mental health technicians,” “care takers,” “drivers,” and clerics treat clients in our current pharmacracy – how superior some “employees” think they are to us poor, wretched, confused creatures. They think we are lazy and pathetic? Some utterly mock us with
****-eating grins on their faces.
Slavery in all its forms is an essential economic pillar of the Industrial World, and has been from the beginning. The eradication of economic slavery would mean the collapse of the profit pyramid structure, the scarcity economics process on which sits the very socio-economic management of industrial civilization itself.
What is this scarcity economics? In scarcity economics, lack is produced. Lack – the sense of needing something one doesn’t possess – is produced, created, planned, and organized in and through social production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the ART of a DOMINANT CLASS. Media advertizes and creates this sense of lack. Lack is a product of the imagination created by the power brokers and their servile media whores.
Mood disorders such as “bipolar disorder” are just patterns of behavior expressed by particular individuals in response to the conditions of the world. Behavior patterns are not illnesses. When doctors act as though they are “curing the sick” by suggesting compliance with taking medications, they are being dishonest. Most likely they are even and especially dishonest with themselves and their peers. They are terminating behavior patterns on the pretense that they are healing the sick.
It is more accurate to say that psychiatrists, therapists, case workers are punishing trouble-makers and coercing deviant individuals to behave in conventional ways. Drug treatment of “mental disorders” does not benefit the patient; it only benefits the established order of society, reinforcing the false hierarchy in a game that is rigged against the disenfranchized.
I am often beset with a sense of failure and frustration, but someone who never experiences contradictions and paradoxes is no serious thinker. I suffer long periods of philosophical despair, depression, nervousness, and anxiety; but these periods are interspersed with periods of furious writing and research. It’s not always scholarly research either. I am a long time fan of black humor (also known as dark comedy). Black humor is a form of humor that regards human suffering as absurd rather than pitiable,, or that considers human existence as ironic and pointless but also somehow comical. Am I an absurdist?
Can we embrace the futility while also embracing survival? It is important that we make some kind of effort to understand what is about to happen to us because it will have earth-shaking reprecussions on the way we live. Is it possible to laugh out loud in the face of the crises we face? People who have invested the bulk of their lives into paying for high-priced suburban houses will be in serious trouble. The loss of their collective hallucinated wealth will be stupendous. If large numbers of gorts cannot unload their suburban McMansions to some greater fools, then eventually these structures will be abandoned, becoming the slums of the future.
As a non-religious person, I am not very comfortable with the image of religious governance where the churches, mosques, and synogogues are the only large institutions left standing. The automobile age will be over soon. It’s in its death throes. The entire modern industrial world is a gigantic perfumed corpse. The primitive future will be about staying put for long periods of time between migrations.
[the rest ... self-censored out]