Posit: If you take an idea seriously enough, it will make you crazy
How do you tell if you're the crazy one, or if it's everyone else?
My daughter started breathing on her plants. She looked like a crazy person, but truth can do that to you. I told my daughter that plants breathe in what we breathe out.
What do you do if you’re stuck in a cargo cult? You try to explain that planes work because of the engines inside, and that there’s no amount of shaping wood into wings that would be sufficient. The townspeople don’t believe you and figure that they need to emulate the form, but better.
What if the causes of mental illness are even more upstream than we imagine? We like to think something goes wrong in the brain due to stress, trauma, etc, and that people go insane as a result. This way of thinking is familiar to people who grew up conservative.
Religion is good because how else can you be moral? College is good because it teaches you how to think. But then you’re surprised when they don’t like your non-religious moral framework.. If you drop out because you can learn better from books, again, you sense a pattern. The “reasons” don't seem to be real. You do these things to signal.
To a certain type of person, all this signaling feels empty. Are we all cargo culting everything we say and do? We remember people’s names because we’re thoughtful. We forget them because we’re oh so important. Everything is signaling all the way down. If you win at this game, you get the girl, the job, and the promotion. And if life is about signaling, is it worth living?
But suppose this is the reality that actually exists. Suppose it’s signals all the way down. There’s no bottom, or ultimate reality. Even your thoughts aren’t your own. Everything you know comes from somewhere. You’re cargo culting patterns of thought. Even your critiques of society are borrowed from culture.
So, if you have a mental illness, the doctor tries to find the the answer to this problem inside of you. Of course, where else could the problem be? It certainly can’t be with society, right? Now what if you take the problems of the world seriously enough, and feel a moral obligation to think about them. The more you’re shamed, the more you resist. Are you being rebellious for its own sake? It can be hard to tell, and the signalers want to place you in the same camp as the obstinate because it’s easier that way.
Boomers lament the generations that come after. However, doesn’t every generation say this? Neither observation is satisfying. The first engenders fear and the latter engenders foolhardiness. If any generation has done a good job, it’s because they’ve climbed to the top of the existing local maxima. They made their society as good as they could make it. And now that they’ve found the peak, all the next generation needs to do is to stay on it and not mess up. Seems simple, right? The boomer parents work hard, get their kids into college, only to see them pursuing the arts. Did the boomers fail? If so, where?
So the boomers see their children sprinting down hill and they’re mortified. Why would their kids do this? Is ingratitude doing this to them? Don’t they know what awaits them at the bottom? On some level, it is fair to worry. Some people really have given up and are running down as fast as they can, but it’s highly unlikely. Others are running down because they’re looking for the next highest peak. Millions of years of evolution have not tuned our survival instinct for nothing. The danger is in being unable to tell the two runners from one another. Boomers pat the loyal local maxima children on the back for staying, but this is a mistake. In order to find the global maximum, we need to be wiling to search far and wide.
A group that doesn’t lack courage are the mentally ill
If you take an idea seriously enough, it will make you crazy. This is especially true if the most dominant world views resist you probing or asking questions about them.
If you question the left, you eventually recognize the excesses of egalitarianism might stem from their lack of desire to look into race science. This may not be the reason, but you’re too afraid to look, and you’re left trying to play in the game you’ve been given. If you knew some people were looking into race science, you wouldn’t care to look into it yourself. But also, weren’t people racist back then? Acceptance of certain ideas can actually be dangerous.
If you question the right, you realize the excesses of blind legalism might stem from a lack of courage, and a cold and unloving spirit. They won’t tell you they love you, but they’re happy to tell you that Jesus loves you. You can’t ask questions or even propose hypotheses for how different scriptures should be interpreted. They assume all the answers have already been discovered and that all there is to do is to look them up. And yet, despite all the abundance of information, we still have a meaning crisis. How is this possible if all the answers are out there already?
If Christianity is right, does this mean Christians have failed their religion. If so, how exactly have they messed it up? And if they have, why would you learn from them? If Christianity is wrong, it would make sense for the divorce rate among Christians to be quite high. Even if all you care about is signals, this is a hard one to ignore.
I come away believing that both the secular and the religious cultures have deep internal problems. The secular are unwilling to look at facts, and the religious are unwilling to love. Surprisingly, this is the very struggle that me and my ex have had. We have two dominant world views, and we have some people who want to be moderates, but it’s increasingly hard to stay neutral as the stakes are raised. Again, this is also the problem I’ve struggled with in my personal life. A body of people and a single person aren’t that different. Men really will study politics and philosophy instead of going to therapy, and it’s not a bad thing.
So, the middle position is “naive and cowardly”, the left is crazy, and the right is crazy. Is everyone crazy, or is it just me? It would be impressive if you don’t go mentally crazy in times like these. A quiet night is no guarantee that a tiger isn’t going to rip through your village and eat all the infants. It’s good to be vigilant even during peacetime. I’m increasingly making friends with “crazy” people who just happened to be early, and the social isolation they’ve experienced for their beliefs has caused them more harm than the beliefs themselves.
Suppose someone becomes schizophrenic. It could be because they take their perceptions too seriously. They might be good at noticing things, but at some point, their pattern recognition causes them to spot patterns where there are none, and derive meaning where it can’t be found. It’s a positive quality taken to an extreme. Another person might be good at reasoning, realizes everyone’s cargo culting and signaling, and spends so much time signaling that there’s no real person underneath it all. They might become narcissists. Some people might lack love, and when they think they’ve found it, they test it out, so they increasingly push it until they see where the weakness is. When they push and don’t see the other person budge, they are in awe and fall further into love. When they spot a weakness, they are gripped in the fear that the love was conditional after all. And maybe this narcissist and the BPD person naturally click.
So the narcissist, after seeing his BPD girlfriend leave, learns to become a better narcissist, and the BPD girlfriend learns to become better at being BPD. At some point these qualities become so extreme that neither can function in normal society. If this is true, then you don’t solve this problem with special treatment programs, or trips to a therapist. You solve them by looking for the root cause. Maybe these people are this way because of their parents. Maybe they need to “unlearn” their toxic habits, but maybe they need re-conceptualize how they see the world. This is an old idea. In fact, this is what Christianity teaches. It tells you that all you need to do is to have faith and believe. Modern Christians have perverted this idea to mean that you need to make a statement of faith, or go through some kind of legible ritual. I’m beginning to suspect we need to drive the money changers out of the temple again. It didn’t end too well for the last guy who did it though.
But really, what if we look at all mental illness as philosophical ideas taken to their extreme?
Autism would be taking rationalism too far. At extreme levels, you no longer understand play, or irony. You understand the relatively straightforward physical world, but the human world with its hormesis, and anti-fragility is a source of constant frustration.
Schizophrenia would be taking lived experience too far. The world is filled with meaning, and patterns are everywhere. People think you’re crazy for finding meaning in random things, and this is isolating. You want to please others, but to do so means to give up on your own vivid experiences.
BPD would be what happens when you’re paranoid about the stability of your relationships, and need to test them
Narcissism would be what I described, and can turn into “covert narcissism” when this person realizes they need to “show” that they care. They understand other people will take advantage of them, and narcissism is their shield against it. However, it’s also isolating because their friendships remain superficial.
Sociopathy would be a way that people cope with suffering, and lack of control. They torture animals to build resilience to suffering while exercising control.
Manic-depressives would be people who feel they’re attached to something unhealthy, and go through ups and downs driven by the thing, but don’t have an alternative goal to strive for. Their unpredictability makes them difficult to be friends with.
Why do people go insane when the world goes insane? I suppose it’s because they’re looking for their footing. They notice they’ve built their house on metaphorical sand, and have decided to dig / explore / fly around until they find solid ground. The search space is vast, so they pick a direction and keep going. They try consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. They look at religions and also find them wanting. What’s left? The “level-headed” ones can benefit from the wild goose chases they see all these people getting themselves into, and take tepid steps in the directions that hold the most promise. However, they shouldn’t forget that their comfort comes at the expense of many nearly invisible people suffering for their world views. Maybe your purpose in life is to be an example to others, and you should be the best version of that example that you can be.
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