“To attribute the behavior of generals or of the imperialists to a sort of monstrous irrationality commonly accepted as normal means not allowing oneself to consider that the logic of war, or of the bomb, or of hunger, is not the result of particular psychological processes, but of a social system which is neither mad nor irrational and simply defends with maximum coherence some vested interests.”
Category Archives: English
‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? (2021)
“Americans, their faith in Capitalism unimpaired, deny the illness.”
The ‘Code of Nature’, 1755: collective feelings vs. individual reason (2020)
Loin que la raison nous éclaire
Et conduise nos actions,
Nous avons trouvé l’art d’en faire
L’orateur de nos passions.
C’est un Sophiste qui nous joue,
Un vil complaisant qui se loue
A tous les fous de l’univers,
Qui s’habillant du nom de sages,
La tiennent sans cesse à leurs gages
Pour autoriser leurs travers.
– Rousseau
Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ epigraph and Bolshevik psychiatrist Bogdanov (2020)
The most famous novel by Aldous Leonard Huxley is opened with an epigraph by the man who described how psychiatrist Bogdanov – founder of Bolshevism with Lenin – was treating, surreptitiously, philosophical ideas he disagreed with as a form of mental illness.
Doctor Erasmus Darwin on ‘Cannabis’ (2020)
“Such plant grown in England shot from seed to 14 feet in five months.”
Voegelin’s “Science, Politics and Gnosticism” (2020)
“Gnostic man must carry on the work of salvation himself…. Through his psyche (“soul”) he belongs to the order, the nomos, of the world; what impels him toward deliverance is the pneuma (“spirit”).
The labor of salvation, therefore, entails the dissolution of the worldly constitution of the psyche and at the same time the gathering and freeing of the powers of the pneuma.”
NASDAQ, Oregon, and Washington D.C.: three steps towards 21st century cyber-psychedelic global capitalism (2020)
The cyber turn of 21st century capitalism is becoming more explicitly cyber-psychedelic, digital as well as hallucinogenic, working to modify common sense and our shared sense of reality.
A new global psychiatric power? Intro (2020)
More than one year ago I presented the talk “Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power?” at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London, in the summer of 2019. The (anti)political, technocratic and revolutionary globalist agenda was clearly and unambiguously presented as the one that would have benefitted from phenomena and discourses of mass global psychiatrization. In 2019 such phenomena and prospects were most definitely not under the unprecedented level of attention we are witnessing today in 2020.
Paul Goodman, 1945: ‘The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud’ (2020)
“Is it possible to draw any other conclusion from this reasoning than that the goal of therapy is the smooth running of the social machine as it exists?” “And what familiar name shall we call a “therapy” that pretends to create harmony on a mass scale?” “The need does exist in its millions — and there are, for instance, 250 Freudian analysts in the United States!”
The economics of ‘ego death’ (2020)
According to Keynes “the essential characteristic of capitalism” is “the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine.” Keynes emphasized the role of the irrational in economic life and talked about “the Freudian theory of the love of money.”
‘CyPsy’ mind? Cyber super-ego and psychedelic id. Or digital surveillance, mass hallucinogens, and the new ‘black gold’ of the unconscious (2020)
In the CyPsy hypothesis on the mind, as the mind is currently transformed by cyber-psychedelic capitalism, the super-ego becomes largely externalized onto the surveillance digital system, the ego is dissolved, and the id becomes free of internal constraints only to be regulated by the external substitution of the super-ego, which is the digital panopticon of surveillance capitalism making profits.
Huxley on Proust and psychology (2020)
“The invention and development of the modern science of psychology has made us regard as important and interesting a multitude of small odds and ends of thought, emotion and sensation which seemed to our ancestors almost negligible. They did not insist on the phenomena because they were interested primarily in what they regarded as the reality behind them.”
Trump, mass hallucinogens, and the cyber-psychedelic transformation of capitalism (2020)
“It was not exactly the emancipation demanded by Karl Marx, who, moreover, did not have the fancy to imagine that the result following industrial capitalism were the states altered by LSD” – Geminello Alvi, ‘Capitalism. Towards the Chinese ideal’ (2011)
“Simply a symbol of national solidarity, the first step towards wearing a uniform.” Orwell on civilians and gas masks (2020)
“As soon as war started, the carrying or not carrying of a gas mask assumed social and political implications…. The extent to which masks are carried will probably be a pretty good index of the impression the war news is making on the public.”
“The peace of Europe hangs on the electro-chemical system in that cranium!” (2020)
Harvard psychologist Murray about Hitler