“Americans, their faith in Capitalism unimpaired, deny the illness.”
Category Archives: Politics
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.
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.”
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!”
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
Trump, spectacle and psyspeak (2020)
“Zimbardo sees reality TV as a logical format for teaching psychology. “The reason reality TV is so popular is because to observe human behavior is fascinating,” he observed. “I spend my whole life doing this.”
Psychiatry, constitutional law, and political power in a 60s TV debate (2020)
“Would you let such an individual, just because he has the advantage of the Constitution, free in society to infect women, to invoke this delusional system on other people?”
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power? (2019)
The current public psychiatrization of “the most powerful man in the world,” as the media often describe the President of the United States of America, could be seen as a new paradigm shift in contemporary power.
In addition to the increasing use of a psychologized lexicon in everyday speech, a role might be played by such spectacle communicating symbolically, and contributing to, a global cultural shift towards a subjectivist worldview and a progressive de-politicization of citizenship.