I call this reality panjective. Panjectivism, unlike superstition, religion and ‘enlightened’ scientific abstraction, presupposes no ultimate distance between subject and object, and therefore no dominance of one by the other.
Capitalist artists, writers, priests, teachers and scientists, of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ (see myth 22) never criticise the means by which they gain prominence. For modern artists, newspaper columnists, celebrated academics and prominent bishops it goes without saying that their platform is down to their talent, originality and honesty, and has nothing to do with the fact that the newspaper, gallery, university, church or radio station that employs them knows that they won’t rock the boat by taking responsibility for the truth by saying anything meaningful about it.
Ideally a definition which is at odds with another — professionally sanctioned religious entity determined by the relevant expert — that he can call on.
Which, like modern neuroscience, conflated mental representation with conscious experience and then concluded that the latter did not really exist.
By post-modernism I am not just referring to the output of a few French philosophers, but to the overall outlook of the late-capitalist system, particularly on the so-called ‘left’.
Promotion, discussion and defence of rights is a crucial element of post-modern activity. Quality, meaning and truth must be eradicated and replaced by rights, so that special interest groups can assert their ‘right’ to appear in the media or in academia, irrespective of the ordure they excrete.
I explore the opposames of analytical scientism and continental post-modernism in 33 Myths of the Ego.
‘Postmodernism is what you get when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.’ Fredric Jameson.
‘Enlightened reason no more possesses the means of measuring one drive within itself against others than of ordering the universe into spheres. It rightly exposes the notion of hierarchy in nature as a reflection of medieval society,’ Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. See Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism and The Apocalypedia, for more on the relationship between [post] modernism and schizophrenia.
The Market suffuses the cosmos; money is the benchmark of rectitude; financial, technological, or professional prowess is the empirical proxy for blessedness; and the aggressive, unapologetic entrepreneur is the eidolon of existential superlativity. Eugene McCarraher, The World is a Business.
25. The Myth of Religion
But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence… truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Religion is the belief that ideas and words are physical real · · · To the extent they take ideas and words to be physically real, and respond to critical ideas as if from a physical attack, socialism, capitalism, feminism, sexism, scientism, relativism, theism and atheism are all religions · · · Religions violently police the borders of belief (orthodoxy), violently persecute non-belief (heterodoxy), and aspire to state power.
The belief that ideas and words are real we call superstition. A group of people sharing superstitious beliefs we call a cult or, if the group is very large, a religion. Religions are comprised of people whose personality is built on the assumption that ideas and words are literally real and that criticism of these ideas and words is capable of causing real harm. Such criticism may come from non-believers, who reject the ideas and words completely (‘infidels’), or it may come from believers, who interpret the ideas and words, or some of them, non-literally (‘heretics’); in both cases the threat is existential; the existence of the egoic personality — via the cultic-religious groupthink it depends on — is under threat.
The paradigmatic examples of religion are the ‘Abrahamic big three,’ Judaism, Pauline Christianity and Islam, members of which tend to venerate the written word and take criticism or satire as literal attacks. They’re not alone though; fanatical Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, modern leftists, nationalists, socialists, fascists, doctors, journalists and other cult members react in the same way, for the same reasons. Point out, in a fanatical communist forum, how petty, spiteful and authoritarian Karl Marx was (or communism is); point out to a group of fanatical feminists that (in feminist author, Fay Weldon’s, words) rape is not the worse thing that can happen to a woman (thermonuclear war is, for example, a bit worse) or that some of the most underprivileged people in Western society are poor, white men; point out the farcical all-too-human concerns of the author of the Quran to a group of fanatical Muslims;1 point out the crimes of Israel (or the disproportionate power of Jews), or the crimes of America (or its clients), or the crimes of Britain to a fanatical nationalist or market-worshipping Anglo-Saxon audience; and watch the physical response; the sweating, the anguish, the eyes turned to heaven, the hysteria, the quaking rage…
Religious adherents, the fanatical kind,2 have extremely fragile selves, comprised of nothing more than thoughts and emotions, which is why they tend to see people not as individuals, but as thoughts, or categories, backed by extreme emotionality. The fanatical world is a rigid taxonomy, comprised entirely of goodies and baddies. Goodies — Muslims, or women, or black people, or Americans or whoever is on ‘our side’ — are right simply by virtue of their emotional category. Baddies wrong, simply by virtue of theirs. If baddies silence, exclude3 or criticise, it must be heretical (racist / sexist / ableist / fascist / centrist / communist / atheist / superstitious / intolerant / immature / an over-generalisation or, the classic, cult-behaviour4), while if goodies do, the judgement cannot be wrong.
It is not just other people who are perceived as emotional categories. The religious attitude denies the embodied reality of all life on earth in favour of an ersatz projection and belief system. Initially, mythic idealisation and systematisation blended with and served natural life, but, around 10,000 years ago, it took on a superstitious life of its own, first overcoming reality and then, with the advent of monotheism, subjugating the world-mythos entire, until reality was seen as a poor reflection of an abstract spectacle (platonic ideas, Hebrew heaven, etc.). Although the monotheistic religion began to decline around three or four hundred years ago, the growth of this spectacle did not merely remain unchanged; it accelerated into every area of life.
The religionist today usually does not believe in a monotheistic god or a polytheistic mythos (although such beliefs are not incompatible with the religion of [post]modernity), indeed he can hardly be said to ‘believe’ at all now that his entire existence is immersed in an artificial pseudo-reality which has completely colonised art, culture, all knowledge, language, thought and even perception. There is nothing to believe in, for there is no position from which to believe; nothing left by which to grasp any kind of experience or expression that comes from without. Thus every passing phantasm, provided that the self can benefit from believing in it, becomes hyper-real, while reality, nature, direct experience and any genuine criticism based thereon appear dreamlike, unreal, laughable or, if they get too close to the pseudo-self, horrifying.
This sense of horror lies under the ordinary — ponderously literal, joyless and repressed — awareness of the religionist. It manifests as constant low-lying addiction, anxiety and restlessness which surface as irritation in moments of boredom (no access to the narco-spectacle), anger at the slightest frustration and a queasy sense of discontent. If the boredom or frustration continues, the horror rises as fury, depression, wild flights of emotional over-excitement, sadism, masochism, terror and finally, outright madness. All of this the cult member defends, tooth-and-nail, for the simple reason that he feels it. Any attempt to question his feelings (actually emotions), or the boundaries of his carefully organised and vigilantly policed categories, or the existential status of his god or his spectacle, is intolerable and met with instant rejection, insanely rationalised justification or immediate, fantastic, infantile and violent overreaction. Throw into doubt the existential status of modern gods (rights or capital or mental illness or just us); point out the role that sport plays in pacifying the restless mass or the chilling dystopia of the sporting spectacle; question the need for schools, hospitals and prisons; tell people you don’t work, don’t drink, don’t have a smartphone; talk seriously and simply of love or death; take responsibility for your unhappiness; refuse to engage in everyday feasts of emotional cannibalism; turn off the wi-fi or the background muzak or the news… and see how the good people around you react the same way as religious fanatics everywhere; automatically and aggressively defending their mental-emotional identity, and its reflection in the world.
This identity, the pseudo-reality of the cult-personality, exists in a realm of binary categories, and so depends completely upon the existence of enemies. The goody can no more exist without a baddy, than left can without right, and so antagonists must be manufactured at the same rate as justifications (see myth 16). While the cult is excluded from power, those who have power are obvious targets, but as soon as the cult gains power it must, instead, generate moral panics (these days; rape-culture and hate-crimes on the fanatical left, and terrorism and extremism on the fanatical right5), witch-hunts and a series of denunciation campaigns.6
The supreme power is the distributed state-corporate nexus to which powerful cult-members tend to aspire. Fanatics are not interested in radically altering the hierarchical structure of the system, or of dropping out of it7, rather they desire to play the dominant role or occupy the top spot within it, at which point the state becomes Marxist, Buddhist, feminist, black or Jedi, the commissars jump ship and join Oceania, and the oppression roles along, as was, with different labels, but the categorical structure intact and all its contentions uninterrupted. The state of yesterday’s Maoist, today’s republican and tomorrow’s leftist (see myth 30), are all ultimately the same, for ultimately there is no difference, psychologically, between religious extremists. They are all uptight, stiff with discontent, resentful, agitated, up and down like a roller-coaster, yet defiantly self-assertive; all attributes of ego, upon which every cult on earth is and has been, built.
Ultimately, there is no difference, politically, between the states that religious extremists end up creating; because they are all religious states. There is no contradiction, whatsoever, in the concepts of ‘gay state’, ‘feminist state’, ‘black state,’ ‘atheist state’, ‘socialist state’, ‘Islamic state’, ‘democratic state,’ ‘rajneesh state,’ ‘scientific state’, ‘totalitarian state’, ‘Jewish state,’ ‘capitalist state,’ ‘professional state,’ or ‘fully automated luxury communist state.’ They are all comprised of powerful people telling powerless people what to do, or in more advanced, distributed, states, tending a mechanism which completely dominates the lives of those who comprise it.
‘Anarchist state’ though — that doesn’t make sense.
Or ask extremist feminists ‘what would you rather have — women’s rights or Islam?’
Many non-fanatical people belong to religions for reasons other than bolstering a shaky sense of self. They may benefit from the psychological insights of its founder or its tradition, they may value the social elements of membership, they may be committed to the general, and non-literal (perhaps even miraculous) ‘way of life’ that the religion represents, they may gain some kind of psychological solace from religious ritual, they might enjoy the practical benefits that their religious tradition confers, they may love the master or they might have had self-rupturing experiences of mysterious otherness which they [wrongly] attribute to the specific divinities and realities of their mythos. I believe that while these instincts can be called ‘religious’ they are not well served by that term, which I therefore prefer to use negatively.
Religious adherents have a positive mania for ostracism, casting out Satans at the drop of a hat.
Loving a teacher, or loving his teaching or, more simply, his loveableness, is inconceivable to the cult member — ego interferes with love and translates it into either a fanatical emotional release into an adoring mass (such as, for example, members of sporting cults experience) or into a cool, rational, abstracted distance (such as members of professional cults experience).
Not, of course, that women aren’t raped, racial minorities attacked, buildings bombed, or nutty ideas disseminated. ‘Moral panic’ means the creation of a denunciatory environment using real crimes as a pretext.
Lupus Dragonowl, Against Identity Politics.
Completely dropping out that is, not merely dropping out to form a new mini-state.
26. The Myth of Mental Illness
Demythologizing psychiatry would undermine and destroy psychiatry as a medical speciality just as surely as the demythologizing of the Eucharist would undermine and destroy Roman Catholicism as a religion.
Schizophrenia, Thomas Szasz
Mental illness does not exist. Selfishness exists, sadness exists, fear exists and violence and addiction, but they are not medical problems · · · They are automatically assumed to be medical problems by the system, which cannot accept allow individuals and their societies to take responsibility for their lives · · · The reason that the system cannot accept the true cause of ‘mental illness’ is because actually curing it entails the revolutionary act of improving reality.
Illnesses are objective physical states; alterations of cells, organs and tissues which cause symptoms that can be detected with tests on the body. Schizophrenia, ‘high-functioning autism’, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome, narcissism, borderline personality disorder and all addictions and phobias are not, ultimately, physical states; which is how they can be voted into existence by the psychiatric profession. Schizophrenia, for example, was invented by Eugen Blueler in 1907; based on the prior invention, in 1898, of dementia praecox by Emil Kraepelin. These men based their invention on behaviour, and on their beliefs about that behaviour, not on changes in tissue caused by disease or any other discernible material fact. This is how every ‘mental illness’ which followed has been invented (discovered is the official term) — from homosexuality to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to the latest set of eating, non-compliant language and ‘oppositional defiant’ disorders. Such problems — and they are problems — may cause a physical alteration to the mind or the body, as learning the piano does, or playing computer games all day, but no causal link has ever been discovered between genes, nerves, tissues and mental disorder and, in most cases, no literal, physical correlation has been found at all. If they were discovered the patient would be passed over neurology; which is to say they would cease to become mental illnesses.
Mental illnesses, as Tomas Szasz demonstrated from every conceivable angle for over forty years, do not exist, any more than dream illnesses exist. Problems exist, unhappiness, despair, alienation and anxiety exist, selfishness and laziness exist; but they are not illnesses. They are automatically assumed to be illnesses by those who have a vested interest in ignoring the social and personal causes of psychological and behavioural problems. Such people fall into two broad groups. One group comprises those who are unwilling to live responsibly and meaningfully. These we call ‘mentally ill’ patients. The other group comprises those who have been granted enormous power over patients; wealth, status, exclusive access to diagnostic machinery and treatments, the power to drug and imprison people against their will and even the power to determine what is real. We call these people ‘mental health’ doctors.
Both groups instinctively reject any suggestion that personal and social problems might have personal and social causes. The possibility that traumatic childhood experiences lead to ‘mental illness,’ or that ‘trauma’ doesn’t really exist, or that verbal abuse during childhood leads to ‘personality disorders’, or that diet can adversely affect mental health, or that schizophrenia is more common in modern, urban settings, or that pre-civilised peoples do not suffer from our mental health ‘illnesses,’ or that society drives us out of our wits, or that there might be a teensy bit of malingering dishonesty behind phobias, syndromes and other ‘conditions’ are, despite all being the truth,1 instantly and reflexively dismissed or rationalised away by the medical profession and by their dependent clients, for the simple reason that if it were ever accepted that we, and not phantom illnesses, are responsible for our problems, doctors would be out of a nice job, patients out of a good excuse, drug companies would lose the billions they make from tranquillising us and the state would have no reason to coerce and confine problematic citizens.
It is true that all illnesses that are not properly understood are, to some extent metaphorical, but when the symptoms are mainly physical, it makes sense to go looking for a physical cause. It does not make sense to go looking for a physical (genetic, bacterial, viral, structural) cause for, say, Christianity, homosexuality, boredom, fear of birds, depression, psychosis, schizophrenia or laziness; unless you want to pass up your responsibility or imprison or anaesthetise people against their will, or unless you are a religious devotee of scientism (see myth 23).
When members of the medical establishment are confronted with a problem which is mainly mental or behavioural they go looking for a physical cause and they rule out personal and social solutions, preferring pharmaceutical interventions and ego-appeasing therapies. They never actually find a definite physical cause, despite their many mendacious claims, which is why they2 have to vote ‘diseases’ into existence and why they diagnose on the base of behaviour; masturbation, anal-sex, hallucinations, weird language, alcoholism, anarchism, unemployment, low grades, socialism… This leads to a series of preposterous fallacious contradictions whereby patients are said to have illness x because they display symptoms (i.e. behaviours) y and z; which are caused by x. John can’t sit still, therefore he has adhd. How do we know he has adhd? Because he can’t sit still! This doesn’t phase psychocrats, or put them off their desperate search for literal and physical causes of psychological suffering for the simple reason that solving mental problems is not good for business.
