Those Crazy Indians

 

Friend Xerxes writes that his father’s doctoral dissertation was almost rejected. His father was using the standard Rorschach test on Indian (as in India) subjects. The problem was, his study showed that most of India’s population was schizophrenic.

There are several possibilities here. One is that Xerxes senior was not properly applying the test. The thesis examiners, however, could not find and flaw here, and so had to approve his thesis.

The second, and the conclusion Xerxes draws, is that the Rorschach test is culturally biased. 

But this implies a further conclusion: that our understanding of schizophrenia is culturally biased. It is primarily a cultural prejudice, not an illness. This has grave implications. It means people might actually be drugged up or put in mental hospitals because of their cultural background. And it has been suggested that this has happened, often, to Native Americans/First Nations shamans.

And there is actually a third possibility, currently not permitted to be mentioned: maybe schizophrenia is a real mental disorder, and the majority of Indians are indeed schizophrenic. Maybe an entire culture can be mad, out of touch with objective reality.

We cannot entertain this last possibility, because we currently falsely identify culture with race; and then with the concept of human equality. So we cannot admit that one culture can be better than another.

This is obviously false. A culture is a tool for living, a technology, and one tool can always be better than another.

I will go further. Our present Western culture, which asserts that a man can become a woman, and vice versa, is objectively mad. It is leading to rising rates of depression and suicide. 

It is always possible that the schizophrenics, and the Indians, are sane, and psychology and the psychologists and modern secular scientistic “Western” culture, are mad.

If this sounds shocking, this is actually the foundational assumption of Christianity, or Buddhism, or Hinduism: that an entire culture, indeed “the world,” can have it wrong.