The Murder of Iryna Zarutska

Although barely being mentioned by the US legacy media, the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte LRT is all over the internet. This is because it resonates with the moment; it is deeply symbolic. It is of a piece, I think, with the current violent uprising against the government in Nepal. Ordinary people have had enough, and are ready to rise against wokery in all its forms. It is about being fed up with censorship and government propaganda and misinformation and suppressing the truth. The video of the innocent white woman suddenly being stabbed to death by a black man, unprovoked, expresses visually and incontrovertibly something we have all known to be true, but forbidden to say, for years.

Anti-white racism is the real problem. 

Beyond that, government contemptuous of and hostile to the common people is the real problem.

The one point I would add to the ferment is that this is not about mental health. The lame common excuse that the killer was let down by the system in not being given “help” is diabolically wrong.

Stop and think for a moment. Claiming that mental illness leads to violence is a grave slander against the mentally ill. They suffer enough already. It is like saying lepers are violent, or cancer victims are violent.

It also denies them the dignity of human agency. It excuses all attempts to control them and ignore their concerns. It treats them as lesser beings. It might even eventually excuse their extermination.

The mentally ill are no more violent, statistically, than the general population.

Moreover, whenever it is revealed that this or that killer is mentally ill, this also reveals that they have been through the system, in order to have that diagnosis. They have already been given whatever “help” the mental health system has to offer. The problem is that the mental health system does not know how to help; throwing more money after it is money wasted.

And as a matter of simple justice, the mentally ill must be held responsible for violent actions against others. Otherwise it is easy for anyone of malicious mind to use this as cover. It is like saying “the devil made me do it.” It is an abdication of responsibility, and in itself is gravely immoral. This is why, historically, the Church has resisted most claims of demonic possession. 

The devil can tempt; he cannot force you to do the thing. You still have your own conscience and judgement.

I can imagine someone hallucinating that they are being attacked by aliens or devils or other hostile forces and needing to defend themself. I can see this happening if police advance on a schizophrenic, for example, with their uniforms and their weapons; or doctors or male nurses in white coats. 

But that cannot be maintained in this case. The poor woman was sitting there minding her own business. The killer felt malice, and acted on malice.

His presumed insanity is no defense.

Waterloo Village

 

This is a video by a local YouTuber about the slums of Saint John. Locals claim it is the worst slum in Canada, although I doubt that.

What most prompts my reaction is the interview with “front-line worker” Melanie from a non-profit. She stresses that the real problem is poverty; she repeats this for emphasis. Yet she also says, correctly, that homelessness, drug use, and mental illness are a growing problem everywhere, “around the world.” Is poverty growing everywhere? According to the statistics, just the reverse.

Why then does she say such a thing? 

Firstly, because she is ideologically motivated. The system is not broken, she explains. The system was designed wrong from the start; it is all about colonialism, oppression and misogyny.

But where does this ideology, in turn, come from?

Melanie reports with satisfaction that at last the government seems to be listening to the front-line workers, that the solution is to “bring us to the table,” and hear what these workers say they need.

Not the addicts or the mentally ill, note. The front-line workers.

In the real world, this is probably a bad approach. The jobs and power of the front-line workers depend on there being a continuing problem and “clients” to “serve”; their interest is to ensure that matters never get better.

Hence they usually turn to ideology about “the entire system.” That guarantees permanence of employment. Poverty as explanation works the same way. As Jesus rightly says, “the poor you will have always with you.” At least in relative terms, poverty can never be eliminated. So, a good job until retirement.

They will also have incentive to exaggerate the problem; and gradually redefine terms to make everyone officially poor, addicted, and mentally ill.

In sum, if you want to make sure a problem never improves, set up a government bureaucracy to fix it. Witness the troubles of indigenous Canadians.

So what is the solution? 

The veteran in the video seems to think the need is for more money for mental health. But Jordan Owens, the interviewer, hints at the problem: mental health treatments have not worked. They are also hugely costly, when our heath system is in crisis. Just a wealth transfer from average taxpayers to highly-paid medical professionals.

Given that the immediate problem, and the problem that is growing, is drug addiction, how about attacking that directly? Make it illegal, and throw them all in jail. Thus the current controversy over whether hard drugs should be recriminalized in B.C.. Although “decriminalization” has clearly been a disaster in BC, I cannot support making drugs illegal, on the grounds of bodily autonomy and the right to the pursuit of happiness. As a practical matter, I also don’t see how it does much. In N.B., and elsewhere, police have largely stopped enforcing the laws anyway. They do not have the resources. They arrest some junkie, the matter works its way through the court system, they perhaps spend some time in jail—they can’t pay a fine—and then are back out on the street. All at great taxpayer expense. Given that many of them are mentally ill, with delusions of persecution, having the police harass them is not a great idea in order to achieve compliance. It is almost sure to create an escalation of tensions and public disorder. And certainly not good for homeless, mentally ill, addicts.

The problem is that the real problem is despair. How do you cure despair? These are people who have given up on life, on the world, and on themselves.

If I were in government, I would set up a sanatorium away from the city, and so away from kids and temptations to steal—as well as from their problems. Maybe convert some of the many motels that are no longer prospering since the road trip declined in popularity. I would send these people there for as long as they want—any who wanted shelter. No medical interventions, no pokes or prods. Three squares and beyond that left alone, in a quiet room to themselves. But no drugs on the premises. Art supplies, writing materials, Bible, Talmud, donated religious literature. Chaplains encouraged to visit; a common room for services.

The mad thing is, this is just about exactly what we had two hundred years ago, sitting on top of a pastoral hill overlooking the Reversing Falls. And the cure rate was quite high. We abandoned that for a materialistic medical model. Things have been going downhill ever since, and we are now in the maelstrom at the foot of the Falls.

Depresssion and Its Cure

 

It seems plausible that the reason for the rapid rise in depression and other mental illness has been the growing use of seed oils. 

But this relies on the premise that depression is a “chemical imbalance in the brain.” That looks like a categorization error, mistaking something spiritual for something physical, the menu for the meal. It is like supposing that doing a dance wearing a false face will scare away cancer. It actually can work—witness the placebo effect—because mind and body do interact. But it is going about it the long way around.

What is depression really? It is not particularly related to feeling sad. “Depression” is a misleading term. The older word, “melancholia,” is better. Often more like an emotional numbness, and as often anxiety.

It is best described, perhaps, to those who have not experienced it, as like being in a maze. And in that maze, there is a minotaur. Any way you turn is probably wrong. But staying put is also wrong.

The obvious way to understand that, is that you have lost your moral compass. You have lost your sense of right and wrong.

Not in the way psychopaths are supposed to. Psychopaths seem to have the opposite experience, that nothing is wrong, and you are free to do what you want. The depressed feel instead that nothing is right; which paralyses them.

Most likely either is the result of an immoral upbringing, an upbringing by a parent who themselves had no moral sense; a parent who is either a psychopath, or chronically depressed.

The more dramatic experience we call schizophrenia seems adjacent in kind. Here the problem is not just what is right or wrong, but what is real. Probably produced most often by a parent who chronically “gaslit,” to use the currently popular term. And here, too, there are logically two opposite forms: either anything I want to be real is probably real; or anything I don’t want to be real is probably real. The former produces what we call narcissism. The latter produces what we call schizophrenia. 

So what is the proper or probable cure?

Where do we go to discover what is genuinely right and wrong, and what is genuinely real? Where do we go to reprogram our minds out of this trap?

Obviously, to philosophy and to religion.

Why We're All Going Crazy

 

Mindfulness

 

I came across an interesting passage in John Fowles’s book A Separate Peace. Gene, the protagonist, has deliberately but secretly made his best friend fall off a tree branch out of envy, shattering his leg. Now he is dealing with the guilt:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was.”

This may explain the common misconstrual of the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness” to mean emptying your mind of any thoughts, concentrating only on immediate sense perceptions. 

It is a form of escapism, that might take the place of alcohol or other drugs.

But it is accordingly not a way to confront your problems or to solve them. It is certainly not a way to deepen your spiritual life or improve your mental health.

A pre-raphaelite take on the Greek goddess of memory.

The actual Buddhist term we translate "mindfulness" is related to the word “remembering.” As we might say "keep in mind." It is filling your mind with thoughts. It is carefully examining the past.

We all need to do this. The guilty will resist it mightily, but they need to do it more than anyone.

How to Improve Health Care

 

My remarks from a recent all-candidates meeting in Beaches-East York.

The question was what I and New Blue would do for health care in the province.

First and immediately, we need to rehire all the health care professionals laid off because of their vaccination status. It is not a good idea to fire doctors and nurses in the middle of a pandemic. 

And it is not following science to insist that health professionals are not qualified to make their own health decisions. We should be listening to them, not firing them.

We have known since at least September that vaccines do not prevent people from getting COVID. They only reduce symptoms. We cannot achieve herd immunity through vaccination. 

There are only two possibilities here. If vaccines work, there is no need to care whether someone else get vaccinated. You’re vaccinated, and you’re safe.

But if vaccines do not work, there is no case for forcing others to get one.

Vaccination is a personal choice.

New Blue wants an end to all vaccine mandates. It wants to prevent vaccine passports. Both are violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Brian Peckford, one of the authors of the charter, is suing the government now over this.

There are other steps we could take to ease the shortage of workers in health care and in long term care. 

There are many dedicated, well-trained nurses and medical technicians in the Philippines. They all speak good English. Back in Saudi Arabia, Filipino nurses and medical staff saved my life when I came down with encephalomyelitis. Something most people my age do not survive.

But they all wanted to come to Canada. 

We need to actively recruit them, and make that easier, by more readily accepting foreign credentials and qualifications.

This is a general problem for immigrants. We bring them in, then won’t let them make a living. 

Again, the problem is red tape. The arbitrary restrictions we now have on foreign professionals is a cartel in restraint of trade.

You asked specifically about mental health. Everyone is alarmed by the opioid crisis.

Mental health is a special concern of mine. 

I once served as the assistant director of The Gathering Spot at Walmer Road Baptist Church, a multifaith outreach to discharged psychiatric patients. 

I was on the Board of Directors of Poverello Charities, which ran a drop-in centre and safe group homes for the mentally ill. 

I was Toronto organizer for Grow International, a faith-based community mental health movement.

I have too much to say about the matter for this brief meeting.

We can’t just throw money at mental health. What we are doing currently is not working. Current psychiatry essentially declares all mental health problems incurable. We’ll just give them safe injection sites, and let them kill themselves. Or we’ll actively kill them, through assisted suicide.

Two centuries ago, we had cure rates of 80 or 90 percent. High cure rates are still found in parts of the Third World.

We are not curing these people, perhaps, because there is no money in it. 

We need to get sufferers out of the city, to a place where they are not anonymous. Mental illness comes from a lack of social supports.

We need, frankly, to evangelize. What do you think that was all about in the New Testament, that healing of demoniacs and driving out devils? Mental illness comes from a lack of meaning in life.

The government can fund faith-based initiatives, so long as it does not play favourites. The Canadian constitution does not recognize any wall of separation between church and state.

And we need to encourage mutual aid and community, such as we see in AA. I am encouraged to have encountered an AA meeting in progress in this church basement.

Safe injection sites are not an answer. Would you treat alcoholism by giving out free booze?

Here again, Critical Theory or postmodernism or cultural Marxism is against us. It alienates us from our neighbours and strips our lives of meaning.

The way to prevent mental illness is to strengthen the family, strengthen religion, and strengthen community. 

Who Is Mad?

 

To be insane is to be out of touch with reality. But what is reality?

It is not just the majority opinion. That is the ad populum fallacy. The majority of men once thought the sun moved around the earth. A plurality of Germans voted for Hitler. 

Plato’s cave analogy suggests reality is experienced by only a few; most of us may live a delusion. Buddhism asserts the same. As, arguably, does Christianity. “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” (1 Corinthians, 3:19) A more familiar concept to many may be that of the Matrix films.

And postmodernists, of course, assert that there is no reality. Everyone just makes things up.

So what is real is not self-evident. We therefore cannot use it as a standard for sanity, or else one man’s sanity becomes another’s madness. The person who experienced the world as it is might be declared insane by the deluded majority. “Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending.” (The Republic, Book 7, Jowett trans.)

Rather, then, than saying that sanity is knowing what is real and what is not, we might say that Sanity is the quest for what is true. Insanity is no longer caring or trying to find out. We all understand the concept of a lie, a denial of the facts or of the evidence. Insanity is believing a lie, while being at least partly aware that it is a lie.

This means that sanity is always at least in part a moral issue. 

The Perils of Vegetarianism--And Social Science

Pythagoras advocating vegetarianism

Recent pieces in the Toronto Sun and Daily Mail report “Study links vegetarian and vegan diets to increased likelihood of depression (Sun) and “Eating meat may improve mental health and one in three vegetarians are depressed” (Daily Mail).

This is an interesting illustration of the problems with social science research.

Several studies have shown the opposite: that a Mediterranean or traditionally Japanese diet, essentially a vegetarian diet allowing seafood, reduce the risk of depression by about a third.

How is this possible?

Compare this: suppose you did a study of the depressed that uncovered the shocking fact that an actual majority of the depressed have visited psychiatrists? One could then produce the equivalent headline: “Study links psychiatry to depression”; “Avoiding psychiatrists may improve mental health.”

It is entirely possible that depressives gravitate to vegetarianism because it eases their symptoms.

Correlation is not causation; because it is not, one can easily make a social science study arrive at opposite conclusions, depending on what you want it to say.

Accordingly, our current “scientific” approach to “mental health,” relying as it does on such statistical correlations, has only a fifty percent chance of giving a helpful instead of a harmful suggestion on any given point.

In other words, avoiding psychiatrists may improve mental health.

Depression and Coronavirus

I was not happy to see Doug Ford, Ontario's Premier, spending his entire press conference yesterday on the topic of “mental health,” and announcing an expenditure of $15 million on a help line to counsel the traumatized public. US sources at the same time are warning of a pending mental health crisis because of the lockdown.

First, there is no solid evidence that mental health counselling actually helps anyone.

Second, historical evidence suggests that the genuinely depressed and chronically anxious actually feel better during a crisis. During the London Blitz, the mental hospitals emptied out.

Third, the best treatment for depression and anxiety is actually to spend some time alone, away from the daily hustle. The depressed are actually finally, thanks to the lockdown, getting the time to think things through.

So this looks to me like a giveaway to already well-off professionals while some are in desperate need. No doubt the psychologists’ lobbyists saw the opportunity and convinced the politicians of the urgent need for their services.

The help lines may get traffic, too, but not from anyone in real need. Just from people experiencing ordinary loneliness and wanting to talk, or from self-dramatizing narcissists in need of attention. In which case, giving them this attention is making their condition worse, like giving an alcoholic another drink.

Welcome to Hiroshima

Things are heating up fast on the coronavirus front, for Europe and America. A doctor has described the Italian situation as “like an explosion.” Canada has so far been lucky, but surely will not be lucky for much longer.

The jurisdictions of East Asia, although they were first hit, seem to have handled the outbreak well. China, after its original fumble, now seems to have things increasingly under control. Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, Macao—all doing relatively well, in the circumstances.

I nevertheless naturally assumed that, if and when it reached Europe and America, the thing would be handled much better. Better infrastructure, bigger budgets, higher levels of public trust and trust in government, greater medical expertise, better organized, and so forth.

So far, it does not look to be so. Despite having the previous experience of East Asia to inform them, Italy seems to have managed to react little better than chaotic Iran. The death is alarming, the spread seems uncontained, hospitals are beyond capacity. The comparison on each of these points with South Korea, which got the virus earlier, is striking.

Now, even with this Italian example, other governments in Western Europe and the USA seem to have been disorganized and slow to react. The USA apparently has a critical shortage of test kits. It is almost impossible to get tested for the virus even if you have symptoms. Large public meetings and regular flights have mostly continued. Worse, in the US, Britain, and the Netherlands, government sources seem to be actually spreading objectively false information that minimizes the risks.

You may think I myself am overacting. Time will tell. But it seems to me that in Italy, time has already told.

Aside from East Asia, some other countries seem to have taken the virus very seriously and to have responded energetically: Russia and Eastern Europe have, in general, shut borders, and this has been effective so far. Israel has banned all flights.

Why the difference? I had suggested it was cultural yesterday, but perhaps it is not even that. There is not such a big cultural difference, surely, between Eastern and Western Europe.

I think it tells us something about human nature.

The difference is perhaps that Western Europe and the USA have had things pretty good for a pretty long time—since the Second World War and aftermath, say. For most of us, that is now beyond living memory. The governments and people of Eastern Europe, East Asia, or Israel, while they might be doing well at the moment, have known harsher times more recently.

This makes them better at recognizing a real threat, and mobilizing for it.

The Americans and the Western Europeans will find denial easier. Why take measures that might hurt the economy? It’s not as if bad things ever really happen, is it? It can’t happen here.

And, not accustomed to taking hits, any inconvenience in the meantime seems to the average American or Parisian unacceptable. Better to deny and hope it all goes away.

People have a natural tendency to cover their ears to real bad news; bad news that doesn’t just happen to others. To refuse to see either danger or evil when confronted with it. After all, hearing bad news makes you feel bad. Churchill once said: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

He credited his own ability to see the true menace of Hitler to his experience of depression.

Orwell too considered his primary talent to be the ability to admit truth, as most men cannot. He wrote “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” He, too, suffered from depression, due to an abused childhood in a public school.

This reveals an interesting law of nature: the poor are likely to be saner than the rich. Those who have suffered are likely to be saner than those who have been lucky in life. Jesus more than hints in the Beatitudes. The poor and the oppressed are those most apt to keep up the constant struggle to see what is in front of their noses. Circumstances have forced them to it.

I think I have seen this myself, consistently.

It is bizarre therefore that we classify “depression” as a “mental illness.” The depressed are in fact the sanest among us. Great minds are always depressed, as Aristotle or Plato said and knew. It is perhaps an emotional disorder, but it is the opposite of a mental disorder in the common sense.

The Book of Consolation

Narcissism: Its Cause and Its Cure

Narcissism: Its Cause and Its Cure  -- the podcast.

Podcast Now on iTunes

The new "Truth about Dragons" podcast is now featured on iTunes, so you can easily download episodes for your iPhone or iPod.

https://podcasts.apple.com/qa/podcast/the-truth-about-dragons/id1488233987

Now the challenge for me will be to keep three podcasts supplied with new episodes. Wish me luck.

Death on the Danforth

There has been another random mass murder, in Toronto, on the Danforth. Toronto, or Canada, is not any longer the peaceable kingdom it used to be.

The first reaction is of course for people to call for gun control.

This is not the solution:

1. more guns in public hands are logically no more dangerous than fewer guns. Note that most mass shootings in the US actually happen in “gun-free zones.” These ensure for a shooter that victims are defenseless: shooting gallery conditions. Secondly, the frequency of mass shootings is actually fairly comparable across developed countries—NOT most common in the US, which supposedly has the loosest gun control. And these various countries have different levels of gun ownership, and different gun laws. 
2. guns if completely banned can be replaced with bombs, vehicles, or—as we see recently in the UK—knives, for similar random mass attacks. Banning guns would do nothing for this reason. 

The second reaction is for people to call for better mental health care, so that deranged people no longer “fall through the cracks.” More funding!

Neither is this a solution.

1. Seemingly without exception, these mass killers are already under psychiatric care. They did not fall through the cracks. 
2. Any number of studies prove that the mentally ill are no more prone to violence than the general population. And, again, the incidence of mass killings is about the same across the developed world, despite different funding models for mental health. 

So what is the solution? Can we do anything?

One obvious suggestion, that nobody wants to make, is to end Muslim immigration. Such shooters do seem to be disproportionately Muslim, as in the current example. Surely this is an argument for ending the immigration of Muslims into any country?

It must immediately be said that Islam or Islamism was not involved in this case. The perp was mentally ill. Nevertheless, as any police department will tell you, there is a “copycat” element in crimes, especially spectacular crimes. One person does it, and others are inspired to do the same. Especially the mentally ill, who tend to be suggestible. Recall for example the spate of assassinations in the US in the late Sixties and Seventies.

The model of going on a killing frenzy against unbelievers will resonate among Muslims who are insane, creating a special danger. Regardless of whether the vast majority of Muslims would never even think of doing it. And such killing sprees against unbelievers are genuinely a longstanding element of Islam. They have been a problem for centuries in, for example, the southern Philippines. Not some new or transitory thing. Ergo, without individual Muslims being at fault, it is still a higher risk to the general population to let in Muslims as immigrants. This is a valid consideration in selecting immigrants. There is, the US Supreme Court to the contrary, no human rights question involved in discriminating on the grounds of religion for immigration purposes. This is an issue of freedom of association for those already here, or anywhere else. Any more than there is a human rights issue in discriminating on the grounds of language ability, or illness, or likelihood to need social assistance. None assume moral fault in the applicant.

Again, nobody wants to say it, but there is another reason to want to restrict Muslim immigration. On a vital issue, Muslims will tend not to assimilate, on religious grounds. Unlike in Christianity or Buddhism, or, at least for historical reasons, Judaism, in Islam there is no separation of church and state. Any government that is not specifically both religious and Muslim is, in Muslim terms, illegitimate. Accordingly, if and when a group of Muslims forms a majority in any area, however small, there will be an inevitable demand for a separate government, with their own laws, on a religious foundation. They will therefore never consider themselves any more than transitionally and regrettably “Canadian.” Witness Bosnia, the southern Philippines, or Chechnya. Letting in a large Muslim minority creates an inevitable future conflict, probably bloody.

But, you may argue, not all Muslims will think like this. So just let in the “good” Muslims who recognize the separation of church and state.

Problem: these are not the good Muslims. These are the Muslims who do not take their religion seriously. Accordingly, they are just as likely to be fast and loose with its other requirements, most of them involving objectively good morals. From the Muslim perspective, to be secularized is to be wicked, and such Muslims will see themselves as having defected to "the wicked West." No rules any longer need apply.

But none of this really does much regarding the immediate question of mass shootings. You cannot deport Muslim Canadians, and there are a good number of them.

The real problem is, I think, a critical diagnostic failure in the psychiatric profession. Psychiatry does not distinguish between two opposite conditions, melancholia, and narcissism. This is the only way you can end up with mass killers always being mentally ill, but the mentally ill not being any more likely to be mass killers. We must have two separate groups being given the same diagnosis of “mental illness.” One has to be less likely than the general population to be violent, and the other more likely, so that the two statistically balance out.

Melancholics, the product of some abuse or trauma, and narcissists, who have mostly simply chosen to do wrong, show similar symptoms, of depression and anxiety; and all psychiatry is capable of seeing, because of its empirical prejudices, are symptoms. So both are treated with antidepressants, or antipsychotics, which give purely symptomatic relief.

These helpfully dull the floating anxiety, the troubling thoughts, or, in the case of psychosis, the hallucinations. In a melancholic, it allows them to function more normally, without unjustified anxieties caused by systematic abuse or PTSD. In a narcissist, however, the anxiety and depression are really the voice of conscience, expressing genuine guilt. Giving them the pills allows them to continue to function narcissistically, and ramp up, by stilling this troubling voice of conscience.

If the former group, the melancholics, experience a crisis, they want to kill themselves. If the latter group, the narcissists, experience a crisis, they will want to kill everyone around them. Big difference. Give them antidepressants and antipsychotics, and this will happen. This itself explains the growing incidence of such mass murders.

How to tell the difference? Not hard, on several bases.

Both groups will also tend to seek similar relief in alcohol, as a form of “self-medication.” But there are two kinds of drunks, aren't there? A melancholic drunk, who drinks to ease the pain of abuse, will get funnier and more outgoing when drunk, or just dopey, or fall asleep. A narcissistic drunk, who drinks to still the inhibitions of conscience, will get belligerent, or self-pitying, or nasty.

It might be a good diagnostic tool, if psychiatry knew what it was doing.

Death By Narcissism

Narcissus

Recently, I ran into this sad passage on Quora:

There are several Narcissists in my family. One person lived in denial to her dying day. ... When she became ill she lost all her power. She even denied she was sick for a while and because of that her cancer got worse. Once diagnosed as terminally ill she cried a lot and showed her anguish. She died in fear. She didn’t cope well in the end. It was sad.

This rang a big loud church bell in the back of my mind. My first wife was a narcissist. While we were together, she developed a lump in her left breast. For something like a year, I insisted she had to go to a doctor—free, in Canada—and get it checked. She wouldn’t do it. I could not understand it. It seemed suicidal. She said it was because she was afraid.

Finally, seeing no other option, I told her I would leave her if she didn’t go and get it looked at.

So she finally went.

It was cancer.

She died of it.

Had she gone sooner, she almost certainly would be alive today.

This reveals the nature of narcissism. It is a fixed habit of refusing to confront any unpleasant reality. It is based on fear. It is an addiction, like alcoholism. A typical alcoholic drinks so he can forget for a time some unpleasantness and disappointment he perceives in his daily life. But a narcissist relies on lies in the same way a lush relies on the bottle—and he lies to himself just as much as to others. He builds up an imaginary world, in which he is king, and tries to live in it. It is an addiction.

A narcissist will therefore deny anything they do not want to be true, to avoid facing it. This most obviously includes bad, immoral things they have done. At least, this is what will be most obvious to others, the victims. They will twist things and twist things in their mind until they can convince themselves it never really happened, it was not their fault, someone else did it. Probably their victim did it himself. This is useful to a narcissist in itself, because it gives him permanent carte blanche to do as he likes without regard to others.

But the lie is the real essence of the condition, and the lie will also and just as likely be about anything else that strikes the narcissist as unpleasant to face. A teen pregnancy; child molestation in the family; a business failure; any personal imperfection. Or a cancerous tumor. Anything they do not want to be true, they will convince themselves is not true.

This spreads immediately to their family, if they are a parent. Nobody else dares say what is going on. Because if anyone does, the narcissist becomes, in effect, hysterical, out of their fear of having to face what they have taken such infinite pains to avoid facing. They will become violently hostile to anyone who seems to shatter their carefully constructed delusions. My first wife, for example, once she learned she had cancer, switched immediately to blaming me for giving it to her. I suppose in her mind I gave it to her because I was the one who made her go to the doctor.

And so you get a dysfunctional family, all living a lie, pretending to lies of all kinds, and all walking on eggshells. Everything is a trigger or a tripwire. Adult Children of Alcoholics speak of “the elephant in the room,” but in most dysfunctional families, over time, there come to be many elephants in the room nobody is supposed to acknowledge.

Now, realizing how this works, I begin to wonder about my mother. She died of cancer too. I wonder if she was herself a martyr to narcissism. Not a narcissist herself, but a key member of a narcissistic, dysfunctional family, in which the denial of any unpleasant realities was standard procedure. The essential enabler.

I have been told that, when she went to see a doctor, the tumor was advanced. The doctor was surprised that she had not come earlier. Usually, he said, by that point the pain is great enough to suggest some urgent action.

Perhaps she did not dare say anything, or do anything, that might imply something as unpleasant as cancer. Perhaps not because she was herself so afraid of the cancer diagnosis, but because she knew the effect it would have on the family. It was an unpleasant reality. That would have been unacceptable.

Perhaps narcissism is the real cancer, and it is killing both bodies and souls around us every day. And making its sufferers, like the woman described in Quora, die in agony.

What Makes a Narcissist?

Narcissus, Cave, 1890.

What makes a narcissist?

The official answer is that nobody knows. Mayo Clinic’s web site says “It’s not known what causes narcissistic personality disorder.” WebMD says “The exact cause is not known, but there are several theories.”

WebMD cites two: narcissism is caused by “parents who put their children on a pedestal,” and “children who are ignored or abused.”

There is an obvious contradiction here: if we accept both theories, that would mean that opposite actions can produce the same result. Moreover, we have seen, and it has been generally confirmed by studies, that children who are ignored or abused tend to develop depression in later life. This is an opposite condition, involving low, not high, self-esteem. So we are also positing here that the same action can produce opposite results.

The obvious conclusion is that option two is false: narcissism is not caused by childhood neglect or abuse.

Our best source for understanding the psyche is literature and legend. So the best place to look for clarity is the original Greek story of Narcissus.

According to the story, Narcissus was an unusually handsome youth, who fell in love with his reflection in a pool—an image of complete self-absorption.

However, in the story, Narcissus’s narcissism was not cased by seeing his reflection in the pool, and it was not caused, directly, by his good looks. He was self-centred and callous before this. “Many a youth, and many a damsel sought to gain his love;” writes Ovid, “but such his mood and spirit and his pride, none gained his favour.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3. 339 – 509, trans. Brookes More). This cannot have been because of his own opinion of his looks; he had not yet seen his reflection. Had he, the effect of seeing it later could not have been so mesmerizing. Falling in love with his reflection was divine punishment for his lack of empathy in spurning the nymph Echo—not its cause.

He was basing his essential narcissism, then, on the adulation he was receiving from others. This would seem to confirm excessive praise in youth or childhood as the cause of narcissism.

This is again confirmed by the tale of Tantalus, another narcissistic figure, and an archetypal child abuser. He was, according to legend, first especially favoured by the gods; from this he developed insatiable expectations.

It is important to note that neither legend, Narcissus or Tantalus, attributes narcissism directly to upbringing or to the actions of others. In both cases, although such circumstances are a temptation, the narcissism is shown as a moral choice, and a moral fault, deserving of punishment, not something that has been done by others to the narcissist.

This being so, it is possible that an abusive or neglected childhood could lead at times to narcissism, and a pampered, spoiled childhood might not. This may be one reason the roots of narcissism are mysterious for psychiatry. It is predisposed to see things as diseases, not choices, and it rules out ethical considerations a priori.

Where does the idea that narcissism comes from childhood abuse or neglect come from?

Pretty plainly, it comes from the clinical testimony of narcissists.

Beginning with Alice Miller. We have seen that she was herself a narcissistic child abuser, and we have seen that she attributes narcissism—which she lumps in with depression—to parents who did not love unconditionally, but instead set standards for the child, in order to “earn” their love.

In a way, this rings true, and one can see how it works. A young child is raised being told they are absolutely wonderful. But sooner or later, in the natural course of things, the outside world will require them to prove themselves. They will, for example, be marked at school. Sooner or later, they will not get the top mark in some subject. Sooner or later, they will fail at something. Sooner rather than later, for the narcissist: being innately wonderful, they are less likely to have made that initial effort. Sooner or later, their parents will need to direct some of their attention elsewhere—to a new child, to their own needs, to making a living.

Because their expectations are infinite, the narcissist will find this traumatic. At this point, they have a choice. They can revise their distorted opinion of themselves, buckle down to improving, and grow up. Or they can decide they have been tricked or betrayed—by their parents, by the system, by any others who have done better than they. The latter is the easy, lazy option. A narcissist is born.

The same equation works of the narcissist is confronted by some moral choice: should he grab the candy from the store, say, or waive his desires until he has the pocket money to buy it. Any kid might give in to such a temptation; a spoiled kid more than another. Then conscience begins to trouble the narcissist. He can either admit to himself his fault, and amend, or he can deny, blame the Jews or the capitalist system or the Catholic Church and their nagging morality, and double down.

Then it is in the nature of a narcissist, once confirmed in their path, that they will never again accept personal responsibility. If they are being told they are mentally ill, or for that matter have done wrong, they will then as a matter of course blame their children. Hence the tendency to abuse them. But failing that, the next obvious line of defense is to blame their own parents. Confronted by an analyst, it is the natural line to take.

A friend of mine had a father who drank excessively. He was distant from his children, by their report; he ignored them. At one point, oppressed by his own unspecified problems, he had an analyst come in on house visits. After several sessions, the psychiatrist assembled the family in the living room and announced to the children, “the problem here is that none of you love your father enough.”

The analyst was being manipulated by a narcissist. Narcissists are good at that.

The Holocaust of the Heart

A good friend told me recently that my stuff on the Dymphna Complex was over his head. He has now, perhaps, told me why.

He asked me what my evidence was.

Which seemed odd, since I thought I had laid it all out pretty systematically.

So I repeated the list, as given by Freud and Otto Rank (with my own female additions, as arising from their list):

Heracles
Moses
Romulus
Cyrus
Telephus
Gilgamesh
Lohengrin
Siegfried
Perseus
Sargon
Paris
Karna
Tristan
Danae
Agaea
Andromeda
Ophelia.

His response was that he had only ever heard of one person on that list, Moses, “but never read his work.”

This, I think, says something important.

This is not a man off the street. This is a guy with two degrees, a college instructor. A college English instructor, an instructor in the Humanities. How much worse the case must be for the average Canadian or American.

Moses, of course, wrote the Bible. Or at least the first five books of it.

Moses rescued from the rushes--Dura-Europos

In sum, we have stopped educating our rising generations in any meaningful sense. These stories and texts used to be the entirety of our education, in terms of its content.

For good reason. These stories told us what we most needed to know.

There is no way to talk about non-physical experiences of any sort without using either metaphor or narrative or both—an “objective correlative.” Like these stories. Yet ALL of our experiences are non-physical. All of them.

Without this common language of symbol and myth, we can no longer communicate with each another, on anything other than a caveman level. “Gimme meat.” “Sex now.” We can talk only about physical wants.

No wonder modern life feels increasingly empty and meaningless. No wonder there is a “spiritual catastrophe” going on, as Leonard Cohen called it. No wonder the statistics for depression and for mental illness generally are skyrocketing in exactly the way global warming isn’t. No wonder America, Europe, “Western civilization,” and civilization generally (it is a mirage to suppose there is any intact civilization outside the West that might take over. They all fell earlier.) seem to be coming apart. No wonder we can no longer talk to one another, but only swing our fists. Even in the bedroom, between men and women.

This is where it began.

People have sold grounds, of course, for thinking studying literature, myth, religion, philosophy, and history is a waste of time. There are no jobs to be had there.

But this is tautological: there are no jobs there, any more, because nobody any longer values myth, literature, religion, philosophy, and history. There is not even any riddle here about the chicken and the egg: the devaluing had to come first, and then there were no jobs.

Granted, these stories may not give you much practical help in the current world in finding or even doing a job. But a job is not much good when everything else is falling apart; especially if you are psychotic, drug addicted, and completely alone. You may not be coming in for work anyway.

And those jobs that need have nothing to do with the Humanities are exactly those jobs that are easily replaced by a machine. And that is already happening, swiftly.

I am not talking here of the “Western canon.” “Western” is a red herring. We might do as well to study the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Confucian classics and those two literatures. (I do not speak here of the Quran and Muslim literature, because it is already a part of the larger West). In fact, we really should study them all. But the same myth motifs and plots tend to be found all over the world. So do the same philosophical issues, and the same philosophical positions.

Dragons appear in folk tales everywhere.

Besides giving us a common language of narrative, allusion, and metaphor, so that we can communicate our own thoughts to one another, necessarily, most of the best thoughts of the past ten thousand years or more have been expressed in this language of myth and story. If we do not know or understand it, all that is lost.

This is, taken together, the rock upon which all civilization is built. It is what our passage through the cosmos on this strange round rock has been about, as sentient beings.

You don’t think anyone figured out anything important or useful in those thousands of years?

You think it is better to smash all the statues, ignore it all and start again from scratch?

Clearly, many people do.

These are what is properly known as bad people.

And this impulse seems to be deep within the culture now. My friend’s protest that he could not understand in the end still seems odd. He did not really need to know any of these characters or their stories. I had not been relying on allusion: I think I had given the relevant details when I referred to them.

It was as if he saw a myth or a word from literature or history, and a light in his mind at once went off.

There is worse. When I noted that the typical fairy tale involved a wicked parent or step-parent, my friend queried this. He said he could think of only one example, Cinderella.

I would have thought that Disney had preserved at least a selection of the traditional fairy tales. Perhaps, however, they pass over us in flickers of light and are forgotten, as the typical movie seems to be. It is only a few hours entertainment, and in most cases we cannot remember much about them a few days later. Eye candy, but leaving nothing to think about.

Fairy tales do not belong in that medium. They were orally transmitted for unknown generations. This means they were composed to be memorized, contemplated, thought about in our solitude and leisure.

Here is the list I offered him, more or less off the top of my head, of familiar fairy tales that seem to include some version of the theme of a wicked parent.

Briar Rose

How many of them do you know well enough that you could retell the basic story to your child? This, after all, is the medium, memory and oral transmission and retelling, for which they were intended.

Snow White
Hansel and Gretel
Rapunzel
Little Red Riding Hood
Cupid and Psyche
Puss in Boots
The Ugly Duckling
Dick Whittington and his Cat
Aladdin
The Gingerbread Man
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Little Match Girl
The Musicians of Bremen
Sleeping Beauty (Disney version of Briar Rose)
Briar Rose (Grimm version)
Rumpelstiltskin
Beauty and the Beast

Perhaps it was here, in the nursery, where the holocaust began. This is when and how we began seeing ourselves and other people as objects.

Pikangikum

Pikangikum - Google maps.

Another mental health crisis in another Canadian reserve: Pikangikum.

The proposed solution: rush in 20 full-time “mental health workers” at a cost of $1.6 million. This adds to eight already there.

Pikangikum has a population of 2,100.

Over the longer term, we are told, the proposed solution is a “fundamental rethink of the way care is delivered on reserves.”

Yeah, that ought to do it. We’ll “rethink.” We’ll have a committee.

“The health-care system … First Nations people receive is not equal,” a local physician explains, noting “Canada has grown accustomed to witnessing this injustice.”

“It is inferior …. It is not equitable.”

This is obviously not true. One mental health worker for every 75 people? The people of Pikangikum clearly have access to more mental health help than anyone in Canada who does not live on a native reserve.

“Communities know what is going to work for them,” says local MP Bob Nault. “Why can’t we help support those plans?”

“Indigenous health has been focused on measuring the number of dollars spent as opposed to health outcomes,” adds Dr. Alika Lafontaine, the past president of the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada.

In other words, the solution proposed by politicians and the press is to send yet more money to band leaders, with less accountability.

Yeah, that’s never been tried before. That ought to work.

To make things worse, that is. Obviously, no lack of mental health workers has caused the mental health crisis on this and so many other remote reserves. Nor has mucking about or oppression by the white man: these are the very places where the white man is not. The problem has to be the reserve itself; and its leadership.

Far from sending more money to the reserve leadership, increasing their power and control over the band members, the obvious solution is to get these poor kids off the reserves.

Apartheid is not an idea with a promising past.

Anti-Psychiatry at OISE

Szasz

Barbara Kay and the National Post are concerned about a new scholarship at OISE for research into “anti-psychiatry.”

“Critics,” says the Post. “worry the university is endorsing an anti-scientific, anti-intellectual exercise”

“’This is a case where academic freedom should be quashed,’ Edward Shorter, a U of T professor and expert in the history of psychiatry, states bluntly.”

A neurosis, I say, on both their houses. Here again is a case where neither side seems close to the truth.

It is entirely proper to question psychiatry. If it were a real science, questioning its premises would be what it is all about. Science is not a body of unassailable dogmas: it is a method for testing any dogmas. It proves nothing; it only disproves. The essence of science—ask Francis Bacon—is taking nothing on authority, testing everything with the direct evidence of experience. Kay and the Post, like just about everyone these days, stand this basic scientific principle on its head. They claim one is “anti-science” if one is not ready to simply take the word of those identified as “scientists.” The obvious current example is “climate science.”

This is not science, but “scientism.” It is a modern religion based loosely on science, including a sacred priesthood held to be above all suspicion. It is not in touch with the real world. It is a great way for a small educated elite to get away with murder.

“To be fair to Barstow,” Kay concedes, “her distrust of psychiatry is not unfounded. For decades, psychoanalysis —often confused with psychiatry, but not a scientific discipline or necessarily premised on a prior medical degree—was wrongly regarded with near-religious awe as a panacea to humanity’s ills. Many analysts did no harm, but others exploited their prestige to promote bizarre theories and, eventually, make psychoanalysis a sidebar in the treatment of mental illness.

Psychiatry, which does require a medical degree, is another story...”

Oh well then. That makes all the difference. If someone has a medical degree, what they say must be true.

Bacon must be ralphing in his grave.

Bacon

“True disciplines spring,” Kay explains reverently, “from pure intellectual curiosity, not the pursuit of social justice. They build on collaboration with similarly engaged scholars. Fact is piled on fact, theories are debated, evidence is adduced, lively debate ensues, and eventually a body of credible knowledge is established. Real scholarship is ‘for’ truth.”

That is a pious recitation of the scientistic faith. So touchingly naive it pulls tears. It assumes anyone well-educated must be beyond base motives of any sort.

Has she never been to grad school? I only wish it were true.

But then, two wrongs do not make a right. That ought to be her argument: two wrongs do not make a right. The present scholarship implies a point of view no better than the one it challenges.

“For Burstow to claim there is ‘no proven biological basis for mental illness,’” writes Kay, “is demonstrably untrue. Countless studies have proved beyond any doubt that there is a genetic basis for all major psychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder and depression.”

No, Barstow is exactly right on this point. Kay is far behind the curve. Back in the early nineties or so, psychiatry was insisting that mental illness is all a matter of genetics and of “chemical imbalance,” and announcing that they were on the verge of isolating the mechanism and the gene. It was fashionable then. For one thing, it justified cheap and relatively effective chemical treatments, coming available. It suited govenments, because it promised a cheaper treatment option. Dare I mention, it suited the drug companies, who were putting a lot of money around as a result? It suited the physicians, because it offered a purely physical cause for mental illness. And none of the claims have been substantiated by further research; even as our knowledge of the human genome grows exponentially.

It is high time to plainly admit that it has all been a chase after uncivilized geese.

Psychiatry as a whole begins as a philosophical error. It is a typical academic field in this regard. The pursuit of truth? Academics has only a tangential relation to truth. Careers and entire new disciplines are usually—usually--premised on some intellectual error, even a fairly obvious one. Sooner or later, when this is revealed somehow to be so, it is in too many vested interests to deny the new information. Even the most obvious error must wait for en entire generation of professors to die off to be accepted. Obvious case in point: Marxism was pretty completely discredited by the 1950s, let alone the collapse of the East Bloc in the 1980s. Yet it continues to thrive—guess where?

Unfortunately, human lives can be in the balance. This is clearly the case with psychiatry.

Psychiatry is at base an attempt to reduce the soul (psyche) to some kind of materialistic basis. This was Freud’s agenda; it was the behaviourist agenda; it is still more the modern “chemical imbalance” agenda. This is intrinsic to the field—otherwise it is no province of “physicians.” Yet this is almost automatically slef-contradictory: it is a field that does not even recognize the real existence of its object of study. How likely is that to work? It is like a branch of zoology dedicated to the scientific study and classification of mythological creatures.

The very concept of “mental illness,” therefore, is a metaphor taken literally.

Suppose, instead, that the soul exists?

As it inarguably does. As Berkeley, among others East and West, points out, we are immediately aware of and certain of the soul’s existence. It is the existence of the physical world, of the body, that is debatable.

There is a second, disastrous fundamental error in the field. If you are going to talk about “mental health”--a metaphor, remember, not a reality, and one that may or may not be useful--what constitutes “health”?

Easy to determine in a physical system like the body, imagined as a machine. Does it work, or does it not?

But the metaphor does not work with the soul. What constitutes “working properly”? What exactly is the right functioning of the soul? How is one soul qualified to judge this of another?

Unfortunately, psychiatry has fixed on t he idea of “normalcy.” The soul is functioning correctly that functions like every other soul. The soul is fit to judge that is properly average.

This is obviously highly debatable. In fact, it disagrees sharply with all the world’s major religions. This ought to be an immediate problem in terms of any public funding.

Any of the world’s great religions would say that the average soul is spiritually lacking. So would any of the great philosophers.

Moreover, anyone of any unusual intelligence, creativity, morality, or talent is necessarily abnormal. Anyone with a new idea is abnormal. Accordingly, the basic premise of psychiatry is destructive of science itself, of human progress, of ethics, and of human freedom. Not to mention the health of the soul. All very well so long as one stays out of the gears of the psychiatric system, but deadly to anyone who is unlucky enough to get “diagnosed.”

So Barstow starts with a very good case. Inside or outside of the academy, we need an “anti-psychiatry” movement. Nor is this new. I studied at Syracuse University, home turf of the late, great Thomas Szasz. At Queen’s, I heard a visiting lecture from R.D. Laing. Has Kay not heard of them? Since when has this academic possibility to doubt psychiatry as a whole been shut down?

Unfortunately, Barstow screws it up completely, and probably boosts Kay and the psychiatrists, by saying wild things like:

“The long history of psychiatry is the long history of pathologizing women … It is also an institution that pathologizes blacks, lesbians and gays. This intersectionality analysis is readily available through an antipsychiatry lens.”

So psychiatry is okay so long as only white men are oppressed? It’s all politics? This allows Kay to point out that, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it is clearly the male tendency that is oppressed. So no problem, then. 

McMurphy

Making it all about politics is almost as materialist as making it all about chemicals: that is just replacing Freud’s materialist pseudo-science with Marx’s “dialectical materialism.” It is just as intolerant. And it has no chance of overtaking the chemical solution, if you will pardon the pun, because it is obviously much less practical to implement.

Barstow’s stated goal is to “spur alternate ways of arranging society so that we aren’t inventing diseases.”

Rearranging society is a big project. By itself, it is ominous, it implies a loss of freedom. Instead of submitting only our most eccentric to the absolute power of some arbitrary elite, we would be submitting everyone. And, if ever possible, that is surely the long way around--a longer way around than drugging up the individual sufferer.

Yes, the world is hopelessly screwed up. But that is not news, that is not a temporary condition. Any religion will tell you: it is the inevitable human condition. So long as people are not perfect, some people will be bad to other people. And you cannot perfect human beings. In fact, you do not even have the right to try.

We must accept that fact, and find our peace within it.

The proper solution has, of course, been known for millennia: religion exists, specifically, as the real psychology. Psychiatry harms, more than anything, by blocking this necessary treatment. Marxist politics harms in the same way.

Depression as Spiritual Birth

I do not know Sarah Silverman. She is apparently a comedian. She has recently gone public with her struggle with depression. She has a very interesting description of the experience: “It feels like I'm desperately homesick, but I'm home.”

But that's it. We are not home. This world is not our home. Some people realize this, and depression is the natural first response. A lousy immediate environment, a trauma, is probably commonly needed to trigger this awareness, but there is a larger existential truth behind it. We would not experience depression were we not half conscious of a profound discord between is and ought. We would just accept what is for what is, as a frog accepts his slime. The clearer our perception of ought, the greater our depression. You cannot know you are in a valley without sight of a mountain.

Mount Carmel.

This is the hopeful side of depression. We have sighted the mountain. The challenge then is to begin to climb.

Mount Sinai

Silverman also speaks of the experience of panic attacks. “Every breath is laboured. You are dying. You are going to die.”

You are, one might say, a fish out of water. Interesting that the New Testament and the early church chose the fish as an image for the soul. A fish, or a bird, both alien to terra firma, where we live in a physical sense. Conversely, the church was early imagined as a ship—hence the term “nave” for the place where the congregation congregates. It was Noah's ark: everything outside the church is a watery chaos in which souls drown.

Early Christian symbol of a fish and anchor.

There is, as the New Testament says, a physical death, and a spiritual death. It is the spiritual death, no doubt, that is feared in a panic attack; to suppose it is a fear of physical death makes it nonsensical. That fear of spiritual death is real, and reasonable.

Image of a bird with an olive branch from the Roman catacombs.

Symbolically, breath is spirit. Hence we “respire.” If you feel you cannot breathe, the proper refuge is a church.

The nave of Bristol Cathedral. You are looking at a ships hull turned upside down.