The Truth about Dragons

St. George in unstained glass.

A friend on Facebook recently posted an article on “Ten Natural Treatments for Depression.” As with most such articles, it is wrong and includes bad advice.

Beginning with the first paragraph:

“Depression is a mental health disorder resulting from chemical imbalances of the brain. It is not a personal defect, failure, or weakness. Rather, it is a medical issue, plain and simple. And, as with any other medical condition, depression requires diagnosis and treatment.”

It is meaningless, to begin with, to say depression results from “chemical imbalances of the brain.” The assertion tells us nothing. What cases the chemical imbalances?

This is like saying psoriasis is caused by a skin rash.

But it’s worse. “Chemical imbalance” itself is only pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. What might constitute a proper “balance of chemicals”? What does the phrase even mean?

Suppose some specific chemical were found in higher proportion in the brains of those experiencing depression than in the general population. This cannot establish cause and effect. Did the chemical cause the thoughts, or did the thoughts cause the chemical?

It is all only a survival of an ancient pseudo-medical myth, the theory of the humours.

“It is not a personal defect, failure, or weakness. Rather, it is a medical issue, plain and simple.”

This is the fallacy of the false alternative. There are not only two choices here, either personal defect or disease. Suppose someone runs into you with their car; is that either your personal defect or purely a medical issue?

It seems the reality is being deliberately avoided; otherwise why ignore one obvious possibility? Why is it impossible that depression be caused by environment? Isn’t it just common sense that it often, if not always, is?

“As with any other medical condition, depression requires diagnosis and treatment.”

This implies that diagnosis and treatment will help. Sadly, whether the current medical treatments for depression do is still highly debatable in medical or scientific terms. There is some survey evidence that people do better if they do not seek such treatment.

Realizing all this may well make you even more depressed. But telling lies is not going to help.

In fact, there are effective ways to fight depression. To begin with, depression is not “a medical condition.”

That is why the book The Truth about Dragons is about to appear.

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.

Jordan Peterson and the Culture Hero

Jordan Peterson’s basic premise as a psychologist seems to be that life is a struggle between order and chaos: the subtitle of his recent book is “An Antidote to Chaos.” “Peterson’s big, unifying idea is that chaos and order, along with the processes that mediate the two, are the ‘primal constituents’ of ‘the world of experience’” (Dan Blazer, American Journal of Psychiatry).

This does not ring true to me.

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as chaos. Where man is not, God is. Any randomness is only apparent.

Accordingly, the struggle against chaos cannot be the core concern in life. Rather, in struggling against “chaos,” we may only be trying to impose our own will in preference to that of God.

And here again I find in Peterson disturbing echoes of Fascism. This would be Hitler’s “triumph of the will.”

Nor is there, in principle, any moral reason to prefer “order” over “chaos.” Why? Because it is tidier?

Peterson undoubtedly gets this, or finds this, idea of order versus chaos in a common creation myth, found in many parts of the Middle East, of a struggle between a sky god and a primordial monster. This has commonly been interpreted as a struggle between form (the sky god) and matter (the monster), or spirit and matter, or order and chaos. Certainly a plausible interpretation; but there is no room for such a motif in monotheism. God creates the universe not by imposing some form on preexisting matter—for then, where did matter come from?--but “ex nihilo,” out of nothing, form and matter together. “Chaos,” in the Judeo-Christian context, is simply non- being, the void.

According to a piece in the Financial Times, Peterson goes on to identify “chaos” with “the eternal feminine.” A smaller point, but this too is surely wrong. It is nonsensical. To impose one sex or the other on chaos is a contradiction in terms: it then has some order, a distinguishing feature, and so is not chaos.

The idea that there is a cosmic battle between spirit and matter (i.e., order and chaos) is an ancient Christian heresy. It is, to be more specific, Gnosticism. The Gnostics held that the material world was depraved, and the goal was for spirit to overcome it. Monotheists, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, hold that, because God created matter as well as form, matter too must be good, and is not to be vanquished or destroyed. Hence the resurrection of the body and the perfected new earth at the end of time.

For a Christian, the cosmic dragon battle, that between St. Michael and Lucifer, is not between order and chaos, but between good and evil.

A cosmic battle between order and chaos is a waste of a perfectly good universe.

And it seems to me the only reason anyone would embrace the concept would be as an excuse to do evil.