Sanity, Insanity & Political Isolation

yo what up I've got a little bit more of
a healthy pink glow in my face in this video if you've been watching my videos regularly you know that I've been recovering from extreme jet lag since going from the west coast of Canada to the middle of Germany and I've been trying to cope with that jet lag but going to the gym a lot but also came down with a really nasty cold flu type of virus and today is maybe the first day that I've recovered from that so nice to see you again YouTube um respond to a few things that Palestinian said about mental illness and mental health as Francis Bacon said it's always better to begin with concrete examples of these things and only later to move on to general statements of theory or principle so to get to the heart of it I used to live in a charming country called Cambodia in Cambodia right up to the 20th century and including the wars Cambodia still infamous for worse the 1960s 1970s and so on warriors would kill their enemies cut open their abdomens and bite into some of their organs I forget now if it was the liver or the kidneys but it was one specific organ that gushes hot blood when you take it out of your enemy's body and this was considered not only normal but some virtuous good in this culture is that insane there were journalists and war correspondents who witnessed this of read accounts and you were horrified at the barbarity of it and they couldn't believe whatever the year was that's what this is nineteen sixty-five or what everything were there and these people are still doing this thing that seems like it comes out of the pages of a history book from I don't know thousands of years ago and this type of intense warrior culture along with what you could call a death ritual or a blood a blood ritual I don't know what you want to call it this existed alongside and in the context of Orthodox tera vaada put this recently in conversation the professor actually pointed this out that while i have many critiques of buddhism very often these cultures what buddhism competed with the other religious views that exist alongside it were so bleak and so terrible involving human sacrifice animal sacrifice and other rituals that inevitably you sympathize more and more buddhism as some kind of civilizing force at least as a force that's directing people to minimize the amount of violence that intelligent as Marcus Aurelius says the question is are we to be sane or insane in Cambodia right up to the 20th century at least until the 1940s probably later in some areas they had gladiatorial games they had men with men who didn't disagree with each other many didn't hate each other fight to the death just for public entertainment this is often kind of glossed over or avoided when people give very flattering histories of what we know called kickboxing muy Thai and so on that actually these were blood sports that were fought for the ultimate prize that were fought for a life and death and for no particular reason it was applauded and people enjoyed it as a public spectacle and son a problem with it seems insane but these were widespread publicly sanctioned socially sanctioned forms of insanity I've read accounts again from the 20th century you know fully a hundred years ago or a little bit more than her years ago now from Mongolia a very different culture but again a culture where Buddhism is a dominant influence where you know men are applauded for behavior that we would consider insane that would you know definitely land them in a mental hospital even if they were serving in the in the US military today but again despite the Buddhists the ostentatiously Buddhist culture of Mongolia out in that part of Asia with the wars that were unfolding there was also a warrior sub culture and various forms I don't know what we might call blatant insanity were held up as virtues as things to be imitated so to some extent what we perceive to be seen and what we perceive to be insane is socially conditioned and in some ways you know the modern Western capitalist world is hyper conformist anyone who can't conform to the demands of their workplace is very rapidly perceived to be insane if you work in an office anyone who can't every day from nine to five keep up with the expectations that are imposed on them comes to be perceived as insane very quickly that's true in many different workplaces across the board there are very few walks of life where there's any latitude or lassitude for someone to be a little bit offbeat a little bit eccentric without being branded xane and of course the exceptions are celebrated in film and television and fiction yes if you work in the arts if you're a sculptor or a painter then you may get away with some eccentric behavior but other than that for the vast majority of us anything that takes a step to the left of the right out of what's expected you what's the matter view is pretty soon regarded as insanity now PO Simeon brings a particular lens to this issue he's speaking in a way that tries to motivate people and uplift people and he says that from his perspective mental health problems are electable there something you can get out of there something that in the moment you have control over now in terms of what is socially perceived as insanity I'm sure he has found that to be true in many instances in his life because we perceive so many things as insane that are not really insane but if you read much pilloried works like the DSM the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual every sophisticated intellectual is a familiar with the critiques attacking and denouncing this foundational work of modern bio psychiatry but nevertheless when you read those descriptions one of the mention to two of the hard criteria that would hear dispute or controvert or cause a problem for Palestinians optimistic assessment of mental health problems two criteria are very simply worded as compulsion and interruption if look you may have never in your life observed truly compulsive behavior but a compulsive behavior whether it's in a person who is sane or insane is by definition something they cannot stop themselves from doing even if they are aware of it so you can have compulsive behavior that a person is not aware of but then even if you observing the person doing it try to stop them and speak to them make them aware of what they're doing they still can't stop doing it even if they've been through therapy and discussed it even if they've reflected on even if they've written a journal about it even if they've published a book about it compulsive behavior by definition is what they can't stop themselves are doing and depending on what walk of life you're in you may go through your whole life without really observing this phenomenon within human nature but truly compulsive behavior absolutely by definition and I have seen it that is something that is outside of the remit of postilions optimistic statement that you can liberate yourself in the moment you can change your character you can change your direction you could overcome the ties that bind you to mental health problems interruption in the strict sense that you find it in the DSM and other psychiatric literature I suppose interruption is a really interesting and useful criterion to point out when you talk about for example alcoholism the meaning of love let's use cigarette addiction you can observe someone who is trying to quit smoking who's intensely addicted to nicotine and they've just started trying to quit smoking and while driving a car with no cigarettes they come to a point where they absolutely cannot continue driving the car because of their they are experiencing interruption as a symptom of nicotine withdrawal okay many other forms of drug addiction likewise have very clear for interruption now how they deal with that interruption may be many things they might get out of the car and go buy a pack of cigarettes but even if you stop them and tie them up in a straitjacket they are going to go through a period where they cannot return to that normal function they can't drive the car they can't just ignore it and keep doing what they're doing so this is actually a really interesting criterion because some things that we refer to as addiction people do not experience interruption in withdrawal symptoms for so you know people talk about today pornography addiction but do you ever have a scenario where someone is driving their car and they suddenly can't continue to drive the car anymore because they need to have access to pornography I believe the answer is no maybe I'm wrong maybe someone's doing a scientific study right now and saying no there really are these forms of withdrawal comparable to a a chemical addiction now not all fours chemical addiction have interruption as an aspect but interruption I mean it's very obvious you know one I remember reading a detailed study of arachnophobia a very simple form of mental disorder in many ways and sort of compared to other things but you know you have someone I remember one of her symptoms was she absolutely could not get into her car because of the fear that there were spiders in the darkness hiding inside the car the only way she would enter her own car was if she first sprayed it with insecticide and waited for the choking cloud of insecticide to throw out of the car and what was it in that case when her husband tried to force her you know froze me just hustled her into the car put her into the car without spraying it with insecticide she expects treem interruption and she actually kicked through the glass window because she was so terrified okay so compulsive behavior is one thing interruption is another I don't know if I ever had the kind of optimism that Palestinian expresses here that you can overcome your mental health problems in the way he describes in a sense I wish I did I wish I had that optimism under the DSM the grouping of what are called personality disorders if you have met and spent time with people who truly have personality disorders then you're often looking at a lot of compulsive behavior and you may be talking some ways otherwise highly rational or highly reflective not everyone but some of them are they may be able to articulate what their mental health problems are and yet they remain powerless over those compulsive behaviors and you can take if you're not a professional if you're not a psychiatrist or psychotherapy so you can take any attitude you want to take towards it you can be sympathetic or you cannot be sympathetic you can be contemptuous you're on a case-by-case basis whether or not you feel any empathy for the person who's going through this is up to you but I think that that empirical experience is spending time with people like that people with personality disorders as an example would really convince anyone that no you can meet human beings who who definitely are powerless over things they have knowledge of they have understanding of even when they exhibit maybe tremendous self-discipline introspection in other aspects of their life so the one sense in which I want to agree with pal Simeon is that a normal everyday life you do meet people who exhibit behaviors that are considered insane that socially qualify as being insane in an informal sense but in fact these behaviors are strategies there's strategies in the sense that their behaviors people elect to engage in for a given objective even if they have been engaging in them for so many years that they have come to appear compulsive that they've come to appear to be any meat part of their own character it's very common even amongst teenagers you can meet people who've engaged in certain types behavior because it got their parents approval because it got the attention the opposite sex because it got them attention period and maybe they engaged in these behaviors these mannerisms when they were six years old and they were still engaging in them at 16 but when you get a little bit older than that those behaviors start to not just seem childish they start to seem insane that's quite common and it's both deceptive to perceive those things as an innate part of the person's character and I think it's all so deceptive to think of them as true compulsions and very often in my own life I've people have been close to me and not even that close to me sometimes really engaged with philosophical discussions of people or by the end of the discussion they realize that something they're doing something they're saying even a political ideology there a spell really is a kind of unexamined strategy they've been engaged in for so many years that they lost their grip on the edges of it they've forgotten why they were engaging in or what the objectives were and maybe they'd forgotten really how inappropriate it was to engage in that behavior in some circumstances and contrast others um I admit I was thinking about this recently for totally different reasons for the ones Palestinian raises or engagement um it is said for me to see so many people with small political differences perceiving each of each other as insane and those political differences although they may be small may be totally impossible to navigate in the United States people who support abortion almost never eat lunch with people who oppose abortion it's what we call a watershed issue in politics when I was in Taiwan people who support Taiwanese independence never eat lunch with people who support Taiwanese reunification whether you think of these as issues as being left wing versus right when normally in any given culture living in there are hard and fast criteria people apply to politics and they never talk to anyone on the other side or often they jump the conclusion that anyone who disagrees on this particular issue that matters so much them anyone disagrees he's insane that's sad for me to see and I see it even with my own professors one of my professors has an extreme view on immigration politics and that Professor will she definitely won't eat lunch with you she will basically dismiss you as insane if you disagree with her even though really at least ninety eight percent of the people of Canada would not agree with review i think it's above 99 percent and I've seen polling data and we do have polls about what people's opinions are on immigration law and and what have you so even though she's in a tiny minority on that political issue she regards anyone who disagrees there as insane I have also spoken to feminists who are extremely opposed to pornography and they they think that anyone who tolerates pornography isn't saying simply anyone who doesn't share their extreme view that it should be illegal and exterminated doesn't even mean you have to like it but anyone who even tolerates they would never eat lunch with would never socialize with the crime scene um so that comes back to my earlier point of the extent to which perceptions of sanity insanity as Marcus Aurelius says the question of whether we are to be seen or insane the fundamental philosophical question it becomes an invidious game and people tend to lose sight of the extent to which their categorization of others is socially conditioned whether that social condition because they grew up in Cambodia or maybe it's socially conditioned because in the last ten years the only people you've been talking to you or other feminists who agree with you or other people who are a member of your particular political faction people who agree with your political opinions on some obscure issue that's it that's an ugly side of human nature um but at the same time I've had enough experience in politics I have seen insane behavior behavior that really looks insane compulsive extreme behavior exhibited by people but I can tell it is not truly compulsive behavior it is something they're doing as a strategy even if it's become a second ational units become so familiar to them and the way out of that if they can become aware of it if they can become aware of their own motives it is electable simply by questioning the reasons why they're doing what they're doing human nature is flexible frightening ly flexible Eva and you know the same people who in Cambodia would go to watch two men kill each other in a public battle to the death on another day of the week that would go to a Buddhist monastery and meditate and chanta sutra about how you shouldn't even kill a mosquito and you should live a life of complete non file human nature is malleable and that is probably what makes us so uncomfortable when we're confronted with the reality of personality disorders in compulsive behavior because that is exactly an exhibition of an aspect of human nature that is not valuable that people are powerless over that refuses to change and that refuses to be changed even when the person is aware of it even when they're sincerely trying to improve