Has the World Gone Mad? : A Comparison With My Own Experience of Insanity

Photo by grechka

How often do we ask ourselves : “Has the world gone mad?”

I wonder if there is something to be learned about some forms of social behaviour that we see in the world around us from my personal experience of mental breakdown.

First an irreconcilable conflict became apparent within the conceptual framework through which I was living my life. Order broke down.

Much that had been repressed by that, now shattered, conceptual framework, came to the surface.

Desperate for escape, my mind built utopian dreams out of the wreckage. They had to be true, because the alternative was unthinkable. But they never could persist, because they were mad fantasies that had no basis in the ground of real life.

As the fantasies evaporated I was left in the barren desert of despair. No wonder I had clung so desperately to the illusions. Here I was confronted with personal responsibility in its most extreme form. What if all the problems of the world were somehow my fault? This was a contrary form of madness, but perhaps a doorway to sanity.

Perhaps this terrible doorway is there within all of us. The most terrible place we never want to go.

Human society is a system playing itself out - action and reaction, in an intricately woven web. Information, knowledge, wisdom.. can bring some order to the system by bringing commonalities to the thought processes of individuals or communities and integrating them with practical realities they face, allowing their problem-solving actions to bear fruit. Lies, on the other hand, whether we tell them to ourselves or to each other, sow disorder in the system, leading to conflict and, very often, violence.

Chaos theory tells us that the most infinitesimal changes in a system will, over a long enough time period, change the entire system. So change in any of us, could be the change which determines the difference between triumph and disaster for the human race as a whole. That terrible doorway is that realisation.

That doesn’t mean we know what to do. And self-consciousness about our own actions tends to impede our effectiveness at even helping ourselves. Ultimately, we have to somehow open up and surrender to some kind of intuitive process. That is what lies on the other side of the terrible doorway - the awareness that we can’t force improvement in the social system, but that we can be a conduit for something helpful to flow into that system and help to manifest the orderliness which will benefit all.

When we see our fellows caught up in mad frantic utopian dreams or mob behaviour or judgement of others, perhaps we can see behind their behaviour a fear of that desert of despair and that terrible doorway that lies there. But that realm is only terrible if we go there alone, unguided and without hope.

The Economy of Love

Gentoo penguin colony on the rocks and glacier in the background at Neco Bay, Antarctica
- Photograph by Vadim Nefedov

Love is a mode of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It is also the bonds and emotions which accompany such a mode of being with others. The underlying message which it conveys is one of unconditional acceptance.

Love is the default relationship mode for humans. This may be hard to believe when we look around us at all the evidence of selfishness, prejudice and malevolence. We might believe that love is a precariously artificial thing which we only achieve by transcending our more basic nature, but that is not the case.

Love is what occurs when there are no barriers to it. If it is the exception it is simply because there are many barriers which can impede it. Think about the Antarctic. All you see is ice. Now that ice rests on rock. For us to see that rock, the ice would need to melt, but the fact that the ice is what we see doesn't mean that the rock is not the more basic and pre-existing phenomena.

Love is what happens between us when we feel truly safe. Not just safe physically, but secure in ourselves psychologically. It happens because if feels pleasurable.

It is a very basic principle that organisms, when all else is equal, open up to what is pleasurable to them and withdraw from what threatens them with pain or injury. If our existence is threatened then our attention may shrink back to ourselves and focus on meeting the challenge or we may reach out specifically to someone who can help us to meet the challenge. This is a conditional exchange. Our connection with them is dependent on their ability to help us to meet that current challenge.

For me the pleasure principle argues against the idea that we are essentially competitive. Where competition arises it is a temporary barrier to love. If we lived in a village during a time of food shortage, then our hunger might drive us to fight over what food is available. But as long as there was enough food, our tendency would be to return to a loving mode of relationship, because it feels most pleasurable.

What I'm deliberately ignoring here is the barrier to love provided by chronic emotional disturbance. This is the Antarctic ice which keeps the rock of love in us buried. If we are lucky, in our intimate relationships, we are able to thaw out enough to uncover it for a while.

The essence of this chronic emotional disturbance is compromised self-acceptance. What undermines our self-acceptance can be varied - suffering abuse at the hands of others, being heavily exposed to unreachable ideals of one kind or another which make us feel that we are unacceptable by comparison, being harshly judged by others, feelings of guilt about some of our actions, etc.

The message of love is unconditional acceptance and its expression requires that, for the moment, we feel unconditionally accepting of ourselves. To be focused on some aspect of ourselves which we feel to be a flaw is to not be fully focused on the other person. In love we forget about ourselves even as we give full expression to our essence.

This chronic emotional disturbance is really love deprivation. But it is important to remember that such deprivation does not necessarily lie in not being shown love by others. We need to be able to received love, and this is where the barrier tends to lie. Love, as I've said, is a mode of communication, and communication is a two way process.

To receive love we have to feel safe. We have to be able to open up to it. Our compromised self-acceptance leaves us feeling insecure and defensive, and for this reason we develop character armour - a rigid structure of self-perception and mode of interacting with the world. The aim of the character armour is to provide protection from external threats - to feel safe we need a practiced form of response - and from internal threats - a way to bottle up any feelings of hostility or despair.

The character armour is a barrier to giving or receiving love, because it stops us from being open and spontaneous. How would we do trying to make love with a suit of armour on? Our flesh would not touch and our movement would not be sinuous. Our bodies could not meld into one. The same is true psychologically. Love is a spontaneous dance. It can't be rehearsed.

Compromised self-acceptance takes either a passive or an active form.

Depression and other forms of mental illness are examples of mostly passive compromised self-acceptance. The message has been communicated to us - either directly by one or more others or more pervasively by some aspect of the culture - that we are not good enough. We passively take that message to heart. We may battle with it, but the battle is mostly internal.

What happens with the active form of compromised self-acceptance is that we set out to defend ourselves against the message that we are not good enough, or, in the extreme, to get revenge for having been subjected to it.

We may become obsessed with "proving" something about ourselves, by seeking status or material extravagance or something like that. We are thinking about what we do and what we have says about us. We are self-centred.

When severe insecurity about self worth combines with exposure to idealistic moral "shoulds", we may be so desperately cornered that we feel compelled toward some kind of revenge for our state. The "shoulds" require us to behave lovingly, but our severely compromised self-acceptance makes this impossible. If we were to take onboard the "shoulds" then they would destroy what is left of our self acceptance, leaving us suicidal. Hence the savagery with which we may attack those "shoulds" or anyone or anything our mind associates with them.

Photograph by Vadim Guzhva

This is the origin of malevolence in all its forms. Malevolence is clearly one of the major barriers to love.

Let's look at an example. Our self-acceptance has been undermined to such a degree that we feel the need to be comforted by sameness in those around us. People of a different race or culture leave us feeling insecure, because they give us a sense of uncertainty about whether they accept us. But then someone criticises us as being racist. The ideal is that we should feel about and behave towards others the same way irrespective of race or culture. This may set up a negative feedback loop. Our sense of insecurity in the presence of "the other" is grounded in our fear that we are not good enough. It leads to behaviour which causes us to be judged not good enough. Thus the insecurity is increased. The presence of "the other" becomes, in itself, a condemnation, which, if we are to keep from total loss of self-acceptance, must be resisted. This can lead to violently hostile feelings toward "the other", ironically generated by the insistence that we feel and act benevolently toward them.

The ways in which hostility between groups and individuals in our society, and all the other barriers to love, are generated are multifarious, but the underlying principles of the process are simple. Self-acceptance is undermined by mistreatment by others and exposure to unreachable ideals. Undermined self-acceptance makes us more likely to mistreat others. The only thing which can solve the problem is the cultivation of self-acceptance. The message of acceptance from others can help in this, but only if we are able to receive that message, something that our character armour impedes. Simply showing love to those who have hostile feelings towards us may actually increase those hostile feelings if they see our loving behaviour as a criticism of their unloving behaviour.

My aim here is not to directly suggest strategies for removing the barriers to love, but to provide a simple articulation of the phenomena which may be helpful in arriving at those strategies.

We need to understand that love is the default and that the barriers to it are outgrowths of compromised self-acceptance. The message which needs to be communicated is one of unconditional acceptance, not of behaviour but of the individual who betrays that behaviour, because hostile behaviour is, ultimately, a defiant response to what the individual experiences as an unjust withholding of that acceptance. It is acceptance that we are not unworthy because we are scared or angry that heals. When we act on our fear or anger in a way which harms others, the likelihood of our receiving that acceptance from others or ourself recedes. Thus the means for redemption and reconciliation where the damage has already been done are the Holy Grail we must seek.

Photograph by rawpixel

BOOK REVIEW : Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was an anthropologist amongst many other things. His central project was the application of systems theory or cybernetics (defined by Norbert Weiner in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”) to the fields of anthropology, psychology, history and ecology. This collection of academic papers and public lectures presents his thinking over the period from 1935 until 1971. The title is a description of his aim. Just as ecology is the study of the interrelationship between living things in natural systems in search of an understanding of what allows those systems to persist as healthy functioning wholes, Bateson is operating according to the belief that the problems of society and the functioning of the natural world can only be understood by achieving “an ecology of mind” in which ideas fit together in an integrated system.

Some of the papers in this book make for challenging reading. Bateson is asking us to consider a different framework for viewing the world, to think outside the box. The box being our deeply ingrained misperceptions about the world. Living things, including ourselves, are systems which exist within larger systems. These systems are interconnected wholes within which all parts are in dynamic relationship with each other. Nothing can truly be understood out of context, and no change in the system can occur without change to the whole system. 

I found some of the abstract concepts to which Bateson introduced me a little hard to wrap my head around at times, but it is worth the effort. This book left me wondering why systems theory, particularly as Bateson applies it to learning and communication, is not taught in high school. Surely being able to understand how we think and communicate and the principles which determine our relationships with others are crucial to our ability to successfully manage life. 

But there is a reason why concepts so useful are not widely appreciated. They would represent a revolution, because faulty thinking goes to the very roots of our society. A mass breakout of sanity in the populations of the world would shake every aspect of our culture and economic activity to the very core. It would be the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of an adventure into the unknown.

Part I : Metalogues

“A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject,” Bateson explains. These are conversations between himself and his young daughter which playfully examine important ideas. One which I found particularly thought provoking was “What is an instinct?” in which Bateson points out that concepts like “instinct” and “gravity” are “explanatory principles” - “…an hypothesis tries to explain something but an explanatory principle — like ‘gravity’ or ‘instinct’ — really explains nothing. It’s a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.”

Part II : Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Bateson did research on indigenous cultures in New Guinea and Bali, the latter work in collaboration with his wife Margaret Mead. From these studies he identified the phenomena of “schismogenesis” in contact between different cultures, a phenomena which also applies to relationships between individuals. 

This is a kind of negative feedback loop in which the behaviour of one individual or group toward another elicits the kind of response from the second which elicits more of the same from the first. Schismogenesis can take a symmetrical form - in which each individual or group has similar aims and are competing with each other - or a complimentary form in which there is a relationship of difference between the two, such as dominance and submission or exhibitionism and spectatorship. 

A simple example is an arms race. One country builds some nuclear weapons, so another country builds some so there is a deterrent against the first country using theirs against them. The first country views this as threatening, so they build more of their own, and so on. The negative feedback leads to a world endangered by a plethora of nuclear weapons. 

It is easy to see how relevant an understanding of these kinds of processes is. Marriage breakdown is no doubt generally the result of some form of schismogenesis. Little irritating behaviours which illicit irritating behaviours from the other party which perpetuate the phenomena, gradually escalating until the relationship becomes untenable. 

Or consider relationships between subcultures within our society. The prejudices of one group against another group can inspire retaliatory behaviour which reinforces the prejudice, etc., etc. One need only look at the behaviour of people of opposing political beliefs on the internet to see how this plays out.

Part III : Form and Pathology in Relationship

What particularly attracted me to reading Bateson was his double bind theory of schizophrenia. 

I don’t suffer from this condition myself, but I have experienced a bipolar psychotic breakdown as a result of finding myself in a double bind. A double bind is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I was in a position where I put all of my faith in someone who insisted on the importance of honesty. Honesty is a strong conscientious principle for me, so I agreed with this. But when I expressed honest criticism of this individual, I was told I was “deluded”. When I pretended to be sorry for what I said, i.e. I lied, I was warmly rewarded. It was important to me to be honest and I wanted to please the person who asked me to be honest, but I had to lie to please him. As a result of this relationship I ended up becoming delusional, being locked up in a mental hospital and becoming so depressed I needed shock therapy. 

So I can relate to Bateson’s accounts of people who end up suffering schizophrenia as a result of demands made of them by a parent giving mixed messages. A mother feels anxious about affectionate contact with the child and backs away from him when he shows natural affection. Unable to face such feelings in herself, she compensates with overt declarations of love. The child doesn’t know what to base his behaviour on - the withdrawal or the pretence of warm feelings. This is a very simplistic description of a situation Bateson analyses in great detail. 

There is a strong connection between what he has to say here and both R. D. Laing’s work on psychosis and the family and Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about the effect that the neuroses of adults have on children. 

Bateson also gives a fascinating explanation for the cryptic verbal communication often exhibited during schizophrenic psychosis. 

Schizophrenia has a genetic basis, and Bateson gives consideration to the implications of this for identifying a predisposition for the “covert” schizophrenia betrayed by the parent and the “overt” schizophrenia which arises in their child.

Part IV : Biology and Evolution

Bateson scolds biologists and boards of education for “empty-headedness” in their battle with Creationists, pointing out that it is important for students to know about the evolution of understanding of evolution in order to properly recognise the problem of explanation it is trying to solve, and there is something to be appreciated in the way that the Book of Genesis framed the question : “Where does order come from?”

“In modern terms, we may say that this is the problem implicit in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a ‘random’ event”. 

He also explores the implications of somatic change for evolutionary theory. Somatic change is adaption to an environment. If people go to live at a high altitude, at first they pant to deal with the thin air, but over time their lung capacity increases and breathing becomes easier. 

Can this kind of adaptation end up as a genetic change? 

Lamarck’s theory involving inheritance of acquired characteristics was discarded, but Bateson hypothesises that a random mutation may come after somatic change which gives the organism survival advantage by allowing what had been achieved by greater effort to be achieved without that effort. 

In order to survive an organism’s body has to be flexible to change, so if giraffes’ necks get gradually longer due to beneficial mutations which have survival advantage, their hearts will also have to be pumping more blood. This change in the demands on the heart is a somatic change. But at a later stage another random mutation may increase the size of giraffe hearts, this mutation having survival advantage because it reduces the effort needed and makes the giraffe more flexible to meet other challenges. In this way inheritance of acquired characteristics might appear to occur, even though it is not what is really happening.

In discussing dolphin language, Bateson points out that animal communication is all about relationship. In developing our own language, we humans acquired the ability to talk about specific things, and so our communication with each other about relationship is mostly conveyed by subtext and body language. Dolphins don’t have our body language repertoire, since they don’t have facial expressions or hands, so he surmises that dolphin language is a very complex, sophisticated language of relationship.

PART V : Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic explanation, Bateson tells us, is focused not on explaining why something is, but why something else isn’t. Natural selection is a perfect example. It explains the process of change in species by looking at how other outcomes were eliminated as unfit. 

Everything is looked at as potential information. There is redundancy in information to the extent that a message can be conveyed without some of that information being present. For instance if I type “sh*t”, the missing letter doesn’t stop you from knowing what I mean. Information can provide the form of something, redundancy within that form and the restraint that makes it that form and not another. All else “is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.”

How is it that we are an expression of a self-regulating balanced ecological system, and yet we are psychologically out-of-balance and bringers of chaos to that larger system? Bateson re-examines the Adam and Eve myth to see if we can learn something about how the conscious purpose for which we have such an advanced capacity compared to other animals has set us against nature — our own deeper nature and nature as a whole — and how it produces a projection by which we blame either ourselves or the system - “I have sinned” or “God is vengeful.” 

To address this dilemma we need to bring the unconscious into consciousness. Bateson sees art as particularly important in this process. He touches on the use of psychedelics, but with some scepticism. “What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.”

He points out a great error in Darwin’s account of evolution, and that was to present the individuals or their family lines or the subspecies as the units of survival. The unit should actually be thought of as individual plus environment or family line plus environment etc., because those who destroy their environment end up destroying themselves. 

Similarly we can’t understand mind if we see it as contained simply in the brain of the individual. The concept of “mind” has to be flexible according to what we wish to explain. It is the realm of ideas. An idea is “a difference which makes a difference.” The ideas we perceive through our senses are parts of the whole which is our mind at that moment. 

But Bateson expresses the view that, just as there is a global ecosystem of which all subsystems and all species and all individuals are a part, so there is a larger Mind of which all of our minds are a part. “This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”

Part VI : Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

What are the harmful ideas which dominate our culture?

“(a) It’s us against the environment.

 (b) It’s us against other men.

 (c) It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

 (d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

 (e) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”

 (f) Economic determinism is common sense.

 (g) Technology will do it for us.”

We need to think in terms of flexibility, Bateson insists. New technologies can allow us to support increases in population, but the more we push the limits of the system and the more we depend on such technologies, the less flexibility we have. The same thing applies for individuals, our ability to survive and to thrive depends on our flexibility, the ease with which we can change our thinking and our behaviour in the light of changing realities.

Steps to An Ecology of Mind is a book overflowing with profound thinking about what really matters. I only wish it were less relevant today than it was when it was first published.

BOOK REVIEW : Capture : Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Illness by David A. Kessler, M.D.

It means a lot for one’s life experience to be understood - to be able to read a book like this one and say, “Yes, that is what happened to me.”

I’ve written about the way we can get caught up in cognitive negative feedback loops, for instance if we feel guilty about being selfish then the suffering brought on by the guilt causes an increase in our focus on our own situation and thus we become more selfish which leads to more guilt… And we can become fixated on those aspects of our own psyche which we find impossible to accept in the same way that our tongue keeps finding its way back to that sore tooth. I’ve written about these things base on my own experience, but this book puts this kind of phenomenon - that of being captured by something which won’t let go of us because we can’t let go of it - into a broader and deeper framework of understanding.

David A. Kessler, M.D. worked for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in which capacity he studied the problem of cigarette addiction. Later he made a similar study of over-eating. Gradually he realised that there is a mechanism which underlies these forms of addiction which is also present in depression, mania, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and the kind of obsession which can lead to horrific acts of violence. He calls this mechanism “capture.”

When it comes to the subject of mental illness there is often controversy as to whether a condition is the result of an imbalance in brain chemistry, unhelpful patterns of cognition or an oppressive social environment. What Kessler has done is to bring all of these factors together into a coherent holistic framework.

The neurons in our brain respond to stimuli in our environment on the basis of the emotional charge which those stimuli carry for us. A single spot of colour in a grey landscape will attract our attention by its novelty. Our attention will be drawn quickly to a snake because we feel it may pose us a danger. A hungry person’s attention will be drawn to a chocolate bar more strongly than will be the case for someone who is satiated. And our neural pathways record the connections between experiences and the more often we revisit them the more they are reinforced. So if a particular song was playing the first time we set eyes on someone with whom we fell in love, it is likely that we will think of them every time we hear it.

These natural and helpful processes can turn against us in an insidious way. If a particular kind of thinking has a powerful emotional charge because it makes us feel very bad we may find it hard to turn our attention to anything else when some aspect of our experience brings it back to mind. When we talk about triggering, this is what we mean - our brain makes an association between something in our environment and the memory of an experience which was traumatic to us. Because the memory is more emotionally powerful than the other things which could be the focus of our attention, we travel back down that well-worn groove. The same kind of thing can happen with self-condemning thoughts or thoughts of committing acts of violence. The emotional charge captures our attention and the more our thoughts go back down that path the more the habit is reinforced. Or it could be something we powerfully associate with relief from suffering, such as alcohol or food, which captures us in a self-defeating way.

So we can see that the chemical processes of the brain, unhelpful patterns of cognition and responses to environmental stresses are all involved, often feeding back upon each other. According to Kessler, studies show that antidepressants work by inhibiting emotional reactivity to the cues which bring a depressive reaction. In other words, when we are depressed we hang onto negative thoughts because they hurt so much we can’t tear our attention away from them.

An explanation of what capture is and how it works takes up only a small part of the book. The rest consists of case studies of people - famous or anonymous - who have been in the grip of some form of capture. The key example is the novelist David Foster Wallace, who was tortured by self-criticism to the extent that he was driven to take his own life. He is not alone. The lives and obsessions of other writers who went the same way - Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway - are also examined. There are tales of those captured by alcoholism, self-harm, gambling, making obscene phone calls, delusions of grandeur, etc. And then there are those whose capture led to violence, including the murders of John Lennon and Robert Kennedy and the mass killings at Columbine and Sandy Hook, amongst others. A section is also devoted to those captured by Islamic extremist ideology.

Capture needn’t always be a negative though. Kessler profiles some individuals who have been inspired by a spiritual form of capture - Simone Weill, Howard Thurman, William Wordsworth and Martin Luther, etc.

This eloquent and compassionate journey through the inner battles of all these individuals gives the science of capture, drawn from masses of scientific papers cited in the notes, a human face to which we can all relate. There is some discussion at the end of the book on how we might be able to loosen the bonds of capture, taking some inspiration from Buddhism’s techniques of mindfulness and Alcoholics Anonymous’s philosophy of fostering a sense of unity with others, but perhaps the most powerful tool is knowledge itself. If we know what is happening and why it is happening and we can put a name to it, the power dynamic between us and it has shifted.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 18

“Born Again” “Pseudo-Idealism”

Let’s first look at the limited situation in which there is some truth to Griffith’s concept of “born again" “pseudo-idealism”.

What he is saying is that we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, but our developing mind has to defy its oppression and seek self-understanding which leads to anger, egocentricity and alienation. But if we become too corrupted by these qualities we transcend them (except alienation since to transcend alienation is to become more alienated) and adopt some form of “good” behaviour and convince ourselves that we are now an uncorrupted individual.

We have to look at this in terms of armouring. Many people whose initial form of character armour involves trying to compensate for their compromised self-acceptance by “proving” themselves in an aggressive, materialistic or combative way will eventually find that they can’t maintain it in the face of idealistic criticism, both from others and from the conscience they learned in childhood. So they will either shift their “proving myself” strategy to one of demonstrating their worth with good deeds or verbal support for a good cause. This may be a very dramatic change in which the whole basis of someone’s life reverses, or it may be only a superficial coating which coexists with much of the same aggressive, materialistic or combative characteristics which were there before. To really be healed and returned to our capacity for unconditional love we would have to abandon the battle to prove ourselves altogether in favour of unconditional-self acceptance. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the need to be “born again”, but this is not what is happening in the situations Griffith is referring to.

In Griffith’s view of the world pretty much all of us are a bottomless pit of rage and corruption and therefore any attempts we make to do something positive about the problems we see around us are just signs of how “false/dishonest/‘phoney’/‘fake’/deluded” we are. Now there is some truth that doing what we feel to be right sometimes involves transcending selfish impulses or feelings of anger for a while. This is after all what Griffith himself has to do when he transcends his angry feelings about our non-ideal behaviour and expresses sympathy for our position.

But since I see no reason to believe we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, I see no reason to believe we have 2 million years of accumulated rage to transcend. We do accumulate rage to the extent that we have to repress it within our character armour, but anyone who does not undermine their self-acceptance by exposing themselves to too much corrupting idealism and provides themselves with plenty of outlets for their frustration, will find they don’t have all that much to transcend. Certainly not as much as Griffith himself who has been both exposing himself to extreme levels of corrupting idealism but also avoiding many of the normal healthy outlets for the frustration that must engender.

The most dramatic evidence of projection in Griffith’s writings is his views on the “pseudo-idealistic” movements.

First of all it is important to consider what we mean by “idealism”. Griffith emphasises the ideal of “selflessness”, but an ideal is any human concept of perfection. For the Nazis racial purity was an ideal. The Nazis were extremely idealistic especially in their worshipping of the beautiful body. Machismo is an ideal - the ideal of the perfect patriarchal male. And the conflict between the left wing and the right wing is not one between idealism and the need for freedom from the oppression of idealism. It is a conflict between two kinds of idealism which can be equally oppressive - the communal ideals of the left and the individualistic ideals of the right.

To really understand the social phenomena Griffith identifies as “pseudo-idealism” we need to recognise that the opposite of idealism is pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach which puts aside all idealistic expectations in favour of a “whatever works” attitude.

Within each of these social phenomena - religion, socialism, feminism, the New Age movement, environmentalism, etc. - there are differing degrees and varieties of idealism and dogmatism, often conflicting with each other, existing alongside pragmatic approaches.

That Griffith can look at this complex chaotic diversity and see in it simply a dogmatic insistence on ideal behaviour and oppression of expression of contrary feelings or ideas, shows how he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. He is the dogmatist. He is the one insisting on us deferring to his personal conception of ideal behaviour (now that he has provided a bullshit “defence” for our having departed from it in the first place). His is the boot that would crush the human face forever if we were, en masse, to adopt his “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” rather than liberating ourselves by learning to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance.

It is true that all of these social movements have been missing a key ingredient for their success, but that key ingredient is not Griffith’s extreme idealism and bullshit “defence”, it is the cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance so that we can melt away our particular armours and thus be reconciled with those against whom our particular armours dictated that we be in conflict.

Keeping in mind that Griffith’s “defence for humanity” is bullshit that allows him, in his mind, to justify expressing his extremely idealistic criticism or all aspects of human behaviour, doesn’t it sound like he is really talking about himself when he says : “And since the lie they were maintaining was so great, they had to work very hard at convincing both themselves and others of it, which meant they were typically a strident, extremely intolerant, belligerent even fanatical advocate of their position.” You never know, they might even be intolerant of women wearing tights!

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Griffith is probably the most selfish person in the world. While there are problems and insufficiencies in the way in which we are trying to address social and environmental problems, Griffth has come to see all of this as despicable because we are addressing ourselves to the world as a whole and not to his personal psychotic problem, which he feels should come first. (Of course that is not how he sees it because he is trapped within that psychosis.) But once we see the way that he is projecting his own situation onto the world, we can see that he is like Oscar Wilde’s selfish giant, not wanting the children to play in his personal garden. Essentially he is saying : “You can’t come into Paradise unless you are selfless.” He wants it all for himself. And that is a sign of how much he must be suffering. No wonder he has been through ten years of chronic fatigue syndrome! By clinging onto the poison of idealism he must have turned himself from William Blake’s Albion Rose to Crouched in Fear. To really understand his world view you have to recognise that he thinks we are all even more fucked up than he is, whereas, in truth, than can be no more fucked up person on the face of the planet than him.

Griffith's second book illustrated with William Blake's paintings - Crouched in Fear and Albion Rose

Burning in Hell

Griffith says : “Moses himself described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire […fire is a metaphor for the searing truth of Integrative Meaning] on the mountain. [This was only possible because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire.’”

And in Genesis 3:24 : “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Doesn’t this fit with my interpretation of Satan as being a personification of idealism? God (the personification of love and forgiveness) would not be represented by something which burns and destroys, like fire. The fires of Hell belong to the devil.

It would take someone fairly secure in self - fairly self-accepting - to confront the condemning ideals and thus be Satan’s mouthpiece as Moses was. But idealism is both the source of corruption and the flame in which we burn for the “sin” of having been corrupted by it. It is the ultimate negative feedback loop.

Jesus on the other hand was not a worshipper of the Devil like Moses. He was not an idealist. When the idealists tried to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus stopped them. He said, “Judge not that thou be no judged.” To judge others is to be an idealist - to hold them up to an ideal standard and find them wanting. Jesus message was a Godly one of love and forgiveness. Love is the opposite of idealism. It is all-accepting. It is the water that puts out Satan’s fire and rescues us from the Hell of idealistic condemnation. Unfortunately, after his death Jesus’ followers turned his healing philosophy into the largely Satanic church known as “Christianity”.

There is controversy now about the Bible’s attitude to homosexuality. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality positive or negative. Condemnation of homosexuality comes from the Satanic (i.e. idealistic) parts of the Bible - Leviticus and the letters of the Apostles. These parts of the Bible preach repression rather than love. Since God is love, those parts of the Bible are anti-God.

Abandoning the Battle to Find Understanding

Griffith says : “Yes, the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy was both treacherous and extremely dishonest — traits that totally undermined humanity’s search for knowledge — because in campaigning against the battle to find knowledge you were leading humanity towards an extreme state of denial/alienation/separation from the truth/knowledge, when, in fact, humanity had to continue the battle to try to get closer to and ultimately reach the ultimate truth/knowledge/understanding of the human condition.”

Keeping in mind the principle of projection, we can see here that, on some deeper level, Griffith is aware that his theory is not the full truth needed to liberate him from his condition, but that, by dogmatically clinging to it anyway, and shutting down his search for a more accountable understanding, he is taking himself into an ever deeper state of alienation, both from truthfulness and from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Jesus

Griffith says : That Jesus “realise[d] that he had to create a religion around his soundness; he had to suggest to people that through supporting and living through his soundness they could be ‘resurrected[ed]’ ‘from death to life.’”

This is the lie created and  perpetuated by the so-called Christian church. Jesus did not want to create a religion. He wanted to liberate the world from the obscene lie that was religion, i.e. deference to idealism, i.e. deference to Satan. His God was not the Satanic “God” of the old testament. Idealism is hatred. The God he preached was love. But the idealists of his day crucified him. He didn’t love the “ideals”. He loved those whom the idealists oppressed and called “sinners”. “Sin” is just another word for “selfishness” and selfishness is just the self-directedness of the suffering individual. It was the condemnation of idealism which made us sinners. So he recognised that the way to help us was to show that God is love, which forgives all, and thus expose the religion of his day as nothing but Satanism. The Satanists couldn’t stand to have their hypocrisy exposed, so they killed Jesus and, eventually, began preaching a new brand of Satanism in his name.

Of course, Jesus words were passed down, so a few rare individuals, such as William Blake, were able to see his true meaning.

Mental Illness

Griffith talks about the increase in mental illnesses in the world, e.g. depression, ADHD, autism… These are a product of a shortage of love, love from parents and self-love, etc. Love is acceptance. What we need is the unconditional acceptance of others, such as our parents if we are children, and unconditional acceptance of ourselves. What has always undermined our capacity for this kind of love, however, has been the conditions imposed by the kind of idealism that Griffith is dishonestly promoting. While we can’t blame our situation entirely on him, he has, for over 25 years, been pumping out his toxic sludge, and now he is looking around and crying about the fact that children are increasingly suffering from a sickness that comes from exposure to just that sludge. Children are not getting the love they deserve from their parents because their parents are not unconditionally self-accepting. And why are they not unconditionally self-accepting? Because they are weighed down with all this guilt about not being perfect parents. Griffith, with his obscene lie that children are born expecting an ideal world and a mother who is as close to the Virgin Mary as possible, is robbing children of love.

On some level does Griffith resent the innocence of children? It is as if he worshipped “innocence”. But when we worship something we split ourselves in two. The conscious part of us clings to that which is worshipped, but to maintain this state we have to push all contrary feelings about what we worship into our subconscious. The subconscious then grows more and more resentful of that which is consciously worshipped. The Catholic Church worships innocence in the form of the “virgin” Mary and the infant Jesus. So is it any wonder that it has generated so much sexual abuse of children?

The Return of the Repressed

So much that Griffth sees as signs that we are headed toward “terminal alienation” are things I see as positives - tattoos, violent video games, pornography, etc.

We have been repressing so much within our armouring. All of these cultural phenomena are healthy ways of letting it out, of opening up to honest free expression. Sure they can have their negatives, like anything. But those who are most frightened by them are those who are most armoured/repressed. They don’t want to admit that they have even more sickness inside them than is on display in these forms of expression.

But what is buried beneath all of this sickness, the seed of which was sowed in us by idealism’s attack on love, is our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, i.e. love of ourselves, and thus love for all others.

Theatrical improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says : “Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes : they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.”

I talk about this subject in more detail in my post Sucked Into Paradise.

It is the censorious spirit of the idealist which would ask us to be dishonest about expressing the non-ideal side of our nature and thus remain forever alienated from our capacity for love.

Read Part 19 (The Final Part)

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 14

Love Indoctrination or Love Liberation

Sometimes when Griffith talks about his concept of “love indoctrination” it seems like something almost aggressive. “…all the other relatively developed/integrated/social mammals are still battling to develop and maintain love-indoctrination to the point where it has overcome selfish competition amongst males to reproduce their genes.” This concept of love as something you have to be “indoctrinated” into, that has to be controlled by dictatorial instincts, feels so wrong to me.

A mother loving her child is not “indoctrinating” it. She is accepting it unconditionally and responding to its needs. She is not trying to control it. Indoctrination is an attempt at control. I know Griffith isn’t trying to say that she is, but he is presenting this process as one controlled by the genes.

To me love is something which is liberated when the obstacles which impede it are removed. I can see where the need to compete in harsh environments or for breeding opportunities would act as an impediment to love. But surely social animals are not competing all the time. Are there not signs of love - of affection and cooperation between them - in those times when they are not? I don’t watch a lot of nature programs, so I can’t really speak from experience.

And if a food rich, relatively predator free, environment provided the opportunity for our proto-human ancestors to increase their nurturing time, would there have been a need for “indoctrination” in love, would love not have been liberated by the removal of its impediments. With the need to compete for food removed, and the mind - freed up by the longer nurturing period to no longer be rigidly focussed on survival issues and thus develop the power to self-manage - having the power to transcend the dictatorship of the genes’ insistence on competition for breeding opportunities, surely the potential for love, which lies buried under all those inhibiting influences in other animals, could have a chance to flower.

Griffith says : “No, the only accountable explanation for the emergence of the fully conscious mind in humans and for what is blocking its emergence in other species is the nurturing, love-indoctrination explanation…” But doesn’t my idea that all what was needed was the space and time away from competitive imperatives make sense? Why is there the need for nurturing to be seen as a process of “indoctrination” rather than liberation?

And I think that here there is a sharp distinction between my concept of love and Griffith’s concept of love. And between how he is going about trying to help the world and the way I am trying to go about helping the world. I believe we all have a virtually limitless capacity for love which just needs the impediments to it to be removed in order that it should flow forth and heal the world. Unconditional self-acceptance is the source of this love. The impediment to its expression is our armour. Our armour is defensive. To put it aside we need to feel safe. We can increase our own feelings of safety by cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and we can spread a feeling of safety through the world by spreading a practise of acceptance of other people as we find them. Idealism and other attempts to push people to change only make such change harder for them. Let freedom and acceptance reign and love will guide us towards a healing of our society and our world.

But Griffith, with his belief that a person’s capacity for love is, to a large extent, bound by the limitations of the nurturing that they received, the saving of the world involves our accepting of his theory, without spending too much time on confronting thought about it, and passing it on to future generations, who will gradually be healed by their ability to understand the world and the fact that, with the importance of nurturing acknowledged and the need for our previous aggression, egotism and alienation explained away, they will finally get the nurturing they need. But if his theory is wrong, as I believe that it is, doesn’t this sound a bit like “indoctrination”?

Where Is the “Human Condition” In Me?

Fundamental to Griffith’s theory is that there is a conflict going on within us between our supposed genetic orientation to selflessness and our ego. Now for much of my life there was a conflict going on within me. Do I send money to starving kids in Africa or spend it on myself? Do I watch porn or do I stop supporting this “shameless objectification of women”? Do I eat pork knowing that pigs are often kept in atrocious conditions or do I not?

So Griffith’s theory seemed to have relevance to my experience.

But over time I went through a process of introspection, much of it spurred on by a need to assess Griffith’s ideas.

One key point arose when I was troubled about the pig issue. I felt so guilty I considered becoming a vegetarian. But then I thought through my response. If I did give up eating pig meat, how would I feel about the fact that pigs were still suffering? “It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest,” I honestly admitted to myself. As long as I’ve got a clean conscience why should I care about the pigs? So I realised that my feelings of guilt were entirely selfish. I was walking around wondering if I were good enough. Someone hands me a brochure about suffering pigs. I eat pig meat. This sends me the message : “You aren’t good enough.” But it is all about my ego. It goes no deeper than that. My compassion for the pigs is virtually non-existent.

So I didn’t give a shit about the starving Africans or the pigs or supposedly exploited women. All I cared about was my own happiness.

But, what I’ve found over time is that all that guilt I’d been feeling about not being good enough had been sapping my enthusiasm for doing things for other people. Once I decided to give up on worrying about whether I’m good enough I was liberated to really enjoy the things I chose to do for myself and had a whole lot more energy to be more helpful to others. Guilt-driven attempts to do the right thing by others left me depressed and were always unsustainable. But unconditional self-acceptance means that when I do feel like making a contribution to someone else’s welfare I do so with full enthusiasm and no internal conflict or resentment.

Now I do what I like. I feel no guilt. I have no war going on inside me. I do whatever feels good and right at the time.

So where, I have to ask myself, is this “human condition” in me? Where is this bottomless well of anger I’m supposed to have deep down inside. Where is this condemning genetic conscience? If these things are real, why can’t I feel them anymore? Am I wrong to assume that that conflict I experienced was nothing to do with my genes, but occurred entirely within my ego?

The Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome?

Griffith says : “Another malicious device that has been used to try to dismiss my work is claiming it puts readers in a ‘non-falsifiable situation’ where if you oppose this information you are said to be suffering from denial, leaving you no way to disprove or falsify the explanation being put forward — but the problem really exists at the superficial level because the ideas being put forward can be tested as true or otherwise. These are not untestable hypotheses that must be accepted on blind faith… In fact, since humans are the subject of this particular study, each person can experience and thus know the truth or otherwise of what is being put forward. Once the explanations are presented and applied you will discover they are able to make such sense of human behaviour that your own and everyone else’s becomes transparent.”

I’ve been living with these “insights” for about 25 years and they didn’t make my behaviour or that of others transparent. Initially I was attracted to the ideas because they resonated with a conflict which was going on inside me. But Griffith’s “explanations” of much of human behaviour, especially sexual behaviour, never rang true to me. It was the need to resolve that conflict inside, and the faith that his ideas could do that because he said they could, which led to my initial support. But later I would discover that the conflict that troubled me was within my ego - a battle between my ego’s need to maintain self-acceptance and various forms of idealism which threatened to rob me of it. Over time my need to have faith in Griffith’s ideas declined and my ability to find a grounding in my own conceptual framework increased. I stopped suffering from the depression which had plagued me off and on from the time of my adolescence, and the bipolar disorder, with which I had been diagnosed in 1995, so that now I have been happy and stable for at least eight years. And in the wake of abandoning belief in Griffith’s ideas, I feel that the world really has become transparent to me. Reader’s can judge for themselves whether my writings are insightful, but obviously they seem that way to me.

If Griffith’s ideas do represent a superficially credible but ultimately delusional belief system which has  the ability to latch on to us by virtue of our desperate need for a solution to humanity’s problems and an inability to deny them if they resonate with our internal ego-battle - if their “confronting” idealism undermines our self-acceptance and makes us need to hang onto their supposed “defence for humans” - would anyone who was on the inside of that condition be aware of it, or would it require someone who was now safely outside of it to point it out?

Read Part 15

Parental Guilt and Mental Illness

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At one point, during the early days of my bouts with severe adolescent depression, I accused my parents of being responsible for my mental illness. Looking back I hate to think what it must have been like for them. My father was a psychologist and my mother a nurse. They were completely supportive of me even when I made this accusation. And I know they were terribly frustrated that they couldn't do more to help me than they did.

I've always been a big admirer of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who, like his predecessors in the psychoanalytic field, viewed mental illness as something which is socially generated. Laing did a lot of work on trying to understand schizophrenia as an adaptation to unhealthy forms of social interaction in families. Critics accused him of blaming parents for the fact that their children became mentally ill. He tried to point out that he didn't feel it was anyone's fault, but that the problem had to be treated holistically and that other family members also needed the therapist's help. More recently the theory that mental illness is socially generated has fallen into disfavour. The concept of mental illness arising through genetically determined chemical imbalances has become the predominant one. I believe that one reason for this is that it is comforting to parents. There is no doubt that mood changes and anxiety states are expressed through changes in the brain chemistry, but I see no reason to think that those mood changes or feelings of anxiety are not responses to social experiences and unhealthy learned ideas.

But perhaps we can untie this knot that was at the heart of Laing's rejection.

The negative feedback loop is central to the problem of mental illness. A simple example of this would be the situation of a young woman who feels she is unattractive and seeks comfort from her depressed feelings by over-eating. The more she eats, the fatter she gets, and the fatter she gets the more unattractive she feels, and the more unattractive she feels, the more depressed she gets, and the more depressed she gets the more she feels the need for the comfort of food. This kind of pattern can be found in depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias and, I believe, schizophrenia.

Now lets go back to me as a depressed teenager. I remember what it felt like, but when it comes to understanding the thinking which underlay it I have to speculate. This can seem false to me. I put myself back into the situation and look at it almost as if it were a mathematical equation to be worked out. But I think this is part of the nature of depression. Thinking is the key, but sometimes it is below the level of consciousness. We spend so long thinking about how we are depressed, that the short time in which we had the thoughts which generated the depression are lost to us in retrospect.

There were no doubt many factors involved. But lets just isolate the question of my parents and feelings of guilt, and lets assume that they did feel guilty about the fact that I was depressed. I don't know if this was true in their case. But parents generally have a strong predisposition to feelings of guilt even if they don't have a child with a mental illness. Central to the human neurosis is that we are incredibly hard on ourselves as individuals. We very easily resort to punishing ourselves if we don't meet our high self-expectations and this must be even harder to resist when we are responsible for the raising of children.

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What if I felt very unhappy about something and my unhappiness made my parents feel unhappy. Not knowing how to shake my unhappiness, and noticing that it was making my parents unhappy, I would have become even more unhappy. If my parents felt, on some level, that they might have made a mistake which led to my depression, then they would feel guilty. I would notice that they were feeling guilty and feel that it was my fault and thus become more depressed.

Since feeling guilty is a problem for parents anyway, perhaps we should tackle it head on rather than trying to run from it.

The reason that guilt has been a persistent problem for humans is that we have a strong cultural belief that it is appropriate. We feel that we are supposed to feel guilty if we make a mistake or accidentally hurt someone's feelings. We feel we would be heartless or selfish if we didn't have these feelings. But the truth is that guilt is a profoundly selfish emotion. When we feel guilty it becomes all about us. Am I good enough? Our attention is on ourselves not those we feel we have let down. This is natural. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Make ourselves suffer and we will make ourselves more selfish. If we want to not be selfish, then we have to let go of guilt and practise unconditional self-acceptance. We always do the best we can in the circumstances. What keeps us from doing better is that we won't accept this.

If the cause of mental illness is negative feedback loops, then the solution is positive feedback loops. If we accept ourselves unconditionally and allow ourselves plenty of the healing balm of pleasure, then our warm, loving and playful nature will reassure others and help them to heal. Even if some people have problems which can't be fully solved, we will help to take them as far as they can go.

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