One crazy world

As someone who has worked in psychoanalysis and psychiatry for the past three decades I suppose I may be considered as having some expertise in ‘madness.’ This is not to say that I have devoted my life to determining who or who is not ‘crazy’—and that is because the true work of a mental health clinician is not to impose totalitarian judgments but rather to accept the diverse variety of humanity in all of its manifestations and to alleviate mental and emotional suffering.

That we all suffer goes without saying. Defining ‘madness’ is a very tricky thing, so I prefer to avoid such terminology altogether. One person’s eccentricities may be another’s wisdom, to vary a saying, depending on time, place and social context. And it is equally tricky to define ‘reason’ or ‘the rational,’ words which have their etymological roots in measurement—itself a very revealing indication of the deep association between knowledge and power, knowing and manipulation.

But I didn’t intend, fascinating as it may be, on an etymological discursion. I wished instead to call attention to something human occurring on a grand scale which deserves to be appreciated for what it is: a vast, devious and destructive insanity. It is no one thing, incidentally, but rather an aggregate that has accumulated over the brief centuries of our species’ existence and congealed into its current form. It is the sum total of where we are today: on the brink of destroying the goodness of our earth’s resources while feeding the seemingly limitless societal need for destroying ourselves in strife and warfare.

I am not discounting the bright and even magnificent capacity of the individual for love, ill-defined as this much-used word may be; for kindness, for helping one another, for care. These graceful characteristics seem to be dwarfed, if not obliterated, when complex and large human associations occur and the power of such giant organisations—nations and corporations and their combined interconnected entities—shows its hand.

Let’s take a brief look at how healthy our human world is. There are over fourteen thousand nuclear weapons in existence, and four hundred and fifty reactors, one of which is actively leaking radioactive waste into the the oceans. There are scores of active armed conflicts occurring. Fewer than ten persons own as much wealth as half of humanity’s population.

Let’s leave aside global warming or overpopulation for now, and concentrate on what civilisation, in its evolving aggregrate forms, with their exponential increase of computational advances, has achieved: nearly total surveillance, the near extinction of privacy, and the limitation of individual human liberty—or, rather, the enhancement of the liberty of the privileged few at the expense of the very many without such means.

And it—this ‘it’ being our global network—does so by fashioning narratives or, as I prefer, fairy tales, whose content and hypnotic power induce a kind of cheerful agreement with the System, the status quo, with the glories of Capitalism, War and Celebrity. Plato’s famous cave endures.

While physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists represent the ‘point men’ for the advancement of knowledge and carry on their fascinating debates and intricate measurements and researches about the origins of the universe and the substance of the atom, much of the world languishes in poverty. Be assured that this quest could not occur without the subsidy of governments who hope to gain the practical advantage of yet another foothold for weaponry and dominance by dint of further discoveries.

Knowledge for the simple sake of knowing doesn’t warrant much attention, or much money for that matter.

I have long held that the most pressing philosophical question of our time is this: what would we do if no further technological or practical knowledge were possible, if there were a limit to what we might learn, discover and use? Would we be compelled to direct our resources towards solving the problems of hunger, poverty, pollution and pacific co-habitation?

Or is that just too crazy to imagine?

Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born author and physician who resides in New Zealand.