Schizophrenic World
Or your local health department
More thoughts on the parallels between psychopathology (namely schizophrenia and autism) and the world we find ourselves in.
The Franco-Polish psychiatrist Eugéne Minkowski gives us an interesting list of antithetical pairings of hypertrophied (exaggerated) aspects of intellect and atrophied (diminished) aspects of intuition (which we could also correlate with exaggerated left hemisphere and diminished right hemisphere function) in schizophrenia:
Atrophied / Hypertrophied
Life/Map
Instinct/Brain
Feeling/thought
‘faculty of penetration which synthesises’/‘analysis of infinite details’
Trust in impressions/Demand for proof
Movement/Immobility
Events and persons/Objects
Presence/Representations
Goal/Preliminaries
Time/Space
Flow/measure
These characteristics not only correlate with right hemisphere damage and an over reliance on the left hemisphere, but they are also characteristic of the way we live life today. The mechanical bureaucratic life of the exaggerated left hemisphere (and subsequent lack of the living embodied vitality of the right hemisphere) can be seen all around us. The fragmented attention of the schizophrenic (and the autistic) leads them to a conscious awareness of massive amounts of data but with little discrimination as to what’s most important in any given circumstance. Often jumping to conclusions without sufficient understanding of context. The autistic person can become overwhelmed by the amount of information and detail that comes at them without any real hierarchy of attention (i.e. every bit of detail seems as important as every other bit) – everything demands attention. Consider this report from a schizophrenic patient:
Everything seems to grip my attention although I’m not particularly interested in anything. I am speaking to you just now but I can hear noises going on next door and in the corridor. I find it difficult to shut them out and it makes it more difficult for me to concentrate on what I’m saying to you. Often the silliest little things that are going on seem to interest me. That’s not even true; they don’t interest me but I find myself attending to them and wasting a lot of time this way. I know that sounds like laziness, but it’s not really. (McGilchrist, 2021, p. 330)
I know in my own work that this environment of too much information coming at me, vying for my attention, without any sense of hierarchy of importance, is both stressful and energy consuming. I am self-aware enough to know I play the major role in allowing this data flood to continually engage my curiosity and the compelling need to know more data points. So it’s not as if I’m just a passive victim of the ‘system’, but rather my left hemisphere dives headlong into the fray – for that is what the system caters to so very well.
When we are out of touch with sensing the whole, the living flow of time, the seamlessness of it, the embodied intuition of existence, then things become increasingly abstract and static. We only see bits in a static sense – we don’t see the overall direction, purpose or meaning. To make sense of the world we have to put all the bits together to see the whole rather than seeing the whole before deconstructing it into bits. Again here are some observations from patients:
· It’s like eating a soup where you taste the individual ingredients: you taste the flavour of the soup itself only after reconstructing it.
· I have to put things together in my head. If I look at my watch I see the watch, watchstrap, face, hands and so on, then I have to put them together to get it into one piece.
And so I cannot help but see correlations between these symptoms of pathology and our current bureaucratic health system and the people who run them. There seems to be a lack of contextual awareness and rather a myopic, tunnel vision, on the ‘bits’ that are known. The context being that massive global vaccination efforts, lockdowns, and so on, have had little effect and now seemingly a negative effect, yet local governments (particularly here in Australia) seem oblivious to such a context.
There is a fixation on gathering more and more data points (testing, tracking) with little to no appreciation that such data is neither prophylactic nor any sort of treatment. There seems to be a lack of appreciation for time (history) and what truly is prophylactic and treatment, and rather a fixedness in the static moment and a fixation on what is known in this moment (i.e. covid vaccines are the only treatment) with a blindness to anything beyond this field of awareness. There is a stubborn “I’m certain I’m right” attitude (typical of the left hemisphere) that refuses to even acknowledge the existence of something not in its narrow field of awareness. What is in this awareness is in sharp focus and as clear as anything can be, and the illusion that this must be the totality of what really matters blots out consideration of anything else.
Therefore the static, non-living, mechanical thing that is in sharp focus is the ‘vaccines’, and an obsessive fixated compulsion to vaccinate is the strong, dopaminergic1 driven urge that must be executed or we will all die. Anti-vaxxers are dangerous monstrosities who’s reasons are completely incomprehensible (literally) and not even part of the ‘normal’ community (just like the right hemisphere stroke patient who denies his left arm even belongs to him).
And what about the doctors, the nurses, the people on the frontlines who are going along with the health department’s narrative? I mean the ones who honestly think the vaccination campaign is correct and that the massive increase in myocarditis, neurological issues, death, etc, is purely coincidental? Could they also have an atrophied intuition, a diminished sense of instinct, trust in impressions, empathy for the events and people in the present moment who have a lived experience of something counter to the narrative? Could they also be trapped in a hypertrophied intellect of the left hemisphere that is devoid of feeling and would rather live in a world of analysis of infinite details, demanding proof, and seeing patients are objects2, abstractions, inconvenient categories that don’t fit the pigeon hole they should? And what does such a mind do with a thing that does not fit the known category? It is thrown out, explained away, denounced as a lie, or simply ignored.
As I have said in previous posts, I do not believe the mass psychosis, or the attitude of the government, or health departments, or health officials can be completely explained by this left brain bias perspective. But I am saying that there is a cultural mental bias that looks very much like an individuals right hemisphere’s take on the world. And this we should be mindful, as much as we can elicit our whole brain to be mindful, of such things.
The left hemisphere is more driven by dopamine than the right.
Interestingly schizophrenia involves extreme disembodiment - the body, mind, soul, are separated, there’s a radical separation from one’s own being as a physical entity. And indeed others can seem unreal, not living, objects and not real people - the disembodiment seemingly is projected onto others as well. There is a lot to say about this, but for another time.
Now imagine a patient who has learned to use that process of decontruction as a conscious tool for understanding reality, especially social interaction.
I used to work as a teacher, among other things with young adult autistics without cognitive impairment. Their biggest frustration was their ability to understand the world mechanistically but not being able to explain and make sense of it to normal people.
To my laymans mind that is where a lot of todays problems are: society is viewed with the modernist and futurist view. A machine, the ever smoother operation of which, its own purpose.
Rather than society (with which I mean administration and bureaucracy, not race or culture or creed) existing as a necessity for co-existance in and as unnaturally large groups of humans - we humans exist to enable that very administration and bureaucracy.
On the other hand, evolution is the very strictest of techers and lets no-one retake a course once failed so any problems with western societies will be solved before the next century. Demography is destiny, and a race or a culture which hampers reproduction and stops seeking to physically dominate others is doomed. And I think we can change this about as much as western Rome could be saved in the year 400AD.
"Anti-vaxxers are dangerous monstrosities who’s reasons are completely incomprehensible (literally) and not even part of the ‘normal’ community." As the immigration minister down under just said of the Serbian Super Spreader who threatens "good order". They're coming out and admitting all this now in plain language and the people are still nodding their heads in agreement completely incapable of taking the whole thing apart, they are fixated only on what the government points them towards.