Posted on 08/03/2010 5:42:45 AM PDT by mattstat
Step into my parlor, and let me wave my diagnosticulator at you. OK, let me just consult the book.
Ah! Just as I suspected. Since you yelled at that IRS agent during your audit, we know you suffer from temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria. This is normally seen in children, and is what we used to call a temper tantrum. Actually, it is a mental disease.
When seen in adults such as yourself, it requires medication, if not confinement. It’s for your own good.
And speaking of children, you have some, do you not? With a guardian such as yourself already known to be suffering from a mental disease, your children are at risk. In fact, I’m going to write a prescription for Psychosis Risk Syndrome. You just give them these pills, OK?
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-V is on its way. Just as did DSM-II, DSM-III, and DSM-IV, the fifth entry in this best seller from the American Psychiatric Association will expand the number, kinds, and ranges of mental disease.
Thus, the APA will have fulfilled at least one of its functions: providing job advocacy for its members.
As in previous editions, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at wmbriggs.com ...
What makes you think I was insulted? I only said our opinion of each other is just that - opinion. There is nothing else there. For it to be an insult one has to consider it as such. I don't consider it an insult. I saw it as your simply trying to retaliate for my referencing Bill Bennett's description of certain things. You apparently thought that was an insult but it was not intended as such. It simply meant you were over-thinking the subject, in my opinion.
You must have a high regard for your old professor as you quote him liberally. I, too, am an old guy who has learned much through books, research, lectures, continuing education and just living a full life. I actually admire your thinking those things through. I simply disagree with certain of your conclusions. I think you are taking certain arguments too far, to places they don't necessarily lead.
I don't understand how my mild criticism has invoked such a response from you. Your reply to me seems to be an attempt to insult me. You also seem to have not read anything I said beyond the "being too smart by half" comment. Is it possible your latest reply is projection, sometimes called transference? I actually responded to some of your stuff in my first post to you but it doesn't seem that you read that.
Sorry if I seemed so.
There was something about your first couple of posts to me that seemed insulting and a little arrogant. If I misunderstood, forgive me.
If memory serves, you and I have had many pleasant exchanges in the past and frankly I was a little surprised by the tone here.
Mama Weer All Crazee Now.
Actually, everyone is crazy.
If that is our starting point, it seems to me that crazy must have a rather broad meaning.
Let's define crazy as an inability or refusal to define and adapt to reality.
If the problem is inability to define and adapt then there is no hope for those people. They are forever crazy according to this definition. If the problem is refusal to define and adapt then they must heartily disagree with this "reality" you describe. That brings into question the truth of the reality. Is it or isn't it true? It may be, as you later suggest, that they cannot easily define this reality because of other difficulties (fear) and if they can't define it how are they supposed to adapt to it?
At sunrise on the Serengeti Plain, reality for the wildebeest is that he must run faster than the lioness...or he is dinner. And the lioness must run faster than the wildebeest or she cannot feed her cubs or herself.
Can the wildebeest and the lioness both be the fastest? Isn't it a situational thing? Sometimes one wins, other times the other wins. That is not just a flippant comment. It applies to this discussion.
In the wild, if you are alive...you are sane.
To me, that is instinct and conditioning. Does it really have anything to do with sanity as we are discussing? Couldn't an insane lioness still catch and kill a wildebeest and vice versa, could a crazy wildebeest still successfully flee from a lion? I suppose that would depend on the type of insanity they had. Isn't there more than one type?
But human beings are able to exist at quite some distance from reality and, the more society and families coddle their members, the more such members are able to extend that distance.
Here, there needs to be a definition of reality in order to proceed. It is my opinion that we all have our own realities in that our contact with the external is through our senses and processed by our own individual brains. There is no reality with out me, to me. the same is true of all others. Socially each society has their own particular mores and standards to which all are expected to conform for the benefit of social cohesion.
To use your example, mature male lions have prides of from ten to fifteen females who provide food, companionship and sex for him. In turn he provides protection for them. That is their instinctive standards, not something they sat around and discussed and then agreed on. It is their particular way of propagating their species.
Now hyenas have their own set of standards. They steal from the hunters and travel in packs as protection and to facilitate their stealing.
That is the reality for both but their standards are so different if you chose one's reality you would have to consider the other insane. Yet, they are each operating within their particular position in nature.
Human insanity, quite incorrectly, has been historically defined by society and families as that distance from reality at which members become difficult to handle or inconvenient. That of course is a fallacy.
Although I am not sure I agree with that and I know I haven't heard it described as such, the central point seems to be that people who stray so far from the accepted norms of a society they become problematic are often labelled insane. You disagree and I say maybe they are and maybe they aren't. Some may just be rebels.
Because humans cannot define reality (and, for the most part, refuse to try) and because reality, even if it could be defined, is a rapidly moving target, it is difficult to calculate the distance between a person and his reality.
Suddenly, we seem to be saying the same thing.
But knowing humans as we all do, we can be safe in presuming that such distance is, on average, significant...and that humanity is collectively and individually quite insane.
I disagree with that and it definitely does not logically follow from your previous statements. In fact, is is contrary to your previous paragraph.
That is why I have difficulty following you and I end up thinking it is just useless blather, that you are over-thinking it. I'm sure you have some deeper meaning but we are not in sync in communicating it.
Give me a chance to dig back through what you were saying and respond in kind.
I have been burning the candle at both ends and my naturally pugnacious character is a little quick to return perceived attacks.
But let's also agree to analyze your posts as well...after all, a transaction consists of two opposing points of view.
All comments are of course fair game.
Thanks again for your courage in pushing back and pointing out my overly aggressive response. And thanks for your politeness in doing so.
Absolutely. Perhaps we will come to common ground.
In the wild, if you are alive...you are sane.
Your comment:
To me, that is instinct and conditioning. Does it really have anything to do with sanity as we are discussing? Couldn't an insane lioness still catch and kill a wildebeest and vice versa, could a crazy wildebeest still successfully flee from a lion? I suppose that would depend on the type of insanity they had. Isn't there more than one type?
I have been thinking that human defined insanity is a human thing.
Insanity in the wild is defined as
"dinner"!
A point of view is like a sculpture. It is carved out of stone by those who care enough to honestly disagree.
My memory of you is that you are an honest broker!
But this isn't about me...or about you.
It is about defining the "truth."
I agree. Our argument on this subject has been about defining terms. To say just surviving in the wild is sane is an example. That is apples and oranges when we are discussing your hypothesis that all of us humans are crazy. With such mixed metaphors we will never agree.
I think we can and do agree.
Against a baseline of survival (that survival the opposite of which in animals means death), sanity has its definition.
As humans move AWAY from that baseline, they enter a territory in which they have the luxury of living lives which are no longer on the razor's edge...and insanity as a livestyle becomes possible.
Because of a man who loves them--or parents who support and defend them from the baseline of nature--humanoids are able to move away from existential "reality"...
Let's start there.
OK. I assume we are saying that survival of the fittest is the norm in the wild but man has moved beyond that and must now deal with the various nuances of life.
However, where we will eventually have to go is defining that reality from which man is deviating. I am saying that each society, and even societies within a society, have their own particular norms and I am not even sure reality is a proper term for this discussion. Reality, to me, means corresponding to fact and that there is a definite truth to which one is referring. I don’t know if that is possible here.
Whether they were living on the Plains of the Serengeti or the mountains of West Virginia or Kentucky...or the Wild West.
Reality in this dimension is defined by our ability to continue...to exist.
Deviation from the ability to exist is the area in which insanity can develop and be defined (at least as I am defining it). On the edge of existence...deviation equals dinner for another species...or it may equal entree into madness if only temporarily.
In consideration of such deviation, here is an example from that plane that pushes into the realm of insanity.
If an American Indian or a frontiersman has a mother in law who is disconnected from that cutting edge...she continues her life (however much she might beatch) at the pleasure of her son-in-law.
Her removal from the edge is what give her breathing room in which to spread her ideas (her "insanity") vocally. If her grandchildren listen to her...they may embrace her madness and run out into a wolf inhabited prairie singing praises of her love of wilderness. And they will become dinner.
Now this opens the very issue of Art.
But I guess that should wait.
Baselines of survival include enduring a recession/depression.
However much our family members might complain, the head of household must still overcome an existential threat. He/she must keep the clan alive.
Obama is pushing/has pushed humanity back onto its baseline.
He isn't redefining reality (IMO he is completely disconnected with it)...but he is reminding humanity of its existential drive.
I don't know how he could possibly know what drives us, but he has perversely/inversely struck our Achilles Heel.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
Although this thread includes a very interesting, somewhat philosophical discussion, your post does a better job of describing what's going on in the new DSM-V. This comes from the more liberal side of science. If they're pulling the wool over the poeple's eyes concerning hard science by presenting the myth of global warming as fact, imagine what they can do with the "soft" science where bell curves and standard deviations rule.
Although a bit of a deviation from the primary topic, I would be inclined to say that Obama is our Achilles Heel.
No, it is not. As I said earlier, which you probably did not read, we are hard-wired in our cerebral cortex with the drive to live. That is where the fight or flight impulse is derived. You don't have to push us back to anywhere, it is always with us.
Whether they were living on the Plains of the Serengeti or the mountains of West Virginia or Kentucky...or the Wild West.
Yes, even there the desire to live is still with us. It is an instinct.
Reality in this dimension is defined by our ability to continue...to exist.
That is a part of our reality but not all of it.
Deviation from the ability to exist ...
If one deviates from the ability to exist he no longer exists, so case closed, game over. Now had you said, "deviate from the effort to exist" you may have had a point. Were one to stop trying to exist that would be unwise but insane ... ??? That, again, reflects back to our value system.
... is the area in which insanity can develop and be defined (at least as I am defining it).
Perhaps but not necessarily.
On the edge of existence...deviation equals dinner for another species...or it may equal entree into madness if only temporarily.
Not necessarily in either case. Were one to wonder from camp they might discover a nearby berry patch, a grove of pecan trees or a fruit tree, etc. That would mean survival, not death. There were many lone explorers in the early days who didn't end up as dinner or go mad.
Her removal from the edge is what give her breathing room in which to spread her ideas (her "insanity") vocally.
Why would her ideas be "insanity?" Does simply not having to scrap for existence make one insane? Anyway, if she cared to, she could still survive without her son-in-law. Why wouldn't she be calm and confident and dispense words of wisdom? Why wouldn't she be doing other useful things like making clothes, etc. Also, since there is a son-in-law and a grandmother doesn't that mean there is a mother around to also exert influence?
If her grandchildren listen to her...they may embrace her madness and run out into a wolf inhabited prairie singing praises of her love of wilderness. And they will become dinner.
They may but it is not likely. If, for the sake of argument, the grandmother was a babbling idiot the children would soon know it and not embrace her babbling as wisdom.
Now this opens the very issue of Art. But I guess that should wait.
Let's not go there. I don't think I can stand much more of this. I am beginning to think your argument is autobiographical. And as far as your old professor, his quotes that you posted are just as vapid as yours. You are smart enough to think on your own rather than be persuaded by the likes of him.
I hate to end on such a harsh note but that is what I think. I applaud your thinking about these things but try a little harder. I believe you are being unduly influenced by others.
Well, there you go again.
You are like school teacher. Eagerly poking holes, finding fault. Passing judgment!
Something you enjoy, no.
Let me put it another way.
Insanity can be sorted into a variety of overlapping categories, not all or any of which may rise to the point of being dysfunctional (i.e. where a person cannot make his way in life).
First, there is the denial of reality. Second, there is addiction--to substances or ideas/obsessions. Third, there are the systemic or bio-mechanical problems, like schizophrenia, manic-depression, etc.
These may all overlap, but off the top of my head, most mental illness or insanity can be placed into one or more of these categories.
The first one, denial (that is denial or a refusal to accept and adapt to reality) is what I referred to as deviation from a baseline of reality.
Again, I do wonder why you take such a discussion, which is by its nature a clinical one, and turn it into a personal one (as you have repeatedly).
This is why I was previously irritated by your insult and innuendo.
When I try to provide precise examples, you pick nits.
If I try to get really, really simple, you complain that I need to think deeper.
Personally, I have come to doubt that your motives are honest (and not just with me but with yourself).
I think we have had enough of this discussion.
Some folks have taken that thought to another level and have suggested that Obama is symptomatic of a deeper problem in America.
For example, check out the following brief article published (supposedly) in a Czech Republic Newspaper (Prager Zeitung - 4/28/2010)...
“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president."The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. "The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.
Very good point. That a majority of the voters could throw their support behind such a man as Obama does show a deeply-rooted problem in this country. Of course, it didn’t help that the opposing party put up a very weak candidate.
I remember reading of that article here on FR a while back, but had forgotten about it. It says a lot.
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