In one of the great acts of humor and desperation, we have invented the field of psychology, and with it, created a virtual army of therapists. Of course, in keeping with our inherent madness, we then go to great lengths to devalue this profession and to hide our contacts with it.

This is often attributed to shame, but I think it is more likely, TERROR!

After all, when it comes to our identity, brains-r-us and, if there's something wrong upstairs then, who are we? Can anyone trust us? Can we trust ourselves? Apparently not. The hint of mental illness can destroy careers, marriages, lives, even when we have managed to "cure" ourselves through treatment. Remember Eagleton, who's political career was terminated when his history of therapy was revealed.

Just as a broken bone is often stronger at the point of repair, it is likely that the wounded psyche is more resilient as a result of treatment. So, one would think that a history of such treatment would lead to an increase in confidence in the stability of the treat-ee. Not surprisingly, the reverse seems to be true.

Despite this disdain, psychology has become a mandatory screening tool in law enforcement and other critical professions. The rationale being that access to weapons or other potential mechanisms of social devastation requires some certificate of sanity. Why, then, do we not apply this principle to politics? Surely, with access to WMD (the use of acronyms to avoid dealing with what they stand for may be the subject of a future discourse), not to mention control over the legislative process, a potentially far more devastating tool, politicians should be among the first to require mental certification.

So, a modest proposal. Let us require pre-employment psychological screening and intelligence testing for anyone aspiring to public office. Publish the results and let the chips, or the nuts, fall where they may.

- posted by Martin Eagle @ 5:13 AM

 
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- posted by Martin Eagle @ 12:40 PM

 
It takes no more than a passing acquaintance with history, a brief scan of the evening news or, indeed, a dispassionate observation of almost any human interaction, to become convinced that we are all, without exception, insane. Not stark, staring, raving mad, though there's plenty of that about. No, just the fundamentals of the human psyche, e.g. that we all maintain and operate on mutually exclusive ideas, that we all knowingly engage in self-destructive behaviors, and that the primary process of human consciousness is denial.

Freud devoted a lot of his thinking and writing to a system of defense mechanisms, all devoted to the reduction of anxiety. While differing in the way they manifest, they are all, ultimately, denial.

The interesting thing about denial, or any of its sub-genres, is that before they can be evoked, we must be aware of what they are defending against. No matter how fleeting that perception, no matter how quickly its content is submerged in the sub-conscious, first comes the knowledge, "This feels bad, pretend it isn't so."

Since virtually everything in our experience causes anxiety, we supress our awareness of it to the extent that our use of the word "reality" would be farcical, were it not so dangerous. It is denial that allows us to espouse a set of principals while routinely violating every one of them; to claim adherence to a plethora of "isms" while acting antithetically to all of their dictates, to be caught with a hand in the cookie jar and exclaim, with perfect sincerity, "what cookies?"

This is bad enough on an individual basis. But, as all of our institutions are merely expressions of the same phenomenon, magnified and made less restrained by the mechanism of group process, our world has become a manifestation of madness, intensified by our burgeoning population and multiplied by orders of magnitude via our technological cleverness.

It has oft been said that the inmates are running the asylum. In the case of our species, that's redundant.
- posted by Martin Eagle @ 11:54 AM