Another point that this article does not discuss is that in many of the "less coercive" societies, schizophrenia or related diseases are not seen as a disease or problematic at all.
McKenna writes: "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told: “You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society. You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.”" [0]
I'm willing to bet that the welfare of the average schizophrenic is quite poor essentially everywhere in the world, a handful of tribes supporting them for myth-related reasons notwithstanding.
While this may be true, hearing that you're useful is important.
As someone that society has basically forgotten about, realizing that I won't be useful has recently crushed me.
I would not presume to speak for schizophrenics. My quirks are bad, but not that. But the welfare of a person is greatly improved by the feeling that they'll be useful.
Deluding yourself into thinking you're useful is much easier when there aren't external forces making it entirely clear that this is false. I can see that in a society without too much coercion, people with problems would be much happier simply because they aren't called out to prove themselves on a daily basis.
I say "called out" rather than "asked," because it fits much better. The feeling that you have to do something very important is so pervasive. If you're not doing that, then what are you doing?
Which is why it feels like you're called out to prove you're useful, rather than requested.
I hypothesize that in a society that doesn't do that, schizophrenics' welfare would be much improved.
Excellent point. Many schizophrenics have poor quality of life, but support from friends, family, and society and large can prevent it from degrading further, and even make it a lot better. Some people with schizophrenia can even be relatively functional, even without medication, if they have a good social structure. I could be wrong, but from what I've heard, with therapy and decent support, they can basically recognize their hallucinations and most of their delusions as internally generated and try to ignore them. That's still a terrible way to live, and they also still have the negative symptoms (which even most serious medication can't treat very well, if at all), but schizophrenia isn't necessarily a doom sentence.
And especially with medication, it can be manageable. John Nash, for example.
> I'm willing to bet that the welfare of the average schizophrenic is quite poor essentially everywhere in the world
Actually schizophrenics in the developing world do significantly better than those in the US. That said, McKenna's models of shamanism weren't actually valid across cultures -- shamans actually played completely different roles in different societies.
My experience in a developing nation is that schizophrenics, provided they were not actively dangerous to their surroundings, were well cared for by family and their general environment. The 'village idiot' (even in the big city where I lived) - their words - was free to roam the city and generally watched out for by everyone.
Of course, the flip-side was that those with mental illnesses (or other disabilities) who had no family would generally have a miserable existence.
Edit: the equivalent I've found here in the West has been Evangelical churches. I strongly suspect some of the 'prophet' or otherwise 'specially anointed' characters to be (mildly?) schizophrenic.
You lose your bet. Outcomes for schizophrenia (recovery) are substantially better in developing countries compared to developed ones, sometimes called the WHO paradox. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26640277
I love McKenna's raps but I really disagree with him here. I doubt he had much experience with actual schizophrenia, which is horrific and debilitating, and I doubt shamans present or past actually had it. Psychedelic drugs induce a superficially schizophrenia-like state but it's transient and may not actually be much like schizophrenia at all. Visionary, trance, and highly imaginative states are not schizophrenia or even indicative of mental illness.
Real schizophrenia is a hell of paranoia and anxiety and I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art or any of the other things a traditional shaman might do.
There's some really interesting research out there on schizophrenia.
"Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful."
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrm...
The implications are huge - if you are more prone to actively resist or think that its wrong it will actively trigger panic, PTSD, anxiety and paranoia. If you think of them as spirits and your society values them its not a big deal, sometimes even possible helpful?
It seems intuitive to me. People who often do psychedelic drugs routinely state that 'resisting' the experience often leads to temporary mental distress.
Agreed completely. I was sympathetic to arguments like his right up until the time when my brother began acting weird and fell into a downward spiral that ultimately led to a schizophrenia diagnosis. What really sticks out to me is the brain damage-like effects of the disease - not just paranoia and delusions but a total breakdown in verbal and reasoning abilities. What my brother suffers from really is more comparable to Alzheimers or even forms of brain damage or post-stroke states than other mental illnesses I've encountered - it's not so much a visionary state as it is a crippling disability. Really grim stuff, and I suspect that many people who glamorize it don't have firsthand experience with the destruction it can cause.
To end with a somewhat more positive note, the late Oliver Sacks has written beautifully and with great sympathy and humanity about his brother's battle with schizophrenia - I think it's mainly in his "chemical memoir" Uncle Tungsten. I've often wished that he wrote a whole book on the subject but I guess it hit a little too close to home for him.
> What really sticks out to me is the brain damage-like effects of the disease
Absolutely... there's an incoherence to true (not armchair diagnosed) schizophrenia. The mind falls apart.
Traditional shamans and modern ones like McKenna himself might hold ideas that some might find irrational, but their thought patterns are coherent and their reasoning ability is there. They're lucid and can think. McKenna's brilliant wordsmithing is the polar opposite of what you see with degenerative mental illness.
It might not even have to with traditional shamans, it could be simpler than that, from an article by a psychologist:
" I once was lucky enough to spend time in an Egyptian village in the late 1970s, before technology or even electric lights had arrived there. One of the villagers had long, impassioned conversations with people no one else could see. He also had a way of seeing through everyone’s pretensions. He could tell jokes no one else could get away with.
Village life was not utopia. It was difficult in many ways. But this one man, who would almost certainly be diagnosed with schizophrenia if he lived in the developed world, had a secure, safe place in his village. He could wander the wide-ranging mysteries his perceptions opened to him, and if he forgot to feed himself along the way, sooner or later someone would feed him and give him a gentle push toward the door of his home.
Contrast his life with that of a typical client in a mental-health agency in Seattle. I remember one man, early in my training, who gave me the most baffled, hurt look when he asked me, “Why do people on the radio lie to us?”
“I can tell that the woman who’s talking about Macy’s isn’t really happy,” he went on, “but she’s pretending to be happy. Why?”
He felt injured by the woman’s lies, and I could see why, because he had a point. He was accurately perceiving the incongruence in her voice. All of the lying we do to each other in the name of advertising can’t be good for us. But most of us, whose brains aren’t quite as strongly bathed in dopamine in certain places where my client’s brain was constantly overstimulated, can tune advertising out. He couldn’t. "
Given this is on the level the speculative, one thing to consider is that the initial condition of the schizophrenic might be delusion, hallucination and the disintegration of one's sense of reality - and when that happens, the result in a modern society with no support for the phenomena could be massive stress, stress being a factor which many are today blaming for much mental illness.
That is to say that shamanic rituals and such might be a way to prevent those on the cusp of the classical symptoms of schizophrenia from progressing to full-blown schizophrenia.
As someone who has dealt with some mental health stuff ("crap in my head" /technical term), I can testify firsthand that a) how it gets framed and b) how others around me respond to it make a really huge difference in how it impacts me -- anywhere from "weird, but functional" to "odd source of useful insight" to "losing my shit and I think I shall go play in traffic now."
Indeed! I've been able to compare friends with similar issues either deal with them as a problem to fix or suppress (therapy, medication, etc.), or as a 'weird, but functional' state to 'live with'. The latter, assuming they were functional enough and assuming they found a place, social group and general environment where their 'issues' were accepted, always were much better off.
That's not an argument to avoid therapy or medication, far from it, but at the very least it's should make one pause and think about finding a balance between 'fixing the person with the issues to fit in his current environment' and 'finding an environment/approach for that person to be happy with their issues'. Too often I feel that we err on the side of 'fixing'.
It reminds me a bit of the way bloodletting was once a solution to many things. Turns out that it often made things worse, and only in specific cases actually helps. Let's try to not make that same mistake.
(Also, more recently I've experienced this phenomenon personally, and I notice the same thing. The more I focus on 'fixing' or 'fitting in', the worse I'm off and the worse my problems are. On the other hand, the more I focus on finding a way to be accepted as I am, the better I am able to actually counteract my problems')
Sometimes, a "crazy" person needs justice. Their life needs to be fixed, not their head.
Some of my mental health stuff was rooted in being molested at age 3 or 4. I suppressed those memories until I was in therapy on a different continent, and thus felt safe enough to deal with it. Prior to that, there were clues to the suppressed memories in the form of bad dreams and bizarre thoughts.
I kept a dream journal while in therapy. I still find that talking about my dreams or recording them is useful, yet I have had people tell me "dreams are just gibberish and do not mean anything." These are often smart people who basically swear on a stack of scientific books that they are driven by logic (or well-educated Christians, who fail to see the hypocrisy and irony).
In short, I have been in situations where the truth was so unacceptable to other people that it created mental blocks in me. So, I feel very strongly that dismissing another person's reality is literally crazy-making.
It's doubtful that schizophrenia is all nurture, but it seems conceivable that coercive circumstances could aggravate a case of schizophrenia, taking a subclinical case and making it floridly symptomatic. Coercion could possibly tip the scales into psychosis.
From what I gather, it is not unusual for schizophrenics to be hospitalized, get better, be sent home to their effed up family and promptly get worse again.
My life experience strongly biases me towards believing that how it gets handled absolutely makes a difference ("it" = any mental health issue).
>I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art
Makes me think of Wesley Willis [1] who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found the only way he could manage it was by making music. Just such a sad and shitty disease.
I'd say that firstly, these are anthropological case studies without much quantification; there can't be. It's meant to provide rich account or potential insight, and that's how it's taken.
Secondly, I think the general professional narrative about those accounts is that those shamans were schizotypal, and that severe marginalization of the schizophrenic population is a cross-cultural phenomena.
Every culture has its idea of what is acceptable, including what's acceptable magical or religious thinking (we don't think that Christians who pray to Jesus for cancer relief, whether effective or not, are schizophrenic). But if you step outside of those realms, you will be mistreated. If you tell Christians that you have a personal relationship with Jesus, they'll think that's normal. If you tell them that you actually hear the voice of Jesus, they'll be conspiculously polite but suspicious.
>In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans.
This is a form of coercion in and of itself. And as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures, it turns out to be a profoundly unhelpful kind of coercion, both for the "shaman" and the society in general.
But is it any more coercive than putting those kids into psychiatric care and putting them on drugs that just make them not feel anything anymore?
I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these thoughts would have helped me better than talking to psychiatrists that don't have the slightest clue about what goes on in my mind.
>By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind.
Probably because a scientific framework of mind exists which you have access to, which allows you to accept that what goes on in your mind doesn't always correspond to reality. In a shamanistic society, you might still be led to believe you had magic powers, and that it was all real, and that you had to follow certain rituals to purify yourself or to interpret the signs from the gods, or whatever. Is that useful? Do shamans really know anything more about what's going on in a person's mind than doctors?
Both are coercive, though, which was my point. "Non-coercive" societies are still coercive, they just draw the lines in different places than modern societies do.
Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.
What if these voices are reflective of the emotional state of the people around them, as this quote suggests?
In that case, that is a kind of "magic", a special ability only you possess, that is real, and if you followed certain rituals your own emotional state could stabilise to such a point where you have the ability to detect what people are feeling.
And if this is true, then yes, a shaman would know more about what's going on in a person's mind than a doctor.
If you close your eyes, it doesn't mean the world isn't real. Just because you can't see something with the scientific framework, yet, does not mean it cannot be true.
Anyway, I don't see what coercion has got to do with shaman's in particular. There was plenty of people captured as slaves, in conflicts between prehistoric tribes, and that's a lot more coercion happening than in a schizophrenic being picked out as a shaman. There's probably less mental illness in prehistoric societies, because people probably didn't care much about a slave going crazy, it's likely unsurprising that happens, and you just kill them off.
I think coercion comes in cycles. Just after U.S. independence from Britain was probably less coercion than before U.S. independence. Today there is probably more coercion in U.S. than in 1850. There is less coercion today in Shanghai than in 1960, but probably more than in 1925.
It's all as real as humans are real. Every person has a mind that exists partially beyond the objective reality we all share. Those experiences are real even if they don't represent reality. They affect reality to the extant that humans do. Schizophrenia is dissociation from objective reality. A mind that is disproportionately subjective. An echo-chamber of thought. Even as a disability and not a "magical power" it does inspire a compensatory inclination. Like lip reading for deaf people. They have a mind that is desperately seeking the truth they know they are without. Truth as simply the coordination of thought and reality. A society able to mediate this inclination would be a treat to live in. It is, unfortunately, certainly not the one I live in. No one has time for that shit. Isn't there some way to just "fix" these people? They're obnoxious. Don't tell them I said that I don't want to be blamed for making them worse.
We've internalized a world of psychic war and we see nothing but liabilities. If we had the same reverence for wackos that we do for other victims we may be far better off. The wackos certainly would be. Is that coercion? Can you see anything else?
But i'm arguing specifically against the shamanistic point of view in the gp. Should we treat mental illness exactly the same as any other? Absolutely. The stigma behind mental illness, I believe, is a vestige from the days when most people thought such things were the work of demons. People can't accept that someone who thinks and sees the world so differently is just as human as they are. But reverence? No. Being told that you've been touched by God can be a prison of its own.
I didn't say anything about God. They aren't like other people. It can be distinctly useful. They just need to be respected. Maybe that would have been a better term than revere. The respect does two things. It helps them exist; They need it and we ought to help them. In doing so we learn useful things about ourselves. They're exaggerations of a part of us. I think this is the point of the GP. A society fit for a shaman is a better society for everyone else. This is congruent with your idea that they're just wackos. They have no idea how they're being helpful.
Yeah, you're right. We're probably on the same page about both of these methods being coercive.
My initial point was just that there's probably a big number of cases of mental illness in traditional societies that we can't diagnose because our ways of coping with these are so different that they manifest in completely different ways.
This is the same with children who are ADHD. Also, in France children who had symptoms of ADHD and were disruptive were made apprentices in kitchens usually around the age of 14 or 15. This might have changed in the last 20 years. It's why a lot of French chefs are notoriously psychotic, many of them were troubled children given a chance to put their energy to good use in a kitchen. [citation needed]
Yeah, but what if it was substituted with art, or something similar. It's possible to produce a society which values mentally ill people without necessarily coercing them.
What if they don't want to make art? Being mentally ill doesn't necessarily grant one creative insight. What if they exhibit antisocial or violent behavior?
You mean what if they don't fit into our status-quo middle class concept of society? Well then we ostracize them... and parade the ones of that do fit the fantastical ideal as unappreciated genius.
The evidence he supplies doesn't actually prove the coercion is the cause. There is no scientific data presented, just speculative statistics and linkages to possible causes. The neurobiologist D.F Swaab wrote a book called "We are our brains" that talks about the issues outlined in this article and provides scientific proof to show how various illnesses like schizophrenia can come about. Many of these illnesses have biological and physical connections to be brought about in a person.
I am not advocating for coercion being a good things, but manipulating a person to do something is not the same as guiding them down a path that has been generally beneficial for the majority, like going to school.
> as guiding them down a path that has been generally beneficial for the majority, like going to school.
Possibly unpopular opinion: school is not negotiable for children and so there's no guiding. It's pure coercion.
Also, there's no popular alternative to school so that we can compare enough data and prove that school is beneficial. Unschooling exists and seems to healthier, efficient and beneficial compared to school but there's just not enough data.
School was a great alternative at a time when it was the only place to get information. This is no longer true.
I tentatively agree with you. Although I am a parent and my child will be going to school - I do feel that the rail road that takes you from childhood to productive adult under the tutelage of the state is fundamentally a coercive one. It indoctrinates children to accept authority unconditionally and sets them up to be good little employees when they grow older - accepting the authority of their superiors without question. But this is the reality of the world we live in, change will be slow and at the end of the day we are all beholden to something, our existence as physical entities makes us subject to the laws of the universe. We all must eat, until we have a choice about this, we are merely choosing our master.
It is far easier for someone who has been free and living life with eyes wide open to understand and play the game if they choose than it is for someone who has lived a life under authority to suddenly have tremendous freedom. This is why many young adults flounder in their 20s. They have never been free and suddenly they are. With no direction and no restraint learned, this can be very dangerous.
If you happen to live near a Sudbury school, I recommend checking it out for your child.
Exactly. The institution of school destroys the healthy relationship with intrinsic motivation, curiosity, self-discipline and relationships with others by creating an unhealthy environment and modeling highly pathological versions of the above as the norm.
While, ironically, labeling some children's inability to accept and tolerate such conditions as ("treatable!!") pathology.
A human child who grows knowing herself, knowing how to determine what's important to her, knowing how to meet her own goals, knowing her own value, and knowing how to gain support and resources to achieve what's important, is very difficult to control or "guide."
There are very few institutions which support gaining such knowledge, like democratic schools. Public schools do not.
"Possibly unpopular opinion: school is not negotiable for children and so there's no guiding. It's pure coercion."
There are lot's of things which are non-negotiable for children. Things like brushing teeth, going to bed and washing hands after toilet. All of which have some intrinsic value beyond tradition.
Coercion is the action or practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats.. There are other means of guiding children to do something. These include gentle reminders, routines and and just agreement.
And, yes, coercion as well, when all other things fail. Hopefully not that much.
If a child goes routinely to school I would not call this an action under coercion, unless the child has learned e.g. that he needs to go to school so he does not turn into a destitute when he grows up.
"School was a great alternative at a time when it was the only place to get information. This is no longer true."
I don't think there ever was time when "school was the only place to get information". I would claim this is location based (if true even then). I.e. rural villages with low rate of literacy vs. a literate society with access to books.
Or, in pre-literate societies, just having access to a sufficient number of people would probably provide a venue for some information access.
Besides, providing information is not the only function a school has. My kid internalizes all math he is taught immediately and combines all new facts he learns into a logically cohesive model of the world which he has structured in his head.
However, he does need to learn how to live in a society and how to work with other people and school provides a good place for that.
> If a child goes routinely to school I would not call this an action under coercion
I'm actually young enough to remember what school looked like and I'm sure as hell many of the kids wouldn't attend if they didn't know that they are going to be forced by their parents or the nanny state anyway.
Sorry, I'm a bit of a pedantic in discussions here.
To simplify the situation let's claim that children do not go to school unless prompted by their parents. This is then an influence attempt by the parent to make the child follow with their directives.
Such an attempt has usually three possible outcomes: commitment, compliance or conflict.
Just because coercion can be used as an influence tactic does not mean it's always necessary to do so. Also, it seldom leads to the most preferred outcome (commitment).
The point was - not all influence tactics can be categorized as coercion - not that the hypothetical child would not need external influence to attend school.
For school, it is illegal not to attend. This means in America that people with guns can forcibly detain children not in school during the school day. Police proudly do so in an attempt to defeat crime since, in their opinion, all children not under the watch of an adult are criminals. How can being threatened with gun violence by the authorities not be coercion?
They also have the power to rip a child from their parents. This is biologically a very serious threat.
I would generally call that a very poor situational awareness by the persons holding executive power.
If the higher level goal for a state is to make people follow the law, then starting with violent coercion is a stupid influence tactic. There are other influence tactics as well.
But, if the culture is such that coercive tactics take precedence then I suppose you can have a point. I would not start to unravel this by deregulating schooling but by fixing the habits and culture of the executive personnel, though.
Absolutely. I have a comp sci degree, I was able to obtain first class results by learning intensively for an average of two months before each set of exams (having not attended any lectures at all).
I also went from a D grade in maths GCSE to an A* with a months work.
I am not that smart - it's just that standard schooling is terribly inefficient. And if you ask me, it's inefficient in this respect because it's not really about learning. It's about keeping kids somewhere while their parents go to work - so that more value can be extracted from the working population. Oh and also about teaching the children to be good little employees.
Your experience is typical for "unschooled" kids who face college -- they learn what's needed in a short period of time and quickly become experts on the subject. Very similar to working in a quickly changing industry like the internet -- a new tech comes around, you learn it, use it, become expert and move on with your life.
But we have constructed our economy in such a way that school is required in order to be successful. So, for many of us, the very fact that education is required to be one of the "winners" is coercive.
Not very surprising that some form of education makes you more likely to be successful, but does it necessarily have to be the institutional form of school?
It's hard not to fall into the trap created by a society with "business values". Should it really be considered less successful to be someone who builds an energy-efficient building which may last for centuries? Should a simple handyman really be paid drastically less than someone with a PhD?
I'm not against differentials in salary. But I do think that our present system is completely messed up.
If you look at it from the point if the economy, a handy man is a easily achievable job, meaning the number of handy man is large. Since there are so many of them, there is a large competition between them, lowering the value of there pay. What they do it specialized but not special. Some who differentiate themselves do make a lot more money. On the other hand a PHD is very difficult to achieve and a much smaller portion of the population receive on. On top of that a PHD makes you specialized on a topic, potentially making you a unique source of information which is worth a lot.
You are arguing for supply and demand setting salaries. But there is plenty of evidence in the economic literature which finds that is not usually true in real world markets (in fact, it turn out to be really hard to find any market which obeys such a simplistic model. And even when it does, it is usually easy to find scenarios where that same market doesn't follow supply and demand.) So supply and demand is mostly, in practice, just a contributing factor - and should be recognized as such.
I agree the evidence do not strictly prove that , but at least, in general , from all we know about indigenous populations , we have good evidence on how one type of society that's conductive to mental health should roughly look like.
And yes, even if mental illness is rooted in biology , we know that some environments cause it to manifest and some environments don't , and since we cannot change biology (and drugs are a very poor solution to such problems ) this means , at least that a big part of the solution is environmental change.
Stress and alienation/isolation have been directly implicated in depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction.
Perhaps these sometimes result from what might be described as coercion, but I think that to characterize, for example, the problem of parents who physically abuse their children as one of coercion misses the point. Coercion is a catch all, and in many cases coercion does not result in stress, trauma, etc.
That and holy shit, when did basing arguments on the notion of the noble savage come back in style?
The societies described in the article have many dissimilarities with modern Western civilization. Why attribute the level of mental illness (a somewhat difficult thing to measure in a primitive society) to the "level of coercion" (an extremely difficult thing to measure in any society)? Why not correlate it with the number of cars, or the number of zoos, or the average diet? Such cherrypicking is generally a strong indicator of a pre-existing bias.
I imagine its hard to get good data on mental illness let alone a good definition of what "mental illness" is across societies. Is homosexuality still considered a mental illness in most of the world?
Things like conversion therapy have been weirdly hard to stop, even with clear advice from professional bodies and regulators that it's probably harmful and has no evidence of efficacy or usefulness.
The author makes a good point about re-examining our approach to treating mental illness. I think the viewpoint that "Big Pharma" has psychiatrists in their hands is a bit too conspiracy-ist for me. What's really happening is mental healthcare is being excessively quantized and dehumanized. We're too concerned with the symptoms and we have studies that lump a variety of people under the ridiculously general label: 'depression'.
We're going too fast, the brain and human spirit is hopelessly complex, and it takes a holistic, humanistic treatment that doesn't reduce the patient to a set of symptoms to make a change. A book I recommend concerning this is "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" by neurologist Oliver Sacks.
Coercion and compliance are basically high-signal low-content terms. It's sort of dose-makes-the-poison in that you can't reasonably compare something like taxation (which is often described as coercion) to something like forced medication.
what do you mean by high-signal and low-content? i don't know about signal and content, but typically the word coercion is used to refer to forcing people to do something using violence and the threat of violence.
And you would think "forcing", "violence" and "the threat of violence" would all be clear. Right up until some one comes along and asserts that it's impossible to force people to do things because they can always choose to die instead. Or some one defines violence as "anything done to me specifically that I don't like at the moment for rhetorical purposes"
high-signal low-content... for example, if you say a term like "gun control" to a collection of people, and every person in the group has a clear idea of what it means, and yet the definition might be different for every person. So, the content of the term has low meaning overall, while as a signal it evokes a strong response.
So, I get what you're saying, but I don't think "signal" is a great term for that, because it comes from information theory, and there its definition more closely matches what you're calling "content".
I'm not sure what you could call emotional impact to make a similarly pithy description though.
Yeah, that's a good point - I have heard "signal" used more in this context in social sciences, like "dog whistle" in politics. But it'd be nice to come up with something clearer and just as pithy.
Not clear to me if the article implies that totalitarian societies have more coercion - but if it does, should a country like China have more mental illness? I don't know if thats the case, at least in percentage of entire population. What does that mean for the central hypothesis of the article and its validity?
China is an interesting case of thousands of years of relatively modern social order with high coercion in many ways.
However, it's also a society that maintained high levels of family and clan based organization which counterbalance the atomization and individuality that you see in modern "Washington Consensus" societies.
I highly recommend "The Search for Modern China" if you are truly interested in thinking about these things in context. It's very pleasing and readable.
Modern China isn't as straightforwardly authoritarian as you might want to compare against.
FTA: "Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry. Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness."
How many great people did we lose because they weren't 'compliant' enough to conform properly? I can sure think of a few.
I'd like to see some concrete evidence that people in the past did in fact had "far less mental illness", and it is not just a result of them not being diagnosed. Most of the mental illnesses we know have been defined within last 100 years. In the past they may as well have been known as anything from demonic possession, and magic, to being stupid, being a brawler or a person ill-disposed.
Secondly, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of coercion that was going on in the past. Sustenance farmers probably didn't feel much direct coercion (besides the days when the nobility showed up to collect their dues), they were just mostly scared of going hungry. But factory workers in the early Industrial Revolution? Miners before, during and after that? Militaries of various times? If coercion causes mental illness, it should be reflected in the historical records. It's probably worth checking.
> I wouldn't underestimate the amount of coercion that was going on in the past.
Don't forget about the Inquisition. Most people hear that and think of the burning of witches and heretics, but that institution alone had a much wider array of non lethal punishments for all sort of behaviors considered "undesirable".
I have been in the Inquisition museum at the city of Guanajuato during the holidays, and they had a remarcable number of painful or even midly unconfortable artifacts that got used on people doing the pre-modern equivalent of littering. Victims would not face lasting harm, but the judicious infliction of pain plus public humiliation [1] was enough to keep them toeing the line more often than not.
[1] A remarkable example was a sort of iron flute. It was heavy and it had manacles for both hands and neck so that the transgressor would be forced in position as if playing it. They would attach it to the victims and send them back home for a few days to reflect on their sins, which was alteration of public order, or "wild partying".
It would be good to remember that he is largely drawing from hunter gatherer societies and not just "in the past" as you describe his thesis.
While valuable to look at, these agrarian and proto industrial societies also had large amounts of coercion.
As I read the other posts I see too many people wanting to T/F this thesis whereas I think it real value is as a critical tool to examine societies and the minds that have to learn to live in them.
Mental illness is a complex entity. Beware of any simple "definition of insanity"
I recently discovered I have a mutation which makes my verbal intelligence too high to measure but has negative effects in other areas. Other people have similar variations.
Some kinds of mental illness such as schizophrenia seem very much to be a biological phenomenon, but stress and particularly the way stress is structured has a definite negative effect on the origin. You can become stronger and more capable in many areas by applying stress in the right way (athletic and military training, for instance), but stress without time to recover has negative effects on body and mind and certainly surplus coercion leads to surplus stress.
It seems contradictory to first note problems in defining insanity and then make a claim of vast "verbal intelligence", a quality a bit further out on the fringes of psychology definition.
Are you talking about the Met-158 mutation? If not, which?
I agree that the real culprit is stress-- biological differences to processing and coping with stress are likely the actual mechanism at play rather than generalized "coercion" like the article suggests without providing evidence. Our society is intensely stressful, and provides no real permanent reductions in stress level.
With response to "The 1916 book The Institutional Care of the Insane of the United States and Canada reports" paragraph. Schizophrenia is by no means easy to diagnose and there is a lot of debate over when someone is or isn't Schizophrenic. I have known two people (one a family member) that some would call Schizophrenic and after many years I'm still not sure if that is a fair diagnosis or not. I think it might be a bit much to expect a society with little social expectations to evaluate this well.
In our society we suspect people to have mental illnesses but it takes years to get a good diagnoses and sometimes they never get a clear one.
Identity is harder to come by in today's society than in the forests of New Guinea or in our own recent history. At the same time diagnosis of mental illness is easy to come by, as is anxiety provoking news media, and identity models of narcissistic, sociopathic and borderline celebrity personalities. Our young people, identities still forming, have many traps in which they can fall and most are alone with their thoughts. I think the author's hypothesis is the polar opposite of what is actually occurring... we've given our young people too little structure and not enough direction.
or indeed, any context. It's a fabulous book about the good and bad in societies untouched by civilization, and about one man's attempts to understand a language with no reference points. And his struggle with his Christian mission, ending up in his atheism. It's got everything, and would make a great film.
I think the author jumps to some conclusions here - not sure what is cause and effect.
Is it possible that people stricken by serious mental illness in these societies simply die? I have some experience with mental illness and I can see how someone 'out of their mind' could easily die young when exposed to the elements.
I don't have direct evidence, but I believe the mortality rate in rural / isolated societies is higher than in more cultivated societies.
A while ago I read that societies around the equator have almost no schizophrenia. This was linked to vitamin D or UV-B, which we lack in the western world.
On the subject of schizophrenia, the most interesting and insightful thinker I have read is John Weir Perry: http://global-vision.org/papers/JWP.pdf
His notion is that schizophrenia is a normal process to reorder the mind to heal from severe psychic trauma, which neuroleptics interrupt and prolong.
For all we know it could be as well the food : there's a lot of people that believes that highly processed food is toxic for the organism and is the source of most of our ailments.
They're generally heavy on beliefs and light on science, but empirical evidence suggest that they might be right.
McKenna writes: "A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as the schizophrenic, but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon. In a traditional society, if you exhibited “schizophrenic” tendencies, you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans. You are told: “You are special. Your abilities are very central to the health of our society. You will cure. You will prophesy. You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.”" [0]
[0]: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12470230/Eros-and-the-Eschaton-rou...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_schizop...