Freud and Nietzsche: Psychiatry between Existentialism and Scientism

Art by Andrew Baines

In The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker defends and broadens Otto Rank’s view of psychotherapy. Rank was one of Freud’s colleagues who broke with Freud, like Jung. Jung and Rank both interpreted psychological problems in spiritual and philosophical terms, whereas Freud clung to a narrower, sexual theory of mental dynamics. For Rank, the human mind is torn between opposite tendencies, towards separation and greater individuation, on the one hand, and towards union with a collectivity, on the other. This is an absurd, dangerous foundation for personal growth, because it threatens the person with the fate of being forever internally conflicted and with the anxiety of oscillating blindly back and forth between the poles. For example, a person might demonstrate her ego’s distinctiveness with displays of conspicuous consumption, while pretending to worship a deity that demands humility and submission to its greater power. The opportunity for what Becker called “heroism” is found in creative solutions to this existential predicament of having an unstable mental structure, stemming from the trauma of separation at birth, and of being propelled by the fear of the final separation at death. Art, love, and a mystical hope for cosmic reunion with a divine being that somehow encompasses all natural things are Rank’s recommendations for avoiding the stalemate of neurosis, of failing to learn how to unlearn past experience or to find a balance between the desire to stand out and to fit into a greater whole.

Freud from Nietzsche

Becker’s presentation of this theory emphasizes its existential aspect, and indeed Rank’s ideas are much more plausibly universal than Freud’s positing of infantile sexuality. But Becker’s criticism of Freud neglects Freud’s direct connection with existentialism. Freud, after all, was aware of Nietzsche’s writings, although he professed to having avoided reading them in depth, even while Freud’s work betrays his familiarity with several Nietzschean themes (as well as with Darwinism). As a relevant Wikipedia article says, “in the 1890s, Freud, whose education at the University of Vienna in the 1870s had included a strong relationship with Franz Brentano, his teacher in philosophy, from whom he had acquired an enthusiasm for Aristotle and Ludwig Feuerbach, was acutely aware of the possibility of convergence of his own ideas with those of Nietzsche and doggedly refused to read the philosopher as a result.” However this may be, Nietzsche must have rubbed off on Freud. This study, for example, summarizes what the two approaches share:

(a) the concept of the unconscious mind; (b) the idea that repression pushes unacceptable feelings and thoughts into the unconscious and thus makes the individual emotionally more comfortable and effective; (c) the conception that repressed emotions and instinctual drives later are expressed in disguised ways (for example, hostile feelings and ideas may be expressed as altruistic sentiments and acts); (d) the concept of dreams as complex, symbolic "illusions of illusions" and dreaming itself as a cathartic process which has healthy properties; and (e) the suggestion that the projection of hostile, unconscious feelings onto others, who are then perceived as persecutors of the individual, is the basis of paranoid thinking. Some of Freud's basic terms are identical to those used by Nietzsche.

The Christian psyche famously provided Nietzsche with his case study in repression and paranoia, just as Nietzsche demonstrated his “genealogical” form of explanation in his account of master-slave morality. Instead of dictating principles or arguing systematically, Nietzsche sought to undermine various philosophies and perspectives by purporting to trace their psychological causes back to either “noble” virtues or to unheroic, “weak” acts of self-deception. For example, instead of celebrating the will to power, a Christian might passive-aggressively cloak her predatory instincts with a show of false humility. Logicians typically regard Nietzsche’s whole approach as resting on the genetic fallacy. Moreover, his philosophy seems self-contradictory, since he presupposes the universal truth of his metaphysics of power, even while he maintains that knowledge depends on perspective and that all truth-claims are surreptitious attempts to overpower others. All living things are beasts, for Nietzsche, and beasts have no sound basis for believing they’re in touch with objective, nonpragmatically-construed reality. Reasoning is a sham, and displays of power are the only demonstrations that matter in that they testify to the greatness of heroic individuals who distinguish themselves from the prosaicness of the herd mentality.

In any case, Freud does add much to the structure of Nietzschean thought: whereas Nietzsche’s arch concept is power, Freud’s is sex. But while Nietzsche’s corresponding image of people as animals led him to write only aphoristic or literary appraisals, Freud’s single-minded interpretations were in the service of his drive to pioneer a science of the mind. Freud reduced every desire or impulse, every conscious or unconscious image, every mental or social event to a sexual cause originating in the Oedipal or castration complex. Whereas power is vague and can take myriad forms, sex is concrete and objective. The Id or unconscious may be irrational, but if it desires sex with the mother, expressions of that desire can theoretically be confirmed, because the sex act provides a benchmark for comparisons. Thus, in a dream a cigar might unconsciously symbolize a penis. Likewise, had Nietzsche identified a particular powerful act as all-important in human relations, as Freud had done in Chapter Four of Totem and Taboo(a prehistoric killing of a father figure, or alpha male), Nietzsche’s thought might have taken on the power of a science. However, like the phony spirituality of Christian religion, psychoanalysis is only pseudoscientific in the Popperian sense of being unfalsifiable. You can posit an infantile, unconscious sexual urge to explain any action, but the merit of that explanation isn’t tested in practice. Indeed, in so far as the applications of psychoanalysis testify to its power, the theory fails the test of being technoscientific, because the analyst-analysand relationship is typically endless. The talking never ends, because the imagination can always conjure new sexual fantasies and interpretations of events in the person’s formative years. Moreover, the theory is awkwardly implausible: sexual impulses are hormonal and the relevant hormones are released in puberty; thus, children have no sexual desires. 

Becker’s existential psychology would likewise be unfalsifiable, since you could just as easily trace any decision or action to a response to some universal fear, such as the fear of death or of standing out as an independent individual. However, existential psychology has the merit of being more plausible than psychoanalysis. Children do learn about death at an early age and they certainly are frustrated by obstacles to their attempts to further their bloated self-interest. The existential condition of being condemned to realize that we’re mortal and fragile creatures with the potential for creative transcendence does plausibly distinguish human mentality from most other animal forms.

Nietzsche against Freud

Ernest Becker

Meanwhile, psychoanalysis can be criticized on Nietzschean grounds. Psychoanalysts may pretend to be interested only in instrumental, value-neutral evaluations of their success or failure in technoscientific, medical terms. Their ostensible goal is to allow the patient to vent unconscious longings, while preserving enough of the ego’s illusions to help sustain a profoundly dishonest society that reflects the absurdity of our mental foundations in our infantile urges. But psychoanalysis is little better than a cult of personality, like the cult that pervades North Korea. Although psychoanalysts don’t necessarily worship Freud, their theory of the mind is just the handiwork of that amoral genius who strove first of all not for truth but for power, going as far as to steal some of Nietzsche’s methods while ignoring the existential insights that would undermine psychoanalysis if they were more widely known. Becker likewise shows that Freud was ruthless in serving his “personal immortality project,” as Freud attempted to outlive his biological death by creating an institution that would survive him while bearing the marks of his preoccupations. More importantly, the pretense that psychoanalysis is scientific is itself an exercise in self-deception and thus fails the existentialist’s test of demonstrating the primary virtue of personal integrity. For Freud, the mind is always at odds with itself, because the social forces informing the Superego are bound to clash with the infantile urges of the unconscious Id. Thus, there will always be work for the psychoanalyst and Freud’s immortality is secure. Freud’s pessimism is thus a subterfuge, covering for his animal urge to overpower others by imposing his peculiar reconciliation with the prevailing Victorian mores onto patient and therapist alike, not to mention on wider Western culture which has absorbed Freud’s scientistic version of Nietzsche’s thought.

While existentialists, too, are often pessimistic, they hold out simple honesty and responsibility as practical ideals, and it’s relatively easy to distinguish between those who know and are true to themselves, and those who lie compulsively to others and to themselves. To be sure, psychoanalysis admits of a difference between mental normality and pathology or neurosis. But the absurd foundation of the human psyche, the idea of which psychoanalysis inherits from existential philosophy via Freud’s engagement with Nietzsche’s writings, conflicts with the therapeutic goal of curing the patient. This is evident from Becker’s discussion of the existential undertones of Freudianism, in which the point emerges that there is no firm line between mental health and disorder. So-called mental normality is already the beginning of neurosis. We’re all trapped by the existential paradox in which we try to immortalize ourselves, to preserve our ego by one illusion or another while simultaneously wishing to merge with a greater totality such as a god or a culture. For Becker, neurotics are merely failed artists, lacking the genius to transcend their greater awareness of life’s absurdity, which enhanced understanding prevents them from automating their social interactions. Thus, for example, the neurotic will be incapable of fulfilling his sexual function as a member of our species, but will cling to perversions to lessen the resulting anxiety.

Becker attempts to divide mental health from disorder in a revealing way, saying clumsily at one point, “But somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure, and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism” (240). Thus, he criticizes Rank for being

so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion that he almost obscured the overall picture…Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it…In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity….If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. (232-3)

This is supposedly because perverts or fetishists were deprived of a certain upbringing which might have established a secure sense of their body, “firm identification with the father, strong ego control”, and “dependable interpersonal skills.”

Art by Albert Carel

Of course, there are differences between normal and abnormal sexual behaviour, although Becker’s analysis here is rendered dubious by his inclusion of homosexuality as a perversion that supposedly has ingenious or somehow inferior “motives” (232); instead, this abnormal sexuality is likely in part genetic. In any case, what Becker doesn’t justify is his value judgment. Even if fetishists were weak in being unable to carry out their species role of sexually reproducing with routine indifference rather than with creative flourishes, why should that weakness necessarily call for a cure? This is like saying that normal people lack the “strength” to murder without being burdened by a conscience. Whether our species ought to continue is an empirical question, not one with a self-evident answer. So the average sexual reproducer’s “strength,” fostered by a certain upbringing shouldn’t necessarily be encouraged. At least, Becker only presupposes that the weakness in question represents a failure. If it turns out that our species eventually destroys the planet’s capacity to sustain life, the “failure” of the perverts who resist normal sexuality would have to be reinterpreted as tragically heroic rather than ignominious since the value assignments would be reversed.

Whatever the merits of Becker’s discussion of this particular point, psychiatry is notorious for being unable to sustain its distinction between mental health and disorder, without resorting to spurious appeals to mass opinion. In fact, there are two sources of this difficulty. One is, as I said, the universality of the existential condition which renders us all clueless puppets in the big picture, an assumption Freud takes over from Nietzsche. The other source is the scientism which Freud adds to Nietzsche. Psychiatrists in general must be instrumentalists rather than righteous in their evaluations if they’re to retain the esteem that’s due to practitioners of a science. Engineers are interested only in doing what works, given some presupposed goal, not in figuring out which goals are right in the first place. Thus, if psychiatrists are medical doctors curing the mind rather than the body, they must likewise presuppose the social functions that enable them to target deviations as requiring their professional attention.

In so far as psychiatry is still informed by Freudianism, the discipline is caught between existentialism and scientism, between recognizing the absurdity of our situation, which calls for an artistic or a religious response, and feeling compelled to fit into a power hierarchy and seeing technoscience as the best instrument to secure the therapist’s elevated status and to establish a certain social order. Nietzsche’s revenge against psychiatry is that he has the resources to heal the doctor, to diagnose the phony neutrality of a pseudoscience as a disguise for a power play, and to recognize the source of the absurdity of that play in the existential condition which calls for decidedly nonscientific solutions.

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The Gods are our Imaginary Friends

What are gods, assuming they don’t exist? They have many social functions as well as aesthetic values. They're tools for subjugating gullible hordes of uncritical thinkers; mirrors reflecting our vanity or perhaps harbingers of what we expect to become; fictions that inure us to the inevitability of our bodily demise. One aspect of the gods, though, that should be better understood follows when we reflect on two unsettling facts.

The High Likelihood of our Cosmic Aloneness

The first is that the probability is extremely low that any human will encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life, and that’s so even if the universe is teeming with life beyond the solar system. This is because the universe is so mind-bogglingly vast that the time needed to travel between galaxies or stars would make even a light speed journey unfeasible. Some parts of the universe are more star-dense than others, such as the areas closer to the center of a spiral galaxy, but our solar system happens not to be in such an area. The nearest stars to the sun are in the Alpha Centauri system and are about 4.3 light years away. Travel there by conventional rocket would take tens of thousands of years, and unconventional means such as warp drive are highly speculative. Moreover, by the time aliens could travel here or we could reach them, both their civilization and ours would likely have become extinct. That is, technologically-advanced civilizations likely don’t survive for the tens or hundreds of thousands of years needed to travel between stars, because power is naturally corrupting, corruption detaches the powerful from reality, but reality always has the last word and so the deluded are effectively punished by their downfall. Thus, just as creatures throughout the universe would be separated in space, they would also be divided by time: the chance that two species originating from different stars would be near enough that they could reach each other, while also evolving at roughly the same time is extremely remote, because the natural duration of each species must be infinitesimal compared to the life of each star. That is, a star lasts hundreds of millions or billions of years, while a technologically-advanced species probably lasts no more than some thousands of years, so species from planets orbiting different stars will more likely evolve before or after each other rather than in the same era.

In summary, we may be the only intelligent creatures to have evolved in any part of the universe that we could realistically reach throughout the lifespan of our species. But even if there are others, we will likely never communicate with them, both because of the vast distances between stars and the barrier of light speed, and because of the self-destructiveness of the technologically-advanced societies needed to undertake the venture of interstellar travel in the first place, which makes for the relative narrowness of the window of opportunity for communicating with alien life.

The second curious fact is that the average human brain prefers social contact to total isolation, and copes with solitary confinement by undergoing forms of mental derangement rather than suffering outright anxiety and despair. Mountaineers, solo explorers, marooned sailors, and prisoners who are isolated for most of the day in a maximum security facility cope by hallucinating, anthropomorphizing their indifferent environment, or by devising obscure problems to occupy the rational side of their mind; otherwise, they can succumb to psychosis. “Without social interaction, supermax prisoners have no way to test the appropriateness of their emotions or their fantastical thinking,” and so their interpretations become distorted. Lone adventurers attempt to transcend their situation by treating the natural environment itself as a surrogate for a companion, wondering at its grandeur instead of dwelling on their preference for social interaction. “A similar psychological mechanism could explain why shipwrecked mariners marooned on islands have been known to anthropomorphise inanimate objects, in some cases creating a cabal of imaginary companions with whom to share the solitude.” 

Putting these two facts together, I’m led to wonder whether theistic religion is a form of mass derangement that allows us to cope with our collective isolation in the cold, dark universe. While it would be fallacious to assume that what’s true of a group’s member must be true of the group as a whole, there is clearly an analogy between the lone individual’s tendencies to talk to imaginary friends or to projections of herself and to analyze fictions at great lengths to hone her reason when deprived of real stimuli, on the one hand, and the universal phenomenon of theistic religion, which involves the positing of extraterrestrial beings with whom we can socialize, and the theological elaboration of supernatural social hierarchies. So while the collective needn’t duplicate what occurs at the level of individual members, such duplication appears to have actually happened for the obvious reason that just as some individuals find themselves permanently isolated from the group, our whole species isn’t in genuine contact with any society that’s independent of the animal kingdom that we dominate on this planet.

Theoretically, we might turn to animal species instead of imagining aliens and gods, angels and demons, or ghosts and goblins to pretend our species isn’t perfectly friendless. Most wild species, however, aren’t fit companions, since their intelligence is limited to conceiving of means of directly preserving their genes, as opposed to grasping their greater, existential situation. More specifically, they have no such situation because their intelligence isn’t powerful enough to liberate themselves from natural forces and cycles. Most wild animals, then, are more like machines than self-aware, enlightened beings. As such, we’ve dealt with most wild animals the same way we’ve dealt with the rest of hostile nature, by extinguishing them and replacing them with tamed versions to suit our social needs. Thus, we’ve demolished many wild places and replaced them with artificial worlds (with cities, machines, cultures), and we’ve hunted most wild species to extinction and repopulated the earth with livestock and with pets. The relationship between humans and domesticated animals, though, is as limited as that between master and slave. Just as the dictator who is surrounded by sycophants lacks the social challenge to keep himself from going mad, whole human societies couldn’t be satisfied with their subordination of the likes of horses, cows, camels, dogs, or cats. We would prefer for our society to relate to equals or even to superiors, so that we might learn and grow from the exchange. We have no such equals or superiors and so we’ve had to invent them in our religious myths.  

The point is that while theistic religions also ward off our fear of death, as Freud explained, we shouldn’t overlook their role in helping us cope with our collective loneliness. We need gods to grant us the miracle of eternal life and happiness, but we also need them to give us an excuse not to feel as though we’ve been abandoned forever in an uncaring cosmic wilderness.

Is the Religious Coping Mechanism an Embarrassment?

Let’s turn to the question of whether, in so far as it has that role, theistic religion is respectable.By hypothesis, there’s no relevant nonhuman life, so the question is only whether we can or should respect ourselvesfor living as though there were extraterrestrial intelligent life that presently socializes with us (by hearing our prayers, by rewarding and punishing us, and so on). This is to say that it’s not worth asking whether anyone looking down on our species should respect what we’re doing. There’s no one in that overseer position. Evidently, though, most theists not only do respect themselves, they condescend to nonbelievers and so-called atheists (the latter being existential realists or gauche speakers of the obvious). The reason for this is that the alternative of universal atheism should be as detrimental as harsh realism would be for the marooned sailor or for the prisoner in solitary confinement. If the choices are to be immersed in a fantasy world or to wallow in dread and angst, the instrumentally-rational option is the former, assuming the fantasy can be sustained and the overriding goal is to be happy.

If the sailor is rescued or the prisoner is released, after having carried on conversations for many months with invisible persons, she may become ashamed of the childlike state to which she’d been reduced to survive. But by hypothesis, there is no salvation from our collective predicament; our species will never be turned over to an everlasting community of angelic beings. Again, we will likely kill ourselves off or be wiped out by a natural catastrophe before we could communicate with any alien intelligence, assuming there is any such intelligence in the first place. So we will have no period of hindsight during which to feel ashamed of our former mental coping mechanisms. The individual’s resort to the imagination to flee from unforgiving reality is spared from being a mark of insanity because that flight is temporary and escape for her isn’t hopeless. Talk with imaginary friends may be a necessary evil in certain individual cases. But suppose there’s no chance of the individual’s redemption, as in the scenario of the last survivor on earth after an apocalyptic scything of humankind. Should that survivor resort to anthropomorphizing trees and stones, with no hope of a return to genuine social interaction, because everyone else is dead, the fantasy wouldn’t be rational or sane as a means of preserving hope in the interim, because there would be no return to normality and thus no interim. Still, although the individual couldn’t rationally hope for a recreation of society, she could speak to imaginary friends to avoid the unpleasant feelings that accompany a realistic reckoning of her dire situation. Nevertheless, although her strategy might be rational and thus understandable, it wouldn’t be heroic or admirable, because she would have broken from reality into madness. Her madness would be useful to her but it would also be an irredeemable defeat. Whether she goes on to loath or respect herself would be a function of her fantasy, and so its justification would be arbitrary since it would follow only from the gratuitous rules of her fiction.

As a species our position is similar to that of the last person left alive on earth. The madness of theistic religion can be mitigated only by the fiction’s utility in preventing an outbreak of mass terror or nausea. The fiction isn’t temporary, which is to say there likely won’t be a universal recognition that almost all of reality is impersonal; we won’t awaken from our fanciful dream and so even if we respect ourselves as children of some deity, that self-estimation is grounded in the fantasy and thus it begs the question. Of course the fantasy respects itself, as it were. But whether the fantasy is respectable as a way of dealing with reality is another matter. In our better moments, we may or may not be prone to feeling shame for surrendering to lunacy, rather than inviting the cosmicist awe and giving up on the ideal of happiness.

You may be thinking of the European Enlightenment as a period in which millions did emerge from a fog of unknowing and acknowledged the nature’s inhumanity. Indeed, there was such a reckoning, but secular cultures came to appeal to substitute fantasies such as the American Dream that personal freedom is noble and worth fighting for. Instead, that freedom might as well be part of a devil’s bargain. In the limit case, personal freedom is autonomy, the powers to resist external forces and to control your future. Such a liberated and thus necessarily solitary mind would immediately be crushed by the existential weight of its responsibility for deciding its course with no cultural guidance. Only individuals who have been excluded from society would be alienated or “liberated” in that respect, and the price, of course, would be that the objectivity and lack of guidance would prevent them from being happy in the sense of being socially fulfilled. Certainly, such a free person could have no family, for instance, since a love bond would be coercive. Likewise, such an autonomous agent could be no patriot, since love of country would likewise impinge on her sovereignty. In any case, the dream of this freedom turns into the familiar nightmare of the capitalistic struggle for social dominance, which leads to mass infantilization due to overconsumption, and millions of foreigners must be impoverished and enslaved to preserve the golden lands of opportunity, just as the ecosystem must be polluted beyond repair for that purpose.

In secular, rationalist, “modern” terms, progress was nevertheless made in the eighteenth century CE, when scientists and skeptics overturned theistic dogmas and revealed the horrific extent of our material nature. Instead of positing invisible friends in the heavens, early modern atheists dealt with the fear of the chaos that should unfold after God’s death, with their rosy, utopian fantasies of the perfectibility of our societies using science-centered, technocratic means. It was as if we were that prisoner in solitary confinement and instead of creating a fictional world to occupy our attention, we would get to work mopping the floor and ironing the bed sheets. If our prison cell didn’t favour us with a mop or an iron, we would invent them. We could immerse ourselves in the work of discovering how nature operates, and use that knowledge to our advantage.

Nietzsche foresaw how these utopias clash with the reality of the grim wilderness, as they did throughout the horrors of the twentieth century, including the sinking of the Titanic and the downing of the Hindenburg, the Great Depression and the world wars, the holocaust and the genocides. Nietzsche and David Hume before him emphasized our animal irrationality, which ran contrary to the sort of optimistic rationalism you find in Kant or Mill. If only we had an algorithm to calculate how to avoid practical contradictions or how to balance pleasure and pain, we could carry out our moral duty or maximize happiness. Instead, because scientists showed we have no immaterial spirit, we seek power, being fundamentally animal thingsalongside the many other physical objects, and so we channel nature’s monstrous lack of empathy in our social dealings. As biologists and cognitive scientists confirmed the unpleasant truth, we found ourselves in the “postmodern” era in which the postindustrial masses no longer trust in either the traditional religions or in science-centered fantasies. Only briefly after the Second World War did the authentic reaction to the philosophical implications of the Scientific Revolution gain traction when the cries of the existential philosophers, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Sartre and Camus enjoyed trendy popularity. Currently, though, instead of dwelling on the existential problem and when we're not succumbing to a naturalistic version of theism such as the UFO subculture, we pretend to be above it, indulging in a hip form of cynicism such as is largely responsible for the anarchical and treasonous rise of the far right in Europe and the United States.

But let’s lay aside the substitute fantasies and return to the question whether the more childlike original fantasy of theism does us credit. Again, even if our religions dictate that we should be proud of our status as spirits destined to be united with God, we can at least contemplate the hypothetical scenario of how the religious crowd would look to the outsider who doesn’t share in the fantasy. While there is no superhuman tribunal, we can objectively examine our culture for signs of mass insanity or depravity, and infer what we ought to feel in response to our association with it. Most theists are proud or at least comfortable in their childlike reversions, and some are even sanctimonious. But those are the attitudes needed to live well in an old-fashioned culture, not those needed to be prepared to oppose that culture if necessary, after critically examining how most people get by. Those outsiders who do take radical criticism seriously should think of the goal of living well to be as bizarre as an adult’s resort to childish fantasies, since the latter is a precondition of the former. There is no happiness without delusion, because the real world is a horror, philosophically speaking, and perhaps the most surreal delusion of all is the oldest and most widespread, the practice of socializing with plainly nonexistent persons, to endure the lifelessness of outer space and of most events in astronomical timeframes.  

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When Madness is Normal: Sanity in the Minds of Animals and the Rise of Divine Persons

There’s a perennial debate about the psychiatric concept of mental disorder. Is that concept being abused? Are normal behaviours being pathologized to sell pharmaceuticals? But the truth of mental health and insanity seems far removed from this controversy.

Mental Disorder as Dysfunction

The latest psychiatric manual of disorders, the DSM-5, defines “mental disorder” as “a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.”

The key to understanding this definition is the notion of a “function.” The psychiatrist wants to distinguish between normality and pathology, the latter being a deviation from a norm that calls for psychiatric action; more precisely, she wants to cater to cultural presumptions about psychological normality, which is why the definition adds that “An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder” (my emphasis). If a culture sanctions some behaviour, the behaviour cannot be abnormal or dysfunctional—unless the whole culture is backward and deranged from a modern, Western viewpoint. What, then, does “dysfunction” add to the concept of mere statistical abnormality, that is, to the concept of something’s rarity? Here the psychiatrist walks a fine line between calculating the difference between common and uncommon psychological and social patterns, on the one hand, and moralizing on the other. The latter is forbidden to the contemporary psychiatrist who seeks to align her discipline more with the hard sciences than with philosophy, theology, and the arts. In the past, psychiatrists did rationalize theological prejudices regarding the alleged evil of certain dispositions such as homosexuality and femininity. Jews and Christians read in their scriptures that women are inferior to men, and early modern, Western psychiatrists deferred to that unscientific, moralistic judgment, prescribing patronizing means for women to adapt to their alleged inferiority and lack of full personhood. But after R.D. Laing, Foucault, and others showed in the 1960s and ‘70s that the prevailing psychiatric criteria for mental health were subjective, psychiatrists developed objective tests in the form of checklists, thus preserving the scientific image of their discipline. (For a stirring presentation of this recent history, see Part 1 of Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Trap.)

The notion of dysfunction, then, is crucial to this larger psychiatric project. On the one hand, a dysfunction is an inability to carry out some process, to complete some expected relation between cause and effect. The fact that there’s a causal relationship at issue provides the generality to account for the norm which is being violated, since causality is the paramount scientific concept for understanding natural order. Psychiatrists see themselves as scientists exploring the mind and so they posit an order in the mental domain. The order investigated by scientists in general is explained with an instrumental agenda in mind, the goal being not just to understand but to control phenomena. Thus, scientists are minimalists and conservative in their theorizing: they objectify, explaining regularities in terms of force, mass, and other such relatively value-neutral properties. Real patterns are understood in terms of physical necessity—not as happening, for example, by free choice, since that would be a form of magic, a miracle that couldn’t be controlled and therefore couldn’t be scientifically (instrumentally and objectively) understood.

So a dysfunction is a deviation from, or a blockage in the furtherance of, a function, where a function is at least a causal relationship. However, because the psychiatrist sees herself as a medical scientist, she thinks she does well in the world, and so a mental function must be more than a regularity that merely happens regardless of any normative context. Functions are deemed to be good from some perspective, namely by a culture at large. Psychiatrists thus still kowtow to social presumptions, but they do so under the cover of scientific (instrumentalist, objectifying) rhetoric.Mental dysfunctions are, therefore, relativelybad irregularities: violations of social norms, causing suffering which is commonly assumed to be unwanted, and preventing the individual from carrying out her “important activities.” The goodness of mental health depends on a social evaluation, which the psychiatrist merely presupposes, but she’s quick to point out that not every conflict with society is pathological. Political, religious, or sexual rebels aren’t mentally unwell unless their behaviour is brought on by a dysfunction, as the DSM definition says. This means the rebel must suffer because of her inability to function, that is, because of a syndrome reflecting a disturbance in her thought processes. 

Of course, a syndrome is also a pattern and a process, which is to say that the “disordered,” unhealthy behaviour exhibits its own order as opposed to being an anomalous event; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a form of behaviour, a general, predictable set of responses subject to scientific explanation. So is the difference between functional and dysfunctional processes in any way objective? The DSM-4 definition provides some more detail which might help: “each of the mental disorders is conceptualized as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) or disability (i.e., impairment in one or more important areas of functioning) or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.” From this we can gather that, while seeming oxymoronic, disordered regularities (syndromes) must be those thought patterns that cause the individual pain or a loss of freedom. Disability is painful because the “areas of functioning” are deemed important, and so a healthy person should want to engage in them. The mentally disordered rebel, therefore, mustn’t choose her antisocial course of action, but must be led to it by a thought pattern that causes her distress. She must be internally conflicted, which should make her liable to admit that her conflict with society is ill-advised.

The psychiatrist’s appeal to freedom, though, is curious, because it threatens to undermine the definition’s scientific status. But the question of whether the DSM’s definition of “mental health” is incoherent would be a red herring. The DSM itself acknowledges that “mental health” can’t be adequately defined. The definition is offered only because of its utility: as DSM-4 says, the definition “is as useful as any other available definition and has helped to guide decisions regarding which conditions on the boundary between normality and pathology should be included in DSM-IV.” This isn’t the extent of the definition’s instrumentality, however; as I said, the rhetoric of functionalism allows the psychiatrist to dabble in normative generalizations while clinging to the authority of science in the form of neutral-sounding jargon. The root of the contradiction is psychiatry’s intermediate position as a soft science, a discipline that stands between scientific investigation which necessarily objectifies and thus dehumanizes its subject, and cultural, teleological presumptions about the goodness of “health” and of the goals which a healthy person can achieve. In essence, then, the DSM definition is an act of camouflage.

Inadvertently, however, the definition helps to reveal some underlying social processes which shed light on the difference between so-called mental health and pathology. Step with me through the looking glass and look anew at these conventions we use to congratulate ourselves on our status as either normals or heroic rebels.

Animals and Persons, Slaves and Masters

Notice, then, that the talk of psychological or social functions is implicitly depersonalizing (and so quite at odds with any talk of freedom). At best, functions are roles played by actors, or by people who aren’t free to exhibit their personal preferences, because they have a job to do. For example, they might have to sacrifice their private standards to achieve a goal they’re expected to achieve on account of their prior commitments. This typically happens in the workplace where the worker needs a job to survive, but detests what her company compels her to do in this public role she occupies. For most people, psychological functions derive from social ones in that an individual feels the pressure to behave, to resist certain ways of thinking and feeling only when she contemplates how her actions would be publicly assessed. The roles most of us play are assigned by the myths that define the character of our culture, not by our private creative acts. By carrying out our social functions, we fit into society. 

There are three paradigms of “behaviour,” of functional activity in this sense. The first is animal behaviour which corresponds to natural order as determined principally by natural selection. Talk of the functionality or optimality (that is, the pseudo-rightness) of adaptive animal behaviour is a remnant of obsolete deistic thinking in biology. Interaction between the genes and the environment produces body types which in turn act with some regularity; in general, organisms are subject to a life cycle which requires that they seek resources to sustain them so they might contribute to the future of their species by reproducing. But Darwin showed that this process is a matter of sheer causality. Animals tend to approve of most stages of their life cycle (short of the final stage, being death), because their bodies are engineered to result in that approval via the influence of hormones, cognitive restrictions, and the like. They fear certain outcomes and desire others, and functional, adaptive, biologically-determined behaviour is the pattern of responses—by turns awe-inspiring and gruesome—that we see throughout the animal kingdom we’ve almost entirely displaced. Animals hunt for food, craft shelters, put on a show to attract a mate, and sometimes cooperate to raise their offspring, because that’s what they’re built to do. In that respect, their behaviour is robotic: genetically programmed and largely automated.

As I just hinted at, that paradigm of behaviour is in the process of being superseded, as domesticated animals replace wild ones and thus as a social order revolutionizes the prior, natural one. The second paradigm, then, is of animals conforming not to their phenotype or to their habitat, but to the dictates of a particular, godlike species that acts as their global master. While deism was a hangover from a time of mass medieval confusion, the behaviour of most large animals is indeed now intelligently designed, because those animals are almost all domesticated or on the verge of extinction. Domesticated animals fulfill social rather than “natural” (naturally selected) functions in so far as they’re forced to act as our slaves (as pets or livestock). For example, they live in pens or cages and so have their basic needs met not by the fitness of their labour but by the power of corporate farming conglomerates and by the insatiable demand of spoiled and deluded human consumers that drives the farming industry. Instead of caring for their offspring in the wild, domesticated sows have their piglets forcibly removed soon after they’re born so the mothers can return to their social function of pumping out another round of offspring.

The third paradigm carries over our practice of domesticating (enslaving) wild animals, into the nonorganic realm of technology, yielding robots and other machines that likewise can function or malfunction according to whether they fulfill their programs. Sheep, pigs, and chickens, along with pets and zoo animals must be forcibly trained to behave as demanded by their masters, because their social function conflicts with their natural one, and so there’s always the risk that the animals will resist when the opportunity presents itself. Technology lacks any such ambivalence, of course, because machines have no prior programming.

These are the three touchstones of our notion of functionality. When applied to people, then, as in the case of the psychiatric conception of mental health, functional individuals are at least implicitly compared to wild or domesticated animals or to machines. In either case, notice that whereas mental health is supposed to be a benefit or even a precondition of our achieving our ultimate goal in life, such as happiness, virtually no one would approve of being compared to animals or to machines. And yet mental health is defined in terms of functionality, pathology in terms of dysfunction. Indeed, putting aside the idiosyncrasies of the DSM definitions, we generally think of mentally healthy individuals as those who successfully go about their business, thus performing one or another social function, the latter being a culturally-sanctioned pursuit such as a family life or a career. Like animals that have prior programming or like machines that are developed from their moment of invention to achieve a single purpose, so-called healthy human individuals are animalistic or mechanical in their social interactions.

But this raises the question of how the analogy might be extended to take into account the input of the masters. Who is assigning healthy, normal individuals their social roles?The answer follows upon our observing that the mass of normal “individuals” or “persons” are betas in the ethological respect: they’re followers in a dominance hierarchy, perhaps working their way to becoming alphas (leaders who enjoy privileged access to the group’s resources) or perhaps content with the security of their station. If human societies are composed of mammalian dominance hierarchies, at least at some level of analysis, there must be human alphas who have an outsized impact on societal standards. Historically, these alphas have been political rulers, including the lords and aristocrats who employed troubadours, playwrights, and painters to mythologize their exploits, but whose tastes and habits typically repulsed the unwashed masses, leading to violent overthrows as in the French, American, and Communist revolutions. More recently, thanks to the rise of public relations propaganda and to capitalistic and democratic assimilations of the potential for mass resentment about grotesque economic inequality, oligarchic tastes have trickled down to the conventions that outline what we might call the middleclass life cycle. A normal, healthy, middleclass beta would be alternately shocked, appalled, and jealous were she treated to an insider’s view of a plutocrat’s lifestyle, just as anyone who glimpsed a deity would be simultaneously terror-stricken and drawn towards the transcendent reality (as Rudolph Otto said about an experience of the numinous). Just as alpha and beta wolves don’t live in the same way, since the alpha has many more privileges and free rein whereas the beta must knuckle under or risk its life by staging a duel, human upper and middle classes might as well reside on different planets—as caricatured in the movie Elysium. For example, whereas a middleclass drudge must wade through the masses at the airport to board a crowded plane, the upper class member typically has access to a private jet or yacht.

The point isn’t that oligarchs explicitly plot to domesticate the masses, deciding step-by-step how the latter might be controlled. But the indoctrination and training do unfold organically as a result of loopholes in democracy and capitalism which implement old forms of social control in new guises, the old ones being theocratic or megamechanical, as in Lewis Mumford's conception of the latter. For example, in liberal societies, civic religion replaces theism as the noble lie that sways the citizens to trust in the society’s systems and laws (see Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless). And capitalism perpetuates the myth that narrow-minded selfishness is the engine of progress, which tricks consumers into accepting vast status quo inequalities. All of which is most glaringly apparent in the political and economic dynamics of the United States. That country does indeed lead the free world in that it reveals how the progress of liberal humanism is due to a Faustian bargain. Humanism is evidently powerless to create a truly progressive civilization, one that does away with premodern forms of barbarism. On the contrary, the U.S.-centered, post-WWII global civilization we think of honourifically as “modern” only perfects the master-slave relationship. We use technology to accelerate the demise of all wild, uncivilized forms of life, meaning all nonhuman species, and then the strongest, most cunning or remorseless human leaders turn our predatory instrumentalism to the task of enslaving the bulk of humanity to boot. Now Hollywood and corporate advertising indoctrinate the masses with market-tested myths to cultivate our selfishness and materialism as well as stoking our fantasies and unconscious fears, to prolong the palpably unsustainable form of civilization at the apex of which is necessarily a quintessentially insane leadership.

And so we reach the surreal irony that the standard of mental health for the masses, namely social functionality, civility or domestication, is established by indoctrination flowing from a liberal, capitalistic (selfish and materialistic) civilization that reserves its most godlike rewards for those who are palpably unwell. To wit, oligarchs are typically psychopaths. They’re either able to peck their way to the top of the pecking order because they’re biologically unencumbered by a conscience which would otherwise retard their ambition, or else they accustom themselves to the inhumanity of their enterprise and so lose their scruples as they acquire more and more corrupting power, as in the case of U.S. President Obama. We middleclass folks—with access to computers and the internet and time to spare perusing blogs—may think it’s important to distinguish between the mentally healthy and the unhealthy, and we’d further conceive of the happy middleclass family that we see on TV ads or in 1950s Hollywood as the paragon of sanity. The smiling parents with their adoring children and pet dog are the sanest because they’ve completely conformed to mass cultural expectations. They beam their smiles not because all is well with them, but because they’re uninterested in learning how their lifestyle is endangered by blowback from the atrocities committed by those buried, as it were, in the matted fur growing from their nation’s repulsive underbelly.

What we fail to grasp is that the controversy over this middleclass distinction between mental health and insanity, where the latter is understood as mere social dysfunction, is a tempest in a teapot. Looked at in the context I’ve laid out above, what we call mental health is akin to the unknowing tranquility adopted by a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. We long to be the godlike oligarchs who have maximum prestige and freedom in our rapacious societies even as we shy away from seeing clearly either those leaders or those societies. Our complacence and passivity are functional means of preserving an unstable, highly-destructive civilization that’s represented by fittingly-monstrous avatars such as Donald Trump and his ilk. That is, our “healthy” normality entails our social functionality, which means we must focus narrowly on our middleclass life cycle, ignoring the global ramifications and the hideous deformities that naturally fester in the leaders of this delusion-fueled way of life. We think we’re sane and healthy when we do our jobs even though we long effectively to be perfectly insane (from this middleclass vantage point). We wish we were oligarchs—even though the oligarchs aren’t fully human; they lack the capacity for complex emotions, because were they burdened by a conscience, they couldn’t manage the massive cognitive dissonance that must form in the mind of any rational person who participates in the upper echelons of so grotesque and blinkered a civilization as the one in which we modern liberal humanists have created for ourselves. The point should be emphasized that the sociopathy of the top one percent of wealthy and powerful individuals is hardly accidental. While not all members of this upper class are equally inhuman, the process by which any average person is liable to be corrupted by their dominance over others and over the world in general is familiar, although we prefer not to dwell on the implications for our self-image, according to which we’re innocent followers of those leaders.    

Outsiders Liberated from the Rat Race

Who, then, are the truly sane ones? We can begin to answer this with a non-normative distinction, between those who are clearly unwell, according to the forgoing analysis, and any remaining folks who at least have that potential for mental wellness. If we eliminate the betas who are called mentally healthy but who are actually dupes in a freakish and heinous system, and we set aside the alphas who are either full-blown sociopaths or who are at least corrupted to some extent by their escalating engagements with hedonism and sadism, we’re left mainly with the losers who correspond, ethologically, to omegas. These last to receive the group’s bounties stand outside the dominance hierarchy because they’re too weak or unreliable to be trusted with the job of defending the territory or of securing the group’s next meal. That very outsider status, however, should allow omegas to appreciate the sublime horror that counts for daily life in the wild. Of course, this assumes that the social species in question have the capacity to feel that sort of abstract, existential fear, which presumably isn’t the case for most of them. Human omegas are in that position and yet that alone doesn’t make them sane. Some of these omegas are homeless and starving and thus ill-equipped to think clearly. Some are depressed or schizophrenic or otherwise deranged. Other, learned outsiders succumb to mystical balderdash and exploit beta herds as their cult leaders. Some graduate to beta status themselves as monks or nuns of a holy order.

In any case, the question of sanity isn’t the one to ask. While we can speak biologically of normal and abnormal brain functioning, and of debilitating disorders such as Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia, the general notion of mental health is part of the beta’s self-delusion. The kind of health we have in mind is the pet’s passivity, the ability to function in the socially accepted way. Mental health is measured by your tendency to contribute to society, especially by raising a family and earning a living. Above all, the healthy person must fit into a culturally-prescribed role. In that respect, she’s more animal or machine than person. To borrow from the DSM definition’s hodgepodge of sophistries, the hallmark of personhood is autonomy—indeed the very freedom that has no place in functionality. Existentialists like Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre have exhaustively analyzed the concept of personal freedom, particularly from the phenomenological end. They emphasized the onerous burden of responsibility placed on the free individual, the dread and angst she suffers knowing that because she’s free, she has no foundation to rest on, no axioms to guide her choice of a direction in life. Indeed, the existentially-free individual seems deranged in her ruminations. Like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the free person will be inwardly conflicted and crushed beneath the magnitude of her decisions, given that a precondition of her freedom is that she understands we alone must decide on our life’s meaning. And like Camus’ stranger, the free person is liable to be alienated from feel-good, beta society. If we ask the broader question—not "Who is sane?" but "What ought we to do?"—the person who is free to obey social conventions or to reject them as farcical may be both mentally unwell in some sense, but also heroically superhuman.

Incidentally, this is why the DSM’s point about the connection between suffering and dysfunction is so telling. The “well-adjusted” beta multitudes shouldn’t suffer because they’re sheeple, and disturbing their domesticity would be as rude as scaring babies. But genuine, enlightened peoplewill likely suffer for their self-understanding: they know that they’re free, that mass culture is obscene, and thus that they’re on their own as outsiders in the whole uncaring universe. Why wouldn’tthey suffer? But also, if that existential suffering makes them “dysfunctional” or even antisocial, why is that worse than being an apologist for a “humanistic,” “progressive” civilization that dehumanizesthe masses and enslaves or exterminates most forms of life like the crazed aliens you see wreaking havoc in old sci-fi movies?

The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate

The more pertinent distinction isn’t between dysfunction and mental health, but between animality and personhood. Animals and machines follow training and rules; their behaviour is programmed and so they’re slaves to a master. Again, existentially speaking, most humans, namely the beta class, are animals and machines, not persons: we live as functionaries in one system or another, playing roles without much self-awareness or appreciation for the cosmic tragedy—the destruction of the biosphere—to which we’re contributing in our workaday fashion. Those with the greater potential for autonomy are the omegas, the social outsiders who thus bear the weight of the existential choice of what to do with themselves, since they have no role to play. Again, the stakes are no longer pathology and health, but automatism and personhood. Instead of wondering whether we’re normal or deranged, we should be considering whether we’re authentic persons in the first place. Are the beta masses that follow the megalomaniacal predators of the top one percent healthy for doing so just because they thereby maintain some social order? Is it sane to pursue the long-term destruction of all life or to shirk your responsibility as a potentially self-aware human, by acting out natural and social roles instead of making a philosophically-informed choice of how to live? What is one deluded nobody’s happiness worth in the shadow of the dreadful con of which she’s a victim? If we shift our perspective to one that appreciates the existential stakes, we begin to discern that the majority that’s called healthy, sane, and normal aren’t even fully human. Their minds are inauthentic, because they haven’t been liberated by a philosophical awakening. Plato and Jesus both called them vulgar swine, those controlled by their lusts or who wouldn’t recognize pearls of wisdom even were they dropped at their feet.

Interestingly, once we set aside the psychiatrist’s narrow, half-hearted teleology, we can see that despite the alphas' psychopathy, they too have a greater capacity for authenticity since like the omegas they’re not imprisoned by any social system. Whereas the omega’s freedom derives from her marginalization and by the higher-order thoughts that afflict and alienate her as she retreats inward in hyper-reflection, the alpha is liberated precisely by his amorality and transnational perspective. Not committed to any national ethos, not trapped in any rat race, but godlike in his command over the experiences he chooses to have, the alpha stands above and thus apart from mass society. As you might have gleaned, freedom isn’t necessarily a gift. We’re most free when we’re detached from everything else, including our home and loved ones, when we’re isolated and left to stew over some weighty decision we alone can shoulder the responsibility for. The homeless and the forgotten losers, the nomads and beatniks, the introverted artists paralyzed by sensitivity, the misfits and drifters and fools and freaks and itinerant monks and above all the outsiders—these are the freest creatures on earth and thus they alone are fully human in so far as our species is supposed to be populated by people rather than by animals or machines. And if the plutocrats and mob bosses and emperors and dictators are warped by their power and celebrity, they can be just as superhuman as the sage, regardless of the alpha’s insanity or evil. Alphas wouldn't be fully human in the biological sense, because of their limited capacity for complex emotions, as I said, but they might be psychologically superhuman, given their detachment from mass society and from its social roles and norms. In any case, there's no guarantee that our best representatives are especially clear-headed and benevolent; on the contrary, we may be afflicted with the leaders we deserve because those masters may develop our human potential to its terrifying endpoint.

In a founding myth of Western civilization, Yahweh said about Adam that he should have a helpmate, because it’s not good for man to be alone, and so Yahweh made Eve (Gen.2:18). But this myth was a rewriting of earlier, Sumerian stories that reflected our animistic past, when our ancestors perceived all of nature as being alive, and so instead of being bent on controlling natural mechanisms, the ancients assumed they could socialize with the world. As Daniel Dennett explains in Breaking the Spell, animism and theism were caused by the overuse of our instinct for relating to each other as minds. On the whole, the ancient animists were thus also more akin to childlike animals than to authentic, liberated and forlorn persons. Far from being rationally alienated from nature and society, the ancients projected social categories onto the whole world and so felt at home everywhere and under all circumstances. Animists would have abhorred the prospect of being alone, because their aptitude for socialization and personification, which Dennett calls the intentional stance, was hyperactive. But solitude is almost a precondition for freedom and thus for personhood. This is why the introvert’s inner life transcends the extrovert’s monkey-like preoccupation with making acquaintances and flirting and gossiping and the like; the introvert’s presence graces the animal kingdom with something new, something virtually supernatural, with a godlike being that can do what it alone likes. The price for this emergence of godhood—which is almost synonymous with personhood—may be mental disorder in the form of cognitive or emotional dysfunction, because an absolute, posthuman god would be tortured by the sovereignty that alienates it from everything else. But there’s a fate worse than not fitting into an irresponsible society, and that’s being the human animal or machine that depends on the delusions keeping that society afloat.   

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Stultified by Reason: the Vision of Heartless Nature

Art by Jim Kazanjian

It’s often said that the scientific way of thinking is counterintuitive. Worse, the mathematical analysis of nature is alien and incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t mastered that language or who aren’t in the habit of thinking within the bounds of an austere standard of precision. Scientific knowledge is hard to acquire not just because there have been so many discoveries in the last several centuries, that delving into even a fraction of modern knowledge overloads the human memory capacity. On top of that and more importantly, the math-centered form of scientific thinking is estranged from the heuristics that make up our innate logic that’s responsible for our intuitive, snap decisions. Those genetically-preprogrammed cognitive rules give us a head-start in the harsh business of surviving but also blind us to the nature of cosmic reality. Our on-board techniques for coming to grips with the world are suitable for reading each other’s minds and climbing social ladders, as well as for interpreting useful terrestrial rhythms such as the cycles of night and day and the four seasons, but not for fathoming chaos, quantum mechanics, or dimensions beyond space and time. Early modern scientists made a heroic effort, based in part on the antisocial leanings of geniuses like Isaac Newton, to develop an inhuman method equal to the task of modeling the remote universe that’s perfectly indifferent to the emergence of life.

We fall in love with each other, losing ourselves in emotional bonds to the point that we risk being blackmailed as we strip off our clothes and carry out sex acts that are banned in public spaces to preserve our presumed dignity. That’s the extent of our preference for the familiar social world. How alien, then, must be any form of cognition that encompasses the ocean beyond the puddle that we call home! How alienated from our native feelings and biases must we become even to entertain the antihuman thought that the entire saga of our historical comings and goings is peripheral to universal reality! And what madness must we court to study the undead shuffling of natural processes, to deprive ourselves of the comfort of trotting out our myopic metaphors that are so many gauche shout-outs to our brothers and sisters in the ‘hood of humanity!

Anthropocentrism: the Norm for Human Happiness

Anthropocentrism is our original sin. It begins with the clueless egoism burning in the tiny heart of every child, passing into the fragile pride of each toddler who’s indignant whenever he or she is told “No.” We all enter the wide world unable even to form the conception that anything could be other than ourselves. Everything from Mother’s milk to Mother herself and the toys we play with are thought of as parts of our craving. We demand this or that and we receive it as a matter of parental necessity or else we throw a tantrum. In effect, as children we perceive every event as being miraculous, because we don’t separate cause and effect in our imagination: everything happens in the orbit of our self-centered expectations. Even after we pass the trials of teen disenchantment, when puberty compels us to long for the Other, in a morass of lusts and other hormonal intoxications, when we grow into independent adults, we still rely on those childish habits of thought. We carry our self-centeredness with us in the theistic delusions of our exoteric religions, when we live with the knowledge of our certain death by spellbinding each other in our collective hypnosis, daydreaming that physical death is illusory because the spirit lives on for eternity in the House of the Lord. With our cities’ light pollution that blots out the far-flung heavens, we facilitate the illusion that the world revolves around us, as though by enveloping ourselves at night in those electric screens we were telling each other, “Keep moving, keep consuming; there’s nothing to see here”—no infinite void all around terra firma, for example, which likely surpasses even scientific understanding so that all our preconceptions about the worth of what we’re doing would eventually be laughed off as so many naive fairytales if only they could be remembered across the generations. Instead, the vain, wishful narratives that contextualize our lives, in which we’re invariably the starring attractions, will pass into obscurity, nullified by the outer void after the curtain call on our species and on our epoch. 

But those examples are just some usual suspects of our inborn self-centeredness. In fact, the very happiness which psychiatrists call the goal of normal human functioning depends on a kind of tenuous stability, called sanity, which is impossible as long as we occupy the view from nowhere that allows the world’s impersonality to seep into our consciousness. Objectivity, the understanding of something as having no subjective qualities is a paradoxical perspective that depersonalizes the knower and the known together, rendering her robotic and functionally amoral. It’s akin to the aesthetic stance in which we ignore our personal preoccupations and allow something’s givenness to wash over us so that our reaction to it flows from our unconscious side and helps reveal our authentic self. Unless we actively suppress our inclinations and thought routines, and think logically which is to say universally, objectively, and thus inhumanly, such as when we carry out some scientific or technical analysis to get at the facts by interpreting the data with minimal regard for our preferences on the matter, we’re playing the animal game of thinking or acting out of self-interest; we’re attempting to succeed according to some conception that, at best, merely rationalizes the pointless flow of genes.

You might be thinking that the insanity of being wholly out of touch with reality would be useless for evolutionary purposes, since some knowledge of facts is necessary to our survival and procreation. But the knowledge that suffices for evolutionary success has nothing to do with objectivity. The “facts” you need to know to avoid falling down a cliff or to help you identify a potential mate aren’t universal or fundamental. When we behave as genetically-driven higher primates, we don’t describe the world as an indifferent deity would or even as would an extraterrestrial intelligence in the midst of conducting an experiment on us. Instead, we think of the world pragmatically, interpreting things in terms of their instrumental relevance, or their being “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger put it. We view the cliff not in terms of its geological composition but as a danger, and we construe the potential mate not as an individual in his or her own right, but as the object of our desire, as something to be won over to complete us as though that person were put on earth to make us happy, as we’re wont to romanticize. The innate ways of thinking that are evolutionarily most useful generate only practical conceptions that are one and all anthropocentric.

By contrast, the inhuman knowledge that issues from objectivity is likely detrimental to the genes, at least in the long run, because it threatens all life with extinction. In fact, objective knowledge of reality is as accidental and anomalous as the emergence of life. Certainly, technoscientific know-how and industrial manufacturing have extinguished most of the wild animal species that have been unfortunate enough to have been thrown up by their genes in the Anthropocene. And we have the power now to slaughter each other in a world war the effects of which would be measured in megadeaths, thanks to the inventions of nuclear and biological weapons. Only the anthropocentric presumptions at the base of the myths of liberal humanism make the use of such weapons taboo. A purely rational, objective people could easily resort to such weapons of mass destruction, since they wouldn’t labour under the feel-good sentiment that humans have special rights in the animal kingdom. This means that we currently survive in spite ofthe fearsome power flowing from objectivity, because we’re seldom ruthlessly detached and logical and we eagerly succumb to the childlike, magical thinking that makes us happy. Again, unless we resist our natural tilt towards self-glorification, our everyday conceptions presuppose that humans are central to the universe, that the world owes us a fulfilling life. So-called normal human functioning is thus categorically (as opposed to instrumentally) irrational, not because we’re ignorant of the means to achieve our personal goals, but because those goals themselves stem from an embarrassingly-false picture of the world in which we each truly matter.

The Horror at the End of Objectivity

Still, anthropocentric normality in both its secular and religious guises passes for sanity, because a deeper madness awaits those who override conventional wisdom and attempt to see the world as it really is. Witness the stock character of the mad scientist such as Victor Frankenstein, Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and numerous others from movies, television, and comic books. The prototypical wise person was the shaman who ingested psychedelic substances to shock himself out of his profane, pedestrian worldview to formulate more fundamental truths. That rough form of antihumanity would just as often mislead with projections of subjectivity in the form of so-called gods and other spirits, as it would enlighten by decentering the self. Next, there were magicians and occultists, saints and mystics who professed to prove that mundane, consensus reality is itself a trick, by performing or experiencing miracles made possible by a glorious, hidden realm. To those forerunners could be added priests and other bureaucratic officials of organized religions who merely speakof such miracles, attributing them to greater spirits. In all such cases, the proof of wisdom was a bout of religious ecstasy or the faith needed to believe in a promise of such ecstasy in the afterlife. Then those occult figures morphed into the one-dimensional scientist. Again, Newton is the link between them, although his esoteric side is less well-known than his narrowly scientific one.

Notice, though, that the madness that ought to accompany scientific understanding, which is credited still in the pop cultural caricature of the mad scientist, became politically risky as scientists found themselves at the center of world-spanning industrial enterprises. No one wants to entertain the suspicion that the serious businesses that elevate our material living standards are powered by the ravings of madmen. Sure, we’re titillated by anecdotal confirmations that therapists and physicians are disproportionately narcissistic, such as when we’re faced with the bizarre character of Ben Carson in his brief starring role in the American political spectacle. The popular comedy show The Big Bang Theory pictures young scientists and engineers as only harmlessly mad, owing to their arrested development. In any case, scientists and engineers have learned to hide their quirks and to compartmentalize their modern, secular form of ecstasy which is best characterized in terms of such existential burdens as angst, dread, and an all-encompassing sense of the absurd and the tragic.

One technique for erecting such mental barriers is scientism, the prejudice against philosophy, artistic interpretation, and the search for meaning in general. If all such interpretations in the humanities departments are just woo, meaning frivolous opinions unwarranted by logic or strict adherence to the evidence, the latter virtues being the mainstays of scientists and engineers, then the madness of envisioning the world as composed entirely of objects, having no purpose or intelligent design or any prospect for divine rescue from annihilation, is of course postponed. After all, the mad scientist doesn’t merely pursue evil schemes of world domination, but is driven to them by a mental break from traditions of morality and religion, of family and community which are the bedrocks of sanity for the anthropocentric masses. In turn, those traditions are subjective articles of faith and value, and so the act of leaving them behind is no mere mathematical calculation, but a comparable leap of faith, albeit one into an inhumanway of life. Indeed, neither the “sanity” of anthropocentric ignorance nor the insanity of cosmicist awe is a matter of strict rationality. No one provesthat humans are central to all beings or that the contrary scenario is dire for our social conventions: logic and observation take us only so far, but they don’t justify our ideals, goals, or stubborn convictions. Thus, the faith-based insistence that the philosophical or religious search for meaning doesn’t matter because it’s not scientific is an attempt to preserve the scientist’s or the engineer’s normality, despite that individual’s having no recourse to happy anthropocentrism or to world-weary nihilism. The scientismist can’t be content with the former because she knows too much about nature, and she can’t fall into existential depression because that would be bad for business. So she maintains the conventional happiness she shares with the unknowing folk, even while she employs and often prizes the objective outlook, and she does this under the cover of some halfway house of denial.

Interestingly, while the embarrassment of common anthropocentric conceits is foreshadowed by the crazed self-centeredness of children, the limit case of inhuman objectivity is the subcriminal psychopath’s amorality, which is stereotyped by the mad scientist. Children best display the arrogance of presuming that we’re each a crown jewel of natural creation. Likewise, the predators who usually dominate our social systems, owing to the latters’ tendency to become corrupt, are the quintessential outsiders burned by their embrace of the antihumanist’s objective worldview. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that the rules that bind society are arbitrary and anomalous compared to nature’s evident impersonality, and you don’t have to understand the mathematical formulas that zombify our endeavours to feel alienated from the herds of frail, childish lemmings that need mental crutches to feel happy. To be sure, the psychopath is a monumental egotist, but his selfishness isn’t based on a conviction that the world cares whether he lives or dies; instead, it’s a reaction against knowing that the world is fundamentally a cold and indifferent place. The psychopath doesn’t care about society, because he embodies nature’s indifference; thus, all that remains to drive his activities is the genetic preoccupation with his individual survival. This amoral avatar of nature’s heartlessness doesn’t feel that he deserves to rule the world, because he has no feelings to take the leap of faith that could generate that or any other value judgment. Whereas children haven’t yet developed powers of reasoning and thus can only feel their unparalleled worth, the supervillains who manage our most powerful institutions have only the capacity for objective calculations, and so their amorality symbolizes nature’s cold-blooded regularity. The genius who’s forced into madness, who makes a Faustian bargain for knowledge and pays for that curiosity with a soul-destroying vision, takes a tragic route to an antisocial endpoint. But that endpoint is found also by the psychopath who reaches that plateau from another direction: the scientist only learns about nature’s inhumanity, while the psychopath lives it.   

What, though, do we see with objectivity? What does the world look like when we understand we’re not integral to its development? Of course, the details of scientific theories supply the full answer. But for an analogy, recall your days in school as a teenager, when the boundaries between cliques and castes were stark. Were you one of the popular kids who participated in extracurricular school activities, who had many rich, healthy, physically attractive friends, who did well enough in schoolwork to gain the status and knowledge for a successful career, but not so well that you were ostracized as a nerd? Or were you one of the freaks? Were you an unpopular outsider who resented being picked last in sports or in dating and who rebelled against the whole social order for teens, by ridiculing the unfairness and superficiality of that order’s recipe for success? Were you so obsessed with learning, that puberty passed you by like a silly, irrelevant ad on TV? The popular kids never feel alienated because their identities and deeds delimit the holy ground that’s untouchable by the flawed lower classes. You can’t feel like an insider if no matter what you do, most everyone else wishes they could have done it, because you incarnate the community’s ideal. The popular kids are inescapably insiders because they can’t step outside themselves and everyone else wants to be them. By contrast, short of some miraculous transformation, the outsiders can’t be cool because they can only long to be perfect.

But weirdos and losers have an inside track on understanding the objective status of the human adventure. If you can recall sitting at home while the popular kids enjoyed the prom, if you lusted after one of the beautiful people whom you could no sooner touch than you could survive an impact with an ethereal angel, or if you longed to have the privileged life of one of the cool kids, congratulations! You have an affinity for knowing what it’s like to be outside the world’s orbit. Like the noble deeds of our high schools’ upper echelons, the universe proceeds with its phases and amplifications, with its complexifications and peregrinations which happen regardless of our lack of consent or our absence. Like the voyeuristic outsider who steals glances at the revered little aristocrats as they stroll down the hallways, we can peer into nature’s depths to glimpse a fraction of what’s been happening long before our emergence and of what will continue to transpire for unimaginable ages after we’ve fizzled out of existence. We’re all freaks as far as nature is concerned. To understand that objectivity is the root of cosmic horror is to realize that our show isn’t the whole of the universal one, and that what we do—whether in our public or our private lives—doesn’t even adequately represent what nature does at large. All our striving to learn and progress, to live well and to pass on our knowledge to the next generation amounts to a side show that’s far removed from the drama unfolding on the main stage. We have to read the tea leaves of images transmitted by telescopes to discern the barest outline of the incomprehensible complexity of what’s occurring on trillions of other, preposterously distant worlds. And we can detect only the remotest aftereffects of what’s happening in fundamental reality, such as what may be the vibrations of one-dimensional strings that give rise to particles, but that are much smaller than a person compared to a person’s size in relation to a galaxy. (If a person occupies the 10⁰ meter order of magnitude, the Milky Way is 10²¹ meters, while the subatomic length shrinks to 10^-35meters.)

“So what?” you might be thinking. “We have our stage and the rest of the universe has its colossal platform. So be it!” But the abyss between insiders and outsiders does negatively impact the latter. In the case of teenagers, the issue is largely that the losers are jealous of the winners, because some teens are better than others according to conventional standards. By contrast, the cosmic show isn’t exactly better than the human one, although we could compare them by saying, for example, that natural forces are much more creative and destructive than are living things. However, that sort of normative judgment has no place in the objective conception of our place in the world. Objectively, what we have is a vast difference in scale between the intergalactic course of events and the blip that will be coextensive with all of human history. Being on the vanishingly smaller side of that value-neutral comparison, we’re still positioned as voyeuristic freaks in relation to the universe. And if we set aside their understandable jealousy, the teenaged underclass still can offer us insight into the horror at the end of objectivity. The unpopular kids are often so much worse than the popular ones that their difference becomes a division between types rather than just degrees. The two classes are alienated from each other, since they live in different worlds. What would it have been like to make out with the prettiest girl or the hottest boy in school? The shunned losers can only dream of it, but the contents of those dreams will be pitifully irrelevant, deriving as they do from Hollywood fables. Unless they somehow switch their social status, losers can’t know what it’s like to live as a winner. They can watch John Hughes films and other romantic comedies, but those scenes are obviously staged. The loser can’t know what it’s like really to be desired by a god or goddess, for example, because the gods and goddesses cavort on Mount Olympus which is inaccessible to mere mortals.

That difference in worlds which is bridged mainly by the negative estimation that you’ll likely be on only one or the other side calls into question everything that’s dear to you if you find yourself to be a disadvantaged nobody in school rather than a cool kid with an edge in life. Next to the rich, beautiful, popular teens, the opposite ones are nonentities. Thus, they’re mocked and bullied so that they learn their position at the bottom of the pecking order. While the teachers spout feel-good lessons of equality, merely by mouthing empty words, the children learn through much more memorable experiences that winners are unequalto losers. The unpopular kids know they’re conventionally inferior, but they sense also that their inferiority is absolute and that to persist in the shadow of the greater beings they must distract themselves with pathetic fantasies. Jealousy is only the beginning of an existential dread of having gods and goddesses in your sight to confirm your metaphysical lowliness. Likewise, we know the universe is so much larger than our world that it’s no longer even meaningful to aver that we occupy a central or a pivotal role in nature. There’s so much else that’s out there, that our smallness becomes a constant embarrassment because we tend to cope with our objective status by telling tall tales such as the panoply of anthropocentric myths. Just as the unpopular kids have movies that caricature the higher realm, and just as they take voyeuristic glances to taunt them with evidence of their insignificance, we generally have the capacity for objective, impersonal reflection on the fact that our world is as though it were nothing. Our ability to objectify doesn’t make us adequate to the universe, doesn’t make us less puny. Instead, our science is like the spycam installed in a lady’s toilet or in a hotel room by some dejected pervert caught in a downward spiral of self-loathing: instead of exciting him in some sustainable fashion, the illicit images—like all pornographic navel-gazing—further establish his worthlessness. The more you’re reduced to spying on others as they enjoy what you crave, the more you must wonder whether that practice demeans you even more than the act of having sex for money demeans the porn stars. With our understanding, then, that the world is fundamentally physical and impersonal, we learn just enough to appreciate that we too are inherently vain, gullible, feeble creatures, and we begin to question the wisdom of our rational enlightenment.

Coda for Aristocrats

For the illustrious alphas who may be reading this and who grew up as privileged, esteemed kids in school, I should qualify my remarks on the analogy between the teenager’s dominance hierarchy and the abyss between nature and the alienated rational observer. While the popular kids are indeed typically superior in various ways to the uncool ones, those advantages are short-lived or fraught with peril. Privileged teens become spoiled and weak, and power over others degrades the dominator (as well as the dominated). So we should expect the inner life of a full-fledged aristocrat to be as vacuous as a stone’s. The rich kid’s upbringing in elite institutions won’t refine her feelings or deepen her character so much as it will establish a sophisticated façade to cover for the psychopathy which accompanies her rise to power. We idolize the power elites even when they have the coarseness of a wild animal, as in the case of Donald Trump. We might as well anthropomorphize the moon. 

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