In the course of the series, I started with a discussion of the pathological styles such as OCD, paranoia, hysteria, and impulsiveness and then related them to society. I then discussed barriers to immediate solutions, which transitioned into an extended examination of the concept of balance. With this post and the next I intend to tie all of these themes together and propose what might not necessarily be a definite solution, but an array of possible actions to ameliorate things.
How to account for the daily effects of social pathology on a mechanical level? First, I think we have to consider the widening discrepancies between our ideological systems and observable reality. For centuries, we've been operating off of both an Enlightenment-era social contract in which everyone is guaranteed equal rights and basic human dignity, and the idea that we can master the world with our rational and productive faculties.
What is in fact happening is that as the business class pulls away in power, and we see the emergence of a global oligarchy which essentially carries out a majority of our collective decisions, whole swathes of the global population are losing the ability to participate in their societies or even maintain a basic dignity, as the raison de etre of an oligarchy is to expand and accumulate wealth, at the expense of everyone else. What also happens in this case is that real social inequalities result in these neofeudal arrangements in which majorities are subject to the economic whims of a powerful aristocracy, and individual life experiences in the modern world drift far past the Enlightenment ideological underpinnings which have manged to keep modern societies stable for so long.
And the thing about humans is that everyone runs on at least some sort of elementary ideological system, and we can handle shocks here and there, but as a system diverges too far from reality, you start to get psychological effects that gradually become more severe. Combine that with the accumulative effects of trauma, both individual and collective, and you start to get the mass development of serious pathologies, which take their shape in accordance with the individual's personality. It is possible all of this is being intensified by various electromagnetic and biochemical disturbances as well. For example, one of the most plentiful pesticides in current usage, which is regularly found in drinking water and our own tissue, contains components which function as endocrine disruptors, which have myriad documented effects on development, health, mental states, etc.
Another phenomenon to consider, which has dramatic effects on the mechanical level, is the double bind, which was first described by Gregory Bateson during the course of his study of schizophrenia. The presence of the double bind betrays growing gaps between ideology and human/emotional economy. Logically, the double bind functions as a contradiction, but indicates a divergence of overlapping systems, in which emotive indications in body language and speech intonation (among numerous things) diverge from actual stated speech. Or a given speech act or direction directly contradicts a set of surrounding circumstances.
A double bind could be thought of as a point in which the emotional/political reality of a given set of relations has diverged from the stated symbolic reality that seeks to make bare reality a little more palatable. Everyone desires numerous ends all of the time, which upon being made understandable to everyone, could very well make living unbearable, so that our rational systems construct stories and abstract codes which allow us to manage our conflicting desires. But when these rational constructs can no longer hold due to political and emotive pressures...
It was theorized by Bateson and his colleagues that it was the presence of multiple sustained double binds that accounted for the development of more severe psychological pathologies like schizophrenia. The preponderance of double binds means the breakdown in one's ability to consistently read social cues and communications. One catches on double binds all one's life. It is no wonder one enters a state of perpetual anxiety.
And of course, this pathology builds a structure of its own that takes on new life, which seeks to sustain itself in contexts far outside its origin. The production of pathology is itself a production of new life: pathological life seeks to grow and subsist as a living system.
So! One's personality and make-up breaks in a certain direction. If a people are crushed under forces of domination, pathology is simply what you get, as a bi-product of this compression. Pathology seems to mount from increasing emotional instabilities which are not conducive to daily living within the conventional architecture of a living system. Pathology is the state of being for an individual that is failing to be absorbed into a social system, an overarching community, or who is at least fitted into an artificial social arrangement by force, for the purposes of extracting that person's energy.
Why do we say this? We tend to only say someone's behavior is pathological when they seek help, or profess that they are unhappy, a sentiment that is almost always manifested in social relations. At the extreme end of this qualification, a person could be said to be pathological if they are attacking or even destroying surrounding social relations and structures. A person's pathological style is pathological in the sense that their mode of neurological functioning begins to work against their daily social interactions; their mode of functioning frustrates their desires and ends, or the desires and ends of others.
But we should also qualify this term "pathological." It is important to remember that "pathology" itself is a relative term. Something is pathological in relation to what? A part is pathological in relation to what whole? A disease is a pathological agent as far as a living organism is concerned, but you can bet that that virus or bacteria instigating the disease is having a blast.
In the same way, the powerful, the guardians of convention, and all of their sympathizers regard these growing masses of the mentally ill as "pathological." And in a sense it is true, as far as the capitalist system is concerned. But just as well, for the "pathological" it seems that this society they are a part of is itself the problem, the disease, and herein lies a deeper truth.
The sense I've been using the term "pathological" thus far is taken from a position of power: to be pathological in the sense that you no longer fit into a given social system is a questionable proposition if that social system itself could be construed to be pathological. And to further complicate things, to be pathological in one way could be revolutionary in another - perhaps you fail to fit into a traditional paradigm, but your creative tendencies could benefit a wholly new one. Another type of pathology is reactionary and destructive in other contexts: to be a purveyor of violence, deceit, and aggression is harmful to any would-be alternate society, at least if that society plans on being peaceful and functional. And so a pathological system produces both creative and destructive pathological individuals through its operation.
You can imagine that in a fairly neutral setting, what the average human being is looking for, besides subsisting on the land, is relating to his or her fellows, living among community, living autonomously, yet connected to and appreciated by peers, which is all the result of our nature as political animals. That is until you introduce power: concentrated power, deficits in power, and the spectacular violence and instability that is a result of this.
It would be lovely if we could call the concentration of power an anomalous event, but really as far as human history is concerned, it has been the normal progression of our affairs. Because really, human beings have been a smashing success, and there is nothing as self-destructive as total success; any great military theorist will tell you this, or for that matter, any chronicler of the rise and fall of civilizations. And one bi-product to this success, due to the fact that we have no natural predators or mitigating environmental pressures, is the mass concentration of power that we began to see with the first agricultural societies.
There is a disturbing school of thought rising that makes this case with astonishing force, and really I can't find fault with it so far. But as even the reluctant purveyors of this school suggest, it isn't time to throw in the towel until that is the only possible outcome.
We are left with a seemingly intractable problem: that the concentration of power and the destruction it encourages produces further concentrations of power, in the attempt to acquire stability, which from the perspective of the powerless is madness, for the concentration of power - in the quest for system-wide stability - is itself a producer of instability. Given oncoming hard resource limits and anthropogenic climate change, it is in the interest of every human society (and most currently-existing animal and plant species) that this cycle is broken.
And so what could mitigate this coming catastrophe, and produce means of development which could alter this destructive course?
