Gaslit By A Madman: On Philosophy, Madness, & Society (13 Sample Aphorisms From The Longer Work)

Gaslit By A Madman:

The Certifiably TRUE Ravings Of A Sectioned Philosopher

“Mental health is primarily a philosophical issue.

So many people have to choose reality in opposition to society, or society in opposition to reality, and the tension can be unbearable.

When the world is mad, being sane is dangerous.”

— Stefan Molyneux

“Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I’m a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I use: I try to figure out what’s at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that’s not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse.”

— Michel Foucault

“Madness, as I conceive it, means most of all the ultimate dissolution of boundaries. Of all boundaries hitherto, and perhaps all boundaries as such. To me, that is what our age, and spiritual transformation and health as such, is about. The dissolution of old boundaries and the erection of new ones over‘God’s tomb’. But, contra Nietzsche, God is NOT dead: He is merely ‘over-coming himself’. He is becoming Over-God!” – The Author

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin — more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Life is suffering
Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated
Truth is the handmaiden of love
Dialogue is the pathway to truth
Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn 
To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small
So speech must be untrammeled
So that dialogue can take place
So that we can all humbly learn
So that truth can serve love
So that suffering can be ameliorated
So that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God”

― Jordan B. Peterson

“They tortured me. You can’t imagine the agony they all put me through. If you or I did it to someone, it’d be called kidnap and forced poisoning producing a condition known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When they do it, its called ‘medicine’.

“You bet I question the mainstream narratives. After what mainstream medicine put me through. You have no idea even the courage it takes to stand up and say this. Even if you don’t agree with me, if you believed in freedom of speech, the most basic right of any civilized society, you would be saluting me for being willing to say it. After I’ve been locked up, drugged to oblivion and had my name slandered simply for behaving differently and holding unorthodox beliefs. Einstein was unorthodox once. Believe me, our time is coming. After all the problems you’ve been storing up for this world, its not gonna last much longer. Soon its all gonna come tumbling down, and when it does, its us crazies who are gonna take over. Not me personally, you’ll probably have me drugged up into a coma by then, or my brains fried the old-fashioned way. But the crazies in high places are gonna crawl out of the woodwork, where they’ve been hiding for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and then you’re gonna wish you had treated us little Jesus eggs with a bit more decency. Maybe we could have saved you. Because then the real King lizard is gonna break out of his egg and make an omelet out of the rest of you!” — The Author

“…— while it is constantly suggested to us today that, instead of his grain of salt, a grain of spice of madness is joined to genius, all earlier people found it much more likely that wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom — something ‘divine’, as one whispered to oneself. Or rather: as one said aloud forcefully enough. ‘It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece’, Plato said, in concert with all ancient mankind. Let us go a step further: all superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind or morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad —- and this indeed applies to innovators in every domain and not only in the domain of priestly and political dogma:—- even the innovator of poetical metre had to establish his credentials by madness. (A certain convention that they were mad continued to adhere to poets even into much gentler ages., a convention of which Solon, for example, availed himself when he incited the Athenians to reconquer Salamis. — ‘How can one make oneself mad when one is not mad and does not dare to appear so?’ —- almost all the significant men of ancient civilization have pursued this train of thought; a secret teaching of artifices and dietetic hints was propagated on this subject, together with the feeling that such reflections and purposes were innocent, indeed holy. The recipes for becoming a medicine-man among the Indians, a saint among the Christians of the Middle Ages, an angekok among Greenlanders, a pajee among Brazilions are essentially the same: senseless fasting, perpetual sexual abstinence, going into the desert or ascending a mountain or a pillar, or ‘sitting in an aged willow tree which looks upon a lake’ and thinking nothing at all except what might bring on an ecstacy and mental disorder…”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, “Daybreak: Thoughts Of The Prejudices Of Morality”,
14 “Significance of madness in the history of morality.”

Introduction

The work you see before you is based upon years of experience on the receiving end of so-called ‘Mental Health’ treatment. It consists in a kind of scatter-shot (label someone ‘mad’, and do NOT then expert perfect intelligibility and easy coherence… although most of what I say IS highly coherent, well supported by evidence and well thought-through – it just isn’t presented in a typical essay or scholarly format. But if this worked for Nietzshce and many others, who are you to knock it?) deconstruction of the current paradigm, better viewed, as I argue, as a type of iatrogenic drug-pushing, including an attempt at a ‘trans valuation of values’, to borrow the Nietzschean term, that seeks to re-rehabilitate and provide a positive interpretation of notions of madness, irrationality and general life problems and crises which are currently lumped under the ever more imperialistic, oppressive, nauseating and demeaning title of ‘mental illness’ — as if the human soul, and all that has ever been studied of it, were but a minor and rather tasteless side branch and speciality of bodily medicine, like its juvenile-delinquent little nephew. While it is now quite popular to talk of ‘fighting the stigma around mental illness’, the fact remains that this stigma is caused primarily by the so-called ‘experts’ themselves, who resort to such queasy metaphors in the first place, among far graver ploys, and thereby either instinctively or consciously seek to diminish the dignity and beauty, the poetry of Man’s great story, his search for his own true self and his troubled voyages beneath the twinkling stars. It may seem that I have gone too far in the opposite direction, but to those who say this, I respond that every action requires an equal and opposite reaction. I am one who has been trampled on and defamed to the most burning pits of Hell by this so-called ‘Science’; is it any wonder I rail against it? As the German 19th century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel espoused, all Truth comes about through a process of the dialectical interplay of opposites. Truly, if there is one thing I’m not, its a dupe for circumscribed, ‘polite’ prohibitions of speech. It is only by exploring the limits of what can be said on the side of this much maligned visitor – of madness – that we may yet come to a true and balanced view of the issue. For the Truth here is so revolutionary that it cannot be restricted to tentative quotidian, painfully well-mannered, ‘sociable’ phrases, which aim to avoid ruffling any feathers. On the contrary, as I see it, the goose here needs to be thoroughly plucked and roasted so that we can finally enjoy the golden eggs she’s been hiding all these years…

Finally, it is important to emphasize that although this work only apparently (if that) skirts on other, wider political issues), it is in fact not only a work of personal & collective therapy, but a comprehensive work of political science for today of a very high philosophical and spiritual depth and mastery, shedding great light on the most fundamental issue of our times that suffuses and saturates all other, extremely dire social, political and existential emergencies; in effect, laying bear the situation at which our almost entire “collective unconscious” is at today. Every word in it is laced with precisely the optimum admixture of venom and panacea. I hope to follow it up with an even more comprehensive, thorough & nuanced work in about 4 years time, if I am still living and not yet too disabled by the oh-so-“caring” ministrations of the incredibly kind nurses, or “wards of State”.

“Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself – as though that were so necessary – that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar….
” — Fydor Dostoyevsky

Introduction, Part II

Monologue With A Madman

Part I:

“Are you feeling O.K.?”

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I have a ‘fixed false belief’”

“That means you’re crazy!”

“Are you sure?”

“Not at all, its what my Dr. said”

“Well, if he says it, it must be true!”

“Indeed.”

Part II:

“So, you learned to trust your Dr. then, did you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.”

“So you don’t go believing your own silly opinions any more.”

“Absolutely, they’re all rubbish. Especially the ones I’m most convinced about.”

“Hmm. Interesting. If all your opinions are rubbish, how do you know that your opinion that they’re rubbish isn’t also rubbish?”

“I trust my Dr.”

“But then your opinion that he is trustworthy must also be rubbish, or at any rate equally unreliable.”

“True. It seems if I can’t trust myself, I can hardly trust my trust in my Dr. either. That one isn’t even in line my own senses, (especially when he’s sending a thousand volts through my poor cranium!)”

“Well, what with all the peculiar, cold, clinical, painful, invasive, non-consensual things he does to you then, that must be bloody terrifying.”

“Quite.”

Part III

“So, you’re sure you’re fine?

“Yes. My memory is still addled from the last treatment.”

“That doesn’t sound so good.”

“Well, it means that I don’t complain so much, so I won’t get shocked again so soon. So it makes me happy.”

“Ah yes. That always puts a silly smile on your face.”

“You’re right.”

“Pity about the brain damage though. Is that why you’re talking to yourself?”

“Perhaps.”

“Yes, because now you lack inner retention. Am I right?”

“Sorry, I’ve forgotten what you just said.”

“I said its because you lack inner retention. You can’t build on your own ideas within your own mind, and need to express them immediately or else they just vanish. But because of your tormented experiences, no one else can relate to what the Hell you’re on about, and they’ve all abandoned you, so you’re left chattering away to yourself like an old loon in ‘The Bin’. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, actually that’s right.”

“Sorry, what is?”

Part IV

“So, you’re not doing too well then after all, if I remember correctly. You’re plagued by utter self-doubt, yet full of delusional conviction at the same time, and the only person you ‘trust’ is electrically and chemically raping and torturing you so badly that you’ve become a gibbering idiot, who is afraid to admit it lest he receive further unwanted ‘medical attention’.”

“You say it better than I could. I can never think of what to say when people ask me about that on the spot. I just see… flashes.”

“Flashes?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm. O.K.”

“So basically you’re extremely scared of your Dr., but so afraid your afraid even to say it; nay, you’re so afraid that you’re afraid to even admit your fear to yourself, or outwardly express your normal distress signals. Instead they appear in ‘flashes’ inside your own head.”

“No that’s not true.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“But you admit you’re delusional.”

“Yes.”

“So perhaps you really are afraid.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“Please don’t harm me.”

“Do you feel that expressing your fear will be interpreted as an act of aggression?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Well, that is an act of aggression just saying so. What a hypocrite.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh you’re going to be sorry.”

“Whoever sayeth ‘thou fool’ shall be in danger of Hellfire” Matthew 5:22, King James Bible

1) Ruined yet rational. What knowledge do I wish to impart? ‘Why don’t you just spit it out?’ I hear you cry. Spit myself out. Such is the rush with which all confessions are pushed nowadays. Well, I know how it is, so here you go: I want to yell that MY MIND IS RUINED.
Got that? Obviously not. For I want to convey what cannot be conveyed. I want to portray the sweep, the grandeur of my loss when it is precisely the brain, the organ of communication, that is the victim here – or culprit. Any appeals to former prowess could easily and quite naturally be dismissed as but vain imaginings of a diseased mind. Worse still, any verbal virtue or insight that I am still able, (and must necessarily to some extent display in order to attract a wanted audience) defeats my thus stated aim.
On the other hand, if I don’t do something to impress, why value my judgement at all? Is it enough that I’m human, to set stall in my own witness of my own mental life? Apparently not…
I can but attempt a surface of sanity, of a sober and perspicacious intellect, that may give some reason for similarly prudent persons to pause and entertain for a moment the dilapidated, decimated condition I am attempting to purvey. For there is a difference between sanity and sobriety on the one hand, and real flair and genius, or joyful serenity and eudaimonia, on the other.

2) Breaking our resistance. So: they have drugs for everything nowadays. They won’t actually do you any good, but they’ll sure as hell give them to you. From the burgeoning blitz of energy that makes you refuse to sit down in class, to that final spasm of veracity that makes you gaze back all day with rose-tinted glasses, unable to say a word to the callous, bone-stripping present. Whole peoples’ experiences and deep personal striving towards the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, written off in a few jazzy letters: ‘ADHD’; ‘Senile Dementia’. So it goes. You take your pills, and you lose. Gradually at first, but: more and more, you lose yourself. Your ability to control your own emotion states, to nurture and care for that little blue flame of the Self as you see fit. Soon, you just give up trying; just go with the flow: ‘Resistance is futile’! But once you lose your capacity to resist, you lose your capacity for everything. You lose your capacity to be who you are, to delineate between that and merely who you are expected to be. You become adrift in an endless ocean of despair which dare not even speak its own name.

3) Begun to doubt. As I reached my latter teens, I had begun to question, to doubt. I was a Cartesian monstrosity, a veritable solipsist, nihilist, and anything else you wouldn’t want to meet in either a bookshop or blind alley. I was all spleen and no heart, and my black bile ran deep. So many years… So many wasted years. Years when I was being such a good boy, and for my reward? Left to sigh, left to cry. So much potential, locked away by ‘average everydayness’, by the ‘They’. Oh, everybody is obsessed with themselves, especially the adults; they have their own issues. Repressions and avoidances, which have become second nature, plus regrets which a bright young sprout like me only begets. They can’t put themselves in the mind of an intelligent adolescent. Confront them on their negligence and they’ll turn phosphorescent. They’ll grow as pale and paralysed as the moon, if you dare in epiphany to swoon. Everything must remain under control, sanitized, predictable, the same as it always has been. They say we’re becoming less traditional; but the less parents have to pass on, the more frantically they cling to the status quo. I had such untapped energy, and nowhere to row.

4) Cogito Ergo Amens. I think, therefore I’m mad.

Or at least I’ll be called it.

5) Seriousness.

“The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact, or consists in the fact, that modern western man no longer knows what he wants – that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong. Until a few generations ago, it was generally taken fro granted that man can know what is right and wrong, what is the just or the good or the best order of society – in a word that political philosophy is possible and necessary. In our time this faith has lost its power… Above all, as is generally admitted, modern culture is emphatically rationalistic, believing in the power of reason; surely if such a culture loses its faith in reason’s ability to validate its highest aims, it is in a crisis” Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves Of Modernity”

“I contend that Weber’s thesis (basis of modern social science) necessarily leads to nihilism or the view that every preference, however evil, base or insane, has to be judged before the tribunal of reason to be as legitimate as any other preference.” (brackets and italics added) Leo Strauss, “Natural Right And History”

“The problem of philosophy is that the paradoxes of nihilism may constitute the most universal condition or “highest principle” that rational thought has “progressed”. At the very pinnacle of rational Western thought lays the proposition that life is meaningless. Is this the most comprehensive insight that human reason is capable? Is this the fundamental conclusion that every experience, all knowledge, and every moment of living existence must come to terms with?”, Mitchell Heismann, “Suicide Note”.

A serious assimilation of contemporary thought conducts one precisely towards madness… Or as they say in Wales, where I’m from, ‘this is is driving me darn sheepbat-crazy!’ —

6) Work On The Self. If one has any intelligence, one soon realizes its not the things ‘out there’ that make one happy. Did I even want ‘happiness’? I’d say I had an intuition of, an unwillingness to reconcile myself to anything but something ‘beyond’ ordinary happiness, something that is difficult to define, but that is best summed up as a childish sense that one’s moral behaviour has a kind of infinite worth, (in Freudian terms, a kind of recollection of being in the womb) linked to the largely unconscious sense that some day in future, one will be rewarded and all one’s upstanding abstinences and obedience will be worth it, but in a way that can, perhaps by definition, never be fully realized. When one begins to see the relative or even totally illusory nature of one’s own ‘worth’, the lack of any ‘absolute’ good or evil in things themselves, or what that would even mean, when one begins to ask such ‘ultimate’ questions, the fragile construct of docile and contented herd conformity begins to collapse. At best, one suddenly begins to feel one’s own separate existence for the first time, the imperious demands of one’s own flashing mortality. More often, one merely languishes in almost total rudderlessness…. until the day when one’s thought turns its dug-out ditch rising up from most dismal nadir, and learns the hard lesson that not to will, not to will one’s own modest allocation of joy and delight on this earth, of happiness, however precarious and paltry, how tentative in view of once amniotic wholeness one unconsciously recollects, or the intimidating awesomeness of the ‘God’ who one inevitably envies and wishes to become, however humiliating all this is, not to assert and defend oneself in this precarious world is to throw away one’s only precious pearls with the swine all about us, and to court the abject degradations, all the sheer misery and inevitable Holocaust of a cold, pitiless Universe. And when one realizes all these things, and begins to really will for the first time, in view of this abyss and dearth of objective meaning, one’s inner resources finally manifest themselves in an avatar of delirious freedom. Truly, it is not things ‘out there’ that make one happy, but the free flow of the will that comes through a patient, diligent carrying of oneself through the abyss of fear and uncertainty and commitment to faith and hope spurred on and catalysed into eventual pregnancy then re-birth by the unremitting terror of a premature and abject demise. With this free flow, the commitment to work on the self becomes ever stronger, and material objects and worldly status are recognized for the distractions and fraudulent decoys that they are. Finally again returns an increasingly pervasive echo of this lost amniotic wholeness and fullness of Being one was originally seeking seemingly in vain.

Meaningful analogy. A physician who treats bones is called an osteopath, a physician who treats with herbs is called a homeopath, so a physician who treats the mind is called? That’s right kids, its a ‘psychopath’! * Well done!

*With due apologizes to practitioners of the ‘talking cure’.

7) Reasons for madness. 1) Parental neglect, dysfunction or abuse. 2) Existential, cultural and intellectual nihilism 3) The education system 4) The destruction of the environment 5) The Psychiatric system itself 6) Religion 7) The State 8) Political Correctness 9) War in the Middle East 10) Nuclear proliferation 11) Food surpluses and starvation In Africa 12) Consumerism 13) Relativism 14) Decay and wilful destruction of tradition, organic community, and the nation state 15) Gender uncertainty 16) Diet 17) Lack of exercise and unhealthy lifestyles 18) Bullying and peer pressure 19) The ‘daycare generation’ 20) Political apathy and alienation 21) Erosion of Civil Liberties 22) Stressed out, over-taxed workforce 23) Lack of opportunity and inspiring role-models 24) The unobtainable allure of Hollywood 25) The shallowness and trivia of celebrity culture and general everyday interactions 26) Islamic terrorism 27) Extreme right and left-wing indigenous terrorism 28) Wholesale and rapid demographic shift 29) Aging population 30) The economic crash 31) The Banker Bail-out 32) The corrupt, debt-based financial and economic system 33) Cronyism 34) The imminent rise of robots and A.I. 35) Widespread and growing surveillance 36) Marital breakdown 37) Single mothers 38) Uncertainty and conflict in relations between the sexes 39) Chemicals in food and water 40) G.M.O 41) The prospect of human cloning and genetic engineering of human beings 42) Mass social changes 43) Growing racial, religious and ethnic tensions 44) Child violence and sexual abuse 45) Systematic child victimization by the muslim arab community 46) Infant genital Mutilationm AKA ‘circumcision’, both male and female 47) School Massacres 48) Being lied to 49) Climate Change 50) Exhaustion of natural fuel and other resources 51) Worrying, anti-human secret projects and services 52) Animal and human scientific experimentation 53) Over use of cosmetics 54) The war on drugs 55) Over reliance on prescription drugs 56) Hospital mal-practice and excessive waiting times 57) Tedious and pestering sales calls 58) Government over-regulation of the employment sector and once ordinary, everyday activities 59) The criminalization of the sex trade 60) Disinformation, conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’ 61) Highly agenda-driven media coverage 62) Welfarism 63) Welfare checks 64) Tedious, machine-like jobs 65) Unemployment 66) Absence of worldly wisdom and leisure time preparation 67) The complexity and inter-connectnessness of the world, life in general and modern life in particular 68) The disenchantment of the world 69) Overly abstract, non-person-centred approach to education 69) Lingering poverty and growing inequality in the West and throughout the world, both economically and in terms of power distribution 70) The corporation 71) Historical grievances 72) Unrecognised, largely unconscious grievances and conflicts 73) Continuing sexual guilt and confusion, exacerbated by a superficial and hypocritical licentiousness 74) Lack of mainstream information and guidance about vitamin intake, together with prohibitive cost compared to free prescription, highly artificial chemical drugs 75) Commercialization of the prison system 76) No-go areas in major cities 77) Widespread homosexual rape in our prisons 78) Exploitation of loopholes in tax and other legal requirements by the super-wealthy 79) The hollowing out of the middle class 80) Different rules for politicians and the famous 81) Over-sexual censoriousness towards those in prominent positions 82) The equation of widely divergent severity of crimes under the banner of ‘sex crimes’ 83) Vigilante violence 84) Sexual and other abuse by those in power, i.e. the Catholic church and the medical profession 85) Covered-up iatrogenic conditions 86) Misrepresentation, skewing and biased- selection of data by the Pharmaceutical and other industries 87) Parallel system of justice and detention at the tyrannical whims of doctors 88) Lack of powers and rights over one’s own mind and body, including the Right To Die and forced drugging 89) Returning presence of involuntary euthanasia 90) Sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit’ through psychiatric and other prescription drugs 91) Burgeoning of imprecise, tyrannical laws subject to arbitrary interpretation and selective enforcement 92) ‘Hate speech’ laws 93) Loss of sovereignty 94) Deforestation 95) Air pollution, particularly in China 96) Child labour 97) Loss of confidence in the scientific and medical establishment due to institutional corruption by Big Business 98) The enormous, largely unexplained growth in major, debilitating illnesses, such as cancer, autism, depression and mental illness in general, despite huge investment in these areas 99) The taboo and avoidance of talking about death in Western culture…

(Oh, I give up, there are just far too many to list ! )

All of these things, and undoubtedly many more that I have not mentioned, could be considered a legitimate reason for mad rage, or the birth pangs of a more clear-sighted, radical discontent which are often wrongly construed as the onset of ‘mental illness’, whether it be ‘depression’, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ‘oppositional defiant disorder’, or almost any number of the superficial, distracting labels that mask the true causes of spiritual unease. None of these labels identify a single true cause of distress or problem area, rather, what they do is create a new problem ex nihilo, adding a stigmatic label and license to strip away an individual’s personal rights, a prelude to medicating the poor chap with toxic chemicals that will lastingly impair his or her brain chemistry.

Backwards questions. “People often get basic psychological questions backwards…. Why do people suffer from anxiety? That’s not a mystery. How is that people can ever be calm? There’s the mystery. We’re breakable and mortal. A million things can go wrong, in a million ways. We should be terrified out of our skulls at every second.’”

— Prof. Jordan B. Peterson
8) Secret human experimentation: an ‘excuse note’ for paranoia. MKULTRA, Subproject 69, run by Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, in which patients were given Electro-Convulsive Therapy at 30 times the normal power a long with psycho-active substances; the granting of immunity to Dr. Shiro Ishii, the Japanese scientist who conducted experimentation involving involuntary surgery on 10,000s of people without anaesthetic; Mustard Gas tested on soldiers in the 1940s; release of whooping cough and other pathogens on Tampa Bay, release of millions of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and dengue fever on upon Savannah, GA, and Avon Park, FL; the Guatemalan project whereby prisoners, asylum occupants and soldiers were intentionally infected with STDs such as syphilis; plutonium injections given to patients during the Manhattan Project, by Dr. William Sweet; testing of Agent Orange, the highly toxic chemical dropped on Vietnam not only causing catastrophic skin abnormalities but also atrocious birth defects for generations, on prisoners by Dr. Albert Kligman; Operation Paperclip, whereby Nazis scientists who had done the most ghastly experiments on humans were given American citizenship and employed by the U.S. Government; Dr. Cornelius Rhoads intentional infection of Puerto Ricans with cancer; the Pentagon’s irradiation of non-consenting African American cancer patients in the 60s; Operation Midnight Climax in which unsuspecting brothel punters were given high doses of LSD and other substances; irradiation of civilians in Pacific Territories as a result nuclear tests, and subsequent studies, such as Project, 4.1, on the inter-generational impact; the Tuskegee experiments whereby African-Americans with syphilis were withheld penicillin for decades and their disease progression studied.

“Do no harm”, indeed. This is just what we know about one government, that of the U.S..; this is only what has been uncovered; and many other governments are known to be just as bad, or even worse. Perhaps ‘mad rage’ doesn’t isn’t the answer, after all… when you think of it, its rather a measureless, sobering, and cold-headed terror that is called for. But, certainly, a slight excuse for a poor innocent raised on the Chronicles of Narnia, or to bewail the loss of his football team, or to stick his chest out with pride that his ancestors defeated those ‘evil Nazis’.. for such a one, would not a kinder world indulge his moment of incensed realization? Alas, there is no ‘kinder world’… —

(I cannot strictly verify all this information of course, but I’ve given specific details garnered from fairly ordinary websites, which I doubt are totally made up. Mk-ultra is widely known about, for instance, so you would certainly do well to look these things up before dismissing them, and that project alone testifies to and justifies the general gist of what I’m saying here.)
An icy star.

“Paranoia is a icy star, but a star nonetheless.”

--- Douglas P. 

Already too great a concession. The avoidance of talking about frightening and unsettling things is already a much too great concession to fear, itself a demonstration of REAL, as opposed to merely officially and conventionally identified, mental illness.
9) A tragi-comic interlude:

The patient. The patient is clearly suffering from paranoid ideation, delusions of grandeur, manic episodes, arrested development, attachment disorders, and not to mention a panoply of barely suppressed infantile fixations. And that’s just the good part!

Admission Permission. ‘Care’ in the community, or would you like an admission? You see, we’re so important, we’re so prissy, we’re so proper, to be ahem ‘allowed’ (don’t you dare say ‘kidnapped’!) into our highly-sought-after modern-day-workhouse, you have to get our permission!

Lock him up. Lock him up! Lock him up! Throw him in a cell and throw away the key! We can’t have this man on the loose! What will the children (who we’re drugging half-senseless) think? He must be seen to get his just desserts (although we’re not allowed to actually describe it like this, anyway its more sinister and subtly, psychologically effective if we pass it off as ‘caring concern’.. you see, even little kids in the backs of their little minds break like a twig and pale in horror at that which they know is a much more humiliating, devilish and all-encompassing servitude) ! If you’re locked up as a punishment, that’s one thing, but if you’re going to be locked up for ‘your own good’ too, with no evidence, due process or jury, then, we all know no one is safe. Especially since we’re all sinners against ourselves, nowadays.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” C.S.Lewis

So modern. Oh we’re so modern! We’re so enlightened! Just lie back and we’ll get those electrodes tightened!

Alright, we’ve trashed his cerebral cortex. You can release him now.
Just make sure to give him a life-time prescription of Clozapine. That’ll keep him in ‘recovery’; he’ll be so recovered he’ll be drooling into his pillow every night like our faithful dog for the rest of his pathetic little life!

Friendly psychiatry. Oh we’re busy fighting the stigma, don’t you worry. Its not easy to keep on making hundreds of billions of $ when one step in our office means permanent social death. We want to welcome the world with open arms…! Those old big iron-gated State-asylums are long-gone…though, still no photography in our ‘hospitals’ of course.. we care so much about your privacy that we check on you every 20 minutes all through the night and knock on your shower door if you take more than 5 minutes,,, minions! — *ahem * I mean nurses – spruce up that bedside manner, we’ve got souls to zombify!

‘Sectioned’ by Philip Porter.

“New board game idea for Waddingtons: SECTIONED. The aim of the game is to die as quickly as possible. As you go around the board you collect nonsense diseases and psychiatric drugs. Discharge squares make you go around the board without consequence and you lose a psychiatric drug until you land on a sectioned square. Once you collect 5 drugs and 5 diseases you are sent to the ECT square where upon throwing a 3 you are electrocuted and killed. Coming soon: Virtual Reality Sectioned features all the horror of being on a ward from the comfort of your living room. Ages 8 upwards.”

10) More about this section of the book:

Someone asked me “Are you O.K.? Should we be concerned about you? Are you really mad?”

Answer: Madness is the theme I write about, but its also a part of my aesthetic and stylistic approach. I play with it and embrace it, rather than trying to distance myself from it. I don’t try to be a dry scholarly or disenchanted, mildly jaded therapeutic commentator, but also an entertainer and artistic performer, if anything more in the romantic and renaissance traditions. combined with an ironical post-modern element, than the one of modern psychology. That is a basic reflection of how I think these things ought to be done more often; as I say in my previous post, I feel the ‘personality’ element needs to be put into things more throughout society. The melding of life and art has also been as basic concern of great thinkers like Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and lots of others who I’m heavily influenced by.
I feel it would be a bit hypocritical to defend madness and those deemed ‘mad’ in an impeccably ‘sane’ manner, whereas by going in the opposite direction I feel I make my own writings more authentic and morally courageous. Much of my aim is to question and break down the boundaries between ‘sane’ and ‘insane’, ‘analyst’ and ‘analysand’, which I feel are in many ways highly artificial and thus counter-productive to the real aim of authentic living and healing honesty. in many ways putting the ‘patient’ at an unfair disadvantage as the mere receiver of favors he often didn’t even ask for.
In a society which is severely curtailing emotional and verbal expression, there is a moral imperative to maintain as wide expression as is still possible, to keep pushing at the boundaries before they become narrower and narrower and collapse in on themselves entirely into a rigid little box. I therefore insist upon the right to be responsibly irresponsible. I also feel that an allergy to genuine and deep emotion is part of our general cultural malaise, and that a good reformer and rhetorician uses affects to his full advantage so as to make people really FEEL their existential state and the plight of others, in a way that may well appear ‘mad’, and be frightening to others used to a more ‘sanitized’ and mollycoddled regime. Of course, anyone who attempts to change a society’s values and modes is always liable to be attacked as ‘crazy’ and all other manner of slander, as he or she challenges the established interests of the status quo. By openly embracing the ‘mad’ aesthetic, I also hope to forestall any further accusations of unintentional, real mental illness (which I would argue must always be unintentional, to qualify as a real ailment). It is also an open pressing of this question and debate, by its mere existence.
The off kilter, anarchic approach to writing presentation and possibly quite ‘manic’, at times seemingly hyperbolic or deliberately paradoxical & offensive content and approach also in itself creates what I consider to be an atmosphere more suited to genuine thought, with its bold, even sometimes reckless daring and abandon. This aesthetic and vibe is thus a truly philosophical vibe; an intoxication of wine and berries, loosening the tongue and the constraints of vulgar propriety. It also attempts to re-invigorates with a sense of wonder, fear and trembling, cathartic sorrow, and playful, childish amazement, the perennial companions of a true authentic attitude towards the Universe and scientific quest, which always sees everything anew and as startling, as if from the eyes of a child or idiot, and feels it intensely. The overall attempt (not always successful, granted.. this is only my first prose-oriented book) is to convey a feeling for the great, dizzying PLEASURE of genuine thought itself. This decadent pleasure is in fact the most, perhaps even the only truly moral pleasure. Part of my aim is perhaps to intoxicate with language to prevent and avert the need for a cruder chemical intoxication in myself and others.
There is also a factor whereby I am now in fact in a sense incorrigibly and permanently drunk (though I am also quite teetotal) as a result of the drug-rapery of psychiatric treatment itself, which, as I say, caused me severe, actual and lasting brain/nervous damage, however hard that would be the Dr.s or seemingly almost anybody to admit. I do not pretend that my former faculties are by any means still intact, only that they are still well above par.
In ancient times, as Nietzsche says in the quote earlier in my blog, madness and genius were not merely mildly associated, but practically only madmen could be innovators in the realm of ideas or customs; and wise men would actively pray for and cultivate an aesthetic of madness to be MORE convincing. It is also however in keeping with the true zeitgeist of our times, which in its unprecedented destruction of tradition and race towards possible oblivion, either literal or technological, ‘post-human’, a long with the omnipotence of ‘the Noble Lie’ and dual, subterranean aspect of reality and political and social discourse, as well as the more overt radical divisions and multiple competing, yet passionately held narratives of what constitutes reality and the correct values, is truly an age of strange miracles, terrifying marvels and often outright popular insanity that give the lie to ‘quiet, everyday normality’ better than anything that has ever happened previously throughout history.

So, please don’t be worried about me, (especially as that is the very thing that got me wounded in the first place). If you want to assist me, and really care and aren’t just responding with a reactive fearful desire to contain and suppress what seems strange and unusual to you, just think about my ideas and what I’m trying to communicate here — how it must feel to be labelled ‘mentally ill’ and have your rights taken away, and become an object for others to ‘treat’ against its Will, (especially when he or she is already feeling extremely vulnerable and fragile), for instance — and please try to take them on board a bit more. If you really want to help, buy one of my other books, and help promote and popularize my work and thought further. Then why not write a review on Amazon or Goodreads? Follow me on Twitter (@gaslitbyamadman). And if I am ever subject to unwanted psychiatric or other State-attentions, take an interest in my case and try to defend me from further cruel abuse like I have already sustained due to no prior crime of my own. Any of those things would be most appreciated.

It is, however, natural, and actually part of my schtick and mystique for some people to be kept wondering a little on this question, so I do not resent it. It is all a question of each person’s current level.

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”
— Michel Foucault

11) Etymologically. Etymologically, the word ‘mad’ is the past participle ‘mei-‘, an Old Norse word meaning merely ‘to change’. And even today, it is ‘changes in personality’ that are often considered a form of mental illness. This fills me with such outrage that I can barely speak. The notion that one’s ‘personality’ is a priori complete and any alteration in it must be considered pathological is a sacralization of death itself. For it is only in death that our character and persona become ‘set in stone’. Ordinarily, as one grows up, one’s ‘personality’ is the mere unconscious, unreflective reaction to one’s environment, in no way fully chosen or willed into a beautiful, ideal and mature shape. Ordinarily, we are groomed to be mere slaves of our society and progenitors. To achieve genuine fulfilment, requires what Carl Jung called individuation, a process of deliberate self-creation and realization, i.e. of change from the state we found ourselves to originally be thrown into. Moreover, for someone who is consciously unhappy, change in oneself, or sometimes in one’s environment, is the one absolutely essential requirement, and this pathologization of it is the most stifling and oppressive thing imaginable. To be told you have to ‘remain’ in the fetal, unformed, self-effacing state in which you currently are, truly makes one want to give up the will to live!
It is precisely in this all too sudden, vexed realization of the vanity and folly of one’s previous ideals and presentations to the world, receiving no support from one’s social environment, that produces the manifest rage and anger also associated with this word ‘mad’, that is often so incomprehensible to others. The fact is, though, that kept within proper bounds, i.e. not manifesting any grossly violent behaviours towards others, this is an extremely healthy and natural reaction. There are so many absurdities and contradictions, or even outright abuse, in the way most people are raised, and in the way the world operates as such, that the true pathology, the greatest sickness of all, is simply to go a long with it all un-noticing of its follies. If this is so – which it certainly is – one is forced to ask why is it not recognized by those invested with the care of ‘mental illness’? The only logical answer is that these so-called ‘services’ are, in some respects at least, an intentional ploy to re-inforce the status quo and prevent people from rebelling against and ‘changing’ the gaping flaws, rampant injustices and ecological disasters in the current way in which society is organized, in which so many people have a vested interest.

Two very different meanings. Two very different senses of ‘crazy’ (i.e. ‘mentally ill’):

⦁ Clinically ‘sub-normal’. Either perceived or actual inability to function in society at a minimum level, with basic sense of reality in order to stay safe.

⦁ Harboring far more intellectual, spiritual illusions or delusions, which may come back to bite one or others at a later date, or perhaps impoverish one’s happiness to some (or even a great) extent, but which pose little immediate harmful danger in everyday life. This latter sense applies to many, many people who do not fall under psychiatry’s radar, if not everyone (even though, potentially, it may be just as or even more dangerous. For instance, take a very high-functioning man or woman who nonetheless believes that 95% of his fellow citizens need to be permanently ‘treated’ with highly toxic psychiatric drugs which are proven to shrink the brain. Such a man is a potential menace to his fellows far more than someone who lays in bed all day & counts invisible demons, precisely due to his very lop-sided competence ).

When I say the word. When I say the word ‘madness’, I have visions of the bubbling, molten surface of the sun, ready to explode into the Universe and change EVERYTHING with its almighty yellow light.
11) How medical theories give rise to new ‘epidemics’. “As his (E. Shorter’s) body of research shows, history was full of ever-changing psychosomatic symptoms shaped in large part by the expectations and beliefs of the current medical establishment. ‘As doctors’ own ideas about constitutes “real” disease change from time to time due t theory and practice, the symptoms that patient present will change as well,” he writes. ‘These medical changes give the story of psychosomatic illness its dynamic: the medical “shaping” of symptoms.’
Shorter believes that is was Lasegue’s famous paper and the public interest in the medical debate surrounding the diagnosis of anorexia that forged a kind of template for self-starvation. As the medical establishment settled on the name, the agreed-upon causes and a specific symptom list for the disease, they were, Shorter argues, ‘disseminating a model of how the patient was to behave and the doctor to respond’. What was once a mishmash of conflicting medical theories surrounding self-starvation had no gained the appearance of a precise disorder with a specific at-risk population.
That new conception of this illness took hold not only among women who had already manifested disordered eating but in the population at large. There are no broad epidemiologic studies of eating disorders from the time, but the anecdotal evidence for what happened next is persuasive: soon after the official designation of anorexia nervosa, the incidence of the disease began a dramatic climb. Whereas in the 1850s self-starvation was a rare symptom associated with hysterics, by the end of the century the medical literature was littered with references to full-blown anorexics. As one London doctor reported in 1888, anorexic behavior was ‘a very common occurrence’, of which he had ;abundant opportunities of seeing and treating many interesting cases’. In that same year a young medical student confidently wrote in his doctoral dissertation, ‘among hysterics, nothing is more common than anorexia.’ from “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization Of The Western Mind” by Ethan Watters

The above quote is not surprising for anyone at all familiar with the nature of modern psychiatry. Dr.s generally see what they already expect, making little or no attempt to understand the patient on his own terms in the tiny slot of peremptory, 15 minute appointments (even your average bootlegging, moonshiner makes more attempt to get to know and empathize with his customers — since in his case, his freedom often depends upon it). On the other hand, the well known psychological ‘labelling theory’, together with related concepts, dictates that ppl will very often play up to expectations, and manifest their ‘diseases’ in socially mandated ways (this is never more the case with psychiatrists, who are people who one senses get very annoyed when you don’t conform to their exceptionally narrow expectations, so one easily allows oneself to be bullied into doing so) Once again, this demonstrates irrefutably the social nature of ‘mental illness’, with its innate quality being a form of communication, centered around certain semantic forms of distress related to sub-optimum factors within one’s environment, rather than being primarily, or even in any way, a physiological brain abnormality.
12) Drug rape. Dr. Rufus May remembers with clarity how it felt to be pinned to the floor of a psychiatric hospital, for his trousers and underpants to be pulled down to his ankles by a gang of strangers and to be injected in the buttocks with mind-altering drugs.

‘”It feels like rape” he says, “Its humiliating and degrading. I know of people who have killed themselves rather than be readmitted to hospital, having had such bad experiences of being subjected to or witnessing the use of force.”
It doesn’t just ‘feel like it’, Ladies and Gentlemen. It IS constant rape, constant invasion, violation and destruction — not merely of one’s body, but of one’s innermost sanctum, one’s own mind — over months and years, rather than minutes. Every fucking second their chemicals are in your blood stream you feel like you’re being held down on the floor on your tummy with Satan’s big fat veiny purple dick up your backside, with your forehead smashing against the tiles. Its like the difference between having your city receive an unexpected and rude, over-lavish gift one morning from a ‘madman’ who you suspect to be wielding a knife but doesn’t actually use it to inflict any real harm, or even have one — although the experience is obviously still quite disturbing — or having it blockaded, the population starved to death over bitter months and years and the buildings eventually burnt down by a trained, legion and ruthless, psychotic army. Then in the afterlife, your ghost drooling forever like a dog, YOU are forced to make amends and supplicate, constantly bowing your head to the feelings and opinions of your evil oppressors and slaughterers!
Oh, the shame…
13) Mental Illness is Real. One thing I would like to point out to people on the mad activist wing is that just because the people invested with the authority to officially stamp one as ‘crazy’ are themselves stupid, evil or literally insane, doesn’t mean there is no such thing as being genuinely ‘mentally unwell’.
The notion of a mental malediction has been in our vocabulary long before the advent of psychiatry, even Plato uses the idea. It connotes originally and primarily simply some REAL derangement of the mind or bad assortment of ideas/character leading to REAL unhappiness. That is totally different from all the numerous modern ‘diagnoses’ which are nearly all relative to social norms or averages (almost none of which I support) rather than REAL happiness and virtue
In my own writing I tend to try to celebrate these divergences from the ‘norm’, as well as generally pointing out the adverse effects of psychiatric practice. The fact that I use the word ‘madness’ is neither here nor there. It mustn’t be taken as accepting the way others use it. To my mind, society as a whole is certainly very mad. Those who are labelled it may or may not be especially mad. At any rate, they are treated appallingly and if it weren’t for that many of them would be able to lead far happier and more productive lives
I do not think it is good to be prudish or ‘phobic’ about certain words just because our enemies use them. Rather, we should reclaim them and turn their rhetoric against themselves, like other Pride movements have. That is a far better way of undermining their sordid intentions. To my mind, while part of the job of a mad activist is to deny the validity of the current diagnoses and medical paradigm, and thereby refute some of the slanderous accusations and ‘treatments’ aimed at those who are labelled with them….It is ALSO to get everyday people to recognize and acknowledge their own madness, and thereby become more accepting of others who receive that label in their society, a long with their great potential i.e. by recognizing that ‘madness, too, is a form of love’.

Beauty in madness. According to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, beauty is ‘purposiveness without purpose’. The same could be said for madness, which is a deeply aesthetic state of being. To grasp it means to comprehend the essential meaninglessness, the rudderlessness of existence and exalt in the sure command of one’s own pure animal vitality. Lo! I teach you the madman.

The Gag Of Being (“Man is the poem of Being” — Martin Heidegger)

If life is a sad comedy,
and death is the ‘punchline’..

Man is the ‘gag of Being’!;

An ape who fancies herself a God, 

Heart laying muffled, gagged in agonizing,
Desperate, unbearable silence its entire life…

Just when it thinks its got it all sorted
& opens its mouth, at last confident, to speak….
KABOOM!!!!!!! ..there rolls her head across the safety mat!…

⦁

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