Mental Health and UwU
Darwin sits like a moon over the valleys of the sciences.
At some point all thought must turn, as his did, to the question of deep time: our world is ancient, even if it isn’t eternal. Because of this, we should proceed with humility. It’s not that you’re actually small and/or insignificant — it’s more that you are the inheritor of something inconceivably ancient. It’s important to remember that how one imagines the universe to be is a small, subjective experience. It really doesn’t matter that your ideas about it be true or not. Only that they be believed. And if the history of myth and magic is anything to heed, we’ve spent most of our evolutionary history preferring the mystic to the efficacious. And we all know that Darwin had a rough go.
Had the matter been left to the Church, his heresy would have been left unconsidered; the religious mind needs a world that can be conjured at will, not one left to chance and self-determination.
Darwin presents a challenge to our understanding of experience that goes far beyond the biological. By demonstrating lineal decent in species, he blew up humanity’s most comforting narrative: namely that we occupy the center of an organized, fixed universe. This is no small feat. But because of this, he offered us a way out from the shackles of our species’s natural narcissism. And so his work became influential. Physics swallowed him whole; biology understands his meaning and embraces him as a founding light; even the Catholics have stopped trying to insist on an alternative narrative — god can always guide, granting perfection to the creation in hindsight, after all. Personally, as an avowed atheist, citizen scientist, and all-around modern guy, I incorporated an evolutionary mindset for most of my life. Things progress from things — the recurrence might not be eternal, but the world was here before us (though I can’t say I’ve really been timing it).
See, the compelling thing about the modern scientific model is the way that it has built on itself. And we should be struck be how many of its central conclusions are built around deltas, that which changes. Einstein, whose theory of relativity upended physics, when confronted with the apparent paradox introduced by Planck and his successors, rejected the notion of an unimaginable universe. It was hard to accept that something one might call God appears to be playing dice (mathematically speaking). Completing the triad we come to the basic insight of Freud — truth is fundamentally fragmentary (the consequence of the unconscious). He proved this, as it were, through psychoanalysis, and its principles turned out to be useful when applied to hysterics in at the turn of the 19th century. In other words, all is in flux and you can never have complete knowledge.
Not to say that it is any less so today.
It must be taken for granted then that any given subject has built a life out of incomplete information. And within their assembled jumble of connections, one will find truth; a necessary part of a constructed subject. To acquiesce to the contemporary scientific model places a peculiar responsibility in the hands of the analyst, the trouble that Lacan isolates in his Ethics: that of the Lady: an ideal to uphold, jammed in between the beautiful and the biological, the mystic and the efficacious.
If we are to accept the evolutionary perspective, is shows us that things, like truth, changes shape. The problem is that it does so in a broadly guided sense — guided by the limitations imposed by experience. In this model, we cannot exactly conjure a world because there is only one. It traps us within its external logic. Through the medium of evolution, the eternal becomes impermanent, and the word “plasticity” begins to loom over all of our sins. What do we do with ourselves in a universe in which changes as we change whether we like it or not? Evolution inscribes this into the physic and the psychic with consequences that can only straightjacket our dreams. As a result, free will itself is jeopardized.
This is only true for free will understood a certain way, of course — the religious version. To believe in the biblical notion, that the sinner is such because he is knowingly wronging the Father, is to see free will in a different, more malevolent light. This is a version of free will in which the subject perhaps secretly understands what it is doing. There is one way of looking a Freud’s unconscious that might see it in this light — and with good reason: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a litany to this ideology.
The problem with free will is, of course, is a political one. Free will concerns choice, and choice is a social category: I can only choose that which is offered up by the society I live in — the people that surround me, how they treat me, and the modes of expression that I can learn from them. To be “free” in this context, has something to do with how we are permitted to interact with our fellows (this is why god is useful to the powerful and the powerless alike — he provides a buffer against the horrible things we do to one another in order to maintain our power and privilege. “Sorry you’re a slave,” says the master, “It wasn’t my idea — it was God’s. Be a better one and we wont knock your teeth out…”).
Which is where our notions of mental health enter the discussion. That which we consider “healthy” or “normative” are the products of a kond of meta-dialectic that looms over the social structures that keep the world operating. You must believe, in the face of all evidence, that if you work hard you’ll be rewarded. You can’t be, of course, otherwise the inequality that we enjoy would be at risk of crumbling. The promise of hard work is reward, and reward offers an escape from labor. Someday, you too can be rich and powerful enough to persuade some schmuck to do the work for you. Suicide is a taboo because, if people really understood how hopeless their dreams were, civilization as we know it would collapse.
Things don’t work because you’re happy and well adjusted, you see. They work because you wish you were. The worst elements of your oppression are made to look self-inflicted; the suffering that brings can be eternally internalized. And (as a bonus) someone can get you a pill for it. And this is what it is to be mentally healthy. As long as you don’t understand that you should probably be pretty upset, you’re doing fine. The DSMV is a book about what it is to be out of alignment with this superstructure. It doesn’t criticize the machine of course, it simply assumes that the tension you experience around it is the problem with you that we need to fix. You should be comfortable with a degree of hysteria — “why am I what you are telling me I am?” Answer that question with the wrong question, and you might be mad.
::hugs::
