Is There a National Dementia?

Some of the more popular blogs in the U.S., which are main stream in thinking, if there is any such thing any more, are wondering about mental aberrations which they think they have detected, and which are showing up massively in the common public discourse or debate we hear or read all around us.

Daily Kos, for example, has a post Sunday Talk - It's Not the Heat, It's the Stupidity, followed by Idiot Nation, Idiot Press, then It's "f-king stupid"?, and finally So you wanna talk about Hitler, from which the photo comes.

The last one mentioned is a good place to focus, I think, because it shows a domestic scene with growing children, a new baby, a stroll in the country, but also the clothing of madness depicted in the NAZI S.S. uniform one of the participants is wearing.

To me it captures a national schizophrenia or similar dementia, where the normal peaceful way of life is slowly being infected, probably undetected at that time, with a social disease.

During the process at first social disease seems normal, then denial sets in, then anger, then catastrophe, then depression, and finally either revolutionary remedy or final demise.

The conundrum is that there is no treatment for national dementia, and as our national health debate shows, there is a number in the many millions and growing daily, of people who could not get treatment because they do not have health insurance anyway.

There are also indications that the treatment may not be effective to the degree that it is not associated with a physical malady of some sort.

The type of treatment with psychotropic drugs that shows dramatic results is usually associated with some brain chemistry that is out of balance, but which can be offset with prescription drugs.

But who is the nation's shrink who does the diagnosis and then dispenses the cure?

And that is the dilemma, not only in the current word storm damaged landscape, but in American social beliefs in general: one man's sanity is another man's dementia.

The diagnosis "you are a sick S.O.B. for thinking that way" is rewarded with "no, you are the sick one".

I suppose if we treat each other well all will heal, it is just that there is no agreement on what the sickness is or what is the cure is.

On Dredd Blog we have postulated a scenario where a person freezing to death and the associated dementia that goes along with it could be compared to an empire going down by suffering cognitive impairment.

Finally, we think that the healthy approach to life is Ecocosmology, where everyone pulls together to save the human species, and all forms of life are respected as carriers of the cure in some way.