The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises - 2

In the first post of this series, The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises, the Dredd Blog System touched upon the notion that some "regular looking news" is actually evidence of a psychopathic nature within a segment of current industrial civilization.

We attribute the source of the problem to "the toxins within power".

To be more specific, we touched upon "ecocide" in a link within that post, comparing or equating individual suicide, in some significant ways, to planetary ecocide.

In another post series, The Peak of Sanity, we focused in on a relative time frame so as to give a general perspective illuminating when one epoch ended (at the peak of sanity), axiomatically commencing another epoch, the criminally insane epoch.

Remember that when individuals do certain things, such as mass or group suicide, it is considered to be psychopathic or mentally ill behavior.

However, when civilization or a subset of civilization such as a nation, behaves in a manner that invites the same thing, e.g. ecocide, for some reason it is not perceived as being as big of a deal.

Instead, it is considered to be a matter of legislative prerogative, a matter of economics ("how much will it cost to not commit ecocide"), or simply a hoax.

Remember also that it is difficult enough just to identify psychopathic behavior, or exclude it, even in the case of an individual who faked his way into a mental hospital:

"So for a while you thought that being normal and polite would be your ticket out of here?" I said.

"Right," he replied. "I volunteered to weed the hospital garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad."

I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn't believe him about this. It seemed too catch-22, too darkly-absurd-by-numbers. But later Tony sent me his files and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony is cheerful and friendly," one report stated. "His detention in hospital is preventing deterioration of his condition."

After Tony read that, he said, he started a kind of war of non co-operation. This involved staying in his room a lot. On the outside, Tony said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbours would be a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you're withdrawn and have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor, not wanting to hang out with insane killers is a sign of madness.

(How To Spot A Psychopath). How much more difficult is it to spot psychopathology and mental illness, or the lack thereof, in a larger populace, and ultimately in civilization itself?

Especially when civilization, like Tony in the case cited above, pleads the case that psychopathology or mental illness is not the proper diagnosis or issue.

We should take notice that, like Tony, current civilization talked itself into a similar trap, as a Dredd Blog post points out, then ask "is that in and of itself mentally deficient or psychopathic?"

There are a number of cases which illustrate the defective techniques that have persisted in mental health scholarship and diagnosis for well over a century.

Those defects even found their way into state laws that were clearly insane in and of themselves.

The Eugenics Review is a journal of that madness which persisted for decades in the United States, all in the name of making The Future American Race "good".

Civilization only wanted to do the right thing, to protect itself, just like Tony who can't get out of the psycho ward now, having been there for over a decade, having been there since he was 17.

In such circumstances, isn't it is better to go with "common sense", to realize "we don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", to trust our "gut feeling", and to conclude that any direction toward the willful destruction of civilization by civilization is just plain wrong ... no matter how the spin doctors diagnose it?

The damaged minds who officially doublespeak call the demise of the honey bee "marginally encouraging" because "only" a third of them died again four years running now.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.