It has been a long time since I've written a post. I feel that with the last two posts I've written (the earlier, "Theory of Mind and the Big House", about my life, and the second, "The Problem-Solution Model of Fictions", about fiction) I have said all I needed to say about both. I could just stop writing this blog now, having arrived at the inevitable final statement on each of these two subjects, and announce my life work completed. However, it is possible I have readers who would be disappointed if I just hung up my hat and allowed myself to slide into oblivion. In tonight's post I want to say something more about my theory of fictions and talk a little more about a particular type of 'mental illness'. The reason for continuing to write about these topics is that, when one has worked for years to solve a problem, to state the solution once is anticlimactic. You need to say it again and again for people to realise it is serious.
However, I wish to start this post with a brief discussion of Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, and Jordan Peterson. I am interested in all three. I decided to subscribe to Sam Harris's podcast some time ago and it was a good decision to make. Harris seems no longer to be obsessed with attacking religion, especially Islam – he seems somehow more mature than he used to be. In a recent conversation with someone he even confessed to being agnostic about the survival of the soul after death. In a recent podcast, he discusses how people and society can continue to function without entertaining the illusion of free will. I do not believe Harris has successfully defended the ethical system he proposed and outlined in his book The Moral Landscape but his thinking about free will, his contention that the very concept of free will is incoherent, seems to me spot on. Harris employs an argument I have considered myself but never written about in this blog. Suppose we have a friend who we know to be outstandingly virtuous, of great integrity. Suppose we hear that this person has committed a crime, embezzled money or assaulted his wife. We might say that this is "out of character" and either choose not to believe the rumour or attempt to uncover attenuating circumstances. If, however, we believe that every person possesses free will, we cannot defend our friend by saying that his alleged crime was "out of character". If every person possesses free will, every person's action is, in principle, unpredictable. The alternative, the better option, is to suppose that no one has free will, that all persons possess characters, and that the particular character of a person determines his or her actions. I shall return to this argument I think in a later post.
Bret Weinstein is another member of the Intellectual Dark Web that I follow. Sometimes it is difficult to watch every Youtube clip he uploads because Weinstein, often together with his wife Heather Heying, produces so many. It seems a new one comes out every couple of days. I wonder if he risks overexposure? I do not agree with everything Bret says but always find him thought provoking. I wish now to single out a specific claim that Bret and Heather discuss in a recent clip because it is symptomatic of a deeper problem. Apparently, flora in the vicinity of a home is negatively correlated with diagnosed major depression or, to be more precise, with antidepressant prescriptions. In their discussion, Bret and Heather make a simple error. The mistake that Bret and Heather make is the same mistake most people make when thinking about mental illness statistics – the mistake of assuming that the diagnosis maps onto the prevalence of a condition exactly. This is untrue. Consider major depressive disorder. For all we know, more people suffered from this condition in the 1950s than do so currently because back then it went unrecognised and untreated. The term 'major depressive disorder' wasn't coined until the 1970s and wasn't included in the official psychiatric handbook until 1980. To take another example, the term autistic spectrum disorder is of relatively recent coinage and had the effect of moving a whole swath of people who might once have been described simply as eccentric into the ranks of the mentally ill. In their discussion, Bret and Heather seem to accept without demur the official statistic that women are more likely than men to suffer depression (Bret even suggests that higher rates of diagnosed depression among women is the result of male sexism), but it is possible that, in fact, more men suffer depression than women but aren't recorded in the official stats because they are less likely to ask for help, to seek treatment. In New Zealand more men than women kill themselves, and in fact mental health campaigners here in New Zealand have sought for years to destigmatise mental illness among men and to encourage men to confide their feelings in their mates. Bret and Heather do not even consider the possibility that men might be underrepresented because they are less likely to seek help. They do not consider the possibility that the stats don't tell the whole story.
Sometimes I like to think that Bret and Heather read this blog and so I would like to proffer some advice to them moving forward. They both claim to be left-wingers but spend most of their time critiquing the far-left, the woke fringe. It makes me wonder – in what way can they be said to be left wingers? I wonder if the success of the DarkHorse podcast depends on its appeal to conservatives as well as progressives, and this is why, apart from Bret occasionally referring darkly to 'rent seeking elites', neither Bret nor Heather lays his or her liberal beliefs on the table. What are their opinions on the specific issues that polarise people politically? For instance – do they think the minimum wage should be raised to fifteen dollars per hour? If Bret and Heather are indeed true progressives, they should stake out positions on the issues that differentiate the right from the left, demonstrate their progressive ideals by taking a left leaning stand. They should articulate their beliefs on the specific matters that earmark idealogical affiliation. I feel that they don't because they are afraid of alienating a chunk of their audience. While I am offering advice to Bret and Heather, I might make another suggestion – perhaps they could consider presenting an argument for the evolutionary adaptiveness of near-death experiences in their podcast? An argument occurs to me myself but I lack space in this post to lay it out. The margins aren't wide enough.
The final intellectual I wish to discuss is Jordan Peterson. I recently watched an interview between Weinstein and Peterson that I found fascinating and highly recommend. In the past I have been critical of Peterson but I wonder if the trauma he has experienced over the last several years has ameliorated his conservatism. I understand, from what I've read about it, that his latest book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, is more liberal than its predecessor. I feel, and this is an inchoate intuition, that there is a connection between the Intellectual Dark Web and Donald Trump, in the sense that the Intellectual Dark Web was a kind of reaction not only to the Woke Left but also to Trump. The Woke Left came first and the Intellectual Dark Web sprang up in response, but I feel that the often acrimonious conflict within the Left during the last four years was a result of having Trump as president. Since Biden has been elected, I feel that the intensity has dialled back. Harris seems more relaxed, as do Bret and Heather. The debate began before Trump was elected but was amplified by having a narcissistic reactionary incompetent in charge. With a Democrat in the Oval Office, I hope that some civility can return to conversations among leftists. And I strongly suspect furthermore that Peterson is, deep down, more a Democrat than a Republican.
As promised in the introduction, I shall now turn to narrative theory, although, considering the typical concerns that occupy narrative theorists today, topics such as 'focalisation' and 'mimesis vs. diagesis', it might be better to say that I am interested in 'story theory' rather than 'narrative theory'. What makes a good story? The conclusion I came to, and discussed most recently in the posts "Interpretations of This is the End and The Night Circus" and "The Problem-Solution Model of Fictions", is that, at its heart, a story presents a hypothetical scenario and a resulting question which it then answers. "If A, how B?" I'll provide some examples, ones I've used before. The premise and question at the heart of This is The End is, "If the fundamentalist Christians are right and the Rapture is just around the corner, how can liberal Hollywood actors, with their tolerant attitudes towards homosexuality and drug use, go to heaven?" The story answers this question by saying "The route to heaven is platonic love (i.e. friendship) between men". The novel The Night Circus is founded on the following premise and question: "If real magic exists, what is its place in the world?" The Night Circus answers this question by saying that the place for real magic is some kind of ideal circus. The film Star Wars is based on the following premise and question: "If an interstellar war is being fought between Good and Evil, and Evil is vastly more powerful than Good, how can Good triumph?" The answer is, "Good can triumph over Evil because it has the Force on its side." These examples alone show that my theory has legs.
Other examples abound. Consider the film Snakes on a Plane, a film that puts its pitch in the title. Reportedly, Samuel L. Jackson leapt at the opportunity to star in this film simply because he liked its name. The hypothetical scenario is, "What would happen if a huge number of snakes are released in a jet while it is in the air? How will the passengers survive?" I haven't seen this film but, possibly, the answer to this question is "The passengers can survive because of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the FBI". A scenario can be fanciful but the answer to the question it poses tends be conservative, conventional. Not long ago I saw the film Nomadland, a film that demonstrates the way in which many stories tend to have orthodox, conventional (and often right-wing) messages or morals. Nomadland begins by presenting a woman who lives in her van and has a truly awful job working in an Amazon warehouse. The problem the film is presenting is simply the problem of poverty. When watching this film, I thought, early on, that the film would be an exposé of the failings of modern capitalism, a little like the films of Ken Loach. However, at Plot Point 1, a solution to the problem is proposed that is far from progressive: at a gathering of fellow nomads, the protagonist's compatriots tell stories about how they chose the life they are now living. The solution to the problem of poverty, the film is saying, is that people choose to be poor, choose to live in their vans and work at menial jobs, because they enjoy the freedom of the lifestyle and the community of other nomads, and so no collective action is required. The question, "Is the life of the protagonist, Fern, something she has chosen or something forced on her?" is kept alive throughout much of the film and then answered definitively at Plot Point 2 when Fern is given the opportunity to settle down permanently with a reasonably affluent family and chooses instead to sleep in her van and then immediately get back on the road. For me, the last part of the film dragged because the problem the film presents has been solved, the question answered, and it was this question, the question of whether Fern has chosen her situation or been forced into it, that had sustained my interest in the movie. Paradoxically I think that Nomadland, insofar as it represents the worst type of poverty in America, has often been misconstrued by commentators as a left-wing film even though its message, in reality, is decidedly right-wing.
It seems to me that stories do two things. First, they present scenarios that might possibly lie within the gamut of potential human experience and invite readers and audiences to identify with the main characters in order to vicariously resolve the problems the stories pose. How would I react in that situation? After all, even the most atheistic people have wondered, if only occasionally and semi-consciously, what would happen if they were wrong and the fundamentalist Christians were right. What would happen if the Rapture actually occurred? What would happen if I was flying in an airplane and a whole lot of snakes fell from the overhead lockers? How would I cope if I was forced to live in a van and travel around the country looking for menial work? We are drawn to these stories because we or people we know might end up having to deal with similar situations. Second, however, the answers successful stories give tend to be soothing, reassuring, anodyne. Nomadland relieves us of our responsibility to address the problem of poverty by strongly suggesting that the poor are poor because they choose to be poor. Star Wars reassures us that Good will always triumph over Evil because Good has a supernatural Force on its side. Ghostbusters reassures us that malevolent supernatural beings can be vanquished by New York city know-how, by tradesmen who seem like a cross between exterminators, plumbers, and fire-fighters, people paid to perform a service. Cesar A. Cruz said, "Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" but most successful stories tend to be much more about comforting than disturbing.
There is much more to be said about all this, particularly the idea that there are many fictions we gravitate towards because they make life more bearable. We want to believe that all killers are apprehended and, when apprehended, confess their crimes – this is why we like police procedurals. We want to believe that everyone is destined to meet and be together forever with his or her soulmate – this is why we like rom coms. We want to believe that mental illness can be fixed by a drug – this is why we like the film A Beautiful Mind. But none of these fictions, fictions we voraciously consume, are true. This is something I may talk about more in later posts.
At this point, I wish to pivot towards my second subject. I want to talk about a particular type of mental illness, a type of psychosis. I discussed this condition a long time ago in a post called "An Anecdote; and a Description of a Condition" – I must have some readers who pay attention to this blog because I noticed recently that some readers had returned to it. I shall discuss this condition again now. This condition has three basic features:
1. A paranoid fear that other people around the sufferer are secretly homosexual.
2. A paranoid fear that others think the sufferer homosexual.
3. An inability to say the words 'gay' or 'straight'.
I have observed this condition a number of times in other patients and had it myself, so I know what I'm talking about. It is a condition that can be greatly ameliorated by two simple forms of treatment. The heterosexuality of the patient should be explicitly acknowledged by those treating him or her. And homosexuality should be openly and honestly discussed. If I had been treated this way when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service in 2007, I would have recovered in less than a year.
When writing this post, I suffered serious writer's block when it came to discussing this condition, and had to wait a week before returning to writing it. The reason is that, in my case, the paranoid belief that others thought me gay when I'm not, although perhaps often a delusion among other sufferers, was true in my case. The people treating me did think I was gay. The delusion that the world was full of closet homosexuals featured strongly during my first psychotic episode in 2007, returned intermittently in 2009 and went away for good at the beginning of 2010. The belief, a true belief, that others thought I was gay when I'm not only went away some three or four months ago. When I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service in around March or April of 2007, the first thing I said was, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay, and I want to come out as straight!" I was wrong about my father. And I know now that what I said when I first presented at the Taylor Centre was open to misinterpretation. But what I meant was, "I have always been heterosexual and I want people to know!" I have been trying for much of the last fourteen years, apart from the period from early 2010 until early 2013 when I simply ignored what others thought, to 'come out as straight'. And I have at last succeeded. People may want to say to me, "Why should you care if other people think you're gay?" I would reply to such people that others thinking a person gay when he or she isn't is really quite a big deal, that people who think it doesn't matter don't fully understand what homosexuality is. Homosexuals want to have sex with people of the same gender. And to think a heterosexual wants to screw people of the same sex is to do him or her a profound psychological injury, is tantamount to a kind of torture.
It is possible that I may never need to talk about this again.
As I said at the beginning of this post that it has been a long time since I've written a post. I hope that people find this one as interesting as others I have written. Should I keep writing? If I receive a message from the universe saying "Yes", maybe I will.
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