Societal madness
How would we know if society was mad? If it had lost touch with reality and was simply deluded much of time? But I get ahead of myself already.
Mental illness is already a much-contested domain. Many medical doctors and many psychiatrists want to insist that there are physical concomitants of mental disturbance, a “chemical imbalance in the brain”. Every aspect of this has been debunked; there has been no chemical imbalance found, the brain may well not be the site of mental disturbance, so-called cures have been shown to cause lasting brain damage, et cetera.
I studied with a lovely man, Noel Cobb, who worked extensively with R.D. Laing. Ronnie Laing was convinced that when a person was deemed mad, the dysfunction was in society — not in the person. There was a house in east London for schizophrenics where this point of view was validated, and Noel worked there with the residents.
The everyday version of this is that people who have suffered excessive stress and trauma are often diagnosed as depressed. It is simply too difficult for society to acknowledge and deal with the underlying causes of distress, so the individual gets treated. This is directly parallel to the near universal treatment of whistle-blowers as having an attitude problem. I know an occupational health doctor whose personal record is that 13 consecutive holders of a particular corporate role went off long term sick before the corporation concerned were prepared to entertain the possibility that the role was responsible.
The roots of family therapy lie with the research of Gregory Bateson. Bateson made extensive recordings of family therapy sessions and tried to analyse the interactions between people in those sessions rigorously. It proved too complex a task to draw firm conclusions about who was “ill” in a family that was dysfunctional. Probably the only generality to be drawn is that the person exhibiting the symptoms of the dysfunction of the family is not the one who needs help and support.
So, madness is one of those things that everyone can recognise in someone else but pinning it down is hard, verging on impossible. We have had much to say in previous blogs about reality itself and how slippery it is as a subject. But we recognise madness by some divergence between our own understanding of reality and a person’s deranged response to the same situation. With a thousand caveats, if someone is hearing voices that we cannot hear, then madness becomes a hypothesis for most of us.[1]
The opposite of madness was long held to be a careful and considered rationality, a calm perusal and description of reality and carefully drawn conclusions. In today’s world this may be precisely the sign of someone who has lost the plot and is unable to deal with the strange reality that faces them. Indeed, the characterisation in detail of mad behaviour is that the mad person keeps trying something they believe will work for them and it keeps making things worse. That is the issue for this blog.
McLuhan
We are only describing the issues for individual madness and its recognition as a way of orienting to societal madness. When a society is mad, the individuals in that society may be, or appear to be, sane and sensible. A society is not the sum of its members, it is the emergent effect of the interactions of those members: not the same thing at all. I know from all my work that recognising the next level up in a system, especially if you are part of it, is really difficult for people.
When we are able to consider ourselves as an individual in an environment, we can to a first approximation look at our sensing of that environment and the sense we make of that sensing. We can consider that we are internalising these processes and that in some sense they are ours. We say this is our personal reaction to a situation.
We live in a world where this is almost never an appropriate model or story. We are reacting to other people’s sensing and reactions in a way that is inherently social. Social media is the paradigmatic example. When a teen is shamed on FB, who is doing the shaming and why is the shaming taken to heart? Are the individual messages and reactions a remotely adequate description of what is happening? We are closer to the Victorian sense of hysteria and waves of inappropriate responses, affecting especially women, hence the word. These are ineluctably social phenomena.
McLuhan fifty years ago noticed that technology shifts the site of the interactions from being internal to being external. One of McLuhan’s adages was that every extension is also an amputation. Here he describes how participating in these social exchanges in this instantaneous way, shifts our mental function out into the world and in doing so we auto-amputate our normal way of relating experience to our own senses and our own sense.
Once we understand the social in this way as being patterns of inter-thinking, patterns of emotional reaction, it is clear that these patterns can be mad in the senses we are talking about. In fact, my experience is that these patterns generally are mad once you have a way of relativising the reaction in the pattern. We see societies and institutions within them having energetic conversations that spin off into complete incoherence, but which from the inside are compelling.
This situation where you can lose any control over thinking of which you are a part, McLuhan describes as generating dread. I had not thought of it that way but as a characterisation of the effect of being part of poisonous social media interactions I think it is perceptive.
One more point here. The impossibility of the detached rational standpoint about a social pattern is obvious too. I can attempt an abstract, generalised description but if you want to speak of the US election or any other hot social topic you are a player and cannot not be a player. You are emotionally involved and if you pretend you are not you are … mad. This includes all those myriad people who want to counterpose science and evidence to hysteria: understandable, laudable even, but mad.
Depression is not madness. Arguably most of the time it is not even mental illness. Anti-depressants are too readily prescribed, can be hard to withdraw from, and can cause lasting damage. Having said all that, 6 million people in UK received antidepressants in three months: that is a sign both of madness in society and of the removal of social supports because of lockdowns. Whatever they are called.
When society is mad then individuals within it have a necessary relationship with a dysfunction that is pervasive. And any symptoms of that relationship that they display will be seen as their symptoms and evidence of their personal dysfunction. That is how it works.
Failure to engage
What is the problem with madness? We fear its lack of rational constraint and its potential for destructiveness. When we try to converse with a person who is mad, we get nowhere and can easily inflame the situation in ways we don’t comprehend.[2] The mad person cannot deal with their own situation, and occasionally casual bystanders are involved in violence that is purely mistaken. But the signature of madness is an inability to deal with commonly perceived reality. It is of course this “commonly perceived” that gives rise to ambiguity.
Supposing that McLuhan’s insight that in social media and the like mental activity has moved outside the individual into a social domain is correct, and supposing therefore that it can become mad, what would we see? The determining factor of course is that no social pattern can be seen for what it is by the people that constitute it. At the sharp end I am emotional disturbed by someone else’s tweet or FB post and I respond as I feel I must. That is a segment of a pattern which swirls in a way that no-one can see directly.
To start at the other end of the telescope is to say that we can witness the storms of activity on social media and we can ask whether the result of that activity allows society to deal with the issues that were the nominal subject. If the storms become largely self-referencing and all people are trying to do from their different positions is to correct or control the storm, then the activity is properly called mad.
If we do the comparison with hysteria again, the hysteria begets hysteria. The extreme anxiety of people caught up in the pattern is relative to the pattern, not to Jack the Ripper or whatever. The pattern moves society away from being able to deal with the supposed issue. “Something must be done” is the often counterproductive signature.
The storms on social media are more complex, with particular vortices of concern overlapping and influencing each other. Anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists are far from mutually exclusive categories. The question here is whether there can be a point from which to observe or comment without being an intrinsic part of the patterns.
If a society has become mad, rational argument about the issues may be totally irrelevant or even damaging and inflaming. If someone is hearing voices, telling them that the voices don’t exist may not be a good route to take. Laying out the facts and arguments more clearly is not a lot of use in talking to Republicans just now. The point of diagnosing madness is precisely to allow some part of society to recover enough to be effective.
Reasons for madness
In the Gregory Bateson analysis of addiction (to alcohol) he is very clear that the addiction has its own logic in coping with the quite ridiculous strictures of friends and family — “be strong”. This is part of our argument. If we in effect tell people not to mad, we will almost certainly be reinforcing the factors driving the madness.
Part of the theory of capitalistic firms is that the market will discipline the firms that have lost the plot. No-one in those firms has to admit that they got things wrong, or that they weren’t up to it, they just go bust end of story. We are asking what the civil equivalent of this discipline is: how do large groups of people get to understand the failure to act effectively that their madness has produced? Why would they not continue to blame others for ever?
In the somewhat paternalistic world of the big enterprises in northern towns such as Manchester in Victorian times, it was understood that there were two types of failure. You could mess up or you could be the subject of unfair practice. The Methodist Church, no less, would adjudicate its businessman members, getting people who had been shafted back on their feet and casting failures into the outer darkness.
We no longer have such authorities capable of wise and uncorrupted judgement. Part of the madness is in having no reference points for ethics and value judgments. We cannot agree how to proceed because we are mad and the lack of agreement leads to its own madness. “Evidence” becomes fuel for the fire rather than a ground for mutual exploration. It would be easy for me to think and say that there are many intelligent people paid to kick away the props to understanding and rational debate.
Guilt and dread
Can you imagine a more potent cocktail than the guilt and dread we have built for ourselves? We feel guilty for our part in the madness and we feel guilty if we individualise and think for ourselves, no longer part of the herd. We dread what happens with the social storms we have no control over. We never thought for a moment that wanting to be liked online could lead to an existential crisis. And there is always someone who knows what is best for us, another simple solution that plays into the raging storms. Capitol Hill is now a symbol of something quite profound, despite the imbecility of the stormers.
[1] Many years ago, I worked with a colleague, a very senior ‘guru’ sort of chap, and one day he kept complaining of hearing a beeping noise. We heard it too, but only when he was in the room. He would not be persuaded that somehow the noise was emanating from his person.
[2] An interview with Anthony Hopkins on madness and Hannibal Lecter, in which he relates an attempt to converse with a mad person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkh-bOujn40
