Our First Duty is to Our Own Sanity
America, and the world that watches closely, are finding out what happens when most of the population in a country goes insane.
Everyone in America is losing their marbles, the predictable effect of a culture that doesn’t value sanity.
I’d go even further: the predictable effect of a culture where “sanity” is sacrificed at the alter of “profit”.
If I could summarise my “work” in one word, it would be “sanity”. I am interested in how people lose their minds, and how they can find them again.
Of course I speak poetically. Mental illness is complex, but we lose our ability to describe reality when we stick too closely to the clinical.
So let’s use prosaic language and let’s not get caught up on what each word means.
Nature-based cultures valued sanity. Which is why they had regular practices, strong myths, group rituals, all designed to mould the human psyche into its best self.
They knew that sanity was the absolute last barrier between a culture and its annihilation. Survival is dependent on people staying sane, on large enough numbers of people staying sane, especially when they are being tested. Before we endure famines, before we face the elements, before we encounter predators, what’s holding everything together is precisely what holds our psyche together, and what holds our collective psyches together is: sanity.
America is a cautionary tale of what happens when sanity is lost, either discarded or actively destroyed, in the name of profit.
And what happens when sanity is lost? Complete dissolution. What used to hold us together doesn’t hold anymore.
At the very essence what keeps a culture sane is what keeps a culture alive. Sounds obvious. But Americans have found a way to dispel with this fact, as it got in the way of money. How? Notice how they have turned against survival, against keeping their fellow people alive, against doing what they can to ensure a deadly virus stops spreading, against even acknowledging that a deadly virus is real.
Faced with the request, for it is no longer a fact as it used to be, faced with the invitation to regard the very idea of a society as real, to consider the effect of their actions on the group, they turned against themselves and each other, their mythology destroyed, their psyches fragmented, their inner compass run aground, their sense of self unable to process the existence of something that would affect them, personally, because it affects everyone else, having been raised on the drug of exceptionalism and atomisation, on being special and different, on the corrosive belief that “every man is out for himself”.
We are witnessing the very beliefs that drive cultures mad, and plunges them into their graves. Refusing to accept the existence of the “other” as someone just like “I”, with similar needs and desires, leads people into a cul-de-sac of the psyche, unable to understand either themselves or anyone else. The foundational belief that “I” must be different, special, uniquely deserving, in a culture where only a few must rise to the top, forces the psyche to cleave off the grounding sanity of belonging to the group.
This is how people go insane. Others? There are no others. There’s only me. I live in a hall of mirrors and nothing can touch me.
You cannot separate a human from the group. The human mind needs people. Not just “others” but people just like me. Connection is more than our birthright. It’s our life blood. It’s the bonds that weave our psyche. Either the mind links to others, or it links to the natural world, and then it’s the natural world itself who becomes “another just like me”. Nature-based cultures knew this. And lived by it.
How does insanity spread? Sure, we can talk about racism, fascism, the role of the media, economic insecurity, the psychic effect of seeing others thrive when you’re sinking, the decades-long suppression of the left under a psychotic “red scare”.
But ultimately, insanity spreads because the truth is no longer within reach. It becomes unacceptable. Socially unacceptable.
Truth such as the existence of other people. How inequality is plain bad. The self-evident destruction of the environment. The necessity to care for others in their time of need.
You could redefine “truth” by calling it “sanity”. What are the beliefs that keep us sane? Other people’s lives matter. Resources should be shared. Nobody should go without while others have more than they need. The production of goods and services irrespective of their need is a plain waste of resources.
You know, “facts”. Before American culture plunged so deep in a madness of its own making, “facts” weren’t called facts, they were simply the narrative everyone agreed to believe in.
A narrative that we all agree with will keep us sane, because “sanity” is held by other people.
Sanity is held by all.
