A Guide to Treating Symptoms of Mental and Physical Illness

PART I: The Neuroses of Civilization OR Cultivating Addictions for Profit

PART I: The Neuroses of Civilization OR Cultivating Addictions for Profit

I’m no primitivist. Our society has millions of people who fervently believe in indigenous medicine, or tend to think that European imperialism introduced strife and suffering to the Western hemisphere, or who make sweeping condemnatory statements about ‘humanity’ or ‘modernity’ or ‘late-state capitalism’. I wager that NONE of them would willingly trade the corpus of modern medical knowledge for indigenous wisdom, or live in those societies which they romanticize (forgetting slavery and human sacrifice and all the rest), or surrender any of the myriad benefits modern capitalism has bestowed upon them. In fact, I know this… because none of them do. All of these selectively-indignant critics have smart phones and air conditioning and shop on Amazon. Almost none of them turn to shamans when they’re diagnosed with cancer, or if they do they visit their shaman AFTER receiving chemotherapy and picking up their prescriptions at the pharmacy. Just as Critical Theorists are, to a person, rank hypocrites who clutch at and collect every last ounce of privilege and comfort for themselves while making sweeping denunciations of the idea of privilege, so the ‘noble savage’ types and the confused academics who trace the ‘roots’ of science or capitalism to racism or heteronormativity (with historical support that is-to put it extremely mildly-selective and distorted) happily condemn a system which they enjoy every day and which none of them choose to separate from and in which they all happily participate.

The primitivists aren’t without any merit, however. The fact is that humans are animals just as much as moose or gazelles or meerkats. As such we evolved to live in certain social and physical environments. Technology long ago began changing our physical environment and down- and up-regulating certain factors which led to greater comfort and safety while also introducing distortions which led to physical and mental illness. Freud pointed out the fact that neuroses (in animals or people) are conditions of developed societies and any GP today will tell you that diabetes and heart disease are primarily functions of our modern lifestyles. Now technology is changing our social environment, too, which is a much more grave and urgent matter for a species like humanity.

I am fully aware that physical illness can be genetic or chromosomal or due to lifetime misfortune and that a great deal isn’t caused by the artificial environments in which civilization has entrapped us (though even many of these might be partly ameliorated by the general advice which I give below). Mental illness is often real and organic, and changing diet won’t cure Bipolar Disorder (although, again, the symptoms might be lessened with a lean and active lifestyle). I also don’t ignore or minimize the amazing gifts that technology has given us. It’s very easy to condemn the massive and self-propelling machine of technological civilization, until your child needs an ultrasound or until you have a book idea that fires your spirit or until you need a prescription drug to keep you from descending into pain, or madness.

Nevertheless, we must try to be more rational and disciplined in our use of these technologies, and this is a growing imperative with the new attention-grabbing and companionship-destroying aspects of social media. These are solutions which can be implemented, to some extent, on the individual level while we maintain access to the boon of modern development.

In each of the areas I’ve chosen to illuminate below you will find massive corporate interests and billions of dollars of research which are devoted to exploiting evolved vulnerabilities, mostly in the ‘pleasure reinforcement’ areas of the brain (the dopaminergic ventral-tegmental area, for example). Our civilization cultivates low-grade addictions with massive implications for our physical and psychological health, and then makes money feeding the addiction and treating the symptoms of their expression (diabetes, depression, anxiety, weight gain). In a cynical and tragic feedback loop, modern capitalism makes money by creating grotesque distortions through the provision of comforts that our brain is built to value (one such disortion would be obesity). Then modern capitalism exploits other, dearer vulnerabilities (such as the importance that we-as social animals-place upon attractiveness and identity and status) to sell us goods and services to address the original distortions. These treatments are rarely effective or final, for the most money can be made by keeping the maximum number of people sick, unhappy, and lonely… while offering them brief salves, which must be purchased regularly, for the remainder of the victim’s life. This is precisely the system which we now see across the world.

Self-improvement is work and discipline is freedom. It’s not exactly easy to break the holds of these insidious dependencies but its difficulty only sweetens the reward available. As I said, this is a battle which must be fought person by person and soul by soul, until society has been improved. No government program or prescription drug will suffice. Travelling those paths partly explains how we found ourselves here in the first place.

PART II: We All Live in Rat Park Now

(coming soon…)