I know. Human beings being human is stressful. and especially now in our global situation, quite startling and alarming, and at times horrifying.
I’d like to offer some perceptive. Maybe it will help.
The Being Human
Many people are getting upset at the state of the world.
We must indeed act. We have nothing else we can do because we exist.
But I am not calling for political action.
A few years ago one of the great late-20th century French philosophers Alain Badiou posed that the best political action is to not participate in politics.
…and everyone gets mad, up in arms. Consumed in fear and indignance.
They think he means sticking your head in the ground or living in ignorance.
No. That’s now what he means. Neither he nor me is saying don’t go do what you think is best for society.
At risk of taking his saying out of context, maybe it is more like Winston Churchill….
Fear is the real enemy.
When one thinks for themselves, they becomes able to sort the nonsense from the sense. Fear lessens.
Life is affirmed. Agency matters; it becomes who you are, what you Be, as a known thing.
Is say This is mental health.
It is not avoiding fear but understanding it, which comes with feeling it, being consumed by it, and thus knowing it.
I got all sorts of sayings today…
never judge another until you have walked a mile in their moccasins.
Im not going to insult your intelligence by saying that we should all just try and understand each other and get along. Im too practical for that. If you dont already do that, I doubt anything I could say would convince you.
What I am going to say is there is a difference between fear and fear itself
It is not merely that people are behaving badly.
The real fear, the one that gets really deep inside of us is that people are just doing the best they can.
Most people simply will not tolerate that kind of comprehension. Their better thoughts come in to validate their fear and argue and fight against the injustice of other people not doing the best they can.
It is truly scary to think that everyone is indeed doing exactly the only thing they can. It goes against everything we know!
It is not that people are making bad judgements or have lame ideas of righteousness. No. It is that they are unable to do anything else.
…that is scary…
….But it is not fear itself.
To know fear itself is to know oneself. And to know oneself is understand others. Just as to know happiensss is likewise. It’s just that we are taught that fear is a bad thing, and then we follow our fear-moved thinking and perceptions to their (what seems to us) natural end.
And that is exactly what I am showing.
Could you have done something different?
Is fear ruling your existence?
The Fear of Mental Health -From the Root to the Fruit
What would happen if the greatest fear that you have right now, what creeps and jumps at you about the world has always been happening?
I was talking with a friend the other day.
I was saying that what is happening now always happens, every era, every generation, there is a grave existential threat that everyone who is participating in that moment believe is finally the one thing that is going to end it all, screw u everything.
Every
single
era
of every single moment in history
everyone thinks this is it!
This is the root of mental health problems. From the root to the fruit.
What are you really Worried about?
The News machine makes money by fanning your fears.
We all seem to know this, but we dont really heed it.
Mega-news corporations know how to keep you afraid because that is how they make Money.
And despite what you might want to think is right: money is what drives the world. Your righteousness is capitalized upon by the fear you have invested in what you see as ethically correct.
Ok. But we (should) know this as well. So, thats why I am not so much trying to educate you on the real world but trying to help you to see what mental health actually is.
I am not saying you should not believe what you believe. That is up to you. I am not suggesting anything about what you should do as a citizen of global society.
Instead I am talking of mental health itself.
Answer me this:
When you think about history and all the crises that humanity all over the globe has gotten through, and then you are upset about our current political situation, what is it that you are really worried about?
You might say : Our world! or Other people suffering? My children ?
Yes. And.
I might say that you are seeing your own suffering in the light of other peoples suffering.
There is a saying about crisis:
It all comes back to airplane travel:
What you are supposed to do in the case of an emergency is put your oxygen mask on first!
That way you are in a more secure position to actually help.
To SKill, or Not to Skill – That is the Question of Being.
I tell my peeps that mental health has two sides, like two sides of a coin.
There is the skills side. Which, as many people might know, is instructions for conditions.
For example:
- When you think X, which you feel is a bad thought, replace it with Y, a thought that you feel is better.
or
- When talking with your partner you notice the discussion is escalated, voices are getting louder, and so on, relate to the feelings rather than the intellectual content.
I also say that the skills side is more about exclusion, because it is about excluding certain aspects of your situation for the purpose of doing something specific in a different way.
In our examples, I am excluding X by replacing it with Y.
But also on a more philosophical level. I am taking what is myself and understanding it in a context of exclusion, that there are things about myself that are wrong and should be removed or abolished.
Then also there is what I call the being side.
This is more “How I Be”, or how I am. The way I am in that I do things.
While in practice I do not make judgments about what is better for a person, as I discuss in my larger work about mental health philosophy, nonetheless for this post, which is geared more toward conventional philosophical engagement with what is happening, I might appear as though I am making a judgement about all people.
But I am not.
I am making a specific statement about a specific conditional instance.
The relevance and application for treatment of mental issues is much larger than this post can provide…
Being is Reductive and Non-Reductive, That is the answer.
Issues of mental health arise due to a certain kind of orientation on things.
Often in mental health and psychology, the focus is on what we could call skills-being.
The reason why I call it this is because I get many clients in my practice that come in saying that they know the skills, but something is either missing or not working.
The typical conventional psychological approach says that you just need to try harder and give it time.
…That’s fine and good, because I am not making a reductive argument about what people should do…
However, by approaching things in this way, oriented on things in this way, one can become caught in and odd cycle where the Being-That-Is-Me (so to speak) is implementing skills to change me. This “me” that I am changing by applying skills is Me, and that thus (1) something is wrong with me, and (2) I am nothing but the skills I enact for improvement.
The odd effect on experience and knowledge is that I am not really Me, but I am only Me as I am a bunch of practices that I do on Me.
If the issue is more than a social issue, this kind of approach on the challenge can lead to aggravating the issue – which then opens the door for psychology to say that there is something wrong with an underlying physical structure, like neurochemistry.
In Existential terms, this justifies the person’s struggle in the context that they are powerless to change. Or more precisely, that something is really wrong with them from an ontological basis.
This is to say: something is wrong with their Being.
From a shame and guilt standpoint, this is paramount to saying that the person is guilty for Being incorrect and therefore should know how screwed up they are and submit themselves to the will of the social intelligence as proclaimed by science and medicine.
This basic understanding repeated and reified by the people that are assumed interested in helping them thus establishes shame as the basic ontological unit, which then justifies modern science as a shaming institution, in contrast to a force of validation for the individual person and their struggles.
This amounts to an ongoing existential crisis as a lived experience.
Then, due to the inevitable inability to tolerate living in that condition, the distress is thrown out onto the world, projected, such that the culmination of the meaning of the denied aspect of the condition of being human in the world amounts to “the end of the world as we know it”.
The Nonphilosophy of Being
To read and understand what I just put above as a call to mistrust modern psychology is a misunderstanding based in a modern orientation upon things.
Mental health is simply the category of what must be the case if indeed we know things in the way we know them as an experience.
When this is understood in its intention, then mental health is able to explain what is happening to include all things sensibly.
This means that, while I personally think, for example, the less medication one takes is better than more, that we should not add medication before we subtract it, and that psychological medication are hugely over prescribed, nonetheless, I do believe that medications do benefit and work for certain conditions, instances, and people.
The problem here is that often (not all the time, but Indeed often) the person who is suffering is made to suffer longer because they are following the advice which says medication will solve their problem. In short, that the protocols for medication prescription is loose and imprecise. For as much as scientists want to point to studies that suggest precision, when pressed, their answer will most often be “We dont really know“.
In this, I have concern that regular people’s ignorance and trust is being taken advantage of.
Nonetheless the point I am making is that Being is intact here in a Nonphilosophical way.
The Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle.
You are.
Matter.
Doing the matter that matters is you.