The hobgoblins of psychology have plagued humankind now for well more than a century. These shamans of the mind have had a profound impact on culture. It is well enough understood, demonstrated and, written as the topic of volumes, how insanity fosters itself culturally. This is all well understood. If you're going to go crazy, you will invariably do it, and go crazy in exactly the manner that is strictly prescribed by the culture in which you exist.
There is no doubt among the learned here. It is equally well established that the course being trekked by our humanity is toward a more globally uniform culture. Because no one is plotting this course, and because it is impossible to plot this course, the current cultural course appears to be evolving into an ever more complex and hazardous maze from within which there cannot possibly arise any morally decent goal or any possible existential release.
As I push toward sixty, I have observed changes in the range, frequency and severity of our collective cultural insanity. Even in my short life I have seen the clearly understood phenomenon of cultural insanity take on an increasingly more ominous character. There seems there will be no turning back or muffling the ticking of this inexorable clock.
In order to come to grips with these ever more perilous phenomena, we are going to need to shift the thought-paradigm to another that can accommodate an exit, if such an exit is to be considered even remotely possible. If such an exit exists, it isn't in any of the culturally likely places, or as desperate as we are, we likely would have found an exit already.
Everyone knows the present course is insane. Temporary relief and Platonic remedies abound, but, the cultural course has taken on a life of its own, and it keeps marching on unperturbed nonetheless. This is surely because there are no known means by which chaos can be made order except by the superficial and wholly false appliances common to Aristotle's categories as manifested by empirical reason and logic.
If anyone holds out hope for such remedies, God bless you. I have come to the conclusion the only real remedy is to expend all efforts searching exhaustively for categorical truths, those truths for which there are no exceptions, no approximations and, that have no need of the falsity of Aristotle's categories.
As I was born in January of 1950 the pertinent timelines of my life are easy for me to reconstruct. Time has marched for me right by the calendars that by chance have provided me an easy baseline to reflect back upon. I have found my frequent reflective reconstructions of my life, as I have repeatedly made them, honed into some small enlightenment.
I continue to reflect back upon my life in its entirety, the different ages and stages of my existence, and then, broadly upon the world only I can know in my own mind. Yes, some of my reflections are due in part to the age at which I made my original observations. But, I do my very best to put my own relative and transitional maturity into perspective by never doubting I am still but a child lacking surety about much more than that I exist. Ah! Life is good. And, unlike many others, I know that.
Let me carefully impart some of my observations.
Those much younger than me will be surprised to read, the first time I brushed up against suicide was when I read about the suicide of Ernest Hemingway who committed suicide in July of 1961. I'd just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea, and my older brother told me Hemingway had gone crazy at the end of his life and committed suicide.
At the time I was thirteen or fourteen, 1963 or 1964. I was intrigued and I read and re-read the book cover with information concerning when, how and why a man like Hemingway committed suicide. It was something I thought was rather bizarre, and a rather bizarre statement for a famous author like Hemingway to make about life, and where life can lead. Having grown up close to the upper middle classes I never had any delusions about happiness accompanying fame or fortune. But still, I wanted to know the course and path Hemingway's life took to arrive at the empirically logical conclusion that a bullet to the head would be the best final step in this life of his. Was there no more, and no better choice? I was still perplexed.
What I also learned about this suicide was that Hemingway suffered from a depression surrounding his alcoholism and aging. Interesting; I thought then as I reflected upon what might be ahead in my own life. But at the age at which I learned of all this, I was neither an alcoholic, nor experiencing the debilitating effects of age creep up upon my own youthful immortality. Hemingway was sixty-one when the bullet he fired ripped mercifully through his brain as grief and awestruck wonderment passed to all those who knew this author however remotely.
The odd thing about this reflection upon my own life is the timeline from which I now consider how old I was and how remotely I experienced suicide for the first time in my life. Few Americans reach the age of thirteen or fourteen before they have their first such experience today. There seems a crushing march toward ever more vexing despair in the world. And that vexing despair seems to arise by the experience of it earlier in every generation.
Today our youths grow up with suicide, school shootings, suicide bombers, random acts of violence like drive-by shootings, the likes of Andrea Yates who killed all five of her children, drowning them in a bathtub, and babies in dumpsters, and whatever else one might have read today, or, tomorrow, when these cultural epithets are heard on the television news. It is going to be repeated on school playgrounds all across the country.
Keep in mind, everything that is in our separate worlds we create ad hoc as our minds assemble these things before our observing eyes that then can see only what we create. Ah! But, life is good. I know that.
Still, the processes by which we note this sure insanity-creep are part of the character of our cultural way. And now as this homogenized credo of life is being spread all around the world, the hobgoblins of psychology and psychiatry prescribe ever more psychotropic medications to an ever broader spectrum of our population, old and young, innocent and the ever so prone to going crazy exactly how our culture prescribes it in an ever broader rainbow of the colors of blood, gore and all its macabre unbelievable-ness. Yes, it is unbelievable. But it is surely going to be repeated, again, and again, and, again. The empirical-ness of it all is assured, and astounding.
These shamans of the psychological both prescribe to a seemingly forever increasingly larger segment of our society psychotropic medications for mental disorders, and, describe these disorders for all of us in our separate worlds purportedly so we can better understand that which we have created in our own minds due entirely to their prompting. These shamans then clinically weigh and measure the results of their incantations made more effective and persuasive by the heightened expectations of cures made of mind-altering drugs. They thus ultimately and adamantly argue, the benefit for some is far greater than the detriment to others who seemingly go more quickly further insane from their cognizance of these disorders, and, by the use and misuse of a growing variety and supply of psychotropic medications.
Our culture is self-medicating too. There are so many psychotropic drugs in our culture that are present in our foods, in cigarettes, and in alcoholic beverages, Mountain Dew and Pepsi no one can deny their addiction to them today. This cultural fact seems to better license the heinous freedoms claimed by these shamans of the mind to experiment with reckless abandon as they do.
Now just here we will take a turn in our perspective.
Except in our more private and introspective moments, we all hold a high moral opinion of ourselves. There is a faint hope there. There is however, intrinsic to the notion that in finding ourselves moral, we also hold ourselves above a majority of the members of society with whom we share and create our personal culture. We thus then clearly see ourselves to be something of Nietzsche's superhuman, the �bermensch. (Along with everyone else reading here, I'm specifically talking to some other writers here and elsewhere who never fail to read my articles. You know who you are. So, pay close attention.)
The demanded acceptance of ourselves as the �bermensch is an unavoidable blind spot in our perception. Such a notion emanates from us as it surrounds us, because we are all quite literally creating the entirety of the universe in which we individually live all our lives. And this landscape, wholly personal as it is, is all that any of us will ever know. We are all something like Helen Keller in this sense, the sense of our �bermensch blind spot. And, we should not doubt, Helen Keller also thought of herself as the �bermensch.
It is possible from this self-demeaning perspective to begin to fathom the dark side of humanity we each also unfailingly create for ourselves. That is to say, to come to grips with the dark side of that which exists in all of us individually, we must take a step back for a better perspective.
We are horrified, and left gaping when we read, or hear of the now commonplace atrocities committed with increasing frequency in our ever more complex societies and cultures. Culture generally is homogenizing and spreading itself out over the whole landscape of the world. This is the evil so many speak of with an utter disregard for its source. It is us. More pertinently, it is the "me" of the �bermensch.
There is however, that which goes unnoticed, and this in fact is the problem I have come here to address today.
Our morality is superficial, contradictory, and our knowledge sets are all profoundly incomplete. The extent of our categorical knowledge is so miniscule, it is as if categorical knowledge is non-existent when we consider the society in which we live and the culture by which it is manifest. Noting that all this exists in our minds only, and as it does, we can be sure our perception of the world is only slightly less feeble than our perceptions of ourselves.
Such perceptions animate us toward the pleading condescension that we are indeed the �bermensch. And more importantly, that the world only we experience is the one true world among the separate individualities of every other human being's own separate and individual world.
Ironically, or at least it is ironic for the self-deprecating philosopher, as we consider the primitive knuckle-dragging non-human species from which we all evolved more than a half million years ago, we must force ourselves to recognize, they too must have had this sense, that they, each one of them individually, felt they too were the �bermensch in the real world they too were sure they knew.
Okay. For those of you who have followed me thus far, and especially for those of you who know I am prone to tricks, and sleight of hand to make a more worthy point. Primitive humans were likely only capable of experiencing the one-ness with the �bermensch we have so natively within our own personal universes, those we created for ourselves ad hoc since our births. The primitives had only an unconscious instinct for it. We know this is true because primitive humans did not have Nietzsche to read.
Culturally speaking someone has to build it before anyone will come. So, our ancient pre-human predecessors did not have a local cognizance of the �bermensch any more than they knew how to blow a horn like Louis Armstrong, paint like Rembrandt, or commit suicide like Ernest Hemingway.
So, we must keep in mind as we look out upon the landscape of the world and the universe that we each have created individually for ourselves, that what we hold in such utter abhorrence as vile, immoral, and heinous, that this is all what we have built, each of us individually, one crude brick at a time.
We are building it now. And they will come.
We are all those cigarette-smoking monkeys we see in the monkey cages in zoos all across the country. Take a good, close look in the monkey cage at the zoo. Take a good close look and you'll see in the monkey cage there are lovers, aggressors, intellectuals, clergy, politicians, pundits, writers and philosophers too.
And, having taken that good close look, it should then become quite apparent how tenuous a hold on reality is available to any �bermensch. Every one of the monkeys is not just capable of knowing themselves as the �bermensch, but, they are also potential mass murderers too.
And, we're all still crazy after all these years.
There, and only there, is the exit from the heightened sense of the urgent cultural malaise into which we all have painted ourselves. And, we must be extremely wary of anyone who posits any notions otherwise.
And yes, there in all likelihood we will finally find the categorical knowledge necessary for the release we all seek.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
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