Joe Bageant: A Commodity Called Misery - The Diigo Meta page

• 16 Feb 09
  

  Chuck Brands
• 15 Feb 09
  

  Clay Burell

  I'm so loving Bageant's Belize journals. They're stark, honest, and beautiful.

  psychology writing capitalism travel

  • the pathology of Americaness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state. The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized by authority since it was first openly broached in the Sixties. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things too in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind expanding drugs. And ever since then corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind numbing anti-depressants and the like, have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become. Not that I'm entirely opposed. As I've said before, if this officially sanctioned dope were a bit more ecstatic and colorful, I'd be right there in line for my share. Hell, I'm an American -- instant gratification works for me too. But an anesthetic to workhouse burnout just ain't enough incentive. Beyond that, the street drugs are crap these days. So to our King Kong pharmaceutical industry, I say: "Work with me here, guys!"

  • Seriously though, back in the Sixties, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil -- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

    But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

  • 5 more annotations...

  • • Now collective societal responsibility is common sense for, say, a Dane or a Frenchman. Most of them anyway.

      For Americans though, it's an explosive issue. Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country.

    • Ever spend much time with the average mid-American social services psychologist? The kind who make recommendations in our juvenile courts? On the whole they're a sorry assed bunch if ever there was one, bureaucrats wrapped in the smug piety of social work. Others are far more aware, but fearful of calling bullshit on the system that pays the mortgage and sends the kids to college.

    • Obviously, I'm no psychiatrist, and am sure to get plenty of email offering certain proof of that, plus proof that I am a paranoid nutcase with authority problems (I'll gladly admit to the latter), though in more polite professional jargon. To which I say less politely, "Fuck ‘em all!" I see what I see.

      And what I see, based upon my own experience and watching that of others, is that alienation and the pain of utter aloneness, is in the rootstock of nearly all psychic malady, excepting the clearly organic. If when we look around us in the world, we do not see ourselves in society, nor does society see itself in us, we eventually come to feel the sustained, unutterable pain of aloneness.

      • 

        Clay Burell on 2009-02-15

        This poses an interesting question for me. I'm almost 100% solitary in my physical life. I live in Korea, don't speak the language, and spend little to no time in any sort of deep communication with my wife since her mother's death last year (and for the three years before our marriage last year, I was similarly asocial - physically).
        
        So I literally go most weeks without having a meaningful conversation with anybody.
        
        YET - I'm in touch with people, I have a society. It's just virtual. And I know how weird this will sound, but I feel no "pain of aloneness."
        
        Then again, maybe it's because I write, and talk to readers. But I feel pretty damn good to be just about as alone as you can be at age 46.
        
        Who was it - Santayana? - who said the word "loneliness" describes the _pain_ of being alone, while the word "solitude" describes the _bliss_ of it?
        
        I'm solitary, but not lonely.
        
        And to circle back around, I wonder how much of that is due to my "virtual community." So many of them are just tweets or comments with names. But a good number, I guess, are more - I know their minds from their blogs, their voices from their podcasts.
        
        Weird. But all good.
    • Many years ago as a much younger man, I went through a couple of major depressions, the second of which brought me to the brink of suicide. In the first instance I was somewhat helped, through medication and "talk therapy," by a psychologist who eventually killed himself. They found him in a tree in his back yard with his beeper going off.
    • The second time though, I walked out of the abyss by myself. And along the way I encountered, sought out really, others on the same path. And I saw that together, in open sharing of our personal truths, most of not all of us were nowhere near mentally ill. Just sick. Sick even to the point of death in some cases, of our spiritual imprisonment within the Great Machine, but strong enough to refuse under any circumstances to dwell under its spiritual humiliation.

      • 

        Clay Burell on 2009-02-15

        So beautiful.
• 09 Feb 09
  

  Todd Suomela

  american culture psychology depression misery commoditization medicine

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Clay Burell on 2009-02-15
  This poses an interesting question for me. I'm almost 100% solitary in my physical life. I live in Korea, don't speak the language, and spend little to no time in any sort of deep communication with my wife since her mother's death last year (and for the three years before our marriage last year, I was similarly asocial - physically).
  
  So I literally go most weeks without having a meaningful conversation with anybody.
  
  YET - I'm in touch with people, I have a society. It's just virtual. And I know how weird this will sound, but I feel no "pain of aloneness."
  
  Then again, maybe it's because I write, and talk to readers. But I feel pretty damn good to be just about as alone as you can be at age 46.
  
  Who was it - Santayana? - who said the word "loneliness" describes the _pain_ of being alone, while the word "solitude" describes the _bliss_ of it?
  
  I'm solitary, but not lonely.
  
  And to circle back around, I wonder how much of that is due to my "virtual community." So many of them are just tweets or comments with names. But a good number, I guess, are more - I know their minds from their blogs, their voices from their podcasts.
  
  Weird. But all good.
• 
  Clay Burell on 2009-02-15
  So beautiful.

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