When Michael C was 18 and in his first year of college, he began to have academic difficulty. He had been an excellent student in high school and was admitted to a prestigious college in the Northeast. He had started college well and received high grades on his first few exams but then began to have difficulty understanding the material in several classes. His grades began to slip; by the end of his first semester he had received 3 C's and an F. Over the Christmas break (winter break was still called Christmas break in those days, the late 1970s) he thought long and hard about his poor performance. His parents were angry at him and threatened to withhold his tuition for his sophomore year if his grades did not improve. He began to notice tell tale signs that things were not quite as they seemed. He noticed a slow increase in the number of red signs in his neighborhood. When he asked his friends and relatives about this, no one else seemed to be aware of the creeping redness. Certain numbers began to appear with much more than the usual random frequency. He found that when he watched TV, the newscasters often had messages of special importance to him. After pointing this out on a few occasions and receiving dismissive responses, he realized that other people did not recognize what was happening. When he returned to school in the winter, things only got worse. He understood his classes perfectly well yet his professors failed him. His puzzlement grew. He knew he was extremely smart; he knew he was destined for great things. After all, he had been told how smart he was and how important he was going to be from the time he was a little boy. Why, he wondered over and over, would his professors try to thwart him?
Over the course of a week in March, he began to put all the pieces together:
He knew he had great things in store; he knew he was being thwarted. The "Ah-ha!" experience hit him one morning when he realized the opposition to him was an organized cadre of evil-doers who were dedicated to thwarting his plans. He alone knew how to save the world from its downward path, yet the forces of evil were fighting him at every step of the way. He went to the police, naively thinking they would help. They told him that without evidence of a crime against him they could not help. He returned a week later with voluminous, hand written notes "proving" the existence of a conspiracy. The police laughed and suggested he see a Doctor. He realized how foolish he had been to look to the authorities for help; they were in on it!
He began to cut classes, having more important things to take care of; his papers were all given failing grades and he realized he was in danger. He started to carry a knife; he noticed the conspiracy was growing; even his roommate was a part of it. He made one last attempt to warn people about their danger, making an impassioned speech in the middle of the student center. When the authorities tried to get him to leave, he knew they were going to kill him and pulled his knife. Luckily, no one was injured. That night, while in the Hospital emergency room it finally all came together. A pure voice of an angel whispered in his ear that he was Jesus Christ returned. His agitation faded and a look of innocence and peace came upon him.
This is a true story (which was put together after the fact), and a not untypical description, of the several months leading up to Michael's first Paranoid Schizophrenic psychotic episode. What was most painful was the desperation with which Michael clung to his self esteem while his life was unraveling around him. His initial problem was a difficulty in separating important data from irrelevant background noise. This kind of signal to noise disorder is often an early sign of cognitive dysfunction in Schizophrenia, well before any of the more dramatic symptoms appear. The problem made it impossible for Michael to function academically and he was left with the option of recognizing a serious problem within himself or finding an alternative explanation that preserved his sense of himself. Since the defense he used couldn't work long term, and his illness was progressive, he had to invent increasingly convoluted and irrational explanations for his ongoing problems. His delusions made him feel better in the short run; by imaging he was Jesus Christ he could avoid the knowledge that his mind was severely damaged and his future was clouded, yet he could not hope to ever function at a higher level unless he eventually found a way to face reality. The price of dealing with reality was a post-psychotic depression (this is the period when first break Schizophrenics are most at risk of suicide.) Unfortunately, in the 1970s the treatments for Schizophrenia were almost as impairing as the illness; this has gotten much better but it is still a devastating illness. In most cases, if the illness can be treated before the overt break, the person does much better and can actually hope for a near normal life.
What occurs in young people with Schizophrenia seems to have an analogue with nations and clans. The left has become increasingly unhinged in reaction their increasing marginalization. Richard Landes does an exemplary job in The “Left” Takes on the Qana Affair: Fisking the Daily Kos. His entire post is worth reading to see how a bright person can twist his mind into knots to avoid even questioning his basic assumptions. Richard ends with a summation and an important question:
But what remains with me most after reading this piece is:
the knee-jerk incredulity at the possibility that the major news agencies might have been fooled — by Arab photographers and stringers no less!
the incredulity that someone of another political persuasion might have caught something that someone of my political persuasion did not
the sense that the larger political agendas determine what smintheus [the Daily Kos commenter Richard fisked-SW] and his friends believe
the notion that name-calling is a substitute for argumentation, and that if the author calls people the nasty names, then I don’t have to go read what they say.And in the end, as they rub their hands in combined agony and glee, clucking over how Israel’s crimes have intensified global jihadi sentiments around the world, they protect one of the major sources of our woe: a deeply irresponsible media.
Tragedy amplified by smug partisanship.
But where does this smug hostility come from? What on earth possesses smenthius and his friends to think they know what’s going on in Lebanon? I guess, when it tells them what they want to hear, they believe the MSM. My question is, why is this what you want to hear?
When your entire world view is at risk, when an admission of even the most minor fact that is in contradiction to your perceptual scaffold is taken as an existential danger, then you will forced into the most untenable positions in order to hold onto your sense of yourself.
Those who gleefully attack Israel for its disproportionate response, for committing genocide, or collective punishment against the victim Lebanese, must simultaneously believe the Israelis are evil monsters bent on genocide, super human military villains, and spectacularly inept at the murderous warfare they are accused of. It doesn't add up and it damages one's critical facilities to continue to believe such nonsense.
The press, meanwhile, caught up in their need for dramatic stories, lends themselves as tools to some of the most vicious, overtly genocidal, anti-Semitic forces on the planet. They must know that they are aiding their own enemies; they know that Hezbollah carefully controls and crafts their every move for the media, and they even admit it in unguarded moments, yet they manage to completely leave this context out of their reports. Is this anti-Semitism? Ineptness? Evil? Noah Pollack believes that the press may have started out without any particular anti-Israel bias but has been skillfully used by Hezbollah, just as the Palestinians have used the press for so long, to wage their media war against Israel. Tom Gross suggests they have descended from anti-Semitism to a frenzied level of viciousness while ignoring the fact that they are next:
But this is far from being an exclusively Jewish issue. Some international journalists seem to find it amusing or exciting to bait the Jews. They don’t understand yet that Hezbullah is part of a worldwide radical Islamist movement that has plans, and not pleasant ones, for all those — Moslem, Christian, Hindu and Jew — who don’t abide by its wishes.
AJ Strata points out that Democrats Have Drunk The Kool Aid:
The one third of America which calls itself ‘liberal’ and ’strong democrat’ can now also be classified as ‘not working with a full deck’, because these people have bought into the BDS hallucination that 9-11 was an inside job. Proof from a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll just out.
More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. ...
These are the same 30% who vote against everything conservative or moderate or Republican. They are the same 30% who hate Israel and Bush and are grateful for the media co-dependants who exposed our terrorist surveillance programs. They are the same 30% who would rather leave Iraq to Osama Bin Laden and Impeach Bush and Cheney. ...
It is amazing that all these people are just incapable of adjusting to an America that has moved beyond their shrill, failed liberal ideas and, instead of attempting to be relevant decide to go delusional - big time. They have truly drunk the Kool Aid. What the reporting doesn’t note is while these minorities are living in a wierdo fantasy, 64% do not in general believe this silliness. 64-36 is what political watchers call a route.
The Arab world is famous for their paranoid conspiracy theorizing about the supermen of America and Israel. S, C & A does a masterful job describing their downward arc in Useless Ceasfires And The Tragedy Of The Unter-Menschen.
There are many similarities between the Arab/Muslim world and the world of the left and their allies in the media. All three clans have failed, and failing, models of the world. The modern world has repudiated communism almost completely and is well on the way to repudiating traditional welfare state liberalism; the media is facing a frightening environment where they no longer have a monopoly on information and its dissemination and are having significant difficulty adjusting to the change; the Islamist world view has been stagnant for 1400 years but only now has the contrast between the modern world and their failure become inescapable. Israel, to a large extent, and America in a much greater way, are the messengers of their doom and they are becoming increasingly shrill and delusional in their agitated and panicky attempts to maintain their sense of themselves as important.
As for the title of this post. Philip K. Dick, whose books I began reading in high school, in his own paranoia and disorientation, described what happens when the inmates run the asylum, though he left out one salient issue. While I last read Clans of the Alphane Moon almost 40 years ago, it has stayed with me ever since. And what did Philip K. Dick leave out? In Clans of the Alphane Moon, the inmates did not have nuclear weapons.
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