Asylum
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After the Jordan Neely murder—after all similar events, of which there will be many more—the right calls for the homeless and “the mental” to be locked up in asylums. “Asylums work!” they chant—and it’s probably because they read the same article on the Heritage Foundation website by Theodore Dalrymple (a Jewish psychiatrist who pretends to be an 18th-century English aristocrat—while we’re on the subject of “sanity” and messing with people’s heads) that said asylums worked, more or less.
Ergo, all schizos, psychos, dirty old men, cat ladies, and smelly jabberers in made-up tongues need to be swept up into the psych wards to protect “normal” society (so-called).
You say it because despite your self-conceptualisation as an “aristocrat of the soul” or “Nietzschean overman” in conflict with “soft liberalism”, you are, in fact, in hock to what “media I regard as high-status” tells you to think. Well, I am an aristocrat of my arsehole and I have some views about asylums.
I will save my famous name, a real ace-in-the-hole, until later, lest I just make an appeal to authority—but let me assure you, I have a tip-top name on my side in this argument.
I’ll speak straight from personal experience, since this is really about the politics of experience. On this site I relate experiences that include (but are not limited to):
encounters with invisible 7-foot-tall entities that bellowed at me;
stars that fell from the sky and engaged in autonomous movement;
invisible hooves that beat on my head;
star-like lights that appeared at the end of a field and disappeared when I approached;
lights that played musical notes to me in an unearthly dirge;
lights that could read my mind;
—and, for good measure, I also discuss the reality of Satan, the influence of the Jews on world affairs, claim that a voice from beyond I call “Horus” tells me what to do, and I also create posts in a made-up language that I claim comes from an ancient Irish goddess trapped in a mortal body.
Now, taken together, if I was brought before a psychiatrist, if I had acted up in some way—been in a fight with a relative where I swore a lot and slammed doors and said they were “Satanic” and they called the police on me, for example—then I could easily be diagnosed as schizophrenic and, depending on how physical I had been, considered to suffer from repeated psychotic episodes where I am not in contact with reality.
Repercussions could include, even under “unbearable liberalism”: forced confinement, suspension of all my rights, and compulsory medication—all for an indefinite period until a psychiatrist judged I had developed “insight” into my condition (which means, in fact, to recant what I experienced and say it wasn’t “really real”).
When they spoke to my family they would say, “Well, he does spend a lot of time on his own, he’s become very reclusive.” Again, a classic prodromal for schizophrenia—so the noose would tighten with words from my own relatives, their words being in line with certain psychiatric diagnoses.
As it happens, I am in a privileged position because if that happened to me I could say to the psychiatrist, “For me, these things are totally real but I understand that consensus reality holds these are not real or unlikely to be real,” and then he couldn’t do anything to me because I had demonstrated insight into my condition, whereas “mad” people don’t have that insight. I could show him various books on magic and say, “This is what I believe, this is my culture, I know it’s not everyone’s culture but this is how I express my culture in its religious dimension.”
This would satisfy the psychiatrist—I can justify even my wildest and most outrageous statements. I can say, “Look, I know this is not how everyone talks, but this is why I said it,” and then the psychiatrist would relent. Note that in order to be released I would have to be political—I would have to compromise. If I sat in the office and said, “Look, this is reality. This is objective reality—all these things happened like I’m sitting here talking to you now; and, further, the fact I’m even here is Satanic—you’re Satanic,” then I would run a high risk that I would be committed and drugged for an indefinite period.
Most people who end up in psychiatric hospitals do not have the privilege to do that. Experiences happen to them and they either cannot explain those events in a way that makes sense to a psychiatrist or just insist on the reality of “the voices” with no insight—or, you could say that they refuse to be political and lie about it (i.e. they are honest). These people have no chance—they are in the system, the system will eat them (to various degrees).
To escape I would have had to compromise—in other words, what psychiatry does is exactly what the left does: it says there is no objective reality (except, as with liberalism, the implicit reality of psychiatry). Hence a Muslim will be committed if he insists “a jinn told me to kill my wife” but released if he says “I believe that a jinn told me to kill my wife but that is just how my culture interprets these things, my condition”. It’s the same as liberal multiculturalism: every culture is celebrated so long as it instantiates liberal values—in others words, psychiatry and multiculturalism are both double-binds.
You can say a jinn spoke to you so long as you say “it’s my interpretation of a voice I heard”—but if you say “a jinn told me to do it”, you’re sunk (i.e. if you say it’s real); although the official line is “you’re allowed to be religious”. But, in fact, you’re not—not if you insist these experiences are real and that “a voice” guides you. That is *insanity*.
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This is bad because psychiatry is the least scientific field in medical science—despite its massive coercive powers over people. The top minds don’t go into it because there’s no glory in it and no money in it because there basically aren’t any cures in it—and people hate “mental illness” and the “mentally ill” because people hate and punish (in a deniable way, ha-ha-ha paranoia) difference; and these people are very different—and that is why, oh my Nietzschean overmen, you hate Jordan Neely, because he was different and when you see someone who has really “left the herd” you want to kill him, just like all the other apes do (for you are an ape too).
Hence the people who do go into psychiatry—the lowest of all medical disciplines—are often frustrated novelists (Dalrymple) or priests (RD Laing); they’re either on the look out for material for “that novel” or just too emotional to be a surgeon who uses a laser scalpel to initial a patient’s liver (don’t worry, he’s a professional—he’s totally sane).
The right expresses scepticism about vaccines—yet, compared to psychiatry, the Covid-19 vaccine is a masterpiece of efficacy and total knowledge. The reality is that psychiatrists know almost nil about how the mind works—they are nowhere near penicillin or even the vaccine in comparative terms (the latter of which we have had since the 18th century, remember—there were Bostonians up in arms about compulsory vaccines in the 1770s).
Yet the right is perfectly happy to endorse the forced committal of “the mad”—where does your faith in this science come from, ye who routinely mock the idea that there is such a thing as “climate change”? Indeed, I’m not sure that “the climate science” isn’t on sounder foundations than psychiatry itself at this stage.
Do you really want to put yourself in the hands of that nitwit Scott Alexander? Some miserable bastard who lives in a polycule in San Francisco and writes pretentious whines on his blog? That’s what psychiatry is—these people are moral and spiritual retards. Their raison d’etre is to destroy experience—they have the personality of a mashed packet of bran flakes (grey and chewy); and, quite often, per Alexander and Peterson, they’re a bundle of neurosis and misery themselves—the other motivation to be involved in mental health is that you’re miserable and you want to know why (physician, heal thyself!).
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It’s asinine mainstream conservatives that tell you that “right-wing values” are about a high GDP, low taxes, the removal of dirty “mad” people from the corporate plaza, and unlimited subsidies for Israel (there he is again, paranoid repetitive thoughts about the Jews—another sign and symptom).
The Arabs used to say, as regards the mad, “Be kind, he is with God.” It is my view—another non-standard view—that the schizophrenic state is analogous to the shamanic experience of old, and is akin to the “mirror-mind” cultivated by Buddhist monks. The schizoid state, where there is no cause-and-effect relation and where communication takes a cryptic sing-song form is close the shamanic traditions—to the pun tradition of the Grail, to the musical world of the Golden Age. This is why schizos often attract paranormal experiences.
I read about a schizophrenic who was in a field and saw a “silver worm” fall from the sky and felt the owls and foxes spoke to him—I’ve seen similar things, the difference is I haven’t been psychiatrically committed. Yet the experience is illustrative—why does nobody see visions of the Virgin Mary anymore? Why does nobody speak to Pan? Why does nobody see the saints march through the heavens?
Have you considered they’re all institutionalised? Have you considered that “the machine”—problem-solving techno-science is “Satan”? It destroys intricate patterns that exist for their own sake—the soul, the spirit, the divine. The way it destroys the religious in modernity is called “psychiatry”.
As it happens, Neely was killed by a robo-man—a Marine who was programmed to kill and when he experienced certain stimuli found his training activated and killed Neely. Marines are like that—I spoke to one about his training and he said, “They wind you up and when you go…you go.” You worry about AI? Too late—the robots have been here for centuries. You can’t feel angry about it because the Marine has no real control over his actions—he’s just a machine for the system; for the real masters, the autonomous decision-makers. Reflex-action.
Given this state, the fact that people can be institutionalised because “they saw a worm fall from heaven” amounts to the criminalisation of the religious experience—in particular, of the mystic experience. How can it be right-wing to support such a state? Secularists often speak smugly of the fact that the Abrahamic religions only exist because “Jerusalem lacked a lunatic asylum at the time”—well, I think the story of Jesus happened pretty much as accounted; but perhaps it never would have—if a psychiatrist had locked him up first (“a voice called ‘my Father’ told me to whip them from the Temple…” It’s not a good look—Jesus didn’t have much insight into his condition…).
The call to imprison “the mad” is about risk-aversion—it’s a typical leftist health-and-safety take on the issue. We can’t risk these dirty people walking about screaming “CH-HA-Kch-SATan—SATan”—it is not scientific, not tidy and anti-sceptic, not permissible. Someone might get hurt—which was why we were in lockdown for Covid for so long, of course. Besides, we *know* Satan doesn’t exist—everybody knows that nowadays, science has proved…
Bullshit! I say we should take the risk—just like we should let companies fail, just like we should let people own guns, just like we should let people drink unpasteurised milk. Who are we to police their experiences? To make them compromise on what they saw with their own eyes—to deny themselves, to perjurer themselves on pain of compulsory medication and indefinite detention? Perhaps the Church—or, today, the scientific authorities—holds that such things are *not possible* but so it was said about a great many scientific discoveries and expeditions to climb mountains and the space program and so on…
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The problem is that people lie a lot—the worst lies are the lies told with silence. For example, I once had dinner with my uncle and his new wife and my father and my step-mother, and my uncle’s new wife called me a “wanker” practically to my face but just barely indirectly. Later, on the phone, I said to my father “like when x called me a wanker” and he just blanked me and pretended the phone reception went.
He worked in corporate management—and they’re all like that, all the top policemen and generals and politicians and managers; they all run it like that, it’s all negotiation and being politique—the game they play is *silent blank* so you get really angry and hit them or they have you committed because you’re mad “he was shouting something about ‘x’, I didn’t really understand, doctor—but we’re very concerned...”.
Due to the way people work, people will just say “that’s your fucked-up family, never happens in my family—we’re totally normal”; except that’s just a defence mechanism (splitting and projection) and to do with assertion of dominance over me because this expresses vulnerability (which is always punished)—and also because it’s too real, and so must be pushed away with the edge of your toe. But all families are like that (I had a similar *blank* with an uncle on the other side too, another management type—for the state, not corporations)—it’s all Hamlet and Lear all the way down, basically.
RD Laing had a similar anecdote about a woman who walked in on her husband having sex with another woman on the living room sofa—she screamed and ran out, but when she came back her husband said “What woman?” and denied it until his wife was psychiatrically committed because her hold on reality broke down. Basically, things can happen right in front of your face and other people say—“I didn’t see anything. What do you mean? Are you mad?”.
It is all like that—and then people wonder why nobody thinks God exists or the saints don’t exist or the gods and so on. Because you have no idea how pervasive the lies are—and, in particular, these lies which are not lies but [[[ ]]]], if you get my drift (not to be too schizo); you know, this way, particularly a problem with men actually, where you plead the 5th (but never say that’s what you’re doing—the question is just absorbed into the blank). Hence: total deception in the human monkey colony—and this is what the real cover-up looks like, not orchestrated from a committee room but all these implicit silences.
It’s to do with control—you can almost see the control nexus in a person when you speak to them. It’s the conscious game-player that wants to make you look good and “get that bastard where I want him” and goes on about “how it’s so unfair all this happened to me”—it’s always there, always plotting (in the dark against your fellow man). “You can’t say that to me—don’t you know who I am!”, “I’ve got him where I want him now and he doesn’t know—ha, ha; ha, ha!”. It’s behind the murder, lies, and greed. It’s why you shouldn’t think about anything you do (it’s why techno-science is so ugly and why we’re destroying the planet for greed—all calculation, all thought, all selfishness).
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Anyway, the situation is even more ironic when you realise that the official state doctrine holds that there are no differences between men and women, that men and women can swap sexes, that white people don’t exist (French, British etc don’t exist), and all manner of other highly debatable ideas—and that to say otherwise constitutes “madness” or, perhaps, “hatefulness” (though if you transported anyone from another time period to now it would be another story—they would say we’re mad). Should such authorities be trusted to determine who is and who is not “mad”?
L. Ron Hubbard was wrong about most things, but the Scientologists are right about psychiatry—it is highly dubious (Satanic, really—like the Scientologists say). To play my trump card, it was Enoch Powell—reactionary icon—who closed the asylums in Britain and freed the lunatics to walk the land. Asylums are a modern invention—they come in with the Enlightenment, with “the age of reason”, and with Victorian prudery.
Sure, it’s not like in the old days you had Wilf the village idiot who walked the lanes and went “tra-la-leee-tra-la-laaa, old mother Hubbard has a bone in the stew, crew—few?” and acted as a human scarecrow to be useful—no, it is a guy stripped to the waste jerking up and down among the grease-stained brown McDonald’s bags on the underground; it’s hot, it’s summer—you’re packed in three deep on the commute, it doesn’t seem like divine madness to you. Well, that’s the price of liberty.
The right has always been “mad”—Thatcher was a mad hag, a witch; and, notoriously, Hitler was a “carpet-biter”. All the way back to the Orphic rites there has been a notion that there is such a thing as divine madness—daemonic madness—and this is always associated with genius (the genius is your genie—genius, daemon). It is the right that defends the inspired “mad genius”—it is the left that wants to lock him up in an asylum.