I largely agree with the above. However, I would express a caution on the line of thinking that says, “nobody else realizes how sick they are.” The world has heard that line of thinking before from people who claimed to be the world’s only hope for clear thinking and healthy minds.
One such was Wilhelm Reich. Reich believed that he had unified two conflicting “scientific” theories of his day: Freudian personality theory and Marxist economics. He believed that he had discovered the common cause of physical, mental, and social disorders in the form of “character armor”, or muscular and mental tension generated by sexual repression. And for this he was driven out of two countries. (Admittedly, the first was Nazi Germany, which wasn’t so big on his advocacy for sexual liberation or his Marxism.)
And that was all before he came to the belief that the cure for these disorders was the blue energy field he called “orgone”; that he could cure cancer and depression and bad weather with devices made with layers of organic and inorganic material; and that when the FDA came around to get him to stop selling quack medical devices, that they were attempting to assert governmental authority over primordial energy forces.
My point: Watch out for the “nobody else realizes how sick they are” mentality. At least sometimes, it points down the cult attractor.
Oh, sure. Reich was pretty good on much of his analysis of authoritarian personality, for instance, and anticipated later work by Fromm, Adorno, and others. But after half a lifetime of actually being persecuted, he apparently lost the ability to say “oops” and went paranoid.
Bayesian rationality, cognitive science, and AI have better math and better data about the mind than early-20th-century psychoanalysts or late-19th-century economists. But we still have to watch out for death spirals.
I largely agree with the above. However, I would express a caution on the line of thinking that says, “nobody else realizes how sick they are.” The world has heard that line of thinking before from people who claimed to be the world’s only hope for clear thinking and healthy minds.
One such was Wilhelm Reich. Reich believed that he had unified two conflicting “scientific” theories of his day: Freudian personality theory and Marxist economics. He believed that he had discovered the common cause of physical, mental, and social disorders in the form of “character armor”, or muscular and mental tension generated by sexual repression. And for this he was driven out of two countries. (Admittedly, the first was Nazi Germany, which wasn’t so big on his advocacy for sexual liberation or his Marxism.)
And that was all before he came to the belief that the cure for these disorders was the blue energy field he called “orgone”; that he could cure cancer and depression and bad weather with devices made with layers of organic and inorganic material; and that when the FDA came around to get him to stop selling quack medical devices, that they were attempting to assert governmental authority over primordial energy forces.
My point: Watch out for the “nobody else realizes how sick they are” mentality. At least sometimes, it points down the cult attractor.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that a crank believed something does not make it false.
And anyway, I think “nobody else realizes how sick they are” is a pretty basic restatement of “people are crazy, the world is mad.”
Except for the “else” term.
Oh, sure. Reich was pretty good on much of his analysis of authoritarian personality, for instance, and anticipated later work by Fromm, Adorno, and others. But after half a lifetime of actually being persecuted, he apparently lost the ability to say “oops” and went paranoid.
Bayesian rationality, cognitive science, and AI have better math and better data about the mind than early-20th-century psychoanalysts or late-19th-century economists. But we still have to watch out for death spirals.
So, someone trying to cure all diseases with a blue energy field is evidence that people generally aren’t crazy?