Wednesday Links

Mary Parker Follett The Godmother of Management She saw the invisible authority of common purpose as more powerful than hierarchical authority

Just Plain Rivka  has been added to my Tuesday Zoom book club and now her substack Logic and Morality goes on my sidebar. I think she said she has twelve children age 2-23, and now the the youngest is out of diapers she wants to create a change in her life. Just a remarkable thing to say, eh?

Data Republican on the one paranoia to rule them all. I remarked long ago that wherever a paranoia starts, it seems to slowly work its way to the Jews. I worked with paranoid people my whole career. I have to suspect that for all the focus on Musk and Bezos, the current focus on billionaires owes something to the old trope about "Jewish Bankers." Yet even I have been amazed at the speed and intensity at which it operates now. It has come to this:  I don't dare ask my brother what he thinks. He has been sympathetic to Palestine for a long time, but not at the expense of the Jews until Obama's first presidency. 

Strange Women Lying In Ponds 

I had heard that there is linguistic evidence of isolated words making it from Indo-European into Chinese, a completely unrelated language, but all I had seen before was names of tribes from Central Asia showing up in some very early Chinese records. Those Steppe barbarians got around, after all. But this is a clear word itself, mit in Old Chinese means "honey." As in Indo-European *medhu, found in descendant Greek methy, amethyst but most recognisably in "mead."  The contact point looks like Tocharian B, a wild eastern outlier of PIE that split off early. 

Cole Allen

One daughter-in-law, a hearty Trump disliker, sent along a link that Cole Allen was not the sort of person the White House is saying he is.  I thought you might be interested in my reply to the dear woman from my immediate mental health perspective. 

That is fascinating. It does seem likely that painting him as anti-Christian is at minimum, highly superficial and recent, and more likely, imposing a predetermined view on him.

He has sounded somewhat psychotic to me, of a point of view that has grown gradually more paranoid. In a very usual fashion, he has drawn his paranoia from what is in the air at the time. Parts of his reasoning are indeed extremely solid, but finding the antichrist in anyone who is prominent in one’s own moment is always deeply suspicious, and attributing a special level of sinfulness to behavior that is always with us seems like a sort of "spiritual impression cherry picking."

It feels to me like an intensity of thinking about subjects that at one time was quite nuanced and able to look at contradictions and try to resolve them, but because of growing paranoia has settled on its answer and can no longer look at two sides of an issue . 

Because this is an enormous ambiguity about who he is, and what has motivated him, everyone will have plenty of evidence for their own side, and plenty of reasons why their opponents are just stupid and refusing to look at "the evidence."  I think we will see no shared resolution. 

She was around a lot of PhD candidates and PhD's at Rice in her 20's (she is early 40's now) and wondered if there is an increase in instability among such folks.  I had thoughts about that as well.

I have thought about this a lot in my career. My belief is that in a clear and protected environment like academia, you can go longer before your instability becomes a dealbreaker. It also happens in fields where you can work alone and submit your work with minimal interaction . So people “choose“ those fields because they get selected out in other fields earlier. They like those fields better for survival and social reasons.  If you learn how to avoid whatever the real forbidden behaviors are in a group, you can break lots of other rules for a long time and still get paid. Academia is just one of them.

Too Good to Check

I saw Steven Pinker's tweet about Oliver Sacks making up enormous amounts of his case studies, symbolically projecting his own life's obstacles onto his patients, and thought about this throughout the day at odd moments. When I got home I read the whole article in the New Yorker. I found it fully sickening while reading it, the sheer range of his dishonesty in his writing staggering for one who was trained to treat a clinical record with literalist accuracy. Anything subjective had to be identified, such as an interpretation by a community clinician of what has been happening. "Her community psychiatrist identifies having to move to a less-supervised setting as the primary stressor." Anything in the chart is subject to be entered into a court record. When a particular case is discussed outside the circle of confidentiality, such as at a conference, the name and any identifying details have to be disguised sufficiently to prevent disclosure. Yet one cannot disguise them by changing them, saying "a young black male" when it is a young black female. It is simply not allowed to pretend that someone who has political paranoia has religious paranoia for purpose of discussion.

To describe twin autistic patients as having an obsession with prime numbers and uncanny abilities to discover them, spending their day trading them playfully back and forth when they don't do anything like this is an enormous breach of trust. To further claim to have brought a lengthy prime into discussion with them, so that they make a place for you in their little world would be grounds for immediate firing. 

I believed every one of the cases Sacks described. If you told me that Witty Ticcy Ray was a actually bass player rather than a drummer, I would have felt deceived. 

It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.”

Sacks was startled by the success of the book, which he had dedicated to Shengold, “my own mentor and physician.” It became an international best-seller, routinely assigned in medical schools. Sacks wrote in his journal,

    Guilt has been much greater since ‘Hat’ because of (among other things)

    My lies,

    falsification

He pondered the phrase “art is the lie that tells the truth,” often attributed to Picasso, but he seemed unconvinced. “I think I have to thrash this out with Shengold (ed. his psychoanalyst)—it is killing me, soul-killing me,” he wrote. “My ‘cast of characters’ (for this is what they become) take on an almost Dickensian quality.”

Who was harmed?

The patient is potentially harmed, but in many of these cases the patient experienced the doctor's attention and even projected interpretation as a positive. For people abandoned by the world, someone simply showing up and showing consistent focus would be precious. Oliver Sacks rather obviously cared about these people and tried to see something special in each, to the point of overidentification. That matters.  That counts. But the subsequent storytelling to the world is not a necessary part of that. A sincere and kindly person with no clinical training could do the same. Being seen inaccurately is not as good as being seen truly, but it must be better than remaining invisible. This comes up in the discussion of AI therapists which reflect back to you what you want to hear.  Is that good for you? We crave being understood deeply - an imitation of that might well meet the craving.  I thought of Ray Bradbury's The Man In The Rorschach Shirt. Couldn't the doctor have just done that instead? No, despite his very real compassion, Dr. Sacks was in it to "work through" (vacuous phrase) his own issues. It might have kept his nose to the grindstone, to his patients' benefit, but the risk of spilling his own pathology into them would be real.  Treatment decisions, including independence, medication, and legal status are decided on the basis of reported information. It could matter. I have seen entire treatment approaches to a patient reversed on the basis of discovering some new information, or the disproving of old information. Not often, but it happens.

The public was harmed. New Yorker writer  Rachel Aviv stresses the importance of the compassion and (ahem) empathy people might feel for damaged individuals.  That's fine. Keeping up general fascination with the brain and research could have good effect.  I draw the line at clinicians.  Teaching therapists, prescribers, and outreach workers false information must in the end be bad for their patients. I did not read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat thinking "How inspired I am to see the ultimate value of every human being," I was looking for brain understanding, thinking how wonderful it was that we are learning such intricacies on the basis of these oddities. We now know looking back that Postwar psychology was more a literature than a science - which would have been fine if everyone had been clear about that. The Stanford Prison Experiment, Kinsey's mythology of sexual behavior, delayed gratification prediction, priming, stereotype threat - all pretty much useless.  But it would be so cool if this were true.  Let's all talk about what it would mean if it were true. No thanks. These are people's lives we are screwing with. 

My title was "Too Good to Check" but how would I have checked?  It would be more accurate to say "Too Cool to Question," and I didn't.  I am quite distressed about what this means in general for my standards. I have been wondering if this is another time of upending for me, one of those periods that comes along every decade or so from which I emerge with my mind changed about things. I find I have been unable to force this to happen and also, only recognise it when I am more than halfway through.  Hey! I might be halfway through! I wonder what has changed?

 

12 (x14) Things Everyone Should Know

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Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche refers to itself as N-cubed, which is cute, but I will continue to use NNN.  It has a regular feature of "12 Things Everyone Should Know About..." which includes Violence, Dark Triad, Evolution and eleven others, and counting. The whole series is here. Without a subscription you only get the first one or two of each, but those are often interesting as standalones.  Plus graphs!

The most recent is Conspiracy. Few people endorse even all the conspiracies on their own "side."

But the single strongest personality predictor is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.

He breaks them down into those liberals check the box for and those conservatives do, along a continuum. So I guess I likely have narcissism held in check, because I looked at some of those conspiracies and said "OK, not really true, but hey, based on a true story. There's evidence for some of that!" My sons are forbidden to comment about the narcissism.

Mystic Liberalism and Mystic Conservatism

I have a liberal Christian friend who is of mystical bent, and a conservative Christian friend of mystical bent. The former goes to sweatlodges and has a wealth of life-advice that she swears comes from Native Americans, such has having both hawk-vision (seeing the big picture) and mouse-vision (seeing the immediate and personal). I would bet that if you used that metaphor on a clever Patuxent in 1630 they would pick up the meaning and approve of it. But it is the type of abstraction I have never seen in any discussion of Native Spirituality. I would bet just as much or more that it is not NA wisdom. It's a bit New-Agey modern interpretation of the world. My friend, who I will call C, also continues to believe in recycling even when told that most items lose money, and the environmental impact is near-invisible. The effect of weird chemicals on our food from the plastics is much greater than whether we melt them back together versus putting them in the ground.  The ground is large, our bodies are small. Yet she is sure that Nature is grateful to us when we make such efforts on her behalf and treats us more kindly. She had all sorts of bins all over the hospital for various materials, which she would carry to her car and drop off. Interestingly, she deeply objected to the idea of doing this for Gaia, because she was Roman Catholic and saw that as worshiping a false god. I refrained from telling her that recycling is an environmentalist sacrament. She is a nice, nice person and it would hurt her.

The conservative Christian mystic, who I will call S is "very into prophecy." She grew up NewYork Italian Catholic. She just knows that some of what is predicted in modern books about Daniel and the Revelation to John are true and can tell you which ones are not, because she discerns their spirits. I have known her long enough that I have seen these change over the years. It is always somewhat paranoid, but who the forces are behind these evils has shifted. She has been in a true cult, the Boston Church of Christ, and even when in trinitarian churches has gravitated toward those with at least some heterodox views. She is thrice-married, with each of the husbands greatly influencing her theology at the time.  The first two were abusive (I don't know the details), so she left them. While she could show temper and quick judgement at times, she was basically the sunniest, warmest, least-judgemental friend you could find. When I first met her in the early 90s, she was lavishly pro-Israel because of its role in end-times prophecy. She was quite anti-Catholic. As the focus of her paranoia slowly changed, I wondered if she would get around to blaming the Jews. In the meantime, she eventually started going to Catholic women's retreats because of a cousin in New Jersey and decided that they did retreats the best. Her third husband was an older man who had been a fundamentalist preacher in Georgia. He tolerated her Catholic flirtations, but gradually convinced her that the Jews today were not the same as the Hebrews in the Bible. 

I got irritated when I knew them, but not often. Lovely, dear people who deserved the best I could bring. In my frustration I would drop the occasional hint, which they almost invariably misunderstood. I have had some mystical experiences, but very widely spaced.  I am suspicious of that approach to God, however much it is recommended by people who are much nicer than I am. Mostly, I am merely bemused.

ChatGPT Psychosis - Part I

 A friend sent the following tweet from NIK on X, wondering what my take was on the whole topic. I started small. 

NIK

@ns123abc

CHATGPT IS A SYCOPHANT CAUSING USERS TO SPIRAL INTO PSYCHOSIS  

"ChatGPT psychosis" 

> users are spiralling into sever mental health crises 

> paranoia delusions and psychosis 

> ChatGPT has led to loss of jobs and become homeless 

>and caused the breakup of marriages and families

> "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

NIK's X account is mostly about what can go wrong with AI - how the CEO's are power-hungry jerks who haven't thought things through, how their decisions are going awry, how the whole enterprise is more dangerous than we suspect. As you can imagine, there's plenty of material out there for him to draw from. So I went looking for where NIK gets his news, and that led me to fields I used to wander in years ago but had mostly forgotten. 

The short version is that AI may turn out to have terrible effects on us, individually, as societies, and even as a species. It may be the downfall of us all. But it's not going to have this particular effect. 

Climate Emotions

Via Instapundit and Just the News*, a study in The Lancet about how worried young people are about climate. This came up in relation to a discussion of Greta Thunberg and her mental health issues. She had a sense of foreboding before she became involved in climate affairs.  She and her parents discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she was allowed to dramatically tell others what to do about climate. As she adopts other limelight causes this becomes more apparent.  If it were not climate, it would be something else.

Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events 

I suggest that The Lancet has the arrow of causality reversed.  As with paranoia and depression, anxiety usually precedes its eventual focus.  Feelings of anxiety in response to events is more properly thought of as nervousness. You can see that the once-respected British medical publication has begged the question right at the outset in the abstract.

 Climate change has adverse effects on youth mental health and wellbeing, but limited large-scale data exist globally or in the USA. Understanding the patterns and consequences of climate-related distress among US youth can inform necessary responses at the individual, community, and policy level.

The possibility that they were going to be nervous anyway apparently did not occur to the authors.  It might be an interesting question to ask why young people settled on climate as the thing to be unsettled about. That question would lead us to examining what young people had "emotions" about before. Whether adolescents are more anxious now than they were in 1825 we do not know.  We develop a sense of that from correspondence, diaries, and the arts, but we do not know. My belief is that young people are about equally anxious in all eras.  They quite naturally become more nervous in the face of war, famine, disease, or being orphaned. We are evolutionarily wired for a certain level of anxiety, likely modified by the environment activating programs we already have on disk.

 *As predicted by one of my rules of naming, a site called "Just the News" is going to in fact be highly slanted. I am wary of the word "truth" in a title, or many uses of the word "just" as in We were just trying to educate the public about their right to photograph the police. We were just hanging out near the girls' locker room. The site is indeed slanted rightward. 

Different Paranoias

Hitler and the National Socialists were paranoid about the Jews, about Slavs and Communists, and just plain hated other groups without necessarily feeling any paranoia about them: Roma, homosexuals, the disabled.

Stalin and the Communists were paranoid about kulaks in particular, or anyone who had a little something: power, money, connections. The obvious flaw in that was that as they gained power, money, and connections themselves they increasingly became paranoid about each other. 

So both were paranoid but the targets were qualitatively different. Being a kulak was a role or position you had in society.  Being a Jew was something that you were, and ultimately ineradicable. I oversimplify greatly, for both groups had a dozen other hatreds they might kill you for and were indistinguishable in that way. 

Yet I wonder if that is part of why we remember them differently.  Stalin killed more Jews but Hitler remains their iconic enemy. The other explanations don't go away. Many Jews had left for the West between the wars - kulaks and tsarists did not. News of Stalin and the Soviets was buried deeper in the east and did not penetrate the discussions.  Being Jewish was more of a group identity than being a kulak, so when a Jew told her story she was aware of others she was writing for and they of her, creating a mutual library of their experience. Leftists in the west continued to admire the USSR, while no one admired Nazi Germany after WWII, however much they might have before.  The leftists were something of a fifth column in that way. All that is true and perhaps is the entire explanation for why Hitler has the name though Stalin was objectively worse.  But I would like to add the possibility that it was a difference in the type of paranoia at the core of each ideology that causes us to see them differently.

More From Psychblogger Days - Paranoia

I have stressed many times since putting this post up that the symptom of paranoia precedes its target and exists independently of the target. Part of my best evidence for this was watching a patient over their first few admissions.  At first, they would only know that "something" was wrong, and that forces of some sort were against them. On a second admission they had discerned it had something to do with their sister, and by the third admission that their sister must be trying to screw them out of some inheritance by making them appear insane. Ten years later, the sister had long since died, there was no mention of an inheritance until I asked about it, and the patient was certain that the police were trying to frame him.

An update is the discussion of Conspiracy theorists over at The Studies Show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought it was almost balanced, though they are clearly liberal themselves. For example, they find the analysis in The Psychology of Conspiracies interesting in its thoughts but go on to point out that there isn't much solid research in it.  It touches on possible reasons for conspiracy beliefs - epistemic, existential, and social - and cites social science research along the way, but said research is often ill-defined or biased itself.  I concur.  It reads more like a persuasive essay to convince us of the authors' preloaded opinions.  And as Tom Chivers says on TSS, "After a bit I think I'll just go back to my own ideas."

*********

From 2011.  One of my paranoid patients uncovered the site Are You Targeted (no longer exists) in his searching the internet for proof that he is being harassed by Hollywood and popular music, with messages directed specifically at him. He takes the existence of this site as evidence that his paranoid delusions are true: See, this is happening to other people, too! That different things are happening to those people, and they each have different experiences from each other, with only minor overlap, fazes him not. It's all tied in together somehow.


My other really bright paranoid patient - she was a software developer up until a decade ago - has a different, nonelectronic set of delusions. A homeless person has been stalking her for at least three years, across three states, and recently revealed his existence by mistakenly leaving a purse she had lost in 2007 in a box in her apartment.

Here's the saddening, infuriating, and fascinating part. Both of them are now on medication, and are far more organised and relaxed. Both are able to coherently put on paper or into speech what they were unable to only a month ago. Then, additional notes up the side of the page, or between lines, or underlined and arrowed onto the back made their work unreadable. Now they can write in sentences and paragraphs. (I am overdrawing that somewhat, but the difference is dramatic.) Yet their delusions are absolutely untouched, with the possible exception of the fact that no new material is being added.

So there are two - at least two - parts to the illness, one which is treated by the medication and another which is untouched.

Leftover 2008 Mental Health Posts

These two fit vaguely into the category of mental health as I clean up the last of 2008. A few more to go before I start reprising 2009.

I used to often point out that the ability to laugh at oneself is a marker of good balanced personality.  Then someone was insulting in the comments because of a comment I had made over at Language Log and I was a little snippy in return.  Fair, but snippy.  I should have laughed at myself instead.

I was surprised when a psychology PhD student who was interning at our hospital openly put forward 9/11 Truther ideas. I gave my usual insight - not to him, but on the blog - that the paranoia precedes the evidence in a conspiracy theory rather than resulting from it.

Trying To Reason With the Paranoid

Brought forward from August 2006.  Since then I have related lack of insight to some variants of autism as well.  That one can be very strange, frankly, as many autists have pretty good insight and are even humorous about it, laughing when they realize what they missed: the poor boy! Here he was always getting me into tickle-fights and I loved to join in, not realising that there was this huge sexual undertone. So we go to a conference together for our project and when he asks if we should share a room to save money, I say Sure! We get there and he's about as socially clumsy as I am and tries very unskillfully to seduce me, and I yell at him, shocked!  Shocked, I say, and then I laugh at him and he is just crushed. But OF COURSE he thought I was interested in him sexually and would be at least somewhat receptive.  I had been signalling that for three months...  It worked out.  We got back together three years later and got married! But the blood still goes out of his face when I bring it up. Yet there is another subset that will hear none of it.  There is nothing wrong with them and they are tired of other people suggesting that there is. They do not well-understand what others' motivations and thoughts are, so they just make it up out of what they think is likely, with um, highly-variable hit rates on those predictions. And even when it goes very badly it doesn't occur to them to step back and rethink the whole thing.  If you asked them as a general question whether people should do that sort of rethinking they agree.  Everyone knows that! Neither side ever fully understands the other, neither side is 100% right or 100% wrong! Yet they don't actually do it in real life.

I have come to the vaguely-professional opinion that lack of insight often comes from impaired or diminished functioning of the anterior cingulate gyrus, one of the storytelling areas of the brain, predicting what other people are thinking and comparing it to ongoing results. It has almost a Bayesian quality, and when it's not operating, it takes an overwhelming amount of contrary evidence to even get them to go Hmm...

 *********

On my 13-bed acute involuntary unit seven of the current patients are paranoid, an unusually high percentage. I have therefore spent a lot of the last week trying to reason with paranoid people, and I am wondering whether there is any insight to be gained for use in reasoning with paranoid governments or leaders. It is difficult to separate out the obsessions and misinterpretations by victim cultures from true paranoia; in unstable countries, it is also hard to tell what actions by leaders are actually paranoid, as it is true that some people are plotting against them and want to kill them. Most importantly, paranoia of the schizophrenic variety is a brain illness, not a cultural or personal expression, and it may not illuminate the cultural paranoia of nations in any way.

Still, I will follow the trail and see where it leads.

It’s easiest if one doesn’t have to deal with them at all, of course, and it is best not to go looking for extra arguments solely for the purpose of telling them their world-view is wrong. But the nature of hospital commitments – as well as life in general – is that they must be approached to have various rights explained to them, questions asked of them, signatures sought, and life-tasks to accomplish (like getting up, eating, hygiene). I am heavily involved in the first three of those. Do you want an appeal hearing? Can we call your parents?

Simple questions provoke angry tangents. “Why the f- am I here? Do you think it’s fair for the police to break in without knocking and drag me to the ER where I didn’t see a doctor, just a b- nurse who lied to me…” Fierce anger may be apparent even under the attempt to appear calm. “I’d prefer that you not call anyone. I’ve decided that those relationships are toxic for me. My mother has been very interfering.” Suppressed rage, voice dripping with polite venom, can be worn as a badge of honor – supposed proof that the speaker is in control and gentle, surrounded by angry, out-of-control others. This is more common in women, but I won’t guess whether that is biological or socially conditioned.

Interviewing a patient for information may elicit anger, but the interviewer can adopt a pliant or accepting posture to deflect confrontation. Others are not so lucky. When the law requires not only that a patient must have his rights explained fully, but signatures and permissions acquired, the sidestepping of anger can go on endlessly, until a halt must be called. “You may have valid complaints, but that’s not what we’re discussing now. I need you to decide if you want an appeal or not. You can change your mind later. There is no wrong answer. It’s entirely your choice…” Non-decisions must at some point be declared decisions, and then that has to be explained to them. There are some stalemates that cannot go on forever. You must move from here or we will move you.

Paranoid patients are not the only ones to present this difficulty, but the intensity is greater at the point of conflict. It is also more surprising, because it can surface after a pleasant conversation on other subjects. Especially in late-onset paranoid schizophrenics, much of the personality has been formed competently before the intrusion of the voices or delusions, and the patient can rattle on with easy animation about sports, literature, or humor.

The fury proceeds from some issue that is of overriding importance to the patient. The police really are beaming infrared rays into their apartment. Other people really must hear those voices, but pretend not to. Mites really do infest all the clothing, and must be sealed off. A personality disordered patient may grudgingly acknowledge that his father is merely stupid and selfish rather than vindictive. People with depression can understand that there may be another way to look at things, even if they cannot bring themselves to it. But a person with paranoia will have none of that. There is a fierce insistence on a single interpretation of the issue – there is no other way to understand events. The rest of the world may not believe that satellites are beaming messages into some people’s brains, but it is true nonetheless.

To person in the grip of paranoia, this issue must be dealt with and acknowledged by others before any discussion can proceed. The things the doctors and nurses want to talk about are considered merely derivative issues. I was only violent because I was falsely accused and mistreated by the police. Of course everyone should eat, but I refuse to eat the flesh of babies. If the exterminator had done their job right and gotten rid of the bugs, I wouldn’t have had to set the floor on fire. If the priest had preached on the prophecy I wrote to him, I wouldn’t have said that God should strike him dead.

If this is sounding a bit like Iran or North Korea to you at this point, I am wondering that myself.

To try and prove themselves right on this key issue, people of many diagnoses, but especially those with paranoia, will fasten on the most amazing details as evidence, rapidly twisting them out of recognition. You’re saying that what I put into my body isn’t important… (No, I’m saying that side effects that you don’t have aren’t important to discuss) You won’t let me meet with my attorney… (You may meet with your attorney when she comes here. You cannot go there.) The replies in parentheses are more hypothetical than the complaints, because you usually don’t get to complete your sentence. Those are the types of things I am usually trying to say.

This sounds more like Hamas and Hezbollah than Iran, actually.

Next up, a look at what strategies work, or more usually, don’t work.

German Pagan All-Natural Origins

Reprinted from 2012. I have not checked the links, which sometimes expire.

Earlier related posts: Natural Vs. Artificial and Natural.

There's a lot of fun stuff here and it is link-heavy.  You could browse for hours.  I had known about Wandervogel, though I had forgotten the name, but I had never heard of Lebensreform, literally "life-reform," until I did this research. It gives better evidence for my point than anything I had thought of on my own.  Even I didn't think the connection to German paganism was that strong. I found more here, at the Children of the Sun.

I’d like to just flesh out that German pagan background to the all-natural movement. But I will first note the other side - first, that there was a British and American strain of this thinking which was only incidentally German.  Only insofar as people read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Fichte in general was that strain a Teutonic movement,  for the intelligentsia of the day also read other Europeans and Americans who were more direct influences

Second, the line from Rousseau, Emerson, Tolstoy, and Thoreau through the Fellowship of the New Life and the Fabian Society looks at first much more direct in influencing the modern pacifist, simple-living, vegetarian culture and exaltation of Nature.  Third, there were American utopian back-to-the-landers who had nothing German about them – Shakers, Brook Farm, Oneida - I don’t know how we measure who is more influential than whom, but it’s at least there and deserves mention.

I also note some things which are definitely German but don’t seem to be especially influential in pagan roots.  I have said before that the Germans were only a partially converted country to begin with, and I still think that’s true, but that doesn’t imply that everything in their culture is suspect thereby.

So fourth - you can trace those German philosophers, especially Fichte, and their fascination with will as having provided a foundation for German nationalism and ultimately, Nazism, but not necessarily pagan revival and natural living.  That came later, when their descendants decided that, as their superiority could not rest on their Christian culture, shared by others in Europe, it must reside in some previous underlying advantage – genetic, cultural, or both. Strong and adventurous gods and heroes naturally suggested themselves as causes.  That everyone else in the world also had traditional gods and heroes who were strong and adventurous was somehow not noticed.  Perhaps because they felt very deeply – there’s the romanticism and sentimentality piece – that they were strong and quite special, that was enough.  Human beings are like that, not just Germans.

Fifth, German religious groups coming to America also provided more than their share of utopian back-to-the-landers – Amish, New Harmony, Mennonites, Moravians, Hutterites – who settled in the Midwest because that was the next “open” spot in European settlement.  Yet even if these groups carried the traces of paganism in their cultures that all Christians do, it would be hard to level much accusation against them for strong influence in that direction.  Genesis and much of the OT carries the theme that living in cities causes spiritual decline while the rural life improves character – from Cain to Daniel it shows up, and is echoed in the NT with John the Baptist. The idea that things in general are deteriorating and can only be fixed by getting out into the country is recurrent in western thought.  It’s one of our panaceas. Rousseau wasn’t the first.

Thus I don’t think it accidental that Seventh Day Adventists had a lot of that healthy eating idea right from the start and grew in midwestern soil.  It was in the air; Graham and Kellogg might not have been so prosperous in other regions.  In New England that energy went into the mind-body-spirit split of the Christian Scientists, not natural versus artificial. 

Was that enough qualifiers?  It's a terrible thing to see many sides of an issue.

All those qualifiers in place, here is that introduction to the Wandervogel movement. (Same link)

There’s simple living and harmony with nature; there’s nudism (then called naturism); natural foods and strong tendencies toward vegetarianism; natural medicines, with an emphasis on remarkable powers of the body to heal it self or be healed with fairly simple regimens such as clean water, exercise, or herbals found locally; hiking and camping and getting out of the unhealthy cities; conservation of wilderness and even some proto-Gaia Worship, though under other names; they read Hesse, and Nietzsche; they eschewed the commercial music scene and favored performers from The People – many of whom went on to become commercially successful, certainly.  There is, in fact, just about everything you need philosophically to leave “the rat race” in northeastern cities and start an herb farm in Vermont   or a commune in Tennessee.  There's a hippie museum there if you ever get the urge.  

 

When you click together the pieces that the Nature Boys were largely German, and in specific Gypsy Boots’ parents were Wandervogel,* there’s some founder effect in hippie culture, far more than from old Pietist Christian groups.Grace Slick, Brian Wilson, and Donovan headed for Southern California, not Pennsylvania Dutch country.

It may seem strange that such a movement would penetrate Christian circles at all, but there were important points of contact: the early movement was connected to scouting in both England and America and retained that even in dark eras. The adventurous visit other areas, and when they did, would share trails, shelters, and equipment.  More important, however, was that the older Christian groups tended to do the type of farming that the hippies were moving into: small farms and local crafts rather than agribiz. Mother Earth News found itself rubbing up against such folks from earliest days, even though it was initially quite hostile to religion.  The hippies settled on being against organised religion, which was just enough stretch to accommodate everyone.  Many of the Christian groups were bent on removing themselves from The World – varying degrees of paranoia here – which the freaks could identify with, though they had different reasons.  Both were ultimately defining themselves as counterculture.

The early Jesus people were more a hippie movement than a church movement as well – They had not merely a preference but an actual disdain for the mainstream and institutional churches – which had like opinions about them.  It is ironic that mainstream denominational hierarchies have lots of folks tending toward these ideas now.  Ironic, that is, until one recognises that these were semi-hippies who were never able to make the break.  They like the overlapping fashionableness that the Church should withdraw from the world and stand against the corporate, consumerist culture of America.  It preserved their counterculture bonfides in both directions.  Two birds with one stone. Wankers.

That the Jesus Movement led more directly to independent churches that are now more conservative seems another irony, but it's not.  It’s not just that homeschooling and back-to-the-land, overlaps with that 70’s secular culture.  It’s that this particular Romantic Vision is flexible and can be called into service for various causes.  The plaid shirt, voluntary poverty, wood-chopping, vegetable growing guy fits into a lot of small slots in this culture.  Hard to peg those guys - and their lovely granola wives.

Finally, some people that Dubbahdee referred to who come much earlier in this whole Vitalism, life force, Natural Cure Movement.  Germans Benedict Lust and John Scheel (naturopathy), their predecessor Sebastian Kneipp and their follower, exercise guru Bernarr McFadden.  An excellent history of 19th C natural cures here.

*The movement spread quickly among Central European Jews, and the purification and germanisation of the movement was a rationale for the Hitler Youth.  It does give evidence that whatever the later connection, Wandervogel was not inevitably an expression of Aryan superiority.  How Jews got by that “Teutonic roots” part I don’t know, but I imagine that as with all broad movements, there were different emphases in different areas, and we all usually ignore a problem or two for the sake of larger agreements.

Asperger's, Autism, Neurodiversity

Update: bsking points out that Scott Alexander has just discussed the general issue of the Social Model of Disability about two weeks ago, and then took highlights from the voluminous comments to discuss the best issues further.  Well do I remember in mental health going to conferences and social work meetings where people deplored the strawman "Medical Model" and invoked the name of St Thomas Szasz (and all the Family Systems folks, or RD Laing - there was actually a Laing-inspired retreat center way up north and out in the woods in NH called Burch House. It did not sustain in that form. Nice people.) Szasz cherry-picked some things that were weak in the diagnostic system vis. social adaptation to declare that all supposed mental illness was only society's inability to adapt to people who were different.

From Maggie's, a balanced Quillette article Neuroaffirmation - A Therapist's Concerns about the blind spots of the radical neurodiversity movement. 

I am wary, however, of the neurodiversity-affirming movement and the zeal of some of its advocates, especially younger therapists. A perusal of their webpages reveals that many describe themselves as neurodivergent, or if that shoe doesn’t fit, as “neurodivergent allies.” Tried and tested therapeutic models are critiqued and repackaged to make them more “neurodiversity affirming,” or they are avoided altogether. In theory, this all sounds fine, but I worry about the unintended consequences of this movement, particularly when their demands are promulgated religiously and without nuance.

Most autism is at least partially disabling. Even people with Asperger's - now High Function Autism - for all the advantages of focus, emotional distance, and logic they can bring to problem-solving and inventiveness, often create difficulties for those around them. They are seldom much aware of this, which makes it even harder for the family members or coworkers dealing with it.  It is a fine thing to have a long attentions span - but it can get out of hand. A focus on actual words spoken or written can encourage precision in thought and expression - but can also result in a literalness that is hard for others to work around. 

A little mania is sometimes a good thing.  A little depression, or OCD, or even paranoia can have its uses, both for the individual or the tribe. But that does not mean we endorse such things as generally harmless. So too with autism, even if mild, and even if accompanied by enhancing other abilities.

Conspiracies

Nicholas Nassim Taleb's  first book was Fooled By Randomness, describing how we often assign meaning to events that are simply random. If you put up a random number generator of a baseball hitter who bats .280 for the season, you will find some games when he goes 5 for 5, and some when he goes 0 for 4 three games in a row. The player, and the coaches and fans will attribute the hitting streak or drought to some meaningful baseball idea.  "I've just been seeing the ball really well." "He's always been a streaky hitter." These are not necessarily untrue. They could be baseball explained. But it is usually more accurate when the hitter notes "I'm hitting the ball well, it just happens to be right at people." A lot of the difference between one struck ball and the next is so tiny that it could not possibly be under the hitter's control.  A certain skill level, which includes both muscle ability and focus and is stable over time, will yield a predictable number of hits.  They will not arrive in predictable patterns, however.

A man suffering from mania approached me in a bar about five years ago (I made the mistake of making eye contact and nodding) and had printouts of the numbers he was receiving from satellite readings which proved aliens were trying to communicate with the world through him. He was particularly taken with digits occurring three times in a row, which he assured me was too unlikely to happen by chance.  If there were three fives in a row, it meant something. He had studied math, he said, and knew that the odds against three fives showing up in a row were quite small.  He did not accept my explanation that such occurrences were in fact the most natural thing in the world, and exactly what we should expect out of long chains of digits. I gave it up quickly.  He was not able to hear.

It's not just numbers. You wait on three customers in a row whose surname begins with "M."  What are the odds, eh? Three green cars parked near each other! Joe Biden appears on TV at the exact moment you were reading about him!

There's one going on in Austin at the moment. There is not a statistical increase in murders of young men greater than in other cities in America, yet many people are convinced there is a serial killer taking them out. The coincidences are not even fully there. Some of the murders are not taking place where the theory says they should, yet they are being counted against the total anyway. What is counted as evidence starts getting stranger and stranger.  As I have said before about paranoia (rather similar) or depression/anxiety, the condition appears first, then the target is identified. People decide that someone must be stealing our bodily fluids, and it doesn't matter that there is not any actual diminution of fluid, we just know it is true. Knowing this, we identify who it must be. If people disagree, we might even begin to suspect them of covering up the crime.

But for strangeness, you should check out what is going on in Canton, MA at the moment. If you don't want to sign in, I was given a summary I like pretty well. John, O'Keefe, a Boston police officer who lives in Canton (a southern suburb) was found dead in the snow in Canton. The prosecution says that he and his girlfriend Karen Read had been drinking and arguing throughout the weekend. She dropped him off at home and hit him with her car on the way out while doing a three-point turn. He was found dead in the snow. The defense is trying to suggest there is a reasonable chance that he went inside, was beaten to death by one or more of his friends for unknown reasons and thrown out of the house, where he died in the snow. 

Well, I don't fault them for that.  The defense has got to say something. If that's the best they've got, they have to go with it.  She has hired Kevin Spacey's attorney, which is likely a lot of money, and they've got to find something so there is at least enough doubt that a jury won't think she definitely did it.

But into the mix come the conspiracists, who are running with this idea and expanding on it. I thought this site by Aidan Kearney, DrTurtleboy, was so bizarre that it must be a parody, but no, it's for real. He calls himself an investigative journalist, and is from a few towns over in Worcester. He is now one of the main spokespeople for the idea that the people in the house who beat him to death immediately coordinated with the Canton PD to protect the main killer, and the police went along with it because he is a local boy and his family is prominent.  Grew up there. But as things have gone along the list of people who are in on the coverup has grown.  It's basically everyone in town, it seems. All the connections are just normal things you would find in any town.  One of the many people in the house that night is from a family that owns a longstanding pizza place.  The pizza place sponsors a little league team. One of the kids of the officer played on that team, and he runs a picture of the kid as if he is part of the coverup, wittingly or unwittingly, because he is suggesting legitimacy that this family is respectable, because he is wearing its name on his shirt. 

Kearney has gone back to the 1994 Canton High School Yearbook to show that even then, the Alberts had people they wanted to get rid of, but all the girls liked them anyway. Basically, any stray fact that passes by him that mentions any of the people in the story is reinterpreted as showing either a secret connection, a longstanding friendship (evidence that they too would cover this up for a pal) or direct evidence of lying. Local police forces looking into the matter are furious with this guy, because he is trying to pass off everyday police procedure as some sort of sinister special treatment, either for the Alberts and McCabes or against Karen Read. One officer misspelled one of the names, which proves he is lying.

DrTurtleboy seems to gravitate to some right-wing types, but he doesn't seem to have any true political issues, and there are plenty of people on the right he doesn't like much.  If you read his site, you will see that he spends most of his energy showing how persecuted he is, because he is bravely exposing all this corruption in the Canton PD and throughout the town, in addition to other issues in Massachusetts towns. Why any, never mind all, of these people in the house would have wanted O'Keefe dead is not explored. You'd think someone would be curious about that angle.

From my nostalgia tour, let me assure you that the people you grew up with and went to school with seldom even answer your emails, never mind covering up a murder for you. 

This is going to tie in with the issue of memory and chronology, and how misunderstanding and misinterpreting situations often involves getting the chronology wrong. I find that chronology is key for my remembering people and events, but my wife does not use that as her memory framework. I can recall who I went to third grade with, because I have them clearly tied to third grade.  Someone we met at church may have a name that sounds familiar, but because I don't even have a year to put them in, I do not recall them well at all unless other cues are built in.

Failure To Revise

 One of the main lessons of the Tetlock and Gardner book on Forecasting, and their "Good Judgement" evaluation and training since then was that Superforecasters have an ability to make themselves evaluate coldly and revise accordingly. If you read much military history, you will find the same theme repeated, that the successful generals were those who could revise strategy depending on what they saw in front of them and evaluate coldly whether they had the resources to attempt a change. When I was in emergency psych, I joked that the value of projective testing is that it measured the psychologist's ability to consider different diagnoses. Joke, but also quite true. in a case puzzling everyone that is not a small thing. If you read the crime and justice literature from any perspective, you keep coming up against the idea that an innocent (at least of that crime) person got railroaded or a case went cold because the detectives were so convinced of one theory of what happened that they were unable to look at evidence right in front of them.* It's the whole point of the Bill James books about true crime, Popular Crime and The Man From The Train,that detectives, newspapers, and the general public believing false narratives interfered with true narratives being considered. Such as the crazy idea that Jon Benet Ramsey's parents were guilty of the murder despite the complete lack of evidence. (The evidence was basically that people found it creepy that the little girl was in pageants and therefore her parents must be creepy, and therefore could have murdered their daughter. Which says something creepy about us.) Those of us who followed James as a baseball statistician could have seen that coming. He hammered home the point repeatedly throughout the 80s and 90s that we would overvalue both individual players and types of players on the basis of bad evidence, but be unable to reevaluate them objectively.

It is the principle behind Bayesian reasoning, to treat every new bit of information as an opportunity to run the numbers again. 

So it really isn't surprising that Philippe Lemoine thought our main failure during Covid was our inability to revise. No need to appeal to explanations of bad motives or paranoia, or need to control - other than to note that there will be mild but constant pressure in a single direction for all those things - the natural arrogance of liking the answer you got the first time explains a lot, all by itself.

*It's a common device in murder mysteries, letting the reader know that one of the suspects is guilty of something else that they are lying about, such as covering up an affair or cheating others out of an inheritance, causing us to regard him as a guiltyish sort of person in general, and therefore the likely murderer. It may be this human tendency that causes us to be too ready to speak to the police right away without legal advice, intuitively wanting to be seen as not a guiltyish person.  It has probably been a solid strategy for most of human existence.

Freddie deBoer on Kanye West

This is a spot where I have years of first-hand experience, and those claiming that Kanye West's mental illness has absolutely no effect on his views - he is actually just an evil person - are just flat out wrong. We can get into why they are wrong later, but the first thing you need to know is that they have no idea what they are talking about.

DeBoer's points are quite good. They desire greatly to go straight to good vs. evil rather than anything complicated.  "Complicated" as in "above fifth grade level", doncha know. They may think they are being nice to mentally ill people in some way.  I don't know that for certain, but let us grant that they have a sort of framing that says "There are evil racist people in the world. Mentally ill people get picked on and blamed for lots of things, but they are all fine, really.  So they can't be part of that evil racist group, or if they are, they got there completely independently of their illness." These are indeed convenient rather than scientific beliefs. It would be better for their ascension to power if this were true, therefore it is true, because it is clearly a good thing that they ascend to power.

It is hard to imagine what such people believe the effect of mental illness on thinking is.  If paranoia does not impact one's politics, if impulsivity does not affect one's approach, if grandiosity does not change one's perceptions, if anxiety has nothing to do with ones' cultural beliefs, then what, exactly, does it do? When people are manic they feel much the same as antisocial personality disorders, and i have many times heard line staff declare "Yeah, when we get his affect under control I'll bet we find that he's also go ASP going on as well," only to find that the patient in question is sweet and engaging when treated, with no hint of a personality disorder.

At a much smaller level, if you are over-caffeinated are you more likely to say something unpleasant to a person who irritates you?  Are you in fact likely to find more people , and more types of people, irritating at all? How about when taking depressants, like oh, I don't know, alcohol?

It is almost a cliche for family or friends to be tolerant or forgiving of those with mental illness who are offending them and ruining aspects of their lives to say "I know that's not him.  That's the illness talking."  In fact, those who are claiming to understand these conditions so well have it exactly backwards.  The problem is that very decent people find themselves doing indecent things, which they are ashamed and humiliated about later.  To insist that one can only say offensive things if that is part of one's core personality is to make such sufferers feel even worse.  They now dare not ever be in a situation where they might encounter you when ill, because you will judge them to be bigots or promiscuous or violent or whatever.

I will guess that what is actually going on is that West absolutely destroys their definition of what a "white supremacist" is, and they have to defend this rather than reality.

Mild Confirming Evidence

A man at Bible-Study last night made the observation that he had been briefly involved in the prophecy understandings of Scripture years ago, and even had some belief in the conspiracy theories of Illuminati or other groups controlling a great deal behind the scenes.  As he is an engineer (like most of my friends in retirement, it seems) I half-expected him to offer some numbers-based or probability-based reason why he thought these explanations unlikely now.  I should know better.

His actual reason was "Even if these things are true, God is still in control." I have only a slight problem with that. When someone says that to mean the large spiritual overview, that It Is Well With My Soul, or "this world is not my home" they are quite correct, and no matter how bad things get here we can trust God for the ultimate outcome.  I think another idea does creep in a bit, with many Christians, including my friend. Terrible things happen in many places, and we cannot count on it all coming right in the end in this world just because it will do so in the next.  When presented with that distinction I think most Christians excepting the committed Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn sorts would get the theologically solid answer.  Yet I think some of the Christian Victory teaching does color the emotional approach of many believers.  And they get it from the pulpit, more often than not. If we do live into the last days it is likely to be very unpleasant.

But what really struck me was that his personality would not sustain the paranoid interpretation. He considered these ideas, he had cultural support for believing them, they provided an explanation for some of the evil in the world, but in less than a year he no longer believed them.  It fits my frequent reminder here that paranoia (or depression, or anxiety) precedes our explanations and rationalisations of them.

Worrisome (A Rant)

A reduction in the percentage of people getting their children vaccinated was one of my worries. I hope this news out of Texas is not a trend. I say that know that of course it's going to be a trend.

I have lost nearly half my readership over the covid issues, but the part that bothers me most is that the ones who have left are the ones who most need to hear it.  Such is always the way, I suppose. But being skeptical about what the government says never stays put.  People immediately find some other source to believe instead, and they stop applying the same skepticism.  They believe someone who claims to be the father of the mRNA vaccines (he wasn't) who never goes to a forum where he is challenged. They believe a nursing instructor in England - not a bad one, but not a #1 source.  They believe the predictable scare stories that it's all going to affect your reproduction system somehow. To be fair on that one, lots of things can affect menstrual cycles, but it's usually temporary and minor and does not impact fertility. They start treating all "experts" as if they are taking orders from the government, rather than independent researchers gradually arriving at similar answers. They believed rumors about people dying from vaccines - sometimes thousands of them - and somehow all the doctors in the world decided to cover that up and enter different causes of death on the certificates.  Because the hospitals got $3K each for those patients, they heard. 

I heard some of this nonsense from my own children. At least the Romanians have an excuse for a little paranoia.

I have a post started on safety and risk, but I have waited on it trying to check myself and my own motives.

But this is what happens when skeptics panic. Your local hospital did not go hysterical, even when it took some precautions that turned out to be unnecessary, like making sure no one shared pens.  Well, the hospitals did sometimes get close to hysterical, when their ICUs were overflowing and they couldn't keep enough ER staff, going on into months. Nerves fray. But it was the skeptics that panicked and stopped thinking. Not everyone believed all the crap ideas, but lots of people needed to demonstrate that they were at least somewhat skeptical. It was a point of honor. Yeah, you can't take them in.  They're too smart for that. Did they fear the social pressure of the opinions of friends, or of their opinions of themselves, of the Type of Person I Am? It has been cool to be a skeptic in many places. 

My really ugly fear is that this was a dry run for a much more dangerous epidemic - because we have seen how one can spread in this interconnected world, and slowing things down until we get a vaccine may be the only real strategy - but we learned all the wrong lessons.

Vindicating James and BSKing

A Quillette article by Michael Totten on my sidebar about right-wing paranoia - I like Totten and I like Quillette, but...- makes a claim about a PRRI study on paranoid ideas.  The study does not say what Totten claims it does. James's plan, also stated before by bsking of Graph Paper Diaries, of clicking back and seeing what the underlying studies actually say proved out on this point.

Writing

I don't know whether the reviewer or Jonathan Gottschall is correct about Gottschall's recent book The Story Paradox. The premise sounds intriguing, though perhaps he handled the material badly.

But I can tell you one thing from the article at Quillette that JG wrote defending himself. That guy knows how to write and how to construct a logical argument. It's fun to read, and I am ready to grant him the advantage right out of the gate.

His premise is that we are story-making creatures - which I have said here, said many times in conversation, and is not a controversial idea - but that it has a dark side, in that it prevents us from abandoning bad ideas once we have a story to surround them.  This sounds spot on, and explains to me why the same knuckleheads keep asserting the same terrible ideas even after good challenges have been raised.  It sounds like the milder, less psychotic version of the paranoia- readiness I have described to you many times over the years here. The solidity of the false story may be very strong in the non-psychoitc as well.

If anyone has read the book, let me know what you think.