The Cult of WTF

Antonin Artaud wrote about the growing surrealism of society 100 years ago, or so, and pointed out then that we have an abundance of psychic anomalies, not because we are sick, but because society grows more so by the hour. I guess it’s a question of perspective for those who can’t “triangulate” and see what’s going on, but Artaud put it as he, and only he, can:

“You can say all you want about the mental health of Van Gogh who, during his lifetime, cooked only one of his hands and other than that did no more than cut off his left ear…
….present-day life goes on in its old atmosphere of prurience, of anarchy, of disorder, of delrium, of dementia, of chronic lunacy, of bourgeois inertia, of psychic anomaly (for it isn’t man but the world that has become abnormal), of deliberate dishonesty and downright hypocrisy, of a mean contempt for anything that shows breeding,*
of the claim of an entire order based on the fulfilment of a primitive injustice,
in short, of organized crime.
Things are bad because the sick conscience now has a vital I in not getting over it’s sickness.
So a sick society invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain visionaries whose faculties of divination disturbed it.” (2)

‘This is psychosis. I had been trained to diagnose myself psychotic.’

~~~~~~~

This was excerpted in the valuable map of a book, “Wisdom, Madness, and Folly” by R. D. Laing, way ahead of the curve in developing a modern psychology. The final line is his.

* “a mean contempt of breeding” best describes the reigning bully mentality of much of USAmerica rather unidimensional “exceptrionalism”, itself a reflection of its corporate structure. Artaud, like Graham Greene, was keenly aware of that trait, and neither were fans.

The other day I had an interesting, intense confrontation with a ‘successful’ family member who basically works for ‘The Cult’ with his technical knowledge. He is my wife’s son from a previous marriage.
He is very quick, intelligent and enthusiastic, and I have always enjoyed discussing his academic insights into all kinds of unrelated topics, including my own field in the musical arts.

On the covid issue, however, I don’t confront people like that, regarding them as basically lost souls.
So on this occasion, where we were both stuck at a party, it was he who wouldn’t leave me alone with my covax-opposed views, (none of his business, of course) and I ended up defending my case for what we all know here to be true, in response to what his successfully brainwashed intellect had to say, the likes of which we are also very familiar here.

The man and I have become friends over the years, so there was no acrimony in this heated discussion, thank heaven, but I was rather surprised that after ten minutes there was not the feeling I had expected, the feeling that we had just wasted our time even bothering to talk about covid and vaxxes.

I certainly didn’t expect to win myself, for the ‘head against brick wall’ reason given above, and I was convinced that nothing but stalemate could come from the whole discussion, even though I’m sure he did expect to ‘win’.
After all, as a researcher and lecturer on his subject, along with a doctorate, he is used to winning arguments, and is extremely detailed and persistent.

But I noticed that one or two of the things I said made him hesitate for a split second…
… Now, this is not a man who hesitates – not even for split seconds…

Yet the sort of things I said to him were really no more complicated than the following:

“I’m not stupid”

“I’m twice your age and when you say I shouldn’t ‘fall into the ways of conspiracy theorists’, you are assuming that despite my long experience of life I have ‘fallen into’ anything at all.

“You are not giving me credit for what I actually do, which is to look at mainstream news (largely unavoidable…), but also to look at some of the wildest conspiracy theories, and also to look at well-researched scientific literature by people who can be shown to have nothing to fear in terms of their career (they are retired), or to have no conflicts of interest.

“In other words, I look at everything, and over the years, or decades, a picture emerges.
A picture which either makes sense, or it does not.
This one does not.
No ‘virus’ could lead to what is now happening to the entire world.”

Of course I didn’t interpret his hesitations as major victories, but then, all of a sudden, he switched tactic. It was almost as if he realized that it was beneath his own dignity to take a superior tone with someone whose common sense might be as developed as his own – or even more so.

So he actually ended up saying that he was fond of me, that for his mother’s sake he didn’t want me to die, that he wished me well, and that he was sure that whatever decision I took about being vaccinated would be built upon reasoning and information. (It shouldn’t be necessary to add here that I will not be getting vaccinated).

And so we parted, somehow, still friends…

He may of course have decided merely to humour me as a lost cause, entirely beyond the pale, or perhaps he was just using a strategy that his peers at work had advised him to use when confronted by idiots like me, or perhaps some of the things I said even reassured him that I knew what I was doing at some level…

Perhaps we both learned something.

At least in the context of covid, this seems to me a sign that not everything is hopeless.
I know very well that the strain on family relationships can be enormous.