In what sense could it be useful to show that western society is suffering from something analogous to schizophrenia?
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Last week’s essay on the importance of psychological factors in international politics sparked a lot of interest and some debate, but I was conscious that, once again, I had been obliged to skate over the surface of many important subjects, and several people correctly pointed out that I could have referenced other writers who had thought along the same lines. (But then I don’t think I’ve ever written an essay which someone has not suggested should be longer, to cover this or that extra point.) In the interests of space last week I largely neglected domestic politics, and the wider psychological consequences of the ravages that neoliberalism has perpetrated on western societies. So I think that it may be useful this time to look at what it means to live in, and for that matter claim to govern, a society that has by some definitions gone mad.
I don’t say that lightly, and I’m quite aware that, all my life at least, critics have been making such accusations, reacting aggressively to contemporary ideas or events they don’t like. I have something more profound in mind though, which is not an ideological or even an ethical judgement, but almost like an engineering judgement. The bits no longer fit together, processes no longer work, manuals are inaccurate or missing, inputs no longer correspond to outputs, things seem to happen randomly, and without a cause. So this week I want to take up a passing reference last week to Apophenia—perceiving relationships between things that are not really there—and expand it considerably. Apophenia, we noted, is often a symptom of schizophrenia. It occurred to me that there might be value in using schizophrenia more widely as a metaphor for what’s gone wrong with our western society, and what has infected the political class and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), who claim to be running it.
Let’s first quickly review what this essay is not about. It’s not primarily about the anomie described by Durkheim: a mismatch between personal values and those of society, and a consequent inability to adapt to social and economic change, where the facts of everyday life no longer correspond to the values that are presented. As we’ll see, this is part of it, but there is much more. Nor, whilst I suggest that today’s society itself shows many of the characteristics of schizophrenia, do I want to get into the treacherous waters of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which is far too complex and internally contradictory to deal with here. Let’s just recognise in passing that of course psychological problems (and how they are described and treated) vary with the nature of the society in question, and that experience of bad things tends to make people unhappy.
So, then, schizophrenia. In spite of etymology, and of popular cultural ideas, a schizophrenic does not have a “split personality,” nor are they in principle more dangerous and more violent than other people. There are many good discussions of schizophrenia online, but because it is a collection of symptoms rather than a simple illness, it’s easiest to characterise it briefly as a difficulty in distinguishing one’s own internal thoughts and ideas from reality. It can take the form of hallucinations, delusions, fears that one is being controlled or listened to by others, disorganised speech and behaviour which often harms the individual, and social withdrawal. (There are a number of typical symptoms and they sometimes overlap: this is an illustrative list.)
In what sense could it be useful to show that western society is suffering from something analogous to schizophrenia? We need first to distinguish between the behaviour of institutions, of individuals and of society as a whole, accepting that the barriers between them are fluid. So let’s begin with the simplest case I can think of, concerning individuals, and riffing partly off Durkheim. Simply put, in most western societies today there is a fundamental difference between the picture of society generally presented, and the way that people experience that same society themselves in their daily lives. Now, if we were talking about one individual, it might be that person was suffering from delusions about society (believing that they were the victim of a conspiracy, for example.) But here—and this is why I think that schizophrenia is a good metaphor—the issue is the other way round. The individual correctly sees what is true in their own life and their own experience, but the power structure of society is promoting what you might reasonably describe as delusions about it. And in most cases, this structure—the PMC if you like—has internalised, and shares these delusions itself. The problem thus lies with society, or parts of it, not the individual.
The political difficulty is that these delusions are only partially effective. There’s a tendency, following a certain reading of Marcuse, to see ordinary people as helpless victims of political and consumerist manipulation. Now it’s true that there are those with power who would like that to be the case, but observably it is not always so. Yes, Edward Bernays was Freud’s nephew, and he founded modern public relations, and was associated with various episodes where his client was successful, but it’s hard to know how far, if at all, he played a determining role. Advertising as a whole is a notoriously inexact art, hence the lament attributed to various business leaders: “half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” With politics as well, the fortunes spent on some political campaigns, are often not effective. (Brexit is perhaps the classic modern example.) A lot of the time people just switch off, assuming, not unreasonably, that everything in official and commercial discourses is just a lie. In certain cases, as with Ukraine, the ability of governments and the PMC to dominate the interpretation of events can affect perceptions, at least temporarily, although even in that case there is no flood of volunteers reporting to military recruiting centres. But this widens the gulf between elites and ordinary people even further, because ordinary people are not as stupid as the PMC likes to believe.
Now of course it’s doubtful that there has ever been a society where the dominant official discourse and the popular perception of everyday life and world events were essentially identical. But here, I’m not talking about ideology or ethical value-judgements, but rather the mundane “stuff” of which everyday life is made. A generation or two ago, politicians and pundits might have had different opinions about wealth and power, about political and economic systems, about religion and ethics. But there was general agreement about the nature of the world they were discussing, and what the key issues were. Here are two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum.
When I was young, for example, one of the major public debates was between those who thought that what remained of the Empire was a source of strength and Great Power status, and so should be retained, and those who thought it was an unaffordable cost and a political burden, and that the country should concentrate on Atlantic and European ties. In this case, the argument was essentially over by the end of the 1960s, with a tacit agreement to seek membership of the then EEC, but while it was on, the two sides were arguing on common ground, and for and against the relative importance of agreed factors—trade, employment, agriculture—so the interested citizen could follow along. By contrast the dominant discourse during the Brexit referendum period consisted of sneering at ordinary people and threatening them.
Likewise, great moral debates of the era—on abortion, on the decriminalisation of homosexuality, on the death penalty—could be extremely agitated, but the issues were nonetheless presented in a way that most people felt they could understand, irrespective of what side they were on. But these days, many of the social, political and economic questions which obsess our elites and our media seem to exist only in some kind of alternative, fantasy world, which ordinary people have absolutely no interest in, or understanding of. When elites do actually deign to talk to ordinary people about things that genuinely affect their lives, the disconnect is often almost total.
For example, people read, or see in the media, that the economy of their country is apparently doing well, that inflation is under control, economic growth is steady etc. But they know that the price of feeding their families goes up all the time, that shops in their town are closing and unemployment is rising, that public services are getting worse, and that every time they go shopping, someone is collecting food for the hungry. Now it’s true that there are technical definitional distinctions here, but in a way that’s part of the problem. Over the last generation or so, unemployment and inflation have both been redefined endlessly (almost always downwards) so that they no longer reflect reality as it is experienced by ordinary people. We are in the world of Facsimile rather than Reality, as I explained a couple of weeks ago.
It would be easier if this was just a cynical ploy by our rulers (and one should never wholly ignore cynicism in politics) but it goes well beyond that. The view of the economy held by the political class and the PMC is not reality-based; it’s a delusion, based on complete dissociation from reality, and a belief that the truth lies in numbers, not in human experience. And like many delusions, it is supported by carefully worked-out arguments made by intelligent people. But the fact remains that to tell ordinary people that prices are not going up, albeit using “prices” and “up” in a very special sense, is delusional. In turn, and to return to a theme of last week, this behaviour also contributes to the almost impenetrable barrier of understanding and distrust that exists between elites and ordinary people, and in effect demands that people doubt the evidence of their own experience, and instead believe voices they hear on the radio telling them that everything is in fact fine.
Or take a subject like immigration. For the political class and the PMC, whose overlapping immigration-related objectives include feeling good about themselves and finding a source of cheap labour, being asked to justify current policies is considered almost an insult. But there is a group of typical related arguments, or at least justifications, sometimes advanced. It is said that we need immigrants, especially young immigrants, because there are too few young people to do the work. Now if you pause there, you might reasonably expect the next step in the argument to be a list of areas and sectors where large numbers of job vacancies exist. There is no such list. Indeed, there is actually a significant labour surplus, especially among young people. A recent report counted almost a million British people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in education, employment or training. You could start by offering them jobs. About one in five young people in France between the ages of 18 and 25 are economically inactive, including students hanging on at university because the only alternative is unemployment. And would you believe that young people from immigrant families are disproportionately represented among the economically inactive? That’s unsurprising, since many don’t speak the language of their new country properly, and have had educational problems, or may even be illiterate.
But surely, I hear the PMC say, we need more young people because we have an aging population, so that means we must have immigrants. Fine, except that your economically-active young male (since females from many of these cultures are forbidden to work) will be part of a larger family unit, whose total effect is to actually increase the proportion of older and economically inactive people in the economy. And so on. And it’s especially curious that western politicians have continued to make these arguments, in spite of the fact that they are wildly politically unpopular. The idea that there should be a national policy on immigration with rules and controls, which would have seemed obvious to everyone a generation ago, and which is supported by overwhelming majorities of western populations including most of the immigrant community, has now been officially consigned to the dustbin of the “extreme Right,” Indeed, in many countries, the subject may not even be mentioned. This is just bad politics, among other things.
Immigration policy today reposes essentially on a faith-based delusion: if something is morally Right, then the actual facts are secondary. In spite of what’s often said, anti-immigrant sentiment in itself is quite rare, and probably no stronger than in the past. All societies are prejudiced to some extent, after all. Rather, people object to a delusional policy which asserts that in principle infinite numbers of immigrants can be absorbed without any costs, any problems of schooling, social services, housing or culture. When your two eldest children have left school and cannot find a job, you will be unconvinced by stories of labour shortages. When your youngest child has difficulties at school because a third of the class cannot speak the national language well enough to follow the lessons and some are disturbed orphans from war zones, you will not be impressed by being told that, in raising such concerns you are “benefiting the extreme Right.”
But by definition, you can’t argue with those who are delusional, and here we shouldn’t be intimidated by having figures waved at us, especially by economists. In a whole range of areas, delusional policy frameworks are supported by elaborate-looking calculations, much in the way that Internet sites and books claim to show by complex mathematical proofs that Apollo 11 could not have gone to the Moon, or that the attacks on New York in 2001 could not possibly have led to the Twin Towers collapsing as they did. If in doubt, the delusional will resort to using any numbers they can find, even imaginary ones. I’ve mentioned before that studies have shown how figures in such sensitive areas as human trafficking and deaths in conflict are often not just exaggerated, but literally made up. It’s likely that many of the numbers for deaths in the Ukraine war will be shown to be invented as well. (Indeed, western policy towards Ukraine as whole seems to be based almost entirely on clinical delusions.) Similarly, most of the claims made by Grievance entrepreneurs are based on alleged facts and figures whose relationship with the real world is, shall we say, tenuous, and of course people notice this when they compare various grievance industry demands with their own lived experiences. (Interestingly, schizophrenics often report symptoms identical those who claim to be suffering from micro-aggressions.)
In politics, when you see politicians behaving in ways that are actually bad for their careers and their party, it’s normal to suspect that something strange is happening. Now yes, in certain circumstances people fail upwards, in certain other cases politicians give way to external pressures. But in the case of immigration, for example, there is nothing to stop major political parties from reverting to the consensus of a generation or so ago, which would be politically popular and help them win elections, as well as banishing this nightmare of the “extreme Right,” that so preoccupies them. Nothing, in fact, except the inability to escape from their own delusions.
In fact, self-damaging behaviour is one of the characteristics of schizophrenia. Sufferers typically withdraw from contacts with friends and family, and have difficulty with their professional lives or their education. They become less successful in all areas of life as a result, but they do not draw any obvious conclusions: rather, they have a tendency to dig deeper into delusions and hallucinations. And interestingly enough, in view of all the above, schizophrenics communicate badly to others, they can give unrelated answers to questions, and speak in word-salads. (By common consent, we have never before had a political class so poor at communication, or so poor at understanding what ordinary people think, or what ordinary life is like. Consider the example of your least-favourite politician …) I’ve talked in the last few weeks about some of the factors that explain the developing political suicide of the western political class. But as well as the Ego Death which they would incur by acknowledging reality, there is the simple fact that many of them are in the grip of profound delusions. They forget things that have happened, even things that they themselves have said, and they live in a delusionary world where Russian casualties in Ukraine are enormous, for example, and the country will collapse Any Day Now, and they will be justified, just as others believe that they will be justified when the “truth” about the Kennedy assassination or UFOs or Apollo 11 is revealed Any Day Now. (And recall in this context that schizophrenics have a much higher tendency to suicide than average.)
Nor is the problem limited to politics: in fact, it’s probably worse in the private sector. It’s curious, to say the least, that both defenders and critics of our current economic system assume that it is basically rational, and that its actors thus pursue rational objectives. Since Marx, there has been a tendency to personify Capital, and treat it almost as having a mind of its own, as it wanders the world looking for the most productive investment. This is quite unrelated, of course, to the way in which large private-sector companies now work. Indeed, if there is a single characteristic that defines a modern world-famous mega-entrepreneur, written about in stunned admiration by a deluded media, it is probably irrationality. And it’s enough to glance at informed writing about the economy to make you wonder whether the Titans of Technology who want to rule us are entirely sane, so little does their behaviour follow any rational pattern.
After all, the stereotypical image of capitalism is of the search for ever greater profits. Yet many of the most talked-about companies in the world today have no profits, and some never will have. They have only debts, funded by various clever schemes to extract money from people who buy virtual pieces of paper that they hope to sell on to bigger fools for more money later. Some of them, it is true, eventually obtain a smidgeon of profitability through the clever manipulation of accounting rules, but that’s about it. (I have long believed that you could get funding for a perpetual motion machine if the funders believed that they could subsequently sell their interest in it at a profit.) The idea that this should be a major field of economic activity, and that people should be paid real money for engaging in it, must seem like insanity to your local greengrocer. Would they necessarily be wrong?
In any event, companies care less about profitability these days than they do about the share price, and virtually any mechanism that raises it, no matter how insane or even how close to criminal activity, is thought acceptable and is fervently applauded. And of course we need to remind ourselves that share prices are seldom connected to any underlying reality: they are effectively related to the collective opinion of not-very-bright people about how much money they can make from selling them again. Likewise, the much-quoted “prices” for oil at the moment reflect nothing so mundane as prices paid by buyers to sellers today, but rather subjective guesses about prices in a few months’ time, and therefore at what price you should sign a contract to make a profit at that point. It’s well known that share valuations as a whole are essentially irrational and even emotional, and are often the product of organised delusions and simple ignorance. There’s therefore innocent fun to be had in reading the tortured justifications of financial journalists trying to make it look as though movements in share prices actually have some connection to reality.
Anything that appeals emotionally to those who buy and sell shares is fair game, most of all the argument that you can shrink your way to growth. Announce that you are sacking ten per cent of your workforce and your shares will go up, because … well, some clever financial journalist can no doubt explain why. Indeed, for some time now, cutting workforces and closing sites has been seen as a good macho thing to do, and good for a short-term boost to share prices, in spite of the fact that the results are often poor even for profits, and for share prices in the longer term. But in this self-harming, self-obsessed world of institutional schizophrenia, destroying the company in the hope of temporarily increasing the share price counts as normal behaviour. (Many years ago, I was at a presentation given by a British company to a prospective Korean commercial partner. The British company was proudly showing charts of how it was progressively reducing its workforce, and I could see the Koreans frantically trying to calculate at which date the company would finally cease to exist.)
A certain type of delusional personality, mistaking numbers for real things, might indeed help to run a company into the ground through a series of damaging short-term initiatives that temporarily increase the share price, and so the notional “wealth” of that individual. But it’s clear that once you go beyond a certain point, wealth is no longer related to any real, or even hypothetical, needs, and its pursuit has become merely pathological. After all, even pirates and highway robbers stole amounts of money they could actually spend. But then dissociation from others and the world itself, and difficulty in following social norms of behaviour, are also symptoms of schizophrenia.
There have been various models of the Capitalist in popular culture: the thrifty self-denying bourgeois, the cigar-chomping union-busting factory-owner, the cold, calculating banker, even the charismatic showman who usually went bankrupt in the end. But in recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of the capitalist—or CEO anyway—who is essentially a trickster, if not actually a fraudster, and whose only real competence is getting people to part with money. Of course, successful businessmen have often been good at self-promotion, but they have usually had other skills as well. The modern CEO on the other hand, likes to present themself as a philosopher, a seer able to anticipate the future, a visionary who has identified a human need, and preferably invented something that will save the human race. In almost all cases this is garbage, but it’s clear that for most of these people earning money is not the main motivation beyond a certain point. Rather, they are seeking status, fame, justification and ultimately just being taken seriously, and at their own valuation as a heroic visionary. And of course an uncritical and amateurish media rewards their egos with mindless hagiographic saturation coverage. They have dreams and visions of transhumanist futures, but then so has the man who has designed the perpetual motion machine mentioned above, whose genius will never be recognised because the oil companies have bribed governments to make sure that his invention is never funded. Now if he’d only been a bit better at public relations …
Which brings us naturally, I suppose, to what I refuse to call “Artificial Intelligence.” A simple glance at the headlines, at the almost incomprehensible sums of money being “spent” (if that’s really the word) on Large Language Models against the reasonably possible returns, should dispel any lingering belief that the technology industry is run by rational people. If you are familiar with the work of commentators like Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus, then you won’t need convincing that the alleged economics and financing of LLMs at scale come from an alternate universe, and that those who are investing sums of money so large as to be just about meaningless in LLMs are caught up in a fantasy existence, and unable to distinguish between reality and their own obsessions. Promising to spend the equivalent of the GDP of a small nation (if you can borrow it) on technology you don’t fully understand, to provide results you can’t describe in any worthwhile detail, with no obvious way of making money, could be characterised as one of a number of things, but “rational” would probably not be among them.
It’s striking, I think, that when LLMs produce stupid answers, those answers are referred to as “hallucinations.” In many ways, their “behaviour,” if we want to humanise them to that extent, resembles that of someone with severe schizophrenia. They do not interact with the “world” at all, they refuse to admit they are wrong, they invent things and tell lies. And because they will be increasingly trained on a database that they have themselves helped to create, they will be driven further and further into shared delusions. All in all, they are an excellent distillation of everything that is characteristic of our society, and its progress from the Divine Comedy and Notre Dame through Shakespeare to Chat GPT. It’s therefore fitting that one of the epitaphs for modern western culture should be collective hallucinations about the value and benefits of collective hallucinations.
I said at the beginning that this was really an engineering problem. Every enduring society, or even organisation, has to have an adequate degree of internal coherence and function with a minimum degree of rationality, or it will break down. Moreover, the necessary coherence is not only practical, it is also intellectual in the widest sense. Imagine that you buy a piece of complex technology, only to realise that the instruction manual provided refers to a different article, that no manual for your purchase actually exists, and that the Chatbot tells you it’s your fault for buying the wrong article in the first place. But extend that to society as a whole, and you begin to understand the mess we are in. It’s essential that the realities of society, and life as experienced by ordinary people, should somehow be reflected in the discourse and priorities of the political class and the PMC, even if their own private opinions are very different from those of the masses. As the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus is supposed to have said: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.”
There have, of course, been ruling classes in the past hopelessly out of touch with the people, and unable to understand social and economic changes. They have generally suffered as a result. But I can’t think of a ruling class in history which has lived, in effect, in a different and parallel universe to that of ordinary people, and has also tried to impose its deluded view of reality on its subjects. Today’s political class and PMC has its own view of what the world is actually like, of what subjects are important, of what are the correct views on any subject you care to name. Through the incestuous process I described last week, this network has become so homogeneous, and has taken up so much of the political space, that for most ordinary people it produces the only picture of the world they can easily find. They may not like its obsessions and delusions—many don’t—but it’s not clear where else they can go that isn’t just as bad. After all, you may not be convinced by the authorised version of the Ukraine crisis, but take an unwary step into the sewers of the Internet, and you can find websites explaining that it’s all the doing of the British Royal Family, who of course control the international heroin trade. (Yes, I’ve seen that.) And for most of us, unfortunately “I read different opinions and make my own mind up,” is no more than a comforting delusion. Few of us have sufficient expertise to do this outside certain narrow areas (I know I don’t) with the result that we select those opinions and those alleged facts that we find congenial and satisfying, and we slowly construct our own delusional bubble and our own little dissociated world. (Which is why the comments sections in some Internet sites are becoming unreadable.)
This process is happening more and more, I think, and is one of the many unanticipated pieces of Internet collateral damage. But it is also a natural consequence of a power structure which is itself mentally disturbed, and moreover seems bent on trying to drive its own populations insane. Those Above inhabit a normative, delusional dream-world, resembling Hegel as performed by Monty Python, in which only Ideas are real, and only ideological struggles matter. The issue with Immigration, for example, is not what practical things to do about it, but rather to decide which discourse about it is acceptable, and then take steps to enforce that discourse on everybody. After which the problem, um, goes away. All problems can ultimately be solved by performative gestures; nothing ever has negative real-life implications. Those Below, meanwhile, are obliged to contort our speech, our behaviour and even our understanding of the world to avoid being penalised in some fashion.
And yet down Below, the society that we live in is coming apart. “Nothing works” as you hear daily in most western societies. You press buttons and nothing happens. Letters are unanswered or lost, messages unread, telephone calls never answered or returned, and attempts to get anywhere, much less contact a human being, fall into a Hell of schizoid chatbots. The simplest things now seem impossible for our society to perform, in part because those Above no longer care. What does it matter if children can’t read and write properly when we have “Artificial Intelligence?” Or something.
As I’ve suggested, you can’t argue with people who have delusions and hallucinations: it simply drives them deeper and deeper. I rather fear the same is true of institutions and political classes. It would be nice to think that the cumulative shock of Ukraine, Iran and climate change would somehow shock our political class and our PMC into some kind of improved acquaintance with reality, but I suspect it will simply force them deeper and deeper into delusion, until they suffer a kind of collective nervous breakdown. (Some would say that Mr Trump, confronted with a choice between two impossible courses of action over Iran, may be going that way already.) Psychiatrists tell us that there is no known cure for schizophrenia in individuals: the best that can be done is to manage it. But who is going to manage the psychological implosion of our ruling classes? Fifty-odd years ago, King Crimson’s vision of the future seemed a bit over the top. Now, I’m not so sure.
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