Despair Now!

A Strident Call for Despair

' . . . a new idea of how to change society began to emerge, not through politics any longer, but by adjusting how [people] functioned. The technicians of this new idea would be the psychiatrists and the drug companies . . . '
the BBC, The Trap
'They'll legalise any drug so long as that drug keeps you producing.'
Doug Stanhope, No Refunds

Life in the west in the last century or so has been characterised by bizarre lurches from one lopsided model to another. Names like Freud, Lenin, Nash, Keynes, and Berlin come immediately to mind. One of these lurches concerned 'mental illness' in our societies. Would any reader care to put her head on the block by suggesting that the enormous sums of money that pharmaceutical companies pour into advertising their products to doctors are not meant to influence those doctors in order to increase the companies' profits? Diagnosing people as 'mentally ill' is a growth industry.
Now take a step back: put the person-and-her-feelings aside for a moment, and look at the greater social reasons why people might feel despair. Are there reasons why people might feel despair? Perhaps about the state of their world?

Ummm . . . yes. Times a zillion. With knobs and fuckin' bells on.

So, if concern and worry and even despair at the state of the world would seem to correlate with the state of the world, and that unhappy state has been brought to us by corporations and governments, what is the intelligent reaction? To allow those corporations and governments to get richer and more powerful by drugging us en masse? Or to get rid of the corporations and governments, and take our chances?
Anxiety and worry and concern and depression and despair and neurosis are all appropriate states at this moment in history. We should all feel this way. The ill-adjusted people are the simpletons engrossed in their bread and X-box circuses. The simpletons are the sick people.

Despair now!