{In case you haven’t noticed, reality is broken. Wall Street celebrates an unemployment rate of 14.7% and rising. The Justice Department says it can’t prove that Michael Flynn lied to the FBI, even though Flynn has confessed, in writing and in open court, to doing so. The hero of the COVID-19 pandemic is Donald Trump, who has made us the envy of the world with our 75,000 or so deaths (and rising). The Democrats have settled on Joe Biden as their man of the hour, because reasons. We could hold the November election by mail, but Trump seems intent on dismantling the Post Office. Is there someplace where I can return my ticket to this nightmare?}
Diane Coyle (Project Syndicate) believes that the economic carnage of COVID-19 will have the salutary effect of putting an end to selfish individualism:
Aristotle was right. Humans have never been atomized individuals, but rather social beings whose every decision affects other people. And now the COVID-19 pandemic is driving home this fundamental point: each of us is morally responsible for the infection risks we pose to others through our own behavior. In fact, this pandemic is just one of many collective-action problems facing humankind, including climate change, catastrophic biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance, nuclear tensions fueled by escalating geopolitical uncertainty, and even potential threats such as a collision with an asteroid.
I would gladly take a collision with an asteroid over four more years of the Sociopath-in-Chief. In any case, Ms. Coyle seems not to have noticed that millions of Americans are angrily refusing the lessons she wants them to draw from the pandemic; instead, those millions are aping their Great Orange Leader who has said “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Coyle goes on to say:
Just as a spider’s web crumples when a few strands are broken, so the pandemic has highlighted the risks arising from our economic interdependence. And now California and Georgia, Germany and Italy, and China and the United States need each other to recover and rebuild. No one should waste time yearning for an unsustainable fantasy.
“Humankind,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear much reality.” With all due respect to Diane Coyle, my money is on the unsustainable fantasy.
Kristopher Nielsen (at Aeon) finds it helpful to consider mental disorders as arising from “the mind’s sticky tendencies”:
More and more, it seems that mental disorder might not be defined by a single biological deviation or essence (such as an imbalance of chemicals in the brain); rather, mental disorders seem to be composed of networks of mechanisms, spanning the brain-body-environment system, that together maintain engagement with maladaptive behavior. Mental disorders are both natural and normative: they’re patterns of behavior, thought and emotion that are in conflict with a person’s mode of functioning in the world.
Referring to, and relying on, a theory called “embodied enactivism,” Nielsen explains:
Mental disorders might be best thought of as networks of mechanisms, rather than as diseases with clearly defined essences. Yet despite being affected by factors spanning the brain, body and environment, we still see apparently recognizable patterns of distress and dysfunction – such as depression and anxiety – rather than a melange of idiosyncratic problems in living. Why is this? Embodied enactivism suggests the possibility that these patterns of thoughts, behaviours and emotions represent ‘sticky tendencies’ in the human brain-body-environment system.
As far as I can tell, all this jargon masks a much simpler idea, which is that sometimes, at least, chronic “mental disorders” are mental and behavioral habits cultivated over a lifetime. To put it yet another way, those disorders are acquired “default settings” to which our brains continually return:
Depression is depression, in part, because it’s a pattern of thought, behavior and emotion that the human brain-body-environment system has a tendency to fall into and get stuck in. From this perspective, mental disorders are fuzzy but real patterns in the world that can be discovered, rather than decided upon.
Nielsen does not, alas, offer any suggestions for unsticking a stuck brain. To quote Bob Dylan and Sam Shepherd, “If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.”
https://aeon.co/ideas/think-of-mental-disorders-as-the-minds-sticky-tendencies
Finally, in what may or may not be a hoax designed to take our minds off our very real troubles, The Guardian reports that “The Trump administration drafts pact for mining on the moon.” Not content with despoiling our planet, we are setting our sights on the rest of the solar system:
The agreement would be the latest effort to cultivate allies around NASA’s plan to put humans and space stations on the moon within the next decade, and comes as the civilian space agency plays a growing role in implementing American foreign policy. The draft pact has not been formally shared with US allies yet…The Trump administration and other spacefaring countries see the moon as a key strategic asset in outer space.
From time immemorial, men and women have gazed at the night sky, admired the splendor of the moon, and said to themselves and to each other, “That moon is a key strategic asset in outer space.” If you believe we put a man on the moon (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah), it’s about time we got around to exploiting it.
As I said, reality is broken. There must be some way out of here. Bob Dylan: Broken hands on broken ploughs / Broken treaties, broken vows / Broken pipes, broken tools / People bending broken rules / Hound dog howling, bullfrog croaking / Everything is broken.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/05/trump-mining-moon-us-artemis-accords
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