Archive for category: #Sensuousness #Feeling #Suffering #Emotion

Author Richard Reeves explains why he thinks terms like “toxic masculinity” are “profoundly unhelpful”

In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, just out, called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.” He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the “mechanization of birth,” how the lack of social services for parents has led to “a massive abandonment of infants,” and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates.

By Carlos L. Garrido – Sep 9, 2022

A recent study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry sent shockwaves across the scientific community and popular outlets as it disproved the predominant “serotonin hypothesis” of depression. In just two weeks since its publication it has been accessed by nearly half a million people and the subject of dozens of subsequent articles. The researchers analyzed a total of seventeen systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and other large studies focused on the following six tenets pertinent to the “serotonin hypothesis” of depression:

“(1) Serotonin and the serotonin metabolite 5-HIAA—whether there are lower levels of serotonin and 5-HIAA in body fluids in depression; (2) Receptors—whether serotonin receptor levels are altered in people with depression; (3) The serotonin transporter (SERT)—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter in people with depression (which would lower synaptic levels of serotonin); (4) Depletion studies—whether tryptophan depletion (which lowers available serotonin) can induce depression; (5) SERT gene—whether there are higher levels of the serotonin transporter gene in people with depression; (6) Whether there is an interaction between the SERT gene and stress in depression.”¹

None of the studies were able to prove any significant link between serotonin levels and depression based on the above tenets, leading the researchers to conclude that “there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity.”²

The researchers further argue, “The idea that depression is the result of abnormalities in brain chemicals, particularly serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT), has been influential for decades,” such that today “80% or more of the general public now believe it is established that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance.”³ In light of this finding, one must ask—how did a hypothesis which failed to substantially prove the connection it is based on achieve such general acceptance?

The serotonin hypothesis wasn’t always the dominant explanation for depression. Shortly after the Second World War, “the first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, was synthesized when chlorine was added to the promethazine structure.”⁴ This synthesis formed “the basis of the development of the first antidepressants” which emerged following Roland Kuhn’s 1957 presentation in the World Psychiatric Association Meeting, where shortly after the first tricyclic antidepressant was released for clinical use in Switzerland.⁵

A decade later, in the mid-1960s, a series of studies introduced serotonin as the “molecule behind depression.” These studies culminated in the work of Lapin and Oxenkrug, who postulated in 1969 the ”serotonergic theory of depression, which was based on a deficit of serotonin at an inter-synaptic level in certain brain regions.”⁶ In the following years, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly created a serotonin-depression study team, which found that fluoxetine hydrochloride was “the most powerful… selective inhibitor of serotonin uptake among all the compounds developed.”⁷ The results led to the 1987 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the clinical usage of Prozac (the brand name given to fluoxetine), the first major selective serotonin receptor inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant drug.⁸

Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness.

The release of Prozac revolutionized the commodification of medicine, incorporating a new field of mass advertisement which has since become the norm. However, as the documentary, Prozac: A Revolution in a Capsule demonstrates, the drug obtained its prominence not only through advertisement—which, interestingly enough, first occurred through business and finance magazines—but through its incorporation into culture as an iconic symbol of the zeitgeist.⁹ From Woody Allen movies to The Sopranos to late night talks shows, Prozac became the drug of the age, a commodity which, like Brave New World’s soma, could provide direct, unmediated happiness. This quickly resulted in the “Prozac boom,” making it by 1990 the most prescribed drug in the United States, and within ten years of its 1988 release, visits to the doctor for depression doubled and the prescribing of antidepressants tripled.¹⁰

The association of depression with low levels of serotonin was an intentional result of institutionally supported (e.g., American Psychiatric Organization) marketing campaigns from the pharmaceutical industry. This has provided “an important justification for the use of antidepressants” and perpetuated an antidepressant drug market that was valued at almost $16 billion in 2020 (a number expected to rise to $21 billion by the end of the decade);¹¹ in today’s antidepressant epidemic, one in six Americans are on antidepressants.¹² This phenomenon cannot be understood separately from the general commodification and marketization of medicine. As Joanne Moncrieff has argued, “there are some obvious drivers of this trend, such as the pharmaceutical industry, whose marketing activities have been facilitated both by the arrival of the Internet, and political deregulation, including the repeal of the prohibition on advertising to consumers in the US and some other countries in the 1990s.”¹³

Venezuela’s Socialist Healthcare System

This is how and why the serotonin theory gained and sustained its hegemony since the 1990s. However, within the scientific community this hypothesis has been on the chopping block for almost two decades as individual studies have disconfirmed various parts of the hypothesis. The scientific community, in general, is much more skeptical of the “serotonin hypothesis” than the general public. This disconnection between the much more nuanced science on depression and the public perception of the issue has been the subject of various articles and speaks to both the separation of science from everyday life and to the effectiveness of medical marketization.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the explosion the recent study caused is a result of its comprehensive character as an “umbrella review” which examined all parts of the serotonin hypothesis at once—and in doing so, went well beyond the many studies which have focused on separate parts in the last couple of decades.

From Biochemical Determinism to Dialectical Materialism

There is a prevalent myth which holds that those who function in society as professional “intellectuals” are somehow “autonomous and independent” from the dominant social order and the interests of the ruling class.¹⁵ This myth predominates in the community of the “hard” sciences perhaps more than in any level of traditional intellectuals. Here it is taken as sensum communem that science is objective and disconnected from ideology and social factors. For these folks, as Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin said, “nothing evokes as much hostility… as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.”¹⁶ But it is in this illusion of non-ideological objectivity where ideology can be seen to be the most entrenched, functioning as unknown knowns, that is, as unrecognized assumptions or inherent biases which mediate how scientists approach the world.

This does not mean, as the postmodernist disease¹⁷ which influences some of the philosophy of science holds, that we should maintain a “deep epistemological skepticism” which often, as Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, conflates “the forms of knowledge with its objects… as if they are saying not only that, for instance, the science of physics is a historical construct, which has varied over time and in different social contexts, but that the laws of nature are themselves ‘socially constructed’ and historically variable.”¹⁸

On the contrary, in Marxism, as Helena Sheehan argues, there is “no conflict between [stressing] the historical and contextual nature of science and [affirming] the rationality of science and the overall progressive character of its development.”¹⁹ In essence, the Marxist tradition’s understanding of the socially determined character of scientific production does not mean that scientific objectivity is rejected and that the object of scientific study itself is conceived of as relative. The form of abstract and unmediated objectivism which prevails in the sciences is rejected and what is affirmed is a necessarily socially mediated understanding of scientific objectivity. This overcomes, as Sheehan notes, the stale “objectivist/constructivist” binary which today structures the discourse about science and affirms instead a dialectical both/and attitude.²⁰ This is important to clarify so that the forthcoming analysis of capitalism’s influence on science is not confused as an embracement of relativism and a rejection of science’s ability to produce objective knowledge of the world.

The serotonin hypothesis emerges from what Levins and Lewontin called “Cartesian reductionism” (the objectivist extreme), which they held to be the “dominant mode of analysis” in all spheres of today’s sciences. In psychiatry this shows up as genetic and biochemical determinism, an attempt to reduce the complexity of mental health issues to genetics or to biochemical mechanisms which, with respect to the latter, somehow the major pharmaceutical companies always have a pill for. But, as Moncrieff has argued, “mental health problems are not equivalent to physical, medical conditions and are more fruitfully viewed as problems of communities or societies.”²¹

Reductionism, in essence, is a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.

For instance, studies have shown that “within a given location, those with the lowest incomes are typically 1.5 to 3 times more likely than the rich to experience depression or anxiety.”²² The plethora of factors that stem from and contribute to poverty has allowed researchers to establish “a bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and mental illness,” such that poverty both increases the likelihood of mental illness and is proliferated further by it.²³ The fact that the poorest in any context are up to three times more likely to experience depression than the rich shows that any analysis of depression must necessarily take into account the socioeconomic context of the individual. This inequality induced dissatisfaction allows one to understand both poverty and depression relationally. As Marx had already noted in 1847,

Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature… A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut… if the neighboring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.²⁴

The Cartesian reductive framework contains various methodological flaws which prevent the concrete understanding of the world. It treats, for instance, the interactions of parts and whole one-sidedly—as if parts are homogenous entities ontologically prior to the whole, and hence, as if the whole was simply the sum of its parts. In so doing, this outlook draws artificial hard and fast lines between causes and effects and fails to see how parts and wholes are reciprocally conditioning, i.e., how “their very interaction structures the way they are interrelated and interpenetrated, resulting in what is called a whole.”²⁵ In short, how wholes are not simply the sum of their parts, but the totalities through which the parts themselves attain the functions which form the whole. It is, in essence, a methodological reflection in the sciences of bourgeois individualism and Robinsonade²⁶ forms of thinking, which artificially divorce individuals from society and hold the latter to be simply the sum of the former.

However, biochemical determinism/reductionism does not necessarily have to reduce explanations to only one factor. For instance, the inconsistent success of SSRIs²⁷ in treating depression has led some scientists to sustain ex juvantibus²⁸ (from reasoning backwards) that serotonin’s role in depression is interactive and dependent on its relations with adrenaline, dopamine, and other chemical processes. Although this represents a more complex view of the serotonin hypothesis in particular, and of the often wrongly conflated “chemical imbalance” view of depression, it is nonetheless a form of biochemical determinism.²⁹ This is because it fails to see how the “chemical imbalances” don’t arise out of a void but are produced by the concrete environment the individual is in. The point, again, is not to diminish the biochemical in order to elevate the role of the environment, but to see both the biochemical and the environment as dialectically interconnected, acting “upon each other through the medium of the [individual].”³⁰ As Levins and Lewontin argue, the individual “cannot be regarded as simply the passive object of autonomous internal (biochemical composition/genes) and external (environment) forces;” instead, the individual functions as a subject-object which is both conditioned by these factors (as object) and reciprocally conditions them (as subject).³¹

The limitations of the prevalent serotonin hypothesis also helps to demonstrate what Friedrich Engels noted in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature: although “natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy by ignoring it or abusing it… they are no less in bondage to philosophy but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy.”³² This reductive, bio-determinist outlook straitjackets science within abstract thought, preventing it from seeing things in their movements and interconnections. It forces the reduction of larger problems to simple components—since these are seen as the ontological basis of wholes—and limits the possibility of observing issues like depression dynamically and comprehensively.

It is much easier to reduce depression to a biochemical phenomenon in the brain than to analyze how the social relations prevalent in the capitalist mode of life create the conditions for the emergence of depression. Similarly, once this reduction is established, it is much easier to treat the “solution” through individualized drug consumption than through socially organized revolutionary activity. As Moncrieff has argued, “by obscuring [the] political nature” of mental illness, certain “contentious social activities” are enabled, and attention is diverted “from the failings of the underlying economic system.”³³

Tracing depression to the exploitative and alienating relations sustained between people and their work, their peers, and nature, is not only a much more laborious task, but one which would necessarily end in the realization of the systemic root of the problem. Given capitalism’s universal commodification, and the form this takes in what Levins and Lewontin call the “commoditization of science,” such a result is directly against the interests of the institutions that control scientific knowledge production.³⁴ As one of many other fields in which the universalizing logic of commodity production has penetrated, the aim is, of course, profitability; the quest for truth and scientific discovery is subsumed under the quest for profit. This is especially true after four decades of neoliberalism, where, as Moncrieff notes, “more and more aspects of human feelings and behaviour” have been commodified and turned “into a source of profit for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.”³⁵ “Investing in research,” as Levins and Lewontin argue, is but “one of several ways of investing in capital.”³⁶

In the West, this reality was clear to the rich tradition of British Marxists scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and others which emerged following the 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. As J.D. Bernal stated in 1937, “production for profit can never develop the full potentialities of science except for destructive purposes,” only “the Marxist understanding of science puts it in practice at the service of the community and at the same time makes science itself part of the cultural heritage of the whole people and not of an artificially selected minority.”³⁷

Healthcare for Human Rights, Not Profits: what the US Can Learn from Cuba’s Coronavirus Response

Towards Socialist Science and Medicine

The serotonin theory gained prominence because: 1) it fits within the one-factor, causally linear framework of the Cartesian reductionist outlook prevalent in mainstream science; 2) it was a diagnosis which facilitated the greatly profitable solution embodied in the tens of billions of dollars’ worth antidepressant drug industry; 3) it plays a hegemonic role in steering the diagnosis of the depression epidemic away from its real source—capitalist social relations which sustain the mass of people alienated from what they produce, from other people, and from nature—and, specifically with respect to the United States, in drowning debt for getting sick, pursuing an education, or attempting to own a home.

Socialism removes these material difficulties upon which many mental health issues are grounded and places the working class in control of the economy, state, and civil institutions, making them function in the service of human and planetary needs, not profit. By abolishing poverty and war; guaranteeing healthcare, housing, and education as a right for all; providing everyone with meaningful well-paying jobs; amongst other things, a socialist society creates the economic and social security which radically transforms the environment in which most cases of depression are rooted. If one seriously seeks to overcome the depression epidemic capitalism is hurling the mass of people into, socialism is the only real solution.

In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds and incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.

Likewise, only socialism can de-commodify science and provide the general social atmosphere for a move away from a hegemonic outlook dominated by static, reductive, abstract, individualist, irrationalist, deterministic, and binary thought, and towards a dialectical materialist one which emphasizes change, interconnection, reciprocity, sociality, emergence, and concrete investigation of the concrete.³⁸ The extraordinary successes of Cuban science and medicine testify to what can be done when the profit motive is removed and comprehensive, preventative, and community-based care becomes the norm.

While enduring an internationally denounced blockade from the most formidable of empires, the Cuban revolution’s commitment to a science for the people has allowed it to construct what is internationally recognized as one of the best health care systems in the world.³⁹ Cuba’s comprehensive social care emphasizes the impact of biological, social, cultural, economic and environmental factors on patients. Far from the United States’ drug-first approach of dealing with mental health issues, Cuba’s comprehensive social care allows all medical issues to be better understood at their source, treated, and prevented from occurring.⁴⁰ In Cuba, mental health treatment emphasizes “individual and group psychotherapies” of various kinds,⁴¹ and when not hampered by the blockade, incorporates psychopharmacology in an integrated fashion with the former.⁴²

Cuban scientists see mental health issues and treatment “within the context of the community,” not isolated individuals.⁴³ As Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, president of the Cuban Society of Psychology, said: “At all times, the community—like the family—are participants and necessary contributors in each action taken to move toward an improvement in the wellbeing of people with mental illness.”⁴⁴ Additionally, unlike the disease-centered model of care which predominates in most capitalist countries, this human-centered approach promotes multidisciplinary and integrative relations between mental and medical care within the different fields of medicine—various forms of medical doctors, psychologists, nurses, and other health care professionals train side by side each other within the communities they serve in.⁴⁵ This socialist model has afforded the Cuban people the conditions where, despite the enormous material difficulties created by the US blockade, depression in Cuba affects only 3.8 percent of the population, whereas in the United States 4.8 percent.⁴⁶

In their 1985 book, The Dialectical Biologist, Levins and Lewontin reformulate Marx’s Eleventh Thesis and state that “dialectical philosophers have thus far only explained science. The problem, however, is to change it.”⁴⁷ In the West, the seeds of such a change are emerging once again. As Nafis Hasan wrote in Science for the People, “recent developments in the fields of immunology, cancer, theoretical and evolutionary biology lend credence” to the view that “any non-reductionist approach (e.g., systems biology) to studying biology will advertently end up using a dialectical approach.”⁴⁸ The fall of the reductive serotonin hypothesis in depression research is but one instance in many pointing to the fact that the dominant outlook presents a fetter for the development of the sciences. Just like a socialist revolution is needed to free humanity and the forces of production from the fetters of the capitalist system of waste, a revolution in outlook is needed to free the sciences from its archaic Cartesian reductionism and furnish it with “the most scientifically apt method for understanding the world”—dialectical materialism.⁴⁹

Notes:

Joanna Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” Molecular Psychiatry (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0.
Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression.”
Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression.”
Victor Silva Pereira and Vinícius Antonio Hiroaki-Sato, “A Brief History of Antidepressant Drug Development: From Tricyclics to Beyond Ketamine,” Acta Neuropsychiatrica 30, no. 6 (February 2018): 307–322, https://doi.org/10.1017/neu.2017.39.
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
“Prozac: Revolution in a Capsule,” New York Times, September 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003127845/revolution-in-a-capsule.html?playlistId=100000002148738.
Pereira and Hiroai-Sato, ”A Brief History.”
Linu Dash, Vidhya Wable, and Onkar Suman, Antidepressant Drugs Market: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021–2030 (Allied Market Research, 2022), https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/antidepressants-drugs-market; Moncrieff et al., “The Serotonin Theory of Depression.”
Megan Pagaduan, “America’s Epidemic of Antidepressants,” Berkeley Political Review, November 7, 2021, https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2021/11/07/americas-epidemic-of-antidepressants/.
Joanna Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System: A Marxist Analysis,” Frontiers in Sociology 6 (2022): 771875, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.771875.
Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect Between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature,” PLOS Medicine 2, no. 12: e392, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392. Note: This article also shows how the disconnection between the science and the advertisement violates the laws of the FDA, but that the FDA has been deliberately inactive in cracking down on marketized misinformation because these advertisements are given “to the fraction of the public that functions at no higher than a 6th grade reading level.” Basically, the FDA allows this misinformation to disseminate because the viewers are too unintelligent to understand the truth.
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 7.
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4.
“Postmodern Disease” is a concept introduced by Ellen Meiksins Wood in the Monthly Review collection In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, which deals with themes relating to the hegemonization of postmodernism in academia and how it serves, in various and often indirect ways, the capitalist “end of history”’ narrative. Its rejection of history, comprehensive outlooks, socially informed scientific objectivity, class struggle, etc., establishes it as an enemy of Marxism while passing itself as “more radical.” The paradox, however, is that it not only fails to oppose the existing order, but actively serves as one of its key hegemonic tools. As Ellen Meiksins Wood states, “Postmodernism is no longer the diagnosis… it has become the disease.”
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “What is the ‘Postmodern’ Agenda,” in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 5, 7, 10.
Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 46.
Helena Sheehan, “Marxism, Science, and Science Studies: From Marx and Engels to COVID-19 and COP26,” Monthly Review 74, no. 1 (May 2022), https://monthlyreview.org/2022/05/01/marxism-science-and-science-studies/.
Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System.”
Matthew Ridley et. al., “Poverty, Depression, and Anxiety: Causal Evidence and Mechanisms,” Science 370, no. 6522 (December 2020): eaay0214, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay0214.
Ridley et. al., “Poverty, depression, and A nxiety.”
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), 33.
Kaan Kangal, “Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (November 2020), https://monthlyreview.org/2020/11/01/engelss-emergentist-dialectics/.
“The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 83.
For instance, studies have shown that “approximately 80% of the response to medication was duplicated in placebo control groups.” See Iving Kirsch et al., “The Emperor’s New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” Prevention & Treatment 5, no. 1 (July 2002), https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2002-14079-003. A similar conclusion was arrived at in a recent study which pooled 73,000 patients and showed that only around 15 percent of the time do the drugs work better than the placebos. As the researchers concluded: “Patients with depression are likely to improve substantially from acute treatment of their depression with drug or placebo. Although the mean effect of antidepressants is only a small improvement over placebo, the effect of active drug seems to increase the probability that any patient will benefit substantially from treatment by about 15%.” Marc B. Stone et. al., “Response to Acute Monotherapy for Major Depressive Disorder in Randomized, Placebo Controlled Trials Submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration: Individual Participant Data Analysis ,” BMJ 378 (2022): e067606, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2021-067606.
As was noted by the study referenced above, this “line of reasoning is logically problematic—the fact that aspirin cures headaches does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain.” Jeffrey R Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression.”
The conflation is distinctly present in marketing.
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 89.
It is also important to note that “every part or activity of an organism acts as environment for other parts,” such that this dialectical integration does not just occur mechanically between the whole organism (individual X) and their environment, but within various sub-levels which themselves function as part and environment. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 58.
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Books, 2012), 213.
Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System.”
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 199.
Moncrieff, “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System.”
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 200.
J.D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science,” Science and Society 2, no. 1 (Winter 1937): 63.
This refers to the method of ascending from the abstract (less determinations, more superficial, less complex) to the concrete (more determinations, more complex, more comprehensive) which is at the core of both idealist and materialist dialectics. For instance, Marx’s Capital (as a whole) is at its core a categorial ascension from the less concrete categories in volume one (commodity, money, capital, absolute and relative surplus value) to the more concrete categories in volumes two and three (various capital circuits, turnover of various forms of capital, etc. for volume two and price, rate of profit, various types of capital, etc. for volume three). This categorial ascension allows for the most concrete—capitalist production as a whole (the title of volume three)—to be reproduced concretely in thought. The same movement can be seen in Hegel’s Logic’s ascension from being (most abstract category) to absolute spirit (the most concrete category).
For more on the United States’ hybrid warfare on Cuba, see my article for Covert Action Magazine or my seminar on the 26^th of July movement for the People’s School for Marxist Leninist Studies.
Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Great Britain: Yale University Press, 2020), 127.
This includes activities like psycho-ballet and other exercises and arts, yoga, martial arts, etc.
Sheila J. Linz and Alexis Lorenzo Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba: An Interview with the President of the Cuban Society of Psychology,” Perspectives In Psychiatric Care 57, no. 1 (January 2021), https://doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12548.
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Linz and Ruiz, “Learning About Mental Healthcare in Today’s Cuba.”
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 288.
Nafis Hasan, “Biology at Another Crossroads,” Science for the People, July 18, 2022, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/lewontin-special-issue/biology-at-another-crossroads/.
Carlos L. Garrido, “The Dialectical Ascension from the Abstract to the Concrete,” Midwestern Marx, July 28, 2022, https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/the-dialectical-ascension-from-the-abstract-to-the-concrete-by-carlos-l-garrido.

(Science for the People)

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav’d of light. – William Blake, “The Little Black Boy,” Songs of Innocence (1789) Othering is built right into the Latin word for More

The post The Color of Suffering: Black and Blue appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Drawing of the busts of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Trotsky, set against a red background.

The post Reason is Red appeared first on Spectre Journal.

Time-out for critical gaze, transnational mutual aid and radical hope.Photo credit: Vural Özdemir

Art and literature that ignite progressive social movements have a secret active ingredient: an enduring hope for change. Hope prevents public lethargy, and keeps . . .

Back story

For nearly a century, the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics has been clear and conclusive, yet its meaning has been opaque. In trying to work out what quantum mechanics says about the world, some interpretations suggest that quantum theory does not describe the world outright but is simply a tool for making predictions about it. Those are “epistemological” interpretations.

Other interpretations of quantum mechanics, however, are “ontological”. They consider what happens once we uncover more about the quantum world (when we find variables that are still “hidden”) or once we accept that some of its structures (such as the wave function) aren’t the ones we’re familiar with. When that occurs, we’ll see that its fundament, or “ontology”, is more or less like ours.

QBism is different. It is agnostic about whether there is a world that is structured independently of human thinking. It doesn’t assume we are measuring pre-existing structures, but nor does it pretend that quantum formalism is just a tool. Each measurement is a new event that guides us in formulating more accurate rules for what we will experience in future events. These rules are not subjective, for they are openly discussed, compared and evaluated by other physicists.

QBism therefore sees physicists as permanently connected with the world they are investigating rather than somehow getting “behind” it. Physics, to them, is an open-ended exploration that proceeds by generating ever new laboratory experiences that lead to ever more successful, but revisable, expectations of what will be encountered in the future.

Phenomenologists like myself find this obvious. We see QBism as simply stating that physicists form their ideas about the world the way the rest of us do: through experience. Humans are pre-connected with the world, and experience comes first. As Laura de la Tremblaye – a philosopher from the University of Geneva – said at the Linköping meeting: “QBism is a phenomenological reading of QM.”

Overlapping thoughts

These remarkable overlaps between QBism and phenomenology made physicists at the conference feel they needed to study phenomenology – and the phenomenologists to study physics. Fuchs himself explained how he’d once driven 75 miles through Boston traffic to pay $1600 for a complete set of the works of William James, the 19th-century American philosopher and proto-phenomenologist. Meanwhile, Delicia Kamins – a philosophy student at Stony Brook University who also spoke at Linköping – last year used her Fulbright fellowship to bone up on quantum mechanics at the University of Bonn.

For phenomenologists, experience is always “intentional” – i.e. directed towards something – and these intentionalities can be fulfilled or unfulfilled. Phenomenologists ask questions such as: what kind of experience is laboratory experience? How does laboratory experience – in which physicists are trained to see instruments and measurements in a certain way – differ from, say, emotional or social or physical experiences? And how do lab experiences allow us to formulate rules that anticipate future lab experiences?

Another overlap between QBism and phenomenology concerns the nature of experiments.

Another overlap between QBism and phenomenology concerns the nature of experiments. They don’t magically beam physicists into a special, more fundamental world. Instead, as I have long argued, experiments are performances. They’re events that we conceive, arrange, produce, set in motion and witness, yet we can’t make them show us anything we wish. That doesn’t mean there is a deeper reality “out there” – just as, with Shakespeare, there is no “deep Hamlet” of which all other Hamlets we produce are imitations. In physics as in drama, the truth is in performance.

The critical point

In the final session of the June conference, the question arose as to whether QBism is an “interpretation” of quantum mechanics – i.e. a new perspective on it – or simply a “reconstruction”, a reassembly with new pieces. That led to a heated, insightful, productive (if occasionally technical) discussion among the philosophers and physicists present as to what these terms mean. I had always dreamed that this sort of debate would occur. I just didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.

The post When physicists and philosophers realize they share a noble truth appeared first on Physics World.

A growing share of Americans also report high levels of daily stress and worry, according to Gallup.

On the afternoon of February 1, 2016, as Iowa voters prepared for that evening’s caucuses, Bandy Lee sat by the bedside of her mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. An assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, Lee had been too preoccupied with her mother’s condition to pay attention to the nascent presidential race, so she was taken aback when she saw footage of a Donald Trump rally airing on the hospital room’s small TV. What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. “He said something about how his supporters should knock the crap out of hecklers,” she recalls, “and that if they did, he would pay their legal bills.”

His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. As part of her clinical work in prison settings, she had evaluated and treated hundreds of violent offenders, including leaders of prison gangs. A native New Yorker, she had assumed that Trump “was just a shady businessman,” Lee told me, but “I suddenly realized that he had a lot in common” with those patients. “Trump was engaging in the predatory manipulation of his vulnerable followers.” In some cases, gang leaders might “ask their members to engage in violence and then issue bogus promises of protection. Like Trump, these leaders also often project extreme self-confidence, and that appeals to their followers, who tend to feel a deep emotional need for protection, connection, and identity.”

Fast forward to November 9, 2016, the day after the election. Lee’s friends and colleagues were bombarding her with calls and emails. Would Trump’s victory herald an increase in hate crimes? “You are a violence expert,” one implored. “Can you do something?”

Violent themes were becoming a staple of Republican campaign rhetoric well before the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search unleashed a fresh torrent of inciteful messaging.

She decided to jump into the fray, organizing an academic conference that took place in New Haven the following April. Titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” the meeting featured a handful of prominent psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors (1986), who addressed Trump’s mental state and the risks they believed it posed to the health and safety of Americans. Their consensus was, as Lifton put it, that psychiatric professionals had a compelling ethical duty to “bring our experience and knowledge to bear on what threatens us and what might renew us.” The event was initially sponsored by Yale’s schools of public health, medicine, and nursing, but Lee ended up running it independently to avoid the perception of “politicization.”

On the day of the conference, when only two dozen people filed into the 450-seat auditorium, the speakers—who also included clinical psychiatry professor Judith Herman from Harvard Medical School, and New York University psychiatrist James Gilligan, who also specializes in violent behavior—were “disappointed,” Lee says. “We assumed that our effort was a failure until we saw the press coverage, which included write-ups in news outlets in [many] different countries.” She proceeded to solicit papers on Trump’s potential for violence from a couple dozen other mental health experts and published the entire collection that fall. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was a surprise bestseller, hailed by the Washington Post as “the most daring book” of 2017.

Bandy Lee felt she had a duty to warn the public of President Trump’s potential for violence.

Zach Gross

Shortly after the book came out, leaders of the American Psychiatric Association began publicly attacking Lee, arguing she was acting irresponsibly. Her alleged offense was violating the 1973 Goldwater Rule, an APA guideline stating that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion” of anyone without conducting a personal examination and getting proper approval.

The rule was the APA’s response to a 1966 lawsuit by Barry Goldwater, the late Arizona senator and presidential candidate. Goldwater had successfully sued Fact magazine, which, shortly before the 1964 general election, ran a piece in which dozens of leading psychiatrists offered crude armchair assessments of the state of Goldwater’s psyche. “His impulsive, impetuous behavior…reflects an emotionally immature, unstable personality,” wrote one doctor, who went on to cite Goldwater’s “inability to dissociate himself from vituperative, sick extremists.” (While the archconservative’s fiery campaign speeches were startling to many Americans at the time, they now seem relatively tame compared with Trump’s.)

This was the heyday of classical Freudianism, and most of the Fact magazine commentary was rooted in theoretical mumbo jumbo rather than empirical facts. One psychiatrist declared that the “core of [Goldwater’s] paranoid personality is…his anality and latent homosexuality.” The legacy of these off-the-cuff evaluations is a primary reason that today’s APA leaders were so eager to quash Lee’s Trump commentary.

“Anything a psychiatrist says without examining a patient is likely to be inaccurate, so it can harm the public figure,” says Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University professor who has served as the APA’s president. Appelbaum is also concerned that diagnosing people from a distance casts the profession in a negative light: “These seemingly cavalier and politically motivated public statements can prevent people from getting the psychiatric care that they need.”

And yet Lee’s Cassandra-like warnings turned out to be remarkably prescient. On the morning of the insurrection, as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed in sworn testimony to the January 6 committee, Trump had no compunction about unleashing armed loyalists on the Capitol, and was furious when told he could not accompany them. Two days later, as Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book, Peril, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed to channel Lee when she told General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “This unhinged president could not be more dangerous. And we must do everything we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country.”

We also know from January 6 testimony that key Republicans—including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Cabinet secretaries such as Steven Mnuchin and Betsy DeVos—discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides for removal of a president who is no longer fit to discharge his duties due to a mental or physical disability.

No former president since John Tyler—who later became a Confederate lawmaker—has warmed to the prospect of civil war quite as much as Trump.

Trump, whose false (and contagious) claim that the 2020 election was stolen remains the centerpiece of his putative 2024 campaign, could still end up being the Republican frontrunner, despite his mounting legal troubles. In this context, Lee’s assessment begs a second look. The threat of violence, after all, was a staple of Republican campaign rhetoric even before the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago unleashed a fresh torrent of inciteful anti-government messaging from Republican lawmakers and right-wing extremists alike. Back in June, to offer just one example, Missouri Senate candidate and former governor Eric Greitens released an ad depicting a fully armed “MAGA crew” going RINO hunting. (Greitens, who had resigned his governership amid a sex scandal and other allegations, lost his August primary to Republican Eric Schmitt.)

As a pioneering scholar of violence, Lee has plenty to say about what can be done to address the growing disregard for law and democratic institutions that Trump helped normalize. Indeed, in January, well before this most recent surge of hyper-partisan vitriol, the Washington Post and the University of Maryland published a poll in which 34 percent of participants—and about 40 percent of participating Republicans and independents—said political violence is sometimes justifiable.

The warning signs have long been there for all to see. Ever since June 2015, when Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, he has repeatedly embraced violence in support of his political goals. Roughly two months after the Iowa caucuses, when his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was arrested for manhandling a female reporter, Trump responded with gaslighting: “It was almost like he was trying to keep her off me, like he was trying to help her.”

Instead of denouncing the white supremacists who organized the 2017 Charlottesville rally that turned violent, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” And during his first debate with Joe Biden, Trump refused to condemn the Proud Boys, a violent extremist group that would play a pivotal role in the Capitol assault, instead telling them to “stand back and stand by.”

No former president since John Tyler—who later became a Confederate lawmaker—has warmed to the prospect of civil war quite as much as Trump, who in late May “re-truthed” a post on his social media platform positing it as a solution for our “failing” nation. His followers may be on the same page. In a poll published a week or so later, more than half of the Republican respondents said America “seems headed toward a civil war in the near future.” The Mar-a-Lago search generated further talk of civil war on social media channels, along with calls to target judges and federal agents that at least one participant acted upon.

Lee’s professional interests date back to her childhood in a run-down neighborhood just south of the New York Botanical Garden. “The windows of my junior high school were strewn with bullet holes,” she recalls. “In the 1980s, Albanian, Chinese, and African American teenage gangs patrolled the Bronx. I grew up never imagining that I wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder to check that I was safe.”

After graduating from Yale Medical School in 1994, Lee devoted her career to studying, predicting, and preventing violence. Early in her residency at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, she jumped at the chance to provide therapy to inmates at Boston’s Suffolk County Jail. “I identify with perpetrators of violent crimes,” she explains. “There is a paper-thin difference between becoming one of them and doing what I do. I’ve lived in their surroundings and I know their mindset.”

In addition to studying the perpetrators, she has focused on the broader topic of how societies view and process violence. America’s leaders have historically perceived it primarily through the lens of crime and punishment, “but I see it as a serious public health problem, which we need to address by means of scientific principles.”

In 1997, she began working with James Gilligan, then one of her Harvard mentors, on the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project. Supported by a $2.6 million grant from the Soros Foundation, the pair established an experimental program for violent offenders in a San Francisco jail.

“Since 1900, every time a Republican president has taken over, economic inequality has increased and the country has become more violent.”

By immersing the men in an intensive six-day-a-week rehabilitation regimen that combined psychotherapy with training in social skills such as empathy, accountability, and creative expression, RSVP reduced the annual rate of violent incidents in the 62-bed unit from about 25 to zero in the year after the program was launched. Among the prisoners who had spent at least 16 weeks in the program prior to release, re-arrests for violent crimes declined by 83 percent. (“In my psychiatric training, I was taught that violence was not treatable,” Lee recalls, “but this is false.”)

Lee also has consulted with government officials in Alabama, Connecticut, New York, and elsewhere—including France and Ireland—on prison reform projects, and has collaborated with fellow academics on the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and written or edited more than a dozen books on violence. Her 2019 textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures, received plaudits from many experts in the field, including epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, the executive director of Cure Violence, a nonprofit that addresses violence in urban communities. “It’s an exceptional achievement,” he says. “This comprehensive look at the psychology, brain science, and sociology of violence” is helping to put the subject on the map as an academic discipline in its own right.

About 15 years ago, Lee and Gilligan began examining deaths by violence in America since 1900. As Lee sliced and diced their massive data set, she was shocked to find significantly higher national rates of violent death under Republican presidents than under Democratic ones. What’s more, murder and suicide rates were higher in states that had voted for Republican presidential candidates than in those that had voted for Democratic candidates. Their key findings were published as a 2011 monograph, Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others.

“Since 1900, every time a Republican president has taken over, economic inequality has increased and the country has become more violent,” says Gilligan, now a professor of psychiatry at NYU. And as the government safety net has crumbled in recent decades, rates of murder, imprisonment, and poverty have been five to 10 times higher in the United States than in Western Europe, Canada, and Australasia. Lee and Gilligan had to circulate their data-driven paper on the political correlates of violent death rates for nearly seven years before they finally got it published in 2014 in a specialized journal, Aggression and Violent Behavior. “My sense is that our study kept getting rejected not because it was lousy science but because editors wanted to avoid appearing too political,” she says.

According to Lee, Trump’s extreme dangerousness puts him in a completely different category from previous Republican presidents, who merely endorsed a set of harsh economic policies that are associated with increased violence. In contrast to past presidents with likely personality disorders, she believes, Trump has a psychological profile that is common among violent offenders. “There is typically a developmental arrest caused by early trauma or abandonment,” Lee says. “As adults, they still act like children in the playground; convinced that might makes right, they often can’t stop bullying others. “Trump’s mother, Lee points out, became chronically ill when he turned two, and his father was cruel and emotionally unavailable, repeatedly urging his son to be “a killer.”

Her clinical insights into the criminal mind draw on the stage theory of morality devised by Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. In Kohlberg’s model, which is backed up by empirical research on children, perpetrators of violence tend to be frozen in an early developmental stage: Like young children, they rarely take into account the concerns of others and tend to obey only those whom they fear. “Such adults are incapable of any sophisticated moral calculus,” Lee says. “For Trump, the only reason not to do something—even something that is likely to harm others—is to avoid punishment. And since he has rarely been held accountable for any misdeeds, he has come to believe that he has a carte blanche to do whatever serves his immediate needs.”

Despite the scolding directed her way by influential psychiatrists, Lee contends that she has never broken the Goldwater Rule, which, as she wrote in 2017, “is the norm of ordinary practice I happen to agree with.” In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, she and her co-authors challenged Trump’s fitness to serve based on his behavior rather than on a diagnosis per se. “The issue that we are raising is not whether Trump is mentally ill,” Gilligan writes in his chapter. “It is whether he is dangerous.” As proof of the psychological peril at hand, the authors point to Trump’s angry tirades and verbal abuse of subordinates, his admiration of authoritarian leaders, conspiratorial fantasies, aversion to facts, and attraction to violence.

Forensic psychiatrists like Lee and Gilligan are often asked to assess people imprisoned for violent acts and offer their expert opinions as to whether, if released, those prisoners are likely to re-offend. They follow a standard protocol, taking into account the person’s criminal history, ability to show remorse, and any lingering attraction toward violence they might exhibit. “Back in 2017, we followed the same protocol in assessing Trump’s potential for dangerousness,” Lee says. “Most Americans do not have direct experience dealing with people who commit violent crimes. But we do. And we could tell that someone who boasts about sexually assaulting women and says that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it was likely to evolve into a president who would severely damage the nation’s public health.”

In early January 2018, the APA doubled down on the Goldwater Rule and issued a public statement urging all psychiatrists—even those, like Lee, who do not belong to the APA—to stop offering any public commentary about public figures. “Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is,” the release asserted, “unacceptable and unethical.” The New York Times editorial board piled on the next day. In a piece titled “Is Mr. Trump Nuts?” the opinion editors called Lee out directly for speaking up about Trump.

Soon after, the Times published an op-ed by Columbia professor Jeffrey Lieberman, another former APA president, under the headline “Maybe Trump Is Not Mentally Ill. Maybe He’s Just a Jerk.” Lieberman accused psychiatrists who’d speculated about Trump’s mental state of “clinical name calling” and compared them to Soviet shrinks who misused their credentials to bolster a totalitarian regime. (In February, Lieberman was suspended from his post as chair of Columbia’s psychiatry department over a tweet that was widely seen as misogynistic and racist.)

“When academics are pressured to give in to power, we have to stand up. We need to make sure that intellectual knowledge and facts are valued.”

By discrediting her academic work, Lee says, these broadsides essentially removed it from the public square. “After the New York Times endorsed the APA’s gag order, which sought to protect public figures rather than public health,” she says, “the rest of the mainstream media followed.”

Defenders of the Goldwater Rule consider it a critical ethical principle. “Trump’s outrageous behavior was public, and because of its flagrant nature, the public doesn’t need experts to interpret it,” says Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and contributing opinion writer for the Times, who supports the APA’s position. “It’s also a fantasy to believe that experts could somehow rescue the nation from a bad character.”

Harvard’s Judith Herman, who spoke at Lee’s Trump conference, counters that the APA is on the wrong side of history. “In his work on tyranny, Yale historian Timothy Snyder emphasizes the value of courageous professional organizations,” she says. “If you see a proto-fascist movement, you can either be part of the resistance or you can go along to get along.” That view is shared by Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who worked as an ethics lawyer in the Obama White House. “We’ve never had such a mentally unfit president before. If more professionals had felt free to speak out, they might have made a difference,” he says.

Thomas Gutheil, a forensic psychiatrist who co-founded Harvard’s Program in Psychiatry and the Law, agrees that psychiatrists were compelled to alert the public to Trump’s dangerousness. In the 1976 case of Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, he explains, the California Supreme Court ruled that mental health professionals have the legal duty to protect anyone they determine could be harmed by a patient. In any case, Gutheil doesn’t think psychiatrists need to examine Trump to understand the threat he poses to society, given that so much of his disturbing behavior is well known to the public.

None of the arguments in support of Lee’s rationale carried much weight with John Krystal, Yale’s chair of psychiatry, who in May 2020 abruptly fired her from the teaching position she had held for 17 years. Krystal previously had tolerated her public pronouncements, so long as she made it clear she was speaking for herself and not the medical school.

What pushed him over the edge, apparently, was a January 2020 Twitter dustup between Lee and retired law professor and Trump confidant Alan Dershowitz. Lee asserted that Dershowitz had taken on “Trump’s symptoms by contagion,” whereupon he accused her of publicly diagnosing him, and then complained about Lee in an email to Yale administrators. Lee should be disciplined, he wrote, due to “a serious violation” of the APA’s ethics rules. He also asked Yale to keep him posted on its plan of action. Krystal referenced the tweets in Lee’s dismissal letter, which cites her “repeated violations” of the Goldwater Rule and an “inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics.”

Lee insists she was addressing patterns of behavior, not offering any formal diagnosis, and she sued Yale six months later for allegedly violating her academic freedom. (The case is pending.) She wants her job back but insists her legal action is about something bigger. “When academics are pressured to give in to power, we have to stand up. We need to make sure that intellectual knowledge and facts are valued,” she says.

Lee’s dismissal, meanwhile, elicited outrage from prominent academics who complain that university administrators have gotten increasingly sensitive to controversies that might rub donors the wrong way. “There is now a lot less tolerance in academia for scholars like Lee who speak the truth bluntly,” says NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of 2020’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, which chronicles the turn of numerous countries—including the United States—toward authoritarianism.

While Lee remains persona non grata in medical school psychiatry departments, she has not abandoned her lifelong academic pursuits. She also earned a master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School during her first few years in New Haven and was recently made a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, where she will work with Gilligan and sociologist Jim Vrettos to establish a violence prevention institute. She continues to consult on prison reform for state governments and social service agencies.

In June, as Lee watched the first round of public hearings of the January 6 committee—which have exposed Trump as “a clear and present danger to democracy,” to quote testimony by the retired federal judge and Republican icon J. Michael Luttig—she was comforted by a slew of emails thanking her for her lonely crusade to warn the nation about Trump. “I’ve alerted my congressman to read your work,” noted one writer.

When Lee thinks about Trump’s inciteful speech on the afternoon of January 6, her mind goes back to the violent offenders she has spent time with. “To gain acceptance, some members of gangs are required to perform an initiation rite—say, rob a store. By telling his supporters that they wouldn’t ‘have a country anymore’ unless they were willing to ‘fight like hell,’ Trump was challenging them to prove both their patriotism and their loyalty to him by engaging in violence.”

She is not surprised that Trump hasn’t expressed remorse for fomenting the insurrection. “Freud once remarked that no one feels as guilty as saints, and I have found that no one feels as innocent as criminals,” she says. Perpetrators of violence—even convicted murderers—often feel victimized: “They tend to think that their behavior, no matter how egregious, was warranted and reasonable.”

“I have found that once gang leaders are taken into custody, their followers soon stop believing in the delusions that they had all shared.”

Lee insists that Trump’s propensity for violence has increased over the past few years—particularly since his rejection by voters. She publicly predicted, in the summer of 2020, that Trump “will likely refuse to concede the results, call the election a fraud, and refuse to leave office.” As she told me more recently, “after Trump assumed the unparalleled power of the presidency, he began to expect he would forever be treated with extreme deference. His ego is so fragile that he is often unable to accept reality; for him, the fact that he lost the election was too painful to bear.”

Trump’s normalization of violence may have inspired its spread in the United States and around the world. Lee points to a paper published this year showing that Texas counties that hosted Trump campaign rallies in 2016 subsequently experienced significant increases in reported hate crimes per capita relative to counties that didn’t host rallies. Nationally, meanwhile, the FBI documented a nearly one-third increase in hate crimes from 2016 to 2020. “Unfortunately, many other countries are now also encouraging and elevating mentally impaired ‘strongmen’—or, in truth, fragile men—to positions of power,” Lee says, resulting in “a huge international public health crisis.”

Like other epidemic diseases, she told me, violence is contagious if not contained early, so “Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and behavior over the past few years” can be seen in large segments of the GOP. Indeed, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago extrapolates from a recent survey he conducted that nearly 50 million American adults believe the 2020 election was stolen—and 21 million, about one-third of whom own guns, believe force would be justified to restore Trump to the Oval Office.

Holding Trump accountable for his criminal behavior, from Lee’s vantage point, could act as an antidote of sorts to the violent sentiments of his supporters. “I have found that once gang leaders are taken into custody, their followers soon stop believing in the delusions that they had all shared,” she says. “And their behavior often returns to normal.” To those who worry that his prosecution could lead to an uptick in violence, Lee counters that “doing nothing would be much more damaging to the country in the long run.”

Which is why Lee and her supporters stress that the APA needs to acknowledge its mistake and free mental health experts to rejoin the national conversation about how best to contain this particular epidemic. “The course of violence is not inevitable; we can change it,” Lee says. “And it seems counterproductive to prevent those who have spent their careers studying violence from speaking up at all.” As the specter of even greater violence looms over our fragile democratic experiment in the run-up to 2024, we can ill afford to ignore the red flags any longer.

Archive for category: #Sensuousness #Feeling #Suffering #Emotion

Notes:

Back story

Overlapping thoughts

The critical point

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