When times are good and the ship of state only needs to sail straight, mentally healthy people function well as political leaders. But in times of crisis and tumult, those who are mentally abnormal, even ill, become the greatest leaders. We might call this the Inverse Law of Sanity.
Got that? When society faces a crisis, you want an emotionally unstable nutbag in charge. Or, to put it another way, crazy times call for crazy people.
Somehow, this logic doesn't seem to apply when "great nations" are facing "great villains" in other countries, however. How many cheered the assumed insanity of Hitler? Wasn't one of the reasons the US supposedly had to go over and bomb Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a wacko tyrant who couldn't be reasoned with? And don't even start me on the entire philosophy of the War on Terror, whose central premise is that those being targeted are in the US government's crosshairs because they're motivated by irrational beliefs and their instability means they can't be brought to a diplomatic compromise.
And of course, the idea of "great leaders" is bandied about much in the article but never once defined.
This just goes to show that the WSJ has totally lost it.
But, I guess by their logic that's a good thing!
Could this finally be the explanation we’ve been seeking for the otherwise inexplicable proliferation of MMTers lately?
ReplyDeleteEllis,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your take. I figured there was a lot more to this story than what is on the surface but, the surface being ghastly enough as it was, I decided to start there and let my dutiful commenters take us all the rest of the way.
Good stuff!
Paging Stalin - your services are desperately needed. Since he was a paranoid, delusional, power-hungry sadist of a madman, I guess he is what is needed to fix the ongoing crisis. As a response to Ellis from someone who knows - there are unfortunately various mental disorders, or illnesses, or what you would like to call it that puts the mind in a state it is not supposed to be. Some of those medications you mentioned CAN be effectively used to put the mind in a more "normal" state (meaning that various chemical substances start acting like they do in the heads of "normal" people). Obviously, they do not always work as intended, obviously they are sometimes (in the US probably quite frequently) prescribed to people who shouldn't have them, and obviously they will not fix any real-life problems a person may have.
ReplyDeleteBut mental illnesses do exist on a biological level, and some of these medicines have prevented myriads of suicides and life-long depressions.
But like I said, I am very well aware that the over-prescription of such medicines to anyone for any reason is a real problem.
And you are quite right, anti-depressants never made anyone happy, ever. But they can, under the right circumstances, remove artificial barriers made by chemical imbalances in the brain that stand in your way of perceiving reality and your own emotions correctly.
He has got a point...The public school Democracy Parasites are mentally retarded so the mentally ill political terrorists seem great to them during crisis.
ReplyDeleteWhen shills for the state are reduced to writing inane, insane, and insulting bullshit like this, then you know that the tide is turning in favor of free minds and free markets, for peaceful relations and against entangling alliances.
ReplyDeleteDale Fitz
HPX,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your comment and understand what you're saying but I would point out that psychiatrist rarely, if ever, perform actual tests to check for these "chemical imbalances." They simply believe they see the symptoms and then prescribe the medication.
It's entirely possible that someone might be suffering not from chemical imbalances but mental contradictions and the psychological effects of trying to integrate the mutually exclusive. It's also possible that the pseudo-scientific "chemical imbalance" might be used to "diagnose" someone who is simply unhappy with the State and living under the boot of others, Soviet mental ward-style.
What's funny to me is that we get mentally ill leaders from time to time. How do those people get elected anyway?
ReplyDelete스포츠토토
ReplyDeletevalue the article post.Thanks Again. Really Great.
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