Interview with Robert Whitaker – How Psychiatry Lost Its Way

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Robert Whitaker joined Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring of Witt-Doerring Psychiatry to discuss what is wrong with the way psychiatry is practiced today in the U.S. and globally, and more importantly, why there are so many problems and why they haven’t been fixed.

Witt-Doerring Psychiatry‘s mission statement is “to raise awareness about the side effects of psychiatric medications to improve informed consent. We make videos about drug side effects and the best strategies to manage them. We also run a private practice that focuses on: 1) the treatment and management of adverse drug reactions 2) the management of most psychiatric conditions for patients who are seeking psychiatrists who try to manage their conditions with the lowest necessary medication use. Come find us at: https://www.wittdoerringpsychiatry.com/.”

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21 COMMENTS

  1. I was ordered out of a psychiatrist’s office at Mayo Clinic. I had refused to go on antidepressants bc I felt worse when I tried. I get 4 Ativan (0.5 mg) pills per month for anxiety. I had asked for 10 pills per month as needed. I was never given the chance to show that I could manage my anxiety w/ just a few more pills. This has went on for 2 years. I feel like I am expected to prove my worthiness as a patient. Thank you for your MIA column.

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  3. Great interview with Robert Whitaker as always. Appreciate Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring’s knowledge and perspective as well.

    Per Robert – “Human beings are responsive to their environment. Environment matters”.

    100%, yet this is so beyond comprehension for psychiatrists who choose to remain stuck in their own simplistic, impoverished way of thinking about people’s problems and putting labels on people.
    It’s obvious psychiatry maintains their own narratives to benefit themselves.

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  4. Dear Robert,

    Here is a way forward. What people should get better at knowing is this…

    All creatures are FREE to think whatever they like. Even if their thinking is logically wrong or mad. It is their own cranium and what ever thoughts go on within that private place are entirely theirs to manage. In short, I often tell people in general this much, I say to them…

    ‘I am free to think or feel whatever I like about you, and you are free to think or feel whatever you like about me. You do not “have to” feel “love” or “like” about me. To force anyone to “have to” feel or think is like holding them hostage to an ideology. It is tantamount to mind control. We must be free to explore out stray thinking, our wildly off the mark thinking, suspicious thinking, paranoid thinking, mad thinking, silly thinking, right thinking, wrong thinking because one thought leads to another and another and another until a dour thought becomes a hopeful thought or a wreckless throught becomes a relaxed thought. You cannot “police” someone else’s private thoughts without becoming a “policer of freedom”. A feeling inside a person and even outside a person CANNOT hurt you, since a mere feeling is not an ACT of kinetic external bodily behaviour interacting with other body.
    A feeling is NOT a behaviour. A feeling is NOT a body. For external behaviour a body is required. A body must lift a chair to hurl it over a room. The trigger for ACTION is a DECISION that is mental in that it comes from a split second of “thinking” that moving the body and chair in a bodily badly behaved way is a fine idea. But that triggering is also NOT an EXTERNAL behaviour. It is still an interior private thought. Thoughts are NOT quite the same as feelings. But both reside within the private interior if the body unless outward behavioural bodily expression has been DECIDED upon. Neither the phenomenon of thinking or feeling actually each have a body in and of themselves that can do any kinetic damaging things. You may say some kinds of thinking lead to impulsive outward behaviour but this is not true. Always “a conscious” planned decision is required by the impulsive one, who invariably is aware enough to know where to hurl the chair. But merely thinking alot or feeling alot are NOT enough to trigger outward mayhem. The globe is full of crowded packed buses all with people feeling and thinking alot about how they hate being squashed next to people. Yet all people on such buses do not unleash murderous outward behaviour. Rage, pain, frustration are feelings that people feel every day without incident. We are capable of thinking and feeling alot without destroying anybody. But the increasing “policing” of each others thinking and feeling would cause the opposite impression. In a totalitarian regime your thoughts and feelings get deemed a danger. You may be grandfather quite incapable of lifting a chair to reach a kitchen cupboard to fetch a tin of chickpeas but your ruminations and mad thinking and eccentric feelings are enough to make you an enemy of those who suspect that your thoughts and feelings will become your behaviour in a nanosecond.
    A billion buses all over the globe that do not house a bloodbath are testimony to the fact that “thinking” and “feeling” are no danger to anyone. Psychiatry often used to lock up who they concluded were mad just because they betrayed elements of odd thinking or peculiar feelings.
    So all that said, it is refreshing to know that one individual does not “have to” like or love another individual, or think nice thoughts about them or religiously perfect or politically perfect thoughts about them. There are no “have to” rules when it comes to “thoughts” and “feelings”. Rules should mainly only be for that line crossing of “outward behaviour”. So you are free to loathe an individual, revile an individual, regard an individual as potty, or mean, or uninformed, or disloyal, or heretical, or satanic. Your thinking may be wrong entirely but your merely thinking anything is not harmful. It is great that you have such freedom to think and feel exactly as you wish, and it is great that all eight billon people on the planet also are born with this same freedom. It is like the child’s freedom to poke a tongue out at a maiden aunt. We recognize that in a child such freedom is healing to its wellbeing. We sadly do not allow this freedom to harmlessly think and feel as we choose to in adults. If you do not like me then I support you to feel that feeling more. The more we accept our feelings the more those feelings do not get stuck as obsessive preoccupations but move on, as a flow, to become new more calm feelings. It is not accepting feelings, because you are admonished for it by a totalitarian regime, that brings about the deadening to emotions that gives rise to bullying. The more we accept our authentic feelings the more we arrive at self soothing calm. Calm people feel too calm to want to bother triggering their outward bad behaviour. Monitoring feelings and “thought policing” leads not to a tidying up of bad behaviour but an escalating national explosion of such outward cruelty. This occurred before the Spanish Inquisition. The “thought policed” neighbours in Salem turned in neighbours who showed too much “thinking” and “feeling”.
    When we admonish an individual for having “assumptions” or “beliefs” about us we are admonishing their “thinking” as if that inner process of theirs is the same as damning and dangerous outward kinetic bodily behaviour. Bear in mind that no human “has to” feel “love” towards another person. And no human HAS TO “know all about” another person before they have even sat down with them for a coffee, or even ever “know all about” them. Some spouses are a mystery to their partners all their life. This means that “assumptions” and “beliefs” and “curious wild explorations” and “guesses” about other people are just extentions of the freedom of choice to indulge in private interior “thinking” and “feeling”. These are “assumptions” are NOT ACTUAL kinetic bodily behavioural outward ACTS of deliberate direct bullying. Indeed at the start of getting to know anything or anyone a ladder of assumptions must be propped. The assumption the other is interested in you, the assumption they are feeling okay and are not in pain, the assumption they are familiar with your favourite authors, on and on. What is happening in these “thought policing” times is people are accused of being “the enemy” merely by them blundering around in curiosity and guesses and assumptions. To reap control on peoples assumptions is exerted an effort by the cagey to control each individual’s private “thinking” and “feeling”.

    A Muslim’s believer’s belief about me cannot hurt me. A Jewish believers belief about me cannot hurt me. An evangelical Christain believer’s belief about me cannot hurt me. An assumption, a belief, a thought, a feeling, are harmless. All ideologies are harmless. It is outward bad behaviour that causes war and to get to deciding to ACT outwardly requires a callous LACK of contact with a healthy interior of balanced thinking and feeling. Insisting that people in any religion or paradigm or ideology must now all think and feel exactly the same way causes the suppression of the naturalnesss of the FREEDOM OF CHOICE to think and feel what you like.
    Knowing that a Muslim’s beliefs and a Jew’s beliefs and a Christain’s beliefs are all fine and cannot harm you means GREATER tolerance of the choice to be “different”…like the choice to stay a mad woman is “different”.
    There is only really one choice that we cannot count as being FREEDOM OF CHOICE, that is in the choice to be sexually abuse or bullying or cruel. Such a choice is the ACT if being INTENTIONALLY OUTWARDLY BODILY BADLY BEHAVED. It is not really like a choice. It is more like a violence or a sickness brought about through imbalance. In any community one cannot allow the freedom of choice to murder.
    Thinking and feeling HAVE NO BODY and cannot harm anyone.

    I think assumptions and funny beliefs all day. It may be fed by my schizophrenia, my madness, my derangement from brain inflammation or trauma or paranoia or sloppy thinking or childish maiden aunt thinking, or tired thinking, or bamboozeled thinking. I may not clarify my thinking until I have said my thoughts out loud all day and then refute them or revise them. I may be naive or only have past experience to fall back on to help me think straight. A person phoning someone will already be assuming the someone as a gender or kind person or brisk person or in a hurry or critical or sexy or weird or worrying or great. All within ten seconds of a “hello”. Our caveman selves need to make fast assumptions incase the other is a sabre tooth tiger. Our survival is locked into our wild guesses. We cannot help it. So a totalitarian regime that says people cannot make assumptions or think their own thoughts is being the sabre tooth tiger we dare not name.

    An individual’s thinking can be swayed by a dominant influencer feeding them ideas of “perfect thinking”. Only these thoughts about women are allowed and not those thoughts about women….or the mad…or the wishy washy peacemakers…or the climate change believers or unbelievers. This taking the brain hostage and using the exuse of a neutral religion or ideololgy to nail compliance extolls a burden on the delightful playful messiness that goes on in the reveries of the brain. Nitpicking over your every word choice is like nitpicking over your private thoughts. A billion buses make their packed crowded murderously hot journeys without incident. The people therein each clutch a multitude of “different” choices of neutral ideology yet they manage to travel though life IN PEACE.

    People become bullies because at some point they are held hostage and told they are not free to BE any way they choose to be. Such dominance over their freedom of choice to be “different” feels nurturing. So without such freedom those embryonic bullies become unnurtured and callous and deadened to the feelings that could calm them. They then become violent and prone to being footsoldiers to any regime. They start snapping at outsiders, any sane person, or any mad person, whomever they deem to have dangerous “thinking” and “feeling”. They punish trangressors of their idea of “perfect thinking” and “perfect feeling” AS IF those persons who merely had woolly thinking or clumsy feeling were unleashing outward ACTS of bad behaviour.

    Why do I say all this? Because in order to envisage any new kind of response to the distressed it matters to know more about some of the mechanisms of distress.

    But because FREEDOM OF CHOICE to think and feel as you choose to is so integral to inner psychological balance it means that we must allow for contrary opinions that do not marry up with our own.

    One individual may have an opinion that all psychiatrists are monsters and all their treatments stink.

    Another person may have an opinion that maybe a few psychiatrists are deliberately cruel, but most are just full of the choice to care in that specific way they do.

    Both individuals are allowed freedom of choice to follow their own inner guidance.

    The MEDICINE we all need is OUR OWN CHOICE…even if it is ill-advised, as in the wish to drown our sorrows in a bottle of whiskey every day that will damage our liver. It is our own liver. It is our own life.

    Robert I thank you for doing your mammoth great work in uncovering the many deceptions that psychiatry has indeed been guilty of. I thank you for wising everyone up. You share your thoughts and feelings and magnificent those are. I truly mean that. I am sincere in this completely. The psychiatric medications are shortening lives.

    But, if I hear you right, I cannot chime with your free thought that myriad things cannot chronically disrupt biology, and since the brain IS biological this can surely then be disrupted too. And I cannot agree that such myriad things cannot cause rather long term brain conditions that in turn feel like illness and even disease to those who experience them.

    I am agreeing with your “Psychiatric medication makes many much worse off, on balance”.

    I am not so much agreeing with an antipsychiatry ideology that has it that psychiatry invented illness as experiences. And that if you can adopt a positive attitude and talk lots then it will all go away.

    Inflammation in the brain is not something like trauma that you can talk all magically healed in a comment section.

    I have schizophrenia maybe caused by inflammation in the brain. I hope nutrient changes will solve it because if it does not then I will be crying for something sedative to make me oblivious to having one thousand hallucinations every year.

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    • I cheer that there is a notion that there is such a thing as systemic harm. It is like being able to spot a prolifferating mass bullying totalitarian worldview.
      A religion can be a system, a political party can be a system, atheism can be a system, science can be a system. All ideologies and beliefs are extentions of inner thinking and feeling and so are comparatively neutral. They might counter each other, just as one person’s thought might counter another person’s thought. But this still keeps within the auspices of prioritizing everyone’s freedom of choice to think what they like. So a system, or organized bunch of thougths or beliefs, is not a harmful thing. Something MORE needs to occur for a religion or ideology or political view to turn that system into a harmful phenomenon. And that is when any system insists that it is so utterly right and true that your preference or choice should not be allowed. It is this step beyond just merely being “a system”, like a religion or ideology or belief, that is like the step away from an interior thought or feeling to enacting outward bad behaviour, via control, over others freedom to think and feel any way they choose to. It is this “step” that ushers in outward controlling persecution and direct harm. It is this “step” that tries to tell you that “your inner thinking and feeling” is dangerous.

      We can and do, as a species, allow eight billion others to “think and feel” a wide array of very “different” opinons. Allowing that biodiverse variety is because we intuitively know that even oppoaitional opinions are not directly harmful. Some religions have diametrically opposed views on sexuality. Some humans say one religion is “wrong” or another religion is “right”, but mostly people are left to plug into whatever religious system they freely choose to. The system is not harmful, until bad actors within it, priests or leaders, move the faith a “step” beyond its eccentric notions and start galvanizing mobs to be imposingly telling others it is the only true or right system and all should obey. So a religion that is “a system” that begins as a loving or caring or charitable impulse, fed by radical thinking and feeling, can over time, become “infiltrated” by imbalanced new priests or leaders who want to use it as a vehicle to despotic power over others. The religious devotee need not necessarily crave power. In the beginning what draws them is love and belonging. They find balance by allowing their eccentric thinking and feeling. But soon factions within the relgion start to bully adherents into crystalizing the faith in a “rational” and “orderly” way. This ushers in more “thinking” than going with the free flow of feelings…until devotees are told they cannot think or feel as they choose to but must follow endless nitpicky library rules. This then has a ripple effect amongst congregants who all start to fear not “policing” the thoughts of newcomers to the faith or system. Rules must be obeyed, goes the top down memo. Rules tend to slice and dice feelings, bidding the compartmentalizing of emotions into tidy “logical” order. But soon this analytically living by “logic” alone becomes an “extreem rationalism” that tilts into “irrational” complexity best summed up by paranoia. A religion that starts out caring can morph into a rule ridden and bullying and policing and hyper critical exteemist persecutor of “the different”, or those who want their freedom to make their own choices. A system is neutral, as is an ideology or religion, until this process starts within it. We saw this with the Christain church, it began as a symbol of caring but soon morphed in the rule ridden Spanish Inquisition. It was a caring system that got infilrated by the imbalanced priests and leaders of that time, who saw within that blossoming caring system a ladder to unfettered power.

      A tolerant world lives alongside many religions and ideologies and systems, as a prioritizing of freedom of choice.

      What is not a healthy choice is choosing to be a brutal bully within any of those neutral religions or ideologies or systems.

      A religion may “think” that sex is dirty. It may draw a hundred people to that religion who chime with that free thought, possibly people who were abused. There is no harm in holding that quirky opinion. You may regard it as a toxic view, but because no one in that religion are telling you that you cannot think and feel as you prefer to do, there is no harm in that peculiar choice of an opinion. It is a system, but it is not attempting to control your opinions or feelings.

      Think of psychiatry as like a religion. It began full of caring but soon got infiltrated by a plethora of bad actors, priestly leaders, who began telling outsiders that their own freedom to think and feel was dangerous and had to be curbed by imposition of lots of rules. Trangsgressors got described in a witch hunt book that morphed out of an originally caring book. Just like how the bible became a Vatican scale library of dogmatic documents all describing other relgious persons as sinners.
      We did go through the Spanish Inquisition but…we came out the other end of that into a reappraisal of what caring love really means and feels like. That is why there are still billions of actual stone churches where some “free choosers” go to in times of grief or despair or lostness. They allow for the fact that the religion or system became harmful because it tolerated people with their poisonous “choice” to murder. May religions and ideologies and tribal customs go through these checks and balances as they develop. Any system is vulnerable to becoming imbalanced in that way, by tolerating a rising tide of leaders who only want power and not to offer caring. They may dress up the imposition of their power “as if” it “is” the caring that the world needs. The devil marquerades as God. The grand “healer”. People are quite justified in not wanting that kind of “healing” thank you very much.
      But what can then occur is this honest refusal by people to continue to bow and accept religious indoctrination that has become a smokescreen for mind “policing”, is that those people can then “categorize” all the caring devotees who are not harmful at all as monsters.
      What then occurs is if a person freely chooses to go to a church, or a system like a doctor’s office, or a political party, or atheist shrine, because that person freely wants “their own thought of healing” to come about through their own choice of where to access it, a crowd of placcard weilding demonstrators, who “categorize” their choice as “the wrong choice” begin to “impose” their own version of “mind policing” on people who just want to belong to that club or this group or that church or this ideology or system.
      The crowd are valliently trying to ban bullying but not by simply banning bullying itself, that “step” beyond a system, but they want to ban the whole system, or whole religion, or whole country of Godless unbelievers by nuking it.

      By calling a religion like Hindu or Islamic or Jewish or Christain or Mormon faiths all irreedeemably “harmful” you can end up calling the supporters of those faiths harmful even if they are a schoolboy wearing the emblems of their chosen faith. When children are deemed “harmful” for accessing any caring system, some people who “categorize” those eccentric free thinkers may want to shower them with radioactive “better thinking”.

      I cheer, Robert, your revealing of the Spanish Inquisition phase of the religion of psychiatry. I cheer your spotlighting of the real harms that the infiltration of bullying indoctrination has done to the masses. I cheer your flagging up of the toxicity of the scientific pharmacological holy water. I cheer you rescue of a billion children who are sold indoctrinating misconceptions and quack miraculous healings. During the Spanish Inquisition many martyrs identified the scourge of “thought policing” and persecution and oppression and rampant bullying.

      What I am not for is the enshrinement of uncovering evidence of nefarious “thought policing” in a person’s random free choice to be a caring Christain or caring Jew or caring Muslim or caring psychiatrist.

      For no matter how wacky other beliefs seems to us, they represent the prioritizing of the free choice to believe whatever you like. A thought, a feeling, a belief, a system, a tribal custom, is not harmful. Bullying is. And anyone and everyone can be one, regardless of what church or temple or proffession they conceal their outward bad behaviour in.

      You may or may not want to “get rid” of the Spanish Inquisition in psychiatry. You may or may not think that this is best done by erasing all of its “churches” from the face of the planet, as if its initial impulse “to care” has become so corrupted that it is incapable of not being the devil masquerading as God. The fervour to rid the world of bullying is fantastic but I feel we need to be clear about what is or is not bullying.

      I was sold a lie that pharma pills would cure me. But an evangelical church also sold me a lie that heaven would cure me. Nobody held the beaker of water with which I took the pill to my lips. Nobody forced me through the doors of the evangelical church. I went shopping for a cure and came home with disappointing and even damaging lies. But I do not call the evangelical church Christains monsters.

      I do appreciate that abuse goes on in ALL sorts of churches and offices and professions and ideologies and fundamentalist systems. Even murders are done in the name of “goodness”. So I am not saying that we should not put a stop that sort of carry on. Millions of women die in childbirth every day because they are not women, they are children forced into marriage too young by a “feelingless” numb grand rule ridden extreem rationalism that becomes irrational and fails to even acknowledge what a child is. A five year old force fed a cocktail of polypharmacy bears similar abuse. So I am not saying that systems cannot be called into question. You do a great job at that. Is it ignorant to think that all billon parents who go to a church are partaking in monstrousnous just because they choose not to leave but rather prefer to bring about healing reforms within that church or temple or religious venue?

      Alot of people do not have an abusive father.

      Alot of people do not have an abusive Rabbi or Vicar or Monk.

      Alot of people do not have a monstrous psychiatrist.

      Knowing this truth does not negate the fact that alot do have a monstrous psychiatrist.

      Both of these seem true.

      We must respond with outrage and vigour towards outbreaks of bullying within any religion or ideology or system, and this may mean calling into question the “show” of “caring” that bullying often dresses itself up as. But when outrage at bullying becomes outrage at anyone or everyone who makes it their free choice to belong to a religion or ideology or system, that once had the seed of divine care and love in it, in its early days, such outrage IS a bit like the bullying of that innocuous freedom of choice.

      Some in psychiatry might have been caught with their ecclesiastical pants down. Some in psychiatry may have been caught torching unbelievers on bonfires of ghastly ECT, while selling billions of lies like miraculous oils. But as with damaging forms of scientific innovation that come out of the hall of science, or that church, or as with the Christain church, new versions of what authentic “love” should feel like come through such dark times…..like light.

      Who are we to say someone should not go to a local church?

      I am not of any specific faith. If someone quizzically asked me for my sense of having any religion I would answer it to be simply my birthright “freedom of choice”.

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    • I write at speed to outrun the hallucinations that are clamouring for my shattered focus, consequently my comments often have gaps and jumbles and typos.

      “Such dominance over their freedom of choice to be ‘different’ feels nurturing”…should have been written as “un-nurturing”…unless one likes being a doormat…which many do…as a free choice…bizarrely.

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  7. To add a point I must clarify that to my schizophrenic way of thinking, which may be mad, I hold an opinion that racism and misogyny and sexism and ageism and ableism and any form of abuse or bullying or cruelty are bad behaviours that can find a home in any faith or religion or science hall or ideology or paradigm or system. A system is not be definition inherently malign. The word system can mean things like the circulatory system or the orthodox Jewish system or the Jehovah’s Witnesses system or the Buddhist steps to enlightenment system or the ecological systems of the planet or the weather system or the alternative healthcare system or the charitable donation system or the human rights system. A system just means something made of interconnected parts. Plants have a photosynthesis system.

    Systemic is a different word. Systemic bullying or racism or misogyny or abuse is where such bad behaviours infiltrate any system and make it imbalanced from within. Which is why bullying or racism or misogyny or abuse can set up power bases is ANY system, be it an orthodox Jewish system or a Buddhist monastic system or an or an alternative healthcare system or a school system or a transport system or a construction work system or or or or or…

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  8. https://youtu.be/k9Rr2vJorEg

    I really like the fresh freedom of feeling and freedom of choice and freedom of opinion in this video.

    Totalitarianism is “imbalance”. It is a sign of sickness. Often it is imbalance brought about via having less and less connectivity with inner feelings. A person sets up home instead in only their brainbox intellect, their thinking. This neglect of feelings can cause unwellness and this can bring anxiety. So the intellectual thinkers reasons that in order to get well again their has to be a war waged against unruly feelings, feelings that seem to cause surges in anxiety (whereas when we allow our many feelings this brings calm). The intellectual one engages in more and more rational thinking, which can lead to more anxiety, since rationalism freaks out about “doubt”. When thinking tries to find security in intellectual “certainty” it often finds another “what if” worrying question beyond that smug certainty. That worry or anxiety escalates, and the paucity of the acceptance of blends of feelings means no calm comes. So the rational anxious soon pursue even more rational ways of being, and become even more divorced from feeling. This then can, through exhausting overthinking, tilt into irrational frightened paranoia. When that occurs there comes a desperate need to exert control over any feelings that well up because of the paranoia. This crackdown on the freedom of feelings expands to include the crackdown on other peoples feelings too. Soon others are mocked for feeling and not being rational. Evidence of too much luxurious feeling is picked out of everyone’s casual use of language, since language is a tectonic meeting place between “logical thinking” and “feelings expressed”. The very imbalanced extreemly rational go after your feelings because they go after their own. They deny you access to the blend of feelings that would bring you calm. They also go in for controlling your free choices since feelings are often at the inception of a choice and often also the result of a choice. You must only make extreemly rational choices. Rational guidance by the rule ridden “logical planners” must be foisted on you, to “save you” and “the world” from frighteningly joyously messy natural blends of feelings. You need educated by extreem rationalism, tidied up by extreem rationalism, scared to death by extreem rationalism, ordered to follow logical rules set by extreem rationslism. Fine friendly folky folks who “know” all the “reasoned” rational arguments for why you cannot just be “you”.

    Schindler approached the extreem rationalism found in the nazi party be schmoozing a bit with their petty rules. To settle them down. Clink clink went the glassy whiskey tumblers. He tried to befriend the terrified tyrannizers. He tried to relax them into enjoying their normal feelings. But often what occurs in the extreemly rational who divorce from feelings that they numbly tilt into irrationality, is what emerges are “explosions of feelings”, all of a piece, as in a bar room brawl or a genocide. A kind of “overkill”, from suddenly overwhelmingly feeling alot of unnaturally dammed up pent up feelings, instead of moderately flowing episodic feelings. The party turns not to an ordinary relaxed acceptance of “decadent” feelings, but an overshoot into “depravity”. This going from cruel paranoid numbness to ravenous sprees of depravity is like manifestations of the same imbalance. An imbalance that cannot see that to be balanced means relaxing a bit about feelings. So having some intellectual rational thinking and some messy inexplicable feelings in any given hour; as a natural flow of both.

    When the way you feel becomes deemed a danger to a collective of extreemly rational nation builders or “the world” builders, then you too are ordered “not to feel your authentic feelings”. You too are persuaded to see your quirky feelings or mad feelings or silly feelings or nonsensical feelings or romantic feelings or compassionate feelings or loving feelings as deeply disturbing. You then plug in to more extreem rational “education” or “re-education” as if that magic wand will give you “logical control” over your by now frightening emotions. You become a regime’s puppet on a string, rather than letting your own authentic feelings and choices and thinking be “your own guide”. Your choices are like mini guides every time you make a choice. If it turns out to be a stupid choice “for you” then “you” will soon know. You do not need a boss extreem rationalist “caretaker” living your life for you and telling you exactly how to feel or think. It is nice to get peoples shared thoughts on matters, but this is not the same thing as terrified tyrannous coercion. Everyone has a shared thought that they love to impart, but imposing that over and over again may constitute a refusal to regard you as capable of having your own thought and feelings.

    There sat Schindler trying to heal the room by being the feeling of love.

    Love is love and so it ought to be able to be “caring” even towards extreemly rational uniformed soldiers of any regime, should it not. Balance ought to be able to persuade imbalance to come home, from where it strayed from. But in totalitarianism there comes a stage where “love looks dangerous” to the profoundly imbalanced. When that day dawns there is no point in trying to “reason” with, or “be the love” with the extreemly rational who have teeter tottered into all out irrational paranoia.

    Any system or ideology or faith or political solution can become infiltrated by such rational balance becoming extreem inflexible tightly controlling unemotional imbalance. It just needs one or two imbalanced charismatic leaders to show up. Totalitarianism is opposite to tolerance. But totalitarianism can tell you that your feelings show intolerance to extreemly rational trains of thought. You get handed a manifesto or bible of how you should become more tolerant of the irrational thinking that comes out of a mindset that is scared to connect with its own inner feelings. You are encouraged to tolerate cold chilling cruel logic rather than natural feelings.

    I hesitate here. I could easily be saying that merely being reasonable and logical and rational and intellectual are bad. That curtailment of the freedom of choice to be beautifully intellectual and scientific and analytical and academic and a lover of order and tradition and rules is also a wrong kind of imposition. All creatures are free to be how they want to be. But abuse and bullying and cruelty are things that are not really the same as freedom of choice, they are the “violent crackdown” on other peoples freedom of choice. They are almost like sickness or signs of an inability to make individual freedom of choice, like the choice to feel one way and not another way, or the choice to hold this opinon and not that opinion, or the choice to have this belief and not that belief, or the choice to visit this kind of healer paradigm and not that kind of healer paradigm.

    Wokeness is fascinating because the debates around it inspire everyone to reprioritize their own feelings and freedom of choice. This is going to help humans undertand their own individual balance, as fed by their acceptance of their own unique feelings and thoughts, by inadvertantly losing balance, because various bullies on all sides say they cannot be who they choose to be.
    Wokeness ushered in the healing of “feelings acceptance”, but like any system can fall foul to dogmatic rationalist thought leaders it became infiltrated by the extreemly rational who went straight to nitpicking over language, as way to hush other peoples feelings. Until wokeness looked like it was flying the banner for tolerance of feelings, decadent emancipated in-touchness with emotions, that help balance, but also shouting for a toleration of imposing an extreemly “logical” control over other peoples “upsetting” feelings.

    People are wanting the championing of freedom of choice brought to the fore in wokeness. But other people are not wanting curtailed if their own freedom of choices choices are quite “different”.

    Choices, all sorts of millions of choices, that come from millions of feelings, are great at balancing all the eight billion rare one-off individuals who make such harmless choices.

    People are becoming aware though that bullying is nothing really to do with choices. It is just a sickness. There are no right or wrong choices, as extreem rationalism wants us all to believe. But bullying, and abuse and cruelty must not be viewed as choices. When I say bullying I do not mean when someone does not like or love you. Nobody has to love anybody. I mean more like deliberate intimidation or direct bruising. Overt bullying. Nearly everyone on the planet is a bully at some point in the day. For balance to be supported it is essential not to be nitpicky rationalist hyper critical perfectionist. For feelings are always messy and cannot be pin sharp perfectionist. Perfection is the enemy of balance. Perfectionism tries to stop the quivering continuous flexible adaptations that go on in balancing a feather in the wind.

    A regime is coming in the future. No one can stop it. No one “side” is to blame for it. It is just despotic imbalance expressing itself on the global stage. It almost needs to come about so that humans can see where imbalance leads to, and ever after cherish individuals need to maintian their balance in their own way.

    The regime will be too strong and overpowering for any heroic person to bring a little love to the party.

    It will be nauseating to watch this turn of events globally arise. But because it will do what you must do is realise that you cannot “save the planet” and that by buying into that frenzy of extreem rationalist paranoia you will be swept into the vortex of utopianism that spawns a regime.

    Far better to be like a mouse. Rodents survive extinction events. Keep your balance private. Any regime cannot bear the balanced. The love that comes from healthy normal balance. A regime wants to slaughter everything that feels. And only when it has destroyed its millionth child will it numbly wonder whether doing the correct logical thing is the best thing.

    But do not worry about a regime coming. The paranoid worry wants to build a counter regime. Balance needs to not worry about anything, whilst also staying safely private.

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  9. Is psychiatry a cult? Is the republican party a cult? Is the democrat party a cult? Is feminism a cult? Is wokeism a cult? What is meant by the word “cult?”. There are seven thousand cults in the world. Most of these do no harm. A cult is mostly a way of celebrating a vision and celebrating life. There is no harm in celebrating. But what can occur, often through the infiltration of external bullies who use the cult as a transport to champion untrammelled extreem rationalism, or logical indoctrination, is the cult becomes imbalanced. Much like an extreemly rational person can become, when out of touch with feelings. When that imbalance occurs to a cult the cult loses contact with emotions, such as caring and compassion towards all, and kind of becomes straight jacketted by numb robotic reason. When reason loses touch with emotion it may weaponize logic. Reason needs a foundation of emotion to be…well…reason-able. The allure of extreem rationalism is through it conferring a sense of being “right”. This heals a wounded sense of being “wrong”. When that allure visits a cult it injects itself into the celebration and turns the celebration into not merely a joyful celebration of being “different” and having different harmless choices, but becomes a celebration of being logically “right” about such “differences”, but added to this it morphs into being a celebration of “rightness” through having “right extreem rationalism” about being “different”, until the “difference” being celebrated becomes the “difference” of being paranoid and right and extreemly rational and disconnected from emotions. The harmless cult is bullied, by extreem rationalism infiltrating it, by imbalanced leaders taking the helm, into becoming totalitarian and very “right” “wrong” or “black and white” in its thinking. The cult then is made to serve its extreemly rationalist paranoid unfeeling abusive masters or be deemed “all wrong”. And the cult is ordered to riducule the healthy emotional cults it encounters as being stupid and wreckless and idiotic and not logical.

    Emotion is not logical.

    So what we see in this invasion by the infiltration of extreem rationalism into a silly celebratory cult is an attempt by imbalanced logic to bully emotions out of existence. To bully the emotional requires teaching those in the cult to behave with unemotional lovelessness, as if regulations must take the place of feelings like compassion. This numbing out of emotions is what can ultimately lead to a cult becoming horrendous. It is not that the initial harmless celebratory message of the cult was a problem, it is when it got won over by the way extreem rationalism swings from numbness to explosive depravity.
    People are correct to call to account any cult that has been infiltrated by the level of extreem rationalism that nitpicks over emotional joys like harmless poetry and art and festivals, and criticizes any harmless choice to be “different” as an individual. You cannot read those books, you must only read these books, you cannot wear those sandals, you must wear these sandals, you cannot feel caring towards those people, you must only feel caring to these people, you cannot feel caring to your own freedom of choice, you have to feel obedient to the “logical” plan for you. If your free choice runs contrary to the “logical” plan then you are a danger to the cult and must be ousted or silenced or cancelled or taught. All of this gets far away from merely celebrating a vision. A celebration is welcoming of whatever “difference” is. It is not logically uptight about whether your “difference” is the correct one. Provided that you follow the rule against ever being sexually abusive to children or adults and you are not a bully and you are not cruel then your “different” choice of sandals is fine. But when a celebration becomes enmired in dogma its extreem rationalism tilts it towards numb enactments of bad bullying abusive outward behaviour as an expression of its need to dominate, control and coerce.

    What everyone is now shouting about globally, in saying this group are a cult, or that group are cult, is a notion that a cult, which really just means a gathering of people who like to have an emotional celebration of “difference” are the same thing as the bullying extreem rationalism that hides in their marquee or temple or church or office or camp. But what happens when everyone cracks down on everyone elses way of being harmlessly “different” and in choosing to join a “difference” celebrating cult or faith or religion or political party, is everyone is being the extreem rationalist who is paranoid about just “difference” and who declare just the freedom of choice to choose to be making lots of “different choices” for yourself, the same thing as being horrendously abusive and bullying and cruel. Until you just being a Jewish person or a Catholic person or a Hindu person or a socialist person or a traditional pruddish person is the same thing as you being horrific. When people go after cults and celehrations and freedom of choice to just be harmlessly “different” they become totalitarian. They do so to crack down on the way extreem rationslism becomes and imposter imposing bully but they do so by becoming the same level of bully towards innocuous freedom of choice.

    More on that in a moment…to be continued

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  10. Comtinued…
    What is not the same thing as freedom of choice is the choice to rape or abuse or exploit or manipulate or coerce or intimidate or enact violence. Any cult that “celebrates” those choices is no longer celebrating harmless “difference” but is celebrating depravity and sickness and numb control over others. Extreem rationalism often masquerades as “acceptance” and “caring” and “love”. All done “for your own salvation”. This does not mean that a cult that is caring and loving in healthy ways is entranced by extreem rationalism. And anyone is free to choose to be overly rational if they want to be, by itself it does not mean a penchant for bad behaviour. Reason, logic, rationalism, academic study are all fascinating and benign choices.
    Logic can be a route to illogicalness because it is based on language, a dictionary of words with very variable meanings. Add in contextual variability and the way any one word is just a pointer at reality and not the mysteriousness of reality itself and it seems absurd to take logic alone terribly seriously. People like to take it seriously because it aids “consensus opinion” and arrives at the warm fuzzy sense of being “correct” or “right”. That satisfying sense of being “right” dispells an uncomfortable wound at buying into a notion of being declared all “wrong”. So logic “seems” to be a wound healer, by getting to grips with who is “right”. But this involves proving other people “all wrong”. On it goes, logic sparring with logic to heal emotional wounds that can only be healed by emotional caring. Even antipsychiatry articles can tilt into using logic against logic to mend emotional wounds. The use of logic to cry out against cruelty is justified, but what can occur is a wish to be “right” about everything else, and where ever logic is given top billing, as in psychiatry, you tend to find “thought policing” of the choice to make “different” choices. As if merely being “different” is what is wounding.

    An extreem rationalism, when nested within a cult, can dress up abuse as “caring”. It can claim the abused “wanted” to be abused “as if it was their liberated freedom of choice”. It becomes hard to rescue victims from such abuses because they may have bought a lie given by extreem rationalism that their abuse is necessary for the celebration.

    The phrase “black and white” thinking is helpful in uncovering extreem rationalism. But there is one caveat. It is healthy for any community to be very black and white in its rule to ban abuse, bullying and cruelty.

    What can occur in these fraught times though is a situation where a cult that has been overtaken by imbalanced extreemly rational paranoid black and white thinking, goes around accusing emotional cults having unanalytical, unlogical, simplistic thinking, as if that is the same thing as black and white thinking, or as if not thinking overly much is black and white thinking.

    In any individual the need to make any “free choice” is governed within their own soul by specific thinking that narrows down the choice as being an “individual’s” best or “correct” choice “based on their emotions”. So being “different” does involve a snap moment of innate “black and white” thinking. In this regard meeting emotional needs that keep a person healthily balanced requires the freedom to think. But an extreem rationalist regime will tend to accuse all other cults and individuals with their random harmless healing choices to be “different” as full of dangerous “black and white” thinking. In short extreem rationalism doesnt want anyone to feel their own quirky feelings or think their own quirky thoughts, both of which are needed to make healthy free choices, and all of which brings holistic balance and calm.

    The cult word can be swapped by the word “belief”. People must be free to believe what they want to. The real problem lies with the way too much emphasis on extreem rationslism leaves normal feelings out and becomes capable of abuse, bullying and cruelty, via numbness or its opposite numb explosive depravity.

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  11. ps. I wrote an in depth comment on “differences” in an excellent article here titled “Its Time For Soteria, An Australian Perspective” by Tim Wlison.
    My comment furnishes this train of thought more simply. Perhaps it can be duplicated over here on this thread.
    A cult is another word for a belief. People are being balanced when they stay vigilant and on the lookout for a rise in cultish dominance that comes from extreem rationalism when it tilts over into imbalance. Rules and petty regulations often are a sign though not necessarily. Some people adore order and tidiness and heirarchy and paternalism and being told what to do. The crucial point is “free choice”. Did they choose freely to be in that fussy regulations cult or paradigm or model? The Delphic oracle dancers in Greece were a funny little cult. Druidry was a funny little cult. The Messiah and his plucky crew of disciples were a funny little cult. Knitting groups are a funny little cult. Literary book groups are a funny little cult. Therapy is a funny little cult. Medicine is a funny little cult. Often extreem rationalism says all these wonderful choices lead to “indoctrination” and “black and white” thinking. But most cults in their original healing and caring beginning have no wish to “change” anyone and are not hooked on logic’s narcotic of “right” “wrong” think. Love does not try to change you. Love accepts you as you are, provided you are not abusive, bullying or cruel. No one has to accept that bad behaviour. But as soon as a cult is encouraged to drift away from the healthy normal feeling of love and compassion and instead it concretizes itself in battlements of rational order then abuses and bullying and cruelty can commense via “taking the cheery belief all very seriously”, to be imperiously lording it over your silly silly silly free choice to be “you”.
    The world may be better off with no cults or beliefs or ideologies. Such defensive forays into “consensus opinion” groups, since such “consensus opinion” is always going to only be a dilution of your “feeling specific” choices, tend to be bullying from the outset. You must wear the proper gown, you must turn the same beads, you must lift your arms in the same absurd manner. At first its all just celebration but soon celebration can become a word for “do as you are told”. This is when the gravitas and seriousness launched by extreem rationalism imports its neurotic fear of death into what was just a funny little cult. A cult is like a big free choice you can make. Mostly cults are benign. But in nature the animals tend not to join cults. That is how free animals are. And because they are so free and balanced in their feeling and thinking, thinking hardly at all, animals do not become abusive or bullying or cruel like human animals do. Far better therefore to be a freelance unique rare “different” one of a kind animal and never need to check some logical standard about your harmless choices. Being so free and balanced then means that if you do “choose” to be in a cult, one that seems a healthy caring compassionate cult, you will know exactly why you want to visiting it. Whether it is a tree worshipping cult, or a shamanic cult, or climate change cult, or music cult, or art and poetry cult, or antipsychiatry cult, or medical model cult.
    A bear does not want to be a squirrel. A squirrel does not want to be a fox. A fox does not want to be a rabbit. In totalitarian times everyone has to be a hidden mouse or say they agree agree agree, that being a bear or squirrel or fox or rabbit is a “difference” that is “wrong” “wrong” “wrong”.

    I bid you all a fond last goodbye.

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  12. Robert, here is a piece I wrote that people can put on their wall if they want to. It is a bit like the alcoholic’s anonymous prayer, or other supportive affirmations. In it I use the word “you” in its general sense.

    “When someone, anyone, is trying to persuade you to be thinking in a particular way, say this…

    You want me to be agreeing with you, you in your differentness, to leave my own differentness to become more like you, side with you, be another you. But supposing I do this? What real difference to the way you are so wonderfully different will it make? My being a clone or identical copy or twin of you, wearing the same shoes, buying the same socks, liking the same music, reading the same authors, at best is only going to convey a sense of shared interests. This cameraderie viewed as only coming from indentical choices may help you feel more “right” about your own choices, as if my apparent allegiance to your choices shows enthusiasm. As if my colluding with your choices within your differentness reassures you that you are on “the right path” and are “going in the right direction”.
    You may be displeased if I want to go with my own differentness and not yours. You might say I am “wrong”, or you might say I am “going in the wrong direction”.
    This attitude of “you are wrong to be you” or “you are right to be me” forms a bickering over the way we are all, all eight billion individuals, completely rare. So who is broadcasting the standard and categorizing of all of these eight billion individuals and declaring them to have a “right differentness” or a “wrong differentness”?
    If ALL ARE EQUAL then WHO is telling each of eight billion that they really must be like everyone else, right down to their choice of shoes or socks or music or beliefs or thoughts or feelings? It is as if a morality is trying to stop bullying in the world but is imagining this is done by making all eight billion people identical and not different and not rare. But is bullying the same thing as differentness in choice of shoes or socks or music or belief or thought or feeling? Are all those differences bullying? Such that a policing morality needs to persuade us all to be clones? Imagine the world as full of identical copies of you. Everyone in the street are wearing your same kind of shoes, socks, listening to your music, praying in your beliefs, thinking your thougts, feeling your feelings? You might want to surprise someone with how daring you are to have lapsed in your belief, only to find all eight billion identical copies of you have already learned that about you since they sort of are you, so you will never be able to shock them, amuse them, worry them, rival them, support them, discover new things about them, nor they you. It would soon become horribly lonely. You are defined by not you. A pear is defined by not being a banana. Your boundary that contains your you needs others not being you to form what is beyond the boundary.
    But is there another push to wanting me to agree to be more like you in your different choices? The drive to assert being “right” can sometimes come from having absorbed and bought the notion you are “wrong”. That becomes a deep wound. To heal that bullied wound you try to declare that you are not wrong at all but are right. You declare you are right to be you and rare and completely different. Indeed this is true. But to declare your rightness may mean telling another individual that that they are all wrong for being their choice of differentness. To heal you from having absorbed nonsense that you are wrong means wounding an individual for their being different in their own rare choices. Your boundary becomes less about defining you as different from someone else, or a pear or a banana, and becomes more about defining that your differentness is the right one and their way of being in the world is wrong.
    When we are schooled into liking being told we are right, being right brings a warm feeling of security and goodness. So being declared bad brings a dreadful feeling. Extending that, when we call someone elses differentness wrong, because they have wrong shoes or socks or music or beliefs or thoughts or feelings, we call the sum total of that individual bad. Not only do they get told they must drop their different rareness and become you but they are told they are wrong and bad if they do not become you. This happened in the Spanish Inquisition.
    Prove it, prove it, prove it, becomes the message. An individual gets told to prove why their different socks or shoes are the right choice, why their beliefs and thoughts and intimate feelings are the right feelings. If they cannot offer an extreemly rational explanation then they and their differentness is deemed a problem for the making of a right world, that only has the right kind of different people in it, all identical, all wearing the same socks and shoes. All of that need to prove your own differentness right is done because of a failure in you to really believe your differentness is indeed right or rather so rare it cannot be reduced to judgey categories or standards that way….and so are all eight billion other peoples differentnesses right or rare and special to them. Now, you may not like their different choices. You really do not have to.
    Some people might say…make me like you by being pleasing to me, by disowning your differentness.
    All you have to reply is…you do not have to like me.

    How can you be wrong? You are too rare and unique to fit into consensus opinion. What any individual can be is abusive or bullying and cruel. That is not so much a choice as a sickness connected to making healthy choices. That sort of bad behavìour may be different also but it is also a form of oppression towards other peoples freedom to choose to be their own different. As such you may call abuse and bullying and cruelty WRONG.
    But all other million trillion choices and differentnesses are harmless. And getting people to change those robs them of their sense of who they really are, and that is part of what makes the wound that later wants to tell you that you are wrong for merely being the rare being that you are.
    You may say that I should drop my differentness to support you, as if my rareness holds you back, or as if you need me to empathize with the way you are getting bullied. This is magical and good. It is wonderful when people unite against bad despotic leaders, but being against bullying does not mean having to change your shoes and socks and music and thoughts and feelings. And because a bully becomes that way by in childhood never being allowed to be their own sweet rare self, the work of reducing bullying in the world involves leaving people alone to be exactly who they prefer to be. The acceptance of difference, not the acceptance of bullying, is curative.

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  13. Lets reckon you are a bystander and you see a man down at heel and you guess he happens to have been told he is a Catholic and you feel sorry for him because you think he is “indoctrinated” by the system of fundamentalist Catholicism to accept his life condition. Lets reckon you want the best for that individual and you want him to be liberated from what you regard are the shackles of domination and control. Lets reckon you see the man’s “difference” as something that was “imposed” on him by lying bishops, who then stigmatized the man for being too “different” within their paradigm.

    Lets reckon you want to broadcast that the Catholic man is no “different” from other people who are “different” and should feel no shame or be stigmatized about who they are. Or lets say you want to broadcast that the Catholic man may be “different” but that such an “individual” should feel no stigma or shame about being so unique.
    Both of these broadcasts are kind of lovingly supportive of a human’s basic human right to be treated with dignity.

    But these two broadcasts are saying separate things. The first broadcast is saying…
    “Everyone is pretty much THE SAME and so no one is really so very different and so no one should be shabbily stigmatized or stoned”.
    The second broadcast is saying “Everyone is uniquely DIFFERENT and should not be shoddily stigmatized just because they happen to be so”.

    A third component occurs when this starts…

    Lets reckon you are a person who fervently feels you know all about the Catholic man and you imagine he must have suffered “indoctrination” because thousands who left Catholicism said they felt dominated and controlled. So lets assume you are a bystander who looks upon the Catholic man as “a victim” who needs “saving” from “indoctrination”. And suppose you are a bystander who guesses that he wants “saving” from being his “difference” which is Catholicism. In order to “save” him from being his “difference” which one that has him buying that he is “Catholic”, you feel he needs to gets to grips with the extent to which he has been “indoctrinated”. Since many “indoctrinated” apostles of any faith or ideology or belief or cult do not seem to know they have been duped by their charismatic deities.
    Lets reckon you are a bystander who sets about trying to rescue the Catholic man from his “indoctrination” by trying to inspire him to “change” his “choice” to be “different”. Given that you do not believe it is his “choice” to be a Catholic man, since you maybe think he is too unintelligent about how woozy “indoctrination” makes anyone become, you have a go at picking at his “choice” and even perhaps picking at what you assume is the cruel “difference” that has been foisted upon him. He may say that he feels okay being a Catholic man and finds healing for himself in that “free choice” to be “different” but suppose you are a bystander who yearns for everyone in the big wide world to all come together as a gathering of SAME people who are no “different”. Or supposing you are a bystander who longs for everyone on the planet to come together as all being free to be “different” but not if they are “indoctrinated Catholics”. Indeed lets assume you are a bystander who feels that anyone who looks remotely “indoctrinated” is not only to be regarded as needy of help to “un-indoctrinate”, as in conversion therapy, but any “differences” connected with that must also be erased, so the shoes, the beads, the prayer books, the healing cross, the songs, the names or labels, all must go, in order to “save” the man who “chooses” Catholicism as his go to place in a crisis.
    Supposing you are a person who hates “indoctrination” so much that even when the Catholic man assures you he likes that “indoctrination” aspect of his “freely chosen” faith that is both “different” and is “his choice of difference”, you tell him his “choice” is a “neurotic” choice, an “irrational choice based on feelings not clarity of mind”, by doing this you begin to call his “heart and mind” rather too “different”. As if his heart and mind are sick and need treated by wise words. Or maybe you think “shaming” him for being so easily “indoctrinated” might “save” him. Yes, you think, maybe stigmatizing him for merely wanting to “stay the same” might persuade him to see himself as “a victim”. It could be deemed “for his own good” that he be challenged to realize that his “choice” to be “different” and Catholic was not “his” choice but was hypnotized into him by the predominatly Catholic culture, one that talked to him “for his own good”. So you could think it is a fine thing to be going rescuing all the “for your own good” victims by telling them all, even all eight billion earthlings, that their “difference” is scurilously imposed on them, and so you might do this, as a healer, “for their own good”.

    Lets reckon you are a bystander, an explorer, to a new country and you stumble across an indigenous Indian man who believes in a Sky deity, you could sit and ask him all about what he believes. And leave him, adult that he is, unchanged in his choice to be “different”. You could be that way towards the indigenous Indian, and the Catholic man, and an old woman who likes Buddah, and a therapist, and a mom on meds, and an exile.

    Difference is no danger. Control over difference is a danger.

    https://youtu.be/gSa5-kXdJpQ

    Some may say that the soldiers in this video murdered not just Jews but Gypsies and Poets and Gay people and Doctors and the Disabled, certainly a vast many thousands of people with mental illnesses, the list is endless, and of course children is a word that should transcend all categorizing.

    But do not let intricacies and analytical, rational, nitpicking details detract from the main theme. It was the erradication of the “different”. And it was done by sometimes claiming that the “different” could not decide for themselves what they felt was their preferred healing, be it an identity, a name, a prayer mat, a sock, a poem, a cigarette, a drink, a bible, a tablet.

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  14. I want to go on now in this comment to use the word “you” in its broad, general form, so not at all referring to you personally.

    A kind of tyranny becomes the insatiable urge to “make a difference” to “the world”. The compulsion to “make a difference” has, underlying it, a curious non-acceptance of your own unique “differentness”. A uniqueness within you that is so miraculous it cannot be comprehended by others, who are also “different”.
    If you are so unique, a rare one off, then what are you doing all day in endlessly trying be part of a collective of sames, or a group full of same consensus opinion? This goes against your rareness. It is like a squirrel trying to belong in a den of foxes.

    What is occasionaly behind the exhilarating yet exhausting and burdensome, drive to “make a difference” to “the world” is a failure.

    It is your own failure to realise that because you are so “different” as an individual, you may never be capable of uniting with the group or the wider group of “the world”. Your own acceptance of your “differentness” is what you shy away from in order to appeal to a collective who cannot accept your “differentness”, since they may never fully comprehend it. So why bother convincing “the world” that your “difference” is the “right difference”?
    As soon as you understand how rare you are this feeds the “calm” within you that becomes the real “difference” to “the world”. Gone is your urge to “change” the outer sphere, as if ever doing so would get you closer to your “own acceptance” of your “differentness”. And because you befriend your “differentness” with a passion you no longer are succeptible to being “policed” by the consensus opinion groups who say that your “differentness” is “all wrong”. If a flower grows on Mars you would not say that this rare, one off, “different” lifeforce was “wrong”. You are that rare flower. And although you grow here amidst eight billion equally rare flowers growing on this planet, no two are the same.

    Instead what happens though is an alluring restlessness, an urge to “settle” the “disagreeableness” of the outer sphere, as if “consensus agreement” is your only home. And this causes a need in you to get others collectively to “accept” your “differentness” or it is as if “the world” is tyrannically unaccepting of you. You may bond with others in a group whose individuals are all desperately doing the exact same thing as you. Rather than those worried individuals simply “accept their rareness” they try to “fix the world”, as you too do, by getting everyone to call a certain “difference” the “right” or “righteous” rareness. And this effort, effort, effort every day to make an improvement in “the world” holds a promise of you feeling the lovely healing that comes of “acceptance”, the “acceptance” of your miracle rareness. But it is an embracing healing “acceptance” that you could easily give to your “own” self from your “own” self instead. For who else can give you that acceptance if they cannot possibly truly “know” you, since you are so rare?

    I see that everyone on the planet is clamouring for acceptance via “changing the world”, but because we are all utterly unique and rare, we all have “different” notions of how to accomplish this impossible, exhausting, never ending, feat. This then sets up factions and polar opposites and schizms and “disagreeableness” escalates. Everyone then says “the world” is in an appalling mess and all the disharmonious disagreeing proves it, and until “the world” is changed, by persuasion, or brute force, or war, or apocalypse, then it is never going to feel “accepting” of our rareness.

    So in order to get “the world” to accept your “differentness” you think you have to radically forcefully destroy it, if push comes to shove. My how calm “the world” looks then! When it is covered with ashy fallout.

    So is activism about “changing the world” or is activism about not changing anything? Even not trying to change the way someone else might not agree with you or like you. And is activism about trying to get “the world” to hurry up and “accept your difference and specialness” or is activism about “you giving you” that acknowledgement…that realization that never in human history has there ever been another person exactly like you.

    When we perish and our spirit goes to our sense of a hereafter there may be a life review but seldom do people want to come back. The rock stars do not want to come back and be rock stars. The medics do not want to come back and be medics. The learned professors at universities do not want to come back. None of them give a stuff about “their life’s work”. It is as if in dying we suddenly find the monumental healing we were searching for in our lifelong frenetic work of trying to “make a difference”. Invariably most of us are too small to make even a dent on human progress, or the lack of it. And angel realms do not seem interested in what rock album we did. I suspect none of us are meant to even begin to try to “change the world”. Doing so becomes at best a competition sport or energizing game but at worst becomes a “reason” for us to be endlessly busy griping at whoever is not displaying our “righteous” sort of “difference”. Everyone seems too busy to smile kindly at an old woman who has been lonely for months. Whilst being so dementedly busy trying to “save the world”, the real world flies out of our busy hands unsavoured and unmet.

    On the internet are a trillion videos uploaded every day that have the shriek of consternation, consternation, flabberghasted consternation….all voices saying “the world needs saved and changed or it will not accept us…so those people must be silenced…and these people must be silenced…”

    But that consternation that tries to rally you to find your acceptance by joining forces, with the left or the right or with the believers or the heretics, and so on, deafens you to the voice of your “own” need for your “own” acceptance. The business rouses you to do your duty and work at being a saviour. Which often escalates into being a “destroyer” of anyone too “different” to be “saved”. A kind of hysteria is sweeping world, about “the world”. But the real world won’t last if everyone is trying to “fix” it.

    Relax! You don’t have to save “the world”.
    All the animals are “not” saving “the world”. All the animals are finding their personal balance within it, through self acceptance, within it. And paradoxically that is how the animals are not blowing it up to kingdom come.

    You are your own cure when you realise that what you have been looking for in exhaustingly trying to save “the world”…is “you”.
    And when you do cure you, by accepting that nobody else will accept you because you are so miraculously incomprehensibly rare, you feel nurtured and serenity comes within and such calm has a ripple effect in other people, who you do not “try to change”. And all of that “acceptance” of them streaming from you that “they” then feel, allows their self acceptance to blossom. And cumulatively, when eight billion people feel such calm, this collective wellbeing does “save the world”, by sort of resiting the allure of “changing everyone in it”.

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  15. I use the word “you” in its general sense here.

    The internet is a shadowy totalitarianism because when you go on it you initially feel welcome to celebrate your rare “difference”. You do not merely celebrate it as is enjoyable, but you begin to want to “make a difference”, which is not quite the same thing. Before long a thousand hecklers, extreemly rational nitpicking commenters or logical preachy nannies, tell you that your “difference” is “all wrong”. You wont be accepted as “all right” if you do not drop your “difference”. Your harmless eccentric free choice. Your “you”. This instils fear that “the world”…which is a faux world presented by the internet…is invaded by this internet shadowy totalitarianism. You feel threatened by the internet merely for having “freedom of choice”. This can then set you off defensively on a warpath to liberate your “freedom of choice” from extreemly rational naesayers. You do this by adopting extreem rationalism yourself, as if one weapon requires a like weapon. You use extreem rationalism to counter everyone elses “difference”. You join the cacophany of paranoid hecklers on the internet all slamming “uniqueness” and you do so ostensibly to “save the world” by “saving” your own “freedom of choice” to be “different”. Almost as if “you” and “the world” are interchangable.

    But a “difference” is not the same thing as “bullying”.

    Though in the melee and confusion, the flight or fight in a comment section on the internet, your attempt to prioritize “your difference” seems to require you bullying everyone else, as if your “difference” is the only “logical” correct one, and as if defending your “difference”, from hecklers in their “consensus opinion tribes”, justifies the need to retaliatively use bullying of “their difference” as the only “logical” option. So you go to war on any “difference” that is not establishing “your difference”. You become sort of totalitarian and you excuse it as you fearing for the demise of “the world” the way it “should be”. Hilter began as a “healer”.

    Weirdly, when you take a rest from scowling at the internet “world” and go to the grocery store to buy a lemon, on that sunlit walk you pass by a hundred strangers, none of whom care one whit about what whatever “difference” you have going on. You were warmly greeted and left unhindered in your stroll through the “real world”. This means that mostly people are accepting. The sunny walk in the “real world” is not the totalitarian brawl of “the world” depicted by the internet. But none of this deters you from an urge to mount a counter attack campaign on online hecklers, whom you think are taking over “the world”. So back you return to the tirades of comment sections. And you become the epitome of extreem rationalism about “right” or “wrong” sorts of “free choice” as exhibited in “difference”. Establishing “your difference” rather than merely celebrating it, seems the only way to crush the fear within you of “the world” gone all internet totalitarianism. Soon you deal with your inner feeling of fear by squashing away all of the feelings that could exacerbate fear, so you numb out “all your feelings” and become “unfeeling” and “uncaring” about what you have to do to establish “your difference”. Being “feelingless” means you start living more in your mind, that pandora’s box of extreem rationalism. You can now rationalize nuking “the different” to “save” what is interchangeably “the world” and “you”.

    More in a tic….

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  16. I am going to use the word “you” in its general application.

    By going after other peoples “freedom of choice” to be their own rare “difference” and not going after just “bullying” that often may drive around in any harmless “difference”, or masquerade as “the only important difference that all must swear solemn allegience to”, you miss prioritizing “freedom for all”.

    A useful way to think of bullying is to simplify it to a bruise. If a person you know closely has not put a bruise on you, or psychological or sexual abuse bruise on you, and they are not exploitatively abusing you or bullying you, then they may not have directly harmed you merely by being “their different”.
    Extreem rationalism likes “perfectionism”. That is why it likes lots of preachy rules, to “perfect” the human. But emotions are seldom “perfect”. This means humans are often flawed, whatever their own choice of “difference” happens to be. The extreemly rational may go after the “emotional imperfections” of “the different” because rationalism equates feelings and chaos and imperfection as “bad”. But given that humans are emotional and flawed, there ought to be a “balanced” approach to such apparent human ineptness or inadequacy. A toleration of “not quite perfect but good enough”. I call this acceptance of the cad. Every human has an inner rebel who is a cad. They may renege on buying a birthday card because they could not give a toss about your birthday, but in other respects they are comprised of “differences” that are good enough, by your estimation. So you relax your totalitarian scrutiny of them.

    In the global acceptance of “difference” there needs to be a tolerance of the way a human may fall from being “perfect” and may be a bit of a “cad” but may never be “bad”. A doctor may be imperfect. A bit of cad in not caring that much about his millionth patient, but he does his job with impeccable integrity. Ironically imperfection feeds the authenticity of “feeling” most needed to be full of genuine “integrity”. A doctor, a dentist, a therapist, a mother, a father, a stranger.
    The acceptance of “difference” in others does not mean you “accept” them being a bruising bully towards you. That line is clearly never to be crossed. But “acceptance” might involve you allowing for “differences” that you think are “bad” but which may just be “cad” relaxed attitudes based on that person’s many fluctuating “feelings”.
    When we allow our “feelings”, and these are not the same thing as outward behaviour, we nurture our wellbeing. We become soothed and calm and “accepting” of our self. This calm feeds the ability to care, and this feeds the feeling of compassion. So even if you despise someone elses “difference”, yet it is harmless as a “free choice” based on “feelings”, by your allowing them their “difference” you make their ability to become compassionate in the “real world” more possible.

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    • https://youtu.be/t_nzFEOpU00

      Before I go, I want to say one last thing. This video is one of many I found, many by psychiatrists who now believe that in many people, though not all, mental illnesses may be caused by whole body/brain metabolic dysregulation over many years. The psychiatric treatment for it is not from the pharma booth but from the grocery store. Here is a psychiatrist explaining in molecular terms how nutrition has a direct impact on brain inflammation. Without this rather medical model level of research this knowledge would not be making remarkable improvements in countless lives. My guess is that whilst trying this ketogenic diet it may not yeild such good results whilst remaining on powerful brain altering medication. So there may need to be a tandem way of helping people taper off medication beforehand, if that is their choice. My hunch is that some people who try the diet whilst on medication will consider it useless at resolving the adhedonia and akathesia, side effects that they are unaware of comes from antipsychotics or antidepressants. Therefore this ketogenic medical diet might not be recognized for the wonderful whole body nutritional healing that it is. Dr Christopher Palmer and Georgia Eades are trailblazing in this area, of ketogenic medical diet for mental conditions.

      I have often commented here and at times people might have been puzzled about where I stand. I stand for love.
      Some may think that this the easiest stance to take but infact it is the most radical and the most difficult.

      A newborn comes into the world as an “individual”, not a “consensus opinion group”. Without giving justice, equality and love to each “individual” you give nothing of real use to them. One unique “individual” bears no comparison to the next. Everyone is “different”.

      I believe that justice is linked to equality and both are linked to love.
      To grasp what equality truly means involves knowing that…

      ALL ARE EQUAL.

      When “individuals” are treated as if they are not equal then injustice enters the discussion. I am not of any religion but I feel wisdom can come from any path. Jesus sat with the street workers, the taxmen, the bar tenders, the gossips, the poor, the leprous, the rich, the fishermen, the children, the scapegoats, the heretics, you name it. He knew that underlying most mistaken harmless “free choices”…

      ALL ARE EQUAL.

      Love prioritizes harmless “free choice” in “individuals”, provided your choice is not abusive, bullying or cruel. Love is not about trying to make you not you anymore. So love embraces the billions of harmlessly “different”.

      I am in favour of love where ever it happens to be. Sometimes I see it in antipsychiatry. Sometimes I see it in critical psychiatry.

      Love is the only thing worth listening to.

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      • https://youtu.be/BUtwr_6sFw4
        Ps. Having read Dr Palmer’s book “Brain Energy” and having just sat through all of this video I am tentatively persuaded that alot of mental severe disability may have a brain inflammation origin. If your brain is already inflammed then medications may make that worse. But also, if brain inflammation is a cause then bullying people into psychotherapy is unethical.

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