Forum / Existential Gangrene

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  Chris Okum

  Jun 24, 06:09pm

  One of (R.D. Laing's patients, 'Peter,' a young man who was convinced his body was giving off a rancid smell despite the fact that it wasn't) his later remarks states the crux of the matter in a nutshell: "I've been sort of dead in a way. I cut myself off from other people and became shut up in myself. And I can see that you become dead in a way when you do this. You have to live in the world with other people. If you don't something dies inside. It sounds silly. I don't really understand it, but something like that seems to happen. It's funny."

  I will be posting more of these nuggets - most over 50 years old - as I feel they are relevant to our current predicament. I think that we, as a civilization, are quickly, rapidly, and irreversibly sliding into the Age of Autism, in which the total atomization of human beings will precipitate what I feel will be a war of all against all. We need to recognize what is happening and hopefully take measures to combat this condition, a condition indicative of the Neoliberal economic system we are living under. I know this all sounds looney-tunes, but I don't think I'm the only person who feels this way. Something is wrong in the world, and wrong in a very new and very inexplicable way.

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  Mathew Paust

  Jun 24, 10:32pm

  Seems to me the delusion Laing's "Peter" suffered was of a similar neurotic compulsion to anorexia. "Age of Autism." We do seem to see more and more diagnoses falling under that umbrella, don't we.

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  Chris Okum

  Jun 24, 10:36pm

  Autistic behavior is becoming normalized and encouraged, in my opinion. Be in your own little bubble and ignore the rest of the world. But the world doesn't evaporate, no matter how much you want it to. It's always there, and my contention is that more and more people just want it to go away. I think this is a potentially very dangerous and very catastrophic mode of being we are nurturing.

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  James Lloyd Davis

  Jun 25, 12:16am

  The behavior has always been present, but the recognition of it has not. I remember reading Laing a long time ago, a book of case studies that were centered on the increasing incidence of social isolation in an urban, industrial environment.
  Bleak then.
  Bleak now.
  The more you study history, the more you begin to understand that, although the props have changed, people have not.
  We just have more and better ways to entertain ourselves in isolation.
  The wisest man in all the world in his day had more wealth, more wherewithal than most of us, more ways in which to approach a meaningful life and wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes, in which he admitted his own powerlessness in the face of finding purpose.
  Everyone seeks answers.
  Few find them.

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  Gary Hardaway

  Jun 25, 12:23am

  Technology continues to separate us further from direct experience of our physical reality, as it has done since the the discovery of how to manage fire, sort of, and how to manage and manipulate food producing plants, sort of.
  It accelerates under neo-liberal policies and late=stage capitalism. I feel a dark, dark age on the horizon. Maybe a total black-out.

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  Mathew Paust

  Jun 25, 09:45am

  The concept "neo-liberal" bothers me in this context--as if "neo-conservative" is the antidote. I cringe at ideology of any kind. Guess it's time to read Ecclesiastes.

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