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I was at a gathering of Libertarians once, and a woman there was talking about the husband that she left, or divorced, or whatever. She said that he's not a bad guy, but he was just sick. In other words, she didn't hold his behavior against him, because he was mentally ill. And we too, of course, are not to judge either one of them as wrong (him for behaving however he behaved, or her for leaving), because, after all, nobody did anything wrong; mental illness is just an accident that befalls us, like spraining an ankle. If someone sprains their ankle, it doesn't count as flaking if you cancel the five-mile run you were going to do together. There have been times when I was facing criminal charges, and my lawyer wanted to use my mental illness as a way of arguing diminished capacity. He finally shut up about that when the judge told him that mental illness can also be an aggravating factor at sentencing if there's a risk that the mental illness will cause the defendant to re-offend. There are two problems with using mental illness as a defense for your behavior. The first problem is that it will cause people to take some of the same actions they would've taken against you if they had viewed you as evil, rather than just crazy. For example, in the case of the criminally insane, they end up walking a track and looking at the outside world through a barbed wire fence just like any other kind of criminal. Or, in the case of this woman's husband, he ended up losing his wife in the same manner, and through the same process, as would have been the case if he had lost his wife because he purposefully acted like a jerk. The reason it works this way is that, especially for a man, all that matters is your ability to perform, at your job and in other contexts. If you can't perform up to the standards people expect, whether it's because of laziness, or incompetence, or mental illness, or whatever, then you have no value to people and they will not go out of their way to protect your rights or treat you well. They will mostly just dissociate from you and ignore you, which by default means they're leaving you unprotected from anyone who does wish you ill. The second problem is that once you're labeled mentally ill, that becomes the go-to explanation whenever you say or do anything that people don't understand. For example, if you have an unusual way of looking at the world, that's the result of spending countless hours in thought and analysis coming up with an independent viewpoint, it's all for naught if people will just say, "Oh yeah, he has a lot of weird ideas because he's mentally ill." It then becomes totally pointless that you've invested all that effort in doing what intellectuals do, which is come up with new ideas and challenge existing ideas. As Ludwig von Mises asked, "Is it permissible to apply the epithet 'sane' only to boors who never had ideas of their own and to deny it to all innovators?" Yes, it probably is permissible. After all, actually listening to intellectuals with an open mind and considering whether what they have to say has value would take time, and it's especially inconvenient if what they're saying goes against your agenda. In that case, if there's a way to discredit the intellectual by saying, "Oh, he's mentally ill," then why not use it? This is especially true if he's a socially isolated intellectual, a minority of one who is crusading all on his own. Once there are two or three with the same viewpoint, collaborating on the same cause, then it's a faction, an organization, and not so easily dismissed. In that case, it's assumed, "Oh, these others checked his ideas for errors, and they decided to follow him anyway, so that means he has some credibility. At any rate, it'll be harder to take out a small group than it would be to take out one person. They might unite to defend themselves." But the lone dissident is very vulnerable to being labeled as mentally ill. The problem is, it's only when you're alone that you have total freedom to say what you want; it's the only time when you can be ideologically pure, unless you're the leader and others in your group are followers. But not everyone is cut out to be an organizer; some are just pioneers who cut out a path through the wilderness and say, "Here's a path you can follow" without actually leading anyone down it. For some reason, it's very demoralizing to be labeled mentally ill, because it makes me think, "What is the point of going into the world and trying to pass myself off as mentally healthy so I can get a job and whatnot, when as soon as people find out about my past, I'll be fired and everything unique I had to offer the world will be dismissed as mental illness. My only value is to the extent I'm able to conform and be a cog in a wheel; anything different about me is viewed as bad." Unless, of course, I'm a high performer (those are allowed to be prima donnas), but it's more common that I'm a barely marginal performer, so I don't have as much leeway. I could just give up and apply for disability, but whatever. Then I would get bored. So I guess I better fake being normal and go out there and perform as best I can. As long as people don't know the real me, I should be okay. I just have to create this fake identity, this Clark Kent, or this Dr. Jekyll, or whatever analogy you want to use, and pretend to be that guy, and not let people know about my other life, whether it exists now or existed in the past. In that sense, I guess I'm not all that unique. It seems like half the world has some other side of them that they don't want people to know about, because if they did, there would be a lot of judgment. The good Catholic girl is actually a slut; the gay-bashing southern Congressman is actually a pederast; the psychiatrist is a pill-popper; etc. Everyone has something to hide. And the people who most aggressively criticize others as abnormal or deviant, are often the ones with the most to hide. Or if they don't have anything to hide, then my, those are some boring people. That's what Ayn Rand used to refer to as "social ballast." Ballast doesn't really help propel a ship forward; it just keeps it stable. Anyway, it sucks to be an intellectual, because then your performance is mostly in your head (and not easily subject to verification, except by other intellectuals who also are fallible), rather than through some anonymous work of your hands, like if you were a carpenter or a mechanic, and it didn't matter what your thoughts on politics or philosophy were, because all you needed to do was be able to follow the principles of your trade and use logic and experience to get a result that others can readily verify. No wonder so many intellectuals supplement their mind portfolio with a mindless portfolio (e.g. working as a barista), just to make ends meet. People might say, "Hey, your music sucks" or "Your political ideas are crazy," which is just an opinion, but they can still appreciate, "Wow, you really did a good job making that venti no foam latte in conformity with our quality standards. I can objectively say you followed the right procedure, even if I disagree with your politics to the point that I think you're a total whack-job for having the views that you hold, and despite the fact that I think that guitar wailing you do in your garage sounds like a bunch of noise." |