Most People Are Mentally Ill

Yes, I know, that is a very provocative title, but I still believe it to be a true statement.

What led me to my conclusion?

Water.

Lots and lots of water.

Like many people here in the UK, I’ve spent the last few weeks watching the endless TV news reports from the regions that have recently suffered catastrophic flooding. News reports that have featured interviews with people who have borne the brunt of the floods, and lost everything in the process. It was quite clear to me that many of these unfortunate souls were very angry at the devastation wreaked on their homes and property. But who were they angry with? SUV drivers? Oil Companies? Airlines?

Not likely.

Many of these people were angry with THE GOVERNMENT.

It is as if they imagine that Gordon Brown and company have the ability to control the weather.

I was reading a copy of the Daily Telegraph in a local coffee shop the other day, and the editorial attitude was the same – it was all the fault of the Government, without any mention of climate change at all. In fact, there were adverts for cheap flights to Disney Land on the front page.

All of this leads me to feel that many people have lost themselves so thoroughly in a kind of materialist modernist fantasy that they are in fact suffering from a kind of mental illness. This illness manifests in the loss of the ability of the sufferer to comprehend the true nature of reality – and instead substitute reality with a fantasy world in which everything is ordered and under control. This fantasy world allows sufferers to passively continue concerning themselves with the minutiae of their own lives, safe in the knowledge that ‘they’ (‘they’ as in the powers that be: the government, corporations, whatever) have everything else (including the weather) under control. ‘They’ is a very important symptom of the malaise, for it is always ‘they’ who are responsible for whatever it is that is going wrong (this also possibly accounts for the popularity of rubbish shows like Spooks, that give viewers a nice feeling that there are those out there who understand what’s going on, and can somehow do their bit behind the scenes to protect the status quo).

What worries me is that people are so lost (and encouraged) in this fantasy that they are losing their ability to make sound judgments themselves, and becoming ever more reliant on the media to make decisions for them. And because the media they consume tends to be of the capitalist SKY / Daily Mail / SUN / Telegraph variety, they become ever more lost in the consumerist fairyland.

It all comes back to the same old theme – we as a species are rapidly losing touch with both nature and reality, and losing our ability to survive effectively without the capitalist machine in the process – a capitalist machine that is rapidly degrading the Earth’s ability to support life itself.

It all makes me feel like setting off for a static caravan in a field. Which is hopefully where I’m ultimately going to end up, tending my crops and watching our glorious super sophisticated society slowly (or possibly very, very quickly) unravel.

Of course, there are those (free market capitalists) who will argue that climate change is a kind of scam, set up to deprive the third world of the resources they need to challenge us economically, or that it’s only taken seriously because people are making money out of it. I don’t buy those arguments, and now that climate change is starting to affect middle England, neither will a lot of people who were previously very sceptical about it all.

The bottom line is that all the money and power in the World will not save you and your family if the biosphere of the planet starts to break down, and climate change could be the beginning of that very process. What starts as flooding for us could be a lot more serious for our children.

I was watching a programme the other day called ‘James May’s 20th Century’, in which Top Gear presenter James May looked at space travel, and interviewed some astronauts who had been up out of the Earth’s atmosphere. One of them was showing James a photograph of the Earth, and pointed out how tiny and fragile the atmosphere appeared from space, and how important he felt it was for us to protect it. This was entirely lost on May, as I’m sure it would have been on the other mentally ill Top Gear presenters, too busy playing with their brum-brums to take anything like that very seriously.

And so it goes. We live on this amazing, beautiful planet that is slowly dying, not helped at all by millions of people who are unable to comprehend the true precariousness of our situation.

Posted on Jul 31, 04:24 pm by treb0r

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