Normalcy: The Most Common Mental Illness Author: Not Normal

Every year, mental illness costs society untold billions of dollars in lost earnings.  The many among us suffering from illness such as depression, manic-depression, schizophrenia and other ailments miss days at work, occasionally suffer periods of non-productivity and have an associated overhead in terms of medical insurance costs.  Capitalist society would be far more productive if these illness could be better managed, turning those with less than constant productive output into good worker bees, reliable and obedient.  To this end pharmaceutical firms have been developing a wide range of drugs designed to moderate "mood swings", hyper-activity and flights from "reality."

However, there is a much more common mental illness that costs society trillions of dollars in the form of unnecessary wars, corrupt governments, unethical business practices, oppressive school systems, over-burdened prison systems and irrationally large and brutal police forces.  In addition to these wasted trillions of dollars, this other mental illness is behind the murder of millions of human beings.  Indeed, the triumph of normalcy in terms of its destructive power were manifested in Germany's Third Reich where millions of innocent people were murdered because of their beliefs or ethnicity and millions more were murdered in unnecessary combat and savage warfare.  This mental illness is commonly referred to as "normalcy."

Normalcy too has its pharmaceutical industry, pumping out mood controlling and behavior modifying chemicals known as alcohol, nicotine and caffeine.  Since normal people often cannot manage the stress of everyday life, they are encouraged to suppress introspection and logical analysis of their plight through drunkenness during their free time.  Since normal people often cannot meet the productive demands of their employers, they are usually provided with free caffeine injection systems while at work.  Drugged with stimulants during the day and drugged with depressants at night, they manage to get to work regularly and keep up their level of productivity while suspending their creative and intellectual impulses outside of work.  So tired and expended are they, upon release from work, that they cannot fathom the existence of individuals who expend creative energy outside of the "productive environment."  This failure to relate to the natural human state often leads them to delusional interpretations of events.  For example, the person suffering from "normalcy", upon seeing a protester holding a sign on a Saturday afternoon will often blurt out, "Get a job", despite the fact that it is a Saturday and the target of their imperative is on his day off.  This absurd delusion about protesters is one of the manifestations of the normalcy illness and it stems directly from the horrible condition of "what it is like to be" a normal person.  After all, since the protester is not drunk or on his way to a party or some other form of entertainment it must be because he has not sufficiently abused himself to be useful to an employer.  He must, therefore, be unemployed.  At least this is how those handicapped by normalcy think.

I've met a lot of normal people in the course of my life and what I've found frightens me.  I spend a lot of time discussing ethics with normal people.  Most normal people intimate to me their belief that in the absence of government, everyone would run around killing, raping and robbing everyone else.  When I ask them whether, in the absence of government, they would run around killing, raping and robbing everyone else, they tell me they would not.  This contradiction between what they believe of others (so much so as to make a universal rule out of it) and what they believe of themselves can only indicate a sharp break from reality: either they believe they are uniquely different from everyone else in terms of ethics (an absurdity) or they have rationalized away their own experience and substituted it with an irrational belief for which there is no evidence.  After all, how many people have actually lived in a society without government?  Powerful beliefs based on the absence of evidence are irrational.  Since the believer in government asserts that government is needed to stop everyone from running around killing, raping and murdering everyone else, he or she should at least provide proof that in the absence of government such conditions would arise.  Failure to do this is insanity.

Watching the deterioration of civil society that we have experienced since the "election" of George Bush has left me aghast at the horrible damage inflicted by normalcy.  While our freedoms are clearly diminishing, normal people continue to call the United States "the land of the free."  While the US Government wages unjustified wars of aggression, murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, normal people cry out against unknown terrorists for much smaller crimes.  While John Ashcroft and George Bush make a mockery of law and the Constitution, normal people support their war against crime.  When the US Government excludes a peaceful artist merely because he is Muslim, normal people buy some absurd story about spelling mistakes.  There is nothing healthy about being normal.  Indeed, I am beginning to suspect that there is no mental illness more pernicious.

As a child I could not understand how the normal people of German permitted the extermination of millions of Jews and legions of others, including Gypsies, gays, the mentally retarded, communists and anarchists.  The documentaries I watched in which these normal Germans were interviewed included reports of columns of smoke rising from concentration camps and the smell of burned flesh.  Yet, in the same paragraph these normal Germans would deny that they knew Hitler was systematically murdering the detainees.  In films of Hitler parading through Germany and Austria we see throngs of people smiling, waving Nazi flags and greeting their "leader" with what can only be interpreted as great love and affection.  Yet their leader was a mass murderer on an unprecedented scale.  Since normal people comprise about 90% of any population, none of the crimes of Hitler could have been carried out without the cooperation, aid and support of normal people.  In the light of what I have seen in the rise of George Bush, I now understand what happened in Germany: normal people are deranged.

In the former Soviet Union those who spoke out against the system were often designated as mentally ill, placed in institutions and treated for their deviation from "normalcy."  As an American dissident I can attest that nearly every dissident movement I have participated in has been dominated by people who are not normal.  Indeed, if you wish to find an organization with a higher percentage of non-normal people than the general population, start with any dissident political group, whether it be socialist, anarchist, or green.  You will find find more depressed individuals in any of these movements.  Since the dominate political ideology in the former Soviet Union was socialism, the Soviets were probably correct, insofar as their diagnosis of dissidents as non-normal is concerned.  Those who opposed socialism in the Soviet Union, more often than not, were probably not normal.  After all, normal people go along with the powers that be and create for themselves delusions that justify their support for their oppressors.  Normal people under capitalism support capitalism.  Normal people under communism support communism.  Normal people under fascism support fascism.  All of these systems are possible due to the active assistance of the normal.

What, then, is mental illness?  Are we correct in using the term "mentally ill" in describing anyone?  The gap between reality, perception and an interpretation of that perception is highly complex and who is to say that normal people interpret reality more accurately than those we call mentally ill?  In treating people with depression, for example, the goal seems to be in increase the presence of various chemicals in the brain so as to bring them up "to normal."  If "normalcy" is a state induced by drugs, just how realistic is normal?  Is it possible that submitting to any system of control (i.e. government) requires a certain level of psychological denial and that this level of denial requires a certain misperception of reality best achieved by a certain level of chemical presence?  If a lesser quantity of psychotropic chemicals induces depression, is that due to a break from reality or is it due to the fact that existence under the current paradigm is so unrewarding and futile that depression is an appropriate response to that reality?  If you are living in an unjust world where freedom is denied, murder is sanctioned by the government and you are locked into exploitive relationships you should be depressed.  If you are not depressed, you have broken with reality and become one of the many suffering from normalcy!  Isn't this possible?

Until will live in the perfect society where each individual is free to live his or her life as he or she actually is, then valuing and seeking normalcy is nothing more than a prescription for maintaining injustice and suffering.  Normalcy is a tool used by oppressors to forward their goals.  The belief that "we should get with the program" is nothing more than a self defeating psychological tool designed to forward the goals of those running the program.  If you are not running the program, then it is in your own rational self interest to resist the program, be unproductive and rebel.  Normalcy is the momentum that keeps the meat grinder of humanity turning.  Throw a wrench in it!