When certain related ideas and beliefs about life are practiced long and consistently enough to be codified into law and solidified into institutions, they no longer comprise only a worldview but in fact have become a world. These are then the ruling ideas. Such ideas are like all the rest in some respects but they also have important differences. All ideas are born high above in ethereal realms, in imagination but they always reflect the reality below on Earth even if they seem to float freely in space. An idea is a representation of multiple facts of life gathered together in their perceived relationship. It doesn’t exist for its own sake but has a function; the idea makes it possible for people to relate to those facts knowingly instead of just blindly. Ideas can float, drift, fly as if they were weightless but over time they usually find their place, become attached to one another and together present a picture; people, events and objects are arranged into a coherent whole so that life makes sense and can be lived meaningfully. However when it comes to the ruling ideas the picture is not inert; it is constantly enacted by individuals and enforced by institutions thus continuously shaping living reality. Their active and ›social‹ relationship to human life distinguish ruling ideas from their alternatives; the world can only be made visible through ideas, after all ›the world‹ itself is an idea but ruling ideas as a constant, ever present force persisting through generations actually ›make‹ the world. Ideas in themselves are unchanging but life is not; it claims its primacy and time and again proves human vanity by always giving birth to the unexpected; unforeseen events, new possibilities or mistaken impossibilities one after the other inevitably arise. Life puts all ideas roughly to the test and carries on regardless of how many of them survive. It demands to be seen and heard, insists on being known for what it fully and really is. Ideally, ideas which fail to reflect that living landscape faithfully and usefully would dissolve in the wind, their dust put to rest in the unreachable past. Ruling ideas though are somehow fixed to the firmament by earthly forces like deceiving stars. Instead of shedding light on new realities they cast deep shadows. The figures on earth are warped, shapes lose their contours and colors take on unfamiliar hues. Inside the confusing whole it becomes hard to recognize things which are known, but what is even worse unknown things yet without a name start to show their disturbing faces. Ideas which can’t relate to facts of life in order to make them known instead try to pull away from reality but unable to break free, they violently collide with it and in the process, create monstrosities. As more of these beings of unexplained origins begin to appear everywhere, something else is hollowed out; reality loses its density. Life, its coherence once taken for granted now feels uncanny and unfamiliar. A fog descended upon the earth when no one was looking. Somehow the world became false.
A false world is an incoherent but also an uncomfortable world. Confusion reigns in every little or large facet of life. All the once revered things which were unquestioningly taken over from the past, like values, principles and traditions become distrusted of hiding their true character. New things are suspected of carrying unknown dangers rather than hopeful possibilities. Appearances are understood as deceptive but no guideline can be found ready at hand either. Change is felt to be necessary but also frightful. At such an uncertain moment it is at first the ideas which are called into question, ideas which are held to be true by most and have been put into practice for some time but since they originated in people’s thoughts still seen to be the easiest to change. When discontent and discomfort reach this stage, doubts giving place to suggestions and proposals, things turn on their head once more and the chasm lying between the earthly and heavenly realms is bitterly recognized once again. But the vast distance which seems to stretch between new ideas and existing reality is also a proof of their connection and more broadly the absolute dependency of ideas and life to each other. It is also an undeniable sign of their concrete social basis. Ruling ideas do not only float in the ether, they also stand solidly on the ground in the form of institutions which are in their effects awe inspiring structures. Institutions are ›solid‹ and ›real‹ because of their social function. Political power is so diffused and dispersed that it is rarely visible in an unmistakable form; you don’t see soldiers or policemen on every street corner, you don’t constantly hear an official voice telling everyone what to do; at first glance social existence looks spontaneous and *natural* but that is only because the ruling ideas have become second nature to most people. People live by them and make them real without even the opportunity to think about their decisions. Still, the governing order also needs centers of concentrated power to assert its will by directing its many abilities to specific incidents, conflicts and emergencies. Emergencies are only the suppressed realities of ’normal‹ life coming to the surface and aside from disrupting its smooth functioning, for a brief but memorable moment they tear off its veil of naturalness. Institutions are similar to production facilities where the personnel and the machinery work to convert political power into logic and exceptions are continually dissolved into the rule. They are also like forts tasked with both defending and attacking in a vast and complex political terrain. At such an impasse when time both seem to stand still and rush on uncontrollably, proposals and solutions seem to either go too far or don’t go far enough. The task is not to look beyond into the still to be reclaimed lands but first to scale the walls. All institutions carry the interests of particular segments of the population, the most powerful ones naturally working on behalf of people who shape the destinies of others. Any strong criticism of an institution is in reality an attempt to wrestle back some power from the people that organization ultimately serves. The battle of ideas which will then necessarily commence will be a veiled struggle between the ruling class and others suffering from the bitter fruits of its supremacy. Ideas that are the basis of the most powerful institutions cannot simply be dismissed as ›false‹ since by being consistently put into practice they have shaped reality in a not easily understood, convoluted way. They also over time became incorporated into ›common sense‹ so are as invisible and real as the air everyone breathes in and out. The walls are there outside as well as inside everyone of us. Still, just as a historian can do a forensic investigation about a battle long since ended which determined the direction of history, ideas too can be examined for the imprint of their inventors and traces of the hands who used them. There are two aims for an investigation like this; the first is bringing yesterday into today and showing people that they are the products of history. The second aim is harder and more important, it is convincing them that as well as being the products of history they can also be the makers of history.
It becomes a strange but necessary task to investigate a world which feels ›false‹. There are not many worlds separated by vast geographies anymore. No lands, peoples or islands remain who can live on their own pace, according to their own rules, uninterested in the rest. In the past people shared a single planet and went around the same star year after year unaware of each other. Today they all have to exist in a single ›world‹, a world not only of land and sea but also of international laws, transnational organizations and their overarching interests. Every person living in this world is subject to the same basic rules and the same ruthless forces. This reality didn’t come about suddenly or naturally. Farthest corners of the globe were bound together into a single world through ever lengthening chains of the world‐market. This transformation which took centuries to reach its current stage might be called the ›long globalization‹. Markets have always been mediums of trade and as such part of social existence but their nature and function have changed too. Over time the instrument of change became aware of itself, matured and grew bold. Aside from being mediums of trade, they now also carry ideas, beliefs and designs from one place to another. At their latest stage of development markets themselves became the basis of an ambitious new worldview. That stage came about very rapidly and in terms of comprehension almost instantly. The new world which to its inhabitants already feels like grew too old too fast was built in the 1980s and then spread over the whole earth during the following decade. Infrastructure and ideology together came into their own as body and spirit. Right at the same time another worldview was also being incubated, invisible to most but precious and promising to some. Modern psychiatry which is fundamentally different from all its previous incarnations was brought together limb by limb also during that same decade. It too conquered the whole world in a matter of awesomely rapid years. Before its most recent conquest, psychiatry has always been the least prestigious branch of medicine. For the most part it couldn’t share in the joys and fruits of discoveries which built the high pedestal the science of medicine climbed in the previous era. Through its history psychiatry traveled many paths, came up with and tried many ideas but at the end failed to reach the promised land, a scientific basis for its practice with dependable methods of diagnosis and treatment. Madness was seen as a curse of unknown cause and origin while its keeper psychiatry was associated with misery and desperation. The patients‹ shame reached their doctors too so they were all exiled to the far away sanatoriums. It was modern psychiatry’s great victory to somehow erase this history and became respectable relatively quickly. The victory went beyond the hospitals though, over a few short years psychiatry spread over courts, schools and businesses. It built its garrisons, forts and supply lines all over daily life. How did that happen? In fact it can hardly be a coincidence that the two most consequential transformations of the current era progressed synchronously, in similar places and then spread through the very same means. Market ideology made modern psychiatry in its image, with the same tools that was used on its own construction. They are artificial but blood brothers, one Frankenstein’s monster sewing up the other. In the words of a true believer of these twin ideologies, together they not only changed but actually »flattened the world«.
Before they merged into a hegemonic worldview, ruling ideas were too only ambitious and uncertain designs just like any other being of the ethereal realm. They were invented and then brought together in a relatively haphazard fashion so that vast historical developments would stay out of sight behind a simple and hopeful facade. The departure point would be a hazy memory and probable destinations would still be unknown while the train was moving at full speed. Our false world came into being in the 1990s, the last ›care free‹ decade. For many people those years are remembered or imagined as a long, leisurely break between two contentious periods, the last stage of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror. In spite of its misremembered parts, Nineties was really a ›golden age‹ at least in two respects. Modern psychiatry proclaimed its new friendly and capable identity in these years. Deinstitutionalization, the emptying of large mental hospitals and reintegration of mental patients into the daily life had started in the 80s and by the next decade was largely complete. This made psychiatry less frightening, more approachable and certainly psychiatrists more respectable. The new generation of medications helped psychiatry too. Those newly invented drugs were marketed not to the hopelessly sick and confused patients destined to spend their lives in institutions but to regular people who wanted to get rid of the uncomfortable emotions which kept them from finally achieving success and happiness, promised to everyone by every book and movie. The wave of optimism and enterprise was not limited to medicine either. 90s were also the high tide of globalism. Right at the beginning of this new era the Berlin Wall crumbled, Soviet Union collapsed and the end of history was solemnly but triumphantly declared. Capitalism was victorious over communism, freedom over every type of oppression and consequently the ›American‹ way of life became the sole remaining goal for all human beings. The convergence of these two developments meant more than transformation of medicine or politics, the coming upheaval went beyond forms of treatment, medications, changing borders or government systems. In those years the meaning of life itself was being determined for coming generations. While Western Europe and North America were walking through those years in a haze, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics were being roughly treated out of their communist delusions through ›shock therapies‹. 90s were the ›sleepy decade‹ for Western Europe and North America but for Eastern Europe and Russia it was a period of massive disruption and a long drawn out catastrophe. All countries formerly belonging to the ›communist bloc‹ and even those who broke off from Moscow like Yugoslavia, were in a few years completely demolished. Public assets were sold, welfare programs were suddenly cut off, armies were disbanded. Western ruling classes threw their weight behind leaders like Boris Yeltsin who accepted no limits to the speed and extent to the ›reforms‹ to be implemented. Those reforms in their real life application amounted to daylight robbery and official plunder, institutions built and preserved over decades were hollowed out in a matter of months. Millions of lives were destroyed as a sacrifice for the opportunity to join the ›Free World‹. In fact, the treatments applied in those countries were parts of an experiment for a new ›world‹ but not so much free. The polarity between the East and the West, one poor and despondent while the other was wealthy and confident would soon be abolished just like the ideological and geopolitical struggle between the two camps. Two worlds became one but only to very few’s benefit. In those years the West was seen as representing the future that the East was trying to catch up to but the decades which followed showed that the violent convulsions ignited in Eastern Europe were to be the blueprint for the future of the Western societies too. The new world was to born out of a catastrophe too like the old one it was replacing.
That old world, the one built after the last ›great‹ war was a compromise between rival forces, countries, social classes and worldviews. Earth was portioned off into two blocks, the East and the West. In spite of the clearly drawn borders neither of them exactly stayed in their place and minded their own business. Ostensibly behind an ›iron curtain‹ socialism’s influence reached beyond the Western shores. Although sworn enemies of communism, Western countries built the welfare state and adopted full employment as a policy principle in an attempt to muffle the voice who promised to feed and shelter every human being. Many political movements which were hailed as proofs of liberal democracies‹ superiority were actually the continuation of national liberation struggles on many parts of the globe, mainly supported by the Soviet Union. On their part Western ruling classes waged a ›cultural‹ war to influence the populations of Communist and neutral countries. In spite of an undercurrent of exchange between the adversaries, open wars were still staged on yet undecided grounds. In the West, previous New Deal reforms combined with the post war buildup meant thriving economies. Social mobility was primarily upwards; a person born into a poor family could build a relatively comfortable life through education, constant work and some luck. Despite its material comforts, this world on an uneasy balance and all its moving parts threatening to go their own way at any time was highly charged with anxiety, dread and foreboding. Unimaginable yet very real threat of nuclear annihilation was like a future memory shared by all the inhabitants of Earth. In that era psychiatry too was an amalgam of many different parts barely fitting into a coherent whole. Psychoanalysis and biology vied for supremacy but for the most part settled for equal portions. Psychoanalysis was in one sense a relic from the early 20th century, a mostly speculative theory with obscure concepts, mysterious forces with its one‐on‐one therapy practice providing only uncertain results. Two decisions made very early in its history played decisive roles in charting the course of psychoanalysis; the first was its hesitancy in treating the most hopeless cases, people who seemed to lost all connection to reality and the capacity for meaningful speech. This type of patients were never fully included in the psychoanalytical framework since basis of its practice was talk therapy. The other decisive development was specific to the United States: the requirement for psychoanalytic practitioners also to be medical doctors. In spite of Freud’s strong objections, this requirement was written into the bylaws of psychoanalytical organizations and consequently medicine and psychoanalysis were entwined in America much more so than in other countries. Theirs was a marriage fraught with all sorts of tensions since psychoanalysis and medicine at their basis had very little in common. While psychoanalysis, which was invented and developed in a time of revolutions in Central Europe stalled in the stultifying Cold War atmosphere, chemistry and biology thrived through massive industry and government investments in academic institutions. One partner grew larger and more confident while the other became less and less relevant to life’s most pressing problems. They were obviously destined for a contentious divorce.
Post war world hit a wall in the 70s. First the fiery 60s promised to put it under with a revolution many people believed possible and dedicated their lives to bring about. Anti war movements woke up a whole generation, their criticisms, ideas and sacrifices actually threatened the ruling order in the West. After the political movements were broken up, crushed, infiltrated and intentionally misdirected by all the might and ingenuity Western ruling classes could muster, self described ›Masters of the Universe‹ still had major problems which demanded their attention. After the governing order survived the direct confrontation with mass political movements, global economy with all its invisible connections and opposing interests turned out to be an enemy to itself. Slumping profits, low productivity, complications presented by an organized workforce came together with dissent in the geopolitical ranks; the energy crisis which broke out threatened to pull the plug on the whole global production. Most obvious solution for the ruling classes was to remove the limits put in place for protecting social cohesion and dismantle the structure built to keep capital from eating the earth in one ravenous bite instead of consuming it by digestible portions. This still to be realized ›New Order‹ was in a way also a return to the old ways, the era before the post war consensus and the New Deal, when capital ran free and all the rest were left to fend for themselves. What was needed at that stage was a relatively small and remote laboratory where the methods and instruments which will bring about the ›New World‹ can be tried and tested. In Chile, the socialists who came into power defied this burgeoning design not by swearing allegiance to Moscow and declaring themselves communists but by daring to try alternatives. American academics from the most ›prestigious‹ universities made an alliance with spies and assassins to realize Henry Kissinger’s dream and make the Chilean economy »scream«. After this successful experiment installed general Pinochet at the helm of the country, ›Shock Therapy‹ was decided to be the main tool for reshaping the globe. New ›therapies‹ were being invented in other spheres too. All sciences, natural or not progressed in leaps and bounds in the years following the war. The last ›great‹ war ended but wars continued albeit in smaller sizes and far enough that the spilled blood didn’t reach the home front for decades. Chemical and pharmaceutical companies were huge benefactors of all the wars, massive public funds were put at their disposal for them to come up with new ›wonder drugs‹ like antibiotics but also wondrous poisons like ›Agent Rainbow‹. In the battlefields, chemical agents were used to suppress resisting populations, in hospitals other types of chemicals were trusted with pacifying people whose bodies rebelled against their existence. Psychiatry became more sophisticated and savvy; invasive and ›barbaric‹ treatment methods like lobotomy were replaced with ›gentler‹ interventions like pills and injections. These new ›treatments‹ made invasive and permanent procedures unnecessary by keeping the most extreme patients docile and compliant. Thus medicine came up with a ›solution‹ for the sorts of mental patients psychoanalysis had always shied away from. Physicians now more or less gave up on curing mental patients and settled to subduing them; while by this choice ›personal‹ or ›human‹ aspect of the issue was completely ignored, ›political‹ aspect of it was satisfactorily addressed. People who couldn’t fit into ’normal‹ life no longer disrupted it for long, they were removed to institutions where drugs made them docile and practically mute. Hospitals in that respect were laboratories too, for the future wider society. The time for experiments was coming to a close while the real world unknowingly awaited their application.
The Eighties was the beginning of a new era, in one sense a period of transition but also of political and economic disruption; strategic and ruthless demolitions performed in those years made it easier for the following decades to clear away rest of the rubble. The future was called to hurry up and it obliged not by arriving in a timely manner but instead crashing into the world without notice. In those years for both psychiatry and market ideology ›the old‹ became the enemy. The ›old‹ in both cases were represented by compromise, stalemate and an unsustainable stasis. Capital’s capacities for innovation and prosperity was chained down by laws written in a previous era. Similarly, pharmacology which became the center of medicine with its promise of curing all maladies was still partially kept out of the realm of the human soul by a theory invented in old Europe. Pharmacology’s newer capabilities were coupled with the power of marketing, itself a ’science‹ that grew out of Cold War academic investments. Communication technologies which brought the world to a manager’s desk turned the far reaches of the earth into markets and resource bases, almost instantly. It was a time of frightening complexity, unknown forces interacting to unknown effects with unprecedented rapidity. Two leaders on both sides of the Atlantic drove this transformation, Reagan and Thatcher. They were as much moral philosophers as politicians; other than designing and implementing policies, they often proclaimed disturbing truths in their televised speeches. They presented this overwhelming upheaval as a break from past errors and as a return to a way of life built on simple, incontrovertible truths. All the essential conflicts of recent history were discovered to be without meaning. President Reagan declared ›The Government‹ to be a not so necessary evil, which is to be dismantled even by its own rough hands. Thatcher, the leader of the nation who invented the discipline of political economy made an even more striking statement by saying that »There is no such thing as society.« Society as the principle of a presumed totality of human relations, as the source and object of all political ideas was to be forgotten. A forced amnesia and a narrower vision of life was the program. In the absence of a commonly accepted idea of society, the Earth was now open ground for primal forces waiting to be let off their chains. Capital and medical technology, the second a progeny of the first would conquer the domains apportioned to them, the globe and the human body. These two were powerful bodies sustained themselves by consuming other, smaller bodies but they also needed ›souls‹, theoretical constructs that could bestow coherence to their practice. In both cases their unifying theories came out of academic institutions and out of seemingly obscure academic fights for the dominance of their respective fields. In the field of psychiatry power was shared between the proponents of psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry. Dissolution of this arrangement also came about in the early Eighties through the publication of the third edition of DSM, so called ›The Bible‹ of psychiatry. It was not a ›scientific‹ affair at all since the evidence base was very thin for the profound change in direction proposed and finally pushed through by the biological psychiatry camp. All the persuasion and intimidation methods common in every sort of political argument were used against the psychoanalysts. What is even more striking, when those methods failed and an agreement could not be reached, the issue was decided by a vote between members of workgroups. The methods were messy but the result was clear. Just like supply side economics replaced the Keynesian model which was a historical middle‐way point in economic policy, biological psychiatry overthrew psychoanalysis and gained sole supremacy of its field. The era of compromise was truly over. Ruling classes desired and eventually won an overarching ›simplicity‹ which over the years covered the world like a sky of one unchanging hue. A narrow but all encompassing picture of the world was put in front of humanity.
The slogan of the following decades was to be another dictum of Thatcher’s, ›There is no alternative‹. In its abbreviated form ›TINA‹, this statement turned into a policy principle for every government regardless of their ostensible political ideals or aims. Names and parties changed but their program was fundamentally the same. Real changes only came through unexpected events, violent shocks like 9/11, 2008 financial meltdown and Covid pandemic, all of which led to more daring and ruthless policies but always in the direction set in the Eighties. Shocks were responded to by shock therapies which didn’t remove their effects but in fact made them permanent. For psychiatric practice too, despite its by now obvious failures, admitted by people who ran the most powerful official institutions, seemingly nothing can be fundamentally changed or reversed. Dominance of the ruling classes in all aspects of life, primarily their ruthless grip on the levers of work and wealth is translated into the supremacy of market ideology and modern psychiatry over all possible alternatives. This ideological rigidity in both cases is an expression of their confidence or possibly arrogance. Both of these worldviews limited the ability of humans towards understanding their own existence but psychiatric practice also incapacitated them, making them unable to assume many fundamental aspects of being human. They forced history into an uneasy sleep, making it confused and anxious to revive and make up for the lost years. The main force driving this world is capital which needs order but whose appetites creates chaos. Human life cannot be shaped or planned in any reliable manner because of the never ending ›creative destruction‹ going on all areas of life. In such a world psychiatry is of central importance since continuous disruption and intermittent destruction of daily life will necessarily be reflected in peoples‹ souls but at the same time the complex interdependent operating of every facet of life, production and reproduction, a factory as well as a school can tolerate very few disruptions themselves. For modern psychiatry operating in that world brain is the chosen point of intervention; rather than trying to determine the inputs, a person’s myriad life circumstances, modern psychiatry decided to attempt at limiting the possible outputs human brain can ›generate‹, such as uncomfortable or painful emotional states. TINA means no alternative solutions which necessities that faulty outputs of the production line must again turned into its inputs and that is how cascading and destructive drug effects are produced. The secondary effects of this forced simplicity are monstrous complexities, previously unheard of forms of suffering like akathisia or PSSD which remain remote to common human knowledge, experience or even imagination. A misleadingly simple worldview when enforced despite all the alarming signs, generates an alien reality.
In the more recent years both market ideology and modern psychiatry fulfilled their latent tendencies. They grew and spread more and more as ready solutions to complicated problems. Markets are the only remaining instrument for going beyond the ›personal‹ sphere into an abstract but actual realm that used to be called ›society‹. Each market is like a vortex sucking in every human relationship and turning them into transactions. Most of the digital networks work on such a logic, they are simply new ›markets‹ founded upon a global communication infrastructure and an economy of affects, emotions and attention. They and all the other markets construct self‐enclosed worlds by translating real events involving actual people into their own private languages which are remote and indecipherable to the outsiders but they also construct those worlds by continuously ›externalizing‹ their unwanted products out of sight. Modern psychiatry depends on a similar process of translation: converting real life conditions experienced by flesh and blood human beings into the language of the ›brain‹ with terms like hormones, receptors, or neurons which assumes the fundamental separation of human body from the human person. Modern psychiatry sees human beings as self enclosed worlds, traveling through cold space, capable of effecting each other in many ways but not really belonging together. Such separate and different worlds can never understand one another or their common reality. Separate worlds are necessarily false worlds. If a ›real‹ world actually exists then it must be the out of which all the false ones were built. If there is a ›real‹ world then it must to be the only one. It is the only world for every design, every ambition, every force to conquer. All the worldviews can only illuminate or obfuscate a single world.
Featured image: Illustration of a druidic Wicker‐man from the book »What the World Believes«, New York, 1888, https://archive.org/stream/whatworldbelieve00raws/whatworldbelieve00raws#page/n102/mode/1up