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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 8th mo. 13, 2015 at 10:36am

This shouldn't have come out in accusatory mode, because people in general are far too uncritical of The Conventional Wisdom on any issue.

And as my favorite Episcopalian rector pointed out, people will sometimes cling to an untenable position because they do care about the people impacted, and hate to give up whatever false hopes the conventional mythos has to offer.

But without letting go of false hopes, can people see where to find true hope?

Part of the problem is that real answers are often complex and subtle. If, as Gabor Mate said, we take 'bad genes' as an explanation for addiction, we don't need to think about whether our political policies -- or our social environment, or our personal behavior and attitudes are contributing to a problem and may need to change.

And this is complex, because psychoses of biological etiology do in fact exist, including chronic infections and dietary deficiencies -- and because everybody knows that virtually indetectable changes in brain chemistry can put anyone into a severely challenging emotional state, that a tiny pill -- or the withdrawal of meds a person has become habituated to taking -- can readily flip people out.

The trouble is, the pill-based solution comes with some nasty side effects, and -- like the panacea of my day, LSD,  is only temporarily beneficial if at all.

Our reliance on drugs to bypass the question: What are we doing that drives people crazy? -- has merely created a population of people with highly unstable brain chemistry, in which 'none are sick and none are well' [as Leonard Cohen described a psych ward.] 

So what does conventional society do -- that makes for craziness? Why are we so willing to dismiss and ignore anyone we can write off as 'just another nut job'? I'm not saying we should take everything anyone says for gospel, but it isn't as if we had 'a sane world-view' to offer anyone...

Is 'The Conventional Wisdom', on any matter, ever quite consistent? I'm not sure that even real wisdom would be, at least not to human minds...

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Permalink Reply by Mark Frankel on 8th mo. 13, 2015 at 12:31pm

Forest, I'm unsure whether you are making a point about the power of the pharmaceutical companies, which is the topic of the linked article, or about Quakers and authority generally.  Assuming your point is the former, the UK National Health Service offers non-pharmaceutical CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) to patients with low-level mental conditions but qualified psychiatrists are able to prescribe psycho-therapeutic drugs. In the UK, as in the US, the pharmaceutical industry is run for profit but given their history of ethical capitalism Quakers should not necessarily object to that. Politics in the UK is not so heavily funded by private business as it is in the US as the UK rules are stricter.  There are also public bodies in the UK which regulate the use of drugs.  Are there no such bodies in the US?  However, you're right powerful commercial companies have a lot of influence and that needs to be watched.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 8th mo. 13, 2015 at 12:51pm

Okay, I'm making a point about the conventionality of the Liberal class... from which the bulk of NPR Quakers seem to be drawn. (It's not as though I didn't find conventionalities of a different sort among the countercultures of the 60's!)

To sharpen it a little: We are supposed to have access to a purer source of Truth, at least in theory... and I have found that this Source is, in fact, quite accessible.  We filter our information through the ideas we came in with; but so far as we're attentive to the Spirit, we're supposed to renew our minds and come to see more clearly. To undergo an occasional Gestalt-shift until we recognize the upsidedown world of the Gospel so thoroughly that we realize (suddenly or otherwise) that we, and our 'real' world, have in fact been on our heads for most of our lives...

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