Category: psychology

If You Want the Young to Avoid Smoking, Properly Fund a Mental Health System

The way to lower rates of tobacco use is not by raising taxes on the substance but by curing the mental illnesses that lead to people finding solace in smoking

Decades of government propaganda has convinced most people that tobacco smoking is a harmful addiction with absolutely no benefits whatsoever. Unfortunately, this brutalist approach to what is really a complicated issue neglects the very real psychiatric benefits of smoking tobacco. This essay proposes that the only realistic way to get young people to avoid smoking is to properly fund a mental health system.

Because our culture is going backwards in many ways, we are losing a lot of wisdom that used to be common. A lot of old folk remedies have been forgotten because a large pharmaceutical company was able to make profits selling an alternative. Cannabis is the most obvious of these, but tobacco risks becoming another.

Tobacco has been used in the West for its anti-anxiolytic and antidepressant qualities for hundreds of years, beginning with its discovery by Europeans in South America. The substance has a long history of shamanic use in South America, where some traditions seemed to believe that the exhaled smoke carried one’s wishes up to God.

Unfortunately, knowledge about how to use this substance wisely has been lost, and most people have drifted to either the extreme of smoking a pack a day or the extreme of thinking that tobacco has no benefits at all. Subtlety has been forgotten.

The first public government campaign against tobacco smoking was carried out by Nazi Germany. The authoritarian nature of the National Socialists made them well suited for ignoring the mental health benefits of the substance. Despite that, the Nazis were unwilling to go quite as far as the New Zealand Government and try to have the substance banned.

The truth is that people smoke tobacco because it feels good, and that tobacco feels good not because it gives an instant rush of pleasure that makes you addicted but because it alleviates suffering that already existed in the smoker’s mind.

If it was true that it gave people a rush of instant pleasure then everyone should become addicted, but this is not at all the case. People who are suffering psychologically are far more likely to become addicted, for the simple reason that smoking tobacco temporarily takes the suffering away. This appears to be especially true of people suffering from schizophrenia, depression or anxiety.

Some will say that these people have “addictive personalities”, but that is rubbish. The simple fact is that people who are suffering are more likely to take a substance that alleviates that suffering than people who are not suffering – this is obvious if one considers the balance of incentives.

And so they smoke tobacco because it helps them deal with stress, anxiety, rage, depression, and a range of neurotic and psychotic disorders.

The correct approach here is not to brutally force the citizenry into abstinence by taxing the mentally ill into poverty like a 20th century authoritarian hellhole would, but to cure the mental illnesses that cause people to smoke tobacco before they start smoking it.

Fundamentally, this means two interrelated things have to change. The first is for the Government to acknowledge that mental illness are legitimate health problems in the same way that physical illnesses are, and to properly fund a mental health system. With a properly funded mental health system psychiatrists will be able to keep up to date in their field instead of parroting 30-year old drug war propaganda because they have no time to research.

For this to be possible depends on the second thing, which is that New Zealand makes a cultural change in which it acknowledges that mental illnesses are legitimate problems in the same way that physical illnesses are, and that “hardening up” when you are suffering from depression makes as much sense as hardening up when you have a broken leg, and is equally as likely to kill you if you try to go on with your life without getting help.

The Future of Empathy

Empathy has probably evolved to facilitate social interaction in the human species, which is why an absence of it tends to have antisocial consequences

By most measures, the world seems to have become a more empathetic place since the Stone Age. The average person’s chances of meeting a violent end are far lower today than back then, and one’s exposure to grossly traumatic events are also far lower. This has had some interesting effects for a species that may have adapted to a certain level of environmental violence.

In many ways, this increasing empathy is becoming standardised and expected. We are more empathetic than ever before by a number of measures: we share more of our wealth than ever, we commit fewer crimes against each other than ever, we have a much better understanding of mental illness than ever. We debate social issues – like bringing refugees into the country to be supported out of general taxation – that would have been unthinkable even a century ago.

The question arises: where does this process end? In my upcoming cyberpunk novel, The Man With A Thousand Fathers, I explore this point in some detail. It is set in the 2080s, when the science of psychology is much more advanced than what it is today and when the confluence of virtual reality and psychoactive research chemicals has meant that the world on the flipside is often realer than this one.

In the Thailand of the story world, children who are discovered to have defective levels of empathy are put into a virtual reality environment instead of being allowed to go into real life, and then raised with exposure to a set of stimuli specifically calculated to condition them to be more civil. One of the story’s characters, an orphan named Suwat, spends over a decade in such a virtual environment before being released.

It’s entirely possible that such a thing may eventuate, for utilitarian reasons. It’s not difficult to predict the kinds of children who are going to grow up to be criminals. They’re simply the kids that lack empathy for other kids. Any schoolteacher could tell you with high accuracy which children in their class are likely to grow up to cause problems and which children are not.

It’s also not difficult to predict why these kids lack empathy. The vast majority of the time it’s because they themselves aren’t shown empathy at home. Children are not born knowing what’s what; they learn to base their behaviour and moral values on what is demonstrated to them as normal. If a child’s parents don’t show empathy to each other or to that child, that child might well grow up to learn that not showing empathy is normal.

A child who has been exposed to really bad things might even come to learn that empathy is weakness that makes a person vulnerable. They might learn that showing empathy is a signal that one is soft, and that one dare not show it in case it invites aggression and exploitation.

With advancing virtual reality technology, we’re almost at the point where using a virtual environment for therapeutic purposes becomes mainstream. Virtual reality therapy has already shown promise in treating soldiers suffering from PTSD.

Extrapolating from this, it might become possible, if a virtual environment was engineered accurately enough, to use VR therapy to cure a wide range of psychiatric illnesses and disorders.

On the darker side, advancing technology might also make it possible for psychotechnicians to use machines to measure aspects of brain activity that the owner of the brain might not themselves be aware of. It has been possible to detect homosexuality in a subject for decades by exposing them to graphic homosexual images and measuring whether certain parts of the brain spark into life or not, and who knows where this sort of technology might lead.

It might happen that young children are exposed, en masse, to virtual reality examinations in which their brains are tricked into thinking that they’re in situations where empathy is required, and then their levels of empathy are measured. Anyone with too low a level is shipped off to VR therapy in the hope that they can learn to become more co-operative.

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Vince McLeod is the author of ANZAC cyberpunk novel The Verity Key.

Are Muslims Bigots, According to the Left?

The acid test for not being a bigot has, for decades, been one’s attitude to homosexuality – but most Muslims fail here

Throughout the Australia same-sex marriage referendum there was a constant refrain: Don’t be a stupid, vicious, hateful bigot, and make sure you vote Yes. Only through sheer bigotry could a person vote No. Only by way of an unprincipled, mindless, unforgivable hate of gay people could a person possibly be inspired to vote against love.

The entire Yes campaign was driven by a fear of far-right extremism. The spectre of white supremacism was even raised. Apparently skinheads and Nazis were ready to storm the streets to give marginalised homosexuals a kicking, cheered on by the same rich old white Christian people who have oppressed everyone else going back to the dawn of time.

But all of this “Love trumps hate”-style rhetoric backfired when it turned out that there were very strong correlations, measured at the electoral level, between being Muslim and voting against same-sex marriage. Notably, the West Sydney electorates with the largest numbers of Muslims were the same electorates to record the highest proportion of No votes.

Statistics showed us that Muslims hate gay people and don’t consider them worthy of equal rights. It’s as simple as that. After all, in Muslim countries they often hate them so much they kill them, so there’s no surprise whatsoever that in a multicultural Australia that grants religious freedom to Islam, some Australians will use that freedom to hate gay people.

This raises an obvious question: are Muslims bigots?

After all, we have just spent months being told that people who were against same-sex marriage were bigots, and that the bigotry of homophobia has to be exterminated from modern Australia at any cost.

Over and over, we are told that bigots have no place in modern society, that all political views considered bigotry will have to be relinquished, that if a person doesn’t relinquish a bigoted opinion they are evil, and can be considered identical to Hitler in kind if not in degree.

Moreover, any person holding a bigoted viewpoint is automatically so evil that it’s legitimate to abuse them, to shun them, to lie about them, and to altogether treat them as if they are subhuman for having committed an unforgivable moral failure out of no motivation but pure malice.

So what do we make of the fact that, as per the definition of bigot that the Left has been using up until now, Muslims are extremely bigoted?

The obvious response is to say that gay people knew that already. Muslims are, after all, Abrahamists, and Abrahamism has a scriptural command to murder homosexuals in the Book of Leviticus of the Hebrew Bible, the same place that most Christian anti-gay hate arises from.

The less obvious response is to be quietly grateful that the Muslims of West Sydney are not ten times greater in number, because that might have shifted the balance of the referendum to 49-51 against.

These West Sydney suburbs are, ironically, Leftist strongholds, so the hate that the Left is always accusing the working class of – of being exclusive, discriminatory, bigoted, cruel and malicious – is present in greatest concentrations within their own territories!

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto XVII (End and Summary)

This reading is the final one in this section, and completes our reading of 2083: A Declaration of European Independence. It carries on from here.

This final section of the document (pages 1414-end) is mostly given over to a diary-style account that Breivik wrote when he was planning his operation. It describes in detail his thoughts leading up to the event and the caution he took in order to go undetected until the final moment.

It reads eerily because of a combination of a few things, especially the ordinariness of the vast majority of Breivik’s thoughts when contrasted with the murderous intent and fanatical devotion with which his deed was planned. Hannah Arendt’s comment about “the banality of evil” comes frequently to mind.

Most of the concerns and anxieties that he describes here are simply everyday concerns. One passage about the tediousness of email farming could have been written by any non-violent person, and another passage about Breivik being forced to overcome his fear of spiders might even be endearing if the reader hadn’t already gone through 1,450 pages of justification for shooting teenagers.

This section is actually capable of being self-consciously dark and comical, such as when Breivik is describing the difficulties he initially encountered trying to buy black market firearms in Prague, when his typically Norwegian frankness brought instant paranoia to the criminals he was trying to do business with.

All in all, it’s things like this that make this document so unsettling. Breivik is clearly capable of sophisticated humour and was apparently able to make friends and socialise without anyone realising what he was planning. With his references to social competition and a great future ambition he seems unbelievably normal – most of the friends he references have serious girlfriends and/or professional jobs.

This is a common sentiment for people who have known serial killers and the like, and were astonished by how normal they seemed. After all, Breivik killed over 70 people, which is more than other infamous killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. So it’s reasonable that many people would be surprised and astonished when they saw on the news that someone they knew and considered normal did such a thing.

A question about gun control is raised in this section. If Breivik purchased a semi-automatic rifle legally under stringent Norwegian gun control laws, and still managed to kill more people in one incident than has ever been managed by an American terrorist in the entire duration of that country and its long love affair with firearms, then what’s really going on?

At one point, Breivik relates a discussion with a Marxist friend at a party, where Breivik asks: “Don’t you consider yourself to be a hypocrite considering the fact that you support mass Muslims immigration and at the same time refuse to actually live with them?” It’s a question that many young Western people have asked themselves of the middle-class left.

If a person would start to read this manifesto with a certain idea in their head about Breivik being a neo-Nazi and Nazis being simple but emotional people, they would get a completely different idea by the finish. Breivik is genuine when he claims to despise Nazis, for the reason that Nazis would soon get rid of people like him, a “cultural conservative” who considers Israel a brother nation.

Breivik is not a Nazi, and neither is he a thug. There are grammatical errors characteristic of a native Scandinavian speaker throughout the text, but at the same time there are few people who would be capable of compiling a mostly coherent 1,500 page document in a foreign language.

Also striking is the fact that Breivik made over $1 million over the course of five year through a variety of entrepreneurial schemes that would have taken good intelligence and great personal drive and commitment to complete.

This paints a picture of Breivik as a member of the class elite in many ways. He was physically, financially, socially and intellectually (to say he was ‘mentally’ healthy would be pushing it) in excellent shape.

Perhaps here the signs of his downfall can be first observed – in one passage he describes himself as someone with “basically the perfect body”, and at no point in this document does he express an appreciation of or reverence for any other person, apart from vague historical figures.

Also telling is the fact that no romantic engagement with a woman is ever mentioned. Breivik mentions partying with Norwegian friends and their girlfriends, but at no point does he mention a girlfriend himself, a desire for a girlfriend, or getting laid (beyond the need to breed children to counter Muslim rates of breeding). It’s possible that his narcissism made him lonely on account of making him intolerable to women.

When all the signs are put together, Breivik is clearly a monstrous narcissist, which is perhaps from where he got the willpower to reject the socially accepted history and modes of thinking and arrive at an intelligent and accurate conclusion.

It’s perhaps also possible that being one of the few people in his social circles to appreciate the iron-cast logic of Muslims eventually becoming a majority in some European countries if current trends continue, Breivik suffered from a profound sense of alienation and isolation. It’s an extremely difficult experience to be the one person who can see the truth while the masses rip you down for speaking it. This may have caused him to become bitter, resentful and vengeful.

In the final analysis, it’s more than possible to put aside the narcissism and the murders and to consider Breivik’s unusual perspective on its own merits. Dismissing this document on the grounds that a murderous narcissist wanted it read is to fall victim to precisely the kind of logic dismantled in the document itself. It would represent the intellectual cowardice that gives rise to someone like Breivik in the first place.

After all, Breivik’s political complaints are entirely reasonable, even if his conclusions are not. The real danger is that people with entirely reasonable conservative beliefs are radicalised into violence on account of the utter refusal of the left to engage with them civilly in favour of adopting “Punch a Nazi” style thuggery. A refusal to honestly talk will lead to violence, so any leftist with an honest sense of duty to keep peace and good order in society has to at least consider this question.

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This is the end of this segment of VJMP Reads. Now we have put to the readers on our FaceBook page the question of which book to read next.