psychology – Page 145

Metasanity

Being insane is one thing, and it is usually very difficult. Not seeing reality clearly comes with pain. Avoiding the difficulty that comes with insanity is primarily a question of avoiding the patterns of thought and behaviour that can lead to things getting out of control. This second-order sanity can be described as metasanity.

For example, you can be insane, but you can also be sane about being insane, which would be metasanity. Being metasane might involve taking advice about not smoking methamphetamine when someone points out that doing so has a deletorious effect on your mental health.

It might also involve, like the Carrie Fisher quote above, maintaining a realistic and objective view of one’s own condition.

A revealing thought experiment is to consider how a person reacts when being told that they have a mental illness. In this manner, two otherwise similar people can vary greatly, depending on their metasanity.

One person might accept that they have a mental illness and that this diagnosis accurately explains the difficulty they have experienced with their thoughts and behaviour.

For such people, high in metasanity, speaking to an intelligent clinician might bring with it a moment of clarity. Probably it will bring with it a sense of relief, as a clear explanation of why things become chaotic makes it more likely such chaos can be avoided.

Another person, lower in metasanity, might deny that they have a mental illness even when told so by a well-meaning doctor, or by family and friends. Such a person will be much less likely to take medications or to avoid situations and behaviours that lead to things getting out of control.

A person low in metasanity might accept that they have a mental illness, but behave in maladaptive ways like over-identifying with the illness, or becoming hyperdramatic about bad influences on their health (often, thereby, creating an anxiety that makes the illness worse).

A lot of a person’s ability to successfully recover from a mental illness – that is to say, from insanity – is really a function of their metasanity. It is metasanity that will tell a person if their current medication regime is actually working or not and so whether they should keep taking it or not, and getting to see a doctor in the first place is usually a matter of whether the patient has the metasanity to accept that they have a problem.

Conversely, metainsanity is, of course, an inability to think sanely about one’s mental health, despite being otherwise mentally healthy.

Part of the difficulty with sanity is that it correlates so strongly with metasanity. And so, a person who has trouble keeping things together may also have problems with keeping their awareness of the need to keep things together together.

Metasanity, as could be expected, correlates highly with narcissism. The obvious explanation is that the more narcissistic one is, the more likely one is to deny anything that might be seen as a weakness, such as a mental illness.

Sometimes metasanity can be a negative. Going insane and knowing that one is going insane is a unique torture that cannot be physically replicated.

However, even when this happens, the long-term prognosis is still better, because nothing is more likely to make an illness kill you than denying you are ill.

Autism and Psychosis Are Perfect Natural Complementaries

Some people contend that all autists and all psychotics are mentally diseased and have to be corrected by whatever means necessary. Others, especially the autists and psychotics themselves, contend that their conditions are not diseases but natural expressions of the human genotype.

A revolutionary article from 2008 pointed out that autism and psychosis are, in some physiological ways, opposite poles of a spectrum: “autism involves a general pattern of constrained overgrowth, whereas schizophrenia involves undergrowth.”

This can readily be confirmed by anyone who has spent much time observing autists and psychotics.

If autism is characterised by overgrowth, one might say that this reflected an excessive degree of order and therefore masculinity. Indeed, autism appears to correlate with masculinity in many ways – such as increased mathematical and logical reasoning and a decreased capacity for social intelligence. Also, autism is much more common in males.

If psychosis is characterised by undergrowth, one might say that this reflected an absence of order and therefore femininity. And, in opposition to autism, psychosis does appear to correlate with femininity in many ways – in particular, an increased capacity for social intelligence and a decreased capacity for mathematical and logical reasoning. Also, it is much more common in females.

On the dark side, the vast majority of serial killers have some kind of autism, because psychotics generally can’t keep it together well enough to kill many people and keep it a secret. However, the vast majority of suicides have some kind of psychosis, because psychosis is unusually terrible, and autists are better at keeping it together well enough to not fall into suicidal ideation.

On the bright side, both autists and psychotics have made immense contributions to the human survival project, not despite, but because of their lack of neurotypicality.

Autists can be programmed to last forever. They just keep going, and if they can find a subject interesting enough to them they never get bored. Many of our great engineers and surgeons were probably a bit autistic, as it was this that led them to obsess magnificently over their projects until they knew more about the subjects than anyone else ever had.

Psychotics are the exact opposite. Psychotics are not easy to program and they don’t stay programmed. Every time there is a ‘psychotic break’, more programming is shrugged off. This means that it is through psychotics, who have seen beyond Maya, that our spiritual and philosophical traditions arise.

In much the same way that, in order to get anything done, a person needs a mixture of autism and psychosis, so too does society need autistic and psychotic individuals in order to function healthily at the top level.

A society wouldn’t last without both autists and psychotics; without the former, no work would get done, without the latter, all work would still be picking berries and smashing open mammoth bones for the marrow within.

Oftentimes, it is necessary for a psychotic to show the way to a new field of knowledge but it is also necessary for autists, once shown the way, to do what is necessary to make practical applications out of that knowledge.

This is akin to how the Anglo-Saxons, whose culture has an unprecedented degree of tolerance for psychotics, tend to invent things and how the Germans, Japanese and Koreans, whose cultures have an unprecedented degree of tolerance for autists, tend to refine them into excellence.

In other words, society would go backwards without the autists and it would never go forwards without the psychotics. Autists, psychotics and people who are neither are therefore all necessary for an optimally healthy and functioning society.

We Used to Rape Them for Their Natural Capital, Now We Rape Them for Their Human Capital

Back in the day (19th century) the Western world completed the Scramble for Africa and held virtually the entire continent in bondage. Every part of Africa under European control was raped for its natural resources, a process that made Europe very wealthy and Africa very poor.

In recent decades, the West has more or less come to widely accept that this process was immoral. The primary reason for this is that it’s apparent in hindsight that, in order to get the populations to be compliant with colonialism and the processes of resource extraction, massive abuse and neglect had to be inflicted upon the native populations of Africa.

This abuse and neglect led directly to a widespread emotional, intellectual and cognitive impairment that has been passed down through the generations, crippling the capacity of Africans to care for themselves to this very day.

But, we also know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In today’s world, wealth has less to do with natural resources and more to do with human resources. After all, diamonds or oil buried deep under the earth are not valuable without the human capital that knows how to extract and process them.

In an age when the total dollar value of services are five times the value of manufacturing, why go through the expense of building an empire just to dig up shiny rocks and extract rubber?

We know that doctors, engineers, psychologists, nurses etc. are generally more than happy to abandon their own people the moment you wave a fat Western paycheck in front of them, so it’s much better to loosen the immigration policy and let the human capital come to you.

The great irony here – which has been entirely unappreciated by the left – is that, from the perspective of people in the developing world, anyone who becomes capable of making a positive difference to the people around them usually ends up disappearing before they do, abandoning those they grew up with.

After all, why should a Kenyan doctor get paid $5,000 for saving 1,000 kids from malaria when he can move to New Zealand and get paid $50,000 to wipe old white people’s arses?

The next time a wealthy person tells you that allowing mass immigration is a moral imperative because of prior colonial action in the developing world, just know that the purpose of this mass immigration is not as moral as it sounds. The purpose is to plunder the affected areas of their human capital, making the West once again wealthy at the expense of Africa and the Middle East.

The only difference with the 19th century is that, today, the capital is getting itself on planes and delivering itself to us.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Greens

Long stereotyped as a fringe movement for harmless eccentrics, the New Zealand Green Party appears to be following the general upward trend for environmentalist parties in the West as the social democrats continue to fragment into special interest groups. The Greens in New Zealand are large and established enough to be a political force in their own right and ought not to be considered an adjunct to the Labour Party.

Despite a nominal adherence to the left wing of Parliament, the Greens have a number of striking differences with the Labour Party to whom they appear shackled.

The most notable is that the Greens are a party for comfortably wealthy people, but not the ones creaming it. This might surprise many who still consider the Greens to be a party for students and semi-employed Golden Bay hippies. The correlation between voting Green in 2014 and Personal Income is 0.31, which is not as strong as National’s 0.53 but is much closer to that than to Labour’s -0.51.

Voting for the Greens in 2014 may have had a negative correlation with Median Age, but it was not significant at -0.17. This belies the image of the Greens as a student’s party, especially if one compares to the correlations between Median Age and voting Cannabis Party in 2014 (-0.55) and voting Labour (-0.70). This suggests that the average Green voter is significantly older than the average Labour voter.

The average Green voter was the best educated of those of all the parties, with a correlation between voting Green in 2014 and having a Master’s degree of 0.64. The only party to come close to this is ACT with 0.57 – National is the closest major party, with a not significant 0.20.

Also, the average Green voter was about as likely as the average National voter to have no qualifications. The correlation between having no qualifications and voting Greens in 2014 was -0.49, for National -0.43, for Labour 0.34 and for New Zealand First 0.79.

One factor that correlates highly with support for the Greens is not being religious. Not being religious and voting Green in 2014 had a correlation of 0.56, which was much higher than for any other major party (National 0.10, New Zealand First 0.12, Labour -0.50). Only the Cannabis Party was close: voting for them in 2014 had a correlation of 0.34 with being religious.

Unsurprisingly, Green voters are very unlikely to be Christians. Voting Green in 2014 and being Christian had a correlation of -0.57. This was at variance with all other parties except Internet MANA (-0.40) and Cannabis Party (-0.41). None of the other major parties are so antichristian. Being Christian and voting National had a correlation of 0.29, with voting Labour it was 0.10 and with voting New Zealand First it was -0.11.

Perhaps the oddest correlation is the one between voting Green in 2014 and having spiritualism as a religion. This is a fairly significant 0.52. This was shared with the Cannabis Party, who had a correlation with being a spiritualist of 0.36, and is a notable point of difference with the ACT Party, with who the correlation with being a spiritualist was -0.43.

Perhaps these points can be explained by the fact that cannabis use tends to turn people strongly away from the exoteric side of religion and strongly towards the esoteric side, an interest they will share with the spiritualists.

Although the Greens are mostly a white person’s party, there is just barely a signification correlation between being of European descent and voting Green in 2014 – this is 0.24. There was also a barely significant correlation in the other direction (-0.27) between being of Pacific Islander descent and voting Green in 2014. For being of Maori descent it was a not significant -0.09, and for being of Asian descent it was perfectly uncorrelated.

So the Greens are an odd mix – like Labour when it comes to taxes, like National when it comes to personal income, like the ACT party when it comes to education and like the Cannabis Party when it comes to religion. The only party they are really opposed to seems to be New Zealand First. Probably the bulk of their voters come from people who are educated in the hard sciences in particular and the humanities to a lesser extent.

This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.