David Brooks recently published an editorial on the death by suicide of his best friend, a highly intelligent man of outstanding accomplishment with a loving family and devoted friends. As in most discussions of depression, the article does not question the medical interpretation of his friends’s condition, though the friend received the best possible medical and therapeutic treatment. To no avail. Obviously the causes of depression must be diverse; and no outsider can possibly have an insight into the plight of an unknown other. But it strikes me that one cause is hardly ever entertained: the profoundly depressing and accurate perception that our shared world is in a dismal state. Individual and personal causes are almost always put forward, as if happiness were the default condition of everyone and only some personal fluke or flaw could make it otherwise. I suppose that if we are guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness,” it’s only a tiny equivocation to assume that we are also guaranteed personal happiness.
Human beings, like dogs, are herd animals. Why isn’t it worth considering that the condition of the whole has a profound effect on the wellbeing of the individual? The more conscious the individual, the greater the capacity to sense that the whole means all of humankind, all life, all of our wasted and ruined planet. I’m sure that the proponents of medication and therapy will object that reading Tolstoy proves nothing. True. It proves nothing. What it provides is an alternative paradigm to the notoriously changeable and unreliable paradigms of medicine and psychiatry. Tolstoy’s near suicidal depression coincided with the apex of his worldly success and family fortune, and it only dissipated when he arrived at his conclusion that the meaning of life lies in living for others, a conviction that brought with it a sense of solidarity with all others. In the digital version of advanced capitalism, we are reduced to commodified bit players in a globally self-destructive system and its war of all against all. Those who take a stand against the system, as socialists and Tolstoyans once did, might conceivably acquire a sense of purpose and fellow feeling. Even if this doesn’t alleviate their suffering, it might at least mitigate its corrosive pointlessness.
The fad-driven and notoriously unreliable discipline of clinical psychology is for the individual what the unreliable discipline of economics is for the body politic. The former can’t be relied on with any certainty to heal us, the latter is less adept with its predictions than the weather forecast. Both clinical psychology and economics provide cover for analyses that bolster the authority of professional experts and the class interests they serve, which amounts to maintaining the system by helping its servants conform to it. Why shouldn’t that be cause enough for suicidal depression?
In Cervantes’ novella, The Conversation of the Dogs, Cipio and Berganza are two watch dogs. Inexplicably, they are granted for a single day the power of speech. Speaking freely, the one unloads his accumulated indignation against the owners to his friend: “Who would have the ability to inform the world that the owners are in fact thieves and that those who pose as guardians are in reality murderers?”
Who indeed!
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 