Psychiatry deals with the individual, but why not a social psychiatry which deals with collective behavior, values, mindset, that of a nation with its particular history, social structure, behavior, in this case, as measured by war, intervention, policies of drone assassination, torture, and rendition, opposition to world democratization, and internally, widespread class differentiation and income/power disparities, deregulation of its financial and corporate systems, massive surveillance to tamp down possible dissent and resistance, in short, a society of emergent fascism? Social psychiatry (unlike social psychology) may not be a recognized academic/medical discipline, yet how else comprehend the political consciousness and perhaps repressed Unconscious of a people, bound together, actively or in complicity, by a common set of institutions and cohesive framework of power—no resistance to which is presently in sight or even seemingly contemplated? Questions are easy to phrase, answers, more difficult. But the record is before us, current policy threads which can be seen with respect to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, as part of a global military-economic posture of counterrevolution aimed and directed ultimately at Russia and China and, down the road, the rising industrialization-modernization of the Third World, already evident, as represented by Brazil, by a middle tier of world power. Domination is scary, particularly when it is so institutionalized in the fabric of the social system as to be second nature, unquestioned, to the extent that American politics is to all intents and purposes Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the consensual pursuit of advanced capitalism as the permanent foundation of the American social order at home and its projection abroad, unilateral, in governing the world political-economic order. Today’s news: Obama and Clinton create sparks in a jar that is hermetically sealed, one outdoing the other in expansionist confrontation as part of a renewed Cold War to arrest America’s imperial decline. Republican opponents, novices at the game, sputtering belligerence, are no match for “liberal humanitarianism” as an instrument of conquest.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 03:16:02 +0000
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