Obamas new brain-mapping project is already a Lilliputian disasterJon Rappoport The utopian technocrats, whove been predicting that, by the middle of this century, they will create an artificial brain that outstrips the one inside the skull, are suddenly on vacation. Theyre mumbling and backing away. Its the old put up or shut up. Theyre shutting up. Theyve got nothing. I guess paradise is postponed. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Obamas Manhattan Project of the brain, launched in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, is a sop to make suckers think science can stop murders by making accurate predictions based on some monumental, all-encompassing portrait of the mind. The current debate, sparked by Obamas launch, centers around which paradigm should be utilized in this Magellan voyage through our gray matter. Thats just a cover-up. Nobody has the faintest idea about which approach will work. Part of the reason? The titanic complexity of brain activity is always changing, moment to moment. So even a perfect snapshot, frozen in timewhich scientists have no idea how to executemeans almost nothing in the next split-second. The adage about never stepping in the same river twice applies perfectly to the brain. In past articles, Ive demonstrated that, of the 297 official mental disorders, none can be tested for. The diagnosis in every case is a fiction. That is to say, there is no scientific basis for labeling a person with such a condition or prescribing a drug. Ive also written extensively on the toxic destruction wrought by the drugs. Behind all of this, then, what is a mental disorder? Its a social construct invented by psychiatrists and their allies to carve up the concepts of mind, brain, behavior, and thought. This construct is primarily inhibiting, which means that a kind of ceiling is created on human experience and consciousness. If you go there, or there, or there, or there, you have an illness, a disease, a disorder. Control. Stay here, dont go there. This area means youre all right; that area means youre not all right. But of course, millions of people like the fiction. They like it for various reasons. And they absolutely insist on equating the fact that people suffer, have problems, lose control, cant fit in, feel pain, are confused, with the idea of mental disorders. They feel compelled to make that connection. Theyll die making that connection. These people want to be inside the prison called super-organized society, where mental disorders make sense. Thats where theyre comfortable. Thats where they feel they belong. Thats their area of expertise. Thats where they know how to maneuver. Labels make them feel safe. The more labels the better. They enjoy tossing the labels around, as if theyve attained special technical knowledge that equips them to make important judgments. As if there is any basis for those judgments, when of course there is no basis at all. But delusions can be friends. The greatest ops in the history of planet Earth have always focused on the mind, because thats where the action is. Thats where people learn to give in. Thats where people learn how to adjust, perceive, and settle on some basic notion of what reality is all about. The basic purpose of a psyop is this: 2 plus 2 equals 5, AND that is really saying 2 plus 2 equals 4. There it is. Thats what a psyop does. So when Pavlov and Freud began to publish their findings, other men who were quite interested in societal control and organization peeped in and realized they had something astonishing on their hands: a false way to educate the masses about the mind itself. What an enterprise that would be! You see, this is what your mind is. This is how it is structured. And there are these disorders, and they help define the mind. They make things clear. Learn about this. Accept it. Live with it. Understand your own mind. Heres how to do it. Just as the Roman Church (the old Roman empire, reorganized to conquer by other means) once took all of history, took key events in history and recast them as mere symbols of underlying metaphysical Church doctrine, thereby cutting off adherents from the richness and vitality of the past, so this 20th-century psyop has distanced people from the free and untrammeled energies of their own minds. Todays psychiatrist, the secular priest in a white coat with a medical degree, with 297 mental disorders to play with, and patients lining up for drugs, is the foot soldier in a vast op to train the mind to think about itself in very specific and narrow terms. Moral and intellectual midgets like Hillary Clinton and a bevy of beautiful celebrities, enlisted as dupes, work the angle of removing the stigma from a mental-disorder diagnosis, as if that were a real problem, instead of a down-and-dirty 2am infomercial hustle. Gone are the days when psychologists and psychiatrists made statements like this: The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. (Wilhelm Reich, Work Democracy, 1937) Rooting [yourself] in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians.(Reich, Writings, 1951) If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible. (Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933) A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche. (James Hillman, psychologist) Instead, we have this (an opening statement in a recent psychiatric study): Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is highly comorbid with alcohol disorders (AUDs) and cannabis dependence. However, the temporal sequencing of these disorders has not been extensively studied to determine whether SAD serves as a specific risk factor for problematic substance use. This is the language of the machine, adapted for human use, with the human under observation viewed as a machine. It is the language whose basic building blocks are categories of scientifically non-existent disorders. It is a tinker-toy language applied to the mind. It is to the actual mind and imagination as a junk-heap robot is to Keats or Yeats or Dylan Thomas. It is a sign of a fools errand such as the world has never seen. Yet, it captivates. People want to learn more, as they might want to learn more about how a dinner table was set in an old English manor; where each fork was placed and what it was for, how the napkins were folded, how many glasses went with each place setting. People think they are being given a window on the brain. However, they are being instructed in a reduction of energy, life, and joy with each lesson, with each little foray into mechanistic sophistry. Psychiatry is the language of bureaucracy. Every sentence sits on a presumption that in turn refers to a department where people bend over work they will transfer to a division which will rearrange it and coordinate it with other incoming streams of senseless calculation. Yes, well, we thought that disorder A preceded B 37% of the time, but we were mistaken. A more accurate figure would be 41%, and even then we have to take into account the overlapping symptoms of disorder C Not only is psychiatry a grand op, its also a phenomenon arising from the fact that people want to submerge and bury their discontents, which they see no way to explore. In this sense, psychiatry and psychology become theater. The participants take on roles based on the premise that there is no way out. No way out of being a dutiful citizen inside a highly organized prison of social and political choices. Be a person with a disorder. Be a person who can express emotion within the context of having problems. In the middle of writing this, I went into the living room and turned on the TV set. I saw a close-up of a woman crying on the Dr. Phil show. I have no idea what she was crying about, but I did see, quite clearly, that she was having the time of her life, the only time of her life. She was digging her hole deeper, because it was something to do. It was something far better than the routine of a day spent distracting herself from a mysterious X she knew nothing about and wouldnt dare inhabit. That X is boredom of the soul. It can extend light years in every direction, because it has nothing to with society. Society becomes the occasion, the means to express boredom. Show me a place where the people always follow the rules and the customs and I will go there, because then I can reveal how exhausted I am. This is a grand tradition. It is even expressed in the ancient Greek myths. Behind all the power and action and rage and lust of the Olympian gods, those great myths invented by the Greek poets, there was the unmistakable scent of weariness. The immortals had nothing better to do than interfere with the humans below. The gods would invent the slightest infraction they could interpret as a slight, deserving punishment. He wandered through the forest and by accident came upon me when I was naked, so I turned him into a stag. Psychiatry and its allied therapies feed on boredom. They stretch it and twist it and cut it and label it. They may say that, indeed, they are concerned with the soul, but it is a lie. They are dealing with a synthetic imitation, fabricated within the structure of a dwindling civilization cut off from its vital energies. People who choose to live inside that structure are emotionally bored, cosmically bored, universally bored, psychically bored. The breakout of the individual, the Soul, is not going to be accomplished through the help of a university-trained acolyte with an advanced degree. Instead, inside the ever-more structured rules-and-regulations civilization, progress is defined within the space of a freeze-dried concentrate, a commercial package, a mechanical artifact that is never you, never me, never any of us, but only seems to be. Under the terms of the implied contract, the professional expert says to the patient: give me a you that isnt you and I can help him; give me a cartoon of yourself and I will cure it. And the patient says: here it is; go to work on it; just dont touch the real center of the storm, my psyche; dont set sail for that place and neither will I; we both know that land is beyond any adjustments you or I, as representatives of this shrunken society, can engineer. Its not quite like the myth of the knights of old, crossing the threshold into the Mystery, where life itself takes on larger meaning, and great spontaneous creation rises in the unending sky every morning. Its not anything like that. Its not meant to be. Its meant to be a virtual fraud that operates on a shrunken desiccated version of ourselves. Its meant to be a scientific expedition to catch life in a net and pin it to a board. Its meant to be a potion we drink, whereby we shrivel to tiny dimensions, and then discover everything looks bizarre, precisely because weve reduced ourselves. And then we need help. Then we need experts. Then we need a brain-mapping project, a preposterous babble of assurance that our experience is comprehensible and curable. Of course, the real cure is finding a way to attain our actual size, which is without boundaries. Then and only then do we begin to see our lives. Then we see the skies beyond the cartoon sky. Then we see the great adventure. Then we feel the cosmic boredom of the soul disintegrate. Then we feel Freedom, not freedom. Then we shrug off these fools and operators who are trying to enthrall us with their yak-yak-yak sewing machines of false knowledge. RELATED ACTIVIST POST ARTICLE: linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 