The Fundamental Strangeness: Mental Health and American Culture

The fundamental strangeness of being born into a culture whose central and guiding principle - pursue your own personal greed in order to accumulate more green paper survival coupons than your fellow humans - I reject. I not only reject it, I am repelled by it and find it anathema to my essence and to the essence of most of the people I know and love.

I have lived with this sensation of profound estrangement for forty-eight years and have now – thanks to much reading and dialogue and life experience – begun to receive some perspective on it and to reflect upon it. I believe that being born into a culture whose founding tenet I reject forced a traumatic rupture or disassociation in me. In my teens, I began to obsessively think morbid and painful and ego-dystonic thoughts. (An ego-dystonic thought is one that directly runs counter one’s actual self and values). This tendency has waxed and waned over the decades, cresting a handful of times into near psychotic breaks. I was diagnosed with OCD and have taken medication in order to control it for 10 years.

What I am now coming to grasp is that my obsessive-compulsive disorder, in many ways, has served as a form of adaptation to the world I was born into. Certainly, I was born with an “atypical” neurological profile and my DNA contains the potential for episodes of OCD. However, I am also beginning to sense that the intensity, the frequency, the duration and the very nature of my OCD episodes have been shaped by and has been a response to my fundamental estrangement from the founding principles of this culture.

Ours is a culture that, above all, has pursued the profane. Nature is to be feared, despised, and attacked. The person guided by pursuits – such as art, poetry and working for peace - that fall outside of the commodity-world is also to be feared, despised and attacked. These facts strike me as fundamentally violent and have caused me, on occasion, to seek refuge in self-destructive thought loops. But what if even those people who appear to cherish and profess to love this culture were also – on a much more deeply unconscious level – repelled by it, unbeknownst to them?

Much has been said about the pathetic and circus-like nature of the 2015 Republican debates. Perhaps what has not been noted is how deeply strange and eerie and profoundly sad the candidates appear. Whether it is the blustering bigotry of Donald Trump or the calmly pronounced nonsense of Ben Carson or the bullying bleats of Chris Christie, it all has the shimmering tinge of great desperation – not only desperation, but despair. I believe that the despair huddling behind the bellows and burps of the presidential candidates is founded upon their own inability to feel well in a culture that goes against our biology as social beings interdependent upon nature. When they speak, when TV commentators speak, when the titans of business speak, when actors in commercials speak, all I can hear is people trying with tremendous desperation to convince themselves that the insane tenets of our culture are not insane: That the atmosphere is not warming, that the ocean is not acidifying and that we humans are not splitting violently in two on the inside, unable to reconcile our true selves as sacred and loving beings with the cultural tenets we have been told to follow.