Reciprocal Gratitude
I appreciate you appreciating me, and so forth.
I’ve been quiet for a while, trying to make sense of some things. The responses to my last post were really wonderful, and to the quite a few new subscribers that found me there, thank you, it’s lovely to have you. As a bonus, Substack’s algorithm- which seems quite exuberantly reactive- has begun showing me a lot more discourse related to patriarchy. It’s been great, I’m learning a lot, I deeply appreciate the engagement and kind words that have come my way.
To Ally Hamilton in particular, thank you for inspiring me to get louder, and for sharing my words. The world is desperately in need of these kind of non-zero-sum actions. Appreciating and lifting each other up doesn’t need to have a cost- everyone can benefit. A line from Ally’s latest post resonated with me deeply:
It will always be unfathomable to me that we would find ourselves on a floating rock in a vast universe for a blink of time — a planet that provides all the resources we need if only we’d share — and this is what we do instead.
One of the more pernicious beliefs held by the kind of dickheads we’re all rebelling against is that the world is zero-sum, like a poker game. It says that in order for me to gain, someone else must lose. If I don’t take advantage of others, they will take advantage of me. Kill or be killed. In the words of Thucydides recently echoed by the prime minister of my country, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
It doesn’t need to be that way. I read this idea recently but I can’t quite remember the source, so I’ll paraphrase:
We’ve grown accustomed to the sentiment that no one owes anyone anything, but in reality we all owe each other everything. Every single person exists only by the grace of others.
Patriarchy is one of those words that can be made to mean different things by different people in service of their own ends. There are many such malleable, embattled words these days- colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, fascism. All these topics that we desperately need to discuss with one another and resolve have been turned into minefields, and it’s no accident.
Fascists are very quick to call their opponents fascists, not so much because they expect to be believed, but because this is how you devalue entire concepts like fascism. This is how you annihilate truth.
Antifa are the real terrorists, you know. Movements like Black Lives Matter are the real racists, actually, or else why wouldn’t they say that all lives matter? Capitalism is the only true source of freedom and justice. Anyone advocating anti-capitalism- anyone even using the word capitalism in a critical context- is actually promoting bread lines and secret police and state tyranny. Communism. No, I don’t know what that is, I just know that it’s bad. Immigrants are some kind of natural paradox- they take all the jobs while also not working or contributing to society. They’re threatening to take control but their dependent laziness is crippling the economy also. Protestors are terrorists, the cops kneeling on their necks are heroes. Cities are war zones, the hot ones require military occupation. Feminists are the real sexists, obviously- they hate men and they desire a world with the poles reversed, where women dominate and it’s the men who are sidelined, silenced, and punished. Male feminists, it follows, are traitors.
Bad actors are dragging us all into the trenches; the meanings of words are made malleable, and all the important ones are now battlegrounds in a fabricated culture war.
None of this is new; on the contrary, it’s tragic just how closely these patterns track history. You know, those landmark events of the 20th century that have been endlessly recounted to me my whole life, that I’ve been assured we learned from and will never repeat. It’s not new, but it is supercharged by the introduction of things like bot farms and AI agents, thanks to which it’s harder now than ever before to know what is real and what is true.
Harder, but not hopeless. This is cold comfort, I know, but there is opportunity in the fact that it’s all so brazen and so ugly now. The masks are off. When I was younger, the exploitation, the abuse, the injustice, the ridiculous unsustainability of human life on Earth, these all bothered me but they were just far enough under the surface that I could sometimes countenance the lies, sometimes delude myself into thinking that everything would come right in the end.
I used to believe that at least some of the people running the world were responsible adults. The refutation of that belief is painful, but meaningful action can only be taken from a place of truth.
My mental health has been on pretty shaky ground recently; I don’t need to look too far for reasons why. I’m prone to experiences commonly described as depression and anxiety, and I’m the proud owner of two official labels- major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). These are two of the most common labels in the book (DSM-5),1 and they’re only getting more common by the year. Indeed, psychiatry is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well. Or to look at it from the opposite perspective, in the words of Krishnamurti, “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Mental health and psychiatry are the subjects I usually write on these days; my own life has been so marked and so frequently derailed by depression and anxiety that this became my focus of study for some years; I went and got a master’s degree in neuroscience pretty much just for curiosity’s sake. I wanted to peek behind the curtain, to see what psychiatric research looks like from the researcher’s perspective. I was quite disillusioned with what I found, and particularly with the difference between what psychiatrists claim to know about mental illness vs. what they actually know.
The gap is wide.
I’m realizing more and more on reflection that this is not really a separate conversation from the one about patriarchy; they’re products of the same system. There are some very obvious, glaring patriarchal features to psychiatry, of course; for starters, most psychiatrists- especially influential ones- are white and male. Western culture- especially North American- is essentially taken as default, while other ways of knowing are dismissed if not ridiculed. There is a long history of pathologizing everything that is inconvenient or challenging to the status quo, from homosexuality (which was officially a mental disorder until the shrinks caved to public pressure in 1973), to invented conditions like hysteria (removed in 1980) and an older one called drapetomania, the mental illness that caused slaves to want to escape their slavery. The list goes on.
One of modern psychiatry’s functions seems to be essentially running interference for capitalism. Instead of questioning all the ways that people might be stressed and traumatized by their circumstances, we diagnose their brains and offer chemical interventions. It’s a good way to discourage class consciousness- we’re just a collection of individuals, some of whom have busted brains- and a good way to avoid tough questions about structural inequality.
Another writer on Substack, Jae Rose, articulates more elegantly than I could how therapy and meds often serve to treat the symptoms while the system perpetuates the illness- an example:
Under capitalism, mental health gets individualized.
Your anxiety becomes a personal flaw.
Your exhaustion becomes poor time management.
Your despair becomes lack of resilience.
But when millions feel the same thing, it stops being individual.Jae Rose on Substack
On top of that, most of the traditional places people used to go for solace and support are simply gone:
We keep saying people need to go to therapy but we gutted every free thing therapy used to not have to be — community, church, family dinners, knowing your neighbors, front porches. Now you pay $200/hr for someone to listen to you because nobody else has time.
Megan Cornish on Substack
And the biggest, ugliest sore on the face of psychiatry is this: it refuses to diagnose the most diagnosable people on the planet. The people who are the most ill, the most sociopathic, and the most harmful to themselves and others- the fucking billionaires. The people who display a pathological lack of empathy, textbook Antisocial Personality Disorder and textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder. People who have the worst cases of Hoarding Disorder ever recorded, who will risk the literal end of the world to add more money to piles that already extend beyond the horizon. People who, there can no longer be any doubt, will abet and engage in Pedophilia (excuse me, Pedophilic Disorder), and whose activities certainly seem to qualify them for Sexual Sadism Disorder. People who are sometimes seen high as kites on national television, suggestive of severe Substance Use Disorders, whose devotion to acquiring private islands and building bunkers points towards Paranoid Personality Disorder.
Every capitalized phrase in the foregoing paragraph is listed somewhere in the 1,120 pages of the DSM-5, though I should add for clarity that I’m not qualified to perform psychiatric diagnosis. These are merely observations and suggestions. I’m also suggesting that there are clear socioeconomic patterns informing who gets diagnosed and who does not, yet another feature undermining the idea that the book is all about ‘neuroscience’.
This shit makes me so angry. What I’m working through here, what I’m trying to navigate, is how to be angry and be outspoken without stealing the thunder of people who are much more harmed by this system than I am. In my last post I centred a lot of other people, mostly women; I was intending to show that I value their voices, and to acknowledge that my ideas are not really mine, they all come from somewhere. It felt good to do that, and I also got some very nice messages about it, so I will continue that practice.
The other thing I’m trying to do is keep the spark of hope alive. This is a very ugly time, and when I pay too much attention to the news I risk falling into the ‘fuck it, nothing matters’ spiral. These people that I read and quote are giving me hope and keeping me moving, and I hope they might do that for you too.
A world where daughters are honored will return, because we will create it. That’s the power of being human. We can look at this depleted soil, this neglected ecosystem, and consciously choose to nourish it back to health.
Patriarchy created the conditions for Epstein by Nergiz on Substack
The big book being the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its revised 5th edition (DSM-5-TR), from whence come most of our modern Western definitions of mental illness.
Thank you for writing this Devin.