Most psychotherapies concentrate their efforts on the individual’s internal and relational problems, with an implicit presumption that the individual who finds him- or herself troubled by the world, must be doing something wrong. This cultural normalisation perspective relies on the individual adjusting him- or herself back into ‘normal’ society, with the help of a therapist, as an indication of recovered sanity.‍ ‍Such ‘helpers’ - in medicine, psychology, finance, education, law, religion, politics, etc - can become unwitting apologists for the State, the institution, and the moral relativism of our day.

This practice takes a different view of the individual and of the society in which we operate. Namely, that our distress is intrinsically bound to our external conditions, our historical circumstances and treatment by others. Few children, for example, are born mentally distressed. They become mentally disturbed by the insanity of demands put upon them to accept and absorb as natural what runs counter to their nature. They quickly learn to make an enemy out of their own emotions and needs, their own sense of truth, their own Being, their own authenticity, learning to forever live in their heads, and under the thumb or boot of someone else who ‘always knows better’. And learning that dishonestly competing with, using and being used by other people is ‘normal’.

In this way, we all become vulnerable to abuse and to abusing others in relationships, via the ‘normality’ of workplaces, courts, educational establishments, and other places where unquestioning conformity is the norm, and where thinking for yourself and acting autonomously are fast being criminalised. The coercive vaccine policies and social isolation forced upon citizens, and the persecution of those who protest against genocide being recent prime examples of medical and State abuses of power in the UK and other places.

It becomes self-evident that the societies in which we live - particularly western, US-worshipping societies - are quite clearly mentally unhealthy from top to bottom, as they systemically value material wealth and personal vanity, over human life, health, dignity and freedom. And where violence is routinely used by authorities against anyone opposing their pathological desire for control, dominance and criminality. The real insanity in the individual lies, then, not in his failures to conform to all this, but in his or her adjustment to a deeply narcissistic way of living. It is a system that invites us all to mimic celebrity, to copy and plagiarise others’ efforts so that there is no originality left; to be indifferent to anything that does not personally profit us, and to think of ourselves as powerless to change the system, so that we only concern ourselves with our latest purchases. We end up living lives that are inherently destructive of a society designed to funnel our wealth to billionaires. It is a system that is abusive in its every hierarchy, from the enslavement of those on minimum wage and zero hours contracts, to the elevation of those in influential positions who are most parasitic upon us. It is a system that rewards individual inauthenticity for the sake of economic and political advantages that benefit the few, at the expense of the many.

Developing insight into how our society is not only structurally exploitative and abusive of its citizens, but on how it succeeds in turning citizens against each other, as we diffuse the best of our energies into social media squabbling and trivia. The most sensitive, conscientious souls within its walls become disturbed and self-stigmatising outsiders for the crime of simply seeing what others don’t want to look at.

Critical awareness of all this is our first step out of the collective madness we have come to accept as everyday life in the 21st century, ruled by crony capitalists and self-serving dictators such as Trump, Starmer, Netanyahu, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and their many adherents. By daring to look and examine, we then disillusion ourselves of all the ways we have come to admire and aspire to be like our abusers.

Critical awareness skills and a renewed trust in one’s own natural conscience begin to form a new foundation of internally regulated mental stability and clear sight in those few who have the courage to start believing in the truth of their own being. In this way, a genuine spirituality and an honest faith can develop in which the individual is able to transcend the socio-political prison of abusive State, corporate, institutional, and church dogmas built upon their long histories of dishonesty and oppression of the human spirit, rather than by its loving acceptance, liberation and enlightenment.