“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”

― R.D. Laing, Psychiatrist

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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 the view that our distress is intrinsically bound to our external conditions, our historical circumstances, the treatment we receive from others, and how we defended ourself against adversity. 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. Under such conditions, 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 competing with, using and being used by other people is ‘normal’. And more: that to excel in one’s ability to exploit others and to profit from others is evidence of ‘success’ in business.

In this way, we all become vulnerable to abuse and to abusing others in relationships without even knowing it, via the ‘normality’ of school, families, workplaces, courts, educational establishments, government, and other places where unquestioning compliance, conformity and collusion are 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 (and their lawyers) being recent prime examples of medical and State abuses of power in the UK and other places, aided and abetted by large swathes of the population all-too willing to stigmatise and attack free-thinking individuals.

With even a modest level of investigation, 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 individual 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 ‘normal’ individual lies, then, not in his failures to conform to all this, but in his or her uncritical adjustment to a deeply narcissistic way of living. We exist inside a system that invites us all, like naive teenagers, 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 a system we help preserve, so that we only concern ourselves with our latest purchases, our image enhancements and obsessions, and our preferred means of escapism. We end up living lives that are inherently self-destructive in a society designed to funnel our time, energy, and wealth to billionaires. It is a system that is abusive in its every hierarchy, from the workplace hierarchy of enslavement of those on minimum wage and zero hours contracts, to the elevation - by virtue of wealth - of those in influential positions who are the 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 keeping many citizens in states of self-absorbed ignorance, turning citizens against each other, as we diffuse the best of our energies into social media squabbling and trivial pastimes of no consequence. The most sensitive, conscientious souls within the prison walls often become disturbed and self-stigmatising outsiders for the crime of simply seeing the bars, straightjackets, and chains that others don’t want to acknowledge.

Critical awareness of the ugly truths of our world is our first step out of the collective madness we have come to accept as everyday life in the 21st century: a life ruled by crony capitalists and self-serving narcissistic sociopaths such as Trump, Starmer, Netanyahu, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and their many acolytes and sycophants. By daring to look at and examine the culture we so readily accept as ‘normal’, we can then disillusion and disabuse ourselves of all the ways we have come to admire and aspire to make ourselves in the image of our worst abusers.

Critical awareness skills, coupled with 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, rare souls who have the guts 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.