Madness & Mass Society: Pharmaceuticals, Psychiatry & the Rebellion of True Community

Posted on 06/06/2011

Brian Awehali interviews Dr. Bruce Levine

Author and clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wants to tell you that many forms of depression, discontent, and a whole raft of diagnosed mental illness are nothing more than natural responses to the oppression of institutional society. In his book, Commonsense Rebellion, Levine contends that the vast majority of mental disorders are, to put it simply, profit-driven fabrications with no established biochemical or genetic causes. This interview with Dr. Levine was conducted several years ago for publication in LiP: Informed Revolt, but the growth of corporate pharmaceutical “solutions” to deviant behaviors has only grown since then. Dr. Levine’s newest book, Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeating, and Battling the Corporate Elite, (Chelsea Green, 2011) is an exploration of the political psychology of demoralization and the strategies and tactics used by oppressed peoples to gain power in the United States.

Awehali: Bruce, you’re a critic of both psychiatry—the medical science of identifying and treating mental illness with drugs—and psychology—the study of human behavior, thought, and development. Are there substantial differences between the two?

Bruce Levine: When I first started out as a psychologist in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was fairly commonplace to dissent from psychiatry—that’s why people became psychologists. They saw the pseudo-science of not only the treatments but of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) itself. Unfortunately, over the years, psychology itself has slowly aped psychiatry, and there isn’t that sharp a distinction between the two anymore. The American Psychological Association (APA)—the professional group for psychologists—now fights for prescription rights for psychologists. So I guess any psychologist who maintains a position that depression isn’t primarily an innate biochemical disease, and that the DSM is a nonscientific instrument of diagnosis, is a dissident!

I should say that back in the 1970s and 1980s, before psychiatrists had the backing of the drug companies, they had very little power. In fact, they were falling apart, as evidenced by so many movies that were making fun of them, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—which could never come out today. But back in those days, when [psychiatrists] weren’t in bed with the drug companies and didn’t have much political power, you saw movies like that come out. Now, psychiatrists have the media power; they’re able to describe the playing field of the controversy.

Let me ask you a blunt question, first: Do you think there’s ever any basis for diagnosing someone as mentally ill?

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Love is the Water Under the Water

Posted on 04/17/2010

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

– Wilhelm Reich

Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.

What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?

When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.

In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid; even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?

When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.

Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism, it’s a dictatorial form of coordinatorism) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.

This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metasticized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.

Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.

As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.

And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” (To be fair, the Chinese mostly see it as just a word, not as a word with literal meaning, much like people in the U.S. rarely think of Chicago, Manhattan or Seattle as Indian words with actual, you know, meaning.)

That said, I have been called meiguoren (美国的, literally, “beautiful country person”), probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and it’s own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?

Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and ascending commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.

At the beginning of this, I quoted Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud’s cohort and fellow psychoanalytic theorist, who was the victim of the only U.S. government-ordered book burning in history, and who died in prison, a mad man, after being imprisoned for what he dared to think and write. (Sound familiar?) Freud thought people were violent sadistic animals, who had to be controlled and taught to “civilize” themselves for the good of society and stability. You can fairly say that Freud’s ideas were status quo – he never asked whether conforming to a sick society was natural or not; it was just assumed that being “well-regulated” and conforming was desirable and healthy. This makes me think of the deeply moving and staggeringly far-reaching speech Martin Luther King gave (presented in 1963, at WMU, and well-worth reading if you aren’t already familiar with it), where he attacks the concept of being “maladjusted” in a society to which he did not want to “adjust”:

Reich thought people were loving and good, and that it was the mutilations of society and government, the imposition of unnatural order, that caused neuroses and dysfunction. It was the systematic and unnatural control of people, in other words, that caused them to be violent, and to behave irrationally. Think of a house cat going slowly loopy, eating houseplants that make it sick and playing manically with a toy mouse when all it really wants to do is be outside, eating real mice, rutting at the appointed time, and following its nature. Reich thought eros was the highest expression of human health and actualization, and that it should be given free reign and support if we were to link hands with our higher selves. There are a great many things to take from Reich’s theory and story, but the one I think of most often, and which springs most readily to mind looking at this little Chinese girl caught between repulsion and friendliness is this: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.

Long Live the Outlaws: The Great Art and Forgery of Elmyr de Hory

Posted on 12/26/2008

Most petty crime is dull, in both motivation and execution. But I have always wished I could be a great outlaw. Consider the outlaw, and the merits of his or her avocation: the perpetration of grand, spectacular, and/or marvelous crime. A widespread and enduring fascination with outlaws, hucksters, escapists, charlatans, and rogues of various ilk has always harkened to embrace the heroic combination of focus, ingenuity, bravery, determination, and intelligence needed to rise to a level of criminal infamy.

“I love the trite mythos of the outlaw,” wrote Tom Robbins, in his comic novel, Still Life with Woodpecker. “I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw…The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet, and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that…There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.“

Great outlaws should be better known! Consider these three: Elmyr de Hory, Alves Reis, and Scott Scurlock. It should be noted that all three are dead, and that two of them died in poverty. Two also committed suicide, though one, an art forger, is rumored to have faked his death in order to escape actual death. Peaceful old age is a jewel rarely found cleaving to the heels of outlaws and, as with many famous painters, outlaws usually die penniless after a series of unfortunate events.

Elmyr de Hory, by far the greatest art forger the world has ever seen, successfully painted and sold as originals his counterfeit renditions of paintings by Picasso, Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Modigliani, among many others. Born to a rich Hungarian family in 1906, Elmyr went to art school in Budapest before moving to Paris, where he seems to have squandered some of his artistic acclaim and momentum for amusement and sexual experimentation.

This is one key aspect of the great outlaw: a certain shiftlessness, not exactly idleness or laziness, but awaiting the right stimulation or opportunity. It also helps a great outlaw’s stature to spend some time in a prison of particularly “nightmarish” reputation, as Elmyr did after being arrested for ties to his lover, a British journalist and alleged spy. The prison was Transylvanian and, of course, nothing but bats, castles, foreboding mountains, creepy royalty, bloodsucking, and other gothic nightmares come from there.

Elmyr survived his imprisonment in part by painting portraits of some guards and thereby currying favor. Yet soon after his release, de Hory was re-imprisoned in a German concentration camp, where he was badly beaten and had one of his legs broken. Elmyr claims to have escaped from the camp infirmary on a still-broken leg, though he is also a well-established fabulist, as was his official biographer, Clifford Irving (famous for his fake autobiography of Howard Hughes).

After escaping, he eventually returned to Paris and set about creating a new life. He most likely couldn’t have known that he was about to earn a reputation as one of the most talented criminals in history.

In 1974, Orson Welles released “F for Fake,” his final major film, which cast de Hory in the main role, playing himself. The film goes into detail about much of de Hory’s life, while also unspooling a fascinating prismatic essay on authenticity, identity and the basis of value for art.

And, thanks to this glorious age of free internet video, you can check out Welles’ sometimes hard-to-find gem right here.

* * *

I’d originally planned for this post to include excursions into the lives of de Hory, Reis and Scurlock, but realize now that blog posts are made for more brevity. One’s enough for today.

Body of (Written) Work

Posted on 04/29/1999

Here is a fairly comprehensive archive of work by Brian Awehali.

FEATURES | ESSAYS | INTERVIEWS| LiP: INFORMED REVOLT

FEATURES

» After the Twister – A Day in the Ruins of Joplin
“I was born in Joplin, but I am not a local. Since my parents divorced and left when I was three, I’ve lived in Tulsa, the Hague, Immokalee (Florida), Albuquerque, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Santa Fe, Asheville, Oakland, and China. My worldview is not like the Joplinites. I’ve long since renounced any belief in theism or supernatural determinism, and don’t believe that tornadoes or anything else for that matter are acts of God, unless you mean it metaphorically…”
:: The Brooklyn Rail :: July 2011

» Drift to Live: Words with China’s People’s Historian, Liao Yiwu
“Why should the government fear me?” says Liao smiling, the first day we meet, along with an interpreter and several of his writer friends, at a riverside teahouse outside of Chengdu, in Sichuan province. “I’m just a guy who tells stories…”
:: Counterpunch :: April 2011

» China’s Underground Historian
Liao Yiwu may be the most censored writer in China. His work has been translated into several languages and has enjoyed international critical acclaim, yet in his hometown of Chengdu, where his books are banned, he’s virtually unknown.
:: The Progressive :: April 2011

» Mongolia’s Wilderness Threatened by Mining Boom
Multinational mining companies eye Mongolia’s earthy fortunes
:: Earth Island Journal / Guardian (UK) / Third World Resurgence (Malaysia)/ Ger (Denmark) :: 2010-11

» Native Energy Futures
Renewable Energy, Actual Sovereignty & the New Rush on Indian Lands
:: LiP :: 2006 :: Project Censored award winner :: PDF version

» Trust Us, We’re the Government
How to Make $137 Billion of Indian Money Disappear
:: Alternet :: 2002 :: Project Censored award winner

» The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ $100-Billion Shell Game
:: Z Magazine (cover) :: April 2002 :: with Silja Talvi

» Broken Promises
Government malfeasance continues in landmark Indian Trust case
:: ColorsNW :: 2003 :: Society of Professional Journalists award-winner :: with Silja Talvi

» New World Disorder
How U.S. arms dealers and their Cabinet-level cronies profit from the war on terror
:: LiP / Alternet :: 2002

» Monitoring Your Every Move – A Guide to Biometric Technologies
What are the facts about biometrics? Predictably, industry leaders and critics paint wildly different pictures. Here, however, are a few brief looks at today’s leading biometric technologies, which may be a much bigger part of your life than you’d expect, in a considerably shorter time than you’d imagine.
:: High Times :: 2002

» Profit, Control, and the Myth of Security
The advance of Total Surveillance Society, aka Total Security, promises a world free of danger and uncertainty, yet the arguments for a comprehensive surveillance society comprise a fear-addled litany of threats and fantastic promises of security that are grossly exaggerated by the very corporate and government serial offenders who pose the greatest threat to our health and safety.
:: LiP :: 2006 :: with Ariane Conrad

» Life After Corporate Death Care
As traditional religious death rituals have given way to more secular alternatives, a consumer revolt against the high cost of dying in America is well underway.
:: Alternet :: 2004

» David and Goliath in Indian Country
The feds are on the losing side of the largest class action lawsuit ever filed against the U.S. government. This time, the Indians may actually beat the cavalry.
:: Alternet :: 2005

» Propaganda, Public Relations, and the Not-So-New Dark Age
Edward L. Bernays birthed the public relations industry in the United States. His clients included General Motors, United Fruit, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the U.S. Department of State, Health, and Commerce, Samuel Goldwyn, Eleanor Roosevelt, the American Tobacco Company, and Proctor & Gamble. He directed public relations campaigns for every president from Calvin Coolidge in 1925, to Dwight Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He was, in the estimation of cultural historian Ann Douglas, the man “who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture.”
:: with Stephen Bender :: LiP :: 2006

» Challenging the War on Drugs
A landmark conference on drug policy in Los Angeles convened nearly 600 attendees from across the U.S. and Europe.
:: Santa Fe New Mexican / Alternet :: 2002

» Nike Come Home, All is Forgiven
Oregon invites shoe giant to consider the economic advantages of domestic prison labor.
:: LiP :: 1998

ESSAYS

» Inventing Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Day provides an ideal opportunity to consider the formation of national identity and the concept of a civil religion. It’s also a living metaphor of the prevailing American model for immigrant assimilation and the ways in which history can be reinterpreted, and indeed wholly reinvented, to serve competing ethnic, patriotic, religious and commercial ends.
:: Britannica.com :: 2002

» Where Fools Rush In – Custer’s Last Stand
July 25, 1876 ― The U.S. Army today suffered its worst defeat ever in Plains Indian warfare, as more than 260 soldiers in the 7th Cavalry were killed along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in the disputed Montana Territory. The bloodbath ensued after an evidently ill-conceived charge under the command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
:: Britannica.com :: 2000

INTERVIEWS

» Madness and Mass Society
Pharmaceuticals, Psychiatry, and the Rebellion of True Community
:: an interview with Dr. Bruce Levine :: LiP :: 2006

» Torture Taxi – Anatomy of a CIA Front Company
Anatomy of a CIA Front Company
:: an interview with A.C Thompson and Trevor Paglen :: LiP :: 2007

» Remote Control Hip Hop
Culture, power and youth…
:: an interview with Jeff Chang :: LiP :: 2005

» Who’s White?
Race, Humor and the New Black/Non-Black Breakdown
:: an interview with damali ayo and Tim Wise :: LooseLiP podcast :: 2007

» Bad Vibes – Poison Pleasure Products?
Words with Jessica Giordano, co-founder of the Smitten Kitten and the Coalition Against Toxic Toys (CATT).
:: with Lisa Jervis :: LiP :: 2006

» Conveying Correctness
The Prefabrication of Political Speech
:: an interview with Chip Berlet :: LiP :: 2005

» Designing Our Demise
One respected Cornell robotics expert is in firm belief that machines will acquire human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, and that by the middle part of this century, they will be our intellectual superiors.
:: an interview with Hans Moravec :: Britannica.com :: 2000

» Membership Has Its Disadvantages
Whiteness and the Social Entropy of Privilege
:: an interview with Tim Wise :: LiP :: 2005

» Notes On a National Disorder
A look at the growing problem of excessive concentration in the U.S. culture industries, and the oligopolistic sway of just a few giant players over television news, book publishing, popular music and cable TV. Also, how the hell Bush II happened.
:: an interview with Mark Crispin Miller :: LiP :: 2005

» Addicted to Waste
Harm Reduction, Disposability and the Myth of Activist Purity
:: an interview with Julia Butterfly Hill :: Tikkun :: 2005

» On Irony
A pointed Q&A with author Rebecca Solnit
:: LiP :: 2006

LiP: Informed Revolt

In 1996, I started a zine called LiP in Chicago, learned a lot from it, took a break for several years to do other things, then relaunched it as a full-fledged North American periodical in 2004. The magazine, always printed on 100% recycled PCW paper, using non-petroleum-based inks, and with either worker-owned or union printers, explored radical (root/fundamental) aspects of the world and its power relations in a way we hoped could reach beyond the choir and be compelling for a wide readership. We did surprisingly well with our all-volunteer staff, 600+ contributors and no appetite for running an actual business, garnering awards from Project Censored, Utne Reader, East Bay Express, South by Southwest and Clamor during our run. Below are links to one complete issue of the magazine, and to various items related to the publication of the LiP anthology, Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press).

LiP No. 5:
The Relentlessly Persuasive Propaganda Issue [PDF]

Featuring: Eduardo Galeano, Vandana Shiva, Dr. Bruce Levine, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jeff Conant, Antonia Juhasz, Timothy Kreider and Hugh D’Andrade, among many others.

“‘Making the world safe for democracy,’ that was the big slogan.” – Edward Bernays, on his work for the first US government propaganda ministry, the 1917 Committee on Public Information

“In really hard times the rules of the game are altered.” – Journalist and social theorist Walter Lippmann, speaking of both elite manipulations of society and history’s mass cataclysms.

Tipping the Sacred Cow
The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt (AK Press)

“Tipping the Sacred Cow is a savvy and well-curated collection of the comics, illustrations, articles and interviews featured in LiP’s myriad print and online incarnations from 1996-2007. Capturing the magazine’s cheeky nature, it reads like a super-special edition of LiP—complete with illustrations by cartoonist Eric Drooker, a “theft ethics” quiz, a glossary of culture-jamming lingo and other useful appendices—including some exclusive, behind-the-scenes, previously unpublished material…. Tipping the Sacred Cow serves as a worthy headstone for a publication that died before its time.”

– “R.I.P. LiP” - In These Times, 11/2007

“Every single article in this anthology forced me to shift my thinking about issues near and dear to my heart (feminism, the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., eco-friendly policies—even the fine art of using the toilet).”

– Feminist Review, 11/2007

“[There's a] paradox that’s becoming increasingly difficult for independent publishers–especially progressive, environmentally conscious ones–to resolve. ‘Being values-driven,’ says Awehali, ‘I think we’re fundamentally and structurally at odds with the systems we use to print, to distribute, and so on. It’s really no surprise that [LiP] found it difficult to survive and thrive in a hypercapitalist periodicals marketplace.’”

– “Shelf Life,” Utne Reader, 11/2007