-DEVIL'S ADVOCATE-???.....

There is a postulate that I reject implicit in what actually turns out to be your reasoning (and I am disappointed. I thought, judging by some of your other posts, that you were better than that. You are seemingly in sympathy with the oppressors on this issue, and are only really concerned perhaps, like most people on this issue, with the purely verbal violence of those at the point of being metaphorically lynched, to borrow from Rene Girard), namely that the burden is on the victim to prove anything. Such reasoning insinuates that the problem is with the victim, if only he/she would speak with less passion, if only he/she would remain in possession of himself/herself and not allow themselves to be carried away by emotions (which displays a fundamental ignorance of the perspective and experiences of people embittered by experience. As always, one of the cardinal flaws our nature is heir to is our woeful inability to put ourselves in the shoes of those less fortunate than us, an ignorance that only whets our appetite for passing such negative judgement on victims and vilifying and demonizing them, an all too common phenomenon that manifests itself in many cunning disguises), if only they would say the things we want them to say, if only they would be more like us in their expressions, us who have a special purchase on the absolute truth! Such reasoning is a variation on the theme of victim-blaming, that is that the patient is to blame if his auditors are not receptive to his protestations. It's always the patient's fault isn't it?

The simple answer is that our audience won't listen to us because they are prejudiced against us and our interests, something they deny to themselves and then assume that anything said to the contrary is symptomatic of madness or some delusion of persecution. We can no more appeal to their reasoning and moral faculties than a disfranchised african american could have once appealed to the reasoning and moral faculties of his lynchers. We are the objects for the displacement of the frustration, hatred, resentment and aggression the mob feels in relation to the ills of society and the powerful figures whose power places them out of the reach of its wrath, the surrogate victims that the many headed monster can vent its poison on, our undesirability qualifying us for this role. Psychiatry spearheads this, whilst making an obscenely hypocritical pretense of really caring, paying lip service to patients' rights whilst trampling on them, making token gestures such as the anti-stigma campaign (they'll have to stop attaching invidious labels to people in a society prejudiced against the recipients of these labels to convince me that such a campaign is anything other than a token gesture at best, and at worst a smokescreen for the real intention to continue attaching these stigmatizing labels to people whose harmfulness they are all too aware of).

We exist in this society only on sufferance, which is why all the abuse is ignored. We are social lepers, excluded from the community of moral obligation. The imperatives of political correctness, much like with racism, drive this bigotry underground, where it simmers beneath the surface of social life (despite all its many flaws and the Stalinist undertones of its imperatives, political correctness is partially redeemed by its function as a bulwark against the violence of the intolerant bigots that sully seemingly every society with their presence), sufficiently out of sight enough as to convince the optimists that there has been real psychological and moral progress, when in truth all that has happened is that the deterrents and instinctual checks that stop people from giving expression to the violence within them are greater and more numerous (political correctness is at best a kind of instinctual, psychological and behavioral straitjacket).

And people like my family or origin and my husband's family just eat that political correctiveness up, CB. It's awful.

I know what you mean. I appreciate the way that you help with logic.

It is sad that there doesn't really seem to be an answer.

In anticipation of possible criticism, some might say, "but why might people be prejudiced against you", but I trust in the testimony of my eyes and ears, as well as experience, and I will always show fidelity to my experience over the self-serving, conventional reasoning of a society willfully blind to its own depravity. There are lots of good caring people in society who mind their own business and leave others alone, true. Yet there are also lots of people who, for some reason or another, are nasty, intolerant, cynical in their relations with others, who use the weak and the vulnerable, people who lack powerful advocates and whose existence is really a matter of indifference and inconsequence to most, as sport for their depraved amusement. Any extremity, any deviation from the enshrined norm, from what is desirable, is a guarantee of future persecution (and of course, your response to it will only leave you vulnerable to more from state psychiatrists and their lackeys, a form of persecution usually much more sinister in its biological, social and psychological ramifications, and much more maddening because those doing the persecuting claim its for your own good!). This is not the mere festering psychic sore of a diseased mind, but a statement of fact.

For example, in our country, there is an epidemic of hate crime against disabled people, whose insight into modern society, bought at a heavy social and psychological cost, we should heed, but conveniently ignore (see the book "Scapegoat" by Katherine Quarmby for an understanding of the historical and contemporary persecution of the disabled, from ancient Greece to today, when, at least in my society, we seem to be undergoing a veritable explosion of hate crime against such people). Look at the way the elderly are being treated. As for the "treatment" of the "mentally ill", notwithstanding all the triumphalist propaganda to the contrary, it represents no real progress over those paradigms that preceded the current one.

If you don't walk the right way, dress the right way, smell the right way, if you aren't the right colour, if your teeth aren't the right colour, if your bones aren't configured the right way, if you are too old, and if you don't conform to the image of the body beautiful, then unless you live in one of the more advanced enclaves of the community where people generally leave you alone, then you're a dead duck!

Cate68 wrote:And people like my family or origin and my husband's family just eat that political correctiveness up, CB. It's awful.

I know what you mean. I appreciate the way that you help with logic.

It is sad that there doesn't really seem to be an answer.

Thank you for your kind words! I have found your comments extremely eloquent. It is indeed a moral conundrum. My problem is with the supposition built into the concept that there is such a thing as an elite coterie or class of people sufficiently enlightened enough to impose their enlightenment on others. I have known many "politically correct" people who label their ideological opponents as "mentally ill" (thus betraying the contempt they feel for the people whose problems are framed as such), who cast aspersions on the looks of others, who are prejudiced against obese people etc., so I am very suspicious of these people's claims to moral supremacy! There are more prejudices under the sun than those officially recognized as such. If only they could see the beam in their own eyes...

Coming back to an earlier point, no amount of appeals to reason or conscience could possibly impregnate the fortress of bigotry and cynicism in which modern man spiritually resides. If you try to talk about this, in all humility to strangers of a demotic mindset, they'll just guffaw, cast aspersions on your intellect (as is fashionable), or look at you like you are a complete weirdo, pointing and laughing. That's my experience. Such people are little adapted to dealing with heretical, iconoclastic opinions. Such is their idolatry of the here and now and their faith in the infallibility of received wisdom, it is something of a social reflex to pour scorn on any opinion that contradicts the simplicity of the ideas they inherit from others and mindlessly parrot as if they were divinely imparted (the demotic mind works like this; you think and express yourself differently to me, therefore you must be an idiot. Or mad. Hence the reason why there are no grounds for debating such things with such people).

Even if I am wrong about all or some of the foregoing, and I'm surely wrong about many things, perhaps everything, after all, tis human to err, what really annoys me is all these people who take this possibility of my being wrong as evidence that I'm a paranoid schizophrenic! Then what can I say, we must all be paranoid schizophrenics.

If you are a "mad-man", and you think society is out to get you, you are quite insane, paranoid. If you are a member of society, who like other members of society, thinks "mad-men" are out to get you, you are quite sane, and not paranoid, even though, the vast majority of violence is done against those labelled mad, not the other way around.