Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”
He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.
I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.
This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the US provocations against China.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of US actions in Ukraine and asked:
Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?
Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?
Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a US/Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.
So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.
When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:
- Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr. is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.
- So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order
- This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
I vote for the bang!
- The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.
There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light . A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit.. - Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.
- Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.
To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both. Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are. It frightened me. It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth. I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.
The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears. Nuclear war was not one them. It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness. As if Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?” No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine. We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”
Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:
At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?
That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience (isbn.nu). He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.” Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.
If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later. Sooner is probable. Nuclear weapons are very real. They are poised and ready to fly. If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the US government does, we are worse than fools. We are suicidal.
As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.” That will be too late. There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.
Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:
End nuclear weapons now before they end us.
Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.
Make peace with Russia and China now.
“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a US government plot.
“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.”
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies (Clarity Press). His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but absolute powerlessness does the same.” – Akala
Actually, power doesn’t corrupt. The corrupt seek power.
Both.
There is documented research that shows how power corrupts. It erodes empathy.
dark eevee
That doesn’t disprove or change what I said. If one’s empathy can be eroded, that person was corruptible already. Let’s say I was president of a country that has resources that the US wanted. I could not be corrupted no matter how much power I had; thus I would be assassinated or disposed in a coup or whatever the US/CIA could think up to rid themselves of someone who wouldn’t buckle under to their dictates. I can name people who have been taken out by the US if you like. They are all gone because of the basic corruption of the US and its leadership, not by their own.
Everyone thinks they can’t be corrupted, but research shows otherwise.
Everyone doesn’t think that. Apparently, you need a list of those who have been murdered or disposed by illegal coups, etc. Look them up yourself, beginning with Mossadegh (Iran, 1953).
Apparently you think that.
I don’t understand your point about people murdered in coups. What does that have to do with thinking you can’t be corrupted?
He’s saying that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, the U.S. wouldn’t have assassinated anyone, because they’d all have been corrupt and could have been bought off instead of being assassinated.
I think that you’re both right here to an extent. I’d say that absolute power usually corrupts absolutely, but like with almost everything else, there are exceptions.
My point is those who can’t be corrupted (i.e., convinnced to give up their country’s resources to rich countries) and want their resources used for their people in their own countries, get killed by the PTB from, say, the US and UK. If corruption works, they could save their own lives and live in luxury…like the Shah, for example.
4Chan?
Seriously?
Hyperbolic overstatements of questionable verasity are about as credible as Pew.
Want to avoid the future our government is rushing to greet? Elect RFK, Jr., the only candidate who wants to talk face to face with our so-called “enemies,” the only Democrat who doesn’t love war, the only one who will practice diplomacy, the only one who thinks the bloated military budget should be used here at home for the good of our citizens, instead of the killing of people of foreign lands who have no intention of attacking us. Or you can go ahead and vote for either a warmongering senile loony or a child rapist. Destruction of all life isn’t inevitable.
I know nothing about the man. Mr. Trump made similar pronouncements, only to go along with increasing the military budget, withdrawing from peace agreements (JCPOA, INF, OPEN SKIES). So, I do not trust pronouncements going into the time of election primaries. Biden made pronouncements on peace, climate, “rule of law”. Look what we got. A President of the GOP variety would, in my estimation, be no better.
I know exactly what you mean. Please hear his campaign speech at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire on June 20, 2023, then get back to me. There hasn’t been a speech like this since President John F. Kennedy gave his peace speech June 10, 1963. (Of course, he got killed for it.) [RFK is Robert Kennedy’s son and Jack Kennedy’s nephew.]
Trump promised to increase the military budget. He also made other pronouncement like condoning torture and promising belligerence towards Iran. If you really cherry pick Trump’s pronouncements, you could probably compare him to RFK.
Ignore all campaign promises, they’re usually broken. Watch what politicians do, not what they say, they’re usually two different things. The only president in my lifetime who actually did what he said he was going to do when he got into office was Reagan, and he was the worst by far.
” the only candidate who wants to talk face to face with our so-called ‘enemies'”
Incorrect.
I haven’t heard him say to explicitly, but I’d bet that Dr. Cornell West would be willing to talk to the leaders of Russia and China.
I agree that RFK, Jr. is the best that the two criminal parties have to offer. However, he is still a capitalist, so much so that he opposes Medicare for All or other single payer healthcare. He’s also in the party of the liberal faction of the ruling class, so he can’t be counted on to do the right thing if he were elected, which is unlikely anyway.
Don’t vote Democrat or Republican, both of those parties are the problem. Dr. Cornell West is running for the nomination of the Green Party. If he gets it, which I can’t imagine he won’t, vote for him.
I like Dr. West, too, and you are right about him. The reason I would vote for RFK,Jr. is he said: first, he would pardon all the whistleblowers beginning with J. Assange; then, second: shut down those damnable military bases. That got him millions right there. Yes, Cornel West would have peace but his chances compared to RDK are less in my humble opinion.
His chances might be lower, but he’s a better candidate overall by far. As Chris Hedges said, don’t fight fascists because you think you’ll win, fight them because they’re fascists.
After doing a little research and after hearing RFK on Israel, I too will vote for Dr. West if he is on my ballot. But I’ll take RFK by leaps and bounds over any of the other R’s and D’s. I’m a one trick pony, foreign policy, and he says pretty much all the right things about that. I wouldn’t have a feeling of doom if RFK somehow became president. Trump or Biden will put me in a four year depression.
I agree, I just don’t do lesser of evils. You’re also right that the most important issue in a presidential election is always foreign policy, because that’s where a president can exercise almost unfettered power. Land use and energy are areas where presidents have more power than on other domestic issues, so that’s the second most important in these elections. The rest, unless they can twist arms like LBJ, is just noise to get people to vote for them.
https://edwardcurtin.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-to-heal-the-great-divide/
This is a very dangerous time for the world. Countries are making interlocking agreements, just as there was before WWI. Day by day. I am 79 and will be 80 in a couple of months. It would be nice if I made it to 80, and my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren survive into at least their 30’s if the time between now and the first ICBM is launched. I am dead serious.
In the preface to The Politics of Experience, R.D. Laing asked rhetorically how anyone could say that the normal person was sane. That’s the real problem here. If humans as a whole are insane, there’s nothing to keep them from turning into a race of Dr. Strangeloves.
BTW, R.D. Laing is the only prominent psychiatrist for whom I have any respect. I find the field of psychology as founded by Carl Jung to be far superior. Laing was a rare exception for psychiatrists.
Excellent essay! And it goes well along with Michael Brenner’s longer essay, “The New ‘New World'” published on Consortium News. Both essays address the important aspect of the distorted consciousness that has developed in society in the West, and especially in America.
The bad news is that such distortions (alienation, narcissism, nihilism, dissociation, etc.) are widely spread and deeply rooted, because they are the fruits of systematic social illness. And it goes back even farther than when R.D. Laing was writing in the 1960’s. World War One was one big influence. See, for example, C.G. Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, published in 1933. And the Industrial Revolution which led to WWI was another.