In our bid
to secure a future a the top of the food chain, every human society
has created behavioural boundaries governing its members to ensure
that we keep our animal instincts in check. The French philosopher
and all-round bad boy Georges Bataille (who spouted a lot of rubbish,
but came up with a few gems of which this is one) theorised that, by
suppressing our instinctive urge to career through life having loads
of sex and killing each other for japes, we could gang up and develop
our superior intellect enough to become the dominant race. The eight
world religions reflect this, having broadly the same rules based on
controlling our more animal of urges (don't kill, be nice to your
neighbour, avoid the temptation of the wanton shag) and therefore
channelling our energy into Getting Shit Done, 'shit' in this
instance being furthering our dominion over nature by building cities
and pyramids and things, and inventing stuff along the way to make
this quicker and more comfortable such as the wheel, the telephone
and Perfect Fried Chicken. Trouble is,goes the theory, we are
actually still animals at heart, so we get a bit restive after too
much rule-following and need to let off steam at regular intervals.
Recognising this, societies the world over have created handy
amendments to the rules above, which I like to summarize in the
following way:
Don't kill. Unless they've done something really bad, like a murder or being a funny colour. Then think of a really nasty way to off the bastards and do it in public. You may like to bring a picnic, and the kids.
Be nice to your neighbour. Unless
you're bigger than them and they've got something you want, in which
case you can go to war with them. Take care to think of something
vague yet ominous to justify this, such as 'they're threatening our
way of life!' and repeat until you and enough people believe it. Then
go wild on their ass.
Avoid the temptation of the wanton shag. Don't rape people, or have sex with your mate's partner. In fact, don't have sex at all, unless you're married, and then only for the purposes of procreation. Unless there's a war on, in which case feel free to lay your sweaty mits on as much non-consensual sex as your smutty heart desires.
This errs somewhat towards the extreme end of the scale, but it demonstrates the need we have to transgress our boundaries. What's also interesting is the fact that, once we've broken the rules of society, we feel the need to reassert ourselves as a society almost immediately. When we declare war, we instantly define ourselves in opposition to the enemy. Communities become stronger in the face of this common foe; old divisions are forgotten as we come together, united by virtue of not being the undesireable thing. It doesn't really seem to matter what 'the undesireable thing' is; what's important is that everybody gets to gang up and wreak some destruction whilst also feeling reaffirmed in the safety of the community by virtue of not being the bad, scary thing over there. Societies have been performing this ritual at various levels since time immemorial, and being the language geek that I am, one of the most interesting things I discovered when researching this phenomenon was the recurring terms and imagery used to describe the 'undesireable'. I've outlined these below:
1. THE UNNATURAL MONSTER. This is a
tabloid fave - it's a pretty poor day at New International if at least one
paedophilic or serial killing monster has not been EXPOSED or found
to HAVE SKY IN JAIL. We also tend to call things that we find
particularly abhorrent 'unnatural' - old Hamlet's fratricidal murder,
for example, was 'most foul and unnatural,' whilst the film of serial
killer Aileen Wuornos' life is entitled 'Monster'. From his cell in
the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade produced a life's work which still
terrifies society today, chiefly because it goes against this very
rhetoric. De Sade continually returns to the idea that his heros and
heroines – a jolly bunch comprised chiefly of rapists, thieves,
gluttons and murderers - are by definition not only natural but an
incarnation of the violence, unfairness and indiscriminate make-up of
nature itself. It is the society around them, with its restrictions
and hypocrisies, that is unnatural. And all things considered, for
all our protestations about the 'natural' goodness of humanity, he's
got a point. Millenia of history tells us so - rape, murder and
paedophilia have existed for as long as we have. They are no less
human than we are; indeed, they are by very definition human traits.
Trouble is, as a wise poet once said, our poor human souls cannot
bear very much reality; the idea that we are in such perpetual
proximity to the violence of nature is a pretty scary concept when
you've built a civilisation on suppressing it. So just as we corset
our natural landscapes into cities, we continue to squeeze animal
instincts into an unnatural model of 'humanity', ram our fingers into
our ears and carry on.
2. THE MAD PERSON. This term was and is still applied to all manner of societal pests, including de Sade, but also the Suffragettes (who were also, somewhat predictably, 'unnatural women') and, most recently, Anders Breivik. The word 'mad' is an interesting one. Although it is still used to reject the traits of the labelled person, unlike 'unnatural' or 'monstruous', there's a hint of derision in there too. You don't laugh at a monster. You don't dismiss one. A monster is a threat, to be feared and slain as soon as possible. A madman, though? A madman might be dangerous, but he does not inspire the same fear. You can definitely laugh at a madman (witness the pay-per-view sideshow that was the Victorian asylum). In colloquial English, something can be 'mad' if it is ridiculous, or unexpected. Laughter and derision allow us to dismiss a threat without necessarily needing to purge it in the same was as we would an 'unnatural' monster.
3. 'ILL'. This innocuous little syllable is by far the most problematic of our defences against the undesireable in our midst. It gets pulled out of the hat routinely once the outright rejection of the 'unnatural' and derision of 'madness' have failed to keep the undesireable at bay. It's a final hurrah of an attempt to keep a taboo on its last legs wheezing through another generation. To illustrate: it is 60 years ago exactly that a man who played a central role in my being able to type this and you being able to read it, father of computer science and creator of the Enigma machine Alan Turing, took his own life. He had been arrested for homosexuality, and chosen instead of going to prison to accept 'treatment' for his 'illness' in the form of chemical castration. Shortly afterwards, he dipped an apple in arsenic. Gosh we've come so far, haven't we? As far as..oh yeah, as far as extremist Christians proposing the advertisment of 'gay therapy' on our public transport. Oh good. (That's a bit faecetious, clearly we have in fact come a long way since Turing's time, but it's worth raising the point that this unspeakably destructive philosophy is still alive and well in relation to something as fundamental as one's sexuality.) The most poignant example of the use of 'illness' to describe the undesireable, however, is currently Anders Breivik. There's been much speculation surrounding the mental state of the perpetrator of the 2011 Norwegian massacre, with the press – always suckers for a good ol' psycho killer, let alone a white supremicist one to boot – getting stuck right into the juicy headline-generator that is a potentially schitzophrenic Nazi. So far, so standard. Then King's College psychiatrist Simon Wessely went and kicked up a heck of a buzz amongst us mental health scenesters by going on the record stating that Breivik does not in fact show symptoms consistent with schitzophrenia. He goes on to say that society 'comforts' itself with the erroneous idea that horrific acts must be linked to - if not the direct result of - mental illness. For this, Simon Wessely, I love you (call round sometime; there can be cake. And gin. How we'll laugh, putting the world of mental health stigma to rights!) Schizophrenia is one of those conditions that most people have heard of, but have very little real idea about. People often confuse it with multiple-personality disorder, or simply think of it as big, bad, scary and definitely Proper Mental (which makes it a handy term to chuck about if you want to make someone sound bad, scary and Proper Mental). A recent study showed that the perception of sufferers of psychosis (one of the defining features of schizophrenia) as violent has more than doubled in prevalence since the 1950s. In reality of course, those with schizophrenia are in fact significantly more likely than the rest of us to be victims of violent crime. Far from being calculating agents of destruction, they also experience high incidences of homelessness and isolation, in great part due to the fact that the active psychosis is the third-greatest cause of disability, topped only by quadriplegia (total paralysis) and dementia, and followed by paraplegia (partial paralysis) and blindness. It is, to put it lightly, a nasty, nasty thing to suffer – after my limited brush with psychosis I cannot imagine existing with the kind of terrifying hallucinations it induced on a day-to-day basis, let alone doing so whilst holding down a job, paying rent and 'engaging with wider society'. It should come as little surprise, really, that pretty much anyone who has ever experienced a psychotic episode will tell you that once in its grip, they are far more likely to be found cowering under something, trying to shut out the voices and the visions and/or smoking themselves into an even earlier grave than their 15-year average reduced life expectency and 5% increased suicide risk would suggest, than going at anyone (other than themselves) with a knife. Still less, reasons Simon Wesseley, meticulously planning and executing a massacre.
A couple of final thoughts on the 'ill label': firstly, one of the most worrying thing about it is that as soon as we call something an 'illness', we also suggest that it can be 'cured'. This has allowed societies to carry out all manner of horrific 'treatments' from lobotomies to the chemical castration suffered by Turing. Indeed, in the case of 'undesireable elements' such as homosexuality and severe mental illness,'cures' have historically owed much more to the philosophy we adopt during wars and executions – ie. a 'purging' of a the undesireable. It's really no surprise that the group mentioned above who recently proposed to advertise 'anti-gay therapy' on the capital's buses call themselves the 'Cure Issues Trust'. Secondly, the Breivik debate has thrown up an oft-mooted opinion that labelling a criminal mentally ill excuses their crimes to an extent. I would argue the opposite. The 'illness label' does indeed serves as an excuse, but it is not the 'sufferer' who is excused, it is the rest of society. Society declares that the 'ill' person is not like them; they are an aberration. They are 'unnatural'. It's a neat loophole which allows society to acknowledge the actions of the 'ill' person whilst keeping them safely outside of the definition of 'humanity'. Society at large is thus 'excused' from the possibility of being 'ill', of being 'unnatural'. The effects of these attitudes are unbelievably damaging to those who suffer with de facto mental illness. To tackle the 'cure' issue first of all: my bipolar is not something I can cure. It's something I can't change, and which – as I've blogged before – is as fundamental to my makeup as my hair colour. What I'm doing is learning to live in partnership with it, not purge it out of myself. Just like when nutritionists tell you to listen to your body and feed it what it needs, I'm in the process of listening to my brain, and learning to give it what it needs to work as well as it can. And if I say so myself, it's not functioning too shabbily at the moment. But to the problem of society 'excusing' itself from Freaks Like Us: in addition to the woeful misrepresentation of severe mental illness via the SCHIZO NAZI HAS SKY IN JAIL-style headlines we're subjected to on a daily basis, it's this action of 'excusing' that keeps us firmly in the box marked 'undesireable'. Admittedly, we've come some way since the days of Bethlem, but it won't be until we address the myth that we stand outside of society because of our conditions that real progress will be made. Being 'ill' is just that – being ill. It is what it is; we have our episodes and we manage them as an epileptic would manage their fits. We are not to be feared, or pitied, or laughed at. Actually, scratch that; I don't mind the laughing so much – I have been known, at the height of a high, to iron the socks of everyone in my shared house at 3am. A relative was convinced that there were friendly aliens hiding in the trees outside her flat. If you can't find humour in that, I probably don't want to be part of your society anyway.
