by Dylan Evans
Dr Satoshi leaned back in his chair. ‘Dabrowski distinguished between two levels of psychological development,’ he began. ‘At the first level, which he called primary integration, people largely accept the values and customs of the society in which they have grown up. It hardly even crosses their minds that there might be other ways of doing things and alternative value systems.’
‘You mean they are like robots,’ I interjected. ‘They’re just blindly following the program that society has installed in them.’
‘Exactly!’ smiled Dr Satoshi. ‘According to Dabrowski, most people stay like this all their lives. A few people, however, rebel against their programming. Dabrowski thought these individuals suffered from things that most psychologists would regard as unhealthy: a tendency towards depression, dissatisfaction with oneself, feelings of inferiority and guilt, states of anxiety, inhibitions, and over-excitability. Dabrowski didn’t see these as necessarily bad things, however. On the contrary, he saw them as valuable spurs to psychological development.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
‘Because they can prompt you to question the customs and values which you’ve previously taken for granted. By making you feel different, cut off from the society around you, these “pathological” traits actually prepare the way for psychological growth.’
Now my curiosity was aroused. ‘It’s an interesting idea,’ I said.
‘Here, take this,’ said Dr Satoshi, handing me a small book. It was a collection of Dabrowski’s writings, and over the course of the next few days I managed to plough through the first two chapters. Reading was still difficult, but my concentration was beginning to improve, and every time my mind drifted I would patiently try to bring it back again and take in another few sentences.
I learned that, for Dabrowski, psychological growth is always painful, because it involves dismantling the program that has governed one’s thoughts and actions since childhood. This process of disintegration often involves some kind of nervous breakdown, a genuine period of mental illness. And this is by no means always positive. Dabrowski was not some naive forebear of the anti-psychiatry movement; he recognized that disintegration could be, and often is, purely negative. What enables one person to learn from the experience of disintegration and emerge reborn from the storm of mental illness, while another sinks beneath the waves forever, is a mystery, and there is no way of knowing which of these fates awaits you as the storm brews. But equally there is no way of growing without sailing right into the heart of that tempest. Sometimes it may appear that you have no choice; the wind blows you into the storm willy-nilly. But Dabrowski thought that it was also possible for the individual to become an active agent in his disintegration, and even breakdown, if he so wished.
Is that what I had done? Had I driven myself mad on purpose? For the previous twelve months I had made it my business to think constantly about the collapse of civilization, all day and all night long. And I think I sensed beforehand that this was a psychologically dangerous thing to do, yet wanted to do it anyway, just to see what would happen.
Maybe an unflinching focus on the end of the world is a kind of test, like Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, which only those who are truly happy can pass, and which sends everyone else mad. Or maybe Dabrowski was right, and one way to attain true happiness is by going through a kind of artificially induced madness, like a rite of passage or spiritual exercise. And maybe that is the point: to terrify yourself to the point where you are no longer terrified, to stare into the abyss until you no longer suffer from vertigo – or until you topple over the edge, and feel the rush of air around you as you fall, with not even the consolation of knowing you will one day hit the ground and put an end to your fear for ever.
To emerge from this dark night of the soul, said Dabrowski, one must develop a new value system, one that is truly yours, not the prefabricated morality pushed onto us by society. ‘Thus the person finds a “cure” for himself,’ he wrote, ‘not in the sense of a rehabilitation but rather in the sense of reaching a higher level than the one at which he was prior to disintegration.’ Some forms of mental illness, then, provide an opportunity to finally take one’s life in one’s own hands. ‘They are expressive,’ wrote Dabrowski, ‘of a drive for psychic autonomy, especially moral autonomy, through transformation of a more or less primitively integrated structure.’
Is that what I was beginning to do now, in hospital? Was this my opportunity finally to learn to stand on my own two feet? I was beginning to wonder whether, in setting up the Utopia Experiment, I had perhaps been trying to avoid confronting my demons on my own. Perhaps some part of me already knew, before the idea for the experiment first occurred to me, that I was sliding into a depression, and the experiment was simply a misguided attempt to create some kind of ‘therapeutic community’ in which I could seek refuge. But in the end, it didn’t work. The community wasn’t therapeutic at all. On the contrary, it just made things worse, and now, at last, I was finally on my own.
The process of reconstruction, of creating a new self, I realized, was a solitary one. Other people may poke and prod you along, but it is ultimately down to you. You can’t create a unique self by following someone else’s path. You must find your way out of the storm on your own.
It is precisely because it is so isolating that mental illness plays such a crucial role in the process. If constructing a unique persona and developing your own set of values is a fundamentally solitary act, madness helps by driving others away from you, and pitching you into an empty black hole. This is to suggest that the madness comes first, and leads to separation, but in fact things work the other way round too. The human need to belong is so powerful that when a person ceases to be part of a community to which he had previously felt he belonged, the process of disaffiliation can itself damage his mental health. Hence madness and isolation work together in a mutually reinforcing pattern, each in turn exacerbating the other.
When lonely people join cults, they often experience a rapid improvement in their mental health, as the new community provides the long-sought social acceptance they had previously been lacking, a phenomenon known as the ‘relief effect’. But this of course blocks any chance of real growth, as the new member submits to another foreign program and relinquishes the search for individuality. For some people, perhaps, that is the best they can hope for. Not everyone has the strength, or the luck, to sail helplessly through the stormy waters on his own. But that is the only way to become truly yourself.
One day Romay came to visit me in hospital. She brought me some books to read and some sweets. She remarked on how nice my room was.
‘You should have seen the old asylum. It was an old Victorian building. No private rooms with en suite bathrooms there!’
I had, in fact, seen the old asylum. A few days before, a nurse had taken a few of us out on a walk in the surrounding countryside, and the path led us right past the building. Some renovation work was underway to convert the main complex into luxury apartments, but the untouched parts of the building showed how gloomy and forbidding it must have been when it housed the local madmen. Imposing square towers thrust upwards from the thick stone walls, crowned by spiky roofs of dark slate. Angus McPhee, an outsider artist, spent almost half a century here, silently weaving hats, pouches and harnesses from grass, sheep wool and beech leaves, in his own private form of art therapy. A few months after I visited, the place was burnt down by a couple of teenagers. I can’t say I blame them.
Romay seemed to find my situation rather comical. Here I was, in a nice warm building, being fed three square meals a day, while the volunteers toiled away at the fields and slept in windy yurts. She didn’t seem to believe I was really ill. She even seemed to resent me being there, though she smiled and laughed and made light of the situation. Maybe she thought I was malingering. I was too confused to try and persuade her otherwise, but I was deeply upset by her apparent lack of empathy or understanding.
One of the books that
Romay brought me to read in hospital was The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. I had read it several years before, when it was first published, and I turned to it again like an old friend.
But old friends do not just give solace. They can also confront you with harsh truths. And there, right in chapter one, the book did just that.
Pinker begins by describing two contrasting views of human nature. On the one hand, there is ‘the belief that humans in their natural state are selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed, anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization’. By contrast, humans have also been seen as naturally nasty, selfish and violent. Pinker uses the philosophers Rousseau and Hobbes as dramatis personae to represent each of these views. He recognizes that their actual writings are more complex than this stark contrast suggests, but as a rhetorical device it is broadly correct.
‘Much depends,’ Pinker argues, ‘on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct.’ And later on in the book, he tells us whom he thinks that is:
. . . many intellectuals have embraced the image of peaceable, egalitarian, and ecology-loving natives. But in the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
Pinker backs up this verdict with startling evidence concerning homicide rates in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The Jivaro people in northern Peru and eastern Ecuador are famous for their head-hunting raids. A band of men from one camp attack a homestead in another camp, killing the men, spearing the older women to death, and taking younger women as their brides. Up to 60 per cent of male deaths are due to warfare. In the Yanomami, who inhabit the Amazon rainforest, it’s around 40 per cent. In the US and Europe, the figure for the whole of the twentieth century is less than 2 per cent, and that includes the dead of both world wars and Vietnam. Rousseau blamed violence on civilization, but it now seems clear that advanced industrial societies are a lot more peaceful than pre-agricultural ones. Hobbes was right to describe life in the state of nature as one of ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’, and ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.
And while I was rereading Pinker, I suddenly remembered something I had written as I was preparing for the Utopia Experiment:
If we ask which of these two thinkers, Hobbes or Rousseau, is more supported by the scientific evidence that has come in over the past century, then the answer is absolutely clear. Rousseau was much more accurate than Hobbes. When we look at the evidence, it turns out that the idea of the noble savage is both lovely and true. It is Hobbes, and all the other cynics, who are wrong. Our savage ancestors were nobler than us, and indisputably happier.
But what struck me, even more than the obvious contradiction between my verdict and Pinker’s, was the remarkable amnesia that had taken hold of me. For when I wrote those lines, I had congratulated myself on my originality in using Hobbes and Rousseau to symbolize these two contrasting views of human nature. It was clearly a case of unconscious plagiarism (thankfully I had never published it), but it nevertheless seemed incredible that I should have forgotten I got the idea from Pinker. For I had not just read his book; I had reviewed it for the Evening Standard, a London newspaper.
Perhaps my mind needed to forget the source of the idea, given that I had come to such a different conclusion. Whatever the reason, rereading the first few chapters of Pinker’s book brought home to me the extent to which my thinking had been distorted prior to the Utopia Experiment. Some powerful psychological force had pushed it off track, to the extent of blanking out any countervailing facts or memories. Before I started thinking about doing the experiment, I had scoffed at romantic notions of noble savages, but by the time I headed up to Scotland my thoughts had done a 180-degree turn, and I had become a fervent primitivist. I longed to live in natural surroundings, and believed that all my worries and anxieties would vanish once I had left the trappings of civilization behind me.
How foolish I now felt! How naive and ridiculous! What was it that made me turn so completely against the technology I had previously embraced with a passion? What was it that transformed me into such a stereotypical Romantic, despite everything I had read beforehand about the realities of hunter-gatherer life? I struggled to put my finger on the moment when I had performed my intellectual volte-face, but I couldn’t isolate a single event, a Road to Damascus experience that flipped me round all of a sudden. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a slow process, so slow in fact that I hadn’t even noticed it.
Another piece of writing that seemed uncannily relevant, as if destiny had placed it there to chastise me, was something I found on Nick Bostrom’s webpage.
Using the Internet was not easy in hospital. There was one computer, an old desktop machine, perched on a small table in the cramped office of someone whose function I never quite managed to figure out. He seemed to be some kind of community leader or youth-club manager, and he was only there for two hours each weekday. He would arrive at his office at midday, and from then until 2 pm a bunch of patients – the young ones in particular, but always the same crowd – would hang out there, eating jam doughnuts and crisps in some pale imitation of normality.
It wasn’t until I had been in hospital for over a week that I discovered you could sign up for a twenty-minute slot on the computer in this bizarre hangout. The Internet connection was painfully slow, and my ability to compose emails was practically zero. Whenever I tried, the computer screen would start swimming in front of me, and my head would begin to feel all cloudy. I did, however, manage to do the occasional bit of browsing.
I was sitting there one day, aimlessly flicking through webpages that reminded me of my former life, when I thought of Nick Bostrom – who had introduced me to the Unabomber manifesto all those months ago – and wondered what he was up to. I went to his webpage, and there, near the top, were the following words, which seemed to speak directly to me, and sent a chill down my spine:
What if I am overlooking something essential or getting a big thing wrong? Then whatever progress I’m making is in vain. It is worse than useless to travel fast and far if one is going in the wrong direction. How can one reduce the probability of such fundamental error? And of course, if one spends too much of one’s time worrying about such questions, one never gets anywhere at all. In the ideal world, perhaps one would have two lives. In the first life, one would figure out what the right direction is. In the second life, one would set off in that direction at one’s maximum pace.
It was as if Nick had anticipated my mistake. I had travelled as fast as I could along the path of my Utopia Experiment, and gone as far as I could, only to realize I was going in the wrong direction. And all that progress I had made was now therefore in vain. I had overlooked many essential things, and got more than one big thing wrong. And now I was spending my time worrying about it all, and going nowhere. I wished desperately that I could have another life, or at least go back in time to that moment when the idea for the experiment had first occurred to me, so I could crush it there and then, and set off in a different direction.
And I wondered how Nick could be so wise, and why I had made such a crazy blunder. We were both interested in the possibility of global collapse, but he was pursuing his research calmly and rationally, in the context of a renowned academic institution, whereas I had set up a badly organized camp in the freezing north of Scotland. Sure, there were some apparently sensible reasons for doing what I did, such as my desire to challenge myself and escape from what I increasingly felt to be a staid, bourgeois existence. But even these motives now appeared somewhat suspect.
Why had I been so dissatisfied with my life anyway? To many people, it would have seemed pretty good. I had had a great job, a lovely old house in the country, a beautiful girlfriend and a decent income. But I had grown sick of all these things, and it showed in an article I wrote for the Guardian in October
2005, entitled ‘The loss of utopia’:
Look at the way we live now, in the west. We grow up in increasingly fragmented communities, hardly speaking to the people next door, and drive to work in our self-contained cars. We work in standardized offices and stop at the supermarket on our way home to buy production-line food which we eat without relish. There is no great misery, no hunger, and no war. But nor is there great passion or joy. Despite our historically unprecedented wealth, more people than ever before suffer from depression.
Once again, the article said more about me than it did about the world. Perhaps I was already sliding into a depression back then, and the Utopia Experiment was a last desperate attempt to claw my way back out of the hole. Or perhaps I was just a spoilt kid, throwing his toys out of the pram in a fit of pique. Now I wanted them back, and I was stunned that I couldn’t get them. There was no cosmic mama to make it all right again.
In his little-known but remarkably perceptive 1925 paper entitled ‘Those Wrecked By Success’, Freud wrote that ‘people occasionally fall ill precisely when a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfilment’. It seems, he added, ‘as though they were not able to tolerate their happiness; for there can be no question that there is a causal connection between their success and their falling ill.’ Maybe the Utopia Experiment was a deliberate, though unconscious, act of self-sabotage. Misery can be an art form, especially when there are no civil wars raging in your streets, no natural disasters, no mass starvation or pandemic striking down those around you.
Or maybe there was no deep Freudian explanation. Maybe I was simply bored. ‘Boredom in the midst of paradise generated our first ancestor’s appetite for the abyss,’ wrote the philosopher E. M. Cioran. Maybe I just needed the lure of disaster to spice things up a bit.
It is often said that you don’t learn the value of what you have until you lose it. Now, at least, I was determined not to take things for granted ever again.