The Crazy Must Be Gods

Apropos of our recent musings, Instapundit links to a piece at Scientistic American called Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything? Pretty silly, but it shows the lengths to which reductionites and neuromaniacs will go to deny the obvious, AKA God. Here's the bottom line:

We know empirically [sic] from DID [AKA Split or Multiple Personality Disorder] that consciousness [whatever that is] can give rise [whatever that means] to many operationally distinct centers [sic] of concurrent experience [?], each with its own [?] personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may [science!] all be alters -- dissociated personalities -- of universal consciousness.

Moreover, as we’ve seen earlier, there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a patient with DID. So, if some form of universal-level DID happens, the alters of universal consciousness must also have an extrinsic appearance. We posit that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply [simply?] what universal-level dissociative processes look like.

Of course, if this were the case, then no one would be able to see or know anything outside his particular dissociative process, AKA split personality. Everyone would essentially be crazy, so no one would have access to the "universal consciousness." As such, the theory is hoisted on its own retardedness.

Genuine Multiple Personality Disorder [I prefer the older and more evocative term] also happens to be exceedingly rare. Certainly I've never seen a case. Having said that, I do believe it is simply an extreme form of something much more common and indeed present in most everyone, i.e., semi-autonomous subselves with varying degrees of independence. The situation is only pathological per se when there is little-to-no integration between these centers of subjectivity.

The most common form of this lack of integration is Borderline Personality Disorder, which you might say is situated between full-blown Multiple Personality and garden variety neurosis, AKA Here Comes Everybody. Who is fully integrated and harmonious with himself all the time? A saint, maybe. Or a complete idiot.

A borderline person easily switches from one sub-personality to another (usually in the context of stress, or lack of empathy, or abandonment depression, or separation anxiety), except there is a degree of insight -- or at least potential insight -- into the switch. Typically they don't understand it while it's happening, but they can gain insight the morning after the night before. That's usually why they seek treatment: because the subselves are beyond their control and ruining their lives.

Here's a charming example plucked from thin air -- or from a combination of idle clicking and morbid curiosity: Heather Locklear is hospitalized for threatening to shoot herself 'after flying into jealous rage over suspicion her fiance was cheating, then choking her mom and hitting her dad as they tried to help her'.

I know we're not supposed to diagnose from afar, but some things can be seen from a mile away, and that right there is a borderline personality. Yes, drugs and/or alcohol may be involved, but they are both cause and consequence, in that borderlines are always impulsive and often attempt to self-medicate in self-defeating ways. The reason they self-medicate is that it confers a degree of integration or pseudo-wholeness, at least while the illusion lasts.

Come to think of it, I recently read the autobiography of Waylon Jennings, in which he's quite candid about his addiction to amphetamine and then cocaine for some 21 years, during the main part of his career. He didn't put it exactly this way, but it is clear that the bullet-proof stud we call Waylon Jennings was a product of speed. When he stopped using it, this larger-than-life character vanished with it. He could no longer storm the stage with total confidence and take over a room, no matter how large. He was just a regular guy -- who, from the perspective of Big Ol' Waymore, was almost a nonentity.

There must be a similar dynamic fueling the addictions of other celebrities, no? What struck me about Jennings is that it went on for so long that it affected a kind of relatively stable transmutation, such that the drug-fueled self became the real self, while the real self withered on the vine.

Not too long ago I evaluated the ex-wife of another prominent drug-addicted celebrity. He too had been on drugs for most of his adult life, such that when he attempted -- one of many failed attempts -- sobriety, it was as if he were beginning all over as an awkward teen.

What have we learned today? Not much yet. I want to go back to the passage about how DID may Reveal the Secret Of Everything. There are so many angles from which to approach its stupidity. For example, it certainly appeals to our gnostic sense, which we all possess, either in a healthy or a pathological way. There are of course "secrets," but they are mostly hiding in plain sight. Religion is always esoteric in a certain sense, or at least you need recourse to esoterism in order to eliminate its inevitable absurdities, infertile paradoxes, and ad hockeries posing as mysteries.

In fact, you could reframe everything the author says in straight-up religious metaphysics, such that it as if the headline is ripped straight from the Upanishads, written several thousand years ago.

Example.

Okay, There are two selves, the apparent self and the real Self. Of these it is the real Self, and he alone, who must be felt as truly existing. Or, The universe is a tree eternally existing, its root aloft, its branches spread below. This could easily be trancelighted to Christian terms, e.g., Creator-source and image-likeness.

One difference is that we do not have to resort to extreme psychopathology in order to make sense of this. After all, Multiple and Borderline Personality Disorders are associated with prolonged childhood trauma. In my experience, you might regard borderline personality as a case of chronic Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Is that what we are? A bunch of PTSD victims?

Well, before you answer... There is an ontological trauma or rupture at the foundation of things, isn't there? Adam and Eve are presumably "whole" and integrated until they take the plunge into fragmentation, contingency, impermanence, relativity, disequilibrium, et al. Life is tough. Much tougher if you pretend that severe mental illness is a kind of norm that explains everything.