A Hurricane is Bearing Down on Me, and What if My Car is Out of Gas?!

We were talking about what Satan is up to with language, and citing examples from the book Homo Americanus. In it the author cites a passage by Freud showing that Freud is far from wrong about everything:

We have found that what neurotics are guided by is not ordinary objective reality but psychological reality.

This is true, but it is also true that more or less everyone is more or less neurotic. Freud's realistic therapy did not promise anything like happiness, rather, just turning "hysterical misery into common unhappiness." 

But truly truly, if the left weren't miserable they'd be immobilized by the mind parasites they ceaselessly project into us (white male Christians), into the environment, or into the past. Indeed, history is rewritten so rapidly -- cf. the 1619 Project (emphasis on the project) -- that no one knows what will happen tomorrow. 

Psychic fragmentation is key to their fragile equilibrium:

If the leftist isn't persecuting, he feels persecuted.  

That is of course correct, Nicolás. Their paranoia indeed runs deep, and into the right it will creep. What better way to interfere with the election than to accuse one's leading opponent of election interference? 

Paranoid thinking is characterized by the fact that it can be completely logical... in other words, logic does not exclude madness.

There are even 

low-grade chronic forms of psychoses which can be shared by millions of people and which -- precisely because they do not go beyond a certain threshold -- do not prevent these people from functioning socially. 

As long as they share their sickness with millions of others, they have a satisfactory feeling of not being alone; in other words, they avoid that sense of complete isolation so characteristic of full-fledged psychosis. On the contrary, they look at themselves as normal and [others] as being crazy.

But let us be charitable and stipulate that one of us is crazy -- that there is a reality, and that one of us is out of contact with it. 

It all comes back to Aristotelian logic and to the identity principle, in that two contradictory affirmations of reality cannot both be true; one of them must be false, or else we must concede that the world itself is psychotic, i.e., like a dream that has no internal consistency.

Or, if perception, as they like to say, is reality, then the perception of the histrionic or paranoid person is as accurate as anyone else's. No wonder then that the postmodern left has no use for Aristotle, much less Thomas. 

I'm old enough to remember when psychology pretended to cure mental illness. Now it is the illness it pretends to cure. No, literally: 

The American Psychological Association recently added a new term to its dictionary: eco-anxiety. It concerns the anxiety over climate change (Janowski).

This includes concerns over what they call "environmental justice" (in reality, the environment can no more be just than it can be prudent, courageous, or honest).

The term itself is devoid of logical sense, but a paranoid mind acts according to its own logic (ibid,).

So, psychologists now breed paranoia in order to charge good money to treat it? Nifty racket! I'm gonna fact-check that.

Wow. It's more than true, it's a full blown pandemic of psychosis:

Over the past several years, climate change has moved from an abstract idea to a reality in many Americans’ lives -- a reality that we are increasingly worried about. An APA survey found that two-thirds of American adults said that they felt at least a little “eco-anxiety,” defined as anxiety or worry about climate change and its effects (https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/eco-anxiety). 

I mean, I have a hurricane bearing down on my ass, but I'm not anxious about it. I'm not even afraid. Rather, even assuming the worst, I will... get out of the fucking way. I don't need therapy, rather, just a car. Or a house. 

Moreover, if I were a specialist in "applying an environmental perspective to mental health and well-being," I would advise my patient to stop complaining to me and get in your fucking car, idiot.

When I was a kid, my dad used to say You'd complain if you were on fire. I don't remember being a big complainer, but I never really understood what he meant. "Of course I would complain if I were on fire, Dad. Who wouldn't?" 

He used to have another saying: Go play on the freeway. Yes, like me, he was more of an old-school therapist. For him, there were few things that couldn't be solved with a combination of common sense and beer.

Here's the second item that comes up in my search (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/03/ce-climate-change):

The planet is undergoing rapid and unprecedented climate change that is creating stress and mental anguish for people around the world (Doherty).

Really? I guess I picked a bad time to retire, with millions of new patients. 

But the thing is, you don't treat people with realistic concerns, at least not back in my day. Rather, that's what friends and relatives are for, and talking to them is free.

The planet is undergoing rapid changes that are unprecedented in human history. And as psychologists are increasingly aware, these changes can bring about great stress and mental anguish to all of us living through these challenging times.

Wait, what? I apologize for using s'many cuss words, but do they know we're still coming out of a fucking ice age? Do they know that you can't open up a therapy practice inside a fucking glacier?

The question of whether a belief is psychotic is the extent to which the delusion is fixed or is amenable to fact, logic, and evidence. You know the old saying, Physician heal thyself. I would tell Dr. Doherty, Physician fuck thyself.

Well, that was some fun insultainment, but let's get back to the real world. For example, now that I think about it, I guess there is the remote possibility that my patio furniture could blow into my windows. WHAT WILL I DO?! HOW DO I CONTACT DR. DOHERTY ON A SUNDAY?! WHAT WOULD HE ADVISE? I mean, aside from moving the furniture into the garage?

I'm not anxious, but I am a little pissed at the idea that the agenda of the climate hysterics will plunge the world into economic chaos. I read somewhere that one can calculate exactly the cost in human lives of each percentage of economic growth one way or the other. Where is it... 

Here, in Alex Epstein's Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas -- Not Less. I'm not a statistician, just a retired psychologist, but he calculates the odds of dying from a climate disaster at one in three million.

So, you're telling me there's a chance? -- Dr. Doherty

Epstein also affirms that the use of fossil fuels lengthens roughly ten out of ten lives.  

In any event, belief in catastrophic climate change is a true existential threat. Climate-related deaths have in fact decreased by 98% over the past 100 years, and thanks to fossil fuels, we are actually living in the safest climate in human history. 

Environmental sustainability is not sustainable. But it is lucrative.