To the last question: no, I don't think they're schizophrenic (I don't think they have that excuse).
The short answer to the first question is 'yes', but that would be a cop-out answer. I'm coming to believe that the more uncomfortable, and probably truer way to think about this is that people can be functioning in the "normal" range and still exhibit a lot of really dangerous or merely counter-productive ideations and tendencies. I'm also struggling with where the boundary lies between what people believe, and what they believe (or "think", if you prefer) that they believe. It seems clear to me that those are two different things. So, one thing that I'm thinking a lot lately is that people believe they believe things (like 'government is evil', 'abortion is murder', 'premarital sex is a sin') and then act in ways that make it clear they don't really believe that (soliciting government money, procuring an abortion for their daughter, engaging in pre-marital sex). That last (pre-marital sex) is a big one, because it involves hormonal, visceral, emotional content. It forces us to face (but alas, not necessarily to understand) the parts of our makeup that don't fit our ideologies. It goes back to that point that Campbell bangs home again and again in the Creative Mythology volume of *Masks of God* (and which you're probably tired of hearing me talk about): that the modern notion of "love" is extremely dangerous from the perspective of a hieratic civilization, because it short-circuits a lot of institutional rule structures. (Same thing Nietzsche was on about when he remarked that "whatever is done out of love lies beyond Good and Evil.") On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 9:19 AM, Janice Carello <[email protected]>wrote: > Will it be hard to differentiate this type of person's world view from the > world view of a devoutly religious individual? Or do you think people like > Sarah Palin are schizophrenic? > > On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 9:08 AM, Eric Scoles <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> . He solves a crime that to us is about theft or adultery or jealousy, but >> to him is about God fighting rebel Angels. He's able to *almost* totally >> conceptualize everything in those terms. I'll probably never write this in >> no small part because what I've been reading lately leads me to believe that >> mental illnesses really don't work that way, but that's an example of the >> kind of approach to induced hallucination that interests me. >> >> >> >> -- > Janice > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<r-spec%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
