Cross posting: Post No. 1,897 - Insanity Inducing Lifestyles and Their Apologists

This originally appeared on my main blog at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2021/06/post-no-1897-insanity-inducing.html. 

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Here's a question for you: 

should soldiers be treated for PTSD sufficiently to send them back into active combat?

If no: 

should torture victims be healed enough to be subjected to more torture?

If no: 

should everyday people be subjected to lifestyle conditions that induce insanity? 

(If you answered yes to any of the above, you may as well not bother reading any further.) 

The first question is one that has been debated since World War One and it's identification of "shell shock", a condition that had existed before and been written about as far back as The Iliad. That question is also tied up with broader contextual questions about whether that or any other war can be justified. (For the record, about the only ones I think have some tenuous grip on justifiability are the fight against evil of World War Two, and the initial defensive war to repel North Korea out of South Korea - which ended when US-led forces crossed into North Korea in September, 1950.)

Apologists for the second often cite fears that their culture / lifestyle / society is under threat, under the idiotic misapprehension that torture provides credible intelligence - have they not thought that people either personally tortured or watching loved ones being tortured would say anything - ANYTHING - to get the pain to stop?

The reality is that torture is most widely used by despots, like Museveni and Lukashenko, to prop up their ailing regimes, but in all circumstances, because of the last point in the preceding paragraph, torture is questionable with regard to its efficacy - and then there is its moral reprehensibility.

One of the biggest problems with the death penalty is that is actively demonstrates that life is not held to be sacrosanct by those who use or advocate for it - to such people, life is subject to someone else's permission or oversight, someone else who can decide that another's life is NOT  ALLOWED, and can be snuffed out. 

An eye for an eye does not demonstrate respect for the sanctity of life, it shows that vengeance is held higher than life. 

Similarly, those who advocate for torture show that they do not value "good" above all else - there is a limit, whether that is set by fear based on real or perceived threats (all forms of bigotry are based on perceived threats), personal convenience, or their quest for populist-based power.

Taking this line of thought into the third question I posed, Western lifestyles have a lot that is of concern - for instance, rampant greed and materialism, environmental destruction, inequity / inequality / discrimination, and so on. There are some things which are often conflated with the Western lifestyle, such as advances in medicine and science, but the absurdity of that is well illustrated by the fact that such advances began before the industrial revolution - in, for instance, the "Age  of  Reason"; quarantine as a modern medical practice began in the 1300s, but had a history going back to the BCE era; and Australia's Indigenous people knew of the importance of keeping sources of drinking water unpolluted millennia ago.

Against that background, why would you do something that aimed to help people cope with something that is unhealthy (other than as a short term "band aid" response), rather than address the core problem? 

As an example, I know of someone who - decades ago - was driven so insane by the stresses of living in an alien nation, in an isolating religious sub-culture, that she became abusive. Why would you force that person to continue living there? 

Poverty is an enforced evil - the rampant greed and dog-eat-dog addiction to competition of the USA's version of capitalism  (and neoliberalism is the most recent and most extreme version of that) has a lot to answer for on that respect. Why would you write "lifestyle columns" as a pseudo-journalist that are aimed at enabling people to "cope" with something that is so unhealthy and evil as our version of capitalism?

Why, as a doctor allegedly committed to the principle of "first do no harm" advocate for ways to cope with high stress levels without first examining whether such stress levels should exist? (And yes, this would require doctors, too many of whom have become comfortable in their capitalist ways, to take a political position.) 

Why would you look at using tech and buying lots of "better" products to address your environmental impact rather than just live more simply - more "minimalistically"? 

Why would you live any sort of lifestyle that created vulnerabilities for you or those about you - or subjected those about you, perhaps who you rely on, to abusive work - rather than live a simpler, more self-reliant lifestyle (assuming you could - some people have health conditions, etc that preclude some of this)?

You may have valid answers for the questions I am posing. If so, well done, but please make sure you have considered the alternatives as well - including simpler lifestyles, particularly those that are not reliant on money (see, for instance here, here, and here). 

And also make sure you do not advocate against something you force others to live or do. Unintentional hypocrisy can be a problem amongst the well meaning.