Self-management without thinking: what 'mental health' is about
The problem with oppression is not that it is mere injustice, as with unruly children or criminal deeds committed out of unmastered lust. The problem with oppression is that its service of might is always in the name of right. And that that makes it very difficult usually to oppose or criticize.
This is why there are bullies, who are typically not just blind and stupid, which is how they may picture their victims. Bullies are cynical conservatives who believe in a morality allied to, and sometimes amounting to little more than, power. They are enforcers, and not because someone is paying them to be, but because they intuit what regimes of power want, and recognize it as what they must value. The bully despises the fool, with whom he forms a strange couplet, almost as if they need each other. The fool's complaint is that he cannot succeed while being innocent; the bully's complaint is that he cannot be innocent while being committed to a success that he enforces all the more for resenting its price. Innocent people are destined to tragedy, comedy, or both. Bullies are destined to recognize, or fail to see, that had they preserve some innocence they might have known a love that stems from a need to be loved instead of merely a will to dominate nobly. Bullies who have children are good at knowing when and how they should be punished; their children will be angry and in danger of becoming bullies themselves.
The world does not suffer from a lack of power used in the service of good, but from the sad poverty of most ideas of good. There is no contradiction in a tyrant loving those he rules over. The concept of justice does not need to be supplemented with mercy to keep it from extremes, so much as it suffers from a thorough identification with power. Protestant Christianity, which identifies God with the state (you can see this in signs and oaths in American courtrooms, whose idea of God is wholly Protestant) affirms domination, particularly in its interiorized and 'rational' Lutheran form, thinks of sin not as failure to love (as in Christianity proper) but disobedience to authority. It offered an idea of freedom that is purely inward and contemplative. What is better said about that is only that it is relatively safe.
If history exists, it is a field in which people act, and in so doing take risks. Curious as this may sound, the political only exists if people can be justified in what they do -- perhaps by virtue of what they oppose -- even if it is highly likely that they will be found to also have been wrong morally somehow. The name for this kind of fate is tragedy. There can be societies where tragedy is impossible. Such a society would have governance but no politics. The purest form of this would be a system of governance that has brought to near perfection (and aims to do so) its identification and prosecution or social control and management, of individual sins. The contemporary form of sinfulness is mental illness. It is a strange morality despite itself, since the regime of health and illness endeavors to dispense with guilt and obligation. The liberal state tends to want to encourage people to think that they have no obligations, only needs. Your need is to get what you want. People are supposed to be driven by what they want for themselves. This assumption supports not a limited government but a very strong one, as the authorities are then given the task of sanctioning people for wanting the wrong things, or pursuing them in the wrong way.
Morality is not easily dispensed with, though it can be disavowed; if you see a therapist, very likely he or she will bring it in through the back door. If you complain about anything, they may reply with reproaches, for what you are failing to recognize, or even for the very thing you complain about, deflected back onto you, in a kind of tu quoque argument, on the theory that everything people think about anyone else is just a 'projection'. You could of the subject of a certain kind of discursive social process or interrogation as an isolated self in a kind of theater, thought of from a managerial standpoint as like Plato's cave, a space of desiring and ignorance, and your thoughts are then 'projected' as if onto a screen, but can be reflected back in what might be called an 'introjection', which reverses the relationship of camera, which records images, and projection apparatus, which presents them.
One could oppose oppression or disobedience only, and wonder about political factions based on these opposite moralities. Or one could oppose both, yielding a Protestantism that is 'left-wing' in some ways and right-wing in others. Such an ethos would be both repressive and liberatory at once.
Yesterday, there was injustice: that of individuals was called sin and that of those who rule over them and to which they are subject, oppression.
Note that power relationships can weigh upon one and thus literally be 'oppressive', with or without them being unjust. Questions of justice can be raised after the fact, as in justifications. When individuals give reasons to justify what they think or want, the others around them quite typically ignore what they say; it's so much talk and nonsense, say what you like, it doesn't really mean much. When officers in institutions give justifications, they may be taken seriously and believed or it may seem transparently silly but tolerated cynically, as in some casual reference to old ideas of government like democracy or liberty that people treat casually, knowing these ideas might be supposed to mean something, but do not much, except maybe as something can one refer to repressively as out there, but not touchable by you.
Now instead of sin and oppression, there is need and health, and behaviors and sanctions. Most of the time people think of what they want or 'need' (want legitimately, for a reason that can be given, on whose irrelevance I have just commented), and when they are frustrated or unhappy, seek help from people who manage how people feel.
Most people take for granted that this is how it should be.
The government does not rule only through the police, who might at any time come in and kill you -- this is what they are letting people know when they kill the dog in their yard: next time maybe we come for you -- but for most people most of the time, consists of a set of authorities that regulate your behavior in terms of how you feel.
They promise what every innocent or childish person, and the feeling, sensitive animal we are all are, wants: happiness.
Only a depoliticized society, which is a thoroughly managed one, can offer no joy, just as it allows no risk. People who want to attend classrooms that are totally secured as 'safe spaces', meaning that no one can say anything that anyone else may found annoying, want this. And we are all asked to want it from doctors and counselors who promise to manage how we feel and tell us how to think. These people are offering to manage affects like depression and anxiety, or, in short, sadness. It is a minimal life, ideally with no strong affects or passions.
The solution lies not so much in freedom to act, as in thinking. It is poorly understood generally what thinking is. It is not self-management. Whether or not people should be in any way managed or manage their own lives and way of being in the world, thinking is something else.
Since so many people now feel disaffected -- and we are expected to attribute this only to ourselves -- their will not be any liberty and life for most of us will be much poorer, ironically leaving us remaining dissatisfied, until and unless we invent and implement ways of dealing with both practical problems and how we 'feel' that involve the risk of thinking.
The Buddhist and Stoical mental health establishment invites people to manage their 'thoughts'. Since the mental processes (which is perhaps all they mean by thinking) engaged in have only contemplative ends, this thinking has no risks, and its outcome is pre-determined. In cognitive therapy people are coached, or coach themselves, into realizing that nothing that might happen to you can be catastrophic, and so whatever it is you can deal with it (which is why it is not catastrophic).
It follows, among other things, that neither the Holocaust nor any other historical experience of barbarism and violence, is possible. And if something horrible of that magnitude does occur to you, you can deal with it, so it's not catastrophic. At least, you can keep your soul free and safe; this was the lesson of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," a bit of sanguine Holocaust literature that played a role in the later development in America of cognitive therapy.
Thinking is dangerous, but not because it can lead to crime. If thinking were just having thoughts, it might; crimes would then result from having a mental representation that is forbidden, and should be. Only that is not why most people commit crimes. Aggressive inclinations are universal, and the mere control of them might only facilitate an ethos of militarism and policing. Imagine a concentration camp guard who acts out in some unruly violence; and his fellow guard, or himself at a different moment, is very strictly disciplined and controlled. Are these real or false alternatives? People who do not commit crimes, like those who perform acts of great courage, are people who at some point, usually in the past, have thought about what kind of person they want to be, want kinds of things (including people) they care about, and what kinds of things they want to and will or will not do. The danger of thinking is not that of behaving badly but of wanting to change the way things are, with oneself, with others, with the world.
Of course, our regimes of management pose little resistance and occasionally some aid to limits on deviant behaviors that might also be acts of injustice. They also pose little resistance to the more deleterious effects of their own practices.
There are two questions psychiatrists and therapists rarely ask people: (1) how they would like to change things in the society they live in, and (2) what they might do not to limit their own potentialities for doing or suffering from the misdeeds of themselves or others (the latter is equally surveilled and thus equally sanctioned), but how they might live more fulfilled in joyful lives in response not to what they 'need' but to their deepest desires, hopes, and aspirations. Thus, their processes and techniques of inquiry and cognitive and affective management lack imagination. Though they might not lack reason. What is or what has happened can almost always be supplied with reasons that are given to justify it. There are ways of thinking that aim at ends that are not given in advance. We can call them creative. I have never encountered a mental health professional who was interesting in helping me be more creative.