INSTITUTIONAL DENIAL ABOUT THE DARK SIDE OF LAW SCHOOL

[st a s h]

O'Reilly may be a dog when it comes to sex with co-workers but he's a quite good journalist. He investigates deep enough and comes up with interesting stuff; for instance, I was not aware of this

FOX News Channel and radio host Bill O'Reilly called the group Human Rights Watch (HRW) "very shadowy" and claimed that "they don't tell you where their money comes from" because the group "knows how they're perceived by most Americans." In fact, HRW's website freely discloses its donors. Later, O'Reilly's guest from the conservative Heritage Foundation complained that HRW has focused narrowly on "Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib" (prison in Iraq) and "Gitmo, Gitmo, Gitmo" (Guantánamo Bay, Cuba), where Americans have been accused of abuses, rather than "using their scarce resources to really shine the light on these places around the world where there truly are human rights abuses" like China, Syria, and Sudan. In fact, Human Rights Watch does extensive research and advocacy on these nations and scores of others.

From the November 17 broadcast of the nationally syndicated The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Human Rights Watch is a group that operates worldwide. They're very shadowy -- they don't tell you where their money comes from. But we have investigated. ... [T]hey won't tell you who gives 'em money, which is always a tip-off. If any group like this won't tell you who gives 'em money then you gotta go -- "Oh, okay."

O'Reilly then referred to what he claimed was a 1995 "investigative report on Human Rights Watch" by "a Dutch reporter," which revealed that the group's funders are all "left-wing people":

O'REILLY: In 1995 a Dutch reporter apparently did an investigative report on Human Rights Watch and found that -- whoa, George Soros -- ooohh! What a surprise! Kickin' in a lotta dough in there, along with the Ford Foundation, which is a far-left foundation -- charitable foundation here in the United States. The Rockefeller Foundation -- I don't know much about them. Norman Lear -- off the chart left. Katharine Graham, who was alive back then, Washington Post Company -- all of these are big donors. Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bronfman -- so Carnegie Corporation, all the left-wing people kickin' in.

Later, O'Reilly claimed that "Human Rights Watch is very secretive about who gives them money ... because people like me are gonna look at their books and gonna point out who gives money." He concluded: "So that tells me that Human Rights Watch ... knows how they're perceived by most Americans."

In fact, nearly all the donors named in the Dutch "investigative report" are openly thanked for their financial support in numerous reports available on the HRW website:

• Soros Foundation and Soros Documentary Fund (Soros' name also appears on the member lists of two HRW advisory committees)
• Ford Foundation
• Rockefeller Foundation
• Carnegie Corporation

Norman Lear is listed in the Human Rights Watch World Report 1993 as a member of an advisory committee, not a donor. Still, the disclosure of his name suggests that HRW is hardly trying to hide its association with Lear, a Hollywood producer known for financing liberal causes.

Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post who died in 1997, is not listed on the HRW website, nor is Edgar Bronfman, though it is not clear to whom O'Reilly is referring. Edgar M. Bronfman Sr. is former chairman of the Seagram Company and former president of the World Jewish Congress. Edgar Bronfman Jr. took over Seagram and turned it into an entertainment empire; he currently operates Warner Music Group.

Minutes later, Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst Jack Spencer called into the show as a guest and complained that HRW and Amnesty International focus excessively on alleged U.S. abuses while letting countries that perpetrate more serious abuses off the hook:

SPENCER: If you look at what they've looked at in the past couple of years, it's all been Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib -- that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq -- and Gitmo, Gitmo, Gitmo -- that's sort of been their thing.

Instead of using their scarce resources to really, shine the light on these places around the world where there truly are human rights abuses, I would argue that ... they not only do not have the United States' interests in mind, they actually detract from the interests of those who could really use the help of organizations like Human Rights Watch. ... But instead of focusing their resources on where they're really needed, they tend to divert those resources on places like the United States.

[...]

In places like Syria, in places like China -- these are the places -- in like Sudan. These are where we need to focus our resources.

Contrary to Spencer's suggestion that HRW focuses primarily on U.S. abuses, none of the lead articles HRW's website were about U.S. abuses when Media Matters for America consulted the site at 5 p.m. ET on November 19; the highlighted article at the top of the page was about Sudan. Links to articles on U.S. human rights issues were relegated to a small panel at the bottom of the page. Inside, HRW's website contains hundreds of articles, letters, and reports on China, Syria, Sudan, and nearly every country in the world.

—G.W.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200411190010

That's all fine and dandy, but what relation does HRW and Soros and the like bear to this thread specifically?

[OldCraig]

I have a way to solve the Darkside of Law School, here goes:

1) don't make students take the LSAT
2) give everyone A+'s
3) don't rank students
4) give all students top-of-the-market paying internships and then jobs
5) eliminate the bar exam
6) streamline the legal profession to not include challenging ethical dilemmas

Yes... I like where this is going... NOWHERE.

[OpaOpa]

It was Freud who first described the marriage between sensuality and organized violence -- e.g., the law school thinking way. "Libido" refers not only to the sexual drive, but to all aggressive acts. In his dual instinct theory, Freud stated that libido and aggression come under broader biological principles Eros (love) and Thanatos (death and self-destruction). More recent psychological theorists suggest that war -- including a nation's insatiable hunger for military power and the passion for armaments -- arises from a deep-seated fear of death, a fear that is, naturally, basic to the human condition. This death fear creates the paradoxical situation where institutionalized murder (war, capital punishment, "right to bear arms," mob violence, legitimized military statism) grows out of something known as "radical pain."

According to this theory, there are three types of pain:

- Physical pain (old age, sickness, and dying);
- Emotional pain (being away from a loved one, being forced to be with people one hates); and
- Radical pain (knowledge -- or fear of knowledge -- of the intransigence of life, and one's own inevitable move towards chaos and entropy).

In other words, the lunacy of a Hitler or a Pol Pot (or even America's own militarists) grows out of an unacknowledged and unrecognized terror of the inevitable, the most inevitable fact of life. Namely, death.

We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which supports us. Man can strut and boast all he wants, but he really draws his "courage to be" from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat and the fetish of money, and the size of his bank balance. The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation, but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Evil arises from a good impulse, the desire to escape the anxiety related to death and finitude. The attempt to escape is inevitable given our capacity for imaginatively entertaining infinity and eternity. The attempt to escape, since it is impossible, involves us in all kinds of neurotic manipulations which falsify reality. It is the fear of death which underlies all evil, the harm that we do to each other, and the destructive, manipulative, suffocating and oppressing institutions we create.  

Why do the cultural solutions to the dilemma of death seem to have led to such blood-shed and viciousness as human sacrifice, torture, executions, and wars? Why didn't this impulse lead instead to harmony and peace? The destructiveness arises, Ernest Becker taught, from the need to experience prestige and power on the one hand, and the need, on the other, for expiation of guilt.  

The need for power and prestige is obvious. The role of expiation for guilt requires some explanation. This is not the ordinary guilt we feel when we betray a friend. This is a more cosmic guilt, the kind arising from what the Greeks called hubris. It is the guilt which comes from trying to stick out above humanity's station, of challenging, by implication, the glory of the gods. It is the guilt arising from trying to exist and live heroically. Such guilt is the corollary of the cultural constructions which are designed to gather to themselves eternal and infinite meaning and power. The two go together like the two sides of a coin. The expiation of this kind of guilt in history seems to have almost always involved the shedding of blood, especially that of the enemy in war.  

Expiation of guilt is one reason why the victim must die in our place. There is another and perhaps more important reason. Victims must die in order to certify that the immortality system is intact and potent, because if our national or religious immortality chariot isn't absolutely intact, then it might not carry us to glory. The heretic who questions the true faith and/or the faithful of a neighboring country with a different system must die to assure us that our way is truth, absolute truth, the real and powerful and saving truth which cradles and shelters us from the Void.

The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he thinks of himself.

Pascal

King Midas seeks out Silenus, the constant companion of Dionysus, and asks him: "What is man's greatest happiness?" The daemon remains sullen and uncommunicative until finally, forced by the King, he breaks into a shrill laugh.

[gia]

[...]

Fear of Freedom: Survival of the Fittest

Characteristic of the authoritarian sadomasochist, Hitler began his crusade on the heels of and surrounded by those he considered inferior. The achievement of ultimate power was their driving force. This quest for world domination was, to Hitler, justified as the ultimate realization of Darwin's theory of survival of the strong over the weak:

The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless which is so typical for the sado-masochistic character explains a great deal of Hitler's and his followers' political actions. While the [Weimar] Republican government thought they could "appease" the Nazis by treating them leniently, they not only failed to appease them but aroused their hatred by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because [italics added] it was weak, and he admired the industrial and military leaders because they had power. He never fought against established strong power but always against groups which he thought to be essentially powerless. Hitler's — and for that matter Mussolini's — "revolution" happened under protection of existing power, and their favorite objects were those who could not defend themselves.

[...]

The Darwinian idea of "the survival of the fittest" is simply a struggle for existence -- for life rather than death. The exceptional life-forms may well be poorly adapted to survive. The history of evolving forms shows that happy accidents are eleminated, the more highly evolved types lead nowhere; it is the average and below types which invariably ascend. This simple biological progression is no progression at all -- it leads to the victory of the herd.

Charles Darwin writes in "The Descent of Man" that a tribe which consisted of many members who were always ready to give aid to each-other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. Nietzsche reversed this scenario. Let the tribe sacrifice itself, if necessary, to preserve the existence of one great individual. It is not the quantity but the the quality of humanity that we must seek to increase. He goes on to say, "A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them!" A struggle, not for existence (Darwin), but rather a struggle for greatness -- and with that, a struggle for power. This highly undemocratic view of humanity as a kind of "raw material" out of which a few great individuals will emerge, leads to one's political views, which are far from ordinary...

Now, if my own will happens to coincide with the will of the group, this is just a happy accident, which raises the so-called paradox of democracy. In a democracy, I am committed to two principles: 1. the will of the majority (the State); 2. My own will. Unfortunately, there is no necessary reason why these two principles should ever coincide! Clearly, the individual will is forfeit to the demands of the government -- a kind of political darwinism. The herd triumphs once again, this time under the banner of the state. The better the State is organized, the duller humanity will be.

As little State as possible! 

[c l o g]

The belief that violence is a reasonable and often necessary route to achieving our aims goes unquestioned in most societies. Violence is thought to be the nature of things. It's what works. It seems inevitable -- the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.

Walter Wink, a professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in N.Y.C., in an article first published by Bible Society's Spring 1999 issue of The Bible in TransMission, further expalains that our very origin is violence. Killing is in our genes. Humanity is not the originator of evil, but merely finds evil already present and perpetuates it. Human beings are thus naturally incapable of peaceful coexistence. Order must continually be imposed upon us from on high: men over women, masters over slaves, priests over laity, aristocrats over peasants, rulers over people. Unquestioning obedience is the highest virtue, and order the highest religious value.

In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the ideology of conquest. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world, but a theater of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion. The Babylonian myth is as universally present today as at any time in its long and bloody history. It is the dominant myth in contemporary America.

In the aftermath of World War I, which some optimists were calling the war to end all wars, the philosopher George Santayana demurred, "Only the dead have seen the end of war." This sort of fatalism is still widespread today, and it cuts across political affiliations. Whether they are hawks or doves, on the left or on the right, many people have come to accept war as inevitable, even "in our genes." The obvious problem with such fatalism is that it can become self-fulfilling. Our first step toward ending war must be to believe that we can do it.

We also need to come to grips with the scale of the problem. As far back as anthropologists have peered into human history and pre-history, they have found evidence of group bloodshed. In "War Before Civilization" Lawrence Keeley estimates that as many as 95% of primitive societies engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many fought constantly. Tribal combat usually involved skirmishes and ambushes rather than pitched battles. But over time the chronic fighting could produce mortality rates as high as 50%.

This violence, some scholars argue, is an inevitable consequence of innate male ambition and agression. "Males have evolved to possess strong appetites for power," the anthropologist Richard Wrangham contends in "Demonic Males," "because with extraodrinary power comes extraordinary reproductive success." As evidence for this hypothesis, Wrangham cites studies of societies such as the Yanomamo, an Amazonian tribe. Yanomamo men from different villages often engage in lethal raids and counter-raids. Like most tribal societies, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who has observed the Yanomamo for decades, found that killers on average have twice as many wives and three times as many children as non-killers.

But Chagnon, significantly, has rejected the notion that Yanomamo warriors are compelled to fight by their aggressive instincts. Truly compulsive, out-of-control killers, Chagnon explains, quickly get killed themselves rather than living long enough to have many wives and children. Successful warriors are usually quite contolled and calculating; they fight because that is how a male advances in their society. Moreover, many Yanomamo men have confessed to Chagnon that they loathe war and wish it could be abolished from their culture -- and in fact rates of violence have recently dropped dramatically as Yanomamo villages have accepted the laws and mores of the outside world.

In his classic book "On Agression," the biologist Konrad Lorenz acknowledged that it might be possible to "breed out the aggressive drive by eugenic planning." But that would be a huge mistake, Lorenz argued, because aggression is a vital part of our humanity. It plays a role in almost all human endeavors, including science, the arts, business, politics, and sports. Aggression can serve the cause of peace. There are, for example, some extremely aggressive peace activists.

Even if warfare is at least in part biologically based -- and what human behavior isn't? -- we cannot end it by altering our biology. Modern war is primarily a social and political phenomenon, and we need social and political solutions to end it. Many such solutions have been proposed, but all are problematic. One perennial plan is for all nations to yield power to a global institution that can enforce peace. This was the vision that inspired the League of Nations and the UN. But neither the US nor any other major power is likely to entrust its national security to an international entity any time soon. And even if we did, how would we ensure that a global military force does not become repressive?

One encouraging finding to emerge from political science is that democracies rarely, if ever, fight each other. But does that mean democracies such as the US should use military means to force countries with no democratic tradition to accept this form of governance? If history teaches us something, it is that war often begets more war. Religion has been prescribed as a solution to war and aggression. After all, most religions preach love and forgiveness, and they prohibit killing, at least in principle. But in practice, of course, religion has often inspired rather than inhibited bloodshed.

We will abolish war someday. The only questions are how, and how soon.

In an amazing scientific discovery, we have now come to know that antihomicidal defenses start early in life -- even before we are born, when we still inhabit the presumably cozy environment of our mother's womb. As Harvard biologist David Haig has discovered, even the womb presents its own dangers; a chief one of those is what is known as spontaneous abortions, many of which happen before a woman even knows she is pregnant. Indeed, we now know that many women who experience late periods and worry that they are pregnant, only to be relieved later when their periods begin again, have actually experienced spontaneous abortion of the growing fetus. According to Haig's findings, these often undetected miscarriages occur when the mother's body has sensed that the fetus is in poor health or possesses genetic abnormalities.

Remarkably, Haig also discovered that a defense mechanism has evolved to outwit the mother's body and protect the fetus. This is the fetal production of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which is a hormone the fetus secretes into the mother's bloodstream. The female body appears to "interpret" high levels of hCG as a sign that a fetus is healthy and viable, and so does not spontaneously abort. Even the womb is a hostile environment where one's own interests must be protected at the cost of another's. Even in that most sacred place we are potential murder victims.

[le mains sales]

[...]

Delusions: One the cardinal symptoms of paranoia and other disorders, most notably schizophrenia. [...]

Well, while delusions are a very important characteristic symptoms of Schizophrenia, hallucinations are just as significative for the diagnosis. For instance, you need only one Criterion A symptom if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts, or 2+ voices conversing with each other.

http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/5117/Criteria.jpg

Here it is a slightly different perspective on the issue, fortune:

"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."
-Thomas Szaz.

While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, this does not mean they have a disease. To Szasz, people with mental illness have a "fake disease," and these "scientific categories" are in fact used for power controls. Schizophrenia is "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" and, according to Szasz, simply does not exist. To be a true disease, the entity must somehow be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion. According to Szasz, disease must be found on the autopsy table and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association. Mental illnesses are "like a" disease, argues Szasz, putting mental illness in a semantic metaphorical language arts category. Psychiatry is a pseudo-science that parodies medicine by using medical sounding words invented over the last 100 years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack belong to two completely different categories. Psychiatrists are but "soul doctors", the successors of priests, who deal with the spiritual "problems in living" that have troubled people forever. Psychiatry, through various Mental Health Acts has become the secular state religion. It is a social control system, which disguises itself under the claims of scientificity. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well, such as Michel Foucault in "Madness and Civilization."

State government by enforcing the use of shock therapy has abused Psychiatry with impunity according to Szaz. If we accept that "mental illness" is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric "treatment" on these individuals. Similarly, the state should not be able to interfere in mental health practices between consenting adults (for example, by legally controlling the supply of psychotropic drugs or psychiatric medication). The medicalization of government produces a "therapeutic state," designating someone as "insane" or as a "drug addict". In "Ceremonial Chemistry" (1973), he argued that the same persecution which has targeted Witches, Jews, Gypsies or homosexuals now targets "drug addicts" and "insane" people. Szasz argued that all these categories of people were taken as scapegoats of the community in ritual ceremonies.

To underscore this continuation of religion through medicine, he even takes as example obesity: instead of concentrating on junk food (ill-nutrition), physicians denounced hypernutrition. According to Szasz, despite their scientific appearance, the diets imposed were a moral substitute to the former fasts, and the social injunction not to be overweight is to be considered as a moral order, not as a scientific advice as it claims to be. As with those thought bad (insane people), those who took the wrong drugs (drug-addicts), medicine created a category for those who had the wrong weight (obeses). Szasz argued that psychiatrics were created in the 17th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of social behavior; a new specialization, "drogophobia", was created in the 20th century to study and control those who erred from the medical norms of drug consumption; and then, in the 1960s, another specialization, "bariatrics", was created to deal with those who erred from the medical norms concerning the weight which the body should have. Thus, he underscores that in 1970, the American Society of Bariatic Physicians (from the Greek baros, weight) had 30 members, and already 450 two years later. 

Drug addiction is not a "disease" to be cured through legal drugs (Methadone instead of heroin; which forgets that heroin was created in the first place to be a substitute to opium), but a social "habit". Szasz also argues in favor of a drugs free-market. He criticized the "war on drugs", arguing that using drugs was in fact a victimless crime. Prohibition itself constituted the crime. He shows how the "war on drugs" lead states to do things that would have never been considered half a century before, such as prohibiting a person from ingesting certain substances or interfering in other countries to impede the production of certain plants (e.g. coca eradication plans, or the campaigns against opium; both are traditional plants opposed by the Western world). Although Szasz is skeptical about the merits of psychotropic medications, he favors the repeal of drug prohibition. "Because we have a free market in food, we can buy all the bacon, eggs, and ice cream we want and can afford. If we had a free market in drugs, we could similarly buy all the barbiturates, chloral hydrate, and morphine we want and could afford." Szasz argued that the prohibition and other legal restrictions on drugs are enforced not because of their lethality, but in a ritualistic aim. He also recalls that pharmakos, the Greek root of pharmacology, originally meant "scapegoat". Szasz dubbed pharmacology "pharmacomythology" because of its inclusion of social practices in its studies, in particular through the inclusion of the category of "addictiveness" in its programs. "Addictiveness" is a social category, argued Szasz, and the use of drugs should be apprehended as a social ritual rather than exclusively as the act of ingesting a chemical substance. There are many ways of ingesting a chemical substance, or "drug" (which comes from pharmakos), just as there are many different cultural ways of eating or drinking. Thus, some cultures prohibit certain types of substances, which they call "taboo", while they make use of others in various types of ceremonies.

[wheresmyadude]

The Lyrics:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I'm crying.

Now, a lot of songs by The Beatles have these "subliminal" messages. Here it is another weird one from Beatles:

The Beatles', "Revolution 9"

The Lyrics:

Right! Right!

When you play the track backwards, it sounds like someone screaming, "Get me out! Get me out!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG0wksBzKSc

A subliminal message is communicated below the conscious level of perception. By nature, you will not be aware of receiving one. Backmasking, an audio technique in which sounds are recorded backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards, produces messages that sound like gibberish to the conscious mind. Gary Greenwald, a fundamentalist Christian preacher, claims that these messages can be heard subliminally, and can induce listeners towards, in the case of rock music, sex and drug use. However, this is not generally accepted as fact.


The manual for the popular sound program SoX pokes fun at subliminal messages. The description of the "reverse" option says "Included for finding satanic subliminals."

Following the 1950s subliminal message panic, many businesses have sprung up purporting to offer helpful subliminal audio tapes that supposedly improve the health of the listener. However, there is no evidence for the therapeutic effectiveness of such tapes.

Subliminal messages have also been known to appear in music. In the 1990s, two young men died from self-inflicted gunshots and their families were convinced it was because of a British rock band, Judas Priest. The families claimed subliminal messages told listeners to "do it" in the song "Better by You, Better Than Me". The case was taken to court and the families sought more than US$6 million in damages. The judge, Jerry Carr Whitehead, ruled that the subliminal messages did exist in the song, but stated that the families did not produce any scientific evidence that the song persuaded the young men to kill themselves. In turn, he ruled it probably would not have been perceived without the "power of suggestion" or the young men would not have done it unless they really intended to.

Subliminal messages can affect a human's emotional state and/or behaviors. They are most effective when perceived unconsciously. The most extensive study of therapeutic effects from audiotapes was conducted to see if the self-esteem audiotapes would raise self-esteem. 237 volunteers were provided with tapes of 3 manufacturers and completed post tests after one month of use. The study showed clearly that subliminal audiotapes made to boost self-esteem did not produce effects associated with subliminal content within one month's use. The effectiveness of any subliminal message has been called into question time after time and has led many to one conclusion, namely: that the technique does not work, as Anthony R. Pratkanis, one of the researchers in the field puts it: "It appears that, despite the claims in books and newspapers and on the backs of subliminal self help tapes, subliminal-influence tactics have not been demonstrated to be effective. Of course, as with anything scientific, it may be that someday, somehow, someone will develop a subliminal technique that may work, just as someday a chemist may find a way to transmute lead to gold. I am personally not purchasing lead futures on this hope however."

[u s e h e r n a m e]

[...]

Charles Darwin writes in "The Descent of Man" that a tribe which consisted of many members who were always ready to give aid to each-other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. Nietzsche reversed this scenario. Let the tribe sacrifice itself, if necessary, to preserve the existence of one great individual. It is not the quantity but the the quality of humanity that we must seek to increase. He goes on to say, "A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them!" A struggle, not for existence (Darwin), but rather a struggle for greatness -- and with that, a struggle for power. This highly undemocratic view of humanity as a kind of "raw material" out of which a few great individuals will emerge, leads to one's political views, which are far from ordinary...

[...] 

Again, wheres, your post is more appropriately placed (situated) here

Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that if you seek something, you wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold, that is seek followers, you have to seek zeros!

[u s ehe r n a m e]

Well, while delusions are a very important characteristic symptoms of Schizophrenia, hallucinations are just as significative for the diagnosis. For instance, you need only one Criterion A symptom if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts, or 2+ voices conversing with each other.

http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/5117/Criteria.jpg

Here it is a slightly different perspective on the issue, fortune:

"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic."
-Thomas Szaz.

While people behave and think in ways that are very disturbing, this does not mean they have a disease. To Szasz, people with mental illness have a "fake disease," and these "scientific categories" are in fact used for power controls. Schizophrenia is "the sacred symbol of psychiatry" and, according to Szasz, simply does not exist. To be a true disease, the entity must somehow be capable of being approached, measured, or tested in scientific fashion. According to Szasz, disease must be found on the autopsy table and meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association. Mental illnesses are "like a" disease, argues Szasz, putting mental illness in a semantic metaphorical language arts category. Psychiatry is a pseudo-science that parodies medicine by using medical sounding words invented over the last 100 years. To be clear, heart break and heart attack belong to two completely different categories. Psychiatrists are but "soul doctors", the successors of priests, who deal with the spiritual "problems in living" that have troubled people forever. Psychiatry, through various Mental Health Acts has become the secular state religion. It is a social control system, which disguises itself under the claims of scientificity. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well, such as Michel Foucault in "Madness and Civilization."

State government by enforcing the use of shock therapy has abused Psychiatry with impunity according to Szaz. If we accept that "mental illness" is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric "treatment" on these individuals. Similarly, the state should not be able to interfere in mental health practices between consenting adults (for example, by legally controlling the supply of psychotropic drugs or psychiatric medication). The medicalization of government produces a "therapeutic state," designating someone as "insane" or as a "drug addict". In "Ceremonial Chemistry" (1973), he argued that the same persecution which has targeted Witches, Jews, Gypsies or homosexuals now targets "drug addicts" and "insane" people. Szasz argued that all these categories of people were taken as scapegoats of the community in ritual ceremonies. 

[...]

Similarly, psychiatrists R. D. Laing, Silvano Arieti, Theodore Lidz and Colin Ross have argued that the symptoms of what is called mental illness are comprehensible reactions to impossible demands that society and particularly family life places on some sensitive individuals. Laing, Arieti, Lidz and Ross were notable in valuing the content of psychotic experience as worthy of interpretation, rather than considering it simply as a secondary and essentially meaningless marker of underlying psychological or neurological distress. Laing described 11 case studies of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and argued that the content of their actions and statements was meaningful and logical in the context of their family and life situations. In 1956, Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Paul Watzlawick, Donald Jackson, and Jay Haley articulated a theory of schizophrenia, related to Laing's work, as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives different or contradictory messages. Madness was therefore an expression of this distress and should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience. In the books "Schizophrenia" and the "Family and The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders" Lidz and his colleagues explain their belief that parental behavior can result in mental illness in children. Arieti's "Interpretation of Schizophrenia" won the 1975 scientific National Book Award in the United States.

The concept of schizophrenia as a result of civilization has been developed further by psychologist Julian Jaynes in his 1976 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"; he proposed that until the beginning of historic times, schizophrenia or a similar condition was the normal state of human consciousness. This would take the form of a "bicameral mind" where a normal state of low affect, suitable for routine activities, would be interrupted in moments of crisis by "mysterious voices" giving instructions, which early people characterized as interventions from the gods. Researchers into shamanism have speculated that in some cultures schizophrenia or related conditions may predispose an individual to becoming a shaman; the experience of having access to multiple realities is not uncommon in schizophrenia, and is a core experience in many shamanic traditions.

Equally, the shaman may have the skill to bring on and direct some of the altered states of consciousness psychiatrists label as illness. Psychohistorians, on the other hand, accept the psychiatric diagnoses. However, unlike the current medical model of mental disorders they argue that poor parenting in tribal societies causes the shaman's schizoid personalities. Speculation regarding primary and important religious figures as having schizophrenia abound. Commentators such as Paul Kurtz and others have endorsed the idea that major religious figures experienced psychosis, heard voices and displayed delusions of grandeur. Psychiatrist Tim Crow has argued that schizophrenia may be the evolutionary price we pay for a left brain hemisphere specialization for language. Since psychosis is associated with greater levels of right brain hemisphere activation and a reduction in the usual left brain hemisphere dominance, our language abilities may have evolved at the cost of causing schizophrenia when this system breaks down.

[cosinger]

It is believed that Mussolini never killed anyone with his own hand -- he did command others to kill people, but he did not do anybody himself; Hitler, on the other hand, is known to have killed with his own hand.

[...] Thus the supporter of fascism or Stalinism escapes from freedom into a new idolatry in which Mussolini, a cowardly braggart, became a symbol for maleness and courage. Hitler, a maniac of destruction, was praised as the builder of a new Germany. [...]

What was the genesis of Hitler's evil? Many theories are given ranging from:

- born with one testicle
- testicle and/or part of penis bitten off by a goat
- overindulgent mother
- abused child with low self-esteem
- abusive father whose family secret was he had been sired by a Jew
- mother died in 1907 from cancer unsuccessfully treated by Jewish doctor
- syphilis
- syphilis caused by Jewish prostitute
- bad parenting
- Jewish suspect
- mental illness
- physical illness

The main factors hampering the development of the superego in wartime have been studied thoroughly by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham. The children under observation in the Hampstead Nurseries were mostly of pre-school age, that is their development was beyond the appearance of the formal superego function and before the integration of the superego. During this period the child is occupied with the complicated task of mastering his destructive and aggressive wishes. Exposure to the destructiveness of war makes it extremely difficult for him to achieve this. The child does not become cruel and aggressive because of these conditions but may remain so because of them. A second factor is the often abrupt separation of the child from its mother which is inevitable when an area has to be evacuated at a moment's notice. Subsequent wandering through evacuation centers, hospitals, and nurseries, from one pair of hands into another, throws the small child in a "no-man's land.

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=psc.002.0257a