Some fascinating thoughts about psychiatry and anti-authoritarianism:
Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.
I would argue this attitude extends to anyone with a university-level education these days, as basically the only requirement to get a degree is compliance with a rather arbitrary set of standards. The more systemized education one gets, the more ingrained this thought process becomes.
Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.
The potential for positive feedback here, not just on an individual level, is frightening. We saw this on grand display in America, and sadly not the only instance of it, during McCarthyism. Anyone who spoke out against the inane Communist-hunt was immediately branded a Communist. Like quicksand, the more you struggled against the brand, the more forcefully it was applied.
In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense.
The problem with a culture devoid of anti-authoritarians is twofold. First, I know very few successful people who have lived lives suppliant to authority. To do so necessarily means to sidestep innovation. After all, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world and the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Second, those that have lived lives as authority dictates usually did so with the hopes of eventually wielding that authority. Whether it’s the first year professor slogging through the least desirable courses in the hopes of one day making tenure or dean, or the associate hoping to make partner, or the politician hoping to become judge, or senator, or president, shockingly, once he obtains some level of power, the rules he followed to get to that position no longer apply to him.
In a community where there are no voices to shout down that authority, and worse, where the rest of the community would shout down any potential dissenters, regardless of the leader’s actions, the only possible outcomes are bleak.
