There is a fifty-year publishing anniversary that needs celebration. It has to do with the meaning of insanity and related terms. Our use of language in every day conversation—in novels, movies, newspapers, TV, and on the Internet—changes the meaning of terms from the past. Take the trio of insanity, craziness and madness. Those three ideas have been around since we’ve had language, and one day someone will find from big data on the development of language, that one reason we acquired language was to keep tabs on people who the community thought weren’t quite right in the head.
It has been 50 years since the Kesey novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released. That makes it a good time to revisit and ask questions about how insanity, craziness and madness remain powerful and effective tools to protect state power and authority.
The film based on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, won five Oscars. The book and film struck a chord with the Academy and filmgoers. McMurphy could be any of us who pushed back against authority. McMurphy, a criminal in the prison system with a relatively short sentence to serve, thought he was clever in gaming the system by being transferred from prison to a mental hospital. He challenged the power of the head nurse. What he discovered that he was inside a system that could keep him indefinitely and no law, no institution, no authority could prevent the head nurse or her staff from using the full range of ‘treatments’ (in the name of medical science) to break him (or from their point of view, cure him).
If you are anti-authoritarian, then you run the McMurphy risk of being labeled insane, rebellious, and troublesome. You go on a list. Nothing that you can do as McMurphy found out will prevent the authorities from carrying out a lobotomy. At the end of the story, the Chief sees what they’ve done to McMurphy whose unresponsive face is a testament to the power of the State who employ the words ‘insanity’, ‘craziness’ and ‘madness’ with the precision of drones.
Insanity is both a legal and medical term. Madness and craziness are ordinary, common usage to describe abnormal mental acts of another person. Political correctness has erased insanity, madness and craziness and instead discussions that would have used ‘insanity’ now refer to ‘mental disorders.’
Science has dispatched madness and craziness to the old world of magic, herbal cures, and shaman trances. Science has replaced the local shaman with doctors, nurses, scientists, and psychiatrists. That has been called progress and a victory over superstition and backwardness. In the 50 years since the novel was published, science hasn’t been successful in changing the attitude, nature, and emotions of mankind. In 1963, the medical workers, in the name of ‘science’, doomed McMurphy. Science acted then, as it does now, as a good cover for those in power to legitimatize the repression of people like McMurphy.
It is difficult to say what is more dangerous—the old witchdoctor non-scientific approach, or the new science, medical approach. A person’s liberty should stand on magical thinking of superstitious people. It is cruel and senseless and barbaric. Has science has put an end to the era of witchdoctors? Many people are doubtful. The history of insanity correlates not as one would wish with the developments in science. The idea that science brings progress and the ways of a superstitious people are left in the past. What we are discovering is that science is creating better tools for lobotomy for critics and opponents. Insanity, craziness, and madness become mud-slinging words hurled against the rise of new ideas, philosophies, and technologies.
Don’t forget that at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it was Nurse Ratchet who won. In 2013 we have a new cast of Nurse Ratchet’s and McMurphy’s and every indication that the outcome will be the same as it was in 1963.
Remember the bottle thrown from the plane in the Gods Must Be Crazy? Whenever a tribe comes in contact with an unknown technology, instability of the existing system of belief and thought starts to list like an oil tanker that’s rammed a reef. Soon the peaceful tribe is racked with high emotions such as hatred and envy and violence follows as the hotheads arm themselves to control, own, and monopolize the novel invention. At the end of this 1980 film the hero Xi throws the bottle over a cliff and returns to his village.
But the days when the hero could return the world to its pre-bottle ways is over.
What is new is not a bottle thrown from a plane, but the Big Data quietly culled, stored, and analyzed into marketing, economic policy, and dissent suppression. That bottle won’t be thrown over a cliff. It is here in the village to stay. New tools to spot and isolate (or control) the ‘hostile disruptions’ increase the reach to track and watch people who are ‘mad’, ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’. Though you will be less likely to see those terms used. As insanity has been tainted by the long history of loose standards, terrorism has been copied and pasted in places where insanity, madness and craziness were commonly found.
The mental health issue always has risked being politicized into a campaign to reduce violence, and maintain security and order. We don’t have to look very far back in history before we stumble upon the inconvenient truths about state authorities using mental health as a method of repression and control.
A list of from the Reasons for Admission used by Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum from 1864 to 1889 gives an idea of the range of thinking and acts that landed you in the bunk next to McMurphy. These 19th century reasons describe the mental state or behavior of a person before being admitted to the asylum. From the 1963 film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a case could be made that much on the list below had survived well into the 20th century. A case can be made that dressed up in different terms, the list will still be sufficient to catch the 2013 version of McMurphy.
Business nerves and bad company along with brain fever, sexual derangement, dissolute habits and women trouble could fit about 90% of the writers I have met over the years. The reasons associated with the definition of crazy may explain why many people view writers, painter, dancers and others as belonging under the big tent of art as crazy or insane. The point is people who don’t wish to or are incapable of fitting into morality and norms of their society are by definition psychologically abnormal and their alternative way of living might be further evidence of abnormality. Religious or ideological fanatics see other non-believers as abnormal. Our technology hasn’t updated the definition, only the power and capability of tracking people who fit one of the categories, of craziness.
The clear and present danger of the concept of Insanity that finally caught up with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has been summarized: a term that “may also be used as an attempt to discredit or criticise particular ideas, beliefs, principals, desires, personal feelings, attitudes, or their proponents, such as in politics and religion.”
In 2013 would McMurphy’s outcome have been any different? Have the last 50 years with all of our advance technology given us better outcomes? Or are we still back at the gate of Trans-Allegheny Lunatic asylum, where McMurphy is put out of his misery and the Chief’s only hope is to escape as fast as one can from the clutches of repressive power. There is a big difference. In 1963 escape was an option. In 2013, Nurse Ratchet’s forces would find the Chief and he would end up like McMurphy.
Whether you identify with the Chief or McMurphy doesn’t matter. It is Nurse Ratchet’s world. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a warning unheeded. We live in the shadow of the Reasons for Admission to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. As ‘novel reading’ is one of the grounds for admission, you’ll forgive me if I put on my track shoes and go looking for where the Chief has gone to ground.
Comments