Consensus Superstitions and Supremacy Groups

Hate groups. What are these things anyway? Support groups for the mentally ill? Conspiracies? How to understand the mind that regards some specific group of people as worthy of eradication? How does this mind come into existence? What sustains it and nourishes it?

The news of the last few days have been filled with numerous stories about supremacy groups and the recent murder by a white supremacist. These people are upset, the news tells us, partly because the US has a black president and partly because the economy is weak. This suggests that supremacists attract new converts when people are stressed and feel alienated. So it should be no surprise that their behaviors -- expressing and sometimes acting out violence -- can themselves be viewed as acts that distress others and alienate others from them. Call it (psychological) projection.

This situation brings up a larger topic: what constitutes mental illness. As a society we are struggling with this feature of our existence, and have relegated its definition and most of the actions implemented by society's psychology-linked institutions to a relatively small group of professionals whose work we vaguely understand and to some degree find repellent.

As a society we have not confronted the concept of mental illness nor its relevance to day-to-day life. We tend to mock a mentally health life as bland, even moribund, certainly not worth our individual concern. Only people whose lives have been directly touched by mental illness -- their own or that of people in their immediate environment -- have some sense that mental health is valuable and worth nourishing. But even among these relatively enlightened people, most have a nearly medieval view of what mental illness is, albeit one now somewhat veneered by well-advertised drug promotions.

One way to understand this situation is to consider who we conceptualize ourselves to be, or, perhaps better said, what we understand ourselves to be. After all, one can hardly begin to examine mental health and illness with no sense of what it is that is healthy or sick. Since the vast majority of people have a core sense of themselves only expressible through traditional consensus superstitions like soul and spirit, no one should be surprised society is having a tough time bringing this subject into the 21st century.

If we choose to put aside all superstitions in pursuit of a comprehensible and comprehensive sense of mental health, we need a way of speaking about ourselves that is free of those superstitions. Arguably, little exists to aid us. Instead, there is a near cacophony of voices with what has to be labeled as political agendas, articulating ancient or traditional viewpoints frequently embellished with quasi-scientific flourish. These people need to be ignored, or grow up.

But it is understandable that these ancient absurdities persist so loudly in contemporary thinking. Why? Because little else is available to consider or develop. This essay is in part an effort to explore or provoke new thinking or concepts that might function to refine our appreciation of illness and health in what is called the mental realm.

If one puts aside superstition -- basically 'belief', to be distinguished from 'conjecture' -- our existence needs to find its source in the world we know. This is the world of Earth and atoms, of electricity and cells, of patterns and complexity. Abandoning superstition, we are left with the material world in all its glory and mystery as the cause of our own existence.

Immediately it is obvious why our subject has not long ago matured; it treads deeply on territory of belief and faith, and challenges the teachings most have heard since early childhood. If we persist despite these hindrances, we are faced with accounting for our existence by linking it to how the body works. We are forced to admit we are in some marvelous way the creation of our body and brain. We cannot yet explain this except in very fragmented ways that struggle to satisfy someone who is aware of their own functioning moment to moment. So one naturally hesitates before the assertion that we exist because of the body's activity only; it's almost beyond comprehension.

Yet any even modest examination of what we know about ourselves makes this conclusion compelling, even if we still lack much knowledge about how it is accomplished. And while this perspective may provide some foundation stones upon which we can build a clear and comprehensive understanding of health, it still offers little to distinguish mental health from mental illness. However, some assertions can be made, and perhaps not surprisingly, many of these echo the wisdom we humans have gathered across the ages, wisdom often found in those very traditions we have otherwise tossed aside lest they hinder our understanding.

Returning to the topic of supremacy groups -- their attraction to violence; their stereotyping; their repulsion toward the culturally and racially alien -- it is easy, though not complimentary, to explain such attitudes as rooted in the animal-world antiquity we all share. As such, these responses -- shall we call them supremacy behaviors? -- must have long ago provided survival advantage in those aboriginal settings when human beings only existed in small groups that were constantly threatened by their neighbors and other predators. Since this viewpoint rests on an assumption that everyone not in supremacy groups must have an ancestry similar to those drawn to supremacy groups, we must ask how it is those in supremacy groups have failed to acquire the understandings and social skills of those not in such groups. Why have these folks not developed the way everyone else has?

This question brings into focus another contentious topic: is it nature or nurture that defines us? As any student of human development now recognizes, the answer to this question is "not 'or', but 'and' " -- meaning, both nature AND nurture define us. This of course means that we are as much defined by how we are raised as how our genetics forms us.

Framing our subject of supremacy groups and mental illness with these ideas allows us to ask: are the members of supremacy groups the product of genetics or an upbringing different from the rest of society? There may be some research that illuminates this question but it is not extensive nor widely distributed. Thus we are all left with hunches and subjective impressions. For me these include several features of aberrancy including psychosis and histories of abuse. That is, members of these groups often bear evidence of these afflictions.

Current understanding of psychosis suggests that it is often a symptom of neurophysiologic dysfunction arising from an organic cause such as intoxication (i.e., intentionally or unintentionally ingested intoxicants) or anatomic abnormality of the brain. For example the common psychotic illness called schizophrenia -- which almost certainly is a catchall term for a whole group of conditions -- has both a genetic, i.e. familial, incidence pattern as well as strongly suspected experiential correlates, some even gestational such as certain viral illnesses occurring during the individual's gestation. Of course these effects don't exclude what these people endure and experience once they are born.

Similarly, situations of abuse very frequently have a lineage consistent with early life behavioral imprinting, meaning the person is taught at an early age to view and regard the world and others in ways that are dysfunctional, and this education is traditional in certain families. Only sometimes do people successfully outgrow such early life traumas.

It is not difficult to regard people who find themselves drawn toward supremacy ideologies as wounded. That these people can bring great hurt on others does not take away their own suffering. Of course the term "suffering" itself may be misrepresenting these people's experience; there are many mental health conditions where suffering is not acknowledged (or acknowledgeable?) by its bearer. Psychologists speak of a lack of insight when they describe such individuals.

So the social problem of supremacy groups and the existence of mental health conditions of such severity that their existence puts society at risk present special challenges. Current technology for recognizing mental health conditions remains rather primitive. Too often it relies upon the art of psychiatric impressions rather than robust objectives tests, though recent advances in imaging technology hint that objective psychiatry is no longer far away.

The whole of human society is now regularly confronted by people driven by supremacist ideologies that in general appear to be supported by overt delusional rationalizations compelling terrorist actions. Though these people often wish to restore some perceived previous society that enthroned their preferred social group, it seems far more likely their actions and rhetoric is going to accomplish something quite different: an enhanced and more commonly-accepted understanding of human frailty and the nature of human development, especially what contributes to mental health and a diverse harmonious society. From the perspective of supremacists, this outcome may be disappointing though something in their ideologies may be found to have sufficient value to become a precious part of our future. An example? Devotion.