In our continuing exploration to discover why people - ordinary people - lawyers, doctors, convenience store clerks, teenagers, ministers of religion, tourists from all over the world, etc., - behave so badly toward nature, we’ve come to realize that it's a complicated thing to unravel. 

The entire 20th century seems to have been a century of madmen.  Cultures all over the world seem to contain large numbers of crazy people.  People deliberately set forest fires; deliberately destroy the beautiful, the pristine, the irreplaceable, their fellow. 

The 20th century began with Freud probing invisible physic forces.  In the second half of the century the probing of madness and aberrant behavior in general entered a new phase.  A new form of psychiatry began to emerge.  As Jules Henry writes, the new form involves “a fundamental alteration in the approach to the patient - from seeing him alone, to seeing him together with his family; from perceiving him alone as sick, to perceiving him as a member of a sick family.”  And he alluded to the notion that the whole family of man is mentally sick (by degree).

How did the whole human family become so sick?  Why is there so much mental illness?  The vast majority of it totally untreated.  Henry observed that entire groups of people coerce others into a role and then stigmatize them.  Some family members exhibit stronger pathological distortions than others, but each member of every family exhibits some pathological distortions in their behavior patterns. 

Freud offered his version of the ancient Socratic hope of self-mastery through self-knowledge by writing “Where Id is, Ego shall be.”  But if the 'demons' within are themselves determined by forces without, the entire Western ideal of the autonomous individual appears to have died.  Henry simply laid it out for all to see: all of us are on some pathway to madness.

Jules Henry wrote Culture Against Man - questioning the authority of and rationale behind cultural institutions, especially the education system.  A few years later he wrote Pathways to Madness - which dealt with mental and developmental disorders, many of which he showed began in the family and/or the school system.  

Henry raised the question we all must face at one time or another in our lives: how disease and disorder arise from dependencies on family and institutions.  For we have created a number of ‘demons’ for each child’s mind to contend with.  Henry warned that we live in a culture that is educated primarily by paid media (which is nearly totally supported by multi-national corporations, each with its own agenda). 

Despair Is Everywhere, Why?

We have tried to show that man’s deepest woes can be traced to his own family and the systems of education that have been set up by governments and industry over the last 200 years.  That man’s general anger and despair can be traced to the techniques used by the family, by peers, and the education system he created to strip himself of his individual gifts.  And that living without his individual gifts developed, he feels like a mere mess of flesh with insatiable needs and desires.  The perfect formula for social unrest and violence.

For when we behave violently toward nature, we reveal a very deep self-destructive tendency.  As we’ve shown again and again via this blog, we ARE nature; we're as much a part of nature as our hand is part of our arm. 

Arthur Evans wrote, “Modern schools and universities push students into habits of depersonalized learning, alienation from nature and sexuality, obedience to hierarchy, fear of authority, self-objectification, and chilling competitiveness.  These character traits are the essence of the twisted personalitiy-type of modern industrialism.  They are precisely the character traits needed to maintain a social system that is utterly out of touch with nature, sexuality, and real human needs.”

Henry wrote, “The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence.  And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves.  It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness...

“...To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply.  One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death.”

And finally these thoughts from Wayne C. Booth, “The man who cannot think for himself, going beyond what other men have learned or thought, is still enslaved to other men’s ideas.  Obviously the goal of learning to think is even more difficult than the goal of learning to learn.  But difficult as it is - we must add it to our list.  It is simply not enough to be able to get up a subject of one’s own, like a good encyclopedia employee, even though any college would take pride if all its graduates could do so.  To be fully human means in part to think one’s own thoughts, to reach a point at which, whether one’s ideas are different from or similar to other men’s, they are one’s own” (our italics).

Our next post will be about the beauty in tree bark.  And how important it is to get our children to touch the bark and actually see the beauty in a living thing different from themselves.  A living 'other' important to their future wellbeing.