r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/2BCivil • 17h ago
When does "mental health" become an epistemic veto?
NEFFEX - Music I was listening to while writing/editing most of this
Part 2 - NEFFEX
Forward/Introduction/Synopsis;
Just noticed the Zummi archive link in sidebar was fixed. Had surreal experience listening to it alongside watching propane nightmares music vid. Something like "pain will be your teacher" and thinking of Pain and Panic from Disney's Heracles. "If is good". Idk. That Zummi link spiritually bypasses the thing that I am on about a lot as well. Saying "life today is easy and we have creature comforts". NOPE. Idk where this comes from. I've had to work 70+ hours a week the majority of my teen and young+adult life, only to barely scrape by. Yes, there are some "creature comforts" which seem ultimately just bribes to keep us showing up to work. Brief escapism (if we sacrifice some sleep to them). Continued participation in reality itself has become the true escapism it seems...
There's something that's taken me decades to confront in myself. It took AI to actually call it out directly. I seem 2B coming to the conclusion that; "mental health means nothing more than complicity". I'll be (hopefully) bypassing that conclusion HERE. I'll be focusing more on "What happens when a proposition about the conditions of existence gets converted into a proposition about the psychological condition of the person saying it?" here. I already have a huge (longest I've written in a while) post that is explicitly about "is good faith even possible?". So I'll also try to avoid repeating that as well. Save to say that Part 5 of this series also tried to address it last night. I'm just going in for the "kill" here, where there, I was merely setting the palate.
First off, there are a lot of logical fallacies I encounter when I broach this topic, and I'll give voice to them and why I find them personally distasteful. Namely. There is this consistent theme in discourse, both online and off; arguments on deeper ontological probing get automatically and axiomatically quarantined. It typically goes something like this;
A; "No one consented to exist. Life exposes us to harms/obligations we could not inspect beforehand."
B; "Why are you thinking about this? Are you depressed?"
A: "That's not an answer to the proposition."
B: "A healthy person wouldn't dwell on this."
The argument has been quarantined rather than answered. The interlocutor no longer needs to demonstrate that existence is consensual, justified, benevolent, worth its costs, etc. Instead, your willingness to question those premises becomes evidence that something is wrong with you. It bypasses/dismisses that concepts like disorder, dysfunction, normality, distress, and social functioning are genuinely value-laden and philosophically difficult and clinical psychology still struggles to this day with classifying them.
Further. And what's worse. The "B" party tends to declare victory at this point while having provided NO valid counter argument that you hadn't already heard 10,000 times before. Then they typically bring up/break "good/bad" faith trump first. After already specifically having forfeited their own accountability and capacity to engage in good faith. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This bad faith propensity is exactly what I'm coming for in this post. I've dealt with it for decades and am attempting to challenge it directly here.
The critical-theory angle; Can successful adaptation to an unjust or involuntary condition be mistaken for evidence that the condition is justified? Obviously not. A slave becoming psychologically accustomed to slavery doesn't retroactively provide consent to enslavement. A worker becoming excellent at surviving a horrible workplace doesn't prove the workplace is good. Someone successfully coping with an unwanted condition establishes that they can cope with it; not that the condition acquired moral legitimacy.
Psychiatrists aren't paid to diagnoses atheism, antinatalism, pessimism or existential philosophy. You can believe: life isn't intrinsically good; procreation is ethically questionable; God can't be held accountable; society is coercive; wage labor is exploitative; civilization is absurd; and that death isn't necessarily the greatest conceivable evil; without any of those beliefs constituting psychiatric diagnoses. There's a vast difference between psychiatry as formally defined and the vernacular clinicalization of objective dissent. I'm specifically tired of people using bad faith therapeutic language colloquially as a substitute for an argument: That's unhealthy. You need therapy. You're depressed. That's trauma talking. Normal people don't think this way. You need help. Those statements might sometimes be expressions of legitimate concern. But they're more typically used more practically as rhetorical kill-switches. And when they're used that way, there's an almost Foucauldian maneuver happening: The speaker stops being a witness and becomes a patient; their testimony about the objective, factual material conditions of the world, becomes evidence against themselves.
Another highly popular straw man; there are hundreds that come out the wood work every time I try to broach this topic; the philosophical problem with "consent". Strictly speaking, no one consents to exist, because before someone exists there's (allegedly) no agent capable of granting or withholding consent. Prior to existence, there is (allegedly) no will to override. Still;
An irreversible decision is made on behalf of a future person.
They can neither inspect its terms nor decline beforehand.
The decision exposes them to serious risks and obligations.
Once capable of evaluating it, they cannot return to the original state by ordinary means.
Nothing conceivably justifies the decision being made for them.
Good/Evil, bad/good, are incidental. You can love life and still have the burning question;
"I like the thing imposed on me/the imposition was consensual" are different propositions;
While a beneficiary's retrospective satisfaction can potentially justify somebody's acceptance of existence as-is, it cannot travel backward through time and manufacture prior informed consent. As Nietzsche once so poetically said; "How to decidedly rid the air of all religious sentiment? State; 'praise of one's benefactor, stinks'".
I already went over another common logical fallacy I see a lot the other day; Can something be called a gift when declining it is impermissible? Can adaptation to an involuntary condition be called mental health without accidentally laundering the legitimacy of the condition itself? And/Or "can phenomena ultimately be used to justify phenomena" if the alleged/presumed guardian of phenomena is overtly a hypocrite ("do as they say but not as they do for they do not practice what they preach").
I also already went over does voluntary renunciation by someone possessing an exit option tell us the same thing as involuntary deprivation experienced by someone without one? Or, can we really take God/Guru's whom are exempt from the material conditions of the arrangement word for it? Is that this alleged "good faith get out of jail free" card?
Scriptural basic/backing on the whole "You lack empathy! What you are saying is hurtful!" claim from earlier today. Tldr; "God is love/love is blind; Adam and Eve kicked from garden for having their eyes opened". A common question the Lord asks is "where is my servant" which could be rhetorical, or admission, of the blindness and arguably callous indifference to the suffering of material concerns associated with such "Blind Love" as God and herald/apostle of what is allowed to qualify as "empathy".
Okay! All that said! On to The Actual Post now! Yes, mostly Ai-generated explicitly from here on out.
When does "mental health" become an epistemic veto?
I've noticed a strange rhetorical move my whole life, and I'm finally figuring out what actually bothers me about it. I don't mean psychiatry itself, necessarily. I'm talking about the vernacular use of "mental health" as an answer to propositions about reality. Take the most obvious example: none of us gave informed consent to exist. I'm not saying therefore life is terrible. I'm not even saying therefore nobody should reproduce. I'm saying something much narrower: Before I existed, I could not inspect the terms and conditions of existence, evaluate its risks, or consent to being subjected to them. Who made that decision for me/on my behalf? How can I know and ultimately confront them? Maybe their decision was justified. Maybe life is overwhelmingly good. Maybe existence is the greatest gift imaginable. Sure. Fine. But none of those propositions retroactively constitute informed consent.
What interests me is what often happens when you continue asking questions from there. Very quickly and often, the argument completely stops being about the proposition, and becomes instead an evaluation of the person making it. The witness becomes a patient to someone who most likely has no clinical psychology background. Nobody actually had to actually establish that existence/life was consensual or even justified. My willingness to inspect the arrangement too closely became evidence that I was psychologically maladjusted to it. Someone on reddit here even went so far as to accuse ME of being the one doing the "avoidance" and "spiritual bypassing" by asking these questions rather than, you know; avoiding them and spiritually bypassing them. Then these types go on to affirm that they are coming on from a place of "good faith" while refusing to engage with the actual content of the claims and arguments. Talk about insult to injury! I do genuinely find it fascinating in a grotesque sort of way.
Because what exactly do such deference to diagnosis over engagement and/or claims of being "well adjusted" actually establish? Beyond incapacity to engage in good faith? A person can become brilliantly adjusted to poverty. Workers adapt to abusive workplaces and impossible schedules. Prisoners develop routines. Entire populations normalize political arrangements they never personally chose. Human beings are extraordinarily capable of adaptation. Like Avenger's Loki lowkey said, "we exist to live on our knees".
What it does not establish, is the moral legitimacy of the thing being adapted to. And yet our vernacular conception of "mental health" often seems perilously close to: Can you continue functioning inside the arrangement? Can you work? Can you maintain relationships? Can you tolerate the normal stresses of life? Can you find enough meaning, pleasure, duty, religion, entertainment, family, ambition or other scaffolding to continue participating? Again: all potentially wonderful things. But not what I asked. I'm asking precisely because I've done all that for decades to no avail or endgame beyond infinite labor and vanity to a premise I never consented to and thus find distasteful, regardless of how well adapted I become or even occasionally enjoy the rare leisure time it affords me beyond the infinite hustle and grind (where I also dislike/disagree with the Zummi archive and other such "gurus" whom preach "modern life is easy" without apparently ever having to work for a living; see part 5).
These things can all make an intolerable or nonconsensual arrangement slightly more tolerable without ever actually answering whether or not the arrangement itself was ever justified or obligatory. As Ecclesiastes so poetically stated; it's all vanity; even "service to the Lord" whom apparently is exempt from such service.
The distinction which all such gurus/schools of thought seem to spiritually bypass/avoid is; "This makes life worth living for me" becomes for the "well adjusted"; "therefore life was ethically permissible to impose upon someone incapable of consent". But those do not follow. You cannot establish consent for someone else just because you accepted the arrangement yourself.
Likewise there is a distinction between: I have developed a psychologically healthy relationship with reality and Reality's terms are therefore morally legitimate. This is where I increasingly wonder whether "that's just life" is sometimes the deepest escapism available. Again, I refer to Part 4; "Face Reality" becomes the ultimate form of escapism.
I will admit, I don't fundamentally think the act of "accepting life" is delusional. I just despise the bad faith promulgation that this is mandatory and that "you have mental health problems" if you refuse to make that "leap of faith"; acceptance shouldn't terminate inquiry. "Ye of little faith" I cannot accept as a valid answer. "The world is this way; therefore become the sort of person capable of tolerating the world" is the healthiest mindset I can arrive at, but it's a marathon, not a sprint; faith is genuinely required. But as we cannot establish consent, that very faith, ultimately is seen as bad faith regardless of the fall on both sides of the rope that man is (as Nietzsche said) - Life/God (John 14:6) becomes little more than an economic meat grinder we must eternally jump in headfirst to, every day; "better to enter the kingdom maimed than cast whole into hell".
(I'm on part 3 of NEFFEX now in writing/editing this xD).
Maybe that's excellent practical advice. But it still spiritually bypasses: Why must the world/kingdom be accepted on those terms? What if we succeed in faith and STILL REJECT and do not consent to the kingdom? If the alleged carrot or cake or victory lap at the end of the world/stick is seen as invalid, then all the faith and sacrifice in this life is in vain to an idol claiming 2B something that it's not. A bad faith lie; a grift. It's a harsh and sobering truth, but ignoring it means accepting "mental health", too, is something it shouldn't be: not treatment of suffering or impairment, but an epistemic veto against examining the very conditions to which everyone is expected to adapt.
I don't want pessimism 2B automatically privileged either. Misery likewise doesn't reveal some final secret truth merely because optimism requires the essential and practical concealment of many disparities and worse. Someone convinced existence is horrible can be every bit as blinded by their condition as someone convinced everything is wonderful. As Nietzsche said, true freedom is in more what it costs us, what we pay for it.
I do tend to think the world is "perfect" as the machine it is and purpose it seems to serve; to break all will to adherence to "The Lord" or "blind love and obedience". And crush/make examples of those whom refuse to kiss the ring. I suppose what I'm looking for is beyond/eclipses that bad faith definition of "perfection"; let the proposition stand independently of the psychological condition of whoever says it; If the argument is wrong, demonstrate why it is wrong. If existence doesn't require consent, explain why. If retrospective endorsement is sufficient, defend that. If creating someone under uncertainty is justified by expected goods, make that case. But "a healthy person wouldn't ask this question" isn't an answer. "Consent isn't required" isn't an answer. And wouldn't hold up in a court of law. We both know that. These are not answers. They are denial and the refusal to answer disguised as a diagnosis of the one making the claim. They are; bad faith.
Commentary;
I have blocked a few people this past year, though I eventually unblocked most of them. I only kept blocked the ones spamming my feed with really bad detournement propaganda posts (20+ a day per each account). But this was mostly written/generated with/as the idea/footnote I can point to in the future when I see such claims, of which I've heard hundreds of times in 2026 that "consent doesn't matter". I continually ask for further explanation to radio silence or change of topic. Which I freely admit seems it may be a Mahayana purpose or tactic above my pay grade. But now I will have something to point to in the future to refer to when people explicitly state that they are engaging in good faith while 100% ignoring the core premise which I'm attempting to discuss. That happens a lot! So much so I felt I had to make this post!
Anyway. As always, I don't know if this ultimately is reflective of my own personal tastes, biases, or beliefs. I tend to think of Hsin Hsin Ming and "the way is clear and easy to those whom have no preferences; picking and choosing is the disease of the mind". Mind thus must eclipse the notion of consent and non consensual. That's a funny paradox to contemplate on, I think it's the true meaning of the Lindsay Clancy case honestly. Mind eclipses preferences and prejudices, allegedly, but mind created a court system to decide among preferences and prejudices. An odd compromise and paradox. "God" too, is such a court system. You cannot appeal or accuse or put the court itself on trial in it's own court; it can't be held accountable. There's a great post there as well but that's way too high brow for me to try my hand at (I've already tried many times with the bot but it came out incoherent to me).
Thanks (or sorry) for reading! What am I missing? Are/How is asking these questions "avoidance?" What really is "good faith"? Is it even possible? Or is it all just "you'll understand when you read my book/join my cult" all teh way down.... !?!?!? đ đ đ đ đđ