Governance 2.0 definition of mental illness

Science evolves too fast for tribal beliefs such as mental illness to keep pace.

What if we could rebuild our society in a way that works for everyone? Epochal changes are now underway that are radically transforming how society operates.
Johann will describe this revolution, and how it will create vast new economic opportunities and unprecedented social freedom.

Johann Gevers is Co-Founder and CEO of Monetas in Zug. Monetas is building the world’s first universal transaction platform—an essential infrastructure for the society of the future. Johann’s lifelong driving passion is to help create a better life and world for everyone, through personal, organizational, and social transformation. It has inspired him to develop a pioneering new legal system for a free society, based on a new Golden Rule. His thirty-year journey searching for better methods and tools—and for freedom and joy for humanity—has profoundly enriched his and others’ lives.

New social systems in the internet age will outgrow this somewhat medieval behaviour for two reasons:

Decentralization works better. In his talk The Four Pillars of a Decentralized Society, Johann Gevers makes the case that we have been on a trajectory towards increased decentralization for thousands of years. We have gradually come to rely on economic principles that scale beyond tribal instincts such as the belief in heathens or mental illness. So, it might seem like superstitions such as ADHD or autism are pre-posterous, but they are less so than what came before (hysteria, homosexuality as a disease, etc)

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity or principles of uncertainty, phenomena that determine the course of our lives. These forces begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives are not our own — we are bound to others — and through each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future.

 

Mental illness is coerced contractual agreements

It’s fight and flight from coercion. What DSM diagnoses is individuals who rightfully try and either fight, or flee, from other individuals who try to coerce them. The problem is that in the eyes of the law, they’ve signed contracts, and their attempts to fight or flee are therefore seen as illegitimate by their peers. But the so called social contract that is nation-state citizenship is, to begin with, coerced upon each human being as they’re registered at birth like animals, without being asked to consent to the contractual agreements that are signed between the individual and their nation-state. There is no consent to begin with. And any contractual agreement that happens on top of a nation-state citizenship is per extension not voluntary either. Thence, it is only natural that people try and escape or fight the constant coercion that they face as citizens under a coercive state.

In that sense, we are all pre-programmed with a form of mental illness from the point we’re registered as citizens, a neurosis that Deleuze and Guattari saw as the origin of all other mental illnesses.

Humans have not always lived under conditions where their peers were more loyal to a nation-state then to them. The word legal derives from loyal, and the human brain is designed to select peers that are loyal to the self, not to the super-organism of the state. Enforcing a set of laws on everyone, removing the ability to question it and to compete, claiming a monopoly on violence and governance, makes it impossible to be picky about loyalty and to form tribes based on shared values, and leads to all sorts of emergent phenomena. Humans in nation-state cultures face more coercion from those they identify with, than humans in hunter-gatherer tribes did, as they are forced to conform to a pre-written set of ideas, with little power to question the belief-system or to create a new one. The human brain did not evolve to deal with that amount of coercion from peers in one’s tribe, and that’s the systemic origin of the fight and flight symptoms and cultural schisms that we call mental illness.

This is not a new idea. There’s lots of consensus amongst psychologists that coercion is what causes say, a struggle to pay attention to something that the law coerces someone to be mediated by. It’s not a controversial idea. What I emphasize here is the idea that psychologists should focus more on legal mediation when they study human behaviours. We are mediated beings and coercion causes us to behave in all sorts of strange ways, and as it stands, what DSM currently diagnoses, ADHD, autism, bipolarity, schizophrenia — those are all mediated behaviours. For example, ADHD is the human brain in conflict with a legal system that tries to coerce it into something it has not accepted or agreed upon. As Leon Eisenberg said, ADHD is a fictitious disease, and it’s morally, ethically, and scientifically wrong to pretend otherwise. >> https://ieet.org