(02/24/2022) Why is the world looking more and more like the paranoid delusions of 19th century mental patients? Why do political systems of disparate ideologies converge on the same nightmarish outcomes, always accompanied by cheerful rhetoric about the scientific perfection of society? Is it easy to distinguish the philosophy of Descartes from the ramblings of a psychotic? This episode is a mashup of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examining the brain science of authoritarian high modernism, the ideology Scott describes as uniting Lenin with Le Corbusier. From the clearcut to the resettlement camp to the factory farm, from the sterile visions of the urban planner to the disembodied eye which frequently appears in the drawings of psychotics, let us examine the nightmare world we inhabit: the world of the left brain hemisphere trapped in itself...
Bibliography for episode 44:
Black Elk. (1932) Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, As told through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow). University of Nebraska Press.
Drexler, D. (2005) Technophobic Delusions in Schizophrenia: The Eruption of Schizoid Thought into Consensus Reality. Out of Control #1. https://ce399.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/technophobic-delusions-in-schizophrenia-the-intrusion-of-schizoid-thought-into-the-consensus-reality/
McGilchrist, I. (2009) The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.
Scott, J. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
