The lowest average mental health scores came from the English-speaking world

Eight out of 10 of the countries with the lowest average MHQ scores were from the region the report calls the Core Anglosphere. From the worst reported mental health to the best, the list includes; South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, India, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.

In contrast, most of the highest-ranking average mental health scores came from Latin America, Spain, and a few French-speaking countries in Europe and Africa.

National economic indicators of prosperity, like high GDP per capita, turned out to be correlated with lower average mental health scores for the surveyed populations, much to the researchers' surprise.

"This belies the commonly held belief that national economic prosperity translates to greater social wellbeing, where these correlations would be expected to be positive and not significantly negative," the report reads.

The authors also considered how cultural values vary between countries. Populations that reported prioritizing work performance and individualism in surveys for the separate GLOBE Project tended to score lower on the mental health quotient, indicating some distress.

Andrea Michelson

Foucault rejects any approach to Nazism as an abominable exception to the Western political tradition and instead treats it as a ‘demonic’ synthesis of sovereign and biopolitical techniques of government already operative in Western societies (Foucault, 1988b: 71). The idea of racism permits him to interpret the continuing recourse to and even intensification of state violence in the age of biopower that should apparently diminish along with the decline of the logic of sovereignty. The biopolitical logic of racism not only permits sovereign violence to survive in the climate hostile to it, but fortifies this violence by investing it with a wholly new function, no longer negative and repressive but rather oriented toward the preservation and improvement of the life of some races by annihilating the lives of the others, which pose a threat to it. [Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races or to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known as races. [Secondly], its role is to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: ‘the very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more’. The enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or 11 internal, to the population and for the population. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. Once the state functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state. (Foucault, 2003: 255-256) It is no longer a matter of what Foucault calls ‘traditional racism’ (ibid.: 258) that consists in mere animosity between different groups that plays no positive function in the ordering of a society. Nor is biopolitical racism merely a matter of a façade that conceals the immanent social antagonism by displacing it onto the external enemy defined in racial terms – a quasi-Marxist account of racism that Foucault deems superficial. Instead, it is a matter of the transformation in the technology of power that is more fundamental than any ideological shift: racism is what permits the state to exercise its sovereignty by enfolding it in the biopolitical context, in which killing is only legitimate when it serves to enhance the survival and health of one’s own race. Thus, the indistinction between the biopolitical preoccupation with fostering life and the thanatopolitical drive for annihilation that we observe in Nazism stops being paradoxical and is graspable as an expression of the logic of racism, according to which the life of any race is fostered by its purification from other races, which ‘implies both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice’ (Foucault, 1990: 149-150). Yet, while this account of racism is quite plausible in the case of Nazism, to what extent can it be used for understanding Soviet socialism? In the final lectures of ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Foucault goes beyond his above-discussed empirical claims about the reliance of socialist governmentality on the techniques developed during the rise of bio-power in 18th and 19th century 12 Europe. Socialism is now also racist in the much more fundamental sense: ‘Socialism was a racism from the outset, even in the nineteenth century. No matter whether it was Fourier at the beginning of the century or the anarchists at the end of it, you will always find a racist component in socialism.’ (Foucault, 2003: 261) This is the case for two reasons. Firstly, socialism has ‘made no critique of the theme of biopower’ and instead has taken over ‘wholesale’ the fundamental idea of modern biopolitics ‘that the essential function of society or the State is to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature, to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities’ (ibid.: 261). This means that as soon as a socialist state comes to existence, it is a state ‘which must exercise the right to kill or the right to eliminate, or the right to disqualify’, [hence] ‘racism is fully operational in the way socialist states (of the Soviet Union type) deal with the mentally ill, criminals, political adversaries, and so on’ (ibid.: 262). Secondly, socialism is racist due to its emphasis on class struggle and the physical confrontation with the enemy, racism being the ‘only way in which socialist thought, which is after all very much bound up with the themes of biopower, can rationalize the murder of its enemies. When it is simply a matter of eliminating an adversary in economic terms, or of taking away his privileges, there is no need for racism. Once it is a matter of coming to terms with the thought of a one-on-one encounter with the adversary, and with the need to fight him physically, to risk one’s own life and to try to kill him, there is a need for racism.’ (Ibid.: 262) While in the late 19th century French context racism primarily characterized non-Marxist versions of socialism (Blanquism, anarchism, etc.) rather than strictly Marxist ones (both reformist and revolutionary), in the 20th century it pertains primarily to the Soviet type of socialism, including the Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR.

Sergei Prozorov

''Deadened inside, we call the world itself dead, then surround ourselves with the bodies of those we’ve killed. We set up cityscapes where we see no free and wild beings. We see concrete, steel, asphalt. Even the trees in cities are in cages. Everything mirrors our own confinement. Everything mirrors our own internal deadness''.

Jensen

"That’s also one of the reasons this culture must kill all non-civilized peoples, both human and nonhuman: in order to preclude the possibility of our escape''.

Jensen

“History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. The lofty origin is no more than ‘a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of birth’ (Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow). We tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator or in the shadowless light of a first morning. The origin always precedes the Fall. It comes before the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony. But historical beginnings are lowly [Mais le commencement historique est bas]: not in the sense of modest or discreet like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation. ‘We wished to awaken the feeling of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance’ (Nietzsche, The Dawn). Man originated with a grimace over his future development”.

Foucault

Freedland/Phillips

Under Stalin, the Soviet state's approach to dealing with citizens disabled during the war was guided by two main ideas. First, it was thought imperative to provide adequate support to "war invalids," in part to placate them and prevent them from rebelling against the government, as had disabled veterans of the war of 1812. Indeed, the Second World War-wounded returning from the front sometimes were called "neo-Decembrists," in reference to the Decembrist uprising of 1826 (Tchueva 2008:96). At the same time, however, in Stalin's trend of silencing or denying any negative aspects of the Second World War, images of "war invalids" were excluded from the official interpretations of the war experience and representations of post-war life. The war wounded — many of them amputees in wheelchairs, who colloquially were called "samovars" (Gudkov 2005:4) explains that they seemed like "human stumps on little wheels") — were a grim and "superfluous" reminder to the populace of the inhumane traumas of war:

The invalids in the post-war period...were left to the mercy of fate, people were ashamed of them, turned away from them, hid them with an unpleasant feeling of guilt and a sense of the ugliness of life — everything was done to keep them out of the official gala picture of peace-time life. (Gudkov 2005:4)

This dual approach to addressing disability — the provision of state support for the material needs of people with disabilities, but within a culture of stigma and social isolation — was to characterize Soviet disability policy throughout most of the 20th century. Because the problems of "war invalids" was a taboo subject, official statistics were scant, and existing Soviet-era statistics are highly questionable.

Sarah D. Phillips




Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming … when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's Untermenschen in German.

I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

According to Dennis Sewell, whose book The Political Gene charts the impact of Darwinian ideas on politics, the eugenics movement's definition of "unfit" was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held, he writes, "that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class." It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor.

Hence the enthusiasm of John Maynard Keynes, director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, for contraception, essential because the working class was too "drunken and ignorant" to keep its numbers down.

Jonathan Freedland

ANW

 ‘Creativity’ is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the ’many’ which it unifies. Thus ‘creativity’ introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the [32] universe disjunctively. The ‘creative advance’ is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. ‘Together’ is a generic term covering the various special ways in which various sorts of entities are ‘together’ in any one actual occasion. Thus ‘together’ presupposes the notions ‘creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one,’ ‘identity’ and ‘diversity.’ The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one,  and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle's category of ‘primary substance.’ Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence.’ These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and of ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition'.

ANW

 Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world.

Ernest Becker

“The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.”

William Faulkner

It should be self-evident that something is wrong when a society is so unequal as to teach some of its members that life consists of menace and that they are fundamentally helpless; it should be self-evident that something is wrong when a society is so unequal as to teach some of its members that life consists of menace and that they are fundamentally helpless; the incidences of anxiety and depression soar among the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

Robert Sapolsky

''What is so absolute about the new type of evil at Auschwitz is, for Arendt, that it is seemingly not done from any “humanly comprehensible motive[s]”.6 It is a type of evil that goes radically beyond the Kantian categorical imperative, which forbids us to treat persons solely as means rather than as ends-in-themselves. If a person is treated as a means, this at least implies that the person is considered to have some utility or value, namely that of achieving an end. But radical evil is absolute evil because it takes this to its absolute extreme; concentration camp inmates are treated not as persons, nor even as things or means, worthy of achieving a particular end, but as intrinsically valueless, as completely useless and thus as totally superfluous. Arendt argues that radical evil is perpetrated through a three step process. The first essential step in this process is the killing of the juridical person. This involves removing all of a person’s legal rights as a citizen, that is, removing a person’s ‘right to have rights’ before the law. 7 As far as the law is concerned such superfluous people simply do not exist. Concentration camps serve this end practically by creating an environment where any pretext to having rights is completely abolished. Thus it is essential that people are not incarcerated in the concentration camps for any legal reason, that is, they cannot be thought of as criminals, as this would imply that they had some legal standing.8 This results in a system of arbitrary detention which forms an integral part of the totalising domination that a totalitarian system seeks to impose on its entire populace. Secondly, the moral person is killed, and this is achieved by removing the very possibility of making moral choices. The moral person presupposes the freedom to choose between doing good or evil, but in a totalitarian regime this freedom is removed through the elimination of good as a possible choice. For example, when a person is “faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children…to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family”,9 the very possibility of choosing good is removed. Further, the traditional outlet of martyrdom, by which the moral person could defy evil, is also removed by making death itself completely anonymous, thereby robbing it of all testimony, grief and remembrance.10 As such, “martyrdom...[becomes] impossible”.11 Thus the one thing a person alone truly possesses, their own death, is stolen from them, thereby proving the totalitarian regime’s assertion that nothing really belonged to them and that they belonged to no one. It is as if they had never really existed at all. Finally, in order to complete the process of radical evil any remaining trace of uniqueness, individuality and spontaneity must be totally removed. Spontaneity is for Arendt the mere possibility of doing something that cannot be simply and completely explained on the basis of reactions to the environment and preceding events. For Kant, spontaneity is a transcendental condition of our very humanity, for without it there can be no rationality and no freedom. However, for Arendt what the Nazi death camps expose is how human spontaneity can be undermined by the phenomenon of totalitarianism.12 The case of the so called Muselmänner in the Nazi death camps illustrate this point all too well.13 A person’s spontaneity has been removed when they have been reduced to a bundle of reactions, which “can be exchanged at random for any other”,14 as they are all identically valueless, and so perfectly replaceable. Hence, radical evil, by literally destroying spontaneity, also destroys the very essence of humanity, and thereby seeks to make humanity itself absolutely superfluous. Thus far I have only described Arendt’s definition of what radical evil is and explored an analysis of how it arises; we are now in the position to explore why it is perpetrated. This question is particularly difficult since it appears as if the concentration camps themselves had neither economic nor military utility. But, as Arendt explains: “the uselessness of the camps...is only apparent. In reality they are more essential to the preservation of the regime’s power than any other of its institutions”.15 In other words, while the concentration camps seek to make the human essence absolutely superfluous, as an institution of radical evil, the concentration camps are themselves anything but superfluous to totalitarianism. Indeed, they are the very “laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism, that everything is possible, is being verified”. 16 As such, they are “essential to the preservation of the regime’s power”.17 This is because totalitarianism, which seeks ‘total power’ and domination, can only achieve and safeguard its goal in a world organised in such a way so as to be void of spontaneity and plurality. In contrast, despotic regimes aim only to limit freedom, and thus their power is likewise limited. But totalitarianism aims to abolish freedom, by eliminating human spontaneity and plurality, and thus its power knows no limits – for the totalitarian state everything is possible, not just, as it is for the nihilist, permitted''.

Formosa

 “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

James Baldwin

Wilkinson

"Over the Auschwitz album, like a gloss, clings a sense of a prideful observance of manners and customs, a tranquil and purified world, a shared purpose, a satisfaction in uniforms, boots, and accordions. Lives so exalted required trips to the hills, shotguns and game hunting, companionable dogs, wine, and the presence of young women. “That S.S. officers went on vacation didn’t take us by surprise,” Judith Cohen says. “What surprised us was that Auschwitz wasn’t only a place to imprison men and women and kill European Jews; it was also a place to have fun.”

The album’s effect is discordant. The people it depicts are engaged in the greatest mass murder ever committed, yet its principal impression is of pleasure; nor do the people portrayed look like villains. “They haven’t got red eyes and horns,” Erbelding says. “They don’t look like people you would dislike.” What they have done is not written on their faces, but, even so, their faces are not especially sympathetic. They are the faces of hard men, who give the impression of being restricted in their capacities, their ranges of feeling. Hoecker’s is the stray face among them which seems now and then to reflect charm, courtesy, and fellow-feeling. In many of the photographs, he assumes what seems to be a characteristic posture—passive, recessive, placid, as if requiring an invitation to join the officers who outrank him. At a hearing related to the Auschwitz trials, a doctor who worked at the camp recalled Hoecker’s presence but not his name. “Adjutant was a quiet and solitary man, modest,” he said. “I never saw him among his comrades except at meals, but there also he sat by himself.”

Several people at the museum told me that the strangest thing about the album for them is that a person can look again and again at the images and never find an answer to the question “How could you have done what you did?” One thing that is particularly troubling is the presence of so many doctors and the pseudoscientific legitimacy that their participation lent to the selection process. I showed the album to Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist and author of “The Nazi Doctors” (1986). Alcohol, Lifton told me, is what made it possible for many of the doctors to persevere when killing was substituted for the imperative to heal, or at least to do no harm. “What the doctors found there was overwhelming,” Lifton said, “even to Nazis who had seen things before. It was staggering. The doctors would have symptoms like post-traumatic symptoms; they would have bad dreams, they would be upset, sometimes they would say, ‘We shouldn’t be part of this,’ but they would often say this while drinking. They would be taken into the hands of experienced doctors there, almost as a therapeutic response, who would say, ‘Look, we didn’t create this. We have to do what we do, and perhaps save some lives.’ The experienced doctor would go with the new one to his first or second selection, and help him, as a matter of therapy—a socialization to evil. One has to be in some way in synch with one’s environment to work. And if the environment is evil the principle holds, even though the adaptation may be more difficult."

Alec Wilkinson

"When you take a classical distinction of the political-philosophical tradition such as public/private, then I find it much less interesting to insist on the distinction and to bemoan the diminution of one of the terms, than to question the interweaving. I want to understand how the system operates. And the system is always double; it works always by means of opposition. Not only as private/public, but also the house and the city, the exception and the rule, to reign and to govern, etc. But in order to understand what is really at stake here, we must learn to see these oppositions not as “di-chotomies” but as “di-polarities,” not substantial, but tensional. I mean that we need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances. The polarity is present and acts at each point of the field. Then you may suddenly have zones of indecidability or in-difference. The state of exception is one of those zones''.

Giorgio Agamben

https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/4/3/567/646395

If Agamben (2010) warns us of the importance of recognizing the field - in this case, the concentration camp as an analogy for the current wide and diversified segregation processes - through all its metamorphoses, we can see the coexistence of two states in the Western metropolises: one, formal legal for rights holders who are included in the consumer market; and another, militarized and generating a type of purifying violence against the unwanted other, represented by “[…] needy and excluded bodies” (Agamben, 2010, p. 173). The deaths resulting in these territories...tributary to techniques and procedures dating from the military period, materialize the idea of ‘naked life’ mentioned by Agamben (2010). In this way, a qualitative cutoff operates between “[…] the life worth living […]” and “[…] the life that does not deserve to be lived” (Agamben, 2010, p. 133) exposing a fracture in the social body whose suture seems impossible. Therefore, everything comes as if what we call the people were, in reality, not a unitary subject, but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the People as an integral political body, on the other, the people subset as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; there, an inclusion that is intended without noise, here, an exclusion that is known without hope; at one extreme, the total state of the integrated and sovereign citizen, at the other, the scum [...] the wretched, the oppressed, the defeated. A single and compact referent of the term ‘people’ does not exist anywhere in this sense (Agamben, 2010, p. 173, author’s emphasis).

Tatiane de Andrade and Marcio de Souza Castilho4

I am convinced that we can break out of our partitioned narratives, that we can look at and listen to and learn from our doubles, even the ones we most reject.

Naomi Klein

"That sentence—“exterminate all the brutes”—is the murderous annihilatory impulse to pursue one’s interests at all costs. It is the supremacist mindset that casts the extinguishments of entire peoples and cultures not merely as an unavoidable element of the march of progress but also as a salutary stage in the evolution of the human species. “And if the inferior race must perish, it is a gain, a step toward the perfecting of society which is the aim of progress,” Mr. Travers explains in Conrad’s novel The Rescue, a distillation of the mindset that drowned whole continents in blood, and that was certainly at work here in Canada, in its so-called schools for indigenous children with their secret cemeteries. Within this mindset, genocide is not a crime; it’s merely a difficult but necessary stage, one blessed (for the believers) by God or (for the rationalists) by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” A “great replacement” theory if ever there was one. What I did not expect was to discover that Peck’s opus was a doppelganger story. His thesis is that the dominant story we tell about Hitler and the Holocaust—which treats that frenzy of death as so extreme that it is without historical precedents or antecedents—is flat wrong. Peck argues instead that the Holocaust was an intensified and compacted expression of the very same violent colonial ideology that ravaged other continents at other times. The Nazis then applied that ideology within Europe itself. At the heart of Exterminate All the Brutes is the claim that Hitler—the twentieth century’s most despised villain, and rightly so—was not the civilized, democratic West’s evil “other,” but its shadow, its doppelganger. This draws on Lindqvist’s argument that the exterminatory mindset lies at “the core of European thought . . . summing up the history of our continent, our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust.” The story Peck and Lindqvist tell begins not in the Americas, but in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Spanish Inquisition and the burnings at the stake and the bloody expulsions of Jews and Muslims. Then it crosses the Atlantic and plays out on a vastly larger scale in the genocide of Native Americans, as well as the so-called Scramble for Africa, before looping back to Europe during the Holocaust. This challenges how the story of the Second World War is so often told: 4 as one of heroic anti-Fascist Allies united against the monstrous Nazis. Certainly, defeating Hitler and freeing the camps, however belatedly, was the most righteous victory of the modern age. Complicating this story is the fact that Hitler spoke and wrote extensively about the many ways in which he drew inspiration for his genocidal regime from British colonialism and from the various structures of racial hierarchy pioneered inside North America. For instance, in 1941, Hitler remarked, “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany. It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” He was speaking for propaganda purposes, but with an element of truth. Concentration camps had, in fact, been used in many colonial contexts—by the Spanish in Cuba; by German colonists in Southwest Africa, against the Herero and Nama people; by the British in what is now South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer War, with tens of thousands of captives dying in the disease-ridden enclosures. Before Hitler began casting the mass murder of genetic “inferiors” as an act of health care for the race, the British Royal Navy commander Bedford Pim explained to the Anthropological Society of London in 1866 that, when it comes to killing Indigenous peoples, there was “mercy in a massacre.” The influences were more recent and contemporary as well. When Hans Asperger and other doctors in Germany and Austria began deciding which disabled people would live and which were “unworthy of life,” they were heavily influenced by the United States, where the world’s first eugenics-based law to mandate involuntary sterilization was passed in Indiana in 1907 and soon spread to other states. Through laws like these, the U.S. eugenics movement had already provided a pseudoscientific rationale for the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of would-be parents whose genes were deemed threats to the overall pool—a project riddled with built-in biases about the relative intelligence of those of Anglo and Nordic stock. The Nazis took this precedent and radically expanded it, with an estimated 400,000 people sterilized during their rule, but their innovations in this realm were a matter of scale and speed, not kind. James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, published in 2017, documents many of the Nazis’ American debts in chilling detail. A professor of law at Yale University, 5 Whitman makes the case that the legal contortions the United States had developed to deny full citizenship rights based on race helped inspire the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which would legalize stripping German Jews of their citizenship and denying them political rights, while banning sex, marriage, and reproduction between Aryans and Jews (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor). They found templates for the new Jewish ghettos they created partly by studying the systems of legalized segregation developed under Jim Crow laws and those for Native reservations; South Africa’s apartheid system also provided key inspiration''.

Naomi Klein

"'Communicable diseases existed during humankind’s hunter-gatherer days, but the shift to agrarian life 10,000 years ago created communities that made epidemics more possible. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, smallpox and others first appeared during this period''.


"'Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women.''.

Hitler

"Nature looks on calmly and is even pleased with what happens. The struggle for...daily livelihood leaves behind, in the ruck, everything that is weak or diseased or wavering''.

Adolf Hitler

Davis

So much of writing about disability has focused on the disabled person as the object of study, just as the study of race has focused on  the  person  of  color.  But  as  with  recent  scholarship  on  race,  which  has  turned its attention to whiteness, I would like to focus not so much on the construction of disability as on the construction of normalcy. I do this because the “problem” is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the “problem” of the disabled person. A common assumption would be that some concept of the norm must have  always  existed.  After  all,  people  seem  to  have  an  inherent  desire  to  compare themselves to others. But the idea of a norm is less a condition of human nature than it is a feature of a certain kind of society. 

Lennard Davis

"If the concept of the norm or average enters European culture, or at least the European languages, only in the nineteenth century, one has to ask what is the cause of this conceptualization? One of the logical places to turn in trying to understand concepts like “norm” and “average” is that branch of knowledge known as statistics. It was the French statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1847) who contributed the most to a generalized notion of the normal as an imperative. He noticed that the “law of error,” used by astronomers to locate a star by plotting all the sightings and then averaging the errors, could be equally applied to the distribution of human features such as height and weight. He then took a further step of formulating the concept of “l’homme moyen” or the average man. Quetelet maintained that this abstract human was the average of all human attributes in a given country. Quetelet’s average man was a combination of l’homme moyen physique and l’homme moyen morale, both a physically average and a morally average construct. With such thinking, the average then becomes paradoxically a kind of ideal, a position devoutly to be wished. As Quetelet wrote, “an individual who epitomized in himself, at a given time, all the qualities of the average man, would represent at once all the greatness, beauty and goodness of that being” (cited in Porter 1986, 102). Furthermore, one must observe that Quetelet meant this hegemony of the middle to apply not only to moral qualities but to the body as well. He wrote: “deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted [for artists] ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution” (ibid., 103). Here Zeuxis’s notion of physical beauty as an exceptional ideal becomes transformed into beauty as the average. Quetelet foresaw a kind of utopia of the norm associated with progress, just as Marx foresaw a utopia of the norm in so far as wealth and production is concerned. Marx actually cites Quetelet’s notion of the average man in a discussion of the labor theory of value. The concept of a norm, unlike that of an ideal, implies that the majority of the population must or should somehow be part of the norm. The norm pins down that majority of the population that falls under the arch of the standard bell-shaped curve. This curve, the graph of an exponential function, that was known variously as the astronomer’s “error law,” the “normal distribution,” the “Gaussian density function,” or simply “the bell curve,” became in its own way a symbol of the tyranny of the norm. Any bell curve will always have at its extremities those characteristics that deviate from the norm. So, with the concept of the norm comes the concept of deviations or extremes. When we think of bodies, in a society where the concept of the norm is operative, then people with disabilities will be thought of as deviants. This, as we have seen, is in contrast to societies with the concept of an ideal, in which all people have a non-ideal status.2 In England, there was a burst of interest in statistics during the 1830s. A statistical office was set up at the Board of Trade in 1832, and the General Register Office was created in 1837 to collect vital statistics. The use of statistics began an important movement, and there is a telling connection for the purposes of this essay between the founders of statistics and their larger intentions. The rather amazing fact is that almost all the early statisticians had one thing in common: they were eugenicists. The same is true of key figures in the eugenics movement: Sir Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and R. A. Fisher.3 While this coincidence seems almost too striking to be true, we must remember that there is a real connection between figuring the statistical measure of humans and then hoping to improve humans so that deviations from the norm diminish. Statistics is bound up with eugenics because the central insight of statistics is the idea that a population can be normed. An important consequence of the idea of the norm is that it divides the total population into standard and nonstandard subpopulations. The next step in conceiving of the population as norm and non-norm is for the state to attempt to norm the nonstandard—the aim of eugenics. Of course such an activity is profoundly paradoxical since the inviolable rule of statistics is that all phenomena will always conform to a bell curve. So norming the non-normal is an activity as problematic as untying the Gordian knot. MacKenzie asserts that it is not so much that Galton’s statistics made possible eugenics but rather that “the needs of eugenics in large part determined the content of Galton’s statistical theory” (1981, 52). In any case, a symbiotic relationship exists between statistical science and eugenic concerns. Both bring into society the concept of a norm, particularly a normal body, and thus in effect create the concept of the disabled body. It is also worth noting the interesting triangulation of eugenicist interests. On the one hand Sir Francis Galton was cousin to Charles Darwin, whose notion of the evolutionary advantage of the fittest lays the foundation for eugenics and also for the idea of a perfectible body undergoing progressive improvement. As one scholar has put it, “Eugenics was in reality applied biology based on the central biological theory of the day, namely the Darwinian theory of evolution” (Farrall 1985, 55). Darwin’s ideas serve to place disabled people along the wayside as evolutionary defectives to be surpassed by natural selection. So, eugenics became obsessed with the elimination of “defectives,” a category which included the “feebleminded,” the deaf, the blind, the physically defective, and so on. In a related discourse, Galton created the modern system of fingerprinting for personal identification. Galton’s interest came out of a desire to show that certain physical traits could be inherited. As he wrote: one of the inducements to making these inquiries into personal identification has been to discover independent features suitable for hereditary investigation. . . . it is not improbable, and worth taking pains to inquire whether each person may not carry visibly about his body undeniable evidence of his parentage and near kinships. (cited in MacKenzie 1981, 65)

Lennard Davis

Galton made significant changes in statistical theory that created the concept of the norm. He took what had been called “error theory,” a technique by which astronomers attempted to show that one could locate a star by taking into account the variety of sightings. The sightings, all of which could not be correct, if plotted would fall into a bell curve, with most sightings falling into the center, that is to say, the correct location of the star. The errors would fall to the sides of the bell curve. Galton’s contribution to statistics was to change the name of the curve from “the law of frequency of error” or “error curve,” the term used by Quetelet, to the “normal distribution” curve. The significance of these changes relates directly to Galton’s eugenicist interests. In an “error curve” the extremes of the curve are the most mistaken in accuracy. But if one is looking at human traits, then the extremes, particularly what Galton saw as positive extremes—tallness, high intelligence, ambitiousness, strength, fertility—would have to be seen as errors. Rather than “errors” Galton wanted to think of the extremes as distributions of a trait. As MacKenzie notes: Thus there was a gradual transition from use of the term “probable error” to the term “standard deviation” (which is free of the implication that a deviation is in any sense an error), and from the term “law of error” to the term “normal distribution.” (1981, 59) But even without the idea of error, Galton still faced the problem that in a normal distribution curve that graphed height, for example, both tallness and shortness would be seen as extremes in a continuum where average stature would be the norm. The problem for Galton was that, given his desire to perfect the human race, or at least its British segment, tallness was preferable to shortness. How could both extremes be considered equally deviant from the norm? So Galton substituted the idea of ranking for the concept of averaging. That is, he changed the way one might look at the curve from one that used the mean to one that used the median—a significant change in thinking eugenically. If a trait, say intelligence, is considered by its average, then the majority of people would determine what intelligence should be—and intelligence would be defined by the mediocre middle. Galton, wanting to avoid the middling of desired traits, would prefer to think of intelligence in ranked order. Although high intelligence in a normal distribution would simply be an extreme, under a ranked system it would become the highest ranked trait. Galton divided his curve into quartiles, so that he was able to emphasize ranked orders of intelligence, as we would say that someone was in the first quartile in intelligence (low intelligence) or the fourth quartile (high intelligence). Galton’s work led directly to current “intelligence quotient” (IQ) and scholastic achievement tests. In fact, Galton revised Gauss’s bell curve to show the superiority of the desired trait (for example, high intelligence). He created what he called an “ogive,” which is arranged in quartiles with an ascending curve that features the desired trait as “higher” than the undesirable deviation. As Stigler notes: If a hundred individuals’ talents were ordered, each could be assigned the numerical value corresponding to its percentile in the curve of “deviations from an average”: the middlemost (or median) talent had value 0 (representing mediocrity), an individual at the upper quartile was assigned the value 1 (representing one probable error above mediocrity), and so on. (1986, 271) What these revisions by Galton signify is an attempt to redefine the concept of the “ideal” in relation to the general population. First, the application of the idea of a norm to the human body creates the idea of deviance or a “deviant” body. Second, the idea of a norm pushes the normal variation of the body through a stricter template guiding the way the body “should” be. Third, the revision of the “normal curve of distribution” into quartiles, ranked in order, and so on, creates a new kind of “ideal.” This statistical ideal is unlike the classical notion of the ideal, which contains no imperative that everyone should strive to be perfect. The new ideal of ranked order is powered by the imperative of the norm, and then is supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be. While we tend to associate eugenics with a Nazi-like racial supremacy, it is important to realize that eugenics was not the trade of a fringe group of right-wing, fascist maniacs. Rather, it became the common belief and practice of many, if not most, European and American citizens. When Marx used Quetelet’s idea of the average in his formulation of average wage and abstract labor, socialists as well as others embraced eugenic claims, seeing in the perfectibility of the human body a utopian hope for social and economic improvement. Once people allowed that there were norms and ranks in human physiology, then the idea that we might want to, for example, increase the intelligence of humans, or decrease birth defects, did not seem so farfetched. These ideas were widely influential and the influence of eugenicist ideas persisted well into the twentieth century, so that someone like Emma Goldman could write that unless birth control was encouraged, the state would “legally encourage the increase of paupers, syphilitics, epileptics, dipsomaniacs, cripples, criminals, and degenerates” (Kevles 1985, 90). One problem for people with disabilities was that eugenicists tended to group together all allegedly “undesirable” traits. So, for example, criminals, the poor, and people with disabilities might be mentioned in the same breath. Take Karl Pearson, a leading figure in the eugenics movement, who defined the “unfit” as follows: “the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess” (cited in Kevles 1985, 33). In 1911, Pearson headed the Department of Applied Statistics, which included Galton and the Biometric Laboratories at University College in London. This department gathered eugenic information on the inheritance of physical and mental traits including “scientific, commercial, and legal ability, but also hermaphroditism, hemophilia, cleft palate, harelip, tuberculosis, diabetes, deaf-mutism, polydactyly (more than five fingers) or brachydactyly (stub fingers), insanity, and mental deficiency” (ibid., 38–9). Here again one sees a strange selection of disabilities merged with other types of human variations. All of these deviations from the norm were regarded in the long run as contributing to the disease of the nation. As one official in the Eugenics Record Office asserted: . . . the only way to keep a nation strong mentally and physically is to see that each new generation is derived chiefly from the fitter members of the generation before. (ibid., 39–40) The emphasis on nation and national fitness obviously plays into the metaphor of the body. If individual citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the national body will not be fit. Of course, such arguments are based on a false idea of the body politic—by that notion a hunchbacked citizenry would make a hunchbacked nation. Nevertheless, the eugenic “logic” that individual variations would accumulate into a composite national identity was a powerful one. This belief combined with an industrial mentality that saw workers as interchangeable and therefore sought to create a universal worker whose physical characteristics would be uniform, as would the result of their labors—a uniform product. One of the central foci of eugenics was what was broadly called “feeblemindedness.”5 This term included low intelligence, mental illness, and even “pauperism,” since low income was equated with “relative inefficiency” (ibid., 46).6 Likewise, certain ethnic groups were associated with feeblemindedness and pauperism. Charles Davenport, an American eugenicist, thought that the influx of European immigrants would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature more given to crimes of larceny, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality” (cited in ibid., 48). In his research, Davenport scrutinized the records of “prisons, hospitals, almshouses, and institutions for the mentally deficient, the deaf, the blind, and the insane” (ibid., 55). The association between what we would now call disability and criminal activity, mental incompetence, sexual license, and so on established a legacy that people with disabilities are still having trouble living down. This equation was so strong that an American journalist writing in the early twentieth century could celebrate “the inspiring, the wonderful, message of the new heredity” as opposed to the sorrow of bearing children who were “diseased or crippled or depraved” (ibid., 67). The conflation of disability with depravity expressed itself in the formulation “defective class.” As the president of the University of Wisconsin declared after World War One, “we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation” (ibid., 68). And it must be reiterated that the eugenics movement was not stocked with eccentrics. Averell Harriman’s sister, Mary Harriman, as well as John D. Rockefeller, funded Davenport. Prime Ministers A. J. Balfour, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill, along with President Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, and John Maynard Keynes, among many others, were members of eugenicist organizations. Francis Galton was knighted in 1909 for his work, and in 1910 he received the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s highest honor. A Galton Society met regularly in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In 1911 the Oxford University Union moved approval of the main principles behind eugenics by a vote of almost two to one. In Kansas, the 1920 state fair held a contest for “fitter families” based on their eugenic family histories; a brochure for the contest noted about the awards, “this trophy and medal are worth more than livestock sweepstakes. . . . For health is wealth and a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human possessions” (ibid., 62). County fairs like these also administered intelligence tests, medical exams, and screened for venereal disease. In England, bills were introduced in Parliament to control mentally disabled people, and in 1933 the prestigious scientific magazine Nature approved the Nazis’ proposal of a bill for “the avoidance of inherited diseases in posterity” by sterilizing the disabled. The magazine editorial said “the Bill, as it reads, will command the appreciative attention of all who are interested in the controlled and deliberate improvement of human stock.” The list of disabilities for which sterilization would be appropriate were “congenital feeblemindedness, manic depressive insanity, schizophrenia, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary St Vitus’s dance, hereditary blindness and deafness, hereditary bodily malformation and habitual alcoholism” (cited in MacKenzie 1981, 44). We have largely forgotten that what Hitler did in developing a hideous policy of eugenics was just to implement the theories of the British and American eugenicists. Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf that “the struggle for the daily livelihood [between species] leaves behind, in the ruck, everything that is weak or diseased or wavering” (cited in Blacker 1952, 143) is not qualitatively different from any of the many similar statements we have seen before. And even the conclusions Hitler draws are not very different from those of the likes of Galton, Bell, and others. 

Lennard Davis

https://health.alaska.gov/gcdse/pages/history/html_content_main.aspx

Nevertheless, until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful day” of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.

Giorgio Agamben

Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient.

Michel Foucault 

"Therewith emerged a new sort of influence, i.e., media power, which, used for purposes of manipulation, once and for all took care of the innocence of the principle of publicity. The public sphere, simultaneously restructured and dominated by the mass media, developed into an arena infiltrated by power in which, by means of topic selection and topical contributions, a battle is fought not only over influence but over the control of communication flows that affect behavior while their strategic intentions are kept hidden as much as possible''.

Jurgen Habermas

 

Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty

Shaul Shalvi 1, Carsten K W De Dreu

Abstract

To protect and promote the well-being of others, humans may bend the truth and behave unethically. Here we link such tendencies to oxytocin, a neuropeptide known to promote affiliation and cooperation with others. Using a simple coin-toss prediction task in which participants could dishonestly report their performance levels to benefit their group's outcome, we tested the prediction that oxytocin increases group-serving dishonesty. A double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment allowing individuals to lie privately and anonymously to benefit themselves and fellow group members showed that healthy males (n = 60) receiving intranasal oxytocin, rather than placebo, lied more to benefit their group, and did so faster, yet did not necessarily do so because they expected reciprocal dishonesty from fellow group members. Treatment effects emerged when lying had financial consequences and money could be gained; when losses were at stake, individuals in placebo and oxytocin conditions lied to similar degrees. In a control condition (n = 60) in which dishonesty only benefited participants themselves, but not fellow group members, oxytocin did not influence lying. Together, these findings fit a functional perspective on morality revealing dishonesty to be plastic and rooted in evolved neurobiological circuitries, and align with work showing that oxytocin shifts the decision-maker's focus from self to group interests. These findings highlight the role of bonding and cooperation in shaping dishonesty, providing insight into when and why collaboration turns into corruption.

Oxytocin modulates the racial bias in neural responses to others' suffering

Feng Sheng 1, Yi Liu, Bin Zhou, Wen Zhou, Shihui Han

Abstract

The intergroup relationship between a perceiver and a target person influences empathic neural responses to others' suffering, which are increased for racial in-group members compared to out-group members. The current study investigated whether oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide that has been linked to empathic concern and in-group favoritism, contributes to the racial bias in empathic neural responses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded in Chinese male adults during race judgments on Asian and Caucasian faces expressing pain or showing a neutral expression after intranasal self-administration of OT or placebo. A fronto-central positive activity at 128-188 ms (P2) was of larger amplitude in response to the pain expressions compared with the neutral expressions of racial in-group members but not of racial out-group members. OT treatment increased this racial in-group bias in neural responses and resulted in its correlation with a positive implicit attitude toward racial in-group members. Our findings suggest that OT interacts with the intergroup relationship to modulate empathic neural responses to others' suffering.

Oxytocin increases anxiety to unpredictable threat

C Grillon,1 M Krimsky,1 DR Charney,1 K Vytal,1 M Ernst,2 and B Cornwell1

Abstract

The nonapeptide oxytocin (OT), dubbed by the media as the ‘moral’ or ‘love’ molecule, has a variety of pro-social effects across species. A relatively simple explanation for these complex effects is that OT alleviates anxiety,1 thereby indirectly promoting trust, cooperation and other affiliative behaviors.2,3 Indeed, OT can reduce anxiety-like behavior in animals, via its neuromodulatory influence on the amygdala, a core hub mediating fear and anxiety.4 Surprisingly, OT also promotes territoriality, aggression and other defensive behaviors toward out-group members,2 complicating any straightforward interpretation of OT’s socio-emotional effects. Here, we show that OT does not reduce but rather increases defensive responding to unpredictable threat in humans, suggesting that OT enhances anxiety.

A critical distinction has been recognized between two kinds of defensive states, sustained anxiety and phasic fear.5 Although the former is elicited by ambiguity and uncertainty (that is, unpredictable threat), the latter is evoked by explicit threat cues (that is, predictable threat).5 The hypothesis that OT differentially modulates defensive responses to unpredictable versus predictable threats directly follows evidence that OT released from the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus facilitates excitatory signaling in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST),7,8 a critical structure mediating defensive responses to unpredictable threats.5 In addition, OT receptor density varies by subdivision within the central nucleus of the rodent amygdala (CeA)4,6 and these subdivisions are differentially involved in defensive responses to predictable (fear) and unpredictable threats (anxiety). The medial CeA (mCeA) and lateral CeA (lCeA) are involved in fear and anxiety,5 respectively, but only the lCeA is rich in OT receptors.6 Finally, while in rodents endogenous OT reduces freezing to a fear conditioned cue,8 systemic OT administration does not affect fear-potentiated startle to a threat cue.9 Accordingly, we tested the possibility that OT may selectively increase defensive responding to unpredictable but not predictable threats using startle as a measure of fear and anxiety.5

Methods are fully described in Supplementary Information (see also Schmitz and Grillon10). We assayed startle reactivity, a well-established index of aversive state,5 in three conditions (see Figure 1) no shock (N), 2) predictable shocks (P) administered only during threat cues (red circles in the figure), and unpredictable shocks (U) administered randomly. Using a double-blind randomized within-subjects design, we administered placebo, OT, the structurally-related neuropeptide arginine vasopressin (AVP), and placebo (PLC) to 43 subjects in three sessions.

Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism

Abstract

Intergroup conflict is often driven by an individual's motivation to protect oneself and fellow group members against the threat of out-group aggression, including the tendency to pre-empt out-group threat through a competitive approach. Here we link such defense-motivated competition to oxytocin, a hypothalamic neuropeptide involved in reproduction and social bonding. An intergroup conflict game was developed to disentangle whether oxytocin motivates competitive approach to protect (i) immediate self-interest, (ii) vulnerable in-group members, or (iii) both. Males self-administered oxytocin or placebo (double-blind placebo-controlled) and made decisions with financial consequences to themselves, their fellow in-group members, and a competing out-group. Game payoffs were manipulated between-subjects so that non-cooperation by the out-group had high vs. low impact on personal payoff (personal vulnerability), and high vs. low impact on payoff to fellow in-group members (in-group vulnerability). When personal vulnerability was high, non-cooperation was unaffected by treatment and in-group vulnerability. When personal vulnerability was low, however, in-group vulnerability motivated non-cooperation but only when males received oxytocin. Oxytocin fuels a defense-motivated competitive approach to protect vulnerable group members, even when personal fate is not at stake.

 

In-Group Favoritism

"Oxytocin may strengthen existing social bonds (for example, between relatives/friends), but it does not help create new bonds between strangers, implying that it is less of a “love”, “empathy” or “moral” molecule and maybe more of an “us-versus-them” molecule [29].

Indeed, oxytocin may actually promote antisocial behaviors toward unfamiliar individuals [29].

Oxytocin can increase positive attitudes toward individuals with similar characteristics, who then become classified as “in-group” members, whereas individuals who are dissimilar become classified as “out-group” members [30].

Oxytocin promotes ethnocentric behavior, incorporating the trust and empathy of in-groups with their suspicion and rejection of outsiders. It promoted dishonesty when the outcome of lying benefited the group to which an individual belonged (the in-group) [31].

When given oxytocin, individuals alter their subjective preferences in order to align with in-group ideas over out-group ideals [32].

The in-group bias is evident in smaller groups; however, it can also be extended to groups as large as one’s entire country leading toward a tendency of strong national zeal. A study done in the Netherlands showed that oxytocin increased in-group favoritism of their nation while decreasing acceptance of members of other ethnicities and foreigners [33].

It has thus been hypothesized that this hormone may be a factor in “xenophobic” tendencies. Furthermore, oxytocin was correlated with participant desire to protect vulnerable in-group members [34]''.