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