Re: Lunatic Left

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Louis,
   When I first got involved in the disabled rights movement, it was through
my blind wife.  So that part was conventional.  One of the more abstract
parts of that movement for me was the struggle that people with severe
mental illness had with participating in the disability rights movement
itself.  The disability of course makes participation a problem, but
disability rights has often threatened to split along various lines of
disability rather than be a larger movement covering the broad issue of
civil rights for all.

   One primary example of such a person who struggled mightily to carve a
place for mentally disabled people, was Howie Harp, who has died since then.
Howie was in your face kind of guy about making room for disabled people,
especially, mentally disabled people.  My friend, Joy, is a good example of
black woman who because depression hits her with considerable force has very
long periods when she can't do much.  But she is a fighter for human rights
when severe depression doesn't make it impossible.

   I used to belong to a small left group.  The leader, Marlene Dixon, who
was friends with people like Andre Gunder Frank, Wallerstein, and so on,
used to enforce her will on her immediate subordinates by putting a gun in
their mouth to test their loyalty.  She disintegrated into a raging
alchoholic, literally raging.  After getting out of that sect I often asked
myself what sectarianism means, and is it about craziness.

   Is being mentally disabled the issue?  Certainly Marlene was disabled by
at least her addiction to drinking.  And such people do inflict social
damage to everyone that has to deal with them.  But in larger sense what
Howie Harp asked for, which is the right to participate even if one is
disabled still is the issue where such people do damage.  In other words
Marlene Dixon was not wrong because she was an addict and obsessively and
compulsively drinking.  Her errors were abuse of people.  But abuse of
people can arise from someone who is not a drinker.  In other words while a
disability may be a problem in terms of behavior that needs to be controlled
so that someone is not abused, it is also true that understanding how to
make a Marxist movement does not mean we focus ourselves on the problem of a
disabled person as the source of sectarianism.

   Lunatic Left as you use it, probably means you are angry with the SWP,
and certainly with the failed attitudes that you can see that won't succeed
in organizing people anywhere.  What you can't demonstrate is how lunacy
makes a group not work.  In other words you don't prove the point that Howie
Harp cannot participate because he is mentally disabled.

   There are many famous examples of mentally disabled people being central
to, and the core of political movements.  Those examples are on the left and
right.  I won't bother with naming names because that is not my point.  What
is my point, is that there is not a measuring stick to definitely know who
is loony and who isn't.  You can't definitely know someone is obsessive for
example by any known measure except that people say it.  That judgement
tends to emerge in experience with someone, and comes and goes also in the
symptoms, yet there is no known way to look at a human brain that shows
exactly what is happening and why.  We are of course on the verge of knowing
these things, but that is not relevant here.

   Large groups tend to function whether or not someone is mentally
disabled.  The group dynamics can be healthy for everyone, whether or not
even leaders are severely disabled by a mental disability.  Winston
Churchill on the right is someone I am thinking of.

   I read a book on the rise of Christianity, where the author a Christian,
reviewed why some sects will go to extraordinary lengths to make fools of
their members.  His point and I think it applicable, was that to take Hari
Krishna's as an example, to belong to the group, some basic symbol of
belonging keeps parasites from participating.  That is a group often has
some goodies for belonging, but people may only suck up the goodies and not
give back to the group, thus diluting, or pulling down the group
functioning.  Therefore wearing the robes, and chanting the nonsense keeps
out people who will use the resources but not put back in something also.
Belonging to any group often exacts some commitment.  Therefore some thing
that might strike one as being undesirable actually has a desirable function
to that group, and does not represent mental disability.

   Bizarre behavior then may have some explanation, but not because it is
lunatic.  It is my opinion that Christianity relies upon obsessive behavior
in constructing it's religion.  It therefore has developed many techniques
for managing obsessive and compulsive disabilities in order to extract the
benefits that such disabilities can provide a large religion.

   In small groups, like the Peoples Temple, where depression and addiction
shaped Jim Jones, there is a definite pathology of behavior.  The disability
that Jones had, affected his whole group.  I don't know of systemic ways of
dealing with those problems by identifying Jim Jones as crazy.  The Chinese
recent efforts to control Falon Gung (sp?) is what I think makes sense when
a group starts getting distorted by leadership methods.  But it is not clear
to me how a disability is the chief cause.  What I agree with the Chinese is
that they focused upon the anti-scientific attitudes of Falon Gung, and that
the best way to consider what is wrong with a group is not so much that a
disability is causing the problem, but that some specific problem like being
anti-scientific is there which is a social problem.

   Christianity has long used priests and nuns, who probably as a group are
self selected compulsive and obsessive more than the larger population (but
that is a guess on my part since the actual measure of priests and nuns
can't be made at this time).  I primarily assert this because Christianity
uses obsessive thinking successfully to inculcate religion, hence dogmatism
came from Christianity.  That just indicates to me that lunatic forces in
and of themselves may be benign or practical within a group.  What is
central is to decide in a larger context what is a problem and not.  And
that mental disability often is of use in many functional contexts, even
though as I pointed out with Marlene Dixon, her drinking was a serious
social problem in my group.

   Up until the twentieth century, it was not possible for people to
segregate mental illness out of any given group until someone's functioning
had broken down in extremis.  But it is now possible to say identify someone
who is vulnerable to OCD long before they break down, and yet still not know
what that would do to the organization to have that person participate,
except where in long practice like in Christianity a collection of
obsessives is utilized in a crude manner to advance kinds of doctrine.

   For example, one might know that someone, a bright person who shows lots
of leadership potential, and know they are obsessives.  There is no good
clear way (a set of rules) to say that person ought not to rise to a
position like Marlene Dixon had.  And so on and so forth.  In other words
there is nothing definite that protects politically from a disability that I
know of.  What protects us is open debate about problems, and lots of human
experience rather than clear knowledge that someone is a lunatic shoot the
bastard.  And that is what is wrong with the SWP not that the SWP is
lunatic, but that there aims and programs are hopeless useless for
organizing a movement.  In addition if a group makes a mistake, a severe
mistake, and they have a schizophrenic leader, the mistake is not a lunatic
error.  Being schizophrenic does not rub off on other people, and the
mistake has to have been something besides schizophrenia on a large scale.

I have felt myself that it is important to be open about such things.  If
someone is schizophrenic, or depressed, and is out there with their
disability rather than hiding it because of the anti-disability bias, and
therefore we can say well that behavior isn't working what can we do?   But
if someone is out there, then one can't very well say the problem with
another group is they are a bunch of loonies.  If someone is a
schizophrenic, in your group, your group is lunatic.  But the point is that
a group functions not dysfunctions.  And that is a different kettle of fish
from saying a group is lunatic.  And saying someone is lunatic boils down to
being anti-disabled.  Not a clear cut way of identifying a problem and
dealing with it.  Which I believe the Chinese demonstrate to some degree in
their dealing with Falon Gung.
Doyle