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I think the word "mental" is doing too much work. It's productive to distinguish between "a minority suffering from a medicalized cognitive dysfunction like sch
by dTal 5y ago
I think the word "mental" is doing too much work. It's productive to distinguish between "a minority suffering from a medicalized cognitive dysfunction like schizophrenia who can be safely ignored in the public discourse" and "a substantial and quasi-organized fraction of the population which behaves in a dangerously unreasonable manner".
In other words, are religious fanatics "mental"? Is this a useful categorization, when they're everywhere?
- throwaway22032 5y agoI agree. I've been lazy with my use of language, I'm categorising both insane and unreasonable people together, I suppose because I see them as existing on the same spectrum (i.e. when people act in extremely unreasonable ways, we medicalise it, whereas when they're just a bit unreasonable, we consider it to be normal variance). The effect seems to be the same though, that you shouldn't use their opinions to inform policy because they're not using causal reasoning. Basically, to listen to them would be populist. It might be a vote winner in the short term but it's a bad thing in the medium to long term. Or, on a more individual level - I don't hang out with these people because well, it's pointless. We can't get on, we can't learn anything from each other, they're broken humans.