Norman Lear and Henry Kissinger

Norman Lear made people talk by producing breakthrough TV sitcoms like All in the Family. Henry Kissinger made people talk by running an American foreign policy which employed waterboarding. 

Both Ashkenazi Jews died the same week at ages of 100+, and received long obituaries in the New York Times. Lear was an outstanding spokesman of American peace, and Kissinger was an outstanding spokesman of American war. One could go all Tolstoy over it.

It is impossible for me to imagine that those who have lived great lives of war and peace could ever have believed in psychiatry. I don't mean "believed in it" just as a putative medical specialty which they have little or nothing to do with, or as an incidental fixture of philosophical or social theory, I mean in their hearts and in their guts. 

Kissinger didn't investigate whether Zyprexa or Adderall might help Menachem Begin or Mao Zedong be more amenable to peace. Lear didn't microdose psilocybin mushrooms to create Archie Bunker, the irascible right wing bigot we all still somehow liked.

It's arguable whether either of these extraordinary people changed his world very much, though they both clearly wanted to. Neither man seems to have ever said he was especially disappointed. The lesson from Tolstoy is that happiness lies in finding and appreciating, or creating, beauty and meaning in everyday, mundane things. Rabbi Harold Stern said we don't blow shofar when Yom Kippur falls on shabbat, because the common discipline of observing a weekly ritual is more holy before God than the uplifting drama of observing an annual one.

Psychiatry simply denies, or tries to remove, all meaning and beauty, all creation, from life. The only discipline that's accounted for at the EMHC plantation is imposed on slaves by their masters. It's a system of punishment, not self control. "Insight" is only professed (truthfully or not) agreement by slaves with the orthodox plantation line: you are a brain, your illness causes your behavior, mistaken thinking and inappropriate emotion; your meds are necessary to treat your behavior, thinking and emotion, which we understand and you don't. We own all of you, so take your meds or you'll never get out of here!

In such an environment, how can "doctor" or "patient" ever find and appreciate, or create, beauty and meaning? Perhaps only by recalcitrance, non-compliance. Slaves don't comply with "treatment" and overseers don't comply with rules against having sex with slaves.

It makes them happy, but only for a while. They don't live to 100.