Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3) by Venkatesh Rao

Author:Venkatesh Rao [Rao, Venkatesh]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Ribbonfarm.com
Published: 2017-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

Digging and Filling Holes in the Psyche

The individual psychology of what happens to at-risk populations during a major economic transition seems quite clear. An Oliver Wendell Holmes quote supplies the diagnosis: “The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”

Parkinson’s Law supplies the prognosis: “work expands to occupy the resources available.”

Parkinson’s Law is usually applied to explain the creation of make-work in bureaucratic organizations, and is normally regarded as a pathology. But it is only a pathology when social constraints restrict the expression of a healthy underlying drive: to do meaningful things with available potential. When meaningful things cannot be found, meaningless and arbitrary things become acceptable.

For American women in the nineteenth century, it was a case of double-jeopardy: not only was their existing purpose taken away, they were prevented from pursuing opportunities that were opening up. Hypochondria expanded to fill expanding minds denied more interesting occupations. Medicine and narrative were skillfully woven together to prevent women from even recognizing their condition for the most part, supplying them instead with a futile activity with which to occupy their lives. Prevailing sensibilities were expanded to accommodate that activity via fashion. Ehrenreich quotes a biographer of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy: “Delicate ill-health, a frailty unsuited to labor, was coming to be considered attractive in a young lady of the 1830s and 1840s.”

If medicine enabled a futile life script, fashion helped craft a narrative around it capable of surviving at least the scrutiny of a drug-addled mind.

It is tempting to apply the Myth of Sisyphus metaphor of rolling a rock up a hill here, but women were denied even an elevating and energizing absurdity of a life (Sisyphean activities are more common on frontiers, and generate their own intoxicants: kool-aid). Instead, they were offered a lifetime of digging and filling holes in their psyches.

It was not the first or last time in history the noble medical profession devoted a great deal of resources to its shadow purpose in civilization: helping societies navigate rough grand narrative shifts by appropriately medicating potentially troublesome groups. Which is all groups caught between safely fossilized rentier enclaves that can ride out tumultuous change, and chaotic frontier populations that can surf it to power and new wealth.

The story of civilization is the story of the one-eyed drunk on kool-aid leading the blind, who grope their way forward in a pharmaceutical haze, while secure gods gaze down from rentier heavens, sipping their champagne.

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