The Liberal Gun Club Forum

A funny thing happened after the tragedy of Christchurch: Everyone discovered, all at once, that ideology matters. Four years ago, commentators were contorting themselves to attribute jihadism to politics, social conditions, abnormal psychology—anything but the spread of wicked beliefs that lead, more or less directly, to violence. Ideology for thee but not for me. Imagine the contempt any thinking person would feel for someone whose reaction to Christchurch was to wonder whether a few Muslim street hoods had once roughed up the shooter, or if during his trip to Pakistan the authorities had given him a hard time at the airport. Did he have trouble getting a job? Feel unsettled by modernity?

The objections to these explanations occur to us as quickly as they are uttered. People get banged up, mistreated, and passed over for jobs all the time, for good and bad reasons, and do not resort to mass murder. Unsettled by modernity? Take a number. Mine is 5,723,222,310. The most obvious objection of all is the killer’s manifesto, which, for all its smirky, guttersnipe web dialect is extremely clear in its intent and influences. The alleged killer, Brenton Tarrant, is a subliterate foot soldier of white-supremacist neofascism, an ideology that was conceived by European nationalists a century ago, nearly took over the planet, and has come back in a revised form in the past decade. The alt-right leader Richard Spencer has not, to my knowledge, called for violence (and he has been the victim of it), but the overlap between Spencer and Tarrant is vast. And in the absence of that ideology, I dare say 50 more New Zealand Muslims would be alive today.

In dismissing these tendentious explanations so breezily—so breezily that they receive not even a mention—Wajahat Ali is absolutely right. So are the countless other commentators, Muslim and not, who have belatedly come to the conviction that if bad ideas permeate communities (virtual and real), their effect is not incidental but decisive. Ali has, in fact, been direct in his acknowledgment of the role of belief in some contexts. Others have treated it as an embarrassment, especially in their own communities. In the neighborhoods that were targets of recruitment by ISIS, community leaders emphasized nonideological causes publicly. But they all knew, on some level, that ideas mattered, and any parents who detected a whisper of ISIS ideology in their household understood that it was as deadly as bubonic plague.

While historically, psychiatry’s biochemical individual defect theories have met the needs of the overall power structure by locating the cause of tension-creating behaviors in the defects of an individual rather than the defects of society, psychiatry’s recent chemical imbalance theories have increasingly met the needs of one major force in the ruling elite, Big Pharma.

Beginning in the late 1980s, psychiatry aggressively sold the notion that that depression was caused by the individual defect of a chemical imbalance—specifically not enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin—which could be “corrected” with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. It is this theory which convinced depressed Americans that it is irresponsible nottotake SSRIs. However, the psychiatry establishment now claims that it has always known that this chemical-imbalance theory was not true and was an “urban legend,” the term used by Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Timeswho stated in 2011, “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”

While this chemical-imbalance theory was in factdiscredited by scientists by the 1990s, it has been so aggressively sold by psychiatry and drug companies that this theory continues to be widely believed not only by many patients but even by many physician prescribers.

Since the 1980s, psychiatry has been increasingly colonized by Big Pharma,documented in many books, including Psychiatry Under the Influence (2015). Big Pharma has utilized psychiatry for marketing and sales by controlling it through funding: university psychiatry departments; psychiatry’s professional journals; psychiatrist “thought leaders” who promote new diagnoses and drug treatments; and the American Psychiatric Association itself. Psychiatry’s official diagnostic manual is called the DSM(published by the APA), and each DSMrevision adds new mental illnesses that expand the psychiatric medication market. In 2012, PLOS Medicinereported, “69% of the DSM-5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.”

In the version of “Lover Me, I’m a Liberal” that is on Phil Ochs in Concert, after Ochs sings its first verse (that I quoted earlier), he briefly interrupts his song to ask his audience, “Get it?” His primarily leftist audience included liberals and more radical anti-authoritarians—the same mix that today reads CounterPunch—and so to pay tribute to Phil, I’ll end by asking, “Get it?”