Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
The "hardest" part right is making someone realize they have a problem and should change for their own benefit.
It's not depression; it's that my life sucks or I feel physical pain and everyone keeps calling me "crazy".
It's not bipolar disorder; it's depression, and my rare happy moods are normal.
It's not abuse; she/he loves me, and every relationship has problems.
Some "magical" method of getting people to see their lives in an unbiased manner would help so many people.
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Personally, I worry about a society where these 'ills' can be cured. I have/am
schizotypal PD. It's considered a disorder, and I've suffered more than a bit from it. It's not the kind of thing you would wish on your children....but I'm not at all sure that removing it from society would be a good thing. People who think differently are important to the development of a society, and unfortunately, that often involves personal suffering. If you cure all mental illness, there's no Van Gogh. For my part, I have no interest at all in being 'cured'. Despite a lifetime of loneliness (primary trait of schizotypal PD is the inability to form relationships) that lead to a failed suicide attempt years back, I wouldn't change.
It seems to me (and to Confucius) that as technology develops, the degree of individuality permitted by a society increases. Many people on this forum would have been considered dangerously unstable and anti-social in previous eras, but now we're part of the mix. If you accept dual inheritance theory, that humans evolve culturally through memetic exchange, people like me play a vital role - we produce mutated memes for lateral exchange. Most of them are inviable, of course, but crazy and creative are closely linked. In THS, you see a society of maximized individuality, so I'm thinking there's a helluva lot more room for crazy.
Also, y'all are kind of ignoring the whole hedonist imperative of transhumanism. There's a whole school of TH thought based around altering one's neurochemisitry to end suffering. A pill for getting up, a pill for work, a pill for coming home and a extra one for weekend - screw that, let's get a MDMA gland! Coffee plants gene-fixed to make modafinil. A high tech society that has normalized hallucinogen use would be VERY odd. Expect religious revivals for one thing. This is a world were New New Coke is real coke, where you can go on a heroin binge, write some Old Romantic poetry, dose yourself of Nu-Bogaine (TM) and never be addicted. Solving addiction itself would drastically alter society.
Ibogaine been around for decades, with dozens of scientific studies and it's still utterly illegal in the US.