[MD] of intellect and sanity

[X Acto]

Now, psychiatry can't really deal with all of this because it is pinioned 
to a subject-object truth system which declares that one particular intellectual 
pattern is real and all others are illusions. Psychiatry is forced to take this 
position in contradiction to history, which shows over and over again that 
one era's illusions become another era's truths, and in contradiction to 
geography, which shows that one area's truths are another area's illusions.
 But a philosophy of insanity generated by a Metaphysics of Quality states 
that all these conflicting intellectual truths are just value patterns. One 
can vary from a particular common historical and geographical truth pattern
 without being crazy.
The anthropologists established a second point: not only does insanity vary 
from culture to culture, but sanity itself also varies from culture to culture. 
They found that the 'ability to see reality' is not only a difference between 
the sane and the insane, it is also a difference between different cultures of 
the sane. Each culture presumes its beliefs correspond to some sort of external 
reality, but a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality 
can be just about any damn thing. Even the facts that people observe to 
confirm the 'truth' are dependent on the culture they live in.
Lila ch26

Edward Sapir said,
The fact of the matter is that the 'real world" is to a 
large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits 
of the group . . . Forms and significances which seem obvious
 to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out
 the patterns; outlines and implications that are perfectly
 clear to these may be absent to the eye of the onlooker.
As Kluckhohn put it,
Any language is more than an instrument of conveying ideas,
 more even than an instrument for working upon the feelings 
of others and for self-expression. Every language is also a 
means of categorizing experience. The events of the 'real' 
world are never felt or reported as a machine would do it. 
There is a selection process and an interpretation in the 
very act of response. Some features of the external 
situation are highlighted, others are ignored or 
not fully discriminated.
Every people has its own characteristic class in which 
individuals pigeonhole their experiences. The language 
says, as it were, 'notice this', 'always consider this
 separate from that', 'such and such things always belong 
together.' Since persons are trained from infancy to
 respond in these ways they take such discriminations 
for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of life.
That explained a lot of what Phaedrus had heard on the psychiatric wards. What 
the patients showed wasn't any one common characteristic but an absence of one. 
What was absent was the kind of standard social role-playing that 'normal' 
people get into. Sane people don't realize what a bunch of role-players they are, 
but the insane see this role-playing and resent it.
Lila ch26