gordsellar’s avatargordsellar’s Twitter Archive—№ 8,903

  1. …in reply to @undefined
    @IsasV See, this is the thing, I struggle to understand how someone can embrace this kind of thinking without some kind of mental dysfunction of some kind.
    1. …in reply to @gordsellar
      @IsasV I'll say this: my sense of mental health is less binary than the social consensus suggests. It's not about how "well" or "ill" you are: it's more like how well you've handled the inevitable weathering effects of living in our world and your given society.
      1. …in reply to @gordsellar
        @IsasV Some degree of weathering is inevitable, and each individual has specific personal limits built in, but also has specific tools and methods of dealing with the wear and tear, with our primary tools (and built-in reinforcements) often enculturated into us.
        1. …in reply to @gordsellar
          @IsasV Which is why you get predictable patterns of crazy-asshole in any given society, and they tend to be to some degree distinct from society to society. (Just as they also tend to be somewhat universal, because humans all run on the same basic hardware.)
          1. …in reply to @gordsellar
            @IsasV The thing is, talking about mental health this way—as in, "we all experience erosion and damage as we go, and it's all about maintenance and keeping the thing functional" challenges profoundly a lot of our assumptions about agency—and thus culpability, citizenship, and so on.
            1. …in reply to @gordsellar
              @IsasV These are challenges we don't seem to be ready to confront yet, as a civilization. We're still stuck trying to work past the conflict between people who embrace diversity and tolerance, versus people who want a strong powerful daddy figure to rule them in an ethno-state.