Jerry Whorebach wrote:

Not only does TV watch you, it fucking holocausts the shit out of you.

A Boner Popping wrote:

Michel Foucault wrote:

For a long time, certain forms of melancholia were considered specifically English; this was a fact in medicine and a constant in literature. Montes­quieu contrasted Roman suicide, which was a form of moral and political behavior, the desired effect of a con­certed education, with English suicide, which had to be considered as an illness since "the English kill themselves without any apparent reason for doing so; they kill them­selves in the very lap of happiness." It is here that the milieu plays its role, for if happiness in the eighteenth cen­tury is part of the order of nature and reason, unhappiness, or at least whatever deters from happiness without reason, must be part of another order.

This order was sought first in the excesses of the climate, in nature's deviation from its equilibrium and its happy mean (temperate climates are caused by nature; intemperate climates by the milieu). But this was not sufficient to explain la maladie anglaise; already Cheyne had declared that wealth, refined food, the abun­dance all the inhabitants enjoyed, the life of pleasure and ease the richest society led, were at the origin of such ner­vous disorders. Increasingly, a political and economic ex­planation was sought, in which wealth, progress, institu­tions appear as the determining element of madness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spurzheim made a synthesis of all these analyses in one of the last texts de­voted to them. Madness, "more frequent in England than anywhere else," is merely the penalty of the liberty that reigns there, and of the wealth universally enjoyed. Free­dom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. "Religious sentiments . . . exist without re­striction; every individual is entitled to preach to anyone who will listen to him," and by listening to such different opinions, "minds are disturbed in the search for truth." Dangers of indecision, of an irresolute attention, of a vacil­lating soul! The danger, too, of disputes, of passions, of obstinacy: "Everything meets with opposition, and oppo­sition excites the feelings; in religion, in politics, in science, as in everything, each man is permitted to form an opinion; but he must expect to meet with opposition." Nor does so much liberty permit a man to master time; every man is left to his own uncertainty, and the State abandons all to their fluctuations: "The English are a nation of merchants; a mind always occupied with speculations is continually agi­tated by fear and hope. Egotism, the soul of commerce, easily becomes envious and summons other faculties to its aid."

Besides, this liberty is far from true natural liberty: on all sides it is constrained and harried by demands opposed to the most legitimate desires of individuals: this is the lib­erty of interests, of coalitions, of financial combinations, not of man, not of minds and hearts. For financial reasons, families are here more tyrannical than anywhere else: only wealthy girls are able to marry; "the others are reduced to other means of satisfaction that ruin the body and derange the manifestations of the soul. The same cause favors libertinage, which predisposes to madness." A mercantile liberty thus appears as the element in which opinion can never arrive at the truth, in which the immediate is neces­sarily subject to contradiction, in which time escapes the mastery and certainty of the seasons, in which man is dis­possessed of his desires by the laws of interest.

In short, liberty, far from putting man in possession of himself, ceaselessly alienates him from his essence and his world; it fascinates him in the absolute exteriority of other people and of money, in the irreversible inferiority of passion and unfulfilled desire. Between man and the happiness of a world in which he recognizes himself, between man and a nature in which he finds his truth, the liberty of the mer­cantile state is "milieu": and to this very degree it is the determining element of madness. When Spurzheim was writing-at the height of the Holy Alliance, during the restoration of the authoritarian monarchies-liberalism was readily blamed for all the sins of the world's madness: "It is singular to see that man's greatest desire, which is his per­sonal liberty, has its disadvantages as well." But for us, the point of such an analysis is not its critique of liberty, but its very employment of the notion that designates for Spurzheim the non-natural milieu in which the psychological and physiological mechanisms of madness are favored, ampli­fied, and multiplied.

*pop*