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Comment by jossclimb | Hacker News Reader

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

This quote is comically misused. It refers to people being called "controversial" or misfits, or being disapproved of for questioning the orthodoxies of deeply immoral societies.

It does not mean that if you're low-functioning in daily life, you get to blame climate change/economic inequality/injustice/whatever. Refusal to take responsibility for one's behavior is always a sign of lack of emotional health.

wow, quite the quote adjudicator, aren't we? where does your krishnamurti lineage come from, may i ask?

have you ever heard of an eastern philosopher who didn't think western civilization was profoundly sick??

it's deeply immoral that we force kids to sit in chairs for hours a day, and then diagnose them with "the ADHDs" when they don't like it. but we could multiple examples endlessly...

>This quote is comically misused.

It is! I suppose because of its dubious origin. First attribution seems to be from Mark Vonnegut in The Eden Express. Did you read the book, or where did you learn what it _actually_ refers to?

Good question; I can't read the author's mind since the quote is made up.

But basic logic dictates that the quote (which is apocryphal) means that we cannot deduce that we are healthy simply because we are well-adjusted to society, if that society is sick. It does not say that psychiatric illness is rooted in societal or social problems. And empirically, proponents of the quote (theosophists and Buddhists) also rarely use it to refer to actual psychiatric illness, but rather to moral compasses, values, and overall behavior.

I doubt you'll find many Buddhists parrot the "I'm only depressed because of how messed up society is" line that you often see on the web, since Buddhism explicitly preaches self-transformation.

> It does not mean that if you're low-functioning in daily life, you get to blame climate change/economic inequality/injustice/whatever

Quite an informal fallacy / strawman you have there, whoever said it was?

Refusal to take action to improve your life is unhealthy. Attributing the source of your problems to an external agent via a plausible mechanism is sensible.

And the way to feel healthy, truly healthy, is to be connected to networks of society or communities that are safe, supportive and which have your back.

Sadly, that's not something easy to find if you're not born into one...

Which society in human history was not sick? Truth is that's the norm, not the exception

But how many of the earlier societies had thousands of years of experience to look back to? Wouldn't you say in a society where we're capable of talking to anyone anywhere in the world at any moment we'd be able to at least try and solve these problems?

We've solved so many problems that afflicted humanity for thousands of years in the past 200 years. So why not this one? I guess because, as the article says, to solve this problem we actually need to change society as a whole.

Northern Europe, right now.

Their livelihoods are predicated as being part of a complex economic web and having good geopolitical conditions. Norway used to be one of the poorest European countries, now it is one of the wealthiest thanks to large oil reserves.

It's interesting to me that oil is one of--if not primary--reasons societies are so rich and industrious. We're burning through hundreds of millions of years of carbon sequestration in a few centuries. It really looks like rocket fuel for civilization. What will it look like when oil isn't so plentiful?

This quote is meaningless because all mental sickness is entirely defined in relation to the target society

But being able to fit into society does wonders for your mental health, so maybe don't listen to random philosophers.

Contorting myself to fit a mould I find profoundly reprehensible has done wonders for perpetuating my depression and suicidality.

I don’t want to develop my sociopathy to the level required to be mistaken for acceptable in what passes for society today.

I guess we're starting from different first principles here - I don't believe that societal fit requires sociopathy, but then, you and I live in different societies, and even if they're only separated by a few thousand kilometres of sea, I feel there's an ocean of difference between our countries in terms of governance and political style.

I'd agree that capitalism has a tendency of rewarding sociopathy, but there's no requirement to be an amoral asshole to be accepted by your community - in fact, it often prevents it.

My experience during the Christchurch earthquakes where people risked their lives to save complete strangers is what convinced me that most people are inherently decent, and I'm not sure a society made up of mostly decent people could become as cruel as you suggest.

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