Reply #52: on psychosis

[ulTRAX]

K-W wrote: "No need to bring mental illness terms into this. This isn't at all about partisanship. You could find examples of such things in any sphere of life."

Absolutely. It hasn't come up but let me make a clear distinction between organic-based psychosis and what I'd consider a self-induced psychosis. An example of the latter is typically someone who goes though life on auto-pilot lost in a closed loop ideological system that is self-justifying rather than self-correcting. For example I like to critique the Constitution on the basis of basic democratic principles. Because I do, I see political reality as different from those who believe the Framers were geniuses and the Constitution should not be changed. The latter operate on an intellectual level akin to a religious belief and are mostly immune to critiques such as mine. If they shared those core democratic principles, they'd have come to the same conclusions themselves.

"What you are bringing up is a very complicated issue, and you need to frame it better. This isn't about partisanship or psychosis, it is about how we look at a complex situation."

Politics for some is as much a source of irrationality as religion for others. At some point it's more enlightening to ignore the actual topic and look at the nature of the ideological system: is it open or closed?