Thursday, September 14, 2006

The Chaos Created By Gossip and Group Contagion



By Patricia Lefave, Labeled, D.D.(P)

I am just finishing reading a book right now for the second time through, on chaos theory.
For some years now I have been telling the system that ‘schizophrenia' or in particular, my own observation and assessment by the hospital staff and everyone else they have involved in the public, as the ‘schizophrenic’ (along with a variety of other labels) is like the Circle of Ten theorem out of chaos theory. It is a problem in the whole GROUP generated by their mistaken belief in the starting point.

My protagonist was ‘trained’ to lead people to believe the starting point is in me and no him. He was shown in his training that it is where people BELIEVE the starting point to be that has a whole lot to do with how and what they perceive to be ‘reality’ in any situation.

To my current great surprise, I am not the first person to see a connection between chaos theory and ‘schizophrenia” though I don’t see the connection in quite the same way.

Decades ago, according to the information in the book: Chaos Theory: Making a New Science by James Gleick, there was a meeting which took place including physicists, mathematicians and even psychiatrists, to discuss this very topic. A Dr. Arnold Mandell was mentioned as being there and feeling ‘resentful’ at the simple idea of a universal concept being suggested to explain chaos in all systems.

(Ah yes, I said to myself. Another of those ‘inappropriate affects’ from which so many psychiatrists seem to suffer when they can’t get their own way)

This meeting took place in 1986. Dr. Mandell, it was said, was a psychiatrist who was there as he was one who had a particular interest in chaos in relation to human minds, especially the minds of ‘schizophrenics.’

As I read that I couldn’t help but think ‘Sometimes they get so close and yet stay so far away from It.’
I know why now of course.

The psychiatrists see themselves and everyone else as OUTSIDE the problem rather than part of it. If he had understood that he was not ‘observing' chaos neatly contained within an individual who was a chaotical system within himself, but was in fact, part of that dynamical system, creating the chaos, along with a whole group, he would begin to recognize the problem as an effect of the group dynamic. Once the chaos is well under way, the group then denies It's creation, and unloads the whole group’s traits, via projection, onto the individual, so they won't get caught behaving badly or get blamed for it.

The ‘schizophrenic’ is not the starting point or the original cause. The group which focuses on, and channels it’s judgments towards, the individual is the problem. The identified patient feels and reacts to the group dynamic; the individual is suffering the effects of that. The individual is not the cause of the problem but the target for the unloading of the problem.

The individual members of the group are all behaving basically the same way but fail to see themselves AS a group, having a collective, cumulative effect on the individual. Only the target (or ‘subject’) has that point of view. If you really pay attention to this, it is all doublethink, doubletalk, and a double standard.


Specific example:
If someone spreads rumours about me I am told that I either imagined it, or that I should not be so ‘touchy’ or I'm ‘too sensitive.’ Yet if the same people who are spreading the rumours about me, hear that I have said anything about THEM, including just the fact that they ARE spreading rumours, then suddenly their feelings about 'rumour spreading', as an abstraction, becomes very different when it is me “telling stories,” a slightly altered definition of the same sort of thing. This similar behavior is then defined as a ‘symptom’ and the next thing I hear is that they are whining to ‘others’ about how worried they are that I may have said something that will harm their own social standing in some way!

It really doesn’t take an Einstein to see a clearly defined double standard being promoted here or the fact that the double standard itself is being denied. This is the bifurcation discussed in chaos theory, a reaction with a ‘sensitive dependence upon initial conditions.' In my protagonist’s ‘game’ the bifurcation is deliberately produced as the MEANS for creating the chaos which is directed at whichever ‘item’ the controller decides he wants to ‘get rid of.’

Because the group refuses to face the issue, admit its participation and expose the truth, it has kept right on going, a result which is also revealed in my protagonist’s training.

So, if I see ‘connections’ that no one else sees, and then I am assumed to be ‘crazy’ for seeing them. In fact, it is the group’s failure to see the connections which are right in front of them and which they are creating themselves, which is THEIR problem. It is the majority who don’t see the obvious that is keeping the chaotic society going. Though the groupthink and behavior is classically neurotic, no one even seems to notice it, let alone question it.

In my own case, it has lately been reported via the acting it out method in the town square, that someone has said of me, ‘She has found her own voice.’ I never really lost my own voice. I had it suppressed whenever I tried to use it by those in positions of power and control. Do from my point of view it is the opposite: ‘They have started to find their own ears.’ Now they begin to hear what it is that has been being said all along.

Of course, the same problem existed in the judges and assessors then (at the 1986 meeting of minds), as exists now. When they were talking about dynamical systems, they saw themselves as OUTSIDE the problem and the human beings assigned the labels as neatly self contained , if defective, dynamical systems, without relationship to psychiatry or the rest of the world. It is this desire of most to view the labeled as uniquely apart from the rest of the world, which considers itself to be ‘normal’ and therefore ‘sane, ’opposite a representative of what is ‘insane,’ which IS the problem. The DESIRE to see it this way IS the problem. I hope I am making that clear.
The psycho spiritual isolating of the ‘schizophrenic,’ the judgements and assessments of the ‘normals’ who believe their group behavior towards the individual is not seen, nor understood, BY that individual, IS the problem.

When the labeled person reports the reality of that group dynamic, the reality of it is denied by the group and by psychiatry, and redefined as the chaos bubbling up from within a ‘genetic defective’ rather than from the chaos created by the group system as a whole. As I keep saying to no avail, it is the system which needs to wake up from the group delusion. It is the system itself which needs to change. Until or unless it does, these damaging people destroying ideas will just keep going on and on and on….

This battle is much like trying to show people there is a real picture to see by just connecting the dots. The people to whom I try to shoe this just say they do not believe there is a picture so they refuse to even look at the idea of connecting the dots. This is the result when those who don’t see, are always ‘certain that they know’ best and so validate themselves by invalidating the other pint of view. ‘

I know some of you have heard these very words many times before.



2 comments:

aurora said...

wow. I somehow just linked to your entry from back on May 9th about the Depersonalization & Identity...very scary stuff. I am glad you have chosen not to hide and to become an advocate and help others through your truth...

aurora said...

wow. I somehow just linked to your entry from back on May 9th about the Depersonalization & Identity...very scary stuff. I am glad you have chosen not to hide and to become an advocate and help others through your truth...