The Insanity of Sanism
The narcissistic flattening and obliteration of "microaggressions," "systemic bias," and all things "oppression"
Every difference of opinion, conceptual and societal orientation, and outlook on life is a threat to the narcissist who cannot countenance difference. Differences threaten the precariously balanced house of cards that is the psyche of the narcissist. The narcissist is incapable of seeing external objects, that is, people, as distinct from himself and not an extension of himself like an arm or leg; this psychodynamic is called hyper-reflection. Eternal objects, i.e., people, are mentally internalized by the narcissist and rendered internal objects. These internal objects are controllable in a delusional, fantastic paracosm; external objects, perceived as capricious and arbitrary, are threats.
As a result, the delta between the real (eternal objects) and the artifice (internal objects) invites delusionality. And so, to differ with the narcissist is to invite his rage, as though suddenly his arm, i.e., you, doesn't function correctly. Further, the narcissist, as a manifestation of arrested development and in many respects, a failure to launch, never successfully separated and individuated from his mother, and as such, everyone in the world is meant to revolve around the narcissist in some sort of narcissistic in utero ectoplasm. It's the narcissist’s world and you’re just a fungible play actor in it.
One glaring example of an inability to tolerate differences comes to mind: our narcissistic age has given rise to a pathological impulse to normalize insanity by reflexively denigrating diagnoses of pathology as an outgrowth of, to borrow a Maoist term, the black class/guard or in American parlance, white male oppression amongst other woke paradigmatic thinking. The response to this white male hegemony from a woke point of view is to narcissistically knee-jerk flatten all differences and distinctions in this instance, between the insane and the sane, in a one fell swoop, which is tantamount to a nihilistic tantrum of throwing-up-one’s-hands-in-the-air exasperation that life could be so unequal and unfair in an unrelenting chase for Marxist equity. As with so many other impulses, the narcissistic radical Left terrorizes society with a call to burn it all down and effectively throw in the towel on civilization as ineluctably irredeemable. Here we teeter on the edge of barbarism in the face of declining civilization thanks to narcissism.
A narcissist rejects life and sees nearly every dynamic as hopelessly unfair, as he is the perpetual victim no matter what. This nihilistic impulse to reject life is predicated on a fervent desire to put civilization in a stranglehold, a vise grip, a straitjacket of utter conformity, and toeing the line that the new society should be cast in the image of the narcissist or narcissistic collectives of ever-shifting goalposts that are incompatible with forming a stable society. But never mind that, says the narcissist, it's just one more iteration, one more bend around the curve and all will be harmonious—a chronic dangling of the carrot or Lucy and the football.
Add in the pathological hope of the masses that the grandiose narcissistic collectives have got it right this time—we are all just meant to be cultural Marxist cogs in the machine of the animal farm until the revolution is forgotten about, things normalize and stabilize for a time and the asinine machinery that is narcissism puts the wheels in motion as a necessary function of the pathology to compulsorily revolt once more.
A few years ago, I was chatting with an ultra-woke, narcissist, now ex-friend about how I could see a pro-narcissist movement emerging on Twitter, built on the premise that narcissists are prejudiced against, and since we, as a society, have been collectively destigmatizing mental health issues, why not throw narcissism into the mix? His head bolted upright from a slouched position and his eyes widened, locking into mine as though he thought it was an eureka(!) excellent idea. His nonverbal cues confirmed that he knew that he was a narcissist and that launching a woke pro-narcissist movement could be just the ticket to his claim to fame.
Fast forward a few years, and there has been an emergence of an effort to unbias insanity through a concept called sanism, which holds that the insane are unfairly biased against and oppressed. Sanism, according to the Woke, is an unjust privileging of sanity over insanity, and as such, a handful of Canadian education researchers at Guelph University in Ontario published the case last year for bringing madness and mad people into early childhood education and care.
According to this paper, “Sanism is a widely accepted form of systemic discrimination that targets individuals who have been diagnosed with or who are believed to have a diagnosis related to madness. Generally, sanism is the overarching belief that those who identify as or who are labeled “Mad” are dangerous and/ or incompetent. A sanist belief system allows governing bodies—including, but not limited to, professional licensing committees and colleges, such as the Ontario College of Early Childhood Educators—to justify the discrimination of those who are labeled “Mad” based on concepts of “public health,” “public good,” and safety.”
"Not yet" Potentiality of Insanity:
Research has shown that concepts of competence, or the absence of competence, are continually linked to mental health diagnoses. However, the concept of “competence” is often weaponized against individuals diagnosed with mental illness within helping and caring professions, despite evidence that suggests competence and mental illness are unrelated. Those in helping and caring professions face discrimination not based on their actions and abilities to manage or cope with their experiences of mental illness but through the judgment of regulatory bodies based on their perception of what mental illness could become. In this sense, mental illness signifies a “not yet”, or the potential—for example, for violence or “emotional dysregulation” —that has yet to occur. In this case, for educators who experience mental distress or are diagnosed with mental illness, the “not yet” is reflected in both their inability to be open about their mental difference due to fears of isolation and fears that others will perceive them as potentially dangerous or incompetent in their work. These judgments based on the possibilities of what a mental illness diagnosis could lead to are unacceptably discriminatory and sanist.
My question is in terms of this "not yet" premise—is not a former diagnosis portending more of the same behavior vis-à-vis the diagnosis, even if aberrant behavior hasn't already happened in a professional environment? Pathetically, this so-called academic paper is thin on substance and backed up by other flimsy woke literature. It never defines madness precisely, except to suggest that we all have some form of it, so we may as well normalize and essentially forget the phenomenon. Narcissism is a highly dissociative and thus, a forgetful condition.
So, who does the woke Left want to teach your kids? Crazy people—all in the name of inclusion and compassion. How compassionate is it when an insane teacher traumatizes your kid and compromises your child's emotional and psychological welfare, perhaps for the rest of his life?
Positivism and Neoliberalism:
The paper goes on to take issue with the societal call for the professional identity of early childhood educators to be feminine with traditional characteristics of nurturance, care, self-sacrifice, and passivity while at the same time expected to take on masculine characteristics such as rationality as a signifier of competence. The paper purports that rationality and professionalism are “based in positivist and neoliberal ideas of assessment and standardization, which call for the regulation of emotions in the workplace.”
Much of this discrimination against Mad educators and the standardization and professionalization processes that regulate Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) can be attributed to neoliberalism as both an economic and social structure. Neoliberalism—an economic and social focus on the individual, notions of personal responsibility, and privatization—is embedded within ideas of “good” educators being those who take responsibility for their health and well-being by internalizing their emotions, feelings, and mental distress. Involved is the demand for emotional labor from educators as they regulate their feelings, emotions, and mental distress to perform the work of care, nurturance, and ultimately, happiness.
In other words, this paper decries that these educators should have to do their job responsibly?? Newsflash: we are all balancing on emotional tight wires. Something devastating can always occur right around the corner. And this reality doesn't preclude professionalism.
Narcissists and in this case, woke narcissists perpetually criticize and shame, this time in essence, the Western global world order through accusations of positivism and neoliberalism, which moves across the expanse to early childhood education as a reification of said Western global world order. As a result, these narcissists certainly wouldn't want to be expected to have regulated emotions in the workplace. After all, woke narcissists hold that they are chronically oppressed victims, who should be unquestionably justified in any action, including any outcomes of their dysregulated and labile emotions, which from their perspective, are an inevitable outcome, given the oppressive nature of the system and effectively, “the man.”
In addition, “microaggressions” such as positivism, neoliberalism, and gender essentialism can be defined as perceiving oppression in a simulated way as a reflection of a societal crisis of authenticity to do with living in the age of narcissism. That is to say, these simulacra-perceptions of oppression called microaggressions, range from being a half step away from reality at minimum, tangential to reality, or all the way to full-blown hyperreality. Seeing as though, we live in a delusional narcissistic age out of step with reality, “microaggressions” abound.
Promoting Mental Diversity aka Insanity
How Is Sanism Embedded in Normative Ideas of Educators in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)?
Since happiness and madness are societally considered antithetical to one another, and educators are still steeped and trained in values connected to white hegemonic femininity and caring as “natural” processes, madness is perceived as disruptive to normative Early Childhood Educators (ECE) identification. As well, the neoliberal demand for evaluating educators’ performance against set criteria through assessments in the early years reinforces masculinist and standardized values. These conformist values place ECEs in a double bind whereby professional care for children is predominately valued by meeting external assessment and curricular expectations to ensure developmental milestones, while caring for children naturally, being responsive to their needs, and cultivating their lively curiosity without formal program planning is conceptualized as “unprofessional”.
Sanism is embedded within discourses associated with Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) that are gender essentialist and assume women hold forms of innate caring, kindness, and “motherly” care. These ideas propagate notions that educators should be always able to regulate any feelings of emotional distress that they might experience, internalize their feelings by hiding them within themselves, and maintain children’s care as their only priority by disregarding their own needs. For Mad ECEs who already experience mental distress, the emotional labor involved in regulating their own feelings without any structural support for their well-being can result in additional barriers to presenting as “competent” in their day-to-day work.
The authors denigrate motherly selflessness in educators under the mantle of gender essentialism, and instead push for a selfish and narcissistic idealized notion of how the new educator should present going forward.
Madness and experiences of emotional distress are presented as incompatible with being a “good educator,” “good mother,” or helping professional. We suggest that this binary be dismantled and ask what madness could offer the field of ECEC and how it could be beneficial for the profession to see madness as an everyday component of working with children. Mad Studies critiques developmentalist and psychological logic that focuses on therapeutic treatment and pharmaceutical interventions—particularly for children—by illustrating how developmental and interventionist knowledges aim to normalize and regulate children instead of promoting mental diversity. Developmentalism—in its various logics, whether within child psychology, international development, or political studies—is about paternalism and the enforcement of control and regulation upon bodies.
Developmental psychology, the Woke’s kryptonite, would be expressly opposed to age-inappropriate exposure to insanity as a pro forma systematized approach to early childhood education.
Obligatory Intersectionality: (For Woke Narcissistic Victimhood Brownie Points)
Sanism targets populations that are already societally constructed as dangerous, such as Black and Indigenous communities, and results in the over-diagnosis of such societally subjugated populations with higher rates of mental illness. As such, the “bad mad” ECE is not a racially neutral construct and more likely intersects with anti-Black racism and colonial forms of violence against racialized populations. Moreover, it is necessary to note that individuals are more likely able to identify with their experiences of mental distress openly if they are white due to white privilege and colonial racial hierarchies. This has implications and considerations due to the highly gendered and racialized nature of care work.
Footnotes
i) We put quotation marks around “mental illness” the first time we use it to illustrate how it is socially constructed and produced through biomedical knowledges and socio-cultural inequalities and to challenge any biomedicalization of the term. Throughout the rest of the paper, we do not put quotation marks around the term but wish to start our paper by situating ourselves within Mad Studies and scholarship that challenges positivist and medicalized ideas of mental distress and/or difference. ii) Throughout this paper, we use “Mad” to indicate identification with mental difference in order to reclaim “the language of madness to challenge the contemporary medical monopoly on the labeling and description of unusual mental states.” We do not neatly distinguish between “mental illness” and “madness” in this article; however, it is important to note that since the evolution of modern science and Enlightenment (17th–18th century) philosophy, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and sensations deemed irregular or abnormal have been medicalized and deemed mad. As such, madness can be a socio-cultural frame for analyzing the pathologization and marking of such behaviors, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and interventions or forms of medical “treatment” and “care.” We contend that mental illness should be considered a social construct in itself but acknowledge the reality and impact of experiences and feelings of mental distress.
Conclusion
Mad Studies defines mental illness as experiences of mental differences and/or distress and asserts that competence and mental illness are unrelated phenomena. These postmodern, critical theory-based, i.e., woke academic appeals and/or mandates to squelch and eradicate difference, dissent, and distress to ostensibly mitigate against microaggressions, systemic bias, and all things oppression, are far from benign in intent and belie psychopathological roots of narcissism.
The psychogenic or catching condition of hyper-reflection amongst other narcissistic traits causes mental illness to proliferate in others on a mass scale, as narcissism is contagious. If the proposed updated idealized early childhood educators act more selfishly and narcissistically, concerned first and foremost, moment to moment, with their own precarious mental health, odds are the children will emulate these role model teachers, generating a more narcissistic society. Hurt children tend to have less empathy with accumulated trauma and will be more self-focused, solipsistic, and narcissistic.
In an effort to be “inclusive” to mad teachers, the woke narcissistic academics are othering and essentially pathologizing mental health professionals, ironically enough, as excluding. And homogeneity of thought is a far cry from the polemical promises of diverse inclusivity. These academics posit that it is exclusively society’s fault (alloplastic defenses—blaming others, a hallmark of narcissism) that mad people are not readily integrated into the fabric of society and it's doubly unfair because it is society who made them mad according to this “logic,” nevermind that mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia are inherited and genetically based. I have written previously about wokeism being an inchoate, incoherent, and crazy-making circular logic ideology.
“Woke means calling everything you wish to control oppressive until you control it.” James Lindsay
By dismissing and disempowering the oppressor-mental-health-professional-class as irrelevant to their own self-imputed diagnoses of Madness as a multipronged catch-all, the marginalized and oppressed mentally ill can now wear their pathologies as a badge of honor in a victimhood race to the bottom. TikTok can valorize and coddle them as requiring special protection and accommodations whilst they are tacitly and under wraps catapulted from the oppressed to the nascent oppressor class as they enact their reign of terror on society. Truly the inmates are running the asylum, running roughshod over erstwhile social mores, civilities, and professional accreditation.
When so much mind is paid to the teachers’ mental health over the children, it reveals in this new-fangled “progressive” paradigm as laid out and promulgated by this academic paper, that the adult teachers are in actuality, regressive, infantile narcissists, and their needs trump the children's needs. The children are parentified, a form of abuse where children are made to assume adult roles and responsibilities and to look after their parents or in this case, teachers. Parentification as a form of abuse can create narcissists. We've seen this role reversal of adults acting like children and children acting like adults in the state of play over “gender-affirming care” as I wrote about here: California's proposed "Gender affirming" laws are anti-parental rights, prioritizing power of the state and children in infantile, regressive legislation on the altar of LGBTQ+: Systemized Narcissism squeezes and regresses parents, propels children into adult decisions/roles in ultimate nanny state maneuvers.
The kids are not alright. They are in no position to lead. Even though they are being parentified, which may give off a veneer of maturity, as a function of their age and brain development, they are going through a healthy stage of narcissism called primary narcissism until the age of 25 which is the new entry point to adulthood. The executive functioning is not all there under age 25. If primary narcissism persists past age 25, it becomes secondary or pathological narcissism. As we've seen in recent weeks, the college kids are pro-Hamas, that is to say, pro-terrorism if it means decolonization. For this youth cohort, the righteousness of fantasy-based ideology is more important than the reality of murdered babies.
Getting back to the academic paper at hand, these are dangerous ideas put forward to attempt to normalize pathology and integrate it into society, when instead pathology should be corralled and contained like a radioactive substance. These pathological, unmoored-from-reality ideas are not restricted to the ivory tower. We've already seen the woke mind virus, Wuhan-style, escape its university lab settings to infect our culture at large. It's worth noting that one of the authors has admitted to undisclosed mental illnesses—so much for being unbiased. As a usurpation of civilization through the long march through our institutions, the agenda-driven, political activist, woke academics may denounce sanism as a form of bigotry, however, I recall the expression of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” this time not for our students but for the teachers themselves.
Psychology, just like politics, is only as good as its culture, as its culture-bound. If we have a narcissistic culture that is flattening differences, because differences are perceived as threats, we will cease to have psychology as we know it as a guiding light to distinguish morality from immorality, health from pathology, and sanity from insanity as there will be no more distinctions.
Resources:
Kindergarten and the Asylum: "Sanism" in Early Childhood Education
Woke Marxism has no limiting principles. It is, in fact, openly hostile to any such boundary on its own madness. As a result, it possesses no mechanisms to prevent the implementation of the worst possible ideas, as we often see, including in the education of young children. We have already seen this with drag queens, sex, sexuality, pleasure-based sex education, divisive Critical Race Theory in education, "gender-affirming care" and transition, and who knows how much else. Now we confront "sanism" as a prejudice keeping the insane out of the classrooms of little kids. Sanism, according to the Woke, is an unjust privileging of sanity over insanity, and a handful of Canadian education researchers at Guelph University in Ontario have published the case (https://childcarecanada.org/documents...) for bringing madness and mad people into early childhood education and care. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads through this terrible idea and laments that it wasn't one of his own "Grievance Studies" hoax papers from a few years back. Join him to push the limits of belief and to understand why we must stop Woke Marxism from taking a single further step forward in our societies.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) Full Movie
A headstrong young teacher who is a narcissist in a private school in 1930s Edinburgh ignores the curriculum and influences her impressionable twelve-year-old students with her over-romanticized worldview.
Psycho (1960) "We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes, Haven't You?”
Hitchcock's Halloween Treat (or Trick?): Psycho, or Embodied Introject-Sam Vaknin’s psychological thriller movie review
Children of the Corn (1984) Trailer
A young couple is trapped in a remote town where a dangerous religious cult of children believes that everyone over age 18 must be killed.
This is one of the most literally insane things I've ever seen. Thank you for exposing it.
Impossible for me to not like this post. As you say, there is no boundary to this madness. I have James Lindsay's recent podcast bookmarked to listen to also: https://newdiscourses.com/2023/10/kindergarten-asylum-sanism-education/