OCD & Philosophy

Economics is a branch of biology, and its logic is the logic of biology, not of physics.

Some illnesses, e.g. OCD and schizophrenia, corrupt the activity mediated by one's basic psychological framework but do not corrupt that framework itself. But some illnesses, e.g. psychopathy, corrupt that framework itself. Thus, whereas OCD and schizophrenia are structure-internal mental illnesses, psychopathy is a structural mental illness. Structure-internal mental illnesses can be alleviated, but structural mental illnesses cannot.

Chris Farley died because he ran out of material. His lack of self-control and consequent drug overdose being there mere occasion or vehicle for his death. People die when their lives lose meaning.

The way to get over OCD is not to try to squash it down, which doesn’t work, but is rather to find a path in life along which one’s OCD can push one forward. And that is how one gets over OCD: one gets over it not by getting over it, but by creating for oneself a context in which it is an asset and in which, therefore, one need not and should not get over it.

Serial killers do have conscience. It isn’t that they lack conscience. It is that their consciences lack some of the capabilities that an ordinary person’s conscience. The serial killer’s conscience does exist, as is evidenced by his ability to self-regulate—and indeed to self-regulate quite as well, at least in most contexts, as the next person. But the serial killer’s conscience is not morally articulated; it lacks, at most, the ability to impose moral strictures on the serial killer’s thought and conduct. But even this it does not entirely lack, given that serial killers are, in certain respects, not entirely without morality. So isn’t that the serial killer lacks conscience or even that his conscience is altogether incapable of functioning morally; it is that his conscience is incapable of certain kinds of moral functioning.

It is said what post-modernism is and why the conceits that supposedly support in fact warrant its rejection.

There is a presumption to the effect that specialization is about depth. This presumption, though true in some contexts, is false in others. And in those contexts where it is false, people hyper-specialize as a way of avoiding having to acquire intellectual depth, and they use the just-mentioned presumption as a way of shielding their work from critical scrutiny.

OCD, though clearly an illness and indeed an extremely serious one, is best thought of as an illness that results when virtue of intellect and character are turned against themselves, the appropriate way to treat OCD therefore being to point these powerful energies in the right direction.

Thanks to automation, the age of alienated labor is coming to an end, and if a given person follows his dreams, then he is far less likely to be replaced by a machine if he follows them than if he doesn’t.

From the viewpoint of what might be referred to as ‘personal’ or ‘individual’ economics, this being the economics of energy-generation and -allocation within a given person, it is economically irrational to be dishonest and economically rational to be honest.