The One Delusion Society Seems to Accept

There’s one delusion that we seem to accept in society. We not only accept it, we actively encourage it, we enable it, we provide opportunities for people to act out their fantasy. But you’re not allowed to speak out against it. I’m not even going to mention the disorder here, because it’s so politically charged.

Anorexia Nervosa is a psychiatric disease that we are all probably familiar with. I’ve known people who’ve had this condition, and it’s certainly very serious. It involves a profound dissatisfaction with one’s body. Despite being dangerously underweight, many sufferers still see themselves as overweight or even obese. But society understands that this is a delusion. It’s a mental disorder where the person has a distorted mental image of their body. It doesn’t match reality. Yet, we would never recommend weight-loss surgery to these people to help with their body image. Physicians who go along with such irrational beliefs, by offering liposuction for example, would be up for medical malpractice or malfeasance.

People with Body Integrity Dysphoria, a very rare mental illness where there is a mismatch between a person’s mental body image and their physical appearance, characterised by an intense desire for amputation or paralysis of a limb, or to become deaf, or even blind. Should surgeons willingly go along with this delusion and help the person become blind, or disabled? That would surely be immoral, and rightfully so. Instead, Body Integrity Dysphoria is treated as a psychiatric illness, as it should be.

Schizophrenia, a chronic mental disorder involving delusions and hallucinations, with some people believing that aliens are trying to poison them. Should we go along with their delusions and help them stop the aliens? Of course not. It’s not real. It’s a disservice to pretend that their hallucinations are real. Instead we treat it as a serious mental disorder.

I am actively employed at a university that is giving people the opportunity to receive permanent, life-altering, often irreversible surgery and other procedures in order for the their physical body to match their spurious mental body image. If you read about it in a book, it would read like some kind of Frankenstein experiment. Surgeons claiming they can change people’s biological identity. But it turns out no amount of cosmetic surgery can effect a biological change. To pretend otherwise is a masquerade. Many individuals who undergo this surgery realise that it doesn’t deliver the serenity they were once promised. Depression and anxiety, among other things, continue. But yet as a society, we have somehow allowed this cultural delusion. It seems like we have learnt nothing from the disasters of previous attempts to treat mental illness with surgery, for example, prefrontal lobotomy. This barbaric procedure was responsible for at least 490 deaths and left thousands of people in a vegetative state. Sadly, in many cases, that was believed to be an improvement in the lives of many mentally ill people as they were now easier to take care of. Thankfully, this horrible procedure has since been discredited, although at the time it was considered the apex of neurosurgical intervention.

Unfortunately, the follies and foolishness of humankind are historically not uncommon. Epidemics of irrational groupthink are well-documented. Witch hunts have been a fairly commonplace practice throughout human history. Simply being labelled a witch was often enough evidence of witchcraft punishable in the most horrendous ways. The authorities at the time honestly thought they were doing a moral good.

Alchemy, the attempt to change base metals such as lead or copper into silver or gold, and to discover cures for disease, or elixirs of immortality. The idea is considered ludicrous to the modern mind, but at the time was considered the peak of scientific research and discovery. Actually, the transmutation of base substances into gold is now known to be impossible by chemical means but possible by physical means, although not financially worthwhile.

Why do I mention alchemy? Well, it is somewhat comparable to the current popular delusion that I mentioned previously, not to turn base metals into gold, but rather to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. In a hundred years time, will this be considered another folly in human history? Time will tell I suppose.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn