mr smith makes clear here that not only are we not in kansas anymore but kansas may not even exist;

Not only is our lifestyle on back-order, so is our sanity.

Yesterday I mentioned our collective inability to make sense of the contradictory messages of the status quo and our own experience. This inability to reconcile completely contradictory messages generates psychosis, an internal breakdown that manifests as a disconnect from reality.

To take one example: we're constantly bombarded with the message that a four-year college diploma is the essential key to a secure middle-class lifestyle, yet our experience is that millions of college grads are living precariously, burdened by extremes of student loan debt.

Here's another I discussed yesterday: the status quo hypes the stock market's near-record highs as "proof" all is well and everything's getting back to "normal" but our experience is the real economy is in a stumbling free-fall.

And what is that "old normal" everyone is so anxious to return to anyway? How about too busy to be healthy, too addicted to social media to have agency? Or as the writer of Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer wrote: "In short, we've done the most modern-American thing possible: bartered away our quality of life for the freedom to be miserable."

As for the "new normal," it's Extremes of Neofeudalism, Incompetence and Authoritarianism (June 30, 2020).

In other words, to keep us in thrall to an unsustainable status quo, what's been normalized and institutionalized is social psychosis, breakdown and burnout.

Our experience is shaped by what psychiatrist R.D. Laing identified as the Politics of Experience. While Laing's initial focus was on family dynamics (Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics) and how conflicting demands (contradictory political "necessities") within a family can trigger a breakdown in children, his insights also apply to society at large.......read more......