Obligatory Joe Cocker link :

Probably not the first time I have linked the late great Mister Cocker on this blog, and it surely will not be the last.

That song came up on my random shuffle MP3ing, and it got me thinking about the Seventies and how much psychological language ended up in the mainstream consciousness from all that group therapy.

Ever since Freud, there have been waves of pop psychology and self-help books and therapy trends that have not only advanced the science of psychology and its efficacy, but also advanced the public understanding of the everyday inner lives of their neighbours and themselves.

Part of me hates to admit it, but we really can’t think about something before we have the words for it. Without words, especially words for describing one’s mental world, the underlying realities remain nebulous, undifferentiated, and impossible to communicate to others. You can’t even discuss them with yourself.

And what you cannot communicate does not get treated.

So while pop psychology trends can be very irritating to those of us who have some sort of clue what we are talking about, and occasionally can even do some harm by giving people false hopes for a simple solution, or confuse them with false information, it is also the vessels by which people learn more about themselves and others.

The Fifties was a decade of optimism. Things are great, the future is bright, we have a heck of a good thing going here so don’t you dare rock the boat by being weird. Optimism and conformity were socially enforced, and the psychology of the time, on the surface, seemed to reflect this increasingly rigid optimism and the expectation that everyone would be happy to conform.

But under the surface, things were changing. The idea that anyone might become mentally ill through no fault of their own began to seep in. It was a feeble little thing at first, but it was there.

It was even possible, within very tight limitations, to blame society, or at least the local version thereof. Why, of course this man became neurotic. His bosses are working him too hard!

Then the Sixties came, and that enforced optimism started to crash and burn. Instead came the hard-drinking cynicism of the Mad Men era. The new consumerism turned sour in people’s mouths, housewives began really hitting the booze, and dreams died lonely and cold in the street. Psychology turned from being a matter of fixing the occasional broken unit to a secret world of therapy done on the down low for people who feel, deep down, that if having it all doesn’t make them happy, that means there is something wrong with them.

Then the hippies came along, and brought the sunshine back. And while they were somewhat successful in shedding conformity and expanding their minds (and hence the public mind as well), they had their own version of enforced happiness. Everyone was supposed to be groovy, and if you weren’t, you got left behind or even blamed for harshing the mellow.

That had to lead to the Seventies, when the fact that everyone was neurotic and messed up finally breached the surface of the public consciousness, and people developed and deployed this whole new language to describe all the ways in which their parents had messed them up.

Suddenly it was okay (in fact, practically mandatory) to have a therapist, to go to group therapy, to have strange aversions (or even stranger perversions) and people were more open about the fact that modern life does not make people happy than ever before.

It was, in many ways, a dark and cynical time. The sunshine high of the late Sixties turned into a decade-long hangover, and people turned to the cheap, the dirty, the easy to escape the pain. The world had come close to annihilation during the Cuban Missle Crises, MLK and two Kennedys were dead, Vietnam lingered on and on like a case of the flu. Crime rose as the hippies of the Sixties became the addicts of the Seventies, and everyone pretty much agreed that everything was going down the crapper.

Pessimism, like optimism, can’t last forever, and eventually people shook off the malaise and decided it was was time to pray to a new god : money.

I can only imagine how refreshing it must have been to stop pretending that you loved granola and brown rice and that you were actually much happier living in some shitty commune full of lazy self-indulgent hippies who, being middle class, had always assumed someone else someone else would be doing the actual work. To go back to that clean, exciting, unnatural world that the Sixties and Seventies had rejected, and really enjoy everything civilization has to offer.

The Eighties optimism was cynical and tough. It was not idealistic at all. The Seventies had seen a lot of dreams die and a lot of other dreams simply fail, and so the new optimism had to be based on the baser emotions of greed, envy, and pride.

It was, in some ways, a time of willful and dedicated spiritual bankruptcy, a rejection of everything you didn’t like in the world by slapping the cheapest possible veneer over it and a big sign that said “Don’t have to be sad about the world any more! We’ve made all the sad things go away by giving you the minimal excuses and obfuscations you need to justify your total selfishness and self-absorption! All people who try to make you think about sad things are just loser liberals who want to keep you from succeeding! Go ahead, be assholes!”

It’s a pretty big sign.

Hmmm. I started off planning to talk about psychological language and how profoundly it changes everyday life, and instead I ended up writing about decades and the zeitgeist.

Again I ask : why is it I never end up writing what I meant to write?

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me…. something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The subject of “toxins”, those mysterious poisons that people feel the need to get rid of by any means necessary, has been bobbing to the surface on Facebook lately. Lots of angry atheist types are enjoying themselves far too much as they crow about how there is “no such thing as a toxin” and “no scientific proof that toxins exist or that the products sold to cure them do anything” (well duh, you can’t cure someone of something that doesn’t exist) and as usual with these assholes, they have things entirely wrong and are too stupid and hateful to know it.

It’s been said that those who love something the most are often those who understand it the least, and so it is apparently up to me to school these schoolboys in some basic science.

Let’s start from the root idea of toxins. It’s a simple idea : we modern human beings live our lives surrounded by unique manmade materials and environmental pollutants that our bodies do not know how to handle. As we live amongst all these substances, even ingesting some of them in our artificial foods, our body takes care of most of them, but small amounts accumulate in our bloodstreams and tissues and impinge upon our health.

An anti-toxin purge, therefore, is simply a procedure of whatever sort that flushes these unnatural substance from out bodies.

None of that is controversial science. Science knows that these substances exist and accumulate within us. Whether in our bloodstreams, bones, or bowels, we accumulate toxic junk.

Not in large quantities, of course. If a substance makes people markedly ill in a short period of time, we tend to find out and get rid of it, sooner or later. Those substances are known toxins in the full scientific sense of the word.

But what about something that just makes you feel vaguely tired and depressed, something that suppresses your immune system a little, or that only leads to a very mild sense of being ill? And what if the cause is something so common that there is no way to distinguish it from the chemical background noise? What if it’s the plastic they use in the lids of disposable coffee cups? Or the residue left behind by organic farming methods? How would we know?

Now multiply that by all the new substances invented in the last century, and it is no big leap to think that there must be some of them our body does not know how to handle quite right. Every moment of our lives, we breathe in trace amounts of everything that is in the room with us (and a lot that isn’t), not to mention the things we eat and drink that eventually become a part of us, and so a “flush” or a “purge” might well make people feel better.

And that’s the idea. To make people feel better.

And no, it’s not just the placebo effect. It’s the purgative effect. These herbal concoctions that are sold as anti-toxin have many impressively natural sounding ingredients, but they all boil down to the same things :

Diuretics, to flush out the kidneys and bladder. Laxatives, to do the same for the bowels. And a mild muscle stimulant to help everything along. Maybe some known herbal painkillers or mood elevators to heighten the effect.

And the thing is, when people have purged like this, they will feel better. Partly because the very nature of the event makes a strong impression on people. Going through a week’s worth of trips to the bathroom in one evening is a very intense experience.

And because it is so intense, it will also get your endorphins pumping, and that means that once the seas inside have calmed, you will experience a sense of euphoria that leaves a profound, almost religious, impression on your mind.

Then there’s the effect of being empty. Most of us will never be as empty as someone who has just been through a purge. It’s a very unusual sensation (been there once) and something that maps extremely well to our sense of innocence and purity (just look at all the bad stuff that is no longer in me) and this further cements the feeling that something profound has occurred.

And who knows, it’s entirely possible that these purges actually do clear unnatural substances from our bodies. Maybe the tsunami of purging is just what the body needs to wash loose the stubborn substances that it otherwise cannot handle. Things that are not severe enough to cause a full body reaction, but that taken as a whole, you’re better off without.

Again, none of this is controversial science. It is all rooted in scientific fact. The fact that many of the people buying and using these purgative products do not understand (or improperly understand) the science does not mean that the science does not exist. Neither does the fact that these products are often marketed in such a way as to rouse people’s superstitious fear of the modern world rather than sound rational reasoning.

A flashlight works just as well for the person who thinks it runs on fairy dust as the one who knows it runs on a battery.

Can I say for sure that these purgative products do what they say? No, I can’t, But I can say that, for most people, they do no harm and probably even do them so good.

We could all use a hard reboot of our systems once in a while, ya know what I mean? Both mental and physical.

So to all you people shouting “ha ha, stupid hippie, toxins aren’t real!”, I trust that I have sufficiently established that science far from precludes their claims from being true.

Of course, there is nothing stopping you from going right along believing the comforting lie that preserves your hate-fun.

But know that to do so makes you just as superstitious and irrational as those over whom you claim superiority.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.