Aaron Schwenzfeier commented on my The Landscape of A Psychotic Murderer post asking whether there were more modern examples of the habitat-disconnection mode.

I’m not sure about examples in fiction, I’m not a huge fiction reader. But there are some other examples here and there.

The film “The Corporation” shows another side of this – that if Corporations were psychoanalyzed as individuals they’d be sociopaths.

I think what’s important is that we’re witnessing a process, and that all of these things (corporate behavior, books like American Psycho, etc.) are symptoms of a trend in process.

The process is caused by (a continually deepening/widening) disconnection. The disconnection is especially from the Earth and Earth-systems (knowledge and practice), but also from our own physiologies (“normal” or “scientific” physiology, and our own unique individual physiologies).

It’s a feedback loop, like this:

1. goal-directed behavior within environment leads to evolutionary change, and to technologies…

2. as the organism evolves, its goal-direction and perception or attentional-focus changes; and technologies change as well (and older technologies continue to evolve)

3. interaction with the environment comes to be guided more and more through and within the constraints of evolutionary changes and technologies

4. “success” focuses effort even further – pushing it down the path that led to previous “success” in a certain behavior or technology

5. culture is the expression of the shared-interpretation of experience within habitat – culture is shaped by (it is the shared interpretation of) perception of and interaction with environment, which includes technology-use

6. culture and “success” support one another to encourage a particular behavioral pathway – even to enforce it, through customs, laws, or group-think – leading back to number 1.

Our process has been one of separation and isolation, which has yielded a particular kind of success, that really only applies within that framework. It is not a “Universal” success. E.g., even the discovery of antibiotics has proven to be limited in usefulness, and ultimately will prove to be its own undoing (and that is largely because that technology is used in a disconnected fashion, as it must be, within a paradigm of disconnection).

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Just read the book “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis. It is at once fascinating and terrifying.

For those who read this blog, know that the book is like a fleshed-out version of the film (if you’ve seen the film). The film doesn’t compare (as so often happens in film adaptations of books) – and in some ways that is a good thing.

For instance, the violence in the book is so extreme that I ended up skipping over later passages of violent acts. They’re just disgusting. To me, anyway.

But I was compelled to write a post about it. On page 374, near the very end of the book, the main character, Patrick Bateman, begins explaining himself. Part of this speech you hear as a voice-over in the film. But an important piece is left out.

“…where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire – meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”

This is the key to the character. His relationship to/with the “geographical” and cultural (and social) environment within which he lives. His physiology has grounding only in “surface” (which isn’t really grounding, IMHO).

It is a clue.

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