#co-optation

Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.

My Questions to AI - The Terrifying Elegance of Artificial Intelligence

“They made limited gains, they were not successful. Because you see part of the problem of Black politics in this country is the way in which Black people have attempted to see the soul [sic] arena for the contestation of this politics within established institutions. The Black Media Workers, for example, started out as a good idea but what happened? All or many of the top people got jobs and it fell apart. Diane Abbot is where she is today partly because of that. Trevor Phillips is there partly because it was a career move. What you are doing is making the mainstream say, "You must be the leader, you must be the voice, come, we will give what you want and forget about it." Where is the agenda of the Black Media Workers Association today that should have existed until now. It should have been an institution. Another great failure was the Saturday School Movement in the African-Caribbean community. By the mid 1970s, there was a network of Saturday Schools, developing an education agenda to counteract the ESN formulations and the bad education in British schools. The significant section of leadership within the Black community decided that it is better to go along with the Comprehensive idea, try to change the schools from within and forget about this notion of Black schools. Now they are trying to get Black schools because the Comprehensive system has failed. It will always fail because the class structure in this country will not allow it to succeed. Black people could have been leading the education debate today, and all of that energy and all of those ideas were cast aside. The individuals became incorporated into the agendas of political parties which have no interest to the Black community per se. So you neutralise the idea, there is no institutional framework.”

How Corruption and Greed Led to the Downfall of Rock Music

Once again, the institution of psychiatry is in crisis and desperately seeking to excite a general public that is increasingly disenchanted by psychiatry’s repeated failures. As I document in A Profession Without Reason (2022), psychiatry’s treatment outcomes were acknowledged in 2011 by former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director Thomas Insel as “abysmal” and “bleak.” Since then, in 2021, the New York Times concluded that psychiatry had done “little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direc­tion, even as access to services expanded greatly.” Has psychiatry contributed anything positive to society? SSRI antidepressants—psychiatry’s last heralded “miracle drug”—are now known to create a far higher percentage of sexual dysfunction than to positively affect depression, with success rates no different or even lower than placebo rates. Psychiatry’s serotonin imbalance theory of depression, discarded by researchers three decades ago, is now finally known to the world to have no merit; and psychiatry’s attempt to gaslight the general public into believing that it is blameless for this theory’s perpetuation has made it vulnerable to a potential class-action lawsuit. Psychiatry’s DSM diagnostic manual has now been acknowledged even by high­-ranking members of the psychiatry establishment to be invalid and even “bullshit.” The Open Payments database reveals 75% of psychiatrists are on the take from drug companies. And research shows psychiatry’s idea that “serious mental illness” is a brain disease has resulted in a perception of greater dangerousness and a desire for social distance—in other words, increased stigmatization. The history of psychiatry is one of consistent scientific failure, but it is also one of remarkable political success through a variety of tactics, which include partnering with financially powerful drug companies so as to control the mainstream media—and co-opting attractive radical movements. Thanks to well-meaning psychedelic advocates, including Michael Pollan (bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, 2018), psychedelics today have a mainstream respectability and a popular allure. Politically astute establishment psychiatrists recognize that psychiatry desperately needs to excite the general public, but that with no new Big Pharma “magic bullet” on the horizon, psychiatry has no choice but to attempt to co-opt psychedelics from an underground radical subculture.

The interests and priorities of the growing diversity consultancy sector intersect with those of antiracist activists, but they are not the same. Some explanations for racism may be welcome in a $30,000 “fireside chat,” others not so much. In a recent interview with The New York Times, DiAngelo said that “capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism—I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me.” Regardless of DiAngelo’s personal politics, this truth remains. Her business model depends on making people uncomfortable, but not too much, or rather only along certain axes of discomfort. She will not get hired if she asserts that the problem she is proposing to solve may be structural and best addressed by the redistribution of power and resources, rather than maximizing the human potential of the marketing department. Of necessity, in a corporate forum, solutions need to be presented in ways that do not threaten the host organization, and that inevitably leads to their being framed as matters of personal, individual behavior.