Daily Times

For Schopenhauer, death is likely to be understood as an “impossibility of all possibilities.” Nietzsche declares “the living being as only a species of the dead.” For Marcuse, death is an “unredeemable guilt of mankind… In a repressive civilisation, death itself becomes an instrument of repression …an element of surrender and submission …an un-freedom.” For him both “theology and philosophy compete with each other in celebrating death as existential category: perverting a biological fact into an ontological essence, they bestow transcendental blessing on the guilt of mankind, which they help to perpetuate — they betray the promise of Utopia.” However, in a non-repressive civilisation “It can be made rational… men can die without anxiety at the moment of their choosing.”

Not many societies, civilised or otherwise, leave the decision of pronouncing euthanasia/mercy-killing for its terminally ill patients to doctors, even when the patient is beseeching for it. Life being a gift of God/nature is too precious to be left to the whims or wisdoms of messiahs or to the pleading of a patient. To be or not to be is an intricate affair; an emotionally disturbed patient is precariously placed — or far removed from sanity — to give a final verdict about his ultimate fate. The human body having an exchange value remains profitable for a stratum of society. As commodity, the human being has to vanquish his right to his own body. Survival is deemed an ethical question, which leaves the enigma of ‘freedom’ in limbo. Even when there is a consensus about the poverty of prognosis, the courts make it doubly assured to stymie any attempt of doing away with one’s life. The wisdom and the jurisdiction of the experts in this regard find the doors of justice slammed on them.

What if a court wears a doctor’s gown and begins to claim the expertise of a profession, which to the best of its own sagacity, it is neither capable of nor entitled to. A scalpel in a surgeon’s hand can save a human body by removing a malignant lump with surgical precision, but the same scalpel in the hands of a non-expert or a charlatan is certain to excise not the lump but extricate the human essence as well. If euthanasia is too serious a matter to be left to the discretion of doctors, the decision or the definition of a malady is equally pernicious to be left to the jurisdiction of a court.

The highest court in Pakistan has bewildered the medical community by refusing to accept schizophrenia — otherwise a psychosis, nearly an incurable disease — as a malady. Having all the medical assistance at its disposal, it is shocking to see the court being so dismissive of a fact approved and recognised globally by the community of psychiatrists as one of the most debilitating pathologies. It is tantamount to calling the integrity of the whole profession into question. How would the court, any court, react if its verdict having a last laugh is openly flouted or dismissed by an individual or a community in general? We are all too familiar with the repercussions of contempt of court, but what about the contempt flung at another profession, especially at the expense of a neck, which is already tied in the noose?

What is schizophrenia? This term, as Laing describes, is applied to a person suffering from “ontological insecurity,” whose being, according to Heidegger “is an issue for him,” which means he is scared of having his being as his own. Hence, he tends to petrify and depersonalise others. Apart from petrification, engulfment and implosion remain his other fears. His self bifurcates into ‘embodied’ or false self and ‘disembodied’ or real self. The former is exposed to others hence remains vulnerable, while the latter “keeps its attitudes and aspirations scrupulously secret. The Inner-half having violently antisocial desires, despises the Outer-half for its compliance and abhors other people for not seeing through the Outer-self to the unpleasantness of the Inner-self.” It is alienation at its worst.

For Laing as for the court in Pakistan, “There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact is a political event… The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation… It’s not like having cold. The patient hasn’t got schizophrenia, he is schizophrenic… Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.” However, here Laing parts ways from the juridical verdict as he “claims that a psychotic development — schizophrenia — is a comprehensible outcome of an unrelieved schizoid experience, which was originally within the bounds of sanity.”

For Laing, it’s not the madness but sanity that needs to be called into question. If sanity is nothing beyond “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world… a capacity to adapt to the external world — to a world gone mad” then where lies the demarcation between sanity and madness. While adjustment of a human being “as half-crazed creature to a mad world… is called normality in present age… the texture of the fabric of socially shared hallucinations is what we call reality, and our collusive madness, which we call sanity.”

The responsibility of this plague rests with the alienated “society where competition for the basic cultural goods is the pivot of action. [Here] people cannot be taught to love each other… We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.” That is why “Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”

This only proves that we as species are all living in a lunatic asylum disguised in sanity. Since victims have become familiar with their chains, they pretend to negate them by confining themselves to their inner self. In this process, everything beyond the inner self has come to be seen as ‘other’, may it be an individual, a society, or the world. This parameter suggests we, the people of this ‘globalised village’, without exception, are all schizophrenics. By rejecting schizophrenia as a disease, the worthy court has saved us from being labelled as paranoids. Does stripping off a label strip the disease off from the patient? It only exacerbates it.

All verdicts have their consequences; hence, they cannot transcend the law of cause and effect. It is an ominous sign if dominant interests tend to maintain their dominance through juridical compulsions. This suggests that either having lost their legitimacy, the dominant interests are incapable of imposing their hegemony over the people or due to the irrationality of their character they are exposed, hence amenable to be overtly ridiculed by the masses. Domination without hegemony is a precarious state for the ruling class. Sensing this precarious position of its dwindling control, the totalitarianism strives to seek a shelter under the umbrella of legality. Legality, the most horrible justification to rule without consent.

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com