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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up al-Shafi'i's The Epistle on Legal Theory. Backlog moving slowly.
About 40% of the way through The Best Minds. I can already tell this book is going to make me feel sad when I finish it. Fresh out of college, Michael Laudor is offered a prestigious job in Bain Capital, but after a year finds he doesn't really like it, and decides to quit. And yet he's sure that, like the Mafia, Bain isn't an organisation one just leaves: he's convinced they're plotting some way to get him to come back to work for him, and thinks he spies agents of theirs following him. This passes largely without comment, until he accuses his own parents of being Nazis and threatens his mother with a knife, upon which he's committed to an institution. Knowing how the story ends makes it feel like I'm watching a car accident in slow motion.
I'm reminded of Scott's observation that paranoid schizophrenia adapts itself to whatever the sufferer considers evil. John Forbes Nash believed the Soviets were conspiring against him: of course Michael Laudor, a Jew whose family members were killed in the Holocaust, accuses his parents of being literal Nazis. I'm also impressed with how elegantly Rosen weaves in scholarship from various sources to demonstrate that, in the sixties and seventies, the question of whether there was even such a thing as "mental illness" was very much an open one, at least in certain corners of the progressive left. He cited people like Huxley, Zsasz and Foucault who forcefully argued to the contrary. (I was thitherto unaware that Foucault spent a lot of time in gay bathhouses in the US, rubbishing the threat posed by HIV by expressly pointing out how convenient it was that this disease just so happened to overwhelmingly affect gays, drug users and blacks. Uh, yeah dude.)
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