Mental health profiling and the struggle for civil rights

The public mental health system serves as a second arm of police-force for the federal government. People who break the law are contained by the criminal justice and penal system. People who break rules not necessarily even written into law are contained by the mental health state hospital system. Our legislators have written this loophole into law, mental health law, that allows for exceptions to be made to the rule of law. Let’s call these unwritten rules, these exceptions, pseudo-law.

Pseudo-laws are laws pertaining to violent pre-crime, in other words, the threat of future violence. The legal definition of insanity invariably targets suspected potential dangers “to oneself or others.” No crime need be committed if one is deemed “mentally ill”, that is, of a violent pre-criminal disposition. People are not locked up because they have any illness, people are locked up because they are perceived of as threats to the public. There is an all too often ignored contradiction here as well in that members of the public are being detained, by a government agency that may be perceived as a threat to them, as a threat to the public.

You cannot separate a section of the population unfavorably from the population at large without resorting to alienation. The proper term for this alienation is dehumanization. This minority population, in other words, must be perceived as somehow different, and therefore, less worthy and deserving than the majority population. Difference is a matter of the degree of unfamiliarity, for this separation is a separation from the basic units of which the larger society is made. Those people are not our families. Those people are the shadows in the closets of our families.

The mental health system is a social control system. The system ensures conformity with certain social rules and regulations by holding over people’s heads the threat of institutionalization if they misbehave. Violence is only the convenient excuse for locking people up. People are not locked up because they actually are violent. People are locked up for having behaved in ways that are deemed unacceptable. The mental health system constitutes a system of rewards and punishments used in order to get these errant individuals back into the conformingly acceptable fold.

Alienated dehumanized second class citizens do not have the same rights as full citizens because we have made laws bypassing constitutional protections with regard to people who fit that category. An obvious example of this demotion of rights can be seen in the case of the military service veteran who must petition the court for the right to own a gun due to a history of mental health treatment. Although our laws may have been envisioned as serving all citizens equally the reality is anything but equal treatment. This circumstance inevitably makes the struggle for equality under the law crucial in the redemption of people damned by professional opinion.

The government now states that it wants universal background checks on all people purchasing firearms. The problems this action is creating are twofold. The names of all people outlawed from gun ownership are to be listed in a federal database that contains the informational ruse used for depriving them of their second amendment citizenship rights. This breach of confidentiality is going to end up harming people in court cases. This also creates a situation where people with histories of one sort or another are literally being targeted for profiling by law enforcement.

Given all the talk about erasing “stigma”, here is another example of reinforcing negative stereotypes and, thereby, creating “stigma”. This is also a matter of prejudice, discrimination, and what both of those movements of mind and body entail, a denial of civil rights. Any denial of civil rights means a struggle to regain civil rights for the people who have had their rights denied. People who have been through the mental health system, and come out on the other side, know this intimately.  Their struggle for equality under the law, far from being over, is far from ending.

Lengthy stays in Australia’s mental hospitals

If a recent report from New South Wales is to be believed, Australia needs to step into the twenty-first century. The Ombudsman for mental health facilities there has uncovered a few real horror stories. ABC News reported on the matter in a story bearing the headline, Psychiatric patients spending too long in hospital.

Bruce Barbour reviewed the files of 95 people in 11 mental health facilities across the State and found a lack of appropriate accommodation and support was leading to people being denied their right to live in the community.

His findings, in his own words, are startling.

“What was staggering was 13 people had been in hospital for over 20 years and indeed there were three people in hospital for over 40 years,” the Ombudsman said.

This is 13 people out of 95 people, well over 10 %. If the this selection accurately reflects the population in Australian mental institutions then there are way too many people abandoned, wasting away, and forgotten in them over long periods of their lifetimes.

“Two people had been in hospital from the time they were teenagers and that’s almost Dickensian, it’s just not something we should be seeing in the 21st century in this state.”

I think to call the situation ‘almost Dickensian’ is to understate it. Charles Dickens wouldn’t be so hard on the characters in his novels as the Australian authorities have been on some of their citizens.

Just think, some of these inmates have been incarcerated since a time when they were practically children. If children are innocent, such a claim can’t be made for their elders, particularly when their elders would condemn them to such a fate.

Saying Yes To Health By Saying No To Labels And Drugs

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I see it as a revolutionary act to proclaim myself free of “mental illness”. It is a revolutionary act because psychiatrists had diagnosed me with a number of different “disorders of the mind” in the past. These same psychiatrists readily give negative prognoses’ for certain diagnoses’, among them some of the diagnoses’ they’d given me. I call it a revolutionary act because I have found that it is an act many people find themselves too cowardly to make. I don’t need a doctor to circumscribe terms for living my life, and I don’t need to pretend I need a doctor to do such.

In a mental hospital setting, where one has been involuntarily committed, by a hearing and not by a trial, one is expected to admit to having an “illness”. If one doesn’t admit to being “ill”, a prequisite for discharge, while one at one time would have been said to be using a defense mechanism, and being ‘in denial’ about the severity of his or her “disease”, now one is more likely to hear that one has ‘anosogosia’, a brain defect, that causes one to ‘lack insight’ into the nature of his or her “disease”. Non-admission of “illness” is seen as a further “symptom of illness”, or a further indication of the more serious nature of the impugned “illness”. This is the game, you go along, or you rot in a psychiatric facility.

It must first be remembered that one has been convicted of acting insane not by a jury, but by a judge, a few psychiatrists, and probably a public defender who was only pretending to defend his client. The suspect, in other words, is presumed to be “sick”, and no proof need be offered, for as long and until a mental health professional declares him or her otherwise. The thing is mental health professionals don’t hand out certificates of mental health or sanity. If they are going to verify anything, on paper, it’s usually to the instability that they would find in their captives. Of course, the appearance of “improvement” can open doors.

I am not a high functioning schizophrenic. I am not a high functioning person with bipolar disorder. I am not a high functioning depressive person. High functioning, in combination with “mental illness”, is an oxymoron. People are gauged by the DSM, the shrink’s label bible, according to levels of functionality, and people so labeled are not expected to be able to function at the level of people who bear no labels. I am, therefore, high functioning precisely because I am not schizophrenic, nor bipolar, nor depressed. The high functioning exception to the rule of low functioning is a ruse.

Much research has stirred up much confusion about so called “mental illnesses” and the direct effects of the drugs used to “manage” so called “symptoms“. When it comes to schizophrenia and neuroleptic drugs, a worsening condition is more often the result of the drugs than it is of the disease itself. Neuroleptic drugs reduce brain mass, induce apathy, and ultimately produce cognitive decline in the individuals who take them. Each of these conditions has been attributed to the progress of the disease. You would have to factor psychiatric drugs into the equation before you begin to figure out whether this is so or not, and this is not done in much research today precisely because it is driven by drug company marketing efforts.

I don’t take psychiatric drugs. I don’t need a psychiatrist to prescribe psychiatric drugs to me. I have recovered from any “mental disability” that I may have been said to have suffered from, and I did so without recourse to excessive psychiatric counseling. Usually this counseling involves little more than a script for a chemical agent to be ingested periodically. I don’t take psychiatric drugs because of the ill effects they have on my person, and because I have some knowledge as to how these drugs actually affect the brain and the body. I, in fact, attribute my continuing physical and mental well being to my aversion to taking psychiatric drugs. I think when you connect the “illness” with the drug you can begin to see the virtue in coming off.

We live in a prescription drug culture that has left many casualties in its wake, and you can read the names of some of the more notable cadavers in the dailies. I am proud, for the moment, to count myself among the survivors of psychiatric labeling, psychiatric drugging, and standard psychiatric malpractice. This survival would not have been the case had I passively concurred with some psychiatrist’s low opinion of myself and my chances. We need to change the predominate paradigm in mental health treatment today from one that relies so heavily on chemical sedation to one that deals with the problems of real people before we can advance. One sure sign that a person is mentally healthy is that they don’t rely upon drugs. I encourage others to do as I have done, in the name of saving lives, and to say no to psychiatry and psychiatric drugs.

Living My Life Without ‘Mental Illness’

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I don’t have multiple “mental illnesses”. I don’t see a doctor who says I have any “mental illness”. If I did see such a doctor, it would still be my big secret. I think there are some things you should never discuss with a member of the psychiatric profession, and that is just one of those things. If I felt I had a “mental illness”, or if I wanted a “mental illness”, as some people seem to do, the situation would be different. Psychiatrists dispense “mental illness” labels, and the pills used to treat such labels, as if they were candy. Doing so, I would imagine, fits the psychiatrist job description as it is defined today pretty much to a tee.

The literature these days seems to suggest that there is a “stigma” against seeking treatment for a “mental” condition. What this literature seldom goes into is that much of the treatment going on today, as it was yesterday, is unsought and unwanted. It is coercive treatment given by way of court order to a person who somebody found annoying, and who doesn’t want that mental health treatment imposed on him or her. Unfortunately there aren’t so many people saying that we should end forced treatment so that the only people in treatment are those who want to have such treatment. This leaves the person who disagrees with forced treatment with a limited number of choices. Released from confinement he or she can either join the chorus of people crying for more and more treatment reputedly to end “stigma”, he or she can vanish into a quiet but unmolested and ignoble obscurity, or he or she can speak out on behalf of all those who are treated against their will and wishes.

The first path was always out of the question for me on account of the fact that I could never be so dishonest. I know there is much incentive, after forced and life disrupting psychiatric interventions, for choosing the second path, but I have chosen the third, and I would imagine more arduous path. Why? I think the value of one brave soul surpasses that of a thousand cowardly souls when it comes right down to it. A number of us feel that that violence that the state uses on people deemed to be of unsound mind is quite literally torture. This torture amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in a circumstance where no crime has been committed. Persuading the victim of this torture that torture is treatment, and that treatment is a necessary “good”, gives the torturer quite an edge over his detractors I would say. It cannot, for instance, as in this case, be said that oppression takes place without the acquiescence of the oppressed. I, for my part, aim to acquiesce as little as possible.

When I was first introduced to psychiatric treatment I was wary of psychiatric drugs not because they were dangerous but because they made me feel miserable. Learning, as I have learned, that these drugs do damage to people, and that the misery I felt was indicative of their destructive nature, I have not become any less wary of their usage. I have in fact become an advocate for non-compliance to treatment plans because of the damage wreaked by these drugs. This is only the beginning though when it comes to my complaints about conventional psychiatry. Some of us, and I include myself in that category, have better things to do with our lives than waste our days in mental health limbo. Some of us had rather be leading a purposeful existence. When it comes to this purposeful existence, we don’t need a psychiatrist telling us just what that purpose should be. We can figure these things out for ourselves.

Imagine a psychiatric label. Imagine a pair of scissors. With a couple of snips from the scissors imagine the psychiatric label divorced from the human whose neck it hung around. Imagine this psychiatric label lying by its lonesome. Imagine freedom. I don’t have to imagine that freedom any more because that freedom is mine. The label had no magic hold over me, and it wasn’t attached by super(crazy)glue. It was only a matter of words in a text on some mental health professional’s bookshelf. I have my own words. I can put the dictionary to work for my own ends, too. I don’t need to be debilitated by language. I don’t need to be removed from any meaningful dialogue and social context. I don’t need to be exiled from the community at large. I am not logically challenged, nor am I communication dysfunctional. I don’t have a “major” or a “minor mental illness”. I don’t know about you, but me, hey, I’m Okay.

Professional Zombie Psychiatry Not Invinceable…Yet

Straight off the bat I’m insulted. I’m not “mentally ill”. “Mental illness” is psychiatry-speak. Listen and you’re damned. Flip ‘em the finger, and you’re saved.

Speaking in more general terms, if you were to draw a circle, and title the circle “psychiatry”, you want to stand outside of that circle in the broader world where things are still possible.

What you don’t want to be is a victim of psychiatric predation. ‘Here’s a label, hang it around your neck for the duration of your days, and let’s play “psychiatry says”.’ You want to say “no” to that kind of psycho-tyrannical ego annihilation.

Don’t confess. Admit nothing. They want to hang you on your past. You don’t want to get caught in that kind of terminally lost and perpetually frozen time frame. Be forewarned, and dress accordingly. The coldest people on earth work in the mental health system.

Psychiatry says, “take a pill.” Psychiatry says, “fit into the square hole.” Psychiatry says, “once a loony always a loony.” Psychiatry says, “my voice is the only voice.” Psychiatry says, “I’m the authority.” Psychiatry says, “you’re not the authority.” Psychiatry says, “worship at the shrine of the prescription pad.”

Psychiatry is boorrinngg! Be wary though, psychiatry wants to bore you into a somnolent compliance. Psychiatry wants to hypnotize you into zombie-dom. Psychiatry is the new voodoo.

Grab an assault rifle. Park yourself by a window, and prepare for the new long night of the living dead.

Wait a minute! Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s no need to get yourself locked up in a maximum security forensic unit. You can fight this war on the street where 75 % of the population have nothing to do with “mental health” or “mental health” zombies. The mental health zombie authorities have still got a long ways to go before the DSM-XKM allows all citizens to be labeled “sick” by virtue of their citizenship.

It may be coming, but it’s still on a slow boat. However much psychiatry wants business to pick up, that much is too much. Too much for the moment anyway.

You have to understand that biopsychosocial rehabilitation isn’t just a nonsense term. Biopsychosocial rehabilitation is the new name for purgatory on earth. Biopsychosocial rehabilitation is rehabilitation that is expressly not rehabilitation. Biopsychosocial rehabilitation is the limbo of non-starters.

The psychiatry grimoire can’t work its magic when it’s closed or kept at a distance. You don’t need to have a “mental illness” if you don’t want to have one. What people don’t have is the classified information that the mental health zombie authorities like to keep from them. Anybody who gets with a “mental illness” can lose that “mental illness” whenever convenient. The technology of our mental health zombie authorities isn’t such that it can keep tabs on its victims everywhere they go. The zombie authorities, just like their labels, are very losable.

This thoroughly beatable non-threatening situation may not always be the situation, but it is the situation today. Biopsychobabble is very vulnerable to rational argument. The forces of psychiatry madness can be warded off by calling on alternate shamanistic powers when necessary. Be forewarned. This may not always be the case. Big pharma’s puppet doctor zombie wants you!

Epiphany On The Threshold Of A Better World

We need to say, and in no uncertain terms, “NO to forced mental health treatment!” Forced treatment is always mistreatment. This totalitarian loophole in our democratic system of government should be closed, and closed for good. The problem is not, and never was, forced this therapy or that therapy. The problem is force in and of itself because force involves denying one of the values we hold most basic to the democratic process, namely individual liberty.

There are just so many ways in which people are made un-free through mental health maltreatment. They can be restrained by restraining devices, they can be subjected to solitary confinement, they can be electro-shocked against their wishes, and they can be drugged regardless of their own feelings on the subject, even when out of the so called mental hospital, more literally a psychiatric prison, and in the larger community.

A new law is not going to fix this old problem at all. A new law will merely add to the confusion. There are so many laws, and in few places is this more true than in the mental health system, that are not being enforced now. We certainly don’t need another silly law on the books. What we need is for the old law that allows this over extended exercise in tyranny to be repealed. When force is not the law, as far as mental health treatment is concerned, then force is a violation of the law the way it is everywhere else.

The mental health system in fact serves as the way in which mental health authorities get around the law. People are neglected, abused, violated, and die in these facilities, and the offenders are let off with little more than a knuckle rapping if that. The people confined to these facilities are not schizophrenics or manic depressives, and they didn’t come from another planet. They are human beings the same as you and me. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are lying words in a lying book used to make human beings out to be something other than what they are.

Violence is growing more and more common in contemporary society. Violence is growing more and more common because of the lack of a sense of community, and because of a breakdown in communications. Violence is not growing more common because of an epidemic of “mental illness”. That is the myth. “Mental illnesses” don’t kill people any more than guns kill people. When all is said and done, it is people who kill people, and it is people who should be held accountable.

Tolerance is the answer. Tolerance and an end to these arbitrary and discriminatory laws. Intolerance breeds intolerance. We see the results of this intolerance in the multiple murders that take place on an almost daily basis here and there. These acts of violence weren’t perpetuated by people with “mental illnesses”. They are intolerant acts perpetuated by frustrated individuals reacting to other acts of intolerance. Build a more livable world, for everybody not just for some monied elite, and such acts of violence should subside to the degree that such a world is actually achieved. There is often a reason, you see, to unreason, and it’s not the sort of reason that should be ignored.

Ex-marine Locked Up Over Facebook Posts Freed

Ex-marine Brandon Raub of Chesterfield Virginia was detained in a psychiatric hospital for evaluation for, of all things, his Facebook posts. The case, handled by lawyers from the Rutherford Institute as it was felt that his free speech rights were being violated, was later dismissed.

Business Insider recently published an UPDATE: Judge Orders Release Of Detained Marine From Psychiatric Hospital

A circuit court judge has dismissed the government’s case against Brandon Raub and ordered that the Marine veteran, detained over anti-government Facebook posts, be released from a state psychiatric hospital because authorities had no grounds to detain him, Catie Beck of CBS 6 News reports.

Raub’s lawyer, John Whitehead, issued a stern warning on the state of affairs with Virginia mental health law.

Whitehead said that every year in Virginia more than 20,000 people are committed under similar circumstances and “that means
a lot of people are disappearing” under the pretext of mental illness.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings a few years ago, Virginia lowered its standard for forced treatment. This situation makes it way too easy for people to get committed to psychiatric institutions in the state of Virginia, sometimes for the most frivolous of reasons.

“I’m friends with the local police; I could call them right now and probably get you committed if you were in Virginia,” Whitehead said. “They can arrive at your door based on somebody’s testimony or your Facebook page and take you away to a mental hospital… There’s a system here that is corrupt. And this guy is caught in it.”

Brandon Raub has been released from that system. Many more people are hopelessly caught in it now. I would suspect that Brandon Raub is not the only person so confined in an effort to suppress freedom of speech.

Dodging The Shit Treatment

I don’t like being treated like shit. I react when I’m treated like shit. The whole mental illness industry, misleadingly called the mental health field, is about treating people like shit. The first precondition to treating people like shit is endeavoring to persuade those people that they actually are shit, and therefore, there is nothing wrong with treating them like shit.

Shit must first know shit’s place in the world. Shit must be convinced of shit’s own unworthiness, shit’s burdensomeness, and shit’s status as a waste product. Shit is, in a nutshell, defined by the nature of its dysfunction, or by its brokenness. Warehouses and sewers have much in common. They contain toxic waste. Shit’s status is as unwanted material and as toxic waste.

We have another word for shit these days. We call shit chronic disease. Do nothings are do nothings because they do nothing. At the root of doing nothing, according to theory, is the messed up circuitry of broken brains. Our esteemed mental health professionals mind the warehouse/latrines where the do nothings are stored when their existence irritates the worthies, as opposed to worthless clods like do nothings and other ne’re do wells, in any community.

Much of this dysfunction is entirely psychological, or should I say, miseducational? Shit has been taught that shit is shit, and that if shit is a human being, shit is a human being in name only. Shit is more fundamentally shit. If human beings have rights, shit doesn’t have human rights per se, shit has shit rights. Shit rights are like patient rights. Those rights don’t include life, liberty, and property (or the pursuit of happiness). Shit knows shit’s place in the world.

Should shit object, then shit must be corrected. Shit is shit, and shit doesn’t do such things. Shit needs to know shit’s place. Shit’s place is out of sight and out of mind in the hospital/warehouse/septic tank/outpatient facility/mental health ghetto. Shit doesn’t do real work. Workers work. Shit stinks. Shit can’t produce fine art either. Artists do that. Yes, there is shit art, but then there is also shit work. Shit can’t achieve because achievement is the opposite of shit.

It’s okay to be little balls of turd, but a human being, that requires a little more wiggle space. Disabled isn’t enabled. This rubber stamped paper and institutional bureaucratic invalidation that one receives extends across ages and continents. Defective humans have defective genes and defective spirits. Gold is a good tan, but shit is to the bone. Unwanted is unwanted. One can’t change human nature despite the fact that we’re changing human nature all the time. Give up. Beyond one’s grasp, wealth and power are everything.

There is a world beyond shit, and by that I mean there is a world beyond mental health treatment. Beyond the distress role there is the stability role. Actors and actresses who are well enjoy playing people who are disturbed, or if you prefer, sick. Sick roles make fortunes. The unfortunate thing is that many people who are labeled sick don’t find much satisfaction in playing people who are well. Perhaps it is only because they haven’t tried. Perhaps it is only because they haven’t discovered acting.

Reality is an act. It is also an act that we don’t want to take too seriously. You could always wind up with the wrong role if you took life too seriously. The wrong role is the right role if you don’t take it too seriously. It is the right role because there is always another role at hand if it doesn’t work out. Any role that you can’t step into, and out of, with facility is a trap. I personally have got better things to do with my life than become a victim of the better mental patient trap.

Interview with Brian Henley

This interview took place on Wednesday, July 25, in Ocala, Marion County, Florida.

It’s been said of any one speaking event that it is difficult for the mind to digest more than three new ideas at any one time. I think there are three conclusions about mental health care in the state of Florida that we can draw from this video. Let me mention them in consequential order of occurrence but ascending order of importance. That is to say, I will list the things that need to be done, first, before we achieve the matters of maximum importance, second.

3. Brian Henley mentions this action in his interview. Mental health consumers, psychiatric treatment survivors, and former mental patients need to band together to struggle for, and to achieve, human rights and social justice within the mental health system in the state of Florida.

2. We desperately need some kind of transitional housing programs in the state of Florida, from state hospital to community, perhaps attached to drop-in or respite care centers, that don’t involve forced drugging and Florida Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) team blackmail and bullying.

1. The aim for former patients, treatment survivors, and mental health consumers should be the repeal of mental health law, and with it the abolition of all forced mental health treatment. Only when all patients are voluntary patients, residing on unlocked wards in which they can freely come and go, should they be able rest content. Before all treatment is voluntary, full citizenship rights have not been restored to people currently oppressed by the mental health system.

Harmful practices, ‘the golden rule’, and a better world

I’m not a religious person; in fact, I’m an out and out atheist. All the same, the one piece of scripture that has had a great influence on me is that concerning what has been termed ‘the golden rule’. ‘The golden rule’ goes like this, “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself”.

I remember going to a book signing event featuring Patch Adams, M.D. once, and if I recall correctly, during the course of this event Patch said something to the effect of, “I would never give psychiatric ‘medications’ to a person I liked.” This is not the case with most psychiatrists. Many psychiatrists dish powerful neuroleptic drugs out like they thought they were some kindly old lady with a candy jar. Physicians who have any regard for their patient’s health should show a little more reserve and caution.

Electro-shock therapy involves sending electrical currents through the brain, the bodies central command unit, and the organ of thought, in order to induce a grand mal seizure. Grand mal seizures, ironically, in some quarters, are thought to be the antithesis of psychosis. Grand mal seizures are not good for the brain. Anesthesia may be able to keep the person from realizing he or she has just undergone a physically traumatizing procedure, but this is, in fact, the case,

Both psychiatric drugs and electro-convulsive shock therapy are procedures that reduce brain mass, or destroy brain cells. Put differently, and to be more exacting, they damage the brain. On top of damaging the brain, atypical neuroleptic drugs also produce a metabolic syndrome that affects adversely the overall health of the individual taking these drugs. This metabolic syndrome causes excessive weight gain, diabetes, heart conditions, and a number of other ill health conditions.

Biological psychiatric theory has it that the annoying behaviors associated with mental ill health are caused by some abnormality in the brain, and therefore, treatment needs to target areas of the brain. We destroy the offending behaviors by suppressing or eliminating activity the area of the brain causing the annoyances. Basically, while we may have outlawed radical brain surgery in mental health treatment, our psychiatrists are still very gung ho about procedures that arrive at the same result.

I personally think many of the psychiatric practices currently being engaged in run completely counter to ‘the golden rule’. I don’t think there are many psychiatrists who would approve of brain damage and physical harm being done to their own persons. This makes it all the more ironic that they are so very enthusiastic about doing damage to other people. I know there are other ways besides the way of biological medical model psychiatric treatment, and I feel like one of those other ways has got to be following ‘the golden rule’.

Through adherence to ‘the golden rule’ I think it may be possible to reach a better world than the one we have presently got at hand. There is one major snafu in ‘the golden rule’ though, and that snafu involves people who persistently violate this rule. People who put their own selfish and narrow minded interests above the interests of their fellows, these people put this better world in jeopardy.

Violators of “the golden rule”, such as medical model psychiatrists, Wall Street bankers, and other evil doers, have to be punished and contained if we are to hold onto to this vision of a better world for everyone in the future. “Doing unto others as you would not have them do unto yourself”, or, to put it another way, bigotry, is not the kind of behavior that we will be able to tolerate. We must, in other words, tolerate all behaviors except intolerance if we are ever to reach this better world.