The radical psychiatrist RD Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. Living within this [Western] environment ultimately foists upon us a bizarre choice between two equally disconnected realities: A) We may decide to accept as real our artificially reconstructed human environment, ignoring that it is an arbitrary re-creation, and accepting this interpretation as our own. ["Sanity"] Or... B) We may recoil from it, allowing ourselves to see our new environment as a stage set or a series of false fronts. This is the way the schizophrenic often describes the world. [A visitor to these pages suggests a third, post-modern, option] Thus far [1977], political theorists have failed to make very much of the effect our modern environments have on us. And so the person or forces capable of speaking most loudly or most forcefully, or with some apparent logic - even if it is an unrooted logic - can become convincing within the void of understanding. ______________________________________________ Interpretted into hypertext by the Undesirable Propagation Unit for the Schizophrenics & Psychotics Liberation Front (SPLF). The above is an excerpt from the chapter "Adrift in Mental Space" from the book "Four Arguments for the *Elimination* of Television" by Jerry Mander (c) 1977 Published by Quill, New York ISBN 0-688-03274-5 ISBN 0-688-03274-2 (paperback)