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)