This article is a guest post from our friend Paul Toth at Violent Contradiction.

“Destroy all rational thought,” William S. Burroughs wrote, while Arthur
Rimbaud sought “systematic derangement of the senses.” Those were the days
when things were merely complicated, as opposed to complicated to the point
of ungraspable incomprehension. This I call a tyranny of the senses. What
Burroughs had right at the time he wrote his words was that rationality then
served social control systems. Now, however, irrationality has been
absorbed into those systems, just as marketing firms absorbed surrealism. Thus,
when people question why everyone they know, including themselves, take one
or more pharmacotherapeutical drugs, the answer is simple: they’ve been
taught and trained to think irrationally. Instead of learning how to think
rationally, they modify their brain chemistry so that it can withstand this
tyranny of the senses.

For example, visiting Best Buy amounts to a “systematic derangement of the
senses,” the audio-visual bombardment obviously targeted at creating
disorientation. How do we normally orientate ourselves when dizzied? By
repositioning ourselves in relation to objects. Thus, Best Buy’s systematic sensory
derangement causes a shopper to buy something, anything, as a means of
grounding the self. Roll over Heidegger, tell Nietzsche the news.

We live in the Age of the Anxiety Attack. Say goodbye, simple anxiety, for
your day has passed. The anxiety attack is the natural reaction to sensory
derangement. In fact, it’s virtually a marker of sanity, the last refuge of
the recognition that something has gone wrong, that the world is slipping
away into some unknown dimension, where perhaps the sun itself is nothing
more than a prop and the moon soon to feature corporate logos.

Here’s an experiment. When stopped in traffic, take a look around and try
to count how many logos you see. Check car bumpers, signs, everywhere and
everything around you. Unless you live in Wyoming or Montana, chances are
strong that you’ll have to drive through the green light before you come close
to a final number. This onslaught of logos creates an identity crisis, for
logos have come to serve as identity identifiers. Consider how much money
people spend to advertise for corporations. Consider the extent to which
teenagers will go to wear the hippest logo, thus, the thinking goes, becoming
hip themselves.

Eventually, however, buying fails us in the same way one lover after the
next fails to satisfy Don Juan: dissatisfaction guaranteed. At that point,
we’ve become “maladjusted” to an intentional and constant state of
maladjustment. This process feels like “going crazy,” but actually it represents the
start of going sane. Unfortunately, you’ve yet to pass through the office
doors of the last salesperson.

Now, I am not going to claim that pharmacotherapeutical drugs serve no
purpose. They’ve done us many favors. However, at some point, one has to wonder
whether, to paraphrase Foucault, the patient isn’t the symptom of the
disease, the disease being the tyranny of the senses created by an unleashed
free market with all the ethics of a rabid pit bull. Thus, anxiety,
depression and other common emotional “disorders” most likely reflect a proper
reaction to a purposefully-disordered culture.

Pills may deactivate the reactions of anxiety and depression, but the
source remains. The pills are part of the source. While I’m not advocating that
anyone stop taking medications and suffer through anxiety and depression, I
am advocating the position that these feelings are the consequence of
irrational thinking that has been embedded in us virtually since our births.
It’s as if we were born into a cult. That our thinking becomes almost
automatically irrational is no surprise. The surprise is that it takes so long
before we begin reacting to the insanity of trained irrationality. The
psychiatrist’s office is simply the last place to learn the lesson: even our own
sense of sanity can be sold, but it’s only a sense of sanity. The
irrationality continues until a person learns to think rationally.

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