Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs's Reviews > Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Fools rush in
Where Angels fear to tread!”

Capitalism, resisted, is the root of Schizophrenia. Capitalism in turn fixes it by turning it into Bipolar Disorder, as it did mine. I know: it "fixed" my Schizophrenia by making it manic.

For it channels infantile fantasies into a desire for the New. Have you noticed that every new venture on the Web must give rise to a bevy of background innuendos? In shop talk, that means "new and improved."

Sex sells.

Our kids' souls wilt under its incessant barrage. Their choice is twofold: acquiescence or alienation!

When I had a Christian conviction at twenty it was perceived as dangerous. My interlocutors then jazzed me up. Is is any wonder that writers in the seventies called social mania a 'classier' version of schizophrenia? It's much more hip.

So nowadays we introverted kids are made mainstream. They now have The Technology for that. And God?

God is Truth - but now He is a blacklisted truth.

And who will pay for that, in the end?
***
The late, great philosopher Gilles Deleuze recorded a vast collection of acute personal insights in his lifetime. But one particular observation, in my opinion, just won’t wash.

You’ll see he was no fool, but he was EXTREME in his ways.

He lived life totally ON THE EDGE.

And if you do that you’re apt to act precipitously. And ill-advisedly?

I think so!

Following a close reading of Nietzsche’s oeuvre in his early years, he founded his own remarkable work on LIVING ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE FOLD.

That was to be his Final Answer.

He could have done like me, and turned to serious Christianity, which is a lot closer to Schizophrenia. And which has largely cured me.

I guess you might term his life as life in the ULTRA-Fast Lane. What does it MEAN to us, exactly?

Well, if one of us makes a publicly embarrassing gaffe, we try to gloss it over as best we can. That’s a public FOLD.

If we commit a private misstep, like reading nihilistic or spooky writing and then encountering an inner feeling of stark terror, we FOLD that over too. That’s an inner fold.

We turn on all the lights or a favourite TV program. Or if we’re a believer, we say a fast prayer.

Either may work.

Both are quite normal.

But Deleuze, after reading Nietzsche, renounced ALL folds in his life, personal and public. Like Jim Carrey.

Talk about life on the edge FOR THE SAKE OF THE EDGE!

I wouldn’t do it. Would you?

You see, he did the Opposite from my introverted schizophrenia: he turned Radically Woke Bipolar, like Carrey, which now results in a similar approximation to normalcy.

Look only at the film Eternal Sunlight of the Spotless Mind, a zany Woke parody of the Cure that Grace Works in Us!

Far better, I think, to avoid the comforts of life by giving your life away selflessly. And that in fact was the rationale behind his later, more meditative, life.

The Edge seems like sheer folly for those of us who are older and wiser. We’ve gotta face the fact of life that ALL of us are sometimes SOMEONE’S RUBE. We’re ALL only human. We smile and keep going.

That’s life.

But Anti-Oedipus, being an early work, is innocently edgy and is full of jumping non sequiturs, like the early stages of mania. It’s novel and jarring, and hip too, I guess.

And Deleuze is right in a way - if life nowadays is just sales jive, good people gotta suffer. And all good people have psychological tics, big or small. We introverts have truckloads!

Deleuze, at least in that sense, was right.

But then, Deleuze chose a godless world over any form of consolation. And that’s just not my way.

For through all his nightmares Deleuze refused to learn from his mistakes, and I guess like Mick Jagger, living life totally in the Open, he believed he never really MADE any in the first place.

He had trashed all his yardsticks.
***
Back in the old days, folks would tell you to give your head a good shake if you said that! They’d just snicker at you.

You know, a pop song a few years ago called our Western “upwardly mobile highway” the “road to hell.” That’s Deleuze’s favourite song, isn’t it?

But that same world of money and power - with its huge gulf between the have and have-nots - gave birth to a postmodern theology of Absolute Love out of the thought of a simple Nazarene, who lived two millennia ago.

And that theology has shown so many of us the necessity of sticking to the Main Street of Life, and not veering obliquely off the beaten path in pursuit of counter-cultural creeds, or - at the same time - the latest, greatest product.

As I have said, Deleuze overcame his early bombast (as in this book) to become a selfless voice for rational change in his advanced age -

Who, would, as he aged, admittedly became a well-considered and common spokesperson for much-needed liberalism amid the primary forces of domineering fiscal conservatism in the world powers -

A voice of caution and reason in an absurdly hormone-enriched, morally vacuous world.