On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Ian Robert Douglas wrote:
> forgive me if I'm missing the point here, but it seems to me what is
> interesting in the case of Ritalin is not so much the enforcement of
> normality, but precisely the question of how it is that our societies are
> becoming so pathological for their inhabitants. We seem to have come a
> long way from the cameral dream of the healthy, tranquil civitas. Either
> that or governments (and States) really have lost control.
Normality, per se, is a very vague term. Especially when one begins to
look at it over time. Is it normal to have a microwave? Is it normal to
beleive in god? Is it normal to take medications? I think that the
"enforcement of normality" is of ancilary worth until the "evolution of
normality" is examined. It sort of makes me wonder how less about how
societies are becoming pathological, and more about why this is defined as
pathological now, whereas something else completely was defined as
pathological in the past.
Caio,
PMK
The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a very poor thing.
Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these
atoms is talking moonshine.
-- Ernest Rutherford, 1933
(five years before fission was accidentally discovered by
German physicists Hahn and Strassman)