Astral Codex Ten

Western

9 min read

Western

Article

Western is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 15, 2021 and June 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “typical Western version where people were scared of being fat”; “Watters makes a big deal of subtle differences in the way Westerners and Sri Lankans think about trauma”; “Western trend to diagnose more and more things as psychiatric illnesses”. It most often appears alongside America, Japan, Bill Gates.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: July 15, 2021
  • Last seen: June 07, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
Here Watters is working off a theory, sometimes raised by psychiatrists and medical historians, that I think of as a kind of Kantian perspective on mental illness. Kant, remember, said that we have no idea what actual reality is; we see reality through the filter of our own preconceived notions and mental categories, and although there is an external world, we shouldn't claim to know very much about it. In the same way, Watters suggests, there probably is some base-level objectively-real mental illness. If you have to think of it as something, you can think of it as formless extreme stress, looking for an outlet. But the particular way the stress finds an outlet is based on the patient's cultural preconceptions. If you believe that stressed people go blind, you'll go blind. If you believe that stress people act possessed by demons, you'll act possessed by demons. And if you believe that stressed people become obsessed with being really thin and starve themselves, you might become obsessed with being really thin and starve yourself. A few people will have some natural tendency towards one outlet or another - there are a tiny handful of anorexics even in societies like pre-1990 Hong Kong that don't recognize anorexia, just as there are a few modern Westerners who still act possessed by demons. But unless you're especially predisposed towards some method or another, your stress will take the outlet already worn to a deep groove by your cultural milieu.
First, my own theory of anorexia (discussed here) is that it's a natural (though hard-to-explain) response to any extreme ego-syntonic dieting - if you extreme-diet long enough, and enjoy it, and maybe have a certain predisposition, your body will "get stuck" in extreme dieting mode and refuse to go back. This would explain why medieval nuns who got too into fasting got it. It would explain why modern Westerners who get too into looking beautiful get it. It would explain why pre-1990 Hong Kongers who were really depressed and couldn't eat got it. It would even explain why Sing Lee got it. Lee (the psychiatrist whose work on Hong Kong anorexia frames the chapter) had a proper old-school experimental temperament, and decided that he wouldn't be able to treat anorexics unless he really understood them. So he decided to starve himself, and for the first three months it was just as unpleasant as you would expect, and then after that it started being really fun, and he felt great about it, and he had to call off the experiment because he didn't want to actually give himself anorexia. I'm not sure how to square this with the culture-bound syndrome position. Maybe whether or not a given extreme diet becomes anorexia is culture-bound? Maybe learning about anorexia inspires a bunch of wannarexics who then start dieting? I don't know, but it doesn't really fit.
Inline links: here, wannarexics
I was kind of unimpressed with this chapter. It seems pretty obvious that Japanese people got depressed before Paxil’s marketing campaign, including depressed to the point of suicide. GlaxoSmithKline comes off looking a bit manipulative, but it does kind of seem like the rush to get Paxil after their advertising campaign was less “sinister pharma company invents a new disease” and more “oh my god, there’s a name for this thing that I’m suffering from and maybe someone can help me!” There’s certainly a philosophical issue here - do you shrug off depression as just a part of life, or medicalize it? - but it’s not obvious that there’s anything different or uniquely Japanese about this question, or that Westerners made anything worse by exposing Japan to our solution.
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
One weird but technically-consistent take might be “Western psychiatry is just the equivalent of primitive tribes banging drums to scare off demons - but the drum rituals works great for primitive tribe, Western psychiatry works great for Westerners, and everyone should just stick to what they’re doing.”
The part where this becomes confusing is I guess where you draw the boundaries of mental illness. If you think of (anorexia and conversion disorder) as two “symptoms” of some underlying nameless illness, then maybe some places will have conversion disorder (but no anorexia) and other places will have anorexia (but no conversion disorder), and then it will look like Westerners “brought” anorexia to a place that was previously anorexia-free. The only problem with this way of looking at things is that if true, you would expect some other illness (in this case, conversion disorder) to decrease at the same time anorexia increased, and I don’t know of any research on whether this happened or not.
Something else about the book: Watters talks about exporting western psychiatry being equivalent to handing out smallpox blankets. But then he reveals that he's married to a psychiatrist. He's, uh, maybe working through some stuff here?
Links For October
October 14, 2021 · Original source
2: @incunabula: “Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain why…”
Inline links: @incunabula
29: Sick of the Columbus discourse? Why not try Zheng He discourse? In particular, were his treasure ships really that much bigger than Western vessels of the time? Chinese and Western scholars argue that traditional estimates for the size of his ships are implausible, since wooden ships that big are not seaworthy. Most likely the ships he took on his expedition maxed out at around 200 - 250 ft, the same as the largest Western ships of the era.
Inline links: argue
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
How is this barrier formed? It starts with the environment in which Americans are raised. I think many young couples are too individualistic and selfish to pay much attention to the support and education of their children, not like the Orientals, who expect their children to grow up, and not like the traditional Westerners who devote their hearts and souls to them. Very young children, not even a year old, are usually sent to a separate room, the American concept is that this allows the child to learn to have a private domain, to learn to have their own domain, on the other hand, can also protect the private domain of the parents. This is the beginning of children learning to be independent. Independence and individualism are highly valued by Americans. Parents instill this in their children and at the same time protect themselves. They do not want to lose this to themselves as a result of the birth of a child. Their innermost, perhaps unconscious, motivations push them to encourage their children to “go first” and “stand on their own two feet. In terms of social effects, this may have positive implications. Children are taught early on that they should make their own decisions and be responsible for their own actions. This allows parents to get rid of their children earlier.
He praises us for our participation in the Western tradition. Just as Americans might have an overly intellectualized view of China as the land of Chuang Tzu and Confucius, so Wang tends to appeal to Aristotle and Locke when trying to explain why America is so strange, in a way that this American felt was a little overdone. Still, as a citizen of a country that was one of its victims, he is acutely aware of the success of Western values, and praises America as a nation where they have reached their highest development.
What prevents me from dismissing it in this way is that, well, China sure is trying the project of having the first set of things but not the second set. In the early 2000s, everyone in the West thought China would inevitably democratize; surely it was impossible to for a rich, technologically advanced nation of the sort China was becoming to remain a pseudo-communist autocracy. This seems a lot like the theory that America’s prosperity and its decadence are two sides of the same coin. If Wang took power in China to test his theory that freedom and prosperity were separable, his experiment has been one of the most impressive and conclusive in political science.