so many people i know are ill and if they were physically ill, other people who don't have their affliction could imagine what it would be like and sympathise and make them food and alleviate their boredom and bring them books and drive them places but because their unwellness arises in synapses and patters down pathways and fiddles with the chemical balance in their minds we don't understand because the mind we talk to is the mind that is affected. one in four, i think it is now, and rising, one in four of us. perhaps we're only just recognising it, perhaps it's the last taboo and one that is only being recognised now that we don't really get physically sick as often as we used to, but i think more than that, i think uncertainty and the death of god and the lack of narratives (nation building? war? politics? making something of oneself?), i think loneliness and the supreme, stupid belief, the replacement narrative that permeates us here in this place and this time that we can do it alone, that the individual has the power to do all things. we can't. and true freedom is scary. and so we get sick and the things which can help us most (other people) are driven away by it.

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the family had a lot of things wrong with it, but the one thing it did well was act as the model for the welfare state, in which the rich helped the poor and the healthy helped the sick, at least a bit. the chinese still have it - look at the success of the overseas chinese community all over asia - but we don't really, not anymore. right, that's my didactic binge for today.