Mono-Causal Explanations (was Re: Accused Killer of 3 Is LinkedtoRacist Writing (fwd))

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Mar 6 08:17:35 PST 2000


Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


> At 04:28 PM 3/3/00 -0600, Carrol wrote:
> >Mental illness simply fails to explain *any* social act
> >whatsoever. Wojtek is simply babbling.
>
> Yeah, right. Beacuse as every self-respecting revolutionary knows, all
> imaginable ills have one and only source, Capitalism cum Racism (CAR).
>

The great Nominalist can't see a nominalist explanation when it stares him in the face. My claim is that the *content* of a person's mental illness is contingent, not explicable by general rules or eternal principles. In other words, in respect to content, I'm more or less of a nominalist. In so far as social relations have any impact on individuals at all, I suppose capitalism has something to do with the content of a manic-depressive's illness. For example, someone with that illness is more apt to go out and run up credit card debt on new clothes and household appliances than on an attempt to bribe the King to ennoble him. Probably, however, under both capitalism and feudalism a bipolar person's thought would be distorted by a false conception of the future. But that false conception would have to operate in markedly different ways in a capitalist and in a feudal society, no?

Wojtek is able to babble by seeing the whole world except for himself as filled with academic Platonists.

Carrol



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