[Sorry if this was already posted; it's an NYT article from July 31, 2006. It's about the particularly American populist obsession with the tax code. I can vouch that many, er, "right-anarchists"/minarchists and folks who intuitively often feel there's something wrong with "the system" often end up in the clutches of Libertarian-like movements that spend much of their time investigating the ominous secrets that supposedly lay behind the tax code/Fed Reserve. This goes into that well enough. - B.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/movies/31russ.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en =58f9c47a1f34aeae&ex=1167282000
[WS:] This is yet another example that many so-called political views in this country are grounded in mental disorders - antisocial personality disorder to be more specific. As Philip Zimbardo once said, if one person is having delusions, we call it a mental disorder, but if several people share the same delusion, we call it a point of view and protect it with constitutional rights.
The most interesting aspect of it, IMO, is not the existence of this mental condition, but its incidence. Every society has a certain number of deranged individuals who succumb to delusions. That is normal variation in human species. However, paraphrasing Zimbardo, some societies are more likely than other to treat some of these delusions as legitimate points of view and accord them a special status and protections. As a result, societies or even subsets of societies vary in their acceptance or condemnation of different types of mental disorders.
My explanation of this rests on Max Weber's concept of "elective affinity." Weber used this concept to explain why certain religious ideas that are marginal in one social context, become dominant themes in another (cf. _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_.) If there is affinity between claims of a particular religious doctrine and economic or political interests of a dominant social group, that doctrine is picked up or elected from many doctrines available in a particular social milieu to be the ideology of this social group. One important corollary of this view is that once that particular doctrine becomes the ideology of a dominant group, it becomes accepted by other groups that do not share the same economic interests, and survives long after its usefulness and expediency to the groups that originally promoted it.
The same pertains to social acceptance of mental disorders. In societies where power is legitimized by the manifestations of the supernatural, individuals suffering from psychoses that cause hallucinations and kindred paranormal experiences may be accorded a special status, like holy men, seers, oracles, saints and so on. Likewise, in societies where power and wealth rests on accumulation of wealth for individual use, and thus emphasize individualism over social obligations, antisocial personality disorders become elevated to the rank of venerable ideologies, and individuals suffering from these disorders are treated as pundits, opinion makers and political leaders. In the same vein, paranoid individuals are likely to get a special status in societies or its segments that feel excluded or oppressed. This of course also work in the opposite direction, and individuals engaging in otherwise reasonable but undesirable from the dominant ideology's point of view forms of behavior - such as criticism, skepticism or unconventional lifestyles are labeled insane and stigmatized, ostracized or institutionalized.
In short, the way various abnormalities and dysfunctions are treated in a given society or social group can be very revealing about norms, values and beliefs that are dominant in that society.
Wojtek