> I think if you followed that line of thinking, you
> would wind up concluding that the great mass of
> humanity is psychopathic (since most people believe in
> the supernatural, that is, god or gods), and that
> 99.9999% of people living in premodern socities are
> nuts. I don't think that Haitian voodoo practitioners
> or the Pope or Taliban mullahs, for instance, are
> crazy, or that the priests in attendance at the Oracle
> of Delphi or midieval peasants were loons. For that
> matter, I don't think pogromshchiki or participants in
> Krystallnacht or the US lynchings of blacks were crazy
> either, though their belief systems were quite wrong
> (both factually and morally).
You're misunderstanding what I mean by "psychopathological". There is a continuum of psychopathological thinking, willing and acting from the psychotic at one end to "the psychopathology of everyday life" at the other.
The key measure of the degree of psychopathology in this sense is the extent to which the dominant anxiety is paranoid. This is the basis of the judgment that the thinking, willing and acting of Russian peasants are "extremely psychopathological".
Since the conditions, including the social relations, within which individuals develop and live determine the degree to which the "normal" individual in a given social context will be psychopathological, normality can be extremely psychopathological. The conditions characteristic of the Russian peasant commune are consistent with this way of understanding the origin of their shared psychopathology.
Ted