12.37 Nixtus, month of Reagus 3, EY 3562
Hail, Supreme Presidential Executive Mrupt,
Mr. Karamazov,
I believe I have found a solution to our subversive problem. The classified research order you put out was quite necessary, given the present circumstances and the possibility of a third-party gaining ground and disrupting the order in the Galactic Congress.
In light of your well-placed concerns, I did some research into how the ancient Earthbound republics of bygone eras handled their social engineering and public relations problems. The standard methods are proving insufficient. Privately held media saturated by messages of proper thematic nature is effective, however frequently messages of subversive nature get through. This is to be expected in any society, but especially one in which the illusion of free speech must be maintained, even when profitability of message is the primary driving factor in the frequency at which messages are displayed.
The solution they found was, quite simply, mental health reform. After studying works on the philosophy guiding the mental health treatment of the ancients, it is clear our modern mental health tactics are flawed from a national security perspective.
The key to the ancient’s success came in the manner in which they regulated anxiety within the population. Our society believes in a concept of rational fear, rational anxiety, and a belief that through meditative practices, one can regulate their anxiety into a manageable and rational thought process. Our professionals teach people to withstand and avoid being crippled by fears, fears which are often rational, such as stress at work, in their job, or even fears that the government will arrest them for subversive behaviors.
In the ancient practice, fears were something to be purged. Anxiety was a disorder. Something not to be overcome, but removed, chemically, and fears that the government would take them away were considered paranoias worthy of a schizo-type diagnosis and a full-fledged involuntary hospitalization. It is worth noting that in the last category, the fear of being hauled away and imprisoned was grounds itself for being hauled away and imprisoned, and despite the very clear cause-and-effect relationship here, their society roundly ridiculed the notion and considered it paranoid, heightening the fear and paranoia and inability to regulate a rational and functional anxiety level experienced by an anxious-subversive.
Anxiety is something any subversive undoubtedly experiences, and the classification of this anxiety as a delusional mental disorder is of paramount importance to the regulation of a democratic society. The next critical step the ancients took was the manufacture of stigmas surrounding the mental disorder this subversive anxiety produces.
Their media was full of them. Every monstrous-man-villain in their fiction was depicted as possessing the mental disorder the subversives possessed. Their pundits made certain to call for mental health reform and further policing of the mental ill whenever an atrocity was committed, regardless of the mental health status of the individual. In many cases, these massacres were committed not by anxious-subversives, but rather by sociopaths, individuals which feel no empathy for others. Sociopaths, however, are not national security threats. Their lack of empathy makes them extremely unlikely to organize, and typically results in an every-man-for-himself style notion of morality that generally aligns them with the philosophy of the ruling class. As a result, the condition of sociopathy went widely undiagnosed in ancient society, and in many of their social circles, sociopathic behaviors were actively encouraged, alpha-males they called them, or sharks, and the title was held with reverence. It also seems that their education system sought out sociopaths to place in special accelerated classes, for the purpose of placing them in advanced science research positions to further weapons research without the risk of moral objections from the inside.
The philosophy of mental health exercised by the ancients was one laid out by the father of their psychiatric method, Sigmund Freud, in his book Civilization and its Discontents, should you care to research this yourself. It essentially claimed that a person who believes there are insufferable injustices in their society will never be happy, and that for a person to be happy, they must be made to conform to their society. Ancient psychiatry focused entirely on the idea that the ideal state of a human was happy, and despite Freud himself claiming that an individual could only hope to be functionally unhappy, and their society set about purging unhappiness through any means necessary, so long as it did not disrupt the natural order of society.
The ancients achieved this conformity chemically. The unhappy and anxious soon to be subversives were simply corrected chemically. They weren’t taught to regulate their emotions and passions creatively and productively. They were simply given one of a variety of slightly different chemical cocktails designed to crush those unhappy passions.
Those medications were flawed in nature. They were quickly developed and then routinely used. Their flaws were what made them so effective for their true purpose, however. They worked by essentially muting regions in the brain which produced feelings. The more passionate the individual, the greater the strength given. The medications of the antipsychotic variety, the ones given to individuals with anxious-subversive type “delusions”, produced a state similar to sociopathy. At sufficient dosage, anxiety was removed, happiness removed, sadness removed, all feeling gone. These individuals, muted into boredom, would then either submit and become careless, or fight to be taken off their medication, sparking a futile decades-long process during which their resistance merely justified increased dosage. When these individuals went off their medication, and were able to think and feel again, their subversive-anxious fears came roaring back, compounded with fears about being discovered off their medications, compounded with fears about the societal stigmas their diagnosis had produced (which they themselves had likely believed and internalized prior to diagnosis, further producing stress), compounded with anxiety produced by their families and friends dismissiveness of their thoughts and feelings, as well as those friends and family members complete willingness to tolerate the drugging and mental health imprisonment imposed on them, as well as the financial strain the hospitalizations produced, and this all combined to undoubtedly produce rampant episodes of traumatic stress breakdowns, which further justified the drugging and imprisonment of the anxious-subversive.
The result was that many potential subversives were eliminated before they ever began, trapped in a decade long tiresome struggle for the ability to feel, a struggle which they all inevitably lost. The stigma surrounding their mental illness undoubtedly eliminated all chance of the individual serving as a nucleation point of a movement, as the public will not listen to someone who is verifiably diagnosed as insane.
If we are to achieve a stable galactic democracy, one which preserves the natural order of society, it is of utmost importance that we learn from the ancient social engineering techniques.
Hail the Supreme Presidential Executive,
D. Ridgeview
