There is renewed talk of the so-called “forest family,” the Anglo-Australian couple who chose Italy to raise their children off-grid. The couple were perhaps convinced that raising and educating their children in Italy would involve an “Italian” approach, understood as a sort of laissez-faire attitude. Instead, they are now faced with a legislative and bureaucratic system worthy of the Soviet apparatchik.
The case immediately became political. On the one hand, there are those who defend the libertarian ideal, and on the other, those who claim to advocate for the education of children by the state. It is curious that those who consider the state to be the “best parent” possible in cases such as that of the “forest family” are always among those who contest Giovanni Gentile and abhor the approach of the Gentile and Bottai reforms regarding Italian schools: in that case, the despised regime had taken the education of children too much into the hands of the state…
When a minor’s opinion is law
In short, ‘education is the responsibility of the state, but only if it conforms to my point of view’: one of the many contradictions in the narrative surrounding the Trevallion case. But it is now clear that the liberal left is not afraid of contradictions, so much so that in the same days it applauds another legal decision on the subject of minors. While the Trevallion children cannot determine their own destiny, in La Spezia there is applause for the ‘sex change’ on the documents of a 13-year-old. This process began in 2024 when the teenager in question was 12 years old. In this case, there is applause for the fact that the court recognized the capacity for discernment of the pre-teen in question.
Of course, the Trevallion children are younger (8 and 6 years old), but even if they had been twelve, their idiosyncrasy for plastic would still have been one of the decisive factors for their removal from the house in the woods.
In any case, if the aversion to plastic and the condition of the farmhouse where the family lived happily were not considered sufficient for the preliminary investigation, a psycho-diagnostic assessment of the two parents has now been requested.
The new assessment
All in the interests of the children, of course. This apparent escalation in documentation is undoubtedly due to the media coverage of the story. First, there was the fact that the house was off-grid (and not ‘without water and electricity’), then the alleged structural problems, and finally the aversion to plastic. Each piece of news added a piece to the picture, making it appear as a crescendo to public opinion, while for investigators familiar with the situation, the puzzle was well put together from the start.
However, the media coverage of this story leaves the impression of an attempt to pathologize the behavior of the two spouses, considered deviant, beyond the obvious and natural assessments of the case and the necessary investigations in the interests of the children involved.
From the fight against misinformation to the psychopathologization of dissent
The pathologization of individuals who do not exhibit behavior that is deviant in itself (using deviant in the common sense) and who have no criminal records but who simply present themselves as non-aligned or “disaffected” on a socio-political level is a particularly sensitive and rarely investigated issue.
In general, individuals who are not aligned with the dominant narratives are perceived as victims of a problem of access to and understanding of information sources: primarily disinformation and fake news. The dispute therefore takes place on a socio-cultural level that can ideally be corrected on the same level within the public debate, despite the growing risks in terms of laws against disinformation and Non Crime Hate Incidents, which we have dealt with several times and against which US Vice President J.D. Vance has lashed out.
There is also a risk that ‘non-alignment’ will be perceived not as socio-cultural disaffection but as a psychiatric disorder. There is no shortage of academic studies in this regard, aimed at demonstrating possible correlations between ‘conspiracy theories’ and states of anxiety and/or stress.
However, there is an implicit risk that if the non-aligned or disaffected individual is considered deviant on a psychiatric level, then the socio-cultural-informational context for framing the perceived deviant is abandoned and we move directly to the medical level. Science says so.
Dystopias and deviants
In today’s debate around free speech, parallels with 20th-century dystopian literature are inevitable. On the other hand, science fiction, on more than one occasion, in creating credible symbolic systems within hypothetical ‘what if’ scenarios, manages to offer reflections that are much more precise than political philosophy (see, for example, the theme of citizenship).
And when it comes to the psychopathologization of political dissidents, the insights offered by dystopian literature are also useful.
The psychological element as pathological in the deviant is present in the most famous dystopian narratives of the twentieth century, but it remains in the background compared to other aspects of coercion.
George Orwell’s 1984 focuses on technology and language as instruments of control, even though the inquisitor-torturer acts on a psychological level because the protagonist must not simply renounce his beliefs, but come to love Big Brother.
Drugs and psychotropic drugs as a painless means of control dominate Huxley’s Brave New World and, to a lesser extent, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where the exercise of power is mainly expressed through control of the media. Bradbury also wrote a short story, The Pedestrian, in which the protagonist ends up in a ‘Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies’ for going out for a night-time walk in a megalopolis of the future where walking alone is considered a relic of the past (I would like to refer the reader to my article for further information, The Totalitarian Realization of Democracies in Dystopian Literature, in Rivista di Politica, 3/2024).
Equally clear on the medical level is the ending of Zamyatin’s We, where the “disorder” that creates deviance is “fantasy,” which must be surgically removed to create the perfect citizen.
Anthony Burgess also plays with the psychiatric element, conceiving A Clockwork Orange in defense of free will against the behaviorist utopias of Walden Two, written by Harvard luminary Burrhus F. Skinner.
But in all these famous cases, the psychologist/psychiatrist remains in the background of the dystopian setting, with the primacy of action being delegated to politics and the secret police. The only exception is Ursula K. Le Guin, who puts the psychopathologization of the dissident down on paper. Or, as we shall see, simply those who find themselves outside the “parameters.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, feminist but…
Among the greats of American science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) occupies an ‘anomalous’ place. She is the first writer to win both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award in the main categories, two awards which, together with the quality of her works and their print runs, make her a voice on a par with the great names of American science fiction, Heinlein and Asimov.
Le Guin made her mark by presenting innovative themes and asserting her own idea of feminism. She won her first Hugo Award in 1970 for The Left Hand of Darkness, which tells the story of an ambassador from Earth to a planet of hermaphroditic humanoid aliens, a sort of precursor novel on the themes of gender roles and stereotypes.
Despite her ability to play on equal terms with ‘male authors’, claim active feminism and anticipate some issues dear to genderism, she is not an author held in high regard by the ‘libtard’ left. The Left Hand of Darkness itself, a great and highly valid novel, despite always being cited as an example of anticipatory reading on gender issues, has been repeatedly accused of not being ‘enough’: stereotyping of gender roles, creeping homophobia, and – horror of horrors! – masculine pronouns for the hermaphroditic ambisexuals of the planet Gethen. And again in 1976, Le Guin wrote in Is Gender Necessary? (in Aurora: Beyond Equality, The Necessity of Gender, The Language of the Night, Editori Riuniti, 1986): “I am not in favor of genetic alteration of the human organism, not at our present level of intelligence.”
Feminists, in short, have always preferred more ‘easy’ authors, in whom the assertion of female roles and abilities are enjoyed in the most basic and deteriorated reversal of roles or male-female opposition, such as the infamous Marion Zimmer Bradley, who remained a true icon of female emancipation despite the now proven allegations of harassment and pedophilia testified to by her own daughter after her death. It is true that the crimes of authors should not prevent the enjoyment of their works, but clearly Zimmer Bradley is not Caravaggio…
Ursula K. Le Guin, anti-capitalist but…
Yet Le Guin is not only a feminist author, but also a left-wing author. Another of the author’s masterpieces is The Dispossessed, 1974, in which a single alien society is contrasted with the capitalist mother planet and an independent anarchist colony. The theme of the book is the journey of a scientist from the anarchist colony to the mother planet, which provides food for thought on the two diametrically opposed societies, including the question of freedom. The anarchist moon represents a sort of ambiguous utopia, as in the book’s subtitle. It is clear that Le Guin sides with the moon of Annares, a sort of anarcho-syndicalist commune. Even the protagonist is aware that the ‘conventions’ of Annares, while not laws, are still a form of limitation on individual freedom.
And individual freedom is one of the author’s underlying themes. She is not a libertarian in the strict sense (both she and US libertarians would shy away from the comparison) because the sense of freedom is always expressed in a perspective of cooperation.
Stalin’s censorship versus free market censorship
The author’s position, with a certain degree of irony, is well argued in the essay Stalin in the Soul, 1973, collected in the volume The Language of the Night, which openly plays with paradox, starting from the lives and works of two dissidents of the Soviet Union, Zamyatin and Solzhenitsyn.
The two great Russian authors who challenged the Soviet censorship system by creating masterpieces were (paradoxically) freer than a hypothetical American writer who will never write his masterpiece because he is ‘too busy’ making money writing best-selling fantasy sagas or becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood. Obeying the party is no different from obeying the market, and paradoxically, it becomes easier for a free man to disobey the former than the latter.
Although she is best known as a novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin was also a prolific author of short stories, which, in terms of brevity, evocativeness, and reversal of premises, can be compared to those of Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, Philipp K. Dick, and Jorge Luis Borges.
The Diary of the Rose
The author’s most famous openly dystopian work is The Diary of the Rose, 1976, in which a doctor in a new field of psychiatry (using an instrument called a psychoscope to view conscious and unconscious projections on a screen during a session of analysis) receives a political dissident as a new patient. The story consists of the diary of the doctor in question, Rosa Sobel, who initially thinks that the new patient is ‘just’ a paranoid personality, convinced as he is that they want to force him into electroshock therapy and a lifetime in a mental hospital.
It is through continuous analysis sessions that the doctor comes to understand that neither paranoia nor childhood trauma (as a child, the dissident witnessed an arrest by the political police) are involved, but that the analysis is merely an intermediate yet necessary step in ‘medicalizing’ the dissident into a lifelong patient.
The reader may wonder why such an intermediate level is necessary in a totalitarian state.
As can be seen from the diary, this intermediate level of medicalization is necessary to convince the educated class, far removed from the fanaticism of politics, to which the protagonist, Rosa Sobel, herself belongs, of the absence of forms of repression. The Diary of Rosa is not only a story of the medicalization of dissent, but above all a tool showing how this medicalization is the instrumentum regni for “governing” the middle class that is well integrated into the system: dissidents are not being sent to mental hospitals, those who show signs of disaffection are simply being treated. Disaffection is the key word in the story. If political disaffection cannot be cured with positive stimuli, propaganda, then it is an irreversible pathology
The unknown factor in the story is whether Dr. Sobel will go along with the classification of the dissident as a victim of pathological political disaffection, or whether she will realize that she is part of a totalitarian control system.
SQ Quotient
The Diary of the Rose is one of Le Guin’s most famous stories because it became a symbol of dissent and censorship. Between 1975 and 1976, the Science Fiction Writers of America worked to revoke the honorary membership card given two years earlier to Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. In an article, Lem had been less than complimentary about much of American science fiction literature. One of the few voices to contest the revocation of the honorary membership was Ursula K. Le Guin, who withdrew The Diary of the Rose from the Nebula Award finalists for best short story, where it would have been a sure winner. The award then went to Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man (here too, I would like to refer you to one of my articles, Philosophical Science Fiction: Lem Reader of Dick, in Philip K. Dick – He’s Alive, We’re Dead, Antarès, no. 19/2022).
Less well known is the short story SQ, an absolute divertissement with even more fatal outcomes. Here, for the sake of magnificent and progressive progress, a harmless test is launched to establish an individual’s mental health coefficient, the SQ that gives the story its title. It is a way of assessing the abilities of individuals as active members of society, and it must be repeated every three months. Supported by individual states and the United Nations, it appears to be a simple and immediate way to make the Earth a better place.
SQ is the first-person account of the enthusiastic secretary of Dr. Speakie, the luminary who invented the test. Those who fail the test by scoring above 50 can be ‘helped’ (in italics in the text) at a Realization Center. These centers will soon be renamed Hospitals.
The SQ test will soon lead most of humanity (including Dr. Speakie) to end up in these Hospitals: the Earth as a single madhouse and not the dawn of a new humanity with the enthusiastic secretary ruling the world.
Once again, a psychiatric assessment that promises to be decisive and scientific on paper. And whose idealistic and fideistic application instead becomes a sort of condemnation of the entire human race, given that reality often does not sit well with the dreams of utopians and their ‘unique measures’ such as those of Dr. Speakie. But then again, as Speakie points out to his detractors, how can a person think they are ‘free’ if they are not mentally healthy?
SQ is a lesser-known story from The Diary of the Rose, but one that sounds much darker and more disturbing today than when it was published in 1978. Today, the blanket application of radical procedures and choices without the slightest consideration of their effects has become the norm.
“The institutionalized stupidity of governments…”
Ursula K. Le Guin, referring to her three dystopian stories (in addition to The Diary of the Rose and SQ, there is also the Orwellian New Atlantis, a feminist story in which the capitalist-welfare government has outlawed marriage), said in an interview with Ramola D (An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, October-November 2023):
“These three stories were born out of anger and fear of the institutionalized cruelty and stupidity of national governments, both abroad and at home. None of them is more than slightly exaggerated. It is difficult for a story to come close to the terrible reality of the punishments inflicted by the government on dissidents and the torture perpetrated by the government itself.”
The problem is therefore not only cruelty, which Orwell in particular warned us about, but also stupidity, perhaps born of the facile enthusiasm of Dr. Speakie. Above all, we must remember that when we begin to question the mental and cognitive faculties of an individual who is disaffected with politics or dominant narratives, the risk of totalitarianism is closer than ever.