#1292 Nima Bassiri: Capitalism, Psychiatry, and the Emergence of Pathological Value

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Nima Bassiri. He's a social theorist, historian, and philosopher of the human sciences and associate professor at Duke University, where he teaches in the programming literature. Duke's Interdisciplinary Humanities and Cultural Studies Program, and today we're going to talk about his book Madness and Enterprise Psychiatry, Economic Reason and the Emergence of Pathological Value. So Dr. Basiri, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:37 Nima Bassiri: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:40 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, uh, let me ask you first, what is the premise and the main argument of your book before we get into details here?

00:50 Nima Bassiri: Yeah, thank you for asking and thanks for having me on the show. Um, THE, a book is essentially uh, something of a kind of reprisal of the history of psychiatry. And one of the things that I've tried to do in this book is to reimagine. The very category of madness as something that is more than just a medical category, and more than just a moral category, but something that's in an economic category or an economic form, quite literally, since its modern kind of outset. Um, AND, um, the way I do it, and I'll just be very brief about this, is to say that, um, when The modern conception of madness, and here I mean, uh, the conceptions of madness that begin to emerge in the early 19th century, when they arise, they introduce a certain kind of a hermeneutic challenge to a lot of psychiatric, uh, practitioners.

01:45 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so what, what does hermeneutic I mean in this particular case just for people of the audience that might not be familiar with this kind of terminology.

01:53 Nima Bassiri: So that's great. Yeah, so an interpretive challenge. So, um, one of the things you have to understand in the history of psychiatry is that, um, madness has been, um, something that people have been thinking about for millennia. But one of the classic ways that madness was always understood was as something akin to what you might call a cognitive disorder. So someone who, for instance, imagines themselves to be the king of France, where they are in fact not. And in this sense, madness was always, you could say, easy to detect. You could always tell who the person was who had some kind of a delusional disorder. And in the beginning of the 19th century, a new conception of madness begins to emerge for a number of reasons that are conceptual, that are professional, sociological. But in fact, madness is very difficult to identify, and it became very important to make this claim that it was very difficult to identify. It was very latent in the population. It was often very masked in the population, and it would only emerge in these, um, unpredictable sorts of ways. And so, um, uh, so this is the kind of interpretive challenge and the, the, and I'll say this very schematically, and we can talk about it in more detail. But one of the, the, the ways that psychiatry kind of inadvertently had to come up with a kind of a framework to make sense of how to Distinguish somebody who is healthy from somebody who was sad was by utilizing what you might call economic metrics or economic benchmarks. Are they good with money? Can they work a job? Um, CAN they accrue wealth? Um, AND this became such an entrenched and embedded way of deciphering the boundary between health and unhealth, that in some ways, kind of economic appraisal. You could say got cooked into the very concept of madness. And that's the, that's the story I try and chart throughout the book.

03:49 Ricardo Lopes: You know, I, I think that probably toward the end of our conversation we can come back to this point, but just to ask you a little bit about what you just said there. I mean, so, uh, one very interesting thing, and please correct me if I'm if I'm wrong here in the way I interpreted what you explored in your book, or one very interesting idea that I got from it is that actually, and I've had these ideas. When reading the work of other people who approach psychology from a more cultural perspective or look at psychiatry within a particular social cultural context, is that, um, I mean, the way that psychiatry developed in the West, at least, and of course nowadays it is, uh, I mean, for the most part, for the most part spread across the world. World, um, is that it developed in particular, uh, socioeconom uh socio-cultural and economic, uh, in a particular socio-cultural and economic context, right? I mean, uh, uh, in this particular case, we are talking about, um, calling people mad, uh, calling mad people who were possibly not able to properly Uh, manage their money or work or generate money in some way. So in that particular case, it would be, uh, associating madness with conduct that we expect from people in a capitalist or an early stage capitalist society.

05:29 Nima Bassiri: That's right. That's absolutely right. And in a way it's um And, and I'll just say something briefly, and we can certainly talk about this in a great amount of detail, because there is some kind of connection that I am trying to make in the book between capitalism and irrationalism, you could say, right, uh, by mental illness in its most kind of paradigmatic sense. And there is a kind of a, a, a critique, of course, of, of capital as a, as a form of irrationality, which I think it largely is, despite however much it masks itself in certain forms of reasoning or economic reasoning. And I think that some, there have been some kind of critiques that you see from different um positions that, um, capitalism's irrationalism will be its undoing. And one of the things that I want to argue in this book is I actually think capitalism and and irrationalism go together very well, that actually, it's not capitalism's undoing, that it, that it thrives in some respects on certain forms of sociopolitical irrationalism. Um, AND, and that's part of one of the arguments I want to make in the book. And so, of course, this relationship between health and, and unhealth and, um, capital, it goes back very far. Just one final point to make too, in response to your question. There's a, a longstanding premise that actually the thing that's most productive for capitalist enterprise is a state of health. And this could be the state of health of, of the, of the population, for instance, as a kind of vital and, and, um, Um, uh, a kind of a vital workforce, you know, you want a healthy pop, and this is like, this is stuff that goes back to, to Foucault, the idea of, of course, biopolitics, uh, a healthy population, keeping them healthy is actually going to keep them very productive. And in this sense, if you follow out the story, then it would suggest somehow that forms of unhealth are actually outside of the purview of capital. And I actually want to convert this story and to suggest throughout the book that actually with respect to capitalism, um, Mental illness is actually more profound and has more fecundity for the capitalist enterprise than than than sanity does, for instance.

07:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, we'll come back to that point later, but I mean, what would you say has been the sort of historical relationship between economic thought and psychological science and medicine in this particular case, psychiatry as a branch of medicine? I mean, has there been some form of parallel between Uh, those two things in the way that economic thought developed and, uh, psychiatry or psychological science, clinical psychology, for example, uh, developed as well. Yes,

08:25 Nima Bassiri: there has been. And in fact, you can start to trace, um, the relationship or the interest, um, the kind of cross-pollinating interest between fields of economic theory and psychological theory. Dating back to the kind of the late 19th century, most of that story has often been economic theorists drawing from psychological ideas to make sense of kind of marginal utility theory or any kind of like Um, theories where the, the, the, the, what's at stake in the economic thought are the activities of economic actors. And, and, and depending on what, which sort of psychological theory a person makes use of, um, the economic theory will be impacted. So, for instance, John Maynard Keynes was famously very like interested in Freud to some degree, and I think considered kind of capital as potentially virulent and so on and so forth. The thing that I'm doing in this book is trying, and of course, I'll just say one thing too, which is that story as well, of economists drawing from psychological kind of doctrines extends even to this day in fields like behavioral economics. The story that I wanted to tell is the inverse story, which is the use that psychiatrists made of certain forms of tacit economic thinking to make sense of mental illness. So that in a weird way, Um, as I argue, psychiatry has always been using economic styles of reasoning to make sense of mental illness since the early 19th century, which is really the formation of the field of psychiatry.

10:05 Ricardo Lopes: So, I, I mean, just to clarify, from the 19th century onwards, uh, has there been some, some form of link between what we consider to be, uh, madness or any form of mental. ILLNESS more generally and the ability of people, uh, the ability that people have to generate economic value.

10:30 Nima Bassiri: Not formally, um, and I will say that where a lot of thinking, there has been a great deal of thinking about what you might call the category of irrational behaviors, and you see it from the writings of Max Weber and on, you see it in Gary Becker. Irrationalism for them though, always meant a certain kind of heuristic thinking, dogmatic thinking, thinking based on traditions and values, and so on and so forth. And so, I make a distinction in the book between what you have to understand as two genres of irrationality. There's irrationalism, which is like non-instrumental, non-utilitarian thinking, right? Using dogma, or how, how many of us often think. We, our, our, our brains tend to work very heuristically, very rhetorically. And then something like mental illness, which is a form of irrationalism that is so irrational, it, it almost never gets talked about. So, in a sense, there has been, to answer your question, no real work that has sought to actually link mental illness and sort of like capitalist or kind of economic. Enterprise as a kind of project. It's always been the thing that's been removed. It's like what Foucault says about Descartes' discussion of madness in the, in the meditations. He says Descartes simply removes madness from the scene of discussion. It's not even Worth discussing, right? It's worth discussing irrational behaviors like heuristic heuristic thinking, or tradition like traditional thinking, or dogmatic thinking. But it's, it's never been worth worrying or wondering whether or not a person with a delusional disorder can be a good economic actor. That was never particularly, um, important. There are signs of it, and I talk about it in the book. So the writings, for instance, of early Schumpeter, Joseph Schumpeter, and his discussions of the entrepreneur that he kind of like develops in the early 20th century. Um, HERE you have this idea of geniuses, and I talk about this in detail in the book about the proximity between the genius and the madman. But it's still always shrouded in the language of a genius, of someone who thinks things that are not thought, you know, in a way, the mentally ill person and the madman share this idea that they, they imagine what does not exist. And, and, and I described that really, the real boundary between the madman and the, and the, the genius is describing what doesn't exist. Um, And trying to put it into fruition creates a division between the genius and the madman, the economic genius, based simply on the fact as to whether or not um the thinking results in some kind of profit or remuneration. So, I am a madman until my ideas make money, and then it turns out I'm a genius. But if they don't, uh

13:26 Ricardo Lopes: but but please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that at least some of the behaviors that tend to go associated with, uh, certain, uh, diagnosis of mental illness, uh, involve the. Inability of a person to adapt to a capitalist way of living, like for example, their inability to Um, I, I mean, in, in a way, earn enough money to sustain themselves, their inability to, uh, properly manage their financial resources and so on. I, I, I mean, is that true,

14:12 Nima Bassiri: or it, it has been true, and it even is still true. I've had discussions around this book with uh practicing psychiatrists and And they will note actually that even today, one of the standard ways that a psychiatrist, um, ascertains whether a person has returned to a state of psychiatric health is largely they can hold a job. Um, AND there is this long standing debate as well about commercial society being what we call pathogenic, um, actually creating mental illnesses, being like, right, it, it, it can, it sort of induces states of madness and There, there is this kind of like, um, double-edged sword, um, about that I do describe in, in the book about the, um, writings that talk about how virulent commercial society is, how much it can cause people to suffer from all sorts of mental illnesses. And there were mental illnesses, in, for instance, in the US, the category of neurasthenia was largely organized around, uh, like burnout from commercial society. And then at the very same time that this is happening, where you then think that somehow capitalism is producing mental illness, there's an entirely parallel discourse about how sometimes being a little bit mentally ill, or a little bit mad, is actually generative of great wealth. Or being a little bit mad doesn't affect wealth accumulation at all. So, this, the story of it just being like, it burns people out, or it, like, destroys. People or it's traumatic, is merely one side of a multifaceted story. And I think it's important to see the multifacetedness of it. And to see, for instance, and this is again something I discussed in the book, why some populations are considered more prone to being burned out by the virulent nature of capitalism, and why other populations are not. They're more, let's say, inoculated towards it. And that's a boundary that in the book I describe. As a very gendered boundary and a very racialized boundary.

16:13 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but there's certainly an element of psychiatry through the course of its history, its development, always and even to this day being influenced by the norms that are prevalent in a particular society and in this particular case, since it has developed primarily in Western capitalist industrialized societies, assuming that people People, I mean that if someone cannot adapt themselves to living in such a society with and operating within the parameters of a capitalist society, holding a job, making money, sustaining themselves, and so on, that they probably suffer from some sort of mental disorder, right, because I mean, I mean, many psychiatrists don't really like to be confronted with this, but I mean, it's very much, uh, I think, a fair critique that many people have about the way that psychiatry operates within, as I said at the beginning, socio-cultural and economic context, and, and develops within that context. And I mean, we could probably say the same for science more broadly, but anyway, let's not. Get into that discussion here, but I mean, it could, for example, be the case that what we consider to be a maladapted individual in a capitalist society, if they were just, if they just lived or were born, born or raised in a different kind of society, they would just be considered normal.

18:01 Nima Bassiri: That's right. You're absolutely right, and I think it's important to see. How true that is, that psychiatry cannot help but internalize certain kinds of norms around capital society. And I'll, I'll say a couple of points about this as well, just to, um, kind of elaborate on, on your excellent point, which is that, um, what you have to understand it, you know, psychiatry wants Or has wanted to make claims, um, that it presupposes a very neutral about the boundary. But of course, the idea of, um, you know, psychiatry is essentially assessing behavior. I mean, above all, right? I mean, psychiatry is understood to be the medicine of the mind. But really, it's about behavior. Like, we could, uh, just, you know, uh, we could do a brain scan of my, of my brain, and it turns out, let's say I have the brain of someone who should have some kind of a hallucinatory disorder or someone who is schizophrenic or whatever. But if none of my behaviors correspond to this, there's really nothing that can be done. And I wouldn't. BE diagnosed, right? So, so, in a sense, psychiatry is always thinking about the norms of conduct. And of course, the norms of conduct are so fundamentally shot through with deeper structures of meaning. And in Western industrial society, those, those forms of kind of social meaning are, are largely economic in nature. We, we, Trust people who work. We, we, right, there's a certain way in which like a certain capacity with money is seen as the, the kind of the metric for rational conduct. Um, ON your point, interestingly, about someone who, let's say is considered maladaptive because they don't they, they simply don't want to accept, let's say the terms of kind of capitalist, liberal capitalist kind of society. Um, IN many, in many major textbooks written in European psychiatric writings, immediately following, um, the Paris Commune. So, in the years just after 1871 and 1972, you actually get very explicit discussions around the inherent pathology of political radicalism. So, you get things like communism or anarchism is seen as in in principle, a form of psychosis. And it's a form of psychosis, largely because it refuses to accept a dominant sociopolitical norm. And in fact, there's one line, and I could be misremembering it, but it's by Richard von Kraft Emming in his, in one of the editions, the earlier editions of his textbook on psychiatry. SAYS, well, obviously, you know, a communist is insane because they are delusionally imagining a utopia, which doesn't exist. And so that must be a form of, of profound madness. And so that just gets to your point quite precisely where you begin to have the pathologization, not just of people who are not accepting certain kinds of sociopolitical and economic demands, but also those who fundamentally refuse them. And this extends, for instance, in into the 20th century around kind of anti-colonial, anti-imperial. Revolts. People are seen as not engaged in legitimate anti-imperial uh resistance, but actually are seen as as being insane. Frantz Fanon talks about this actually in Wretched of the Earth where he says there was a view by the French colonizers that the entire Algerian War was just an expression of nativist madness rather than a legitimate war for independence. And so this is just extending the great point you make, yeah.

21:46 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, and it's very interesting because you mentioned earlier, uh Chmpeter and uh I mean the way that people like him and others, um, basically observed that perhaps there is some kind of madness associated with being uh an entrepreneurial genius, but of course he presents. IT as, uh, for, uh, as being a genius and not really a madman, but uh it's actually interesting because, I mean, when you look at uh many people out there, I mean, for example, certain billionaires because they expose themselves nowadays a lot, nowadays a lot in the public space. I mean, it, it, I, I, I, I guess that there are two things that we can say here. So, the first one is that if you, you, if you were to use the current diagnostic criteria for, for example, antisocial. Personality disorder, I mean, many of them would actually be diagnosed as such as having an antisocial personality disorder. I mean, as being sociopaths or psychopaths because actually their behavior. Exhibits that or manifests that. I mean, I mean they are, they are very vicious. They don't care about much about empathy for other people. They don't care about hurting other people, damaging other people in one way or the other. So, so I mean, I guess that. On the one hand, you have that and the fact that perhaps the reason they are not diagnosed or considered someone that should, for example, be thrown into a psychiatric ward is that they are considered functional in the societies. Live in and they perhaps don't feel enough distress to act to actually, uh, to actually have, uh, I, I don't know, psychotherapy sessions or sessions with a psychiatrist and so on. So that, that's one thing. The other thing is. That, that perhaps that talks to my earlier point when I said that the way we consider someone to be or to suffer from mental disease actually has a lot to do with them being considered adapted or. Adapted to the kind of environment they live in, right, because those particular people, because they produce or contribute to producing economic value and are considered productive members of their society within a capitalist system. They are just usually, at least by most people, not considered mentally ill.

24:40 Nima Bassiri: Yes, and I, I, and just to add to, it's not just that, um, oddities or eccentricities or even just flat out transgressive behaviors are tolerated. Or even revered by some, by many, um, not, not by me, not by you, but by many. Um, IT'S not just because these individuals are, are functional or productive, but that they are highly profitable. They're incredibly remunerative. So when you look at these billionaires up close, it's very funny, especially this sort of tech feudal. You know, tech sovereignty oriented kind of billionaires, um, when you look at them very closely, it's kind of hard to see what it is that they've done exactly that makes them the, the kind of geniuses they think they are, outside of just sort of luck and, and entitlement and so on and so forth. But because around their kind of cult of personality, wealth is accumulated. It's like they don't produce anything, but they do generate money. That their oddities become celebrated and it becomes this kind of norm, right, that somehow there is some value in their kind of like, you know, audit. I'll just give you an example, we can go the billionaire route, but also, um, Uh, just something that's been very recent, um, and to sort of discussed very recently around, um, our, our president Trump, whose behaviors in terms of particular kind of like foreign policy have been seen as very erratic. But what's very interesting is that the erraticness, um, in the background. Like sometimes the tweets and stuff that seem very much like they're going from one position to the other translate into market growth. And it's, it seems there's a question that People in his circle are benefiting from this market growth. So, even what's the sort of erraticness is actually not very erratic. It's about shifting financial markets and, um, you know, if I say something, I'm not going to affect the market. Like I can't just make a declaration, the oil market's not going to change based on what I say. But if I were a president, I could quite do that and I could potentially take advantage of it. So again, there is this idea that the erraticness is folded into some kind of remuneration and it's

26:59 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, because actually many of those people are also, and this again would be another diagnostic criterion for people who have or who are considered as having antisocial personality disorder, many times they exhibit lots of impulsive behavior. It's just that their impulsive behavior is rewarded in some way and and is considered valuable by society at large. Yeah,

27:25 Nima Bassiri: that's exactly right. And, and that's, and I just want to reiterate, that's the kind of furthest extreme of a deeper story that I want to say about mental illness in general being fundamentally coded as an economic form from the outset. So, whether it's billionaires or presidents, erratic, impulsive behaviors, or whether it's you and I. And, and medical assessments that are made about us, um, largely come down to a series of economic factors, um. And I think that that's just a very interesting thing to consider.

28:00 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so I would like to ask you specifically, I, I think this is a very interesting part of your book. At a certain point you talk about the relationship between industrial labor, traumatic occupational psychopathologies, and the politics of accident insurance legislation. So could you tell us about that?

28:21 Nima Bassiri: Sure, sure. Well, this is one of the chapters in the book, I think it's called The Pathology of Work. And it's a chapter that focuses on a relatively, I think, well, uh, sort of trodden topic. There, there are, there are topics in this book that have not received quite a lot of scholarly attention. I have a whole chapter on, uh, aphasia, the, uh, the kind of, um, the pathology of speech law. AND language disorders and testation, the writing of wills. And that, that's, uh, in my opinion, a very interesting subject matter that hasn't been talked about a lot. But this, this chapter, the pathology of work, we talk about the psychopathology of occupational disorders. So, uh, traumatic accidents, um, and, and there has been a fair amount of work, but I kind of retell this story through a case study. And this case study is a short-lived, um, French illness called synerosis that gets coined in the early 20th century. Um, AND has a very kind of short shelf life. It kind of comes and, and goes. But one of the very interesting ideas about this is that it reframes, um, it, it sort of tells the story once again of how psychiatric categories are encoded as, as economic forms. But this one tells the story of why some kinds of categories are always seen as a form of economic loss. And this is the story of a disorder where a worker, um, an industrial worker, a kind of laborer in that sense, um, has some kind of, um, accident on the job and, um, cannot, as it were, Believe or imagine that they are cured or recovered in any way, and so they have persistent need to continue to ask for some kind of remuneration either through litigious means or through eventually what become in the context of Europe. Uh, NATIONALIZED legislation for occupational, uh, accidents. And it's seen as a kind of veritable psychosis, like this laborer just feels entitled to be kind of paid. And there are these interesting conversations that are happening, uh, throughout the European kind of context, especially in Germany and also in France, that the real culprit behind this psychosis, the reason for why laborers feel as if they are actually being injured. So the idea is laborers feel very fragile, they feel like they're victimized, they feel like they're being injured all the time. The real culprit isn't the laborer themselves. And of course, the psychiatrists believe they're being very good people by not blaming the workers. The, the culprit here is actually the legislation itself, that somehow worker oriented legislation that protects workers' well-being, that's, that, that, that remunerate that, that, you know, pays them if they're injured. That this is actually inducing in them a kind of delusion that they're all in a state of injury. And so it's a, it's a kind of tacit critique of liberal legislation that's worker oriented. Um, THERE'S a lot going on in this chapter, and one of the things that I try and do is offer a kind of genealogy of this, um. Of this category and a and a genealogy, this discourse that runs through a number of discourses, including the long history of the forensic psychiatry, the medical legal discussions, specifically around the idea of simulating. So this is one of the criticisms that's often made is that someone is actually faking an illness and, and psychiatric illnesses have been seen as one of the, the, the illnesses that people have been supposedly faking for the entire kind of modern era. And so it deals with this, it deals with a number of different, like the political economy of occupational psychosis as well, or occupational um injuries, um. There's a lot to say here. I, I don't want to, there's, there's, I don't want to unpack it because we'll be here kind of all day just talking about this, this section. But, um, this is seen really as the inverse story of what we just talked about. So the way an erratic kind of billionaire can, can act terribly and in fact, quite pathologically, but be rewarded in a sense culturally. And socially because they generate wealth. Here, a laborer, their illness is seen as fundamentally costly, because it's costing an industry or it's costing a state money. And so, they're, the, the kind of the financial encodement of their mental illness is seen as pure loss. And so, this is sort of the flip side.

33:03 Ricardo Lopes: Right. I, I mean that, that also reminds me of when, for example, people, uh, and this perhaps has also something to say about how we view or how we tend to make assumptions about people from different socioeconomic strata because for example, if someone who is on the poorer end of the spectrum, uh, if they, for example, have a quote unquote gamble. ADDICTION and they waste all their money and they get evicted from their home and they go to live on the street, they become homeless, then we see that as a form of psychopathology. But if a billionaire or a multi-millionaire bets their money on, on the, uh, bet, bets, bets their money on the on the exchange market or something like that. That, I mean, basically they're also, uh, they also have that kind of uh gambling mentality, but it's not considered psychopathological. I mean, sometimes they might lose a lot of money and they might get help from banks or the state or something like that. Other times they just might get. Yeah, they just might get, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

34:28 Nima Bassiri: Yeah, just to say too, I mean, the very, as you say, that the whole, the bailing out, so private equity is just gambling. I mean, it's just a gambling that's, but the fact that, um, like you and I, if we gamble and we lose our money, we're not going to get bailed out that the that the reason for that. This is that in precisely because we're not seen as fundamentally, like, profitable in that sense, right? So, there's some, that, that, that valuation is already oriented in terms of that boundary structure between a very wealthy corporation or entity or person and someone who is, who does not kind of have that kind of accumulated wealth. That's already a kind of Value appraisal that's being made. We don't deserve to get bailed out because that was our mistake. It was our responsibility, and it's our kind of pathology, and we need to be responsible for ourselves. But here, uh, of course, a company is betting on this, that, the other thing. But because the potential wealth that can come out of it is so immense, it's seen as fun. Valuable. That's a very simple kind of point. But it's an, I think it, it, it's a deeper point, or rather, it points or index is a very deeper way in which we appraise this boundary of norm and abnormality around kind of class structure.

35:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, sure, and I mean, I think also that we sometimes are sort of blind to the fact that if they bet millions or even billions of dollars on the stock market and they make a bad bet and they lose it all and then they they get sort of bailed out. By private banks or by the state itself. Uh, I mean, that just happens because people look at those people differently and think that they're still, they're still able to produce high amounts of money even though because of that they might even sometimes crash entire economies and ruin the lives of millions. And billions of people, and on the other hand, we have people that perhaps they bet a few $1000 and they lose it all and suddenly we look at them as losers even though they're just hurting themselves or maybe their family, but it's just a handful of people and

36:49 Nima Bassiri: that's, and that's the difference is if you and I do that and we lose all of our money betting. We all, that, that there's a kind of reflexive way that we are pathologized. But when a major corporation, the very fact that there is not, I mean, you and I might say these are pathological individuals, but from a general kind of cultural, socio-cultural consensus, that's the, the very lens of pathology or the very frame of pathology is not attributed to them because of the amount of wealth that's there. So, the premise This is, well, they can't be crazy because at some point, they made a lot of money. So, obviously, it's just a bad call. Whereas you and I might have one bad call, but because the amount of wealth or that history of wealth accumulation isn't there, we become much more readily pathologized. And again, this is, this is the kind of story, there's a kind of underlying kind of logic to all of this, which is what I have been trying in this book to kind of like bring to the, kind of bring out into the light. Yeah.

37:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, I mean, there's also this, uh, there's also this very interesting topic that you explore in your book and actually, I've been trying to talk with, uh, psychiatrists or people who, um, I mean, explore psychiatry as a research topic, whether they are sociologists or some other people like as a as a philosopher sometimes. Uh, I mean, at a certain point in the book, um, you talk about how For example, an individual might adopt and internalize an economic style of psychiatric reasoning, and then such a style of functions as a hermeneutic strategy for self-intelligibility. So, uh, could you explain that and then I, I might ask you about the an idea I have about that.

38:38 Nima Bassiri: Of course, yeah. Without going into too much detail, one of the chapters in the book is something. Akin to a kind of a biography of an American Gilded Age millionaire. They weren't billionaires as of yet, I think in the 1890s. Uh, HE was a, um, an Astor, that is to say, one of the relatives, the great, great grandson of John Astor. So, um, a great inheritor of kind of New York wealth. And his name was John Chandler. He, he changed his name to John Armstrong Challoner. Um, HE'S a kind of little well known figure. Um, uh, HE suffered, allegedly from what I think was a legitimate psychiatric disorder. I mean, he heard voices, essentially. And, um, but he never perceived his oddity, his abnormality as a kind of a medical ailment. He perceived it as something like a psychological power. And an economic asset. And he used it. What's interesting is that he um made sense of his madness as if it were from the start, a kind of an economic form. And it's very interesting because, um, He, uh, uh, often would engage in tests to confirm whether or not this was sort of true. So he would play the stock market because the voice told him. He also named his voice, he called it the X faculty. It told him to bet on this or do this or do something here. Um, HE, uh, um. Invested in, um, Southern textiles. It was not uncommon for wealthy New Yorkers to invest in Southern cotton. In fact, the cotton industry is excellent work. I don't, this is not work I produce, but draw on a great deal of, of the cotton industry in the South, both antebellum and postbellum is, was coming from new finance. So he, he, he actually starts, uh, a textile town, or at least is one of the founders of it that actually becomes quite profitable. He's not able to make use of the profit because his family has him committed. Um, THE, the point of this story, it's a, it's a kind of tragic narrative in, in some ways, and, and I'm not interested in, in extolling him whatsoever. I actually think he was a deeply person with incredibly heinous kind of politics. Uh, ONE of the, the points that I want to make in this book is one of the reasons that he felt entitled to think about his abnormality, not as a pathology, but as an economic asset, had a lot to do with the fact that he was very well aware that he was a wealthy white man. And so there is this thing that I call In the book of pathological entitlement, that he, he felt like he had the kind of social, political and economic status by which to understand what would otherwise be understood as, let's say, a kind of psychological disorder is actually this great kind of laudatory asset. And I think this is something we see a kind of style of thinking that we see even to this day, uh, with the billionaires and the so on and so forth, where people clearly have what you earlier described as some kind of a like maladaptive kind of, you know, they're, they're, they have impulse control problems, this, that and the other thing. But they don't see themselves as um problematic, the way you and I might, if that, because it would actually jeopardize jeopard jeopardize our lives and our careers in a certain way, but they see it as actually this, this asset that they can profit off of in a certain, in a certain sense. And so, um, Uh, one of the things that I wanted to do in, in this chapter was to say that this idea of madness being economically encoded is not simply happening way up here in the literature, in the discourse, in the psychiatric theory. But it is actually disseminating into what you might call or what I just to draw on someone like Foucault, a technology of the self, a way that um a a kind of discursive set of uh a reservoir of discourses by which people can start to interpret themselves. And so, I think, um, We, we tend to think of like our uniqueness or our, our oddities or this, that other thing as potentially part of a, a portfolio of ourselves that we can kind of draw on to generate wealth or to generate success in our lives or in our careers. We think of this as a very neoliberal phenomenon. So, a, a style of self that really doesn't emerge until the 1970s, the 1980s. But I want to suggest that actually something like this is, is emergent, even in the late 19th century, where someone could imagine what would otherwise, in many other social contexts, be seen as a liability to actually imagine it as a profound asset.

43:30 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so you, you mentioned the word interpreting or interpretation there and that exactly connects to the kind of idea I have and I would like to run it through you to see what you think about it. So, I mean, when it comes to, for example, uh someone getting a uh medic uh psychiatric diagnosis or a clinical psychology diagnosis, so let's say that someone is diagnosed as Uh, depressed, they're suffering from a major depression or something like that. I mean, uh, uh, these are just ideas that, that I have. Uh, I mean, sometimes I talk with psychiatrists and clinical psychologists about it, and, uh, sometimes I have sort of positive reactions or sometimes not so positive reactions because they might think that I'm just, um, telling them that they, what they do is, BS. It's not exactly that that I'm doing, but I mean, so isn't there, and particularly this aspect of self-intelligibility and interpreting oneself in a particular way, I mean, it always makes me think about two things. So the first one is, isn't there the possibility that that if someone starts integrating into their identity, the idea that they They are a depressive person that perhaps they might adopt the scheme that comes with being a depressive person and they sort of become more entrenched into the behaviors and patterns of what that were associated with being depressed. So that's one thing. And the other thing is I'm Isn't there a possibility that perhaps sometimes, I'm not sure about all the time, but sometimes these labels might help people, but in the sense that they provide them with new narratives to interpret or reinterpret their lives in a way that makes them make sense for them, makes their lives make sense. Sense for them, but what we're talking about there is not really having an objective look at their lives, but having sort of a reinterpretation of what their lives were up to that point and what they could do with it. I mean, does this make sense or makes perfect

46:04 Nima Bassiri: sense. It's an excellent question. I'll say two things provisionally. First, um, I, I am not a psychiatrist or a clinician. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which is good, because I think, interestingly, you're not asking a clinical question. You're actually asking a question that is a question at the intersections of theories of subjectivity and social theory. You're asking essentially social formation, excuse me, subject. Formation. How, how does a self, a sense of self cohere in a particular kind of social context? And how does it cohere, given the background discourse of something like psychiatry, kind of operating in the back? I'll say a couple of things just in, in response, because I agree with the premises of, of your, of your question. I agree with it fundamentally. I think that, um, and, you know, uh, people will disagree, but I think the disagreements are going to be largely disciplinary disagreements. I think, I think subjectivity is, is an, is an artifact that is to say, I'm not saying it's fake. I'm saying it's an, it's an artifact. That is to say, it's, it's contingent, historically contextual and specific. So, the ways in which my sense of self coheres now in the 21st century is going to be very different than how it might have cohered 1000 years ago. Um, THE, the, the, the, the discourses, the truths, the world in which I am drawing from is fundamentally kind of different. And so, the world in which we draw our sense of interiority, our sense of self, is, is a world comprised in our contemporary moment, largely from the human sciences. So the human sciences offer Um, some of the most forceful schemas by which we make sense of ourselves. But at the same time, the human sciences are not based on a pillar of light from God revealing the truth of things. The human sciences are are historically constructed institutions that are politically, uh, grounded, economically grounded, socially grounded, culturally, so on and so forth. And so, in that sense, um, I think, in fact, um, one of the ways to think about psychiatry, which I think is very, very interesting, is the extent to which, um, between the year 1826, which is kind of one of the moments in which psychiatry is really beginning to professionalize, like, in, in the most forceful ways, it's going to be another couple decades before we really start to see. Um, STATE-BASED asylums and so on and so forth, but just to use 1826 to 2026, 1 of the differences that we see is that in 2026, people have an increasing tendency to use psychiatric language to understand their sense of self in a way that they didn't quite in 1826. And I think that has largely

49:07 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, yeah, there, there's, there's even that. I think that phenomenon that you see occurring on social media where people complain, for example, about other people. INSTRUMENTALISING the use of, uh, therapy speak to manipulate others, for example. Oh, I, I, I suffer from this, and then they start using the uh the um, the terms that uh psychotherapists or psychiatrists usually use in a um a therapeutic context. TO sort of, um, I mean, have an upper end against the people that they are, they are trying to present themselves as better than or

49:55 Nima Bassiri: something like that or even more benign, the fact that there is a tendency to invoke certain kinds of identity markers and The, uh, you know, one of the most common ones, of course, is, is gender identity. And another increasingly common one is psychiatric identity. I mean, this just is, it, I mean, this is a not a not uncommon way people kind of present themselves. There's a similar story that can be told around gender identity and why something like gender becomes a way in which people come to identify the truth of themselves. And I think psychiatry is following suit, though it, it is maybe a little bit later in that kind of historical development, because in 1826, there was less of an incitement, I think, for people to really identify with a psychiatric diagnosis than there is today. And, and I think that in that identification, As you rightly put, you introduce all the schemas that come with it. So, in a sense, you not only identify with it, but then you, in some respects, allow that identification to fill in the gaps that render more and more coherent your subjectivity. So, for instance, you know, for instance, let's say I decide, and it's just a very thought experiment, I decide, I, you know, I, I, I read about the London Marathon and some, you know, 2 runners beat the 2 hour mark, and now I decide I want to be a runner and I'm going to go marathon. And I slowly start to build a kind of identity as a runner, right? And so I allow, so I, I start to identify and then I allow it to shape future identity. So I start to do things as a runner might and so on and so forth. And you can make a similar kind of an analogy. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a very facile analogy, but it's, it's, I think, a functional one with a psychiatric diagnosis as well.

51:38 Ricardo Lopes: It's, it's like, or along the lines of when people Say, oh, I was born to be a doctor or something like that. Yeah, yeah, because I, because I mean, people fail to realize that that's very circumstantial. I mean, if they were born in a society without doctors, of course, they wouldn't say that because that possibility wouldn't even be there.

52:03 Nima Bassiri: Exactly. And not even just a career, but I even think an even stronger kind of. Um, EXAMPLE would be something like an astrological sign. I was born as a Taurus, or I'm a a Virgo. And so, this is how I am. And so you read about what Virgos do and maybe it influences you. And by the way, there's, you know, the, the excellent kind of scholarly point about this is the late philosopher of science, Ian Hacking, and his looping effects. So, the idea that a person internalizes a certain kind of a psychiatric disorder, in some respects, um, um, Shapes themselves in relation to the disorder, but not entirely. And so, in some respects, there's, uh, instances of incompatibility with what they might imagine a depressive personality to be. And then that, that inconsistent inconsistency goes back into the diagnostic category. So that, so that so-called depressants are acting like this, but not like that, and then the category shifts. And it kind of loops over and over again. And there, there are benefits and drawbacks to that, which we don't need to describe, that's going into kind of like minutia territory. I will say one point though, about all of this, which is that when you look at the history of psychiatry, and I'm talking now about why is it that in 1826, psychiatric identification was not as strong as it was in 2026. There are a couple explanations for this. Well, first, the most obvious one is, it's, it's two centuries of an entrenchment of psychiatry. And then psychiatric discourse is everywhere, right? I mean, it's in schools, and hospitals, it's in courtrooms, it's in popular cultures, it's in TV shows. There's really no way to escape it. It's very, very diffuse and very ever present. So, of course, it's not surprising that it would affect people in this way. But there's something else to consider too, which is that there's, there's an entire political economy that underwrites this, um, this incitement to identify. And this is not something I talk about explicitly in the book, but it certainly comes out of it. If you look at the history of psychiatry, one of the most interesting characteristics of it is that psychiatric classifications. Typically are remarkably transient. They come and they go. They come and they go. Monomania comes and goes, hysteria comes and goes, and so on and so forth. The very interesting thing to consider about a psychiatric classification, given that it is normally prone to transience, is to consider when it becomes entrenched, when a psychiatric category stays, and why it stays. Why does it stabilize? And what's very interesting is one of the explanations for why a psychiatric category stabilizes has quite a lot to do with the political economy of psychopharmaceuticals. The longer a psychiatric disorder stays existing, the longer my medication will become profitable, in some respects, right? And so, and the longer it stays, and the longer it becomes profitable, and the more it diffuses itself culturally, the more people might be inclined to begin to identify with it for a variety of reasons. And then that leads us to another kind of question, which I don't talk about in the book at all, because it's too early historically to talk about it, which is about biocapital or the industry of psychopharmaceuticals, which I will just say one point about this is, it's, it's not just the case that psychopharmaceuticals are one of the most highly prescribed medications in the United States, especially antidepressants. So they are a remarkably profitable kind of drug base, but What's very interesting over the past 10 years, is that, um, a lot of pharmaceutical companies have actually stopped producing more pharmaceuticals. And the reason for this is that, although psychopharmaceuticals are very profitable, they don't have quite the market growth of other kinds of medications. So, in an interesting thing, what I imagine happening moving forward is we're going to have fewer and fewer new pharmaceuticals on the market. And new sort of new pharmaceuticals dealing with new disorders on the market. And so, I think this is going to be a very interesting thing to consider, what's going to happen in the next 30 or 40 years, in terms of psychiatric classifications, when one of the engines, um, kind of Moving the, the, the, the, like, moving the clock or whatever on the, the state of classifications, those that engine being the industry of psychopharmaceutical is going to diminish. And I'm curious to see what's to the classification disorders moving forward.

56:50 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so I mean one thing that I was going to say, or actually let me ask you this because we've already talked about what is considered to be irrational and how psychiatry deals with irrationality, but I mean, how about morality. Does morality also weigh in on how psychiatrists classify mental disorders? I mean, are what we consider in a particular society to be immoral people or immoral behaviors also considered pathological.

57:26 Nima Bassiri: This is a great question. And, and it's a theme that I talk about in the book as well. There's sort of three ways that I think about the category of value, which is through the lens of medicine, the lens of economics, and the lens of morality. Each of these has a kind of value marker to it. Health is considered valuable. Um, Obviously, uh, wealth is, is, is a form of value. And we talk about moral value in a certain way. And, and I actually try very intentionally to collapse these terms, or the collapse these sort of like lenses. And the reason I do this is because there is a point that I think is very important that, um, Michelle Foucault made in the History of Madness, the very first kind of book, which is that in the early modern period, Um, you get this change that happens with respect to madness. And it's a change that seems to have sort of, um, it continues in some respects to be the case even today, which is that madness was, in the early modern period, moralized in a very specific way. And it was moralized as a form of, like, um, Uh A certain kind of immoral conduct. And I know that's a very strange thing to say that madness is being moralized. And I want to be very clear, while in the, in the long history of, of madness being medicalized, There is still a certain way in which the mentally ill. Continue to carry this baggage that Foucault describes. It's the baggage of idleness. In a sense, the mentally ill person was from the, from the, essentially from the 18th century on, seen as the individual who cannot partake in market activities. This is the person who cannot work. This is the person who cannot, as it were, contribute. It's a certain form of moralization that's attributed to the mental illness. So, the idea is not that the, the The cause of mental illness is immorality. You know, the cause is medical. The cause is, as it were, biological, in, in the writings. But the effect is that the mentally ill are sidelined, sidelined from moral productivity. And so, madness then, has long been not only a medical category, but a moral category. And I think there's still a way in which the shame. There's still shame organized around mental illness, this sort of sense that you're not able to contribute, that you're, that you're going to be disruptive in a certain way, that you're, you, you're, you're kind of disrupting social order in a certain sense. You're kind of introducing disharmony. One of the things I suggest though, is that if in fact. Um, There is a way that madness is an economic form allows for the reappraisal of what you might say otherwise pathological people who make money. Suddenly, you have this inversion around the moral status, so that it's good sometimes to be a little bit mentally ill. So that you have this very strange shift that happens in the moral appraisal of madness itself, if that makes sense. So, um, so, the, the, the more The moral category runs throughout the book. And it's a very important kind of element that I think is really key for us to consider tacitly often, if I have a kind of mental illness or a mental disability or a disability of any sort, I have a certain kind of, I mean, I'm, I'm speaking for myself, a sort of disinclination to want to make it public. Because of how I imagine I'll be viewed, right? And I think that there's a, there's a difference, though, if in fact, let's say I have this thing that one of my historical actors calls an X faculty, and it's making me money hand over fist, I will want to actually talk about it in a great, great detail. And it kind of reestablishes the, the, the kind of moral hierarchy that we have long attributed to something like madness.

1:01:36 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the fact that, for example, uh, more, particularly more ancient thinkers, but also, I mean, you, I think you can still see that in at least, I mean, I don't, perhaps not so much in the kinds of ideas they expressed, but at least in, in the way they lived in some more modern thinkers, particularly philosophers and others. I mean, where, I mean, just to give an example, in, in ancient. Greece, I mean, the, the most prominent philosophers that we know, I mean, it wouldn't be odd at all for them to praise leisure time and to say that even, I mean, having to work for money was beneath themselves and I mean it it would, it would be more virtuous even to just dedicate yourself to philosophy, to Uh, higher ways of, uh, conducting yourself and, uh, and, uh, and thinking and producing knowledge and so on. Uh, uh, AND, and now, uh, for in more recent times, in more modern times with the, with the advent of capitalism and for example, uh, the Development of Protestant Christianity and particularly more so Calvinism. There's this obsession with working and producing and contributing to the economy, producing economic value, and so on. Which is something that is not at all a human universal and even in our sort of Western, even Judeo-Christian tradition wouldn't be considered as such or wouldn't be considered as important for most of our history. I mean, people valued leisure. Time people valued being able to just have time for thinking and discussing ideas with other people without necessarily even tying knowledge to economic value as we have even nowadays in academia where I mean you even have to justify a sort of economically why you're going to. The particular subject to get grants and all of that. So I mean that this is again, I guess to say that we really can't be blind to the sort of, uh, in this case, particularly economic conditions that we live in and the economic system we live under,

1:04:17 Nima Bassiri: right? I agree with you completely and, and one of the points I make strongly, especially towards the end of the book. IS to suggest um that I, and I believe this, that our The very structure of our moral intelligibility today is fundamentally suffused with economic logics, to the point that I don't think we know how to kind of think otherwise. And I draw on quite a lot of kind of social thought to, to kind of make this point. But I also suggest that looking at the history of psychiatry and the way that I narrate it, helps us see even more why the economic has so fundamentally suffused the moral. And part of the reason for this is because in the kind of like post 18th century period, Um, a lot of the ways by which we think about moral right and moral wrong tends to be through the language of the human sciences. We don't often use the language of evil to describe people who do incredibly horrific or pernicious things. We tend to invoke psychiatric language. We, we suggest that they're sociopaths, they're psychopathic, there's something wrong with their brains, and so on and so forth. And so, psychiatry or kind of like a language of the human sciences has largely taken over the task of what classical moral thought had done. Even if we still use moral claims, I think, unconsciously, we mean it in a scientific sense. And because the economic Essentially suffused the psychiatric, that has become the kind of Trojan horse by which economics has essentially suffused moral thinking. And I think I say at one point, our modern moral economy is more economic than it is moral. And I think that there's something about that, that is, um, worth kind of, um, Not just considering, but being like very concerned about, to be honest.

1:06:11 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, uh, I have one last question. I mean, everything that we've been talking about here and of course, uh, other topics that you explore in your book, do you think that uh people can pick on all of this to, uh, use it as a critique of capitalism, uh, or is, or was that not your intention to, uh, use it as a critique of capitalism. BUT just as presented as a new way of looking at the link between uh economic thought or the kind of, uh, in this particular case, capitalist economic system that we live in and how that relates to the development of psychiatry and how we understand psychiatric conditions just from a more neutral point of view.

1:07:09 Nima Bassiri: This is a great question. And, and I will be very straightforward that from, from my standpoint, this book was from the outset intended to be a critique of capitalism. Um, AND, and in that sense, though, a critique that's told from a maybe slightly different or a more Unique or whatever kind of standpoint, where in the sense that we typically in kind of think about critiques of capital, uh, like the quite literally like a formal a formal critique of capital being a largely Marxist or Marxian kind of project. And it's not one that I am any way trying to disavow. It's merely trying to show a kind of different entry point to thinking about capitalism from a critical standpoint, from a, a critical and kind of genealogical standpoint, and from a discourse that we might not otherwise expect. So, not from the standpoint of political economy, but actually from psychiatry. And, um, and, but it's also an effort to show. At least in part, the challenge of a critique of capital, that as I said earlier in our discussion, that to simply draw out the contradictions or the irrationalism of capitalism may not be sufficient, a sufficient enough critique that in fact, as I say, There's a kind of way that capitalism and and irrationality have had a, a morbid dance for a very long time. And, um, in that sense, it, and, and, and if an infant, if in fact, our moral economies are also in, in large part, um, contaminated by economic thinking. Then what does it actually mean to position oneself in contradistinction to, to capitalism? What does it mean to actually separate ourselves from capital? What does it mean to actually engage in some kind of like, An emancipatory act that would require us, and I think this is one of the, the things I kind of end with, it's not just an emancipation from institutions, but an emancipation from kind of forms of subjectivity that have been shaped by capitalism. And it's a subject formation that, as I say, has taken over the entire language of psychiatry, which is such a great, such a significant part of how we understand ourselves today. So, They're, they're, I, I'm engaging in a critique of capital and from a tradition that might be something more drawn from social theory, um, that has a more of like a Foolian orientation, Webarian orientation, but one that I want to suggest is profoundly compatible with the critiques of capitalism that we're familiar with. It's just a different, a different story, a different orientation, but the aim, the aim, the critical aim is still the same.

1:09:56 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but if, for example, someone who identifies as a Marxist, a socialist, a communist, or something like that, an anarchist even perhaps, would read your book and say, oh, so look, I read Dr. Basiri's book Madness and Enterprise, and I will use some of the arguments. He makes there some of the information he makes there to uh make a case against capitalism. I mean, you wouldn't be opposed to that or

1:10:26 Nima Bassiri: no, I would hope, I would hope for that. That would be the, that would be the goal. And to, so that I, you know, a, a critique of capitalism needs, in my opinion, to be a multi-pronged approach, and we need to see it, um, we need to see the sort of its tentacles in all aspects of our lives, and especially. In the places we did not expect it to be. And I think that that's one of the things. So, as I say, towards the end of the book, I am not even doing in, to the extent that this is formally a critique of psychiatric thinking, right? Because that's the topic. I'm not suggesting that actually, it's the institution of psychiatry, which is the problem, like the way that professional, I think that's a problem too, but There's been work on it. I want to suggest that the very concept of mental illness has been transformed into an economic form. So, the very thinkability of health and unhealth is fundamentally shaped by capitalist kind of forces and structures, so that it's not just about institutional transformation. It's a kind of, you might call a profound epistemological, even an ontological endeavor that I think is, is really demanded. So, I really want to show that um a critique of capital needs to go. Maybe even further than we imagine it to go, that it's not just enough to transform the infrastructure of a polity, that might not be enough. There needs to be something possibly kind of more.

1:11:52 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, I, I mean, and just to make this point clear because of course I, uh, presented here some ideas that people could pick on them and say, oh yeah, then the psychiatry and clinical psychology are just useless. But I, I mean that, uh, just to clarify that those were not the points I was making, I was just saying that we have to look at those. Disciplines or whatever you want to call them as as things that operate within a particular sociocultural and in this case as we talked about here today, economic context and that I mean if it helps people, great, I'm all for it, but it's just that we have to Be mindful that it operates under particular constraints. It's not really about, it's not really about objective reality, to a great extent. It's an interpretation of social reality and also, I, I mean, I I guess that uh. There are another point is that psychiatry and clinical psychology, at least in my understanding, this is just my opinion. I don't know if you agree with it or not, but shouldn't be the alpha and omega of how people deal with their own psyches because there probably are other. Cultural tools, cultural technologies out there that can be as effective or as good for people, for people's psychological well-being as psychiatry and clinical psychology are. Yeah,

1:13:35 Nima Bassiri: I, you know, as scholars, I think it's very important for us to be able to and to willfully. Um, HAVE multiple and sometimes incompatible thoughts at the same time. We can look at the institution of modern medicine and say, it is important, it helps people. People should have access to it. Personally, I think people should have unencumbered access to it. That is to say, universally available access to it, paid for by a public, universally bought to. Um, AND, and I say this is also the case with, uh, the medicine of mind, clinical psychiatry. I think it is profoundly helpful for people. Um, AS to the kind of alpha omega quality, I think that, um, I, I, I think like any medicine, some people respond to some medicines better than other medicines. And whether that's a, uh, a form of psychotherapeutic, whether that's a, uh, an antibiotic, that's a, that's, that's the kind of pluralism that's present in the fact that medicine is engaged in life and the, the, and the living organism is an incredibly multifaceted thing. We can say this and also say that medicine is a product of historical moments, that it is suffused with structures and infrastructures and institutional commitments, that, um, it's not about it being nefarious, but it is simply a fact. Uh, MODERN medicine emerges at the same time, for instance, as modern economic forms, and it would be actually shocking and strange if they weren't so fundamentally interwoven. It would be odd. It wouldn't make any sense, actually. And so we can have, we can have both thoughts simultaneously. And I think the question then becomes, um, what is the kind of ethical aim to the extent that we can have one, if we, you know, we want to say people should have access to medicine, I think this should also, you know, to, to what end? Well, because people should be able to live healthy and flourishing lives. OK, to what end? If I'm being kept alive, simply because I need to be economically productive. So, I'm being kept alive, so I can just keep making money for someone else, that's a very strange way of valuing my life. So, just to suggest that someone should be alive for the sake of being alive, is not, in my opinion, a rigorously scholarly conclusion. We have to keep asking for. Further to live for what end? Um, AS you say, like what the ancient philosophers used to say, uh, to live a life of flourishing, to live a life of virtue, right? And I think virtue can't happen if you're working 3 or 4 jobs and, and so on and so forth. There was one point I wanted to make interestingly about this idea of the, the moral, which I forgot to say. And back to the point, our whole idea of morality is totally suffused with economics. I, I use often in my classroom, the language of successful. If I were to say Ricardo is a very successful person, people are going to say, oh, what does Ricardo do? The immediate thought is your success is tied up to your economic productivity. But if I say, oh, no, he's he's, he's successful because he engages in virtue, like Plato, you know, he, he's like, he has, he has virtue. She has achieved virtue. People are going to think I'm crazy, or you're crazy, or I'm making a joke. So the very idea of what it means to be successful, like you, we don't even have moral success anymore. Like, that's not even a thing that we have. It's always a kind of like career-based success, and economic based success. And then that just gets to this other point. And that ties to this idea that we can hold two thoughts together. There is a profound significance to psychiatric medicine, as it is for all medicines, and at the same time, point out that medicine is not immune from structures of the, the realities in which they find themselves, um, um, situated within.

1:17:25 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, OK, great. So the book is again Madness and Enterprise Psychiatry, Economic Reason and the Emergence of Pathological Value. I'm of course leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Dr. Basiri, apart from the book, are there any places on the internet where people can find you and your work?

1:17:45 Nima Bassiri: Yes, um, you can. I have a website, nema Basiri.com, which I try and keep updated. You can also find me, um, through, uh, Duke University, the program in literature. It's literature.duke.edu. Um, I also am the director of the Frederick Jamison Institute for Critical Theory, and you can find us there online at criticaltheory.trinity.duke.edu.

1:18:10 Ricardo Lopes: Great, I will add that to the description and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a really fascinating conversation and I mean, if you're open to it, I would love to have you back on the show someday.

1:18:24 Nima Bassiri: Yes, I would love that. Thank you so much. It's been a great talk.

1:18:27 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights, Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Mulleran, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingberrd, Arnaud Wolf, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andre, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognon, Michel Jonathan Labrarinth, John Yardston, and Samuel Cerri, Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezara Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Rusmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alec Baka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel P Scortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffyani Smith, and Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgius Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannes Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank, Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlo Montenegro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.