ABSTRACT
It is precisely this “insane” and brutish, or subhuman aspect to divided rationality—its dreadful inner hollowness and devitalisation, its increasingly compulsive ordering and calculating processes and “devouring lusts”—that strikingly prefigures modern diagnostic characterisations for such left-hemispheric disorders as schizophrenia, OCD, certain forms of autism, and, at the end of the scale, psychopathy. Fallen Urizen resembles not so much a glorious and illuminating Sun God after all, as he sees himself, but a compulsive and murderous psychopath. Interestingly, in contemporary political and economic domains something very similar is occurring. The last decade has seen a remarkable number of articles and books examining the potentially “psychopathic” nature and processes of many of the dominant political and economic institutions within our own societies, and some formidable critiques of the assumptions previously used to justify them as being “rational”.
