Doctor: I can see that you are precisely one-third depressed.

Patient: What is that, Doctor? Is that like being "one-third pregnant?"

Doctor: Ha, ha, ha. Hardy, har, har. Very funny. No. Actually there is this manual that I use in order to diagnose mental dis ... er, uh, forget about it, I'm pretty sure that I could not explain the logic of it to you. I'm just going to have to ask you to trust me that I know what one-third of one symptom would look like.

Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by anxiety in situations where the sufferer perceives certain environments as dangerous or uncomfortable, often due to the environment's vast openness or crowdedness. These situations include, but are not limited to, wide-open spaces, as well as uncontrollable social situations such as the possibility of being met in shopping malls, airports, and on bridges. Agoraphobia is defined within the DSM-IV TR as a subset of panic disorder, involving the fear of incurring a panic attack in those environments.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) (DSM-5 300.23), also known as social phobia, is the most common anxiety disorder. It is one of the most common psychiatric disorders, with 12% of Americans having experienced it in their lifetime. It is characterized by intense fear in one or more social situations, causing considerable distress and impaired ability to function in at least some parts of daily life. ... Physical symptoms often accompanying social anxiety disorder include excessive blushing, sweating (hyperhidrosis), trembling, palpitations and nausea. Stammering may be present, along with rapid speech. Panic attacks can also occur under intense fear and discomfort.

Now consider the sphere of recreation. For instance, a party. A rational man enjoys a party as an emotional reward for achievement, and he can enjoy it only if in fact it involves activities that are enjoyable, such as seeing people whom he likes, meeting new people whom he finds interesting, engaging in conversations in which something worth saying and hearing is being said and heard. But a neurotic can “enjoy” a party for reasons unrelated to the real activities taking place; he may hate or despise or fear all the people present, he may act like a noisy fool and feel secretly ashamed of it— but he will feel that he is enjoying it all, because people are emitting the vibrations of approval, or because it is a social distinction to have been invited to this party, or because other people appear to be gay, or because the party has spared him, for the length of an evening, the terror of being alone.

Rand, Ayn (1964-11-01). The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet) (Kindle Locations 1192-1199). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Given current trends, it won't be long before 'anti-social' is expanded and classified to include 'anti-"S"ocial' as well, as the complete '"S"ocialization' of the population proceeds virtually unchecked on all fronts.


The two classifications might someday overlap somewhat; when someone is zoned out, concentrating on complex details, they appear somewhat 'disconnected' from the tribe around them. This 'abnormality' might someday be amplified from 'disorder' to 'misdeameanor' to 'social crime.' Given the army of smarmy louts on MSNBC, and the shrill accusations of 'terrorists!' aimed at the limited government crowd, it isn't hard to see those dark tribal ages coming.

Epistemologically, their dogmatic agnosticism holds, as an absolute, that a principle is false because it is a principle—that conceptual integration (i.e., thinking) is impractical or “simplistic”—that an idea which is clear and simple is necessarily “extreme and unworkable.” Along with Kant, their philosophic forefather, the pragmatists claim, in effect: “If you perceive it, it cannot be real,” and: “If you conceive of it, it cannot be true.”

What, then, is left to man? The sensation, the wish, the whim, the range and the concrete of the moment. Since no solution to any problem is possible, anyone’s suggestion, guess or edict is as valid as anyone else’s—provided it is narrow enough.

To give you an example: if a building were threatened with collapse and you declared that the crumbling foundation has to be rebuilt, a pragmatist would answer that your solution is too abstract, extreme, unprovable, and that immediate priority must be given to the need of putting ornaments on the balcony railings, because it would make the tenants feel better.

There was a time when a man would not utter arguments of this sort, for fear of being rightly considered a fool. Today, Pragmatism has not merely given him permission to do it and liberated him from the necessity of thought, but has elevated his mental default into an intellectual virtue, has given him the right to dismiss thinkers (or construction engineers) as naive, and has endowed him with that typically modern quality: the arrogance of the concrete-bound, who takes pride in not seeing the forest fire, or the forest, or the trees, while he is studying one inch of bark on a rotted tree stump.