Is Humanity Marching toward Suicide?

We Need to Mind Our Collective Mental Health

“A super bomb should never be produced.  [We are like] two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

In 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave a speech likening the nuclear-capable United States and Soviet Union to two scorpions in a bottle.  He was recently brought back to life on the biggest screens worldwide, in the film, “Oppenheimer”.

Oppenheimer spoke up when our world was still at the dawn of the nuclear age he had played such a unique role in creating, and of “the Cold War” he had tried so desperately to prevent.  Three years before, the Soviet Union had much more rapidly than expected exploded its first atomic bomb, and as a result President Harry Truman had tasked Oppenheimer to rush to build nuclear bombs, which he knew would be immensely more devastating.

How and why Oppenheimer refused, resulting in his being severely ostracized and threatened by our own government and much of the media, how and why he then fled his comfortable Princeton home, taking himself and his family into exile in a remote location in the Virgin Islands, where he thought they might survive nuclear war, is an immensely compelling story for us all to ponder.  It is also a commentary about how far our whole world has devolved.

Now, seventy-three years later, the situation Oppenheimer so hauntingly feared has escalated far beyond what even he could have imagined.  There are now many scorpions and super scorpions, each equipped with weapons of far greater destructive capability, in far greater numbers, and deliverable in far faster and multiple unstoppable ways, than ever conceived in his day.  The Doomsday Clock that Oppenheimer, Einstein, and their leading scientist colleagues had inaugurated, even before this scorpion statement, is now closer to Armageddon midnight than ever before.

What do I and my professional psychiatric colleagues conclude about this predicament of humanity that is consuming our lives, constantly threatening what I have taken to term, “Ultimate Violence”?  And what can we psychiatrists and mental health experts advocate to be done now to avert the looming “Ultimate Violence” and to reverse the Doomsday Clock’s advance before it is too late?

The heart of the situation is that there is something terribly wrong with the way our world is organizing and governing itself, and with how humanity’s resources are foolishly and grossly inequitably misallocated for war and destruction rather than for human advancement and protection.  The fundamental problem is that there is something very wrong with our collective human consciousness, or, I might even say, our spiritual disposition.

We are currently dying, not because of an external threat or a material lack, but because of our collective psychology.  A psychic contagion has been allowed to spread unchecked, and it has now entrapped humanity, like the scorpions in Oppenheimer’s bottle, in a kind of collective psychosis.  Now, the only hope we have to extricate ourselves from this situation is to face the reality of this predicament, before it is too late.  The task is indeed global but not different in nature to what we as mental health professionals do on a daily basis.  The application of mental health principles is an urgent and vitally important and imperative of our times: we know that the nature of madness is that, the moment one gains insight, even the most severe mental symptoms are close to inconsequential.

The task is nothing less than to help our own country and ourselves, as it still leads most of humanity, find ways to achieving a healthier equilibrium that is more compatible with survival. 

For Oppenheimer and his colleagues, the looming Doomsday Clock danger resulting from the nuclear discoveries they made, which quickly led to the immediate use of a new, horrendous weapon of atomic mass destruction, became the central focus of their lives.  Rather than applying their discoveries for human advancement and betterment, the opposite ensued.  The failure of international collaboration and cohesion also led humanity to impending climate destruction as well as greater dangers of worldwide pandemics.  All of these Doomsday dangers are interrelated, as they all relate to our state of collective mental health and, ultimately, what I have called our “collective suicidality.”

The tools that are available to us, including social media and artificial intelligence, are equally taken in destructive directions.  Destructive, rather than constructive, application of the same tools indicates a poor state of health, whether at the individual or the national level.

The highly-educated, best trained, and most experienced experts among us in relevant disciplines have been warning about these multiple escalating dangers from each of their perspectives for some time.  But leaders and the public have resisted all pleas, scientific facts, and even observable evidence, whether for profit, power, convenience, or participation in a kind of collective mental denial, even derangement.

Indeed, in our country, our political leaders as well as the corporate media are responsible for the predicament in which we find ourselves.  It is not a conscious collective suicidal death wish, but it is not an unconscious one, either.  Those responsible for bringing about this situation should be responsibly leading our way to reversing the hands of the Doomsday Clock, but as Albert Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”—and it is now clear we cannot continue in our old way of thinking.

There is a collective inability, for multiple reasons, to focus on the truly important matters in a serious and rational way that is commensurate with the magnitude of the dangers. Indeed, rather than supporting the course we are on, we should all condemn it and demand major changes. There are collective psychological and mental health reasons that explain what I will call “Our Existential Predicament.” Russians are actually claiming that they are being provoked into using tactical nuclear weapons, and Americans are stating that such claims are bogus and irresponsible, while rushing to prepare for just such a possible outcome.  In the midst of our national and international institutions seriously failing and endangering us all, there may be a rational and psychologically healthy way of approaching today’s situation, which comes next in Part 2.