The required thought wasn’t made any easier by writing my latest book review, David Lay Williams ‘The Greatest Of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato To Marx’. It’s a philosophical analysis of pleonexia – that insatiable greed which has driven despots throughout Cooper’s millenia of repeated collapse – and which thanks to democracy now spreads well beyond the realm of the plutocracy.
Then today a revelation arrived from a most unexpected direction, Sainsbury’s supermarket, who sent me this Christmas gift of extra credit points. A quick Google informs me that the toe-curlingly embarrassing jargon which peppers this missive derives from the works of Roald Dahl, a man whom the BBC once described as “an unpleasant man who wrote macabre books – and yet children around the world adore them”. I had the privilege of learning to read in the pre-Dahl era, and bear no malice toward the man but rather toward whoever, in some advertising agency in some glittering tower office, decided that employing this imbecilic jargon while the Ukraine, and Gaza, and Lebanon, and Syria and [insert latest] are going up in flames and concrete dust, was going to improve my morale this Christmas.
With Elon Musk spending 15 whole minutes of his income ($250,000,000) to help elect Donald Trump, pleonexia does remain one of our greatest problems, but now that we’re all so focused on mental health perhaps it’s worth re-evaluating hebephrenia too. Wikipedia will tell you this is an obsolete term for a subtype of schizophrenia, no longer recognized as a separate condition following the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) in 2013. (Even forms of madness are no longer safe from being reclassified). Originally proposed by the German psychiatrist Ewald Hecker in the 1870s as an "insanity of youth", he named it after the Greek term for "adolescence" – ἥβη (hḗbē) – and thought it was more prevalent between the ages of 15 and 25. Prominent characteristics were disorganized behavior and speech, including loosened associations and schizophasia ("word salad"), flat or inappropriate affect, absence of frank delusions and hallucinations but behavioral disorganization may that might impair a sufferer's ability to carry out daily activities such as showering or eating. Emotional responses could seem strange or inappropriate, including inappropriate facial expressions or laughter – or by contrast a complete lack of emotion, including anhedonia (lack of pleasure) and avolition (lack of motivation).
Although the DSM says it’s no longer a brand of madness you can aspire to, that may be because it’s become fully integrated into our Western way of life and popular culture. Some future Paul Cooper (if there is one, they may be a mollusc or rodent rather than a primate) will perhaps remember us as the Hebephrenic Culture of the 20-21st centuries who sank down in flames giggling to Monty Python’s ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’.
