Exploring the being of knowing

The Consolidation of Ideology and Mental Health

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Reading Time: 4 minutes
mental health philosophy
There is a long line of thinking and writing that frames ideological negation as emancipatory, or as an advancement of cognitive ability towards a … deep adaptation as post-nihilist praxis?
———- indeed! It is our next meal because what happens when we eat, what happens when we satiate our hunger? We digest it, we incorporate it, we become it. —-and we excrete what is not useful. And Some honesty arises…. mental health philosophy Love it. Reposting it. And.. What does Nathaniel have to say ?
One should not help but make a notice to the coincidence and synchronicity that occurs between, say, work and experience and encounter with other through this blog and people all around. …and Somehow I feel like we might differ on what is actually occurring even while that difference just highlights how the view is the same…I feel that there is an analysis that would tend toward thoughts synthesizing with brains functioning coming to conclusions of an entirely human mechanism. Yet, I come from the opposite direction to say that we are coming across the same motions of concepts in the polemic itself. The world is manifesting and for those who can see “it” report on it, just as it is the unfolding of our individual beings, just As it is the unfolding of the universe. But that’s just a very loose and rough description of two sides of the same coin; I’m not sure we need to make them exclusive and attempt to reduce to another “what is actually occurring”… Nevertheless, as simplicity of what I see in reading philosophy just confirms it —- from my perspective, from my angle of view, it is not that ideology is going away but quite the contrary: It is that ideology is becoming functional. Like a fish swimming and water, the fish does not notice the water, it is just it’s natural environment; the water essentially disappears but it is actually just everywhere. This is really what I see happening in a real sense. Drowning, I resist. I choke on the water; I attempt to deny it .Yet, as many have reported, supposedly, for a couple seconds I’m actually breathing water and I am fully relaxed… I totally get — it — the plunge into nothingness in nihilism. I’m not sure what I would have to say, except to reiterate the same terms that is used in the various discourses: I fully comprehend and resonate with where it came from, the process, and where we are at. Personally, I don’t think that incredulity towards meta-discourses eliminates meta-discourses. I am quite skeptical that I am able to question a meta discourse now and then to have myself exist “suspended in nothingness“. For me the real suspension in nothingness is utter identity loss, and inability to make any headway in the world, and yet that also is a certain corresponding adaptive metadiscourse which remains in the background as a sort of “philosophy” (what Is indicated in the band “The Covert Sound Philosophy”). It is a perpetuation and insistence of doubting everything as an identity that makes me locate meta-discourses as something that I am not involved with. This denial then helps me attempt to assert my identity of getting nowhere in the world and being generally unhappy and defaulting to a certain resolve in such a state To point to ideology as if it’s something these “poor unintelligent wretches” are involved with while me and my Nietschean Uber Mench gets to sit back and proclaim How justified and superior I am to all these other stupid religious animals. In other words, I am depressed because everyone else is stupid. Really?? …coincidentally, and I do mean happening at the same time at all times, this is exactly the condition of my being despite how I would want to resist it and live a life arguing against it, as though I was forging some identity that everyone needs to recognize. Strange how I remain in my small world with little identity because I was so smart as to question every meta-discourse that I came across… No, I do not believe that there was ever a time that me nor you nor anyone else was succesdfully avoiding existing within Meta Discourse. It was just silent, held back in irony, as a sort of sarcastic spite, like I’m better than you, but then all the while really just asserting my identity of being a pissy complainer to those pussy bitches who don’t question their existence in the proper manner… No; I think it is once I recognize that what I was asserting in my nihilism was really everything that I was denying, but denying for the sake of my attempt to forge a new ideological identity, once I get to the end of that curve, what happens is that I become part of the ideology, the ideology the Meta Discourse actually takes hold of and begins to function properly As because that’s what’s been going on all along despite my intellectualization of the matter.
Thanks again! x

Enjoying this? The Sunday Same is my biweekly letter: one essay like this, every other Sunday morning, straight to your inbox. Subscribe at lanceamh.substack.com.

A note on how I use AI. I write everything on this blog myself: the ideas, the arguments, the words. I do use AI, but as an editor, not a co-author. It helps me with grammar, formatting, and structure. That use is recent: AI has been part of my process only for roughly the past year’s worth of posts. Everything older was written without it, because there was nothing like it to use. What I have found is that AI most often misinterprets what I write philosophically, so its suggestions are usually wrong, and a good deal of my attention and editing goes into sculpting each post until it reflects the ideas correctly. The ideas are never AI’s.

For transparency, I keep a Word document of my original writing and the full exchanges, back and forth with the AI, that produced each post. If anyone is interested in how a piece came together, that record is available.

Share this article:

Leave a Reply

About this blog

Essays in mental health philosophy—less “tips,” more why things work (or don’t). I look at the first principles under therapy, psychiatry, psychology, and everyday life, and occasionally share notes from papers and books-in-progress.

This space stands alongside—not inside—my counseling practice. If you’re seeking therapy in Colorado, there’s a link in the footer.

About the author

Lance Kair, LPC, blends philosophy, mindfulness, and counseling to help clients find agency, meaning, fulfillment, and healing through deep understanding, self-awareness, and compassionate therapeutic collaboration.

Copyright © 2025 Lance Kair, LPC | Website by TechG

Get new posts by email

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Subscribe to get new posts by email

Join 769 other subscribers