Neurosis

Neuroses. Patterns of information-as-thought that emerged as once-optimal solutions to existential questions of personal survival or social and cultural continuity that have now become autonomously self-propagating and are unnecessary burdens and active inhibitions to healthy and efficient psychological information-processing or adaptation to new contexts and experiences. The context for which the psychologicaI solution was originally cultivated has now moved on but the patterns of thought have not; the patterns themselves generate bundles of reflexively-ordered information around the abstract gravitational centers of their own inertia.

In this sense of the word, many of our legacy organisational, ideological and political solutions are effectively neurotic. Constitutional democracies, for instance, also often find themselves in structurally enigmatic situations incurred by the fact that the people and the context that they were originally intended to serve (when their legal logic and axiomatic basis were formed) effectively no longer exist. Questioning the validity or values of the political system within which you exist is a problematic activity, as are psychotherapeutic methods of neurosis disentanglement. There is no best way of psychological, social or economic organisation; as a matter of logical or physical fact and the indefinitely-extensible nature of non-trivially sophisticated axiomatic systems, there are only better ways.