My parents had Copaganda The Show on in the room, and a Chinese character talked about how her parents were doctors during the cultural revolution, but were accused of using bourgeois science and were sentenced to reeducation. I don’t know enough about the cultural revolution to know anything about that, so I googled. Naturally I found myself on Wikipedia (blech) where they talked about a variety of “bourgeois pseudoscience” ranging from phrenology and eugenics to psychology and sociology. These latter two were specific to the PRC. Of course I know better than to automatically believe NATOpedia, especially on topics like these, but I don’t know any better places to look for accurate information, particularly in English. So I have a few questions.

  1. Where can I go to find these answers? I am aware of ProleWiki, but a lot of the pages I’ve seen have been more summary and less in-depth talks about these things.

  2. Is psychology and potentially psychiatry still considered bourgeois science? I have a variety of psychiatric disorders, and I would be upset if my communist utopia did not see fit to help me deal with them. I have heard of anti-psychiatry, and some random dude claiming it is popular on the left? Not jumping to believe them, but instead asking people who have a better chance of actually knowing.

  3. Is there any truth that the PRC did take these actions? Do they still? If I were to move to China, would I be unable to get psychiatric meds?

  • NikkiB@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    7 days ago

    About the cultural revolution, yes, horrific and absurd crimes transpired against more or less innocent people, and the angry mobs shouting about reactionary science were generally wrong. If you were to read Chinese sources from the last few decades, they would form a consensus that the cultural revolution was a series of misguided responses to the challenges of industrialization. Mao in particular believed that economic development was a trivial factor in building communism, the primary factor being a protracted class war against bourgeois elements in society. In its own way, it’s idealism manifested. People are liberated through the satisfaction of their material needs, not the absence of their foes. A very wide net was cast concerning what counted as “bourgeois,” and a lot of people needlessly suffered from the reflexive desire to fight perceived class enemies. If you were to move to China, I’m quite certain you would be able to get your prescriptions filled. It’s not the sixties anymore.

    “Bourgeois science” is a real thing, however. All sciences reflect certain priorities and worldviews, whether they are effective or not. In fact, the “effectiveness” of a given science is judged through the lens of these priorities, and the question of what priorities are worth considering is ideological. I would stray away from thinking in terms of “is psychology reactionary?” and instead think “what elements of psychology are reactionary? Are there any that aren’t?”

    More on antispych stuff: people who subscribe to this belief system understand psychiatry as a mechanism by which people’s rights are usurped on the basis that the mentally ill or disabled don’t know what’s good for them, that their judgement has been clouded by the delusions their sick brains induce, and therefore others should make decisions for them. Psychiatric “medicine,” in this sense, becomes a mechanism of dehumanization. A person suffering from cancer could refuse treatment, and physicians would respect this. A psychotic who does the same thing has a slim chance of receiving the same grace. Some leftists think this way, others don’t. Either way, psychiatric medicine exists in China.