SATURDAY: "What a piece of work is a [person]!"

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2025

Human dysfunction explained: Leave it to Shakespeare to place such words in a character's mouth!

In this instance, the character was Hamlet himself. The leading authority on the speech starts to explain:

What a piece of work is a man

"What a piece of work is a man!" is a phrase within a monologue by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Hamlet is reflecting, at first admiringly, and then despairingly, on the human condition. 

Hamlet is reflecting on the human condition. As he starts, he seems to be describing a condition which would today be called (clinical) depression. 

The Mayo Clinic calls it "major depressive disorder." It's a very dangerous condition. As the leading authority notes, Hamlet's soliloquy starts like this:

Hamlet's monologue:
I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. 

Our point is not to dwell upon Hamlet's state of mind, whose origin he can't explain. We want to move ahead to the famous portrait he offers next:

What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Women get folded in at the end. But what kind of creature is a human? In his despair, Hamlet finds himself moving away from the standard glorified imagery about how big-brained we humans are.

This morning, we join Hamlet's question to a question asked by Don Corleone:

How did it [ever] get this far?

In a famous scene from a 1972 feature film, Don Corleone is asking about a war among Gotham's five families. Today, we ask the question about our failing nation and its rapidly failing experiment:

How did we ever make it this far? When we look a the moral and intellectual breakdowns taking place all around us, it's hard to believe that the experiment ever managed to get this far.

At issue are the imagined mental faculties cited by Hamlet in his ironic proclamation. More specifically, we refer to the crazy statements being made by the chief executive, and we refer to the ugly inanity being voiced by the disordered though telegenic child he chose as his press secretary.

We refer to Speaker Johnson's most recent statement about Blue America—more precisely, about the people he's aggressively casting as fiendish others. We think back to that other disordered person's recent statement:

The Democratic Party is the party of Satan.

The various voices inside Silo Red are defining a state of tribal war. Over here, within Silo Blue, our biggest news orgs chose to disappear that statement by the sitting president. What a piece of work are such women and men!

Also, the sitting vice president! We don't think we've ever seen a public figures so disordered, or so changed, at the age of 40, from the genial fellow he had seemed to be only ten years before. 

Below, we'll quote from his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, to show you where this may have begun. But amid all this, we also take you to the top of the academic pile. 

We refer to a tiny chunk of an obituary written by a Times reporter. That reporter isn't a specialist. The Times report starts like this:

John Searle, Philosopher Who Wrestled With A.I., Dies at 93

John R. Searle, an uncompromising and wide-ranging philosopher who was best known for a thought experiment he formulated, decades before the rise of ChatGPT, to disprove that a computer program by itself could ever achieve consciousness, died on Sept. 16 in Safety Harbor, Fla., west of Tampa. He was 93.

His son Tom confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that Professor Searle’s health had declined since a bout with coronavirus last year.

Professor Searle, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for 60 years, was the rare philosopher who could proudly declare, “I’m not subtle.”

He brought ironic humor and bluntness to subjects as diverse as the politics of higher education, the nature of consciousness and the merits of textual deconstruction as a philosophical style.

Professor Searle was uncompromising, but did his work make sense? We won't be quoting his actual work. Instead, we'll refer to this later passage from the Times obit:

Professor Searle did stick fiercely to his positions, but he was also thrilled by hard problems. He spent decades writing about the nature of consciousness.

“What you’ve got in your skull is about a kilogram and a half, three pounds of this gook,” he told Harry Kreisler, the host of the U.C. Berkeley interview series “Conversations With History.” “How can that have all these thoughts and feelings and anxieties and aspirations? How can all of the variety of our conscious life be produced by this squishy stuff blasting away at the synapses?”

Professor Searle sought to solve the long-running debate over the division between the mind and the body by dispensing with the duality altogether. He argued that mental experiences like pain, ecstasy and drunkenness were all neurobiological phenomena, caused by firing neurons. Consciousness is not, he said, a separate substance of its own: It is a state the brain is in, like liquidity is the state of the molecules in a glass of water.

Searle wrote at the very top of Blue America's academic pile. That passage, waved into print at the top Blue America's journalistic pile, doesn't make a lick of sense—but what a piece of work is a human! We humans aren't built to see that!

Remember—we're looking at a passage in which Professor Searle is being quoted and paraphrased by someone who's a journalist. That said, editors waved that passage into print, presumably imagining that the passage made sense.

It doesn't. It's the type of high-end bafflegab Professor Horwich was writing about when he said this about that, for the Times, in discussing the later Wittgenstein:

Was Wittgenstein Right?

[...]

It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on—and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking.

Say what? At the highest platforms of academia, have our "philosophers" merely been producing "the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking?" 

What kinds of "linguistic illusion" could possibly be producing that effect? How could some such claim possibly be accurate?

That, of course, is a very good question, but there is exactly zero point in trying to spell the answer out.  Meanwhile, down there on the darkling plain where Speaker Johnson and press secretaries live, disordered people spread their tribal poisons around as what once was taken to be a nation rapidly sees things fall apart.

No one tops JD Vance for this tribal dysfunction. How did the genial Vance of age 30 end up, ten years later, as the bomb-thrower he currently is? 

Below, you see part of Vance's own account concerning the way he grew up. Our submission would be this:

Many people who grow up this way will likely be profoundly damaged. In this passage from his 2015 best-selling book, Mamaw and Papaw are his maternal grandparents. Jimmy is his uncle, one of Mamaw and Papas's kids:

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

(page 42) 

I couldn't believe that mild-mannered Papaw, whom I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk. His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition. She was a violent nondrunk. And she channeled her frustrations into the most productive activity imaginable: covert war. When Papaw passed out on the couch, she'd cut his pants with scissors so they’d burst at the seam when he next sat down. Or she’d steal his wallet and hide it in the oven just to piss him off. When he came home from work and demanded fresh dinner, she'd carefully prepare a plate of fresh garbage. If he was in a fighting mood, she’d fight back. In short, she devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell.

If Jimmy’s youth shielded him from the signs of their deteriorating marriage for a bit, the problem soon reached an obvious nadir. Uncle Jimmy recalled one fight: “I could hear the furniture bumping and bumping, and they were really getting into it. They were both screaming. I went downstairs to beg them to stop.” But they didn’t stop. Mamaw grabbed a flower vase, hurled it, and—she always had a hell of an arm—hit Papaw right between the eyes. “It split his forehead wide open, and he was bleeding really badly when he got in his car and drove off. That’s what I went to school the next day thinking about.”

Mamaw told Papaw after a particularly violent night of drinking that if he ever came home drunk again, she'd kill him. A week later, he came home drunk again and fell asleep on the couch. Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their eleven-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life. Miraculously, Papaw survived the episode with only mild burns.

Because they were hill people, they had to keep their two lives separate. No outsiders could know about the familial strife—with outsiders defined very broadly. When Jimmy turned eighteen, he took a job at Armco and moved out immediately. Not long after he left, Aunt Wee found herself in the middle of one particularly bad fight, and Papaw punched her in the face. The blow, though accidental, left a nasty black eye. When Jimmy—her own brother—returned home for a visit, Aunt Wee was made to hide in the basement. Because Jimmy didn’t live with the family anymore, he was not to know about the inner workings of the house. “That’s just how everyone, especially Mamaw, dealt with things,’ Aunt Wee said. “It was just too embarrassing.

We've long advised you to pity the child-—the child who was forced to endure that environment. For the record, the book he produced at age 30 wasn't especially well-written, the way the reviewers all said. 

As a case in point, you may note the cheeky way he describes his grandmother's violent madness, seeming to tiptoe past the idea that he himself had been affected by this massive dysfunction in any particular way.

At any rate, that was the younger Vance's account of the time when Mamaw set her husband on fire as he lay there sleeping. What a piece of work is a human being! 

That said, according to Vance's account, Mamaw was the moral exemplar in his gruesomely dysfunctional family. Even today, he fashions Mamaw as the person who kept him sane when he was a child and a teen.

That's the way he grew up. As for the sitting commander, his niece, a Ph.D. wielding clinical psychologist, says that he had the misfortune to be born to a father who was "a high-functioning sociopath."

She notes the fact that sociopathy is believed to be heritable. Like others before her, she describes the president displaying behaviors which are treated as necessary diagnostic symptoms by the time he was 12.

At the highest platform of Blue academia, Professor Searle seemed to think—or seemed to be willing to say--that when a person feels pain, it's really that person's brain which is feeling the pain.

You're right—that doesn't make any sense. What a piece of work is a high-ranking "philosopher!"

Today, a well-known nation is falling apart. Speaking to a very large audience, jugglers and clowns run roughshod at the Fox News Channel—and on Blue America's highest journalistic platforms, Blue American leadership cadres agree to look away.

Is there a way to get back out of all this? Everything is always possible, but things are falling apart very, very fast. What a piece of work is the creature which functions like this:

"Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit."
—Professor Brabender

One final point:

A we look at the president's cabinet, it seems to us that we may be seeing (serious) "mental disorder" (formerly, "mental illness") pretty much all around.

For better or worse, Blue journalists refuse to discuss such possibilities. Tommy Christopher (Mediaite) is a good, decent person, but we were puzzled by what he says about President Trump in this recent opinion piece:

Two Sick WTF Trump Moments That the Media Completely Ignored

A pair of President Donald Trump’s most revealing “WTF” moments were completely ignored by a news media that has become too numb or too afraid to give them the attention they deserve.

In the expanse of Trump’s lifetime of WTF-isms, there are categories within categories. With the focus on his dead pal Jeffrey Epstein, the creepy-pervy subcategory has gotten a lot of attention this year—but not nearly enough from the mainstream media.

[...]

But there’s another category that I have a hard time describing because I want to take care to avoid the pitfall of diagnosing Trump. Mental illness is too serious and important to be trivialized into a hot take—or any other temperature of take. Because whatever makes Trump this way, it can’t be chalked up to mental illness.

Christopher's piece continues from there. That said, "Whatever makes Trump this way, it can’t be chalked up to mental illness?"

Almost surely, it's too late for any of this to make any sort of a difference. But whatever is going on with the president, it can't be chalked up to "mental illness?"

What a piece of work is a good, decent person! Just as a provisional matter, why on God's green earth not?

Next week: American cartoon?