MAYBE "THEY'RE" THE ONES WHO ARE CRAZY

Psychiatry in general can trace its origins to five prominent European scientists in the 1800s-Thomas R. Malthus, a British economist(?) who viewed war, disease, and starvation as beneficial survival mechanisms against unchecked population growth; Charles Darwin, the naturalist whose 1859 book "The Origin of Species" convinced whole generations that survival of the fittest is a law of nature; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher and close friend to Hitler's paragon, composer Richard Wagner, who declared "God is Dead" and advocated the superiority of the "Ubermensch", or superman, over lesser races and there virtues and values; Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, a French diplomat who championed the concept of an Aryan aristocracy and its preeminence over others; and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born philosopher who moved to Germany, married the daughter of Richard Wagner, and also promoted an "Aryan world philosophy."
"Darwin entangled his theory of natural selection with the assumptions of Malthus's population theory. The result was a strange, incongruous marriage of Darwin's observations of the animal world with Malthus's emotional assumptions about the uncontrollable population growth and social solutions to preserve the British aristocracy," noted Roeder, Kubillus, and Burwell.
From the viewpoint that certain people are more evolved and thus more competent to judge others came the profession of psychiatry. The term itself came from the Greek "psyche", or soul, and "iatros", or doctor. However, these doctors of the soul quickly became preoccupied with more material matters-the physical brain and how to manipulate or destroy it.
As the field of psychiatry grew, so did its definitions. In 1871, "The Psychical Degeneration of the French People" was published, a paper that left the impression that simply being French constituted a mental illness. "One of psychiatry's leading figures, Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, added to his list of varieties of mental disorder 'political and reformatory insanity'-meaning any inclination to form a different opionion from that of the masses was considered to be a condition of mental insanity...
-J.M.