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Western Atomism and Its Culture-Bound Syndromes

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Computational Psychiatry

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Summary

The stabilization of human cognition via feedback from embedding social and cultural contexts is a dynamic process deeply intertwined with it, constituting, in a sense, the riverbanks directing the flow of a stream of generalized consciousness at different scales: cultural norms and social interaction are synergistic with individual and group cognition and their disorders. A canonical failure mode in atomistic cultures is found to be a “ground state” collapse well-represented by atomistic models of economic interaction that are increasingly characterized as divorced from reality by heterodox economists. That is, high rates of psychopathic and antisocial personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder emerge as culture-bound syndromes particular to Western or Westernizing societies, or to those undergoing social disintegration.

Culture is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth.

– Robert Boyd.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr. D.N. Wallace for fruitful discussions and two reviewers for comments useful in revision.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA

    Rodrick Wallace

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Wallace, R. (2017). Western Atomism and Its Culture-Bound Syndromes. In: Computational Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53910-2_3

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