A post here on the SDMB made me aware of http://www.timecube.com/ and I couldn’t help noticing that the language and rambling style was similar to the stuff you can still see on Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles. Of course the time cube guy is very negative and frustrated, where Dr. Bronner’s soap only has positive messages. I have encountered other people who hand out rambling tracts of something or other, usually written in a very cramped, run-on style. Is there a common thread here? What type of psychological problem might this indicate?
Both were self-“doctored”, both were/are nuts, Bronner certifiably so. Bronner lacks hate. TimeCube guy has a hateful racist side, and a deranged space-time model. Bronner has an ill-defined hyper Unitarian religious model.
For DSMV, dunno, schizophrenia?
I posted a sorta-related thread a while back, but no replies.
If you’ve never heard of Henry Darger, you might be interested in taking a look. Similar sort of obsessive run-on style of writing, but a very, very different scenario. In Darger’s case, it was likely a symptom of autism manifesting in obsessive writing. Darger’s mainly remembered as an artist, but his art was all made in service of his fiction.
My wife was once given a hand-written religious screed by a coworker that felt like the same “genre.” Rambling, repetitive, and focused on a few small idiosyncratic details (the whole thing argued that all other religions were wrong because everyone has mistranslated the Hebrew and that God’s real name was “Yishy.”
Aw, c’mon. Dr. Bronner was in an institution at one time but I don’t really think we need to call him nuts. Nutty, yeah. He certainly had some weird ideas but he made great soap and like you said he didn’t advocate hate. Overall he was pretty much harmless.
He certainly doesn’t belong in the same company with Gene Ray/Otis E. Ray, the Time Cube guy who probably is nuts. And hateful and racist.
One sign of schizophrenia is the tendency to write incomprehensible (to everyone but the writer, that is) messages containing long, rambling sentences; grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors; and arcane subject matter.
I was in social services for a while, often doing work with schizophrenic clients, and this sort of thing was typical.
Wait, what? YOU created 4 days?
How do you add Cancer to a number?
How dare you say I am worthy of death!
In Soviet TimeCube, your opposite rationale voids a perspective.
Thanks, I was wondering about that. I’ve seen the typical rambling writing thing so often, usually passed out by someone obsessed with one topic. Is it possible to be partially schizophrenic and still function? Dr. Bronner, in an interview I saw him in, had the same kind of disconnected speech as on his bottles.
Absolutely! With the right medications and support systems, people with schizophrenia can, and do, lead ordinary lives. Obviously Dr. Bonner is doing OK (or, was), since he managed to invent a soap and get a national distribution network together for it.
Questions of degree do arise. For example, people can have things like ‘pressured speech’ and ‘loosening of associations’ without being otherwise frankly delusional. And delusions themselves, in order to qualify as such, have to be held with a fixity and intensity that is beyond access to rationality - you can’t talk someone out of a delusion. Short of that, odd ideas that are vigorously held and advocated can sometimes amount to what are called ‘overvalued ideas’. It takes a psychiatrist lots of training and experience to sort out the symptomatology in a given case and arrive at a diagnosis, and even then in marginal cases there can be substantial disagreement among experts.