I have no desire to uphold bourgeois ideals around personal mental health because I have been crazy on their terms my whole life and have been attacked by that same system the whole time. The rationality I will speak of in terms of social organization is my weapon against that system. I am not giving it up because some theory milieu says the underclass can’t break from liberal society and assert values against it, and must remain somehow illegible in all instances. Stressing values, in some limited sense, will be unavoidable. Being illegible to the system is no reward, and doesn’t help you escape their management.

We have to assert a world against theirs, inverting the driving social logic of their society into something that gives that practical logic no quarter. We have to take up the questions implied by social life itself, for which liberals can only provide contradictory answers. Contrary to what some believe, liberal philosophy is not an all-knowing big Other, and did not pull all elements of society from thin air as a means of control. If liberals say friendship is important, that does not then make friendship a philosophical conspiracy. Liberals were forced to answer specific questions that were implied by a social organization that preceded them, and escaped them at many points.

We are going to assert that every human should be fed and housed. We will assert that in practice, and we will devise a practice that does what it promises. That practice will be rational, even if it lets us off the hook individually to be something else. It is not important that we uphold some sanist standard as individuals. Rather, it is necessary for us to be able to trust that the total social body, in as much as it is consciously organized, will do the minimum of what is necessary while acting as that social body.

We can be personally “irrational”, but that is currently only a question as a congruence of how society is organized, and because of power’s need to escape interrogation. We want a collective social endeavour to be predictable on certain terms. It is not incidental that it would be rational. It is functionally necessary for it to be so. The contradictions of human society thus far make that demand even more central. In application, this is not individuals conforming to any standard around mental health. They can be totally insane by liberal society’s current standards. All that maters is that we collectively do enough work to provide the minimum guarantees of life.

The question of rationality matters in the total social product. That is also the case now, and was the case when bourgeois liberals went about philosophizing rationality, just in an inverse illusion: liberalism displaces this matter of the non-rational system onto individuals. When a liberal sweeps up homeless people off the street and sends them to psych wards, there is a definite question of a non-rational system being inverted into a matter of individual dysfunction by those liberals. The needs of those homeless people are inescapable because they are universal: they need food, shelter, and social care.

The rational thing for the society to do would be to care for its citizens with the resources it definitely has. There is no way out but for us to cross the bridge that is rational social organization at the total social level, but especially when you start from the social contradictions we endure. It has nothing to do with “saving liberalism” from itself.

In addressing the irrational social organization, we are doing away with the problem that made the matter of rationality so important to liberals in the first place. Their clinging to “rationality” is a neurotic reaction to a world that is no such thing. Yet the matter of rationality appears because of the misapprehension of the social totality. It lingers until you resolve the central conflict that keeps giving it shape, and that does necessarily come down to social organization being stable and tethered to universal needs.

We have a social system now that refuses self-acknowledgment, allowing it an escape route from serving universal needs. It exists, but refuses to admit that it does. Once it consciously exists, it must serve the needs that are universal, and impose no ideals in lieu of that. Humans should be free to be whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t transgress against universal basic needs. Liberal capitalist society is purely that transgression.

Securing needs is exactly the way to open up an expansive realm of freedom where we may depart from one another in more interesting ways. Yet this new society doesn’t escape ideology, either. Practically, the communist society acts every day to help, where capitalism forces us to attack one another. Where competition lurks in the background of capitalism, we have something else entirely when the automatic movement of society is about feeding and caring for one another.

Ideology comes out of that, but it would be a result of a stable embedded practice that built trust, that also would allow us to depart from one another, while always having our bonds reinforced in the background. Someone could claim to be a lover in capitalism while the real society forces them to kill. In communism, we could have people who claim to be scary monsters, who practice love in opposition to their self-image. The only semblance of rationality that matters is at the total social level. We can not get beyond that matter other than by going through it. We have to transform these conditions into something else, first knowing what they are.