Let's look at the object and purpose of Social Psychiatry in the context of the role it plays within the wider society and with particular reference to Pareto's grasp of history as a graveyard of aristocracies.
The upper crust elite grows soft, averse to risk, they become more like foxes in their approach to leadership, they become indecisive and inevitably are replaced by the raging lions of a non-elite class. Round and round it goes. Then when this circulation of elites is blocked, because of gerrymandering, just being slimy, new technology, something like that, a disequilibrium occurs, people get very ratty and unsporting, which results in the ravages and inefficiencies of revolution which can last through the generations. If in doubt, consider the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, or the foundering of Tool Makers, the aristocrats of the Industrial Revolution.
Why this graveyard of aristocracies? Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto would answer with something like: "Because those who gravitate toward an understanding of themselves as leaders are a long way from being rational, well balanced and learned in their understanding of solipsism, otherwise known as looking at themselves in the mirror and seeing the ultimate in perfection."
Vilfredo died in August 1923. His book learning included society, civil engineering, political science, philosophy and economics, his mathematics was a given. And of course Pareto's body of work has been studied by the management class and their hangers on. Generally much of Pareto's contributions to knowledge has been criticized for being a little too subjective, which hasn't stopped many a born again academic with a mirror in hand, from adopting Pareto's ideas, some of which have been dubbed Welfare Economics.
Yes indeed I share your grief at the thought of any management style attempting to chase down an objective view of welfare within the balance sheets of business management. All hail to a British born male called Sam Gompers of Jewish and Dutch origin, a cigar maker by trade and Union Leader who founded the American Federation of Labor. His quote for the ages is "The Business of business is business," which basically still means f-management and their BS, we want our share of the good times.
Then, following Abraham Maslow's set of picket fence assumptions about us people which he called a Hierarchy of Needs, a dream world if ever there was one, came Frederick Herzberg who was born in Massachusetts fifteen years after Abe Maslow was born and four months before Pareto died. So with luck you got a sense of emerging people management themes in the land of the free.
Fredrick Herzberg had the nerve to refer to his theory of how to get people to work harder for less by giving it the subjectively laden title Motivation-Hygiene Theory. How soft and kind. Happy Talk Healthy. How sweet lies are, when whispered seductively. Herzberg was a psychiatrist, and it's tempting to think of him as a man who as a psychiatrist wanted to fit us to the blueprint of a world that suited him.
Social Psychiatry is defined this way: The study of how the broader society though social groups, relationships and community dynamics influence mental health. Oh Yes, how hard it must be on the mental health of a Solipsisist whose mirror has shattered, or about to be shattered.
