Report From The Council of Post Apocalyptic Psychiatry

Following is a report from the field by an anonymous researcher invested in the tenets and philosophy as drawn by the Council For Post Apocalyptic Psychiatry:

Take every devastated Sunday morning ruined by hangover or drug use that you have ever known, compile it as extended metaphor, and apply it to the spirit of the surviving populace's yearnings.  It is evidenced foremost that we carry the themes of post-apocalyptic landscapes within our minds, sometimes conscious and raised to the interpretation of the world in the manner that a banner relates to surges of wind, sometimes pressed like shrapnel into the machinery of our subconscious.  You can see evidence of hoarding instincts in the soft mercenary actions of deluded citizens of the former republic, just as you witness survival sickness in conscripted laborers living out their time within the shackles of bondage.  Ideals and mercies are hard to come by in this strange world, with freedom and love remaining rare ribbons.  For some reason, perhaps based in our biology, the inhabitants of this wasteland continue to abide by the absurdities of bygone ages mingled with an overarching compulsion to survive.

I met the family at a reconstructed house by the shipyards, where the ballistic missiles had plummeted into harbor cranes and oil tankers in order to cripple trade.  I could tell immediately that there was something peculiar in the house itself, for it had been constructed along pre-war lines that denoted former values of symmetry in architecture and proficiency in labor.  But yet it had been made from debris, with its porch constructed out of a dissected shipping container and it's sidings evidencing the use of yacht hulls.  A woman in a cocktail dress waved politely from the porch, beckoning me to come in.  This was, as a formality, rare and charming, given the propensity of other survivors to behave with apathy or thinly veiled homicidal impulses.  I followed her motion, curious.

"I want to show you what we have been doing," she said, as I followed her into the house.  I was immediately overwhelmed by symbols of great wealth in the post-apocalyptic era, things such as functioning clocks, a door that led to a well-stocked kitchen, and electricity provided by an actual working generator.  "We have, in our way, been rebuilding the world here."  She gave me a relieved look when I smiled, than proceeded to act coy.  "Of course, we have been ridding ourselves of unnecessary things as well."

I met her husband Mark and her child Logan.  They struck me as oddly vulnerable, open in conversation and distanced from the verve of ruin and struggle.  Mark claimed that he had indispensable knowledge of engineering and architecture, for he was old enough to have been among the last wave of graduating students from the former trade schools.  He said he had spent five years on the house, with his only defense of the land being redistributed signs that claimed dangerous levels of radiation were in the area.  He told me that fortunately, they had used clean bombs only on the area, and that the crater the house straddled ended up serving as a suitable basement. 

They treated me to a banquet of vegetables and fresh fruit, which had been harvested from the woman's (Teresa) multiple gardens spread across the region.  I had not tasted crisper apples in my pre-war days, and felt eternally grateful and indebted to them.  I reached into my rucksack to offer canned green beans in exchange for the favor, which they surprisingly declined, saying that they were fortunate and understood where others weren't.

As our discussions ranged from the scattered attempts of the old government to reconstruct itself, our talk eventually fell on the subject of belief and religion.  Teresa had been scavenging at the former university archives nearly two miles inland, and had much to say on the topic as pertaining to biochemistry. 
As a disciple of the Council of Post Apocalyptic Psychiatry, I was invariably intrigued and considered it my good fortune to be able to benefit from her dissemination of knowledge.

"Dopamine," she said "was an often maligned and abused biochemical.  It was insubstantially linked to socially undesirable behavior occurring among the alienated and misunderstood, for whom there was no outlet of sublimation of desires existent in capitalist society.  They possessed dopamine, just like you and me, which nearly half of the brain maintains as a neurotransmitter that is actually responsible for such things as learning and belief."

"These poor people were subjugated by the development of drugs that destroyed their ability to experience dopamine, which also gives palpable expression to joy and well-being in life, as well as maintaining the role of a reward mechanism in the brain during the experience of agreeable circumstances.  They were forced to live in controlled environments, without the benefit of a belief-causing agent designed to instill meaning."

"Suffice to say, it can be evidenced perhaps that the distribution, function, and real world evidence of dopamine function within people who were attracted to the role of psychiatrist was completely abnormal and delusional in the manner in which some sane people are known to be.  This is evidenced in the fact that they were able to view a multitude of forms of human experience as disease, which is a completely unfounded belief given that it is experience itself that shapes our conceptions of disease, not the other way around.  Furthermore, historical evidence bears out the fact that the mad have contributed more to the overarching understanding of life than have psychiatrists, particularly with in the realms of art and literature."

"However, my main point relates to the notion that since we have been fortunate enough to be given a clean slate, and that I fully believe that dopamine and its invocation of belief remain today a key component in the human puzzle.  Everywhere you look there is evidence of an overriding incredulous nature, as though the annihilation of belief in the possibilities of the everyday were a fact of human disposition.  Our construction and gardening projects would not be possible, however, if it were not for some burgeoning belief in the finer qualities of humanity and its capacity to overcome challenges while remaining integrated amid the environment.  It is therefore my assertion that the survivors of this wasteland called the Earth investigate dopamine-releasing situations in order to cultivate it as an experience, in order to instill in themselves and others the potential for revolutionary changes based on a religion of the self that lends itself to experiences of euphoria along with redefined consciousness of matters of the mind that have long since been stagnating.  I guess what I am saying is that it is about time that we began positively building on facets of our biochemistry that have long since been neglected."

I was sufficiently taken aback by her speech, for it seemed that I had possessed many Old World understandings in terms of biochemistry myself.  While it took time to settle, I could see in this family threads of reconstructed hope and love that had long since been languishing within the crevices of the wasteland, where people remained on the verge of utter criminality with only their own self-interest preventing lapses into barbarism.  Certainly, their generosity and benevolent attitude did much to instill in me a renewed spirit that acted favorably upon my sense of well-being as I bid them goodbye and walked out of their remarkable oasis.