Maladapted: Aaron Bushnell, Mental Health, and the Role of Heretics in Fostering Social Change

Part I in a series exploring the humanistic implications of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation in protest of the war on Gaza

The following is the first part of a series examining the humanistic implications of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. The reader will not encounter photographs of Bushnell’s self-immolation.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke for many in the U.S. political establishment when he insisted that Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation against the war on Gaza, on February 25, 2024, self-evidently declared his mental illness. According to Shapiro, anyone dousing “himself with flammable liquid and then lighting a match is obviously a sign of mental disturbance….”

Many mainstream media pundits and countless social media commentators have echoed this view of Bushnell. In The Atlantic, Graeme Wood wrote that he felt it was “sick” to so much as “be moved” by Bushnell's self-immolation.

Bushnell’s self-sacrifice has revealed a narrow and distorted conception of mental health identified with adherence to the status-quo, one that opposes not only humanistic psychology’s conception of mental health but also human excellence and social progress. A humanistic view enables us to recognize that mental wellness might, under extreme circumstances, inspire rather than impede self-sacrificial behavior. The moral apathy, indifference, and rationalizations of the bystanders to injustice may be greater evidence of mental “disturbance” than the efforts of those taking heretical action to end injustice.

Mental Health According to Power

People who characterize others with whom they have disagreements as “crazy” or “mentally ill” are usually communicating question-begging disdain and not a reasonable evaluation. Rather than seriously engaging with the argument in question, the challenger attacks the person and meticulously polices both the “tone” and propriety of their advocacy.

We’re more likely to sympathetically scrutinize people’s actions on behalf of a given cause when we agree with the cause. We’re also much less inclined to presume they are “sick.” All of us are predisposed to that easiest of fallacies: taking our assumptions about the “real” world for granted without so much as realizing we are doing so.

The other problem is that mental “health” and “sickness” are frequently deployed as empty buzzwords, language meant to make our arguments for us without the inconvenience of having to justify our claims ourselves. The language of mental health and sickness often mask value judgements with seemingly credible scientific terms. Thus alleviating those insisting others are mentally “well” or “sick” of the responsibility of rationally defending their beliefs about what is good or bad, right or wrong. Instead they flippantly claim to simply “observe” that the other is mentally (un)well. Students of history know that members of marginalized social groups have always been accused of being “crazy” or “uncivilized” by those identified with the dominant culture.

Those serious about contemplating Aaron Bushnell’s mental state—or anyone else’s for that matter—must begin by answering the question, “What does it mean to be mentally healthy or mentally sick?” For many, mental wellness is equated with adherence to the dominant norms and values of society. Being well, on this view, has to do with fitting into and functioning within the existing structure of the world. Being rational, by extension, means recognizing and confirming to “the way things are.”

From this vantage point, the mentally “unwell” are those who fail to adapt to the norms of society—fail to behave in accordance with standard social expectations. The unwell—the mentally sick—are unable to accept and acclimate themselves to the “reality” as it's found in present day society.

Was Aaron Bushnell “Sick”?

By this definition, Aaron Bushnell was most certainly mentally unwell. Friends say that Bushnell was appalled by homelessness and the dominant economic system. He believed capitalism and other social systems fostered immoral social ills including economic inequalities and warfare. He was also disenchanted with the U.S. military, and looked with anticipation to the end of his service in the Air Force. In San Antonio, Texas and Akron, Ohio Bushnell joined radical communities committed to feeding the hungry and taking other nonviolent direct action to remedy the injustices of our highly stratified society.

An image of Aaron Bushnell and comrades participating in the mutual aid group, Serve the People Akron’s effort to feed the hungry.

In “Stop Glorifying Self-Immolation,” The Atlantic writer Graeme Wood wrote that he wouldn’t “speculate” on Bushnell’s “mental health.” He then proceeded to list these details about Bushnell’s life: he was reared in a “religious cult” [a group he extricated himself after joining the military], embraced the political philosophy of anarchism, and favored “extreme spiritual and political practice” over a life of “moderation.” Wood offered no explanation of the significance of these facts or why he chose to list them.

As those advocating prevailing views often do, Wood relied upon common sense to make his argument for him. Informed by the previously discussed common sense conception of mental health and sickness, the implied argument is clear: 1) People who behave in “extreme” or “immoderate” ways are not mentally well. 2) Bushnell behaved in extreme/immoderate ways. 3) Therefore Bushnell was not well. Near the end of his essay Wood made his view clear: “I have serious doubts about the value of discussing anything with someone who brings a jerry can [a fuel container] and a Zippo to the conversation.” Bushnell, in short, is crazy. And crazy people shouldn’t just be denied honors, they shouldn't even participate in serious conversation.

Adjusted to What? Heretics and Social Change

Though prevalent, such thinking about mental wellness is too shallow and irrational to be taken seriously. Mental health cannot be reasonably defined by cultural-social adaptation. In Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), the renowned humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow criticized the shortsightedness of emphasizing social conformity and “adjustment” as the benchmark of mental wellbeing. “Adjusted to what? ,” he asked. “To a bad culture? To a dominating parent? What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave? A well-adjusted prisoner?” The conception of wellbeing as adaptability or social conformity is proven erroneous from the simple fact it would render all of human history’s great agents of change mentally sick.

A conception of mental health that centers on culturally relative norms is untenable for anyone who believes in social progress. For to believe in social progress implies a recognition that societies, not unlike individuals, are not infallible. And given that they are comprised of people who make mistakes and foster detrimental norms and irrational institutions, they must sometimes be changed and even transformed. And if society is going to change some of its members will need to refuse to adapt themselves to the prevailing irrational or unjust norms; society will need people who courageously interrogate and then actively subvert its traditions.

Positive social change is the creative result of individuals and subgroups within a culture prioritizing commitment to truth, compassion for others, and the wholeness of integrity over the demands of tradition, social conformity, and adherence to the dictates of power. Social change requires capable, caring, and daring people who will critically and creatively examine and then actively challenge beliefs and practices rendered unquestionable by dominant culture.

The heroes of human progress have always appeared as blasphemers to the apostles of moderation. The advances in human rights we all celebrate, today, were not won by those worshiping at the altar of the status-quo. As the existentialist psychologist Rollo May argued in his book, Power and Innocence (1972), growth-oriented societies require rebels. “Society can tolerate only a certain amount of threat to its mores, laws and established ways,” wrote May. “But if civilization has only its own mores and no input to fertilize its growth—that is, has only its established ways—it stagnates in passivity and apathy.” The solution that has been worked out throughout human history, May observed, “is to martyr the rebel during the time in which he lives and then, when he is dead and there is no chance for him to alter his message (it is now established), disinter him, apotheosize him, and finally worship him.”

The dissident Russian novelist, Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the early dystopian novel, We (1921), poetically made the point in his 1919 essay, “Tomorrow.”

“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is inevitably heresy to today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust.”

In a later essay, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” (1923), Zamyatin added that heretics were “the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.” Zamyatin was an early participant in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and member of the Bolsheviks, but he lost favor with his fellow revolutionaries over his vehement objections to the squelching of freedom of expression.

Zamyatin recognized that heretical disputation was discomforting. “Explosions are not very comfortable,” he wrote. “And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words. To every today, to every evolution, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, the burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics.” Yet Zamyatin reminds us that for all of the pain heretics cause, they “are necessary to health; if there are no heretics, they should be invented.” This is how humanity is sustained and expanded.

Suffice to say, mental illness cannot be equated with the refusal to successfully adapt to a society’s existing norms without simultaneously declaring all of our honored change agents mentally ill. And even if we took this intellectual step we would rob the idea of “mentally illness” of the normative sting that motivates many to use the term. For if Socrates, Jesus, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were all mentally ill, then perhaps mental illness is something we should all aspire to!

The question left to ponder is whether or not Aaron Bushnell’s cause and his sacrifice will join this pantheon as furthering of our humanity. That his actions audaciously conflicted with those in political and cultural power—that they were rightly judged “extreme”—is, at best, irrelevant to the question.

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