VIEW FROM THE RIGHT:  AN APPRECIATION AND A DISSENT

PART TWO: A DISSENT

by Alan

[Part One of this essay is available here.]

View from the Right presented a superlative counter-assault on the moral-philosophical-cultural decadence that Americans have permitted to overtake their nation.

Why did Mr. Auster oppose “Liberals”?   Because they promoted and excused that decadence.  Why did he oppose “Conservatives”?  Because they agreed to accommodate that decadence.  The differences between the two groups were entirely cosmetic, and nowhere is this more evident than in their uncritical acceptance of certain myths propounded in the name of science and medicine.

A case in point is a discussion at VFR in 2009 in which Mr. Auster and his readers addressed the matter of murder on a Greyhound bus.  It was one of a few instances in which I thought he and his readers were mistaken.  Indeed, they allowed themselves to debate the “condition” of the murderer’s “mind” or “spiritual state”, as if that had any bearing on the case.  Implicitly, they accepted the claim that it did.  It went on for 13 pages.  I thought that was 13 pages too many.  It was, I thought, a splendid example of the consequences of accepting false premises.  [“The Horror, The Horror”, VFR, March 5, 2009]

Mr. Auster wrote about the murderer:  “If he is insane, he is insane.  We all understand that you don’t try and sentence an insane man as you do an ordinary criminal…..”

“We all” did not include at least one reader:  I dissented.  I yield to no one in my defense of Mr. Auster in the many instances when he was right.  But here I parted company with him.

It is a critical mistake to accept the premises and vocabulary of paradoxers.  (By “paradoxers”, I mean people who would make the simplest and most easily understood matters in life into complicated mysteries replete with impressive-sounding words whose meaning is impenetrable.  Obviously the modern world abounds in paradoxers.)   I believe Mr. Auster and his readers made this mistake when, implicitly, they accepted the propositions (a) that psychiatry is a legitimate science, (b) that its practitioners are disinterested men of science, and (c) that there is a proper role for psychiatry in the administration of law.

None of those claims is valid. Psychiatry is a fake science.  Its practitioners are partisan advocates on one side or another of a conflict.  Psychiatry is not about medicine, science, or the “mind”.  In the world of psychiatric fairy tales, the lust for power and the lust for evasion walk hand in hand:  Power-lust on the part of doctors, psychiatrists, the medical racket, the pharmaceutical racket, the welfare racket, and government, the worst racket of all;  and hatred of responsibility on the part of judges, juries, lawbreakers, and ordinary Americans, most of whom are decent but much too gullible.

Hatred on the part of murderers of the responsibility to live by rules is matched by equal hatred on the part of “The Law” of the responsibility to enforce those rules and impose proper penalties for not doing so—penalties prescribed in advance by means of objective laws, not the self-serving advice of doctors.

Forensic psychiatry is indefensible partly because it is a fake science but primarily because it provides a pretext for non-objective law.  There is no justification—moral, philosophical, or political—for the existence of any non-objective law.

Every year psychiatrists invent new psychiatric diseases with impressive names.  But that does not prove that millions of people are afflicted with such fake diseases.  It proves that there is an enormous and unchecked appetite for evasion:  Evasion of the responsibility to enforce rules, to uphold laws, and to set and accept limits.  Modern Americans crave such evasion more than anything else.  That is why fake diseases invented by psychiatrists are so popular.  Such professionally-certified excuses save ordinary men and women the trouble of making up their own excuses.

I am not denying that forensic psychiatrists are “experts”.  On the contrary:  I happily concede that they are indeed experts—in Higher Nonsense, Advanced Folderol, Opaque Sloganeering, pseudo-medical Mumbo Jumbo, and Professional Mendacity.  Their credibility is considerably less than that of people who tell us they have been abducted by UFO Aliens.

But I do not want to give them too much credit.  There is an old saying: People want to be deceived. Fakery and foolishness like forensic psychiatry could not be sold to a population who did not want to be deceived or who are not comfortable being deceived.  Observe the exquisite balance in this ritual dance:  Deceivers at one end and the deceived at the other, in mutual pursuit of excuses and evasions under the patina of “scientific medicine”.  Isn’t that just peachy keen?

I was reading a website that ostensibly was politically incorrect—that was precisely one reason why I read it regularly.  Yet the views being expressed there were no different from those expressed by the same “Liberals” and “Conservatives” whom Mr. Auster opposed so properly and eloquently on other matters.  And all of them wrote in deference not to the existence of objective, incontrovertible evidence (because there is none) but to the self-serving advice of psychiatrists.

Mr. Auster wrote that some crimes are monstrous.  Indeed they are.  But then he added:  “From which it follows that the agent of a monstrous act, even if ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’, must be confined and kept separate from society for the rest of his life.”

Et tu, Mr. Auster?, I thought to myself as I read those words.  On whose say so?  On what grounds?  On the grounds of what objective standards?  None.  On the grounds, rather, of the pretentious, impenetrable, pseudo-scientific, self-serving, unverifiable and unfalsifiable cant of forensic psychiatrists.  What is most disturbing here is that even so astute and principled a commentator as Mr. Auster saw nothing wrong with that.  I see everything wrong with it.

It is typical for modern Americans to express concern about a killer’s “mind” and to say they want to “understand” why men commit murder.  All of that, I suggest, is diversion and evasion encouraged and excused by self-serving “experts” and “authorities”.  All of it is extremely useful for evading the responsibility to act on moral judgments.

I don’t care a fig about any killer’s “mind”.  Why should I?  Why should Mr. Auster care?  Why should anyone?  Why should Mr. Auster defer to the self-serving advice of psychiatrists?  Nor do I care about “understanding” why men commit murder.  That men commit murder is the point — and the point modern Americans allow voodoo practitioners to paper over with psychobabble.

The plain fact was:  A man committed murder.  What part of that is hard to understand?

The plain responsibility was:  Try, convict, and sentence the murderer.  What part of that is hard to understand?  What is there about that to justify 13 pages of debate?

It goes without saying that free room, board, and amenities for men who commit murder—paid for by those who don’t—is perfectly acceptable to sob-sisters, do-gooders, “Liberals” and “Conservatives”.  But why, of all people, did Mr. Auster also find it acceptable—or refrain from opposing it?  Did he imagine that punishment determined by objective standards is not infinitely preferable to punishment determined by the whims and self-serving advice of psychiatrists?  Did he imagine that the administration of law by psychiatrist-kings would be any less tyrannical than by philosopher-kings?

Modern Americans live by the self-deception that rule-enforcement is optional.  Law enforcement is a perfect example.  It cannot be optional.  It must be reflexive and constrained by objective standards.

The law has a solemn responsibility to enforce laws and punish lawbreakers.  Indeed, those are the only reasons for the law to exist. That it may seek to evade that responsibility—as it often does—is as predictable as day following night.  What Mr. Auster and others who think they are being “humanitarian” would permit is for the law to do precisely that by ceding that power to self-serving psychiatrists, whom no one has ever elected.  (Because no one could be that crazy.)  I object and I object most strenuously to any such evasion and transfer of power.

What actually follows a monstrous crime is the law’s responsibility to try, convict, and punish its perpetrator.  All discussions of “state of mind” or “sanity” or “insanity” are diversions and evasions—evasions of that responsibility.  “The Law” loves power but hates responsibility.  And the more the law allows do-gooders to intervene in its proceedings, the less effective it will be in discharging its proper responsibility.

Later in the discussion, Laura Wood wrote in regard to folderol about “good personality” and “bad personality”:  “The idea of multiple selves is a myth…..”

That is exactly right.  It is a myth; a lie; an evasion.  And so is the idea of “insanity”, the idea of “mental health” and “mental illness”, the idea of “diminished capacity”, the idea of “mental states”, the idea of “psychopathy”, the idea of “mind” as a thing with an “inside” and an “outside”, and the idea of “not guilty by reason of insanity”.  I contend that each is a myth, a lie, an evasion.  Such terms do not describe anything.  They are moral judgments concealed as medical diagnosis.

Strategically, they are ploys to beat the rap or be awarded years of free room, board, and amenities at other people’s expense.  “Mental illness is a legal fiction”, wrote law professor James Hardisty [ Washington Law Review, Vol. 48, 1973, p. 735 ].  Truer words have never been written.  American law is infested with such legal fictions.

No such thing as “psychopathy”, no such anti-concepts, no such fake “diseases” or “conditions” can “cause” men to commit murder, any more than the alignment of the planets can “cause” men to do anything.

But then she wrote:  In the case of lesser crimes than murder, “treatment” for the lawbreaker may be “appropriate”.

Again, I beg to differ.  Health and “treatment” are never any proper concern of the law.  The law’s proper business is rule-enforcement and punishment—and only those. The only pertinent question is:  Did the accused do what it is alleged he did?  Anything beyond that is evasion and pettifoggery.

People who would not presume to tell a man how to furnish his home show no equivalent reluctance to concern themselves with his “mind” or “mental state” or “soul” or “spiritual state”—and nothing but silent acquiescence when government or “the law” or some group of self-serving “experts” tells us that they and government and the law have a right to concern themselves with such things when a man is accused of lawbreaking.

Is that so?  Well, I submit that all such attempts are obscene and tyrannical.  I submit that they are worthy of Kafkaesque or Orwellian government or Stalinist Russia.  The law has a right to enact rules and to prohibit rule-breaking.  It has a right to impose penalties for rule-breaking according to specific, objective standards.  It has no right whatever to concern itself with a rule-breaker’s alleged health or “mind”.  Nor does any group of do-gooders or busybodies.

Concern for a man’s “mind” or “spiritual state” or “mental state” is an expression of Mommy Government.  And if modern Americans don’t realize that Mommy Government is a very bad idea—and quite obviously they don’t—then they deserve what they reap when they fail to oppose that claptrap and exclude those who assert it from any involvement in the administration of law.

Proper Government is concerned only with what men do and only when they break the law—not with how they feel, what they think, whether they think right thoughts or wrong thoughts, how well-nourished they are, how comfy they are, or how “healthy” their “minds” are or how sinful their souls are.  It is not Proper Government but Mommy Government that oozes concern and compassion for all those other things—things that Proper Government knows are none of its business.  It is not Proper Government but Mommy Government that allows busybodies to weaken the law with pseudo-medical pettifoggery.

The power to enforce objective laws is one thing.  The power to tinker with men’s minds is quite another.  It is tyranny, as was known to Kafka, Orwell, Huxley, Solzhenitsyn, C.S. Lewis, Dr. Thomas Szasz, Dr. Robert Nisbet, and other perceptive critics of “The Therapeutic State” and Do-Gooder Government.  (Read for instance Dr. Nisbet’s essay “The New Despotism”, Commentary, June 1975, p. 31, or Dr. Szasz’s book Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, 1987.)

What despot, what tyrant, what group of do-gooders would not love to have the power to tinker with men’s minds?  Yet Mr. Auster and his readers, who fashioned themselves to be politically incorrect and to oppose non-objective laws like “hate speech” laws (properly), did not express even a glimmer of doubt about the self-serving claims of forensic psychiatrists, to whom gullible judges and legislatures have given precisely that power.

If a baseball player breaks a rule during a game, he is ejected or fined or otherwise penalized.  His manager and the umpire do not inquire into his “mind”, “mental condition”, or “spiritual state”.  They enforce the rules—reflexively and properly.

That is also how it should be when men break rules—“laws”—in the game of life.  But that is not how it is when men accept the false premises and vocabulary of a fake science.

What matters is what criminals do, not what they think, say, or imagine, or what others think, say, or imagine about them.  If a murderer is claimed to be “insane”, does that make his victim less dead?  It is the deed and not the doer that is the proper object of punishment.  Whether the doer of the deed is a saint or a scoundrel is immaterial and irrelevant.  Whatever is claimed to be “in” his “mind” is immaterial and irrelevant.

If a woman killed her ex-boyfriend and claimed “not guilty by reason of broken heart”, would Mr. Auster have approved a court order that she undergo heart surgery?  If that had been her motive (instead of a stratagem), would her victim have been less dead?  But that is absurd, you say?  Of course it is; that is the point.  How much less absurd is it to claim that a “sick mind” can (a) “cause” a man to commit murder, and (b) justify a court’s decision not to try, convict, and punish him?

Like a “broken heart”, a “sick mind” is a metaphor and nothing but a metaphor.  The only difference is that Americans accept the latter as an excuse for not enforcing rules.

Poverty does not cause crime.  Neither does illness, whether that illness is real (like bronchitis) or fake (like “psychopathy”).  The cause of crime is a man’s choice to commit it.

No one has ever been able to produce a shred of evidence for the existence of “insanity”, “psychopathology”, “mental disease”, or any other psycho-prefixed pomposities and “conditions” that psychiatrists invent out of the blue.  “Expert psychiatric testimony” has nothing to do with “insanity” or “mental illness”.  Its practical utility is to serve as authoritative-sounding camouflage for moral cowardice.

I am confident that these considerations did not occur to Mr. Auster because, like most Americans, he was taught from childhood onward to look upon doctors as knowledgeable, authoritative, and trustworthy.  It is very hard for decent people to stand apart from what they have been taught and to realize that many doctors are knaves, fools, and opportunists.  But they are.  Like “political correctness”, forensic psychiatry is a fraud and a hoax on the American people.  Each is an abomination.  Each is tyrannical and totalitarian.

            “We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain”, Mark Twain said in a speech on Independence Day in 1873.

Indeed.  The objection raised by Mr. Auster to the “insanity verdict” was not an objection on principle but an objection on degree.  It had no more credibility in 2009 than it did when Pat Buchanan expressed the same objection—on degree, not on principle—in the 1980s.  I differed with both men and with anyone else who defends either the “insanity verdict” or the “insanity plea”.  Both should be rejected, excluded from any code of objective laws, and sent permanently to the archives of pseudo-science where they belong.

I have no doubt that Mr. Auster and the readers who took part in that discussion (including Laura Wood) were entirely sincere in what they wrote.  But such decent and principled people err when they allow the self-serving claims of knaves and fools to take the place of objective law or to believe that such claims have any more merit than the daily horoscope.  On second thought, let me alter that statement:  Any comparison of psychiatry and astrology is unfair to astrologers, to whom I duly apologize.

Contrary to what Mr. Auster wrote, I submit that the problem is not that forensic psychiatry has been “taken too far” or misapplied; the problem is that it has no place in law enforcement or government; it never did.  If Americans were serious about law enforcement, they would not allow busybodies and do-gooders like forensic psychiatrists anywhere near government or the law.  They would kick them out and keep them out.

Mr. Auster was a courageous thinker and writer in opposing many examples of the outrageous decadence in modern American culture.

What I have written here is not inconsistent with VFR’s worldview or Mr. Auster’s dead-on-target assessment of that decadence.  I wish only to suggest that forensic psychiatry and its vile influence on American law are additional but even more fundamental expressions of that moral-philosophical decadence.

— Comments —

Zeno writes:

Vince Li, who now goes by the name of “Will Baker”, was discharged in 2017. He is a free man with no criminal record, and not even any obligation to take his medications.

I met some people with schizophrenia. Not violent types, but still, people who could have on occasions very little grasp on “reality” as we commonly understand it. Who would have hallucinations and paranoid thoughts. So it is a real condition, even if we don’t fully understand it. That doesn’t take away their responsibility for their actions, however.

It could also be argued that all criminals, in one way are another, are “insane”. And not only criminals. Many “normal” people act under impulses that they later regret, or that they don’t even understand, such as in crimes of passion. That doesn’t mean they should be given a pass.

In the end, the best way is really just to ignore the mental condition or even the justifications for the crime, and just punish people according to what they actually did. But more and more the Western justice system tries to “understand motives” and separate intent from action, as if criminals were never fully responsible for what they do.

The so-called “hate crimes” laws are a manifestation of the same twisted logic. What is the difference if someone kills because he hates blacks or gays, or if he kills to rob people? The focus should be on the crime, not on the motivations, or lack of motive.

Also, it must be said that psychiatrists seem to be more interested in studying or caring for deranged criminals than in “normal” average people. While a lot of psychiatric care was directed to the beheading criminal, other people who had psychological issues because of witnessing the gory scene have been ignored. See here and here.

But in defense of Mr. Auster, I don’t think he was defending psychiatry at all.

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