Moral Cowardice
December 13, 2024
ALAN writes:
With perhaps a few exceptions like the Amish and a small percentage of others, modern Americans have proven conclusively that they are not guilty of common sense.
Celebrities are NOT “sick people”. They may be stupid and they may do evil things. That does not make them “sick”. It makes them stupid or evil. Propositions like “celebrities are sick people” or “murderers are sick people” are moral judgments couched in the vocabulary of fake-medicine.
It is standard procedure nowadays to attempt to discredit people by calling them nasty-sounding names like “crazy”, “insane”, “mentally ill”, “mentally sick”, “psychopathic”, “psychotic”, and “sociopathic”. I contend that such name-calling is both a measure and a consequence of moral cowardice. It is as if breaking rules or laws were not itself sufficiently wrong or evil. I submit that all of that pseudo-medical vocabulary is nonsense, evasion, and theater.
To call people such names is to deny their moral agency; in effect, to regard them as feral animals. We do not attribute moral agency to such animals or to earthquakes, tornados, or hurricanes. But human beings do not belong in those categories. The claim that people who do despicable things “couldn’t help it” is a lie, an evasion, and a stratagem for beating the rap. That is bad enough. What is worse is that many otherwise-sensible people agree to accept such claims and all the metaphysical, bombastic, scientistic luggage that comes with them: Non-objective law, forensic psychiatry, pretentious excuses, “behavioral science”, and low-grade farce provided by liars and frauds who call themselves psychiatrists.
If a man who commits murder is claimed to be “insane”, would his victim be less dead if he were claimed to be “sane”? Yet the fake-science of psychiatry consists entirely of such intellectual-philosophical swindles–to which Americans have shown themselves extremely receptive.
Malcolm Pollack has written some excellent commentary about the moral-philosophical degradation of our time. Like many other “Conservatives”, he is a good man and perceptive writer. But he also accepts fairy tales promoted by fake-doctors. On the New York subway, Daniel Penny subdued a thug who was “clearly mentally ill”, Mr. Pollack writes in a statement that would earn him accolades from those fake-doctors. ( “Justice For a Change”, Motus Mentis, Dec. 9, here: malcolmpollack.com ) How does he know that? Because “expert doctors” would tell us so. Name one “Conservative” who would not accept that claim as valid.
That is one reason why most “Conservatives” are utterly useless in “conserving” anything of value. Like the “Liberals” and “Progressives” they so rightly oppose, “Conservatives” are thoroughly receptive to such intellectual-philosophical swindles. Observe the change in focus–from what thugs do to what they claim or are claimed to “have” or to “have had”, which in turn is claimed to have “caused” them to break laws. If you accept that swindle, then you have earned membership in the Church of (Pseudo) Scientific Medicine.
And observe that virtually everyone–“Liberals” and “Conservatives”, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, the young and the old–agrees to look upon that arrangement with a mixture of awe, credulity, and delight.
In the old days, when power and authority were kept local and locally-controlled, and when Americans had a much better understanding of law and morality than they do today, doing wrong or evil was enough to inspire them to act in response, not to sit around speculating about your “mental state” or other, equally absurd non-entities. THAT some people broke rules or laws was the only deciding factor–THE most important fact. Even Americans once had enough sense to understand that. It was enough to prompt local authorities to act in response. They confronted evil head-on and dealt with it by means of the traditional objective standards of criminal law. They neither made nor accepted excuses They understood that to do so and not to punish lawbreakers is to reward them and to punish those who do not break rules or laws.
In the proper (literal) meaning of “health”, there is no correlation between health, illness, and lawbreaking or rule-breaking. Many people who break rules or laws are in perfect health. Many people who are not healthy never break rules or laws.
In the improper (metaphorical) use of “health”– as in what fake-doctors call “mental health”–there is no correlation between such fakery and lawbreaking or rule-breaking.
When people break rules or laws, THAT they do so is the proper concern of “The Law”. WHY they do so or claim to do so or what their “health” is (in either sense) or is claimed to be or what their “state of mind” is claimed to be is no proper concern of “The Law”. Yet most modern Americans persist in inverting that arrangement: They spend years in baseless conjectures about other people’s alleged “state of mind” or “mental state”, while at the same time accepting or making endless excuses and evasions for not punishing lawbreakers.
By doing so, they reward fake-doctors who promote fake-“treatments” for fake-“diseases” that they specialize in concocting out of the blue–not to overlook pharmaceutical companies with a substantial stake in such fakery, all to the detriment and weakening of American law, whose effect is to inspire more lawbreaking. That is just one measure of the cost–legal, monetary, intellectual, moral, and cultural–that Americans have shown themselves willing to pay in exchange for being entertained by psychiatric fairy tales.
(When Laura Wood posted my essay on the pseudo-science of psychiatry in 2019, she entitled it “Psychiatry’s Pretensions”. I am grateful to her for posting it, but I must take exception to those two words. My contention is that there are NO pretensions “of” psychiatry because psychiatry itself is the greatest pretension. )
The New York subway thug was NOT “sick”. He was a moral agent — which means that he acted — which means that he chose among alternatives. No one and nothing “caused” him to do what he did on that subway. He chose to do it. That is called moral agency. It is a choice, not a “condition”. It was not something that “happened”. It was something that he made happen. And it was despicable and indefensible. That he paid for it with his life is entirely his own fault and entirely proper. Daniel Penny should never have been charged, a point on which Mr. Pollack and I are in complete agreement.
Laura writes:
I agree with your general point, but sometimes people use the word “sick” to mean disgusting, repulsive or morally diseased as in, “That’s sick!” When I said, “Celebrities are sick people” I meant to register that kind of disgust — not that they should go to psychiatrists and get medication or that they had no moral agency. The transgenderism fad has the feel of a moral plague, a contagious delusion. It’s contagious intellectually, as ideas often are, but I use the term “contagious” loosely because it takes consent to get the disease.
Immorality and evil are forms of sickness, but not physical ones. What can we say of the delusion that a boy can be a girl? Yes, it’s evil, but the person who suffers it is sick in the soul, not normal. The mental health paradigm can’t deal with moral sickness because it can never say, “You have embraced sin and it’s destroying you.” You insist that these terms of “health” and “sickness” are always referring to physical conditions and we shouldn’t confuse the two categories. I agree generally we shouldn’t but I find it helpful to think of celebrities as sick because to get near them is to risk contagion.
As for Daniel Penny, the saddest thing is, yes, that he was ever charged at all.
The whole thing was a success from the prosecutorial standpoint. Even though he was acquitted it surely succeeded in making people more afraid to defend themselves. Government wins again!!
— Comments —
Dianne writes:
Really appreciated your and Alan’s exchange, Laura, and agree with both of you.
This lecture by C.S. Lewis along these lines brings out good points.
We seem to be abdicating our free will on so many levels, slowly but surely. Soon all kinds of “behaviors” (although normal) might be deemed mental illnesses and “treated” by The Authorities.
Janice writes:
I very much agree with Laura on Alan’s general take regarding the soft stance society has taken in regard to crime, corruption, and the plain rot that exists everywhere today.
But as I read the essay, I too felt that the word “sickness” isn’t what needs to be stricken from the discussion of immorality. What we are seeing are open displays of moral sickness, if you will.
Mental illness, same as physical illness, does exist. There are many people with neurological deficits and sensory impairments that interfere with normal behavior in some way. They are truly mentally ill, as their brains do not function well. I also agree that there are mentally ill persons who never do immoral things, just as there are those who do. Moral illness and mental illness are separate realities. One, the other or both can exist in one individual.
I thought of the parables of how Our Lord cured persons with physical sickness as He forgave, or cured, their moral failings at the same time.
Oh…has anyone else noticed the newest slang term the youth use to describe awe and admiration for someone or something? “That’s SICK!”, they exclaim.
How the meanings of words turn into their opposites…that’d be an interesting point for discussion!
Laura writes:
Oh, wow.
I didn’t know “That’s sick!” is used in that way.
How, how …. sick.
George Weinbaum writes:
In 1961 Thomas Szasz wrote The Myth of Mental Illness.
You will be sympathetic to what he wrote.
Merry Christmas.
(I still say it, as opposed to “Happy Holidays.”)
Kathy G. writes:
Wonderful exchange between you and Alan. Interesting how we can see how insidious the mind direction actually is. It is so easy to think of things within certain parameters, that exclude the spiritual worldview, True Catholicism, etc. I find myself doing it all the time, and have stop with knee jerk reactions and think along spiritual lines, what we have been taught. The satanic are spiritually sick, in the sense that they are not right, they are against God and Creation, spiritually inverted from what they were designed to be/ function. They choose malfunction.
