As always happens in the wake of a mass shooting, last week when Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people at his former Florida high school, commentators spared not a moment to take to the airwaves to bemoan the government\u2019s alleged inattentiveness to the issue of \u201cmental health\u201d or \u201cmental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Republicans, i.e. self-described conservatives, were at least as prone as their liberal Democratic counterparts to offer this response.<\/p>\n
Few people think through the implications of this line\u2014yet there are many.<\/p>\n
First, it is telling that the proponents of \u201climited government\u201d and \u201cpersonal accountability\u201d should lament what they evidently think is a failure on the part of the federal government to be sufficiently aggressive in tampering with the minds of its citizens.<\/p>\n
Second, the federal government has already spent, and continues to spend, billions <\/em>of dollars\u2014all taxpayers\u2019 monies, <\/em>bear in mind\u2014on \u201cmental health\u201d services.\u00a0 Yet \u201cconservative\u201d Republicans don\u2019t think that the Therapeutic State is expansive enough<\/em>.<\/p>\n Third, those who insist upon identifying \u201cmental health\u201d as the cause, or at least a <\/em>cause, of mass shootings, usually do so only with respect to: (a) a certain class of mass shootings\u2014school shootings; and (b) a certain class of shooters\u2014young, predominantly white, school shooters.<\/p>\n When suspected Islamic terrorists drive a truck into a crowd, fly jets into skyscrapers, or shoot up a military installation, there is remarkably little said about the \u201cmental health\u201d challenges of the perpetrators.\u00a0 When non-white gangbangers, irrespectively of their ages, or organized criminals of any ethnicity or age commit atrocities, no one talks about \u201cmental health.\u201d<\/p>\n This is telling, for what it suggests is that like, say, \u201cclimate change\u201d and \u201cgun-control,\u201d the elasticity of the term \u201cmental health\u201d may very well be the product of design, providing as it does a justification for the potentially limitless centralization of government authority and equally limitless consolidation of government power over every facet of the lives of its citizens.<\/p>\n For the social engineer who aches to fundamentally transform society, the concept of \u201cmental health\u201d is indispensable. Yet it\u2019s also invaluable inasmuch as its immense broadness permits the engineer to exploit it as selectively as the political circumstances demand: Since public sensibilities (at least at present) promise to be offended by the suggestion that the 9\/11 hijackers, ISIS, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and mob hitmen are \u201cmentally ill,\u201d the engineer can simply cast his net elsewhere, toward the Adam Lanzas and Nikolas Cruzes of the world.<\/p>\n There are still yet other disturbing implications of the concept of \u201cmental health\u201d or \u201cmental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n To assign \u201cmental illness\u201d as the \u201ccause\u201d of criminality, whether the crime in question is theft, arson, assault, or murder, is to divest the act of all moral value, positive and negative.\u00a0 In short, if we\u2019re going to insist that a person was \u201ccaused\u201d by his \u201cmental illness\u201d to, for example, go on a shooting spree at a school, then it is no longer possible for us to condemn<\/em> that person and his acts as immoral, <\/em>much less as evil. <\/em><\/p>\n The realms of \u201cmental health\/illness\u201d and morality are mutually incommensurable: The language of the one cannot <\/em>be translated into that of the other.<\/p>\n When the world is considered under the aspect of \u201cmental health\/illness,\u201d people are regarded as patients <\/em>whose behaviors <\/em>are caused <\/em>by sicknesses <\/em>that can and should be treated. <\/em><\/p>\n In glaring contrast, when the world is considered morally, people are viewed as agents <\/em>whose conduct <\/em>is self<\/em>-initiated based on the agent\u2019s reasons, <\/em>conduct that deserves <\/em>to be praised <\/em>or blamed, rewarded <\/em>or punished, <\/em>depending upon whether the conduct is good<\/em> or bad<\/em>, right<\/em> or wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\n Crucially, the universe of \u201cmental health\/illness\u201d is, ultimately, not a world comprised of persons<\/em> at all.\u00a0 It is a universe inhabited by objects<\/em> that behave <\/em>according to quantifiable regularities, objects that can be studied and measured according to the same scientific <\/em>principles and laws used to study and measure all other objects of non-human types.<\/p>\n In this universe, human beings become addicted <\/em>to substances. <\/em>Purely material beings, \u201csubstances,\u201d causally determine other material beings, humans, by \u201chooking\u201d or enslaving them.<\/p>\n The moral sphere, though, is inhabited by persons, by subjects\u2014<\/em>not objects. It is precisely by virtue of their standing as subjects that it\u2019s meaningful to regard persons as beings uniquely entitled to dignified treatment. Persons or subjects can no more be causally determined then a bachelor can be married or a square circular; if persons can be spoken of at all as being determined, then it is only in the sense of being self-<\/em>determined, for unlike the human objects that occupy the realm of \u201cmental health,\u201d the occupants of the moral realm are selves<\/em>.<\/p>\n There are no addictions <\/em>or addicts <\/em>on the moral plane of existence. Rather, people develop habits, <\/em>some of which are good, some of which are bad.\u00a0 The former are virtues.\u00a0 The latter are vices. \u00a0People are habit-forming beings, for it is by way of repetition, by repeatedly doing, that learning is made possible.<\/p>\n And the kinds of things to which they become habituated are not dead, material \u201csubstances,\u201d entities possessed of a set of trans-cultural, trans-historical properties guaranteed to have one and the same effect on all who partake of them.\u00a0 People become habituated, rather, to activities <\/em>that, being socially and culturally-constituted, are open-ended and, thus, underdetermined.<\/p>\n To put it simply, whether a person will become strongly habituated to using, say, cocaine will depend upon that person\u2019s own proclivities, interests, aspirations, motivation, history, cultural-setting\u2014comprehensively, a broad spectrum of contingencies and relativities that cannot be forecasted in advance.<\/p>\n The bottom line is this: If Nikolas Cruz was \u201csick;\u201d if he suffered from a \u201cmental illness\u201d that \u201ccaused\u201d him to do what he did, then Cruz was not evil. Neither were his acts of murdering 17 people and shooting many more evil acts.\u00a0 This in turn means that Cruz not only doesn\u2019t deserve punishment; he doesn\u2019t deserve so much as to be criticized.\u00a0 <\/em>After all, sick people are entitled to our compassion<\/em>.\u00a0 They deserve to be treated. <\/em><\/p>\n So, we must choose: Either Nikolas Cruz was evil or he was sick.<\/p>\n He cannot be both.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As always happens in the wake of a mass shooting, last week when Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people at his former Florida high school, commentators spared not a moment to take to the airwaves to bemoan the government\u2019s alleged inattentiveness to the issue of \u201cmental health\u201d or \u201cmental illness.\u201d And Republicans, i.e. self-described conservatives, were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n