I like this take from Allen Frances, a psychiatrist.
Confusing mad and bad is a very dangerous precedent. It’s not at all restricted just to Trump. The National Rifle Association happens to believe that whenever there’s a mass murder, the person must have been crazy. It’s not the guns that did it; it’s the crazy person. They actually work hard to get the mentally ill more armed. There are against laws that restrict arms for the mentally ill, but then the minute there’s a serial murder, any kind of homicide, it’s the crazy person who did it, not the gun. We are criminalizing mental illness. We have 350,000 people with mental illness in jail because they couldn’t get treatment. We’re medicalizing bad behavior.
When the Harvey Weinsteins and Tiger Woods and all the others get caught with their pants down, the first claim is sex addiction: “I’ll go off for a rehab program and I’ll be cured in a month.” We’re medicalizing immorality. We’re medicalizing people who rape and say they have mental disorders. Bad behavior is part of the variety of human nature. Only a small portion of bad behaviors are done by people who are mentally ill. Most bad people are not mentally ill; most mentally ill people aren’t bad. When we confuse the two, it’s a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill. It’s terrible for them to be lumped with Trump because most of them are well-meaning and well-behaved, and Trump is neither.
I mean, the other problem with this is it treats Trump as if he’s a one-off and he’s crazy. It takes away from the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him.
The Republican party is full up with cunningly sane people — they are not insane at all. From their perspective they’re being productive and accomplishing their goals in an effective way. It’s just that their goals happen to be driven by narcissism and greed, and are destructive to everyone around them.
That last line is important. I expect the Russians were tinkering with our elections, but all they did was play into the worst features of the American electorate. If we could wall off all foreign interference, we’d still have the problems of gerrymandering and voter suppression and ignorance and xenophobia working to elect Republicans.
I’ve always kind of liked that aspect of the old legal definition of “insanity”: to be found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity, you had to not only not know that what you did was wrong, but not know that *society* thinks it’s wrong.
The latter is a really strict standard: for example, in a crime, if you do anything like run away or wash off blood or lie to the police, you are evincing your awareness that society thinks your action was wrong, therefore you are guilty and not insane.
I don’t think they use that definition anymore, and it had its problems when applied to crime, but I’d apply it to politicians: if they have to lie about their goals or the purpose of their policies, they know that society won’t accept their real purposes, and they are bad, not mad.
If they can’t say straight up “This tax law is to increase the wealth of the 1% at the expense of everyone else”, “I want immigration policies that will make America a whites-only society”, then they know that’s bad behavior, and they’re not crazy.
I think the madness is collective, rather than residing in any particular individual. We have the oligarchs on the right promoting madness and distraction in order to maintain their wealth and influence, and in doing so inevitably bringing about their own ruination as aristocrats given time always have in the past. And on the left we have progressives who will not vote for sanity in contrast with madness because it isn’t *their* particular brand of partial sanity. And both of them subscribe to the mad idea that a government that makes it’s own money can somehow run out of it.
At this time the left is rather less mad than the right and so I prefer them.
But there is plenty of madness to go around, apparently. Heinlein’s “crazy years” seem to have well and truly arrived, if not quite in the way he expected.
Mind you, I do wonder if Nehemiah Scudder is waiting in the wings under the assumed name of “Pence”.
Ed Seedhouse@2,
Your “both sides” stuff is not insane, but is is spectacularly stupid.
yes there are both people who are mad that do things that are bad and bad people who do things that are mad. I am not equipped with the ability to reliably tell the difference by myself and I do not trust anyone any single authority figure or expert by themselves to make those kinds of distinctions either.
The biggest problem I see with madness and badness is how destructive or self-destructive any actions taken as the result. What to do is not always very clear-cut.
uncle frogy
1 – but enough about PUMAs. Now, either bring in Vicar so we can make this fun, or can this tangent.
Speaking of which, why is Weinstein not yet charged with anything?
#6
#1 seemed to make a good point to me. Also, what do you mean by PUMA?
“If we could wall off all foreign interference, we’d still have the problems of gerrymandering and voter suppression and ignorance and xenophobia working to elect Republicans.”
This makes sense – our problems didn’t start with Trump: he is a symptom of a sick system and treating the symptom and not the disease will only guarantee the disease will progress.
We had a similar situation in the 2000 election where the popular vote was vetoed by the Electoral College (along with voter suppression and the other lovely features of our electoral process). Yet no one thought to do anything about it. Remember how black voters were thrown under the bus when they protested Bush’s selection?