While clearly a painful reality for some, “mental illness” has long been an abused concept. Cold War-era Marxist nations would sometimes declare dissenters mentally ill and then lock them away in asylums. (You’d have to be crazy to disagree with the state’s official ideology, right?) Media have also applied the mentally ill label tendentiously. When they don’t want a given act of terrorism called just that, for instance, they’ll deem the perp “mentally ill.” Of course, this is all self-serving. Such fudging is made easier, though, because it gets complicated.
That is, how much of what we call mental illness is really philosophical/moral dysfunction?
Where is the line between the two?
And how often does philosophical/moral dysfunction actually cause psychological dysfunction?
(Note here that while psychology is now its own distinct “soft science,” it was long part of natural philosophy. The division between the psychological and philosophical is relatively recent — and perhaps misguided.)
This issue arises again with the vicious left-wing attacks on Charlie Kirk in his assassination’s wake. As one commentator, struck by the bizarre and malevolent behavior, puts it, “It’s Deeper Than Mental Illness.”
Unless you’ve just awoken from a Rip Van Winkle-like slumber, it’s hard to have missed the vile venom spewed at Kirk the last two weeks. As the aforementioned commentator, J. Robert Smith, points out, assassin Tyler Robinson has actually been praised. “Some even call for more violence,” he writes. In fact, just perusing Libs of TikTok’s and Vigilant Fox’s relevant X threads can make your hair stand on end. “‘Somebody had to do it’ wasn’t an uncommon refrain,” Smith informs.
The commentator is struck by something else, too. Many of the vile comments and most of the aligned videos were posted by the “gentler sex” (aka women). Oh, an “XY” pulled the trigger, Smith concedes. But now females have picked up the Beelzebub ball and run with it. This can’t be chalked up to sampling bias, either, states the writer.
Remember here, too, that those who knew Kirk revealed him as a man of sterling character. Yet his detractors embrace an alternate reality. To them, Smith laments, Kirk was every kind of “phobe,” an “ogre”; they “fictionalize” him to demonize him.
Smith then points out that this is all part of a societal “sickness,” one that, he writes,
starts with an obsession — the obsession with self. “If it feels good, do it” was a 1960s mantra that has sparked a decades-long deep dive into hedonism, regardless of the blarney about “self-actualization.” The Me Generation ethos metastasized, spreading throughout the society.
What does preoccupation with self do to a person’s mind and emotions? How does it affect relating to others? How does it warp perceptions? What happens when academics have, for decades, peddled the notion that there’s no external or objective truth? Should we be stunned that people — mostly females — popped up on TikTok and Blue Sky giggling, praising, toasting, and jigging in reaction to a cold-blooded murder? Shades of the Manson girls, huh? Perhaps females have been more greatly damaged by over half a century of being battered with me, me, me?
Smith is on the right track here, but he hasn’t quite found the prey. The answer, though, involves what he mentions: Truth (objective by definition) and the “self.” For remove Truth from the equation, and only the self is left. Explanation?
Westerners long believed that God exists, authored Truth and hence right and wrong. Now, however, we live in a secular time in which moral relativism (nihilism, really) reigns. But what happens when this yardstick for right and wrong — Truth — is invisible to people because they disbelieve in it? What then will be their morality yardstick?
The most compelling guide they’ll have left, as research has shown, is feelings. And feelings originate within the self.
This is why the ultimate result of believing all is relative, is to make it relative to oneself.
Hence, “If it feels good, do it.”
Another corollary of moral relativism/nihilism is that virtue — that set of moral habits (again, objective by definition) — cannot exist. This is significant because from Aristotle to Aquinas to our Founding Fathers and beyond, virtue was recognized as developmentally necessary. It was (and is) a prerequisite for the “good life.”
As I often put it, too, if morality came in a jar, the virtues (e.g., Charity, Kindness, Love, Courage, Diligence, Faith), would be on the ingredients label. You cannot be a “good” person without being “virtuous” — the two descriptors are synonymous.
The point? In every civilization there exist low-virtue and higher virtue people. The difference between them in philosophically/theologically polarized societies, such as ours, is especially profound, too. And in every civilization the low-virtue people have a name.
In ours, we call them “leftists.”
How did they get this way? There isn’t space to do that matter justice here. In a nutshell, however, it’s a function of upbringing, of enculturation. Bad parental, educational, and entertainment-oriented influences all play a role.
Returning to Smith, he wonders why women are overrepresented among the most vicious Kirk haters. This is hardly inexplicable. Most simply, there is a large intersex ideology gap now, with young women substantially more liberal than young men. But then there’s another factor, one expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 poem “The Female of the Species.” A representative verse:
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws —
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale —
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
If you’d dismiss this as mere fiction, the picturesque words of bards, consider anthropologist Margaret Mead’s apropos observation that
the evidence of history and comparative studies of other species suggest that women as a fighting body might be far less amenable to the rules that prevent war from becoming a massacre and, with the use of modern weapons [i.e. nukes], that protect the survival of all humanity.
(This is another good reason, her point was, to have men run the warfare business.)
Speaking generally, it is a reality that men tend to be rules-oriented while women are feelings-oriented. This is what Mead was alluding to. Another reality: The stereotype of two fellows engaging in fisticuffs and then drinking beers together an hour later is valid. It’s also true that, in contrast, women are more likely to hold grudges, as poet William Congreve’s famous line notes.
That is, hell hath no “fury like a woman scorned,” he wrote in 1697.
Add to this women’s extreme family/in-group (with groups they’re emotionally attached to) patriotism, and the female-authored Kirk hatred makes sense. Harking back to the Kipling verse, conceptualize assassin Tyler Robinson as the “brave” who spilled the blood. Conceptualize the venom-spewing women as the “squaws” emotionally attached to their “group,” in this case the leftist-ideologue tribe. The negative emotion doesn’t subside (which would allow them to “have a beer” with their adversary). Their emotional commitment is total and intense — and unrelenting.
Men have their problems, too, of course, which receive great focus (and are often exaggerated) by our misandrist society. But when thinking of the line, “Sugar and spice and everything nice; That’s what little girls are made of,” from Robert Southey’s early 19th-century poem, something occurs to me. It either reflects naivete (few men truly understand the opposite sex).
Or it’s an aspiration, an ideal meant to counter natural tendencies, not a description of reality.
In conclusion, though, both sexes must recognize Truth and cultivate virtue, and need God’s grace to make virtuousness possible. Without that, our human fate will ever and always been the same: regression to type — that is, bloodthirsty barbarian.