Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to address it.
Readers of this blog, if they hit only one or two entries, probably come away with the impression that I'm an arch-conservative or a flaming liberal.
I note that, as readers who only hit this one, are going to think "oh, reactionary conservative". Not so, my views don't fit easily into a right or left category, and that's because they're all based on a set of guiding principles, one of which is the adherence and belief in science and nature.
Both the left and the right are fully at war with nature right now. And this is one of the things causing the country to be so massively polarized.
I'm not in the Trumpist right by any means, but lefties who wonder how anyone could be should take stock in this. Right now, a fair part of the left, and not even the far left, is pretty much invested in normalizing mental illness. We've gone from a state in which an aberrant behavior, but one that didn't otherwise control every aspect of a person's personality, was forced upon society as normal, and forced upon those who bore it as their singular identity, to one in which outright mental illness is now being proclaimed as normal. There's a pretty big difference between a person experiencing some disordered inclinations, to having those inclinations define them in every way and be celebrated.
There's also a big difference how far down a scale a person goes once they depart from a genetic mean. Some people, for example, might be excessively materialistic to their personal detriment. Not too many take that all the way into compulsive theft. Or, for example, some people might have an inordinate fascination with food. Calling somebody a glutton is out of style now days, but not too many of those people take it all the way into compulsive overeating. Some people are inordinately fascinated with themselves, but only a true minority take it into narcissism. Some people drink more alcohol than they should, but then there are also alcoholics.
Part of what keeps people from going overboard with deeply seated negative personality deviations is societal and legal controls, legal controls being a species of societal ones. The law will step in if you steal. Societal pressure, anymore, will step in if you eat too much. You get the point.
Some of our deeply seated natural instincts are the ones that can really get out of control if they are allowed to delve beyond an acceptable mean, and decay into mental illness. A person has a right to defend themselves, but not to become compulsively violent. Those who do become psychopaths. We shouldn't tolerate temping people into being psychopaths, but in fact with do.
As people know that abnormal is in fact not normal, they naturally get up in arms about it at the point where they're told they have to accept it in spite of the evidence their own eyes affords them. The far right, as personally hypocritical as it is, at least on some social issues doesn't advocate for normalizing mental illness.
The left, in contrast, has at first done everything it could to take down the guardrails. . . we can hardly remember, for example, that Hugh Hefner was once prosecuted for obscenity. Once that had the predictable results, and the decay really set in, its tried to normalize the decay.
And, as it was only a matter of time, we're just about to go through one more door, maybe, in which a mental illness/deeply destructive compulsion, is about to be regarded as "A Okay". Inevitably, we're now going through one more door. Consider this twitter post from the group Gays Against Groomers:
New pedo flag and “orientation” just dropped. Meet the “YAP” community: Youth Attracted Persons.
According to them, they are oppressed, and you are a hateful, fascist bigot if you oppose them.
Normalizing pedophilia was always the goal. They are the next victim class.
And already a Virginia professor is wanting to make sure that the term "minor attracted person" is used rather than pedophile, as the latter term might be regarded as offensive.
That's right. Since Obergefell, we've gone from altering the normal, universal understanding of marriage, to forced acceptance that there's no difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, to chose your own gender, and we're about to go to molesting children being a life choice.
And, take for example, Montana legislator Zachary Raasch.
Never heard of Raasch? Well, if you are following the news, you've heard of him being proclaimed as a hero for disrupting Montana's legislature.
But not as Raasch, but as the self-proclaimed Zooey Zephyr.
Raasch was a high school wrestler who, at some point, decided he'd rather be a woman, even though that's genetically impossible. He had himself surgically castrated and a pseudo vagina surgically created and is taking drugs to complete as much of the process as can be. He's deeply mentally disturbed, as this Twitter post likely demonstrates to anyone who isn't so far gone down this path as to be unable to see.
That's deeply weird.
Raasch is interested in other disturbing things, such as transhumanism. He's heavily into video gaming. He's a Manga fan, as the distressing image above shows. According to one person whose detailed his interests, who is of course only one person, he's "shows all the classic signs of an autogynephilic—a man who (often spurred by pornography or fetish) becomes sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman." Raasch's known "relationships" have included at least two other men affecting the trans identity, one of whom was also a "furry".
Raasch has clocked himself in the mantle of a type of crusader, disruptively arguing that not allowing people afflicted with a desire to change their gender will lead to suicide. Even pro LBGTQ groups assert this argument should not be made as it is counterproductive. But all of this is instructive. Starting no later than the 1960s, and perhaps a couple of decades earlier than that, we started taking the fences down. By the time of Obergefell, we were ready, or at least some were, to knock a stone wall down. Now it's so far down that a person who is obviously deeply mentally ill is being portrayed as some sort of crusader for civil rights.
And the next step. . . almost taken.
Many have been concerned that the US seems to be sliding towards fascism. It probably isn't, in literal terms, as fascism properly understood is a corporatist political theory that has no real popularity in the US. What we are sliding towards, however, is on one hand a deeply authoritarian anti-democratic populist right and a deeply anti-natural left.
Should this get any worse, the left will be more to blame for it than the right.
The left went to war with democracy in the late 1960s and began to advocate for rule by an autocratic court, which it apparently thought it could keep left wing forever, as lawyers were, and are, generally political liberals. It certainly did keep it left wing for a long time. Concern over this only developed when the court returned to actually interpreting the law, one really significant actually accomplished during the Trump administration. Now the left, which was previously perfectly happy to leave the Court completely to itself, is howling with rage over supposed ethics concerns on the Court, something that it didn't care much about previously, and much of which is just a thinly veiled desperate effort to remove justices while the Democrats control the Oval Office and Senate. At any rate, the left is now deeply dedicated to being wholly at war with human nature, vested in the concept that every human being has a right, basically, to be a god of their own. Liberal commentators, like Robert Reich, who likely would have thought Raasch nuts up until relatively recently, are all for such fantasies now.
It's well worth remembering that it was the German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese radical left that appeared long before the extreme right in those nations. German communists, which had its own collection of now benighted individuals who really aren't very admirable in real terms, appeared well before World War One and struggled to seize the country from the less radical Socialist when the German monarchy collapsed in 1918. The Communists can't be blamed for the Nazis, but fear of Communism certainly contributed to the rise of the Nazis and their electoral success in a major way. More than a few German voters who voted for the Nazis in 1932 were voting against the Communists.
And the Spanish Communists were headed for a clear usurpation of democracy in Spain before the Spanish right revolted. The Spanish right was deeply anti-democratic, but the Spanish left wasn't dedicated to it either.
And while the claim that is sometimes made that moral decay in Weimar Germany lead directly to the rise of the Nazis isn't really correct, there's a slight element of truth to that, albeit it's only a piece of a much larger pie. The Communists of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century were absolute in supporting the libertine. Marx's dictum that "all wives shall be held in common" was a Communist position, and many early Communists expressed that in their personal lives flagrantly. Whitaker Chambers notes in Witness than he and his wife became exceptions over time, starting at the point at which she became pregnant, as the expectation was that she'd abort the child, the Communist norm.
It isn't that the Socialist government of Weimar Germany made the country a moral sewer, but it is the case that following the First World War some urban areas of Germany did experience a notable moral decay, if a person can recognize one, that did repel some conservative Germans. It was not the case that this was a major factor in the Nazis coming to power, but rather just one more thing.
And hence why I note it here. On the right, there's a definite fascination right now with finding a vehicle to return to existential conservative values. In the more thoughtful camps, this is being expressed in terms of Christian Nationalism. Some are just expressing it in terms of traditional conservatism. But the populist right is really picking it up as people are shocked by the rapid change in this area and know it to be wrong without thinking deeply on it. People turned to Trump in the first place, as he basically promised to burn the entire edifice down.
He's promising that again.
Yes, personally he may be morally bankrupt, but then Hitler wasn't a choir boy either. People, in desperation, will turn to those who seem to be able to get things done. And in doing that, they'll adopt the conspiracy theories that explain how something so weird could happen.
The left closing a blind eye to the really disturbing events going on here is feeding the right. It's a rare person who can closely cut between two extremes and not fall into one. People are being pushed into one here.
And the really mentally ill are being left behind.
This is the second time in recent decades we have done this. Earlier we decided that people with mental illness, often caused by drugs or alcohol, would be happier if not detained. So we set them out on the streets, where they likely descend further into drugs and alcohol. Compulsions in this are too can be massively overwhelming. St. Matt Talbott found that in order to overcome alcoholism he actually had to take routes that avoided taverns, lest he fall into them.
In other words, he put up his own guardrails.
In the area we are referencing here, profound sexual deviance, that's also the case. Prior to the aftershocks of the Stonewall Riot era, most homosexuals lead pretty normal lives, even if they engaged in the conduct. The societal guardrails, of which the legal recognition of some of the natural law in the form of laws pertaining to families, men and women, were part of that. Once that started getting taken down, it left those with pulls, often developed pulls, in other directions to try to stay on the road by themselves.
Drinking is one thing. Alcohol is a poison and while the species is long acclimated to it, it's an acquired taste of some degree. But the biological imperative to reproduce, no matter how much moderns may wish to frustrate it, is wired into us. The overwhelming majority of human beings will not fall into deviance, but in every society up until this very one, the societal laws, if not the statutory ones, operated to affect guardrails. Even those people who like to note "but the ancient Greeks" blind their eye to hte fact that no less of a a figure than Plate railed against homosexuality.
Homosexuality, of course, is just one of the deviations, and in contemporary terms it's nearly a garden variety one. All sorts of other plagues exist in this area, from people addicted to pornography to people who engage in serials conventional affairs. Indeed, the last item is the oldest of the deviations of them all, and probably the one that gets more people killed, even now, than any other.
Some years ago, on a Catholic Things You Should Know, Fr. Michael O'Loughlin noted being in a group of friends, who were secular friends, in which one of them noted longingly that he wished he could go back and look at women the way he had before he had knowledge, to put it delicately. There's more than a little to that. Indeed, it's worth noting how many long married men remarry, and always have, very rapidly after a spouse dies. It's likely a certain acclimation has something to do with that. And its been noted that in our modern society, where the rules about monogamy and chastity have broken down, it's become harder for those with serial "partners' to really form a bond. Indeed, according to psychologist, after men have had eight such partners, their chances of delving down into the below 18 ranks for more dramatically increase.
And the long example of pornography should warn us. The entire culture is pornofied, but some descend into various types of mental illness due it. Raasch likely has, although we can't know for sure what caused him to take the deviation that he did.
But simply asserting that everyone has to accept it as normal makes no more sense than pretnding alcoholism is normal.
Or, pretending pedophilia is normal.
But the logic is there. If cutting off your member and having a fake vagina, and taking drugs to affect the appearance of a woman is normal, then pedophilia, which requires a lot less than that, must be too.
But it isn't. Neither is transgenderism.
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