Jack Niewold's Blog

During the years of the old Soviet Union, those who dissented from the party orthodoxy were often sent not to labor camps but to psychiatric hospitals. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and the poet Joseph Brodsky have all spoken and written about the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Of course, these “hospitals” were often prisons in their own right, but the regime’s attempts to psychologize politics set a precedent that is very much with us today.

Mutatis mutandis (making the necessary adjustments), let us count the ways.

The whole concept of “hate speech” is an attempt to apply psychological categories to political activity. Hate is an emotional phenomenon, not a volitional one. As we all know, there is a great deal of hate in our public life, but relatively little of it is perpetrated by those manacled with the hate-speech cuffs. Most of the real hate in American politics is disseminated by those who dismiss the legitimate concerns of citizens as varieties of sickness.

What is more hateful than ascribing mental impairment to those who dissent from widely-held assumptions?

Hence the pervasive use of such therapeutic mechanisms as sensitivity training and diversity workshops. College orientation processes now routinely indoctrinate entering students in the pieties of the cultural left. Children are now told to make “good decisions” and avoid “bad choices,” whereas in former, saner times, they were told the difference between right and wrong while at the same time introduced to the idea of proper authority.

In the old way of thinking, bad choices were not mere mistakes made by otherwise innocent children, but manifestations of the crooked timber of their basic nature, which could only be ultimately governed by religious and moral imperatives. Those notions of human nature are long gone. They are considered “repressive,” another psychological category.

Employers who want to be rid of squeaky wheels will use “HR” solutions to problems that are administrative in nature. The presence of an HR person in a room with a manager and an employee biases what may be a genuine workplace problem towards a psychological “solution.” This usually leaves dysfunctions in place that will be repeated later.

Political correctness is a culture-wide imposition of therapeutic categories onto normal human concourse. Terms such as “inclusive” are reflective of proper thinking, while “racist” or “homophobic” are adduced not just to denote error, but pathology. Those who depart from the prescribed formulas for speech and thought can be labeled as deviants so that they never have to be taken seriously again.

The nice thing about using psychiatric tools to “treat” dissident thinking is that there is no end date, as Vladimir Bukovsky has noted. Inmates can be drugged for years at a time.

I am reminded of all of this by recent efforts of Facebook to expunge what are considered “xenophobic” comments from its pages, especially in Europe. In Holland, police have come to the doors of Facebook users to warn them that they must cease posting comments that are deemed offensive to newcomers from the Middle East. Recently, Angela Merkel was heard through an open mic requesting Mark Zuckerberg to work with her to eliminate “xenophobic” comments from Facebook in Germany. Zuckerberg told her he could help with the project.

Legitimate concerns about mass immigration are being censored from public places.

Xenophobia is not a political category but a psychological one, which explains its wide use by the cultural left. In an America where a Sanders or a Clinton is President, we can expect such strictures to govern Facebook, other social media, or political speech of any kind. And who will object? After all, it is so much easier and quicker to dismiss someone as retarded than it is to grapple with his ideas.