Politics as “mental illness”
Commenter “Cavendish” wonders:
A few questions: What is the difference between “mental illness” and “incapable of thinking rationally”? What, precisely, is the definition of “thinking rationally”? And, is “incapable of thinking rationally” suffered uniformly and consistently, or is it situationally dependent?
By that I mean, is a person living independently in a capitalist society who fully embraces and aligns with Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders but can easily discern and choose between between grapes at Fred’s for $2.00/lb versus identical grapes at Jane’s for $1.75/lb is, by one measure, demonstrating irrationality in the former but rationality in the latter; does that mean he or she is “partially mentally ill” or subject to “situational irrationality”? And, if it’s “situational irrationality” exactly what does that mean, and how does it relate to “mental illness”?
The questions arose as a response to this statement by commenter “Richard F Cook”:
Your friend [the Rachel Maddow fan who thinks non-criminal citizens are being deported] is mentally ill. In the the face of facts they have to believe their version of reality to maintain their concept of how virtuous they think they are.
First I’d like to deal with the concept of “mentally ill.” It’s an old-fashioned term that originated as an effort to medicalize the treatment of the insane/psychotic/crazy. The idea was that, by listing clusters of symptoms and giving each cluster a name, the problems could be addressed much like physical diseases were addressed. That dream turned out to have been untrue – at least so far – although it bore fruit for certain problems such as schizophrenia, which seems to have a strongly (although not entirely) physical cause and can be greatly helped (although not cured) by medication. Other problems conform more or less to the medical model, mostly less, but it’s been somewhat helpful in a lot of cases and less so in others.
In addition, “mental” illnesses and such diagnoses persist very powerfully in part because insurance coverage is based on them.
The world of “mental illness” was also divided into the very serious psychoses, which involved breaks with perceptions of reality, and neuroses which did not. These distinctions still hold to a certain extent but the term “neurosis” is less used than before.
Modern surveillance capabilities and revelations about the NSA have made it less “crazy” for a person to think the government is spying on him or her. After all, cameras are ubiquitous in public places, there are ways to determine identity from a photograph, cellphone records are accessible – you get the picture. So although it’s “crazy” to look up at your own ceiling and think you can see a camera there placed by the government, the thought that you’re being spied on in general is not far-fetched – although focusing on it can certainly cramp your life.
Being on the left, believing Rachel Maddow, none of that is a mental illness. It’s not even really irrational, depending on your sources of news and information. Maddow can easily be proved wrong, but in order to do that two elements are necessary: (1) a person has to take in the relevant information that discredits what she’s said; and (b) a person has to believe that information comes from a source more credible than Maddow. But people of the left often only take in sources on the left, and those sources are consistent with each other. Those sources continually say that it’s sources on the right that are lying. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to make the effort to go to sources on the right for fact-checking, and it’s easy to dismiss them when just about everyone you know is also on the left and agreeing with Maddow and company.
None of this is crazy or even mentally ill or irrational. It has internal consistency and logic.
I will add that most people – left or right – tend to seek out sources that confirm their already-existing opinions. That’s human nature.
Lastly, we all are a combination of rational and irrational. Emotions are not totally rational; we’re not Star Trek’s Vulcans.
For some reason I’m reminded of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. In Goldwater’s case, he was deemed mentally unfit for the presidency by some psychiatrists, without the benefit of ever having examined him. In that scenario, who was disconnected from reality?
In Nixon’s case, the media pummeled him relentlessly as being “paranoid.” Well, guess what? There was a cabal in DC that was out to get him, and they succeeded.* Nixon may have been depressed or suffered from some kind of neuroses, but irrational or untethered from reality? Probably not.
*I remember during the Watergate scandal how my grandmother asked why they were after Nixon. Her opinion was that LBJ was far more corrupt and far more likely to have used the various levers of government power to harass and intimidate those who displeased him. I would add that LBJ also probably enjoyed doing that sort of thing for sport, just because it amused him. Were LBJ not a Democrat, he probably would have been on the receiving end of some kind of accusation of not playing with a full deck.
Some of it seems to be an unwillingness to believe their own eyes.
The COVID madness was a good example where I would talk to people that were the most freaked out and ask them do they actually know anybody that has died or even gotten really sick beyond a normal flu like illness that would happen occasionally and they would say no but they just KNEW those people were out there because that was the stew they were marinating in on cable news and social media.
It’s true with so many things like the entire Trump fascist stuff and when asked for a real example it’s always something heard on TV or on social media.
I’ve heard (I think it was Bret Weinstein) talk about how the human brain is not able to handle the amount of input it has been receiving the last 15-20 years through social media and that leads to all kinds of issues. People think they know all kinds of people and things that they don’t really know but they draw sweeping concrete conclusions from these things and then are fed more and more that validate those possibly shaky conclusions and here we are.
So I don’t think it’s ‘mental illness’ as much as we are in an unprecedented time in human history where we are exposed to way more than we can process and that leads to all kinds of problems that we are seeing throughout society.
In other words, willfully and deliberately ignorant.
“And yet they move.”
Galileo Galilei, attributed.
I think it was Chesterton who said you cannot reason someone out of a position they were not reasoned into.
==
I’ve been in discussions on this site which were, as far as I can tell, emotions-driven. (Not my emotions). The question is why someone would have that investment in the sentiment at hand.
==
Our political battles are asymmetric inasmuch as on the one hand we have an omnibus representing (ineffectively, for the most part) people roughly satisfied with mundane life and ordinary expectations. They want to ward off the abuses others wish to visit upon them. On the other hand, we have a compendium of hostilities (whose bearers tend to be more organized, unscrupulous, and implacable). Why are they hostile? You have to answer that question. Elaborate academic discourses on public policy or social research may be interesting (or elaborate rubbish), but they’re not going to answer that question. Someone like Thos. Sowell or Edward Banfield or Jordan Peterson or Jonathan Haidt may bring us closer to understanding.
much of this is performance art
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/05/15/nate-silver-calls-out-privileged-yale-profs-supposedly-fighting-fascism-n2412841
the sally quinn piece is of the same ilk
of course if this inspires irrational acts like the Alexandria shooter, which they pretended for the longest time was not happening,
of course this is much of what orban has dealt with, in the 10 years or so, that he’s been in office,
I’ll reiterate what I said in yesterday’s thread:
___________________________________________
Re: Mental Illness
I do wish this term were retired from political discourse.
Humans are imperfect, emotional, tribal beings. What we are seeing with Democrats is regrettable, though not unusual in history.
Mental illness is a different kettle of fish.
Yes Miguel Cervantes, Orban has been the left’s bogeyman for quite a while. I remember when 60 Minutes did a story on Hungary, and it turned out to be nothing more than a hit piece on that country for the crime of wanting to remain Hungarian. A small, politically insignificant nation in central Europe best known to people of a certain age for the Gabor sisters had offended the UN and the WEF, so they had to be shown who’s boss.
It is difficult, but not impossible, to use methods like socratic argument to deconstruct the logical inconsistences of a given person’s political beliefs and arguments. This is provided that you are able and they are willing to have a 1 on 1 conversation with such a person, both of you have the time and are well prepared for such a discussion. In essense, it’s possible to engage a persons critical thinking abilities provided they have them. All that said, it can be emotionally draining to do so and you may find it unpleasent.
Beyond those somewhat exceptional set of circumstances, individuals can begin to question certain authorities that they have trusted in the past when they have been shown to be unreliable, that is when such authorities have been caught in a lie and exposed demonstrably so. We’re actually seeing a little bit of that with the whole Jack Tapper/Mainstream Media blowup over the past few days regarding the general perceptions of Biden’s mental state over the course of his tenure and the patently absurd attempts to explain away what was and is obvious. At this point it’s difficult to see what the long term fallout might be from all this. My gut tells me that it’s far more likely to lead to just a mild skepticism of certain sources rather than a full defenestration of trust in them.
On the part of the legacy media, I’m sure that narratives will be reconstructed to accomodate certain undeniable truths while attempting to maintain certain critical falsehoods. Their credibility has been challenged after all. They have to restore some of that which will necessitate some changes to their “reporting”. I have little idea of what that will look like. Perhaps more “conservative” voices will be allowed to be heard to maintain some perception of balance.
probably but could corporate press, really recognize legitimate conservative voices at the post, there is thiessen, who is not terrible, of course rubin flounced having really had pro israeli sentiments, that she has sublimated, its hard to find even a moderate liberal in the stables of the leading broadsheets,
we saw how one note every paper was on the tariff issue, even those who are not classical liberal by inclination,
orban was a protege of soros, thats how he earned his fellowship as the youngest remaining dissident of the crew of 1989,
lets not reference the bulwark and the dispatch, they are almost amusing in their category error,
Something which drives me crazy is the irrational belief of conservatives that they are rational and everyone else ought to be. 🙂
It should be obvious that none of us always rational. Part of being human is regularly doing all sorts of irrational things. In fairness, we don’t always have the time, patience, or desire to self analyze everything we say, do, and believe every moment of every day. As Neo says, “We’re not Star Trek Vulcans”.
Funny, when the first Mrs. Friday and I would argue, I often told her to stop being so irrational. For some reason that seemed to just make her even more angry.
huxley, well, we do TRY to be rational. Thinking everyone else ought to be is utopian, no doubt.
huxley, well, we do TRY to be rational.
Kate:
Some try; some assume.
________________________
I’ve been in discussions on this site which were, as far as I can tell, emotions-driven. (Not my emotions).
–Art Deco
________________________
‘Course not, dearie.
A charge of mental illness is a handy excuse not to have to engage with a person’s statements or ideas, and should definitely not be used outside a clinical setting.
Almost all of us are living in a self-selected bubble. It’s been getting easier and easier to do this; harder to avoid doing it. Within that bubble lots of things seem reasonable or even self evident, but can seem nuts to those outside it.
On the phone recently with some (left-leaning) relatives, California’s high-speed rail boondoggle came up. Not only had they not heard of it, they immediately assumed it was some scheme of Elon Musk’s.
I used to think I wasn’t in a bubble, because legacy media was everywhere (and before then I was in academia). But over the last ten years I found that I was never seeing anything in legacy media at all unless I was stuck in an airport, or I was seeing it at a right-leaning blog like this one.
The COVID madness was a good example where I would talk to people that were the most freaked out and ask them do they actually know anybody that has died or even gotten really sick beyond a normal flu like illness that would happen occasionally and they would say no but they just KNEW those people were out there because that was the stew they were marinating in on cable news and social media.
==
I knew someone who died of COVID.
We on the Conservative side had a bout of mental illness with Bill Clinton. I didn’t like him but I didn’t make it my mission to hate him every waking hour.
I think mental illness is an apt term for hating someone so strongly, yet not really knowing why you hate them that every organ of government must be turned against him and his supporters, serious talk of reeducation camps, assassination attempts, cutting off family and friends, etc. If that’s not mental illness what is it? They really can’t describe why they hate Trump but they do. If people do not like my description of them being mentally ill, oh well. After encountering them coast to coast and in between the unhingedness is mind blowing.
And Niketas the charge is because I have engaged with them.
Art Deco,
And I knew someone that died of the flu.
That doesn’t mean I thought the world should shut down because of it.
A sense of perspective and understanding of math and how common or rare something is must be used in deciding things and too many people have no sense for that.
Is a rejection of basic aspects of human nature, such as why should you work long hard hours, so that I can sit on my ass and watch the boob tube… and a rejection of basic principles that govern the external reality within which we all exist… such as a rejection of the economic principle of supply and demand… evidence of a departure from reality? Evidence of a refusal to accept reality? If not evidence of mental illness, it is certainly evidence of a less than fully sane state of mind. Which of course begs the question: can a society survive when every four years the inmates have a chance to vote themselves into running the asylum…?
“But over the last ten years I found that I was never seeing anything in legacy media at all..”
Which is why every morning, as much as I dislike doing so, I hit both CNN and MSNBC web sites, and each day look at the posts from my lefty friends. I used to engage them but I got tired of the vitriol rather than a reasoned response. So now I just read what they write and try to formulate a response that I would never post.
Being retired from academia means I’m no longer bombarded by continuous left pronouncements, so I have to get my “fix” someway. 🙂
Griffin, thank you very much for this:
“I’ve heard (I think it was Bret Weinstein) talk about how the human brain is not able to handle the amount of input it has been receiving the last 15-20 years through social media and that leads to all kinds of issues.”
“Our political battles are asymmetric… we have a compendium of hostilities (whose bearers tend to be more organized, unscrupulous, and implacable). Why are they hostile? You have to answer that question.”
The ‘Trotskyite’ “useful idiots” are hostile to our obstruction to the creation of the promised ‘better world’. Implicit to the belief that a better world can be achieved is the assumption that mankind can do a better job than God has done. Implicit to that assumption is a rejection that their good intentions are actually paving another road to hell.
The Stalinists are deeply hostile to our objecting to their seizure of power for as David Horowitz pointed out, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always The Revolution.”
And I knew someone that died of the flu.
==
You asked the question, I gave you an answer.
==
The early iterations of COVID were vastly more lethal than seasonal flu – by a factor of about 15.
Art Deco,
I asked the question of people I know. I don’t know you or anyone else here and you don’t know me that is part of my point. I don’t KNOW if you knew someone who died of Covid and you don’t KNOW if I knew someone who died of the flu. I’m not saying either one of us is lying I’m saying that when people rely on information from people (often anonymous) that they don’t know and then multiply those people exponentially it leads to people having a warped sense of proportionality.
And if you are susceptible to this you can start believing all kinds of things like Trump is deporting legal immigrants or sending the gays to concentration camps or that going to a park without a mask on is a 50/50 death sentence.
But people of the left often only take in sources on the left, and those sources are consistent with each other. Those sources continually say that it’s sources on the right that are lying. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to make the effort to go to sources on the right for fact-checking,…
Well said. Nothing to do with actual mental illness here.
It is really the ultimate “hat trick” in politics or social matters in general, to convince great masses that one group are the truth tellers and the another group the liars, when the opposite is much closer to the truth. But when people generally have no real information one way or the other, it’s not so surprising. Then, it breaks down to identity politics factors.
________
The different, but related (I think), current issue is: What were the Dem leadership and their minions thinking when they engaged in this massive coverup of Sloe Joe’s feebleness and disfunction? Obviously, over the years they have become quite adept at coverups, and importantly, coverups of the coverups. Never crack wise and always push the denials.
But now the media is on a “cracking wise” spree. “Can you believe how terrible the White House minions were?” they say. “It wasn’t us!” Or, “We stupidly believed what they told us.” It’s rather incredible. Will this actually work? “Work” in the sense that electorate lefties will forgive them and stay in the fold.
I’m saying that when people rely on information from people (often anonymous) that they don’t know and then multiply those people exponentially it leads to people having a warped sense of proportionality.
==
The death toll from COVID was readily available from Wordometers and Our World in Data.
To expand on my point I made above and I’m pretty sure it was Bret Weinstein who made it think of how many people an average person interact with in person or through technology in a given day in say 1880. Unless you were in a large city that number was very low on average. The amount of information input was very low. Now go to 1980 and that person it was probably higher because of greater transportation and the telephone as well as tv/radio ( a one way interaction). Now do now with cell phones and social media constantly with us.
In evolutionary terms 140 or 40 years is nothing but the technological advances have been immense and I think that all plays into polarization that seems to be everywhere across the west. Humans simply can’t handle everything that we are exposed to at this time.
Just a theory probably not a perfect one.
‘The death toll from COVID was readily available from Wordometers and Our World in Data’
Yeah, that data is shaky at best. There have been numerous studies of Covid deaths and they all find the deaths attributable to Covid were greatly overrepresented.
There was a recent one from Greece (a pretty small country so much easier to do) that found about 40-50% of the death originally labeled as from Covid were probably not in fact from Covid.
It’s been said before but it bears repeating in this context-
The leftist side uses silencing as a routine part of their armamentarium. Whether it’s canceling, banning certain topics on FB, Twitter, or online comments. or making sure that only certain people are hired or allowed to speak, it’s clearly essential for the left to make sure that nobody hears a dissenting word or thought. When that tactic does not work they go about redefining commonly understood English words and phrases to confuse the issue. The Fascists are now the people who want the government to be smaller. Women do not have to have different anatomy than men. Republicans are the party of slavery.
The conservative side’s response when a leftist spouts some nonsense is, “Let him speak.” Give him a platform, put him on TV. If it’s a face to face encounter, they will typically walk away or end the discussion.
It’s a qualitative difference. Easy o tell what is going on.
Griffin,
I don’t know why information intake would be any more or less for modern humans than those who lived 10,000 years ago. I know a lot, but I doubt I could survive on my own in the wild, even with some weapons and tools. My ignorance of some fundamental subjects is vast. I’ve memorized the song lyrics from hundreds of ’80s pop tunes, but I can’t distinguish edible plants from poisonous ones.
Some time ago another commenter here drew the distinction between being stupid, i.e. mentally deficient, and being foolish, i.e. morally deficient.
It seems to me that insanity/psychosis/craziness all have (like I guess most everything else in the world) a spiritual component.
Rufus,
If I remember correctly Weinstein explained it as humans have evolved slowly and our surroundings have also evolved at similar rates. There were minor changes but a person living in 1700 wasn’t much different than a person living in 1800. You knew the people around you and talked to the people around you only. You had no idea what was happening 200 miles away let alone the other side of the world so you would expend little mental energy thinking of these things. Now on the other hand we have access to massive amounts of information and are inundated with huge amounts of information immediately on subjects we know nothing about and exposed to unlimited amounts of people who also don’t really know much but who present themselves as experts and there is no way we can possibly take all this in. Are brains are simply not capable of processing it in a way to stay balanced emotionally. The reactions so many people have to Covid, Ukraine, Gaza, tariffs you name it are completely irrational because there is no way an average person could possible understand such complex issues and prior to the relatively recently you never had to because you would have never heard of what was happening in Ukraine or Gaza so they would never be so invested in these conflicts.
The technological evolution has been moving much faster than the human evolution.
I think it’s an interesting theory that partially explains a lot of what is happening and is much stronger in first world countries which also would support the theory.
Neo,
You make an interesting point about schizophrenia. My college psychology professor once said that she had seen schizophrenic patients all over the world, across many languages and cultures, but they all had one thing in common: they all had a strange, goat like laugh that sounded like “heh heh heh”. Now, granted she did her research decades ago, but if it’s true, that lends credence to the theory that schizophrenia is partially biological in origin.
Twitchy thinks the Dems are crazy.
https://twitchy.com/warren-squire/2025/05/16/scott-jennings-a-democrat-just-admitted-that-all-the-political-persecution-of-trump-backfired-on-them-n2412872
Some of the collected tweets:
While laughing about it. Like, whoops putting him in prison for life and trying to murder him, was just politics. These people are fricken psychotic and they don’t even realize how insane they are.
— Jo?? (@JoJoGenX) May 15, 2025
lol side note the fact that they can sit there and laugh and joke ab trying and coming close to potentially ending a man’s entire life for political purposes like it’s nbd is crazy work
— av (@xvxavx_) May 15, 2025
James Comey isn’t helping the Democrats fight the “insanity” label.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/05/15/did-a-former-fbi-director-post-a-death-threat-about-trump-n2657144
Griffin, Rufus,
Yes, we are inundated with information about more stuff than we really need to know – or care – about. The implicit message being that we really DO need to know about this stuff. Who was it who said; ‘It’s not necessary to have an ‘opinion’ on everything.’?
Very liberating.
I deal with the inundation by operating on what I call the Miss Marple Principle.
‘I don’t believe anything anyone says. I haven’t for years.’
If it’s something I care about or am interested in, I’ll scout around for as many facts as I can – review opinions, and formulate my own. Subject to reevaluation as the facts change. It’s amazing the number of things that just aren’t worth the effort to research!
I’d like to add here that I greatly appreciate the trouble that Neo takes to investigate the topics she posts on and doing all that work for us. We are lucky to have you, Neo!
Griffin, Molly Brown,
First, Griffin, thanks for the explanation.
Second, I don’t think it’s technology feeding us more information than we can handle, we can pick and choose that level. The Library of Alexandria had a lot of information in it. But I do think technology eliminating distances causes anxiety and stress.
We are hard wired to pay attention to potential threats and when our incoming information of potential threats expands from our local neighborhood to the world it’s more than most of us can rationally manage. If the news starts featuring stories of child abductions in Asia and Africa mothers in the U.S. stop letting their children play and walk to school unchaperoned.
I agree with Molly Brown. Decades ago I realized it is OK if I do not have an opinion on everything someone may ask me about. Knowing what you don’t know is helpful for one’s sanity.
Politics is another reality — or unreality. People are in tribes or bubbles that reinforce their instincts and beliefs. They are insulated from opposing opinions and when they do encounter them they are able to easily dismiss them. So when people say that some politician is delusional, I don’t really buy it. If they are, it’s part of a mass delusion that is their whole mental world. It’s only in relatively rare moments of clarity that people question the assumptions that define their bubble. The fundamental “truth” is always that the other side is worse and has to be stopped and that is enough to keep the tribe together.
We could use “bubble” in another sense to refer to politicians’ reputations and to the passing fads that rise and grow and eventually pop. When the “bubble” of Bush or Obama or Biden pops people come to see them in a less exalted light and some agreement is possible. By the end of his term, nobody much liked G.W. Bush. It was similar with Lyndon Johnson. Today, some people like Obama and some hate him, but few view him as a savior. Now that Biden isn’t the alternative to Trump, the media and Democrat bigwigs are willing to venture some limited criticism of the man and his inner circle.
Its virtually impossible for conservatives to be unaware of left wing thought and policy–we are surrounded by leftist media content, regardless of whether we seek it out or not.
Liberals never see conservative thought or policy other than through the leftist lens of their chosen media, so its always distorted. I believe it is impossible for a regular consumer of, say, CNN or MSNBC to know reality when it comes to politically related information. When I try talking with my liberal friends, its clear we exist in separate worlds that cannot be reconciled with logic.
The two most important increasingly rare characteristics in our society are intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills.
Thus, a person who fervently believes in man made global warming will believe it no matter what his lying eyes tell him, e.g. NONE of the dire predictions of the global warming doom-sayers have come to pass–the Westside Highway in NYC is still not underwater, the ice caps are still there, no island nations or even Florida are underwater, we still have snow..I could go on and on.
Nothing will change their minds, and none of them question the “need” to eliminate fossil fuels, nor understand what the impact would be on their quality of life. They would likely not survive, and their children would most definitely not thank them for the quality of life bequeathed to them.
Many of my liberal friends still think Trump colluded with Putin to defeat Clinton. They’ve tuned out all else, as they tuned out how mentally compromised Biden was/is despite seeing many of his obvious issues with their own eyes.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2025/05/15/congressman-introduces-bill-to-study-dangerous-psychological-condition-known-as-tds-and-i-had-to-laugh-n2189162
Mentally ill?
That’s just nuts.