Jheronimus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross
Goons not Guns the Problem
Ilana Mercer on the evil that men do
The public personas who pass as conservatives are NOT system builders. We know them as conservatives not by their well thought-out, philosophically consistent thinking; but because they’ve staked out certain positions on The Issues, over time.
“Gun violence” is the term used by conservatives with this messy habit of mind. A careful thinker would refer to “goon violence.”
“For guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of manufactured illness in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is integral to the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. It is here to stay.”
In cahoots with their left-liberal partners in crime, conservative jurists, journalists, politicians and pundits now routinely debase this moral vocabulary. “Gun violence,” they all jabber, is caused by mental illness.
Their cure for goon violence: bring in the big therapeutic guns to do the diagnosing. With state imprimatur, the witch doctors will lay the “scientific” cornerstone for walling-in society’s oddballs.
Democrats concur: if someone does something awfully wicked, he must have an illness as real as cancer or Alzheimer’s.
Still, progressives are pioneers in abolishing the fact of evil and replacing it with a diagnosis amenable to state intervention. Did not Joseph Stalin replace the wisdom of the ages with a scientific system that deployed the therapeutic idiom to murder and imprison dissenters?
But while they dare not cop to it openly, a secondary goal exclusive to progressives is to destroy the very idea of a self-reliant citizenry.
Left-liberals would dearly love to disarm all citizens (bar their own security details), to better resemble the “enlightened” Eurocracy. In today’s backward Britain, home of the Magna Carta, the police now instruct their subjects that “the only fully legal self-defense product … is a rape alarm.”
Both factions of our opposing position holders are generally unoffended by prior restraint initiatives. Easily would they condone the initiation of aggression ad absurdum against the individual, on the off-chance that he himself may initiate violence against others.
There once-upon-a-time was, in our town, a darling, loopy young man who stood on the curb, holding up commercial signposts, face beaming, yelling his love for The Lord. He’s gone! Replaced with a more sedate, swarthy gentleman. Perhaps the exuberant youngster was rounded up and hospitalized. Just to be on the safe side.
Likewise are conservatives perfectly comfortable with the fortification of the therapeutic state and the deconstruction of conventional morality.
What is meant here by deconstructing morality?
Take Dr. Keith Ablow, a conservative regular on Fox News. Ablow first diagnosed the goon du jour, Chris Harper Mercer, with a mental illness. The good doctor arrived at the diagnosis thus: Harper Mercer shot up a college, in Roseburg, Oregon, killing 10 people and wounding seven. Ergo, he must be ill.
As Dr. Ablow surmised, Harper Mercer must have lived a life “of terrible desperation and suffering in the shadowy basements of suburban homes, lost in delusions and wandering the streets.” (Ablow’s writing is worse than his brain infarcts.)
This awfully evil act, Ablow and the other TV knaves take as irrefutable proof of disease. This disease, for which there is no scientific evidence, causes killing just as Parkinson’s causes shaking.
Ablow was up against a smart and moral man of the cloth, also a regular on FNC. Much to Father Jonathan Morris’s horror, etched on his young face, Ablow went on to insist that evil is a disease.
Morris scrambled to correct this awfully destructive statement, made on national TV, but there was no stopping evil Ablow and his anchor enabler.
Evil is a disease, asserted Ablow, because human beings are defined by their humanity.
When human beings lose that humanity, it can only be because they’ve been afflicted by a sickness.
With that, Ablow struck a blow to the moral foundation of our already tattered civilization: the idea that man is in fact not very good and that a meaningful life is defined by a struggle to be better.
With his evil-as-disease illogical, ahistorical folderol, Ablow and his co-conspirators flout all The West’s great secular and sacred texts.
If we accept the intellectually, logically and morally wicked idea that evil is a condition of the flesh and not the spirit—We The People don’t have a prayer.
The ancients taught that “every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood” (Genesis 8:21). Look around you. The truly good and noble are as rare as philosophical system-builders on national TV and radio.
However, if good is the default position of humanity, as Ablow has it—then the rest, hundreds of millions of bad people, are all ill.
In truth, our frailties define us. Human beings are not universally good. On the contrary; the struggle to live a righteous life is not that common among mankind.
The many deadly sins—gluttony, greed, sloth, pride, envy, and so on—are what define humanity. Few are the people who actually struggle to vanquish vices and work at being virtuous. (Gluttony is this writer’s vice. In the course of writing this text, six slabs of chocolate were devoured! This is no illness; it’s gluttony. Another is being late to file copy, to the detriment of a long-suffering editor. This vice shall be conquered!)
But according to TV’s philosopher kings, this writer’s resolve is futile, for vice is a physical illness, and not a moral affliction amenable to self-correction.
Ultimately, if evil is accepted as an unnatural condition, a disease—then wicked individuals cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds.
If you’ve bought into the evil-as-disease balderdash, work to vanquish this most diabolical of vices.
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer “Friend” her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilanamercer.libertarian
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Goons not Guns the Problem
Jheronimus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross
Goons not Guns the Problem
Ilana Mercer on the evil that men do
The public personas who pass as conservatives are NOT system builders. We know them as conservatives not by their well thought-out, philosophically consistent thinking; but because they’ve staked out certain positions on The Issues, over time.
“Gun violence” is the term used by conservatives with this messy habit of mind. A careful thinker would refer to “goon violence.”
“For guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of manufactured illness in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is integral to the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. It is here to stay.”
In cahoots with their left-liberal partners in crime, conservative jurists, journalists, politicians and pundits now routinely debase this moral vocabulary. “Gun violence,” they all jabber, is caused by mental illness.
Their cure for goon violence: bring in the big therapeutic guns to do the diagnosing. With state imprimatur, the witch doctors will lay the “scientific” cornerstone for walling-in society’s oddballs.
Democrats concur: if someone does something awfully wicked, he must have an illness as real as cancer or Alzheimer’s.
Still, progressives are pioneers in abolishing the fact of evil and replacing it with a diagnosis amenable to state intervention. Did not Joseph Stalin replace the wisdom of the ages with a scientific system that deployed the therapeutic idiom to murder and imprison dissenters?
But while they dare not cop to it openly, a secondary goal exclusive to progressives is to destroy the very idea of a self-reliant citizenry.
Left-liberals would dearly love to disarm all citizens (bar their own security details), to better resemble the “enlightened” Eurocracy. In today’s backward Britain, home of the Magna Carta, the police now instruct their subjects that “the only fully legal self-defense product … is a rape alarm.”
Both factions of our opposing position holders are generally unoffended by prior restraint initiatives. Easily would they condone the initiation of aggression ad absurdum against the individual, on the off-chance that he himself may initiate violence against others.
There once-upon-a-time was, in our town, a darling, loopy young man who stood on the curb, holding up commercial signposts, face beaming, yelling his love for The Lord. He’s gone! Replaced with a more sedate, swarthy gentleman. Perhaps the exuberant youngster was rounded up and hospitalized. Just to be on the safe side.
Likewise are conservatives perfectly comfortable with the fortification of the therapeutic state and the deconstruction of conventional morality.
What is meant here by deconstructing morality?
Take Dr. Keith Ablow, a conservative regular on Fox News. Ablow first diagnosed the goon du jour, Chris Harper Mercer, with a mental illness. The good doctor arrived at the diagnosis thus: Harper Mercer shot up a college, in Roseburg, Oregon, killing 10 people and wounding seven. Ergo, he must be ill.
As Dr. Ablow surmised, Harper Mercer must have lived a life “of terrible desperation and suffering in the shadowy basements of suburban homes, lost in delusions and wandering the streets.” (Ablow’s writing is worse than his brain infarcts.)
This awfully evil act, Ablow and the other TV knaves take as irrefutable proof of disease. This disease, for which there is no scientific evidence, causes killing just as Parkinson’s causes shaking.
Ablow was up against a smart and moral man of the cloth, also a regular on FNC. Much to Father Jonathan Morris’s horror, etched on his young face, Ablow went on to insist that evil is a disease.
Morris scrambled to correct this awfully destructive statement, made on national TV, but there was no stopping evil Ablow and his anchor enabler.
Evil is a disease, asserted Ablow, because human beings are defined by their humanity.
When human beings lose that humanity, it can only be because they’ve been afflicted by a sickness.
With that, Ablow struck a blow to the moral foundation of our already tattered civilization: the idea that man is in fact not very good and that a meaningful life is defined by a struggle to be better.
With his evil-as-disease illogical, ahistorical folderol, Ablow and his co-conspirators flout all The West’s great secular and sacred texts.
If we accept the intellectually, logically and morally wicked idea that evil is a condition of the flesh and not the spirit—We The People don’t have a prayer.
The ancients taught that “every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood” (Genesis 8:21). Look around you. The truly good and noble are as rare as philosophical system-builders on national TV and radio.
However, if good is the default position of humanity, as Ablow has it—then the rest, hundreds of millions of bad people, are all ill.
In truth, our frailties define us. Human beings are not universally good. On the contrary; the struggle to live a righteous life is not that common among mankind.
The many deadly sins—gluttony, greed, sloth, pride, envy, and so on—are what define humanity. Few are the people who actually struggle to vanquish vices and work at being virtuous. (Gluttony is this writer’s vice. In the course of writing this text, six slabs of chocolate were devoured! This is no illness; it’s gluttony. Another is being late to file copy, to the detriment of a long-suffering editor. This vice shall be conquered!)
But according to TV’s philosopher kings, this writer’s resolve is futile, for vice is a physical illness, and not a moral affliction amenable to self-correction.
Ultimately, if evil is accepted as an unnatural condition, a disease—then wicked individuals cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds.
If you’ve bought into the evil-as-disease balderdash, work to vanquish this most diabolical of vices.
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer “Friend” her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilanamercer.libertarian
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