The "Therapeutic State" - We are now "All-In" with COVID
The primal urge for protective mystical talismans & amulets, and the primal urge to hide from pestilence and poison all drive and legitimize the biomedical security state we now all find ourselves in.
I actually started writing this article before I encountered this excellent piece by attorney and Brownstone Institute contributor, Brian Oshinskie, titled “Covid Exposed the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex.”
In it, he observes at length the idea that we are living through an era where institutional medicine truly ‘rules the roost’ and occupies an unquestionably dominant influence over the media, airwaves, government budgets, our personal pocketbooks - in fact, over our daily lives - than ever before. A great quote from the article:
Medicine is the new American religion. Given such fervent belief in medicine’s importance and the sense of entitlement regarding expanding medical treatments, government and insurance money is relentlessly overallocated to medicine.
A great read which I recomend. Most of his article tends to focus on the growing size and rapacious economic appetite of the “Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex” and how it’s warped our media and government institutions - or what I prefer to call, the “therapeutic state.”
Thomas Szasz and the “Therapeutic State.”
Back in in college, I majored in psychology. Because I liked to be different, I read a ton of books by a fellow named Thomas Szasz - an Austrian-born psychiatrist who lived for a long time in upstate New York, was clinical faculty at Syracuse University, and had a strong yen for taking hugely controversial positions on topics like drug legalization and the “right to suicide” - and most famously argued for the idea that ‘mental illness was a myth.’
I don’t want to spend too much time on Thomas Szasz and his observations about mental health and psychiatry (there’s a lot there!) - but you can find more about him here, and I recommend as starter books the above, “The Myth of Mental Illness” and “The Manufacture of Madness.”
I would like to talk about Dr. Szasz’s ideas as regards what he frequently referred to as “institutional psychiatry” - or the massive complex of intertwined interests of government, academic psychiatry and medicine, and the coerced mental health treatment industry - and apply them to the larger issue of institutional medicine as regards the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Szasz had an amazing gift with language. He also seemed to have a massive amount of historical and philosophical acumen to bring to bear on his perspectives on psychiatry, human behavior, and political theory. Szasz was able to employ (or directly coin) a bunch of terms that captured some really thorny sociopolitical phenomena that are so embedded in our society currently that it’s often extremely difficult to actually see… much like the proverbial cavedwellers in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
One of the terms he coined - and very important here - is the idea of the Therapeutic State - or the idea of the psychiatric (medical) / government complex, an unholy alliance between the institutional medical system and government in which disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions are repressed ("cured") through pseudomedical interventions (much like the “theocratic state” of Inquisition-Era Spain where the country’s government was taken over by a brutal dictatorship by the church).
In the same book (basically a book entirely critical of the idea of drug prohibition and medically-enabled persecution of addicts and drug ‘pushers’) Dr. Szasz coined yet another set of terms / concepts, the idea of panaceas and panapathogens.
From Chapter 10 of his book (I’ve lightly edited the excerpts for clarity):
Because one of the dominant passions of human beings is to control-themselves, other persons, and natural events-all cultures develop systems of explanations that function both as accounts of why good and bad things happen and as methods for causing them to happen… (this is explained by the) magical or religious character of panaceas-and of their opposites, which I shall call "panapathogens" (and) is also revealed by the role they have played and continue to play in the history of medicine. Simply put, these two categories of agents-formerly theological but now therapeutic in character-are the saviors and scapegoats of society; they constitute the ceremonial symbols for the collectivity's rituals of purification and pollution. (p. 138).
Again, although Dr. Szasz’s favorite targets were institutional psychiatry - this whole experience of the COVID pandemic (lockdowns, mandates, etc.) has really opened my eyes that his concept of “therapeutic statism” really has applications far beyond just psychiatry and mental health.
Institutional Psychiatry’s Influence over the Public is on the Wane
One of Dr. Szasz’s favorite metaphors was looking at the galloping, growing influence of the rhetoric of psychiatry over government institutions, and how it spawned an enormous industry of forced psychiatric hospitalization (which had its heyday in the 60s in the USA - where at one point over 1.1 million people were living in psychiatric hospitals, where many (I suspect, most1) were living due to involuntary hospitalization. Institutional psychiatry also has helped to give rhetorical cover to the “War on Drugs,” and a number of other abuses.
But - I think it’s fair to say that the most glaring government excesses enabled by the rhetorical cover of Szasz favorite bugaboo - institutional psychiatry - are on the wane. Although civil commitment, as an industry, saw somewhat of a contemporary resurgence with the idea of involuntary commitment of “sexually violent predators,” the current US population of psychiatric inpatients currently has clearly collapsed from it’s apex in the 1960s - currently around 170,000 (as of 2014). The so-called “War on Drugs” seems to be less popular than ever before. Psychiatry gave up on pathologizing homosexuality in the 80s (which coincided with many governments loosening up their laws demonizing it as well) - which was another sign of their waning influence. All indications appear to be that the influence of institutional psychiatry is on the wane in the halls of government.
Viral Avoidance is the New State Religion
I say medicine is the new “state religion” deliberately. While GeroDoc is more or less of an agnostic, I’m perfectly aware that there is a drive for humans to practice religion. And yet - study after study has shown that the influence of organized religion in the United States and in other industrialized countries continues to be on the wane.
So I would say that at least in America - because people seem to need some sort of organized belief system - the state religion is no longer the Church. It’s now Medicine. Previously, institutional psychiatry had ruled the roost. Now, with the COVID pandemic - I would say that it’s now infectious disease, epidemiology, and “public health” - they are now in charge. The new Spanish Inquisition of health is no longer a fight against the “insane” or “addicts” - instead it’s now a fight against COVID, “antivaxxers,” and “anti-maskers.”
Indeed - after a couple of short years, the fight against COVID has become the new religious war. It has all the hallmarks of a religious war, with sacred talismans / panaceas - like masks and vaccines - panapathogens - like COVID infection and the almost inevitable suffering of “long COVID syndrome” that comes after. Instead of Torquemada of the Catholic Church (re. the Spanish Inquisition) - we now have Tony Fauci at the CDC.
I’ve arranged an illuminating chart to illustrate:
Here’s the thing though - even at the height institutional psychiatry’s heyday - the amount of sheer power and control exerted by the ‘COVID-industrial complex’ has completely dwarfed that of even institutional psychiatry’s wildest dreams. The War on Drugs, involuntary hospitalization - absolutely huge. But the COVID lockdowns have done things that were heretofore unimaginable. We have:
Shut down entire swaths of the economy by declaring them “nonessential”
Closed schools
Instituted “vaccine passports” for entering buildings, businesses, and travelling - better really to be named for what they are - movement licenses.
Legitimized the societal practice of censorship of unpopular opinions (also known as “misinformation / disinformation”).
Mandated universal (cloth) mask use where there was scant evidence of its effectiveness and aggressively squelched debate over the harms.
Effectively turned long-term care facilities into veritable prisons, with no end in sight.
In Conclusion
I have no idea how to fix this. If the CDC is the new Catholic Church and fighting COVID or whatever new pandemic virus hits their fancy (be it monkeypox or bird flu) is the new Inquisition - then as a student of history I’m aware that this could take potentially generations before we’re able to shake off this kind of worldwide, mass crowd madness.
However, let’s bring it back to the residents at my nursing home.
They basically haven’t seen the outside world for almost three years now (aside from behind the glass of a car, or a computer screen).
They haven’t seen their caregivers’ faces for almost three years now.
They are in prison.
Can we do something for them please?
They don’t have much time left.
Interestingly, unlike normal judicial proceedings, civil commitment statistics apparently aren’t tracked by the Federal Government.
Oh, GeroDoc....thank you for continuing to advocate for the voiceless.