Treating Americans Like Children

Are you in touch with your inner child? I hope that you are not. Yet, getting in touch with your inner child was once all the rage. Thanks to someone named John Bradshaw, the psycho world was abuzz with the absolute need to get back in touch with your inner child. 

Bradshaw was not a mental health professional, but he initiated a movement that was strictly consonant with the advice that more than a few psycho professionals have been giving. Remember the past, recover lost childhood memories, repair the damage that your dastardly parents inflicted when they did not love you well enough.

Of course, this seems harmless enough. Some even pretend that it is hard science. Yet, in truth it was designed to counter a Biblical text from 1 Corinthians 13:11:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I trust that the text is more than familiar. I raise it because it is precisely what the psycho world, and even a coterie of Democratic politicians, is telling you not to do.

It shows us that psycho theorizing, the kind that began with Freud and Co. was a counter-theology. Calling it empirical science was, Oxford biologist Peter Medawar once remarked, one of the twentieth century’s greatest confidence tricks.

In the meantime, America’s Democratic political leaders seem to have overstepped their authority. They want to shut down as much as they can in order to tame the rampaging coronavirus.

Their hearts are surely in the right place, but they are, as Karol Markowicz explains in a New York Post column, treating people like children. (via Maggie’s Farm)

It makes a certain amount of sense. The Democratic Party is now, by my analysis, the Girl Party. It touts its capacity for care and compassion, handing out dollops of empathy, mixed with charity. It promises to rescue us all from the Boy Party, aka the Republican Party, which values competitive striving and respects the outcomes of said striving.

In truth, Democrats just ran an election campaign on the premise that President Trump is responsible for all of the pandemic deaths, because he did not show enough empathy.

Democratic governors are acting like mothers and are treating us like children. They are imposing draconian lockdown rules because they can, not necessarily because said rules have proved to be effective. And they show no concern for the consequences, to businesses or to personal health.

Markowicz sets out after the king of the Mommy state, Gov. Andrew Cuomo:

During a news conference last week, Gov. Cuomo put up a chart highlighting where the novel coronavirus is being spread. It turns out, a shocking 74 percent of new cases were caught at gatherings in private homes. Restaurants and bars, meanwhile, accounted for just 1.43 percent.

So the governor banned indoor dining, specifically in New York City, which has the second-lowest case rate and the second-lowest hospitalization rate of any region in the state.

Makes sense? Of course, it doesn’t. Cases have been rising sharply in our state, a few months after Cuomo published a memoir celebrating his triumph over COVID-19. He must’ve felt he had to do something. And something is what he did.

His actions — shuttering businesses that weren’t responsible for most of the spread — are a symptom of the wider infantilization of the American people by elected officials. Politicians wield a vast power for its own sake: power over subjects whom they consider too stupid to object or to make rational decisions for themselves.

Cuomo, whose decisions yielded the highest death rate of any state, doesn’t know how to slow the spread of COVID-19. Instead, he keeps handing down unscientific edicts against already-struggling businesses.

Nice touch… Markowicz notes that Cuomo, who is the Lord High Executioner of the coronavirus, for having sent recovering patients to nursing homes, just wrote a book about his splendid handling of the pandemic.

As for why he sent patients to nursing home, the answer is almost too obvious to state. But, here goes. The federal government had sent, as per Cuomo’s request, a hospital ship to New York. It had set up an infirmary in the Javits Center. And the Samaritan’s Purse charity set up a tent city in Central Park.

If Cuomo had allowed recovering patients to go to these venues, it would have made the Trump administration look good. So, to improve Joe Biden's electoral chances, better that gramps and granny die in their nursing homes.

Markowicz suggests that when leaders issue edicts for the sake of issuing edicts, to to show that they are in charge of something other than their mouths, they risk issuing incoherent orders. They represent an exercise of raw power, designed to infantilize the public and to make them feel dependent on the largesse of empathetic democratic governors.

If none of it makes any sense, you are no longer allowed to exercise your faculty of reason. You need but obey, mindlessly.

Besides, if the rules do not make sense, people will rebel against them. We will lose faith in our government and will stop following rules:

Perhaps if authorities would give us real, workable guidelines for how to protect ourselves, we’d see a decrease in spread. Instead, every time the numbers go up, politicos wag their fingers at us as if we are naughty children, even as most of us do our best to follow the self-contradicting, intelligence-insulting rules.

It’s not just masking — it’s all of it. We’re tired of nonsensical rules and a relentless assault on our way of life. The continual ­focus on the positive test numbers seems like a smokescreen at this point. New York’s hospitalization and death rates remain low. In fact, our case numbers are in line with those of states like Florida, where everything is open. Why continue to follow a failed policy of closures?

She continues:

Arbitrary is exactly right. In fact, it’s the word I used in these pages in early August to predict that people would stop listening, because so many of our safety guidelines made no sense. As I warned then, “pretend safety” has a high price. Rules that insult Americans’ ­intelligence eventually lose credibility, as will the authorities that promulgate them. The danger was always that people tired of being imposed upon by stupidity would stop following the rules altogether.