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THE FREEMAN | IDEAS ON LIBERTY

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The Burden of Responsibility

Posted By Thomas Szasz • December 2008 • Vol. 58/Issue 10
Life is an unending series of choices and, therefore, “problems in living.” Ordinary choices—
what to have for breakfast—we ignore as trivial. Extraordinary choices—whether to kill
ourselves (or worse)—we dismiss as the symptoms of mental illness. The profession of
psychiatry rests on, and caters to, the ubiquitous human desire to avoid, evade, and deny the
very possibility of morally “unthinkable” choices. We use the rhetoric of psychiatry to
transform such choices into medical-technical problems and “solve” them by appropriate
“medical treatments.” This is why deception and prevarication are intrinsic to the principles of
psychiatry, and fraud and force are intrinsic to its practices.
We humans are choice-making animals. The freedom to make choices is both a blessing and a
curse. Depending on age, temperament, information, and alternatives, some people
experience the opportunity for choice as exhilarating, others as tormenting. Traditionally, it
was one of the functions of religion to relieve people of choices. Today, psychiatry and the
therapeutic state perform the same job.
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)—the great twentieth-century German psychiatrist-turned-

philosopher—understood this. But he identified only one part of this drama, the patient’s:
“Generally formulated, we may say that these people [“neurotics”] are determined that events
for which they are accountable and in which they are understandably concerned shall be taken
as mere happenings, for which they are entirely irresponsible.” Psychiatrists were, and are,
happy to play the other part, authenticating the person’s false self-definition as mental patient
—medical object, not moral actor.
Lord Acton
There is important religious precedent for the authoritative declaration of falsehood as truth.
In 1870, under the leadership of the legendary Pope Pius IX—Pio Nono, the longest-reigning
and one of the most colorful popes in history—the Vatican declared the dogma of papal
infallibility. This was anathema to Lord Acton (1834–1902), the most respected Catholic
layman in Europe in his time. Alienated from the Church, Acton did not leave it; and, probably
because he had not been ordained, he was not excommunicated. It was in the context of this
moral conflict that, in 1887, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, Acton made his famous
pronouncement:
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with
a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the
other way against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic
responsibility has to make up for want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Most people who quote Lord Acton’s famous dictum today are unaware it refers to papal power
and was made by a devout Catholic. In 1882 Acton, now alienated from his great teacher and
lifelong friend, Father Johann Ignaz von Döllinger, who was excommunicated for opposing the
infallibility doctrine, writes him:
“I came, very slowly and reluctantly indeed to the conclusion that they [the great
Catholic notabilities] were dishonest. And I found out a special reason for their
dishonesty in the desire to keep up the credit of authority in the Church. . . . When I
got to understand history from the sources, especially from unpublished sources, the
reason of all this became obvious. There was a conspiracy to deceive. . . . That men
might believe the Pope it was resolved to make them believe that vice is virtue and
falsehood truth.”
Acton regarded the claim of papal infallibility as evidence of intolerable religious arrogance and
power. I regard psychiatric infallibility—the unfalsifiability and irrefutability of psychiatric
diagnoses backed by mental-health laws—as evidence of intolerable psychiatric arrogance and
power.
Acton thought “he witnessed the triumph of error in history.” Indeed, he had. Today, we
witness a similar—but more ominous—triumph of error in medicine-psychiatry. In addition to
persuading the public and the government that human problems are medical diseases,
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The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty » The Burden of Responsibility » Print
psychiatrists have succeeded in abolishing the concepts of responsibility, guilt, and innocence,
and in replacing punishment with the irrefutable and ineradicable stigmata of psychiatric
“diagnoses” and “treatments.” “Modern psychiatry,” I wrote in 1970, “dehumanize[s] man by
denying . . . the existence, or even the possibility, of personal responsibility, central to the
concept of man as moral agent.” It accomplishes that evil by treating responsibility, following
Ambrose Bierce, as “a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune,
Luck or one’s neighbor.” In our day, it is not merely customary but, in matters that really
count, mandatory to unload responsibility on Mental Illness (“he snapped,” “had a breakdown,”
“battled his demons,” “was on drugs,” “went off prescribed medication,” and so forth).
In Acton’s day the separation of church and state was an established political practice in many
countries. Hence, the Church’s moral failures and self-arrogated powers affected only persons
who chose to be its adherents. Our predicament is more serious. We live at a time when the
alliance of medicine-psychiatry and the state is taken for granted—viewed as an unalterable
social fact and undoubted moral and social good. Everyone, regardless of personal choice, is
affected, directly or indirectly, by the powers of the therapeutic state.
Psychiatry and the State
Given its limited legal-political powers, the Vatican could not have tried to purge the world of
its critics, much less intimidate them into becoming its crypto-supporters. In contrast, in our
day the alliance of psychiatry and the state has enabled pharmacracy to do just that. Its so-
called critics—who call themselves “antipsychiatrists,” “critical psychiatrists,” “ethical
psychiatrists,” and so on—oppose one or another psychiatric “diagnosis” or “treatment,” rarely
even psychiatric coercion. But they all support the view that the misbehavior of individuals
afflicted with/suffering from so-called mental illnesses ought not be regulated by the same
rules as are the misbehaviors of individuals not so denominated: They recoil from defending an
ethic based on personal responsibility for public actions (as distinct from private actions, called
“thoughts”) and of every individual’s inalienable right to his or her life and death, lest they
appear uncompassionate and, perish the thought, unscientific and illiberal (in the modern,
statist sense of “liberal”). Thus they endorse—explicitly or by the assent of silence—
psychiatry’s war on responsibility, epitomized by the wars on drugs, mental illness, and suicide
and by the insanity defense.
“Truth,” said Thomas Jefferson, “will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has
received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom
welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. . . . It is error
alone which needs the support of government.” Jefferson was right in applying this principle to
religion: modern states should not (and for the most part do not) lend their coercive powers to
the support of the clerical lies of priests. Nor should they lend their coercive powers to the
support of the clinical lies of psychiatrists. As long as they do, serious persons ought not to
take psychiatry seriously—except as a threat to reason, responsibility, and liberty.
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The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty » The Burden of Responsibility » Print

THE FREEMAN | IDEAS ON LIBERTY

The Burden of Responsibility

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)—the great twentieth-century German psychiatrist-turned-

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-therapeutic-state-the-burden-of-responsibility/print/[11/15/2009 4:58:41 PM]

Psychiatry and the State

Article printed from The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty: http://www.thefreemanonline.org

URL to article: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-therapeutic-state-the-burden-of-

Click here to print.

Copyright © 2008 The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty. All rights reserved.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-therapeutic-state-the-burden-of-responsibility/print/[11/15/2009 4:58:41 PM]

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