It is at times like this, when news comes of the murder of 20 children and 7 adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that I miss my dear friend and intellectual soul-mate Tom Szasz, RIP, more than ever.

One of the last emails he wrote to me—he was a constant in my life for years—was dated Fri 6/29/2012 5:52 PM. It was a response to one of mine. I had complained (kvetched, as we older Jews would say) about the loss of “wisdom, shophia.” He wrote back using the beautiful Greek concept I had invoked.

“As you know I have done that (and so have you). But this is what passes for wisdom now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/abdul-awkal-deemed-mentally-unfit_n_1600273.html
So be it.
Love, Tom.”

Like all brilliant men, Tom was pessimistic. Reality warranted a pessimism of the deepest kind, something we shared. Tom was alluding to the dominant narrative in the Zeitgesit about evil, and the attendant error of medicalizing misconduct.

That ritual has begun. Once again, the true “Mad Hatters”—the self-serving tele-experts, twits of psychology and psychiatry—have gone into high gear.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the exculpation industry has taken its perennial position. And it is that of placing wicked behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions.

To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease. The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. These liberals (including most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency if—and only if—adaptive actions are involved.

As the psychiatric shaman has it, a killer is not evil, but ill. The modern-day witch doctor’s potions can thus exorcise evil, as evil is merely a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer.

UPDATE I: CORRECTION. The shooter’s name is Adam Lanza. Media initially named Ryan Lanza, the “suspect’s older brother,” because A. Lanza may have been carrying his brother’s identity document.

UPDATE II: GUNS: THERE THEY GO AGAIN. Displays of evil invariably elicit calls to ban or restrict certain firearms, as these are seen as part of causality. If you’re going to look for root causes, look for the right root causes. I’d look in the direction of permissive, child-centered, progressive parenting, which is conducive to the creation of narcissistic personalities. Progressive, indulgent, child-obsessed parenting is practiced by “conservatives” and liberals alike.

An acrimonious divorce, where the young man was alienated from a father by the Courts, by the mother or by the father himself, or by all the above: these could go toward the making of a monster. However, anti-gun, progressive interests dominate the media, and so one is less likely to hear a rational debate about the role of permissive parenting—where the child is encouraged to think that the universe does and should orbit around him—and the breakdown of the traditional family, in the creation of these monsters.

Here is something I fished out of the Mercer Articles Archive, dated … 2000. The Calgary Herald article I wrote quotes Canadian Professor Marilyn Bowman:

“The prototype aggressor,” explains Bowman, “is a man whose self-appraisal is unrealistically positive.” Like all efforts to drum up ignorance, this one can be dangerous.
“…every kind of social problem is analyzed as the outgrowth of low self esteem,” and while “treatment programs to teach people how to love themselves are put forward as the means of raising self-esteem,” not only is “the relationship between emotion and well being not robust, causal or meaningful,” but, on the contrary, there is a dark side to self-esteem.

What follows is a segment of a conversation I had with Karen De Coster, CPA. “Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol” is now on RT:

Karen De Coster is an accounting/finance professional and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the corporate state, food politics, and essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings.

ILANA MERCER: Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. As convention has it, Americans should give thanks to Native Americans for having taught them to plant corn. Even if this palliative history—this bit of myth-making—were true, all in all corn is a modern-day curse, is it not? Give us the goods on corn and Thanksgiving. What “primal” recipes made their way onto your Thanksgiving dinner table?

KAREN DE COSTER: Corn is at the top of the government’s list for subsidies. The current farm bill gives billions per year to commodity producers of corn. According to the EWG farm subsidy database, corn subsidies in the US totaled $82 billion from 1995-2011. These subsidies take the financial risk out of the system, thereby allowing for a fabricated sustainability. Hence we have the corn-bred Industrial Food Machine.
Cheap corn is a staple in processed, industrial foods. No matter how unhealthy these products are known to be, they become the preferred choice of food for consumers looking for bargains in order to chop at their family budgets.
Additionally, we have had 30+ years of federal alternative fuel subsidies to support ethanol production. In the early 1980s, the government’s ethanol subsidies made it worthwhile for everyone to risk getting into the corn growing game. They did, and the subsidies drove down the price of corn while the government’s tariffs on sugar drove up prices of that product. These government interventions brought us an economical alternative to the tariff-burdened sugar: high fructose corn syrup. Like soybean oil, HFCS is found in so many processed foods, as well as beverages. Nowadays, you have to go to a Mercado (a Mexican market) to buy coke with cane sugar instead of the usual HFCS.
The pilgrims may have celebrated with corn as a way of showing gratitude for their plentiful harvest, but growing that corn involved risk, capital investment, much labor, and it offered no subsidies.
For a primal Thanksgiving, I have access here to free-range, heritage turkeys; raw butter; locally grown organic sweet potatoes, and fresh-off-the-farm stalks of Brussels sprouts. I make my own mayonnaise from free-range eggs, vinegars, olive oil, and nut oils. It takes 10-15 minutes to make a big batch that stays good long enough to use it all. This gives me a pass on the government’s horrific soybean oil, most of which is made from subsidized, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Furthermore, Monsanto corn will never make it to my Thanksgiving table.

ILANA MERCER: Speaking of the devil, what’s up with the misguided love establishment libertarians have for GMOs and Monsanto?

KAREN DE COSTER: Wrong-headed libertarians worship Monsanto and exalt the Frankenfoods (GMO) industry because they believe these “food” innovations are advancing mankind and therefore represent the ultimate free market. No matter what your views on the science of genetically modified foods, the Big Food-Big Agra complex, as I have mentioned, is a heavily subsidized and government-enabled corporatocracy. …

Read the complete interview, “Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol,” on RT. Stay tuned for Part II of my conversation with Karen.

Still better: Receive this interview in your email. Scroll down the page to sign-up for it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)

I have “messaged” paleo life-style guru Karen De Coster the following questions:

Just as I had begun to enjoy guilt-free eggs comes this study from the Atherosclerosis Journal. What do you think are the methodological flaws of the study? Which data do you suppose the scientists involved have omitted, to get these presumably skewed results?

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