At Samizdata, Natalie Solent remembers how her early discovery of Ideology and Insanity by Thomas Szasz helped to shape her philosophical views in a generally libertarian direction. On the other hand, as the death of Jordan Neely shows, one of the long-term results of Szasz’s denunciation of the institutionalization of the mentally ill has been a vast increase in violence, vandalism, and anti-social behaviour in urban areas:
Szasz believed that if we accept that “mental illness” is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric “treatment” on these individuals
Great stuff. I think Szasz still has much to teach us… but I suppose by now you have all heard of the killing of Jordan Neely on a New York subway train?
I have linked to the Wikipedia account for convenience, but I do not trust Wikipedia. There are very few media outlets I do trust on subjects like this. The magazine USA Today initially called Neely a “beloved subway performer”. USA Today has changed the article since, but I saw it when it still had the original wording. The article was right to say that Jordan Neely was a human being with a tragic past, but he was not beloved by users of the New York subway. Back in 2013, a Reddit post on /r/nyc warned passengers, “Try to stay away from the Michael Jackson impersonator if you see him … Just avoid the guy at all costs, try not to look at him at all. Stay safe.” That was Neely. By the time of his death, he had been arrested more than forty times, including for crimes of violence.
There are thousands of Americans like Neely who still live as he lived, exercising the right Thomas Szasz helped gain them to be mentally ill (or whatever you want to call it) drug addicts living on the subways and roadside verges of America. It is not going well for them or for others. A viral graph shows the declining proportion of Americans held in mental hospitals and the rising proportion of Americans held in prisons forming a neat “X” over the course of the twentieth century. Liberals in the U.S. sense have a prodigious capacity to not see inconvenient facts, but even they are being forced to notice that the presence of the crazies and junkies is causing their beloved public spaces and public facilities to become dirty, frightening places to which much of the public only goes when it must.
There is a libertarian solution of course: fewer public spaces. This would increase, not decrease, the number of places where the public could happily go. Junkies and crazies are much less of a problem in shopping malls, because the owners still retain some power to eject them. I feel no shame in saying that a further benefit would be that said junkies and crazies would be under more pressure to seek treatment if the state no longer facilitated them sleeping on the sidewalks and the subway trains.
Unfortunately for everyone, this solution is politically impossible in the current climate. Even in the miraculous event that the public transport systems and the streets of New York, San Francisco and Chicago were privatised tomorrow, anti-discrimination law would ensure that practically no one could be excluded.
Thomas Szasz had a noble ideal. Sadly, the way it combined with the dominant ideals of our time has produced very bad results. I know what should and could be done to make things better in a sane society, but the US in 2023 is not that society. So what can be done?
