By Marvin Ross
One of the comments I received from my last blog A Pox on the Woke Folk was that I was not explicit enough with what Woke represents. Let me try again with an example from California. This is from the LA Times of January 26:
A coalition of disability and civil rights advocates filed a lawsuit Thursday asking the California Supreme Court to block the rollout of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s far-reaching new plan to address severe mental illness by compelling treatment for thousands of people.
I don’t know about you but this confuses me. There are thousands of people suffering needlessly from some form or other of severe mental illness who could be helped with treatment. The governor wants to help them get back some normality of life so that they do not have to live on the streets pushing all their worldly belongings around in a shopping cart.
Why is that a bad thing?
Ok The answer is that:
Disability Rights California, Western Center on Law and Poverty and the Public Interest Law Project — asked the state’s high court to strike down as unconstitutional the program known as CARE Court (for Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment). The groups argue that the sweeping new court system will violate due process and equal protection rights under the state constitution, while “needlessly burdening fundamental rights to privacy, autonomy and liberty.”
This is an absurdity since people have a right to be well and to not suffer. If part of their illness means that they do not realize that they are even ill (as is the case with many with mental illnesses), we have even more of an obligation to help them. The philosophical basis for this belief that we have no right to impose treatment on anyone comes from the philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty.
“the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”
Mill wrote that book in 1859 at a time when there were very few medical treatments for anything let alone mental illnesses. But Mill was not stupid or arrogant and he also added this:
“Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against personal injury.”
By not taking care of these people, we are denying humanity. Besides, medical science has progressed considerably since 1859 and we now understand to a much greater extent the causes of these illnesses and we can now treat to a certain degree of success. Why should these individuals be denied the relief we have?
The reason seems to be that the woke folk do not believe in the scientific advances that have taken place in psychiatry. What gives them the right to ignore those advances? Have they studied these disciplines? What if they decide that they do not agree to allow people with cancer to be treated? We’ve already seen what those who do not believe in vaccine science have caused.
In Bill Maher’s rant on the topic, he says that “good intentions can turn into the insane arrogance of thinking your revolution is so awesome and your generation is mind bendingly improved that you have bequeathed the world with a new kind of human”
That was the Cultural Revolution and that is the arrogance of these so called civil libertarians who welcome seeing people suffer because they think they know better than others. Well, they don’t know better.
Enjoy Bill Maher’s rant.