Why We Live Like This

Two weeks ago in Charlotte, North Carolina, Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death by DeCarlos Brown Jr.

The full video is a horror. No one, including Iryna, seems to fully understand what has happened. She is terrified, but doesn’t cry out. None of the bystanders take notice of the blood slicking the floor while Brown stalks the aisles, gibbering. You’re supposed to mind your business on the subway.

Brown is schizophrenic, and has at least fourteen prior arrests for larceny, robbery, assault, shoplifting, and threats. His mother kicked him out of her home because he was unmanageably aggressive, and eventually obtained an involuntary commitment order.

Of course, he was immediately arrested and charged with first degree murder — but the question is why, after over a decade of escalating violent criminal activity, he was at liberty in the first place.

This crime seems to have broken containment.

Fox News is openly talking about black-on-white crime and anti-white media bias. Even on Bluesky, if people are commenting on the crime at all, it’s to argue for reinstitutionalization — a policy that was denounced as fascist just a few years ago.

There seems to be consensus: the libs aren’t bothering to argue that this is a one-off, overblown random crime. It’s somewhere between “disastrously bad policy” and “criminal negligence” and “eliminationist conspiracy”

But the proposed solutions are all, in effect, identical. Whether it’s a cell in a hospital, or a cell in a prison, or a coffin, everyone recognizes that this person should have been permanently taken out of circulation a long time ago.

Even die-hards like evan loves worf are just saying the same thing in lib-speak: there’s no pill that makes homeless criminals behave themselves, so “robust universal healthcare”, for a guy like this, just means permanent institutionalization.

I don’t think it’s worth quibbling about what kind of box he belongs in — what matters, as far as the public interest is concerned, is that he needed to go in a box. He can’t or won’t live in a way that the rest of us can tolerate, so we should have long ago imposed some coercive restraint on his behavior.

The gentlest and most “rehabilitative” solution available to us would be to commit him the first time he does anything antisocial, pay a big moose orderly to force him to take his Haldol every morning, and let him watch TV and do puzzles. That’s the best we know how to do for this kind of person. (Whether that’s worth doing is a separate question.)

Virtually everyone seems to be saying, “we don’t have to live like this” — but we have lived like this our whole lives. It’s worth asking why.

Deinstitutionalization was a bipartisan effort: a common cause for leftist egalitarianism and conservative libertarianism.

Ken Kesey (who belonged in a ditch for many other reasons) wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, depicting life in a mental hospital from the Rawlsian veil of ignorance — how awful it would be to be treated like an insane child if you were, in fact, a handsome funny regular guy.

Soviet defectors reported on their governments’ growing abuse of psychiatric commitment to imprison civil libertarians, religious believers, and attempted émigrés, making it pretty easy to sell the idea that This Is Not Who We Are.

Simultaneously, clinical success of antipsychotic drugs like thorazine created the impression that the severely mentally ill really were just ordinary people with a monocausal chemical problem, like a vitamin deficiency — which strengthened the intuition that depriving them of ordinary adult liberties was immoral and un-American.

Mental hospitals are predicated on the idea that certain people must be deprived of basic liberties: not as punishment for a crime, but for their own good and the good of society, as a condition of their nature. They make bad decisions, so someone else must make the decisions for them.

This naturally conflicts with Western liberals’ belief in the individual’s limitless right and capacity for self-actualization.

I may have no serious risk of being committed in a mental hospital — but encountering someone who does have the kinds of fundamental limitations that justify an involuntary commitment might force me to confront my own fundamental limitations, which is psychologically intolerable.

Deinstitutionalization had little stated connection to egalitarian anti-racism, but both were driven by the same psychic aversions. If other people have natural endowments that bound and define their potential, then my potential (or worse, my child’s potential) might also be bounded and defined. Much better to believe that every child is a latent prodigy, a blank canvas limited only by education and resources and self-esteem.

(Trans ideation creates even more fundamental problems for “mental health” as a concept: the idea that the mind should be expected to accurately model and operate within objective reality. To believe in “trans” identity is to believe in a kind of Calvinist Absolute Sovereignty of the Self. If there is an apparent confrontation between external reality and the Self, then external reality must be brought to heel.)

I’m being somewhat sarcastic about this, but the psychological need to believe in one’s own freedom to act is incredibly strong, and the fear that that freedom might be illusory is suffocating.

The liberal insanities that have created trans shooters and cannibal subway zombies are rooted in understandable desires.

Becoming acquainted with mentally ill or low-IQ people challenges some load-bearing psychic pillars.

They may have some agency to make their lives better or worse on the margins, but the bounds of that potential are obvious. They can’t overcome their limitations by paying attention or working harder or having a better attitude. They are what they are — which means that you are what you are.

Considered in light of one’s own persistent shortcomings and insecurities, this knowledge can be difficult to bear. This is the sense in which repentance and change of heart is a literal miracle — a mortal impossibility.

One way to deal with this problem is to reach out for grace; another is to deny the problem’s existence, or at least compartmentalize it. It is comforting to believe, for example, that there are discrete categories of people who “have a diagnosis”, and this makes them incapable of change and not responsible for their actions — but I am still the Captain of My Soul.

But if you step outside this self-pity and neurosis, it’s pretty obvious that this just isn’t true, and isn’t working.

DeCarlos Brown is an extreme outlier, but all of the capacities and tendencies of personality that led to this crime are found in gradients and distributions in the population. For every shocking and mediagenic crime like this, there are millions of less-dramatic crimes and dysfunctions unfolding every day, in proportion to the presence of those tendencies, in all the ways you would intuitively expect.

Alongside that host of incorrigible criminal personalities, there are tens of millions of people who are just ill-equipped to deal with life’s complexities in ways that don’t quite rise to the level of a clinical mental disability. The vast majority of these people are not malicious or dangerous — they spend most of their lives just wandering around making dumb personal decisions, and getting screwed by systems built by and for smarter people.

There are at least 100 million people in America, for instance, who are incapable of understanding compound interest, or negotiating with a mechanic, or doing their taxes, or reading a contract — but our law makes no allowance for this, so they’re expected just to stumble through all these transactions, and take whatever deal their Lovecraftian bloodsucking counterparty can get away with.

To compensate for this lifelong gauntlet ass-beating, liberal egalitarianism offers a few consolations: a propaganda narrative that gives them someone to blame, a limitless freedom to express racial grievance, and the right to vote — which is why DeCarlos Brown targeted a blonde white woman, and why the Democrat-Run™ criminal justice system in Charlotte, North Carolina gave him the leash to do it.

America seems to have found consensus on extreme cases like DeCarlos Brown — but it will be impotent to stop them until it addresses the bigger picture.

Anyone who has loved someone with a mental illness or disability knows intuitively what it means to take care of a person who is not fully accountable: it means keeping a lot of eyes on them, and maintaining a long list of things they’re simply not allowed to do.

And if you’ve loved someone who’s “just kind of dumb”, you know that there ought to be more eyes on them, and that they’d be a lot better off if they had some advocacy and help making decisions — including the power to unilaterally override their (dumb, bad) judgment.

But a giga-scaled liberal bureaucratic state can’t possibly handle that job, because it’s a messy, case-by-case thing that can’t be modeled with an algorithm or DSM checklist — and, more importantly, because such an institution has no human motivations and doesn’t care about anyone. (This was what people found true and resonant about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — you don’t want the DMV lady deciding whether you’re sane or not.)

DeCarlos Brown is a feral, violent psychopath. The people he grew up around were “just kind of dumb”, and not equipped to handle him, and neither was the state.

Unfortunately, the giga-scaled liberal bureaucratic state has systematically dismantled all the human institutions that could have addressed this problem.

In fact, the liberal state’s purpose is to make war against all such hierarchies and particularities.

Human beings can’t be trusted with stewardship over one another: instead, they must be ruled by impartial and universal algorithms — which, in practice, means being ruled by the technicians who create the algorithms, and the lawyers who interpret them.

When the universal and impartial algorithms reveal systematic disparities in outcome across protected classes, the algorithms must be adjusted to eliminate the disparity. And since any standard of capability or behavior will reveal systematic disparities, all standards must be eliminated.

The coercive power of the state, then, exists not to enforce public order, but to prevent its enforcement — and even to suppress public outcry for its enforcement.

Which, ultimately, means innocent young women being savagely and pointlessly murdered by a retarded animal in a subway, surrounded by onlookers and police.

Fortunately, the liberal managerial system is rapidly being disrupted, both by new technologies and by its own internal contradictions.

People won’t live this way. They won’t fight this state’s wars. They won’t raise families under these conditions. They aren’t investing in this system’s future.

Decentralized communications technology is overwhelming the apparatus of narrative control upon which mass democracy depends. (Iryna Zarutska’s murder would have been effortlessly concealed from public view in 1995.) Novel military technology is eradicating the scale advantage of vast impersonal managerial systems.

(Cynics may point at places like Zimbabwe or South Africa to suggest that decay can persist indefinitely — but these states are a colossal ideological irrationality — a geopolitical luxury maintained at great cost over decades by a prosperous global empire. If America ever becomes Zimbabwe, there will be no carrier strike groups to make sure that Zimbabwe stays Zimbabwe.)

In your lifetime, humanity will once again be governed at human scale, by accountable, personal, human judgment.

Which is a pretty extreme “good news, bad news” situation. Competent and well-intentioned human leaders have the power to create safe, happy, and harmonious communities that will remember our present headless DMVocracy as unimaginably dystopian.

But the power vacuum created by the collapse will also unleash all the violence and abuse and petty despotism that the liberal state was built to extirpate.

So, if you believe that this system is nearing its end, the way to short that system is not to attack it head-on, but to build relationships with capable and virtuous people who will be ready, when called upon, to assume the responsibilities that the system has abdicated.

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