The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point - and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior - smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians. Can American society survive this legal-psychiatric assault on its moral and political foundations?
Thomas SzaszRelated topics
american assault assertion behavior concept destructive disease drinking equivalent fast gambling increasing insanity killing liquor moral murder point political prove responsibility responsible say sick smoking society suing tobacco use zeal replacingRelated quotes
A factor that is almost indispensable to this kind of behavior [serial killing] is the mobility of contemporary American life. Living in large centers of population, and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It's the anonymity factor, and it has a twofold effect. First of all if you're among strangers you're less likely to remember them, or care what they're doing or what they should, or should not, be doing. If they should or shouldn't be there. Secondly, you're conditioned almost not to be afraid of strangers. Mobility is very important here. As we've seen...the individual's [himself in third person] modus operandi was moving large distances in an attempt to camouflage what he was doing. Moving these distances, he was able to take advantage of the anonymity factor.
Ted Bundy
I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.
H. G. Wells
When my dad died at the end of my sophomore year [at university], I stopped and took stock of my life. There was this real sense that my childhood was officially over. I decided I wanted to be an actor. I knew I was loved as a kid. The thing you can always rely on, your core person, comes from your family's attention and love. When my mother got sick, and I'd see her fight to survive, it gave me an early view of bravery and what life was about. I was able to prepare for it. Your mother dies, and you're eighteen, and you face a choice. Are you going to take drugs? Become a drunk? Or are you going to try to become more spiritual? Why not go with the thing that seems more positive? [pause] Why do I tend to be optimistic? Because the alternative is just crushing to my soul.
Martin Short
But why do you force upon men, a million years of this wretched existence?” asked Lanarck.
Laoome gave an untranslatable mental shrug.
"I am just, and indeed benevolent,” he said. "These men worship me as a god. Upon a certain hillock, which they hold sacred, they bring their sick and wounded. There, if the whim takes me, I restore them to health. So far as their existence is concerned, they relish the span of their life as much as you do yours.”
"Yet in creating these worlds, you are responsible for the happiness of the inhabitants. If you were truly benevolent, why should you permit disease and terror to exist?”
Laoome again gave his mental shrug. "I might say that I have this universe of our own as a model. Perhaps there is another Laoome dreaming out the worlds we ourselves live on.
Jack Vance
Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom," a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions-North and South, black and white, labor and management-but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.
P. J. O'Rourke
