Is government the new playground bully?

A broad consensus among psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals holds that attempting to change or control others is, in general, mentally unhealthy — or, at the very least, not a practice of mentally or psychologically strong people.

Focusing on the behavior of other adults with the aim of altering or stopping that behavior is almost always self-defeating, an exercise in frustration and anxiety, a good way to disrupt your own mental equanimity and alienate yourself from others. 

This stands to reason. 

Consider that even if you happen to be correct about the wrongness of the particular behavior you’d like to change or fix, you can be almost certain that you do not have the power to change or fix another person or his behavior.

{mosads}And even if you do find yourself in a position of such power, to forcibly change another’s behavior is nonetheless ultimately futile. You have not, in your appeal to brute force, really changed the object of your childish neurosis, for the thought processes that led to the behavior in the first place remain quite unreachable by physical means.

Exercising this kind of power is, moreover, self-destructive; it makes you a bully and an abuser, someone who gets his way by force rather than reason.

Licensed clinical social worker and bestselling author Amy Morin counsels us to determine what we can control and to “[r]ecognize that, sometimes, all you can control is your effort and your attitude.”

Morin’s insight is simple but deeply freeing, its practical applications important and far-reaching. To be more influential in the true and meaningful sense—that is, not merely bullying people into acting as you want them to—“focus on changing your behavior.” Let go of the fool’s errand of “try[ing] to fix people who don’t want to be fixed.”

Of course, as Morin observes, for the control freak this abortive project is difficult to abandon, because he prefers trying to change others to changing the one person over whom he actually can exercise control, himself.

The political implications of these ideas are many, though they may not be obvious at first blush. Ideally, political institutions, which are after all run by mere human beings, would refrain from trying to fix or bully people, would avoid the problematic and mentally weak desire of some to impose their will on others.

Government should not try to force people to be good or enforce a one-size-fits all morality or pattern of living. Of course, this is not to suggest that individuals ought to be “free” in a way that would endow them with a license to hurt, defraud, or steal from others. True freedom requires the reciprocal obligation to recognize the dignity and autonomy of all others—and therefore to respect their individual rights.

The political process is the misguided and psychologically destructive appetency to control or fix others writ large, alchemized from vice to virtue. 

What is for the individual an indicator of serious mental weakness is for the state a hallowed calling. We, through politics, exalt the petty, domineering spirit of the small man so afraid to look in the mirror that he attempts to distract himself by obsessing over the perceived faults and flaws of others. 

On a fundamental level, such people are morally and psychologically broken.

As Morin writes, “Rather than controlling their emotions, they’re always trying to control the environment—and the people in it.”

Human government is the deranged project of control predicated on this warped thinking, made much worse by the fact that we treat it as a necessary and proper part of the natural order rather than a mental health problem.

Enlightenment liberalism is in large part the simple argument that each and every individual should be presumed free, that, assuming they respect the equal liberty of others, people shouldn’t be pushed around or made to conform.

As Georgetown political philosopher Jason Brennan writes, “people should be free to live as they see best, without having to ask permission from or justify themselves to other people.”

The coercive power of politics and government must be reduced as far as possible to the modest function of defending the individual from aggression, lest that power fall into the hands of narrow-minded busybodies, as indeed it has.

The rest of us, though, are responsible for calling the busybodies’ authoritarian compulsion what it is. The irrational need to change, fix, or control other adults is a serious mental health problem.

A free, liberal society is one whose citizens live and let live, bound together not by fear and coercion, but by genuine fellow feeling, good will, and voluntary cooperation.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, an expert policy advisor at both the Future of Freedom Foundation and the Heartland Institute, and a columnist at the Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.