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In the seemingly neverending effort to ignore motive in favour of mental health in the wake of an act of domestic terror, I'm always reminded of the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
While I disagree with Szasz on many significant points, his address in the wake of the murder of Harvey Milk in 1978 and the subsequent acquittal of Dan White due to "diminished capacity" still carries a lot to think about
"There is no such thing as a political assassination in America," Szasz wrote. "In America, only 'mental patients' kill political figures."
"JFK is assassinated. The explanation? A lone psychotic. Oswald, in turn, was shot by a lone psychotic called Jack Ruby."
"If you don't believe that," Szasz argued, society deemed you "paranoid."
This was not an argument for a JFK conspiracy theory. It was a lament that the acts of Oswald and Ruby had been written off as mental illness, with little or no effort to examine motive or context.
This effort to handwave away any examination of an ideology or belief system behind political violence, Szasz complained, meant there could by definition never be any political motive attached to that violence.
"In our 'sick society,'" Szasz concluded, "what seem to be political assassinations are [rendered] not political acts at all."
This tendency, Szasz feared, would mean diminished individual responsibility for political violence. It would also mean diminished societal responsibility. For if all motives are rendered meaningless, then no-one can be culpable.
