| HN Mirror

The problem is that they are a bandage for the real problem. While some people may have a temperament that predisposes them to having depressive episodes or symptoms, or constitutional defects that may result in such problems, the general rise in depression, anxiety, and mental illness thus characterized points toward a cultural crisis.

For example, the sexual revolution and the hedonistic false promise of "safe sex" and "free love" has wrecked families and communities, poisoned relations between the sexes (as this worldview is fundamentally selfish and exploitative), devalued human life; produced friendlessness, porn-addicted incels, sexual abuse, demographic decline; and produced an inability to relate to other human beings in healthy ways. That this should produce loneliness and isolation is not surprising, and this alone could produce the observed misery as human beings are profoundly social animals who grow and thrive by giving and receiving care in the various relations they enter into.

Note also the ideologies of big-c Capitalism (not to be confused with free markets) and Socialism, both of which ultimately celebrate selfishness; self-centered people are not the exemplars of happiness, to say the least. Both ideologies are rooted in the false anthropology served up by liberalism (as in Locke, not as in liberal institutions), one that misconstrues freedom as being able to do whatever you want--a concern for only exterior constraint--versus being able to do what you ought, to live according to human nature, to acquire the virtues--in a word, self-mastery. The liberal view of freedom naturally leads to debauched and increasingly depraved indulgence of the base passions, ever greater rebellion against and distortion of reason, something the wisest of the ancients already recognized was a recipe for misery, not happiness. "[A] good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices." Thus wrote Augustine. Living immorally, living by vice, produces misery by definition. Evil actions destroy the evildoer from the inside.

And do not forget repressed and unresolved guilt, something sexual misbehavior easily and justifiably produces and multiplies. We have abolished the notion once called "sin" from our culture as some archaic superstition. If we're just atoms in the void, who cares? Ah, but it is not so. Guilt isn't just something you can erase. It lodges itself in the mind like a splinter, a poison, a worm. It calls for justice. It gnaws at us. Repressed, it exacts revenge through strangely expressed symptoms, like what we once called neurosis, which is to say anxiety, despair, and depression; behaviors like projection of the burden of guilt onto scapegoats. How often do these not become construed in medical terms, understood as maladies to be treated like a physical disease. By obfuscating the true cause, we've robbed ourselves of he explanation and the way to freedom. The truth will set your free, but this will not be easy. Taking stock of one's moral past terrifies the prideful man. It threatens his addictions. The light of truth sears his conscience, makes him see the arrows piecing his soul. How to remove them? There is a way. But even then, the wounds need time to heal.

The tendency to transform our moral deficits into medical problems is escapism, and it will not last. It will ruin us totally.