A lovely review from a reader on Amazon.com:
I read around 30 pages on-line by searching for "liberal", and it appears to me that the presentation suffers from the usual difficulties of argument from Randian commitment hyper-individualism and amoral familism.
The added twist here that the author appears completely oblivious to the strong parallels between his blanket condemnation of his ideological opponents via a diagnosis of psychological pathology and the use of identical techniques by Authoritarian governments to punish dissidence as mental illness - the good doctor appears to me based on this work to be exactly the kind of man, wielding exactly the kinds of arguments, that the psychiatric minions of Russian Communism and Chinese Kleptocracy deployed (and still do) to justify the commitment of political dissidents to mental institutions for involuntary "treatment" as a means of punishment and a warning to others: "no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and Communism".
Still... just because his diatribe on the liberal mind resembles a publication issued under the imprimatur of the Serbski Institute for Forensic Psychiatry and devoted to the political menace of "sluggishly progressing schizophrenia" we should not discard out of hand the author's conviction of the dangers of liberal delusion - perhaps if such pathology became the basis of actual societies the reality would be as desperate and dispiriting as he posits.
Fortunately in this case such fears can be subjected to the test of actual experiment: there are numerous Western European societies where for generations voters and politicians under the sway of such delusions have been in a position to set policy, and have been doing so.
And these places - though apparently governed by the demented on behalf of the delusional - don't seem to be doing much worse than ourselves and certainty don't seem to be in danger of imminent collapse - in fact looking at the evidence one could almost become convinced of the apparently heretical notion that both sorts of societies seem to be reasonably stable and successful.
But of course, the very idea is insane.
I think thirty pages is a sufficient basis for this sort of comparison.
If you are really curious, the best account in English of Soviet Era punitive psychiatry is "Soviet Psychiatric Abuse: The Shadow over World Psychiatry by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway", I see there are several copies available used here on Amazon. I no longer own a copy, so I can't provide you with the exact parallel quotes, but there are lots of them, most often related to a diagnosis of what Soviet psychiatry called "infantile personality with paranoid development of the social reforming type".
BTW, your comments suggest some interesting ethical questions I had not considered until I read your response.
To take one, Rossiter apparently has a substantial practice evaluating the mental states of participants in both criminal and civil trails, in this capacity his opinion has substantial influence on peoples' fates, and I have to wonder if any mental health professional holding the opinion that around a quarter of the population can be judged to be seriously mentally disturbed on the basis of their political opinions can be considered an objective judge of such matters; for example I would think people holding "conservative" political views would be somewhat leery of court ordered evaluation by a "liberal" psychiatrist who believed that "conservative" opinion was sufficient basis for diagnosis of a variety of severe personality disorders.
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