On treating the inanimate as if it is animate and the inanimate as if it is not.

It is a Leftist tendency to begin to blur basic categories together. Given that, the Left will begin to try to treat inanimate objects as if they are persons and persons as if they are inanimate objects. From guns to animal rights to the way that the Left seeks to treat the poor or addicts as if the only issue is one of economics or medical "treatments" the basic confusion and disordered thinking is similar. The essential and primary issues that must be placed first are of philosophy, spirit and will, with therapeutic and nurturing treatments being secondary. It is not as if nurturing is inferior to ethical teaching, yet it is secondary and can become inferior if vanity drives people into a denial that it is secondary.

Social change is in the language first, prisons gradually become Departments of Corrections (as if Walmart could run prisons and correct criminal's lives with therapeutic treatment or perhaps an economic solution) as they cannot be a penitentiary, where a penalty is due and some transphysical notion of "justice" served. In the Socratic dialogue the culture has come to be on the side that argues for a lack of justice in any essential, transcendent sense. Yet we still have to get along somehow, so subjective therapy and medicalization will have to do. Besides, that's probably scientific, which always leads to safety and nurture.

Bad: Obsolete; superseded by insane, mentally ill, sick.
Good: Obsolete; superseded by sane, mentally healthy, healthy
Ethics: Obsolete; superseded by the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
....
The therapeutic ethic: convict and punish the innocent, and call it mental hospitalization; diagnose and excuse the guilty, and call it the insanity defense.

(The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
By Thomas Szasz :57)


Despite the tendency to venerate science there may never be a way to implement the effete Leftist dream of a Scientific State ruled by Mother Nature for the benefit of all. Perhaps one can model the impact of one pebble on a pond as its effect ripples out, yet the issues involved are more like measuring the impact of many pebbles of different sizes being dropped at different rates and all the ripples constantly changing each other. Change and flux is a part of Nature, in seven years you will not have the same body given the amount of cells dying and being replaced in your physical body right now. Yet here "you" are, and you may feel like pretty much the same person you were seven years ago. Maybe that is because you are in fact a person, with a mind and will capable of causing small ripples of cause and effect in Nature.

The Leftist mind does not seem to grasp that point. The other day I was answering a Leftist mind going into its typical murmurings about science and a littany of problems. And it is always a littany! This one was something like, "Leftists go with science all the time, from global warming to abstinence education it's all just scientific or somethin'. Hey, I bet giving teenagers pieces of plastic to keep their sex safely safe is like the theory of gravity too. Saftey first!" Is it scientific? The truly scientific answer may be much more Socratic than the scientism typical to the Left, as I noted to this mind murmuring about science and its littany of problems like abstinence education, there is the issue of condoms and seatbelts. That is because most persons are more like small versions of Aristotle's notion of an unmoved Mover and less like inanimate objects than the Left typically feels, so the primary issue for young people is ethical and not a piece of plastic.

But leave it to the Left to feeel otherwise in its touchy feely feelings. Most of their minds are probably smothered by now.