Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEW  written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 2.5 minutes Why is Trauma Dispatch posting a review of a book on a political philosophy? The following passage from the book provides the basis of an explanation: “A political paradigm provides us with the basic concepts and relations needed to recognize events taking place in the political arena and to understand their significance.” Without an intellectual framework, individuals will neither see nor understand clearly what is happening. Trauma Dispatch has a similar aim—to recognize events taking place in research, clinical, and advocacy arenas that appear to be about trauma on the surface but have deeper motivations as partisan political acts. Book Summary Learning about the conservative paradigm (and its rival liberalism) is missing from the education of Americans. Hazony fills this gap, beginning with the origins of conservatism in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries as England struggled to balance traditional monarchical rule with growing personal liberties. Hazony then follows this thread during the founding of the United States and on to modern times. Hazony also described the liberal paradigm in detail. Today’s liberals do not call themselves by one name or manifesto. They disorient opponents with a shifting vocabulary including the Left, progressivism, social justice, anti-racism, anti-fascism, Black lives matter, critical race theory, identity politics, woke, and others. Hazony refers to them alternatively as Marxists and as Enlightened liberals. An essential difference between the two paradigms is that liberals, embracing principles of the Enlightenment, believe humans can discover universal truths simply through reason, which, more than once, were used to justify revolutions. In contrast, conservatives value preserving tradition that has been borne of empiricism, i.e., it is worth keeping what has been proven to work through time and experience. Hazony recounts the history of how a “liberal hegemony” was achieved in American politics through the 1960s reworking of the constitution via supreme court decisions, and the constant compromises conservatives made with liberals during the Cold War. As a result, many of today’s so-called conservatives are confused about the content and purposes of true conservatism.
Analysis Trauma was never mentioned in Hazony’s book, but the relevance to trauma is realizing that pscyhologists in academia are nearly all liberals, clinicians in the field are mostly liberals, and many are of the progressive Marxist type [1]. A liberal hegemony in trauma paradigms has been achieved in the mental health professions (psychology, social work, counseling, and psychiatry) by a combination of their creation in the early twentieth century with social justice foundations, and the subsequent stranglehold through what has been described as the long march through the institutions [2]. This hegemony raises two concerns. First, Enlightened liberalism is so attractive because they think they’ve discovered the secrets of understanding why disadvantaged humans exist. The simplicity of their approach (all you need to do is use reason) allows adherents to feel like they have “grasped an immensely powerful truth” that explains a vast array of effects. This, in a nutshell, also describes the remarkable trauma hype around beliefs in toxic stress, Adverse Childhood Experiences, complex PTSD, and dozens of other dogmatic beliefs. The secret cause is oppression in nearly all cases. As Hazony noted, “In every society, there will always be plenty of people who have reason to feel they’ve been oppressed or exploited…And those who are troubled by such apparent oppression will frequently find a home among the Marxists.” The same dynamic applies to trauma activists who believe they have finally grasped that trauma is the cause of every disadvantaged group, every bad behavior, and nearly every type of mental dysfunction. The trauma hype claims are not based in evidence. They were constructed to be consistent with a liberal political paradigm. Second, is what Hazony calls the dance of liberalism and Marxism. Center-left liberals are trying to conserve their traditions, while Marxism is bent on destroying any tradition. But liberals, trying to appease Marxists to turn them into allies, find that Marxists cannot be appeased. Hence, the dance moves in only one direction towards more Marxism. Some liberals want to speak out about absurd disinformation but are afraid of being purged by the Marxist mobs. This describes why hardly anyone ever seriously criticizes trauma hype. Not only are there few conservative scholars around to speak out, the liberal scholars who want to speak out know they may not survive a purge. References [1] Neil Gross, Solon Simmons (September 24, 2007). The social and political views of American professors (working paper). ResearchGate. [2] Christopher F. Rufo (July 20, 2023). How the Radical Left Conquered the Culture. Substack. Comments are closed.
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