The placebo effect is a treatment used by medical practitioners and psychologists for over a hundred years. Placebo was given to patients when painkillers and drugs weren’t readily available or if the patient was assumed to have convinced themselves into a sickness or mental illness.
What’s the secret to this magical treatment? The subject’s own reasoning.
It’s no surprise many patients reported improved symptoms when given placebo drugs or surgeries because the very idea of its healing power is entirely subject to the user’s mindset. Even to the point that placebo in Latin means: ‘I shall please’.
In essence, leftism, progressivism (the bad kind), and liberalism (also the bad kind) provide a treatment to problems that merely please through self-reasoning and often ignore the nagging of moral reason.
In situations of differing opinions and opposition, the left takes shelter by overdosing on its own painkillers of self-reasoning in the form of human rights and equality, rather than searching for the truth. It’s like slapping a band-aid on a broken arm—it’s applied to the surface but that’s not where the problem is.
Justice for the unborn (but only on a case-by-case basis)
A recent example after a tragic accident in a nearby suburb, where a sixteen-year-old driver of a stolen vehicle killed a couple and their unborn child, news articles shifted to conversation about juvenile punishment and whether the sixteen-year-old should be charged as an adult. Among the outrage and community justice reformation taking place on Facebook, a news article titled; ‘New push to charge drivers over deaths of unborn children’ made its way to the top of my newsfeed.
Discussion around manslaughter shifted to whether or not an unborn child should be considered among the death count and the teenager be trialled accordingly.
The left holds the position that an unborn child is not known to the law as a human being until birth. Obviously the reasoning behind this position comes from the opinion that a mother should maintain the right to abort the child. But that’s where the over-complication, and self-reasoning of a very simple moralistic question comes to light, the question being: “does all life matter or not?”
How can we demand justice for an unborn child killed in a car accident but not for an unborn child killed in utero? At some point the left will clash with one another on this moral dilemma and contradict their own beliefs. The contradiction rests in the idea that they don’t believe all life is equal, regardless of what they wrote in their Instagram bio.
If an unborn child’s murder is worthy of justice, then shouldn’t all unborn children be protected?
A bigger issue
What I’m saying here is that self-reasoning seems to get the upper hand on moral reasoning in most public discourses. This isn’t exclusive to the left, but recent history would tell us that the left is driven by a tribalism of neo-Marxist ideas of equality.
This is the same reasoning that advocates for the equality of all African American’s but burn down their businesses if they don’t agree with their movement. The reasoning: that ‘something is right if I say it is’. I feel, therefore I am. I disagree, therefore it isn’t.
Jesse Moore draws from the Bible and classical literature for insight into life’s tough questions. He is currently studying at university to become a film-maker.
Jesse Moore’s previous articles can be viewed at: https://www.pressserviceinternational.org/jesse-moore.html
