Late to the party here, but wow, that was one beautiful essay, @Donald_Petersen.
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I found the following in @socialistdogmom’s recap of the Trial of James Fields, and I thought it appropriate.
I’ve really struggled with how to handle this portion of monday’s proceedings. I have a lot of personal and contradictory feelings about it. To slightly spoil the discussion that follows, it is very clear that Fields suffers from significant mental illness. I won’t dispute that in any way. And I want to be clear that mental illness is no one’s fault. That it isn’t something you can will away or pull yourself up by your bootstraps to overcome. I have been thinking about how to have this conversation for months. During his federal arraignment in July, Fields told the judge he is being treated for anxiety, ADHD, and bipolar disorder. My first thought was, well so am I and I’ve never killed anyone. I recognize this knee jerk reaction is unfair and unreasonable – people experience the same illnesses very differently. I do not mean to imply that because I, or other people with these illnesses, have been able to navigate them with varying degrees of success that those whose struggle is different are in some way deficient or choosing to be sick.
For some people, no amount of intervention or personal effort will ever mitigate symptoms to the point that you can live what other people would call a normal, symptom-free life. And there are conditions that can be so severe that you may take actions that are out of character for you, that you may be to some degree not responsible for. I don’t dispute that. But ideology is not an illness.
Mr Fields was and is quite ill, but a person suffering from identical symptoms who was NOT a white supremacist would not have taken the same actions. Insofar as it is their legal obligation to represent their client to the best of their ability, I believe it was fair and ethical for his defense team to present this evidence as mitigation at sentencing rather than as a defense during the guilt phase of the trial. But I do not agree with the philosophical thrust of the argument generally. I do not think his mental illness excuses or even truly makes any progress toward explaining his actions. That he is sick is a fact, but I don’t find it to be a relevant one. I would argue that the witness they presented would mostly agree with that statement.
I do not want it to be lost in this story that white supremacy is not a mental illness. Racism is not a mental illness. You can be a racist with a mental illness the same as you can be a racist who has diabetes or a racist who has carpal tunnel syndrome. No one would ever argue that it was your diabetes that made you racist or your wrist pain made you a murderer. The conflation of mental illness with acts of violence is dangerous. It not only allows those who commit violence to shed some of the culpability they should bear, but it demeans and endangers everyone who lives with mental illness. People with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than they are to commit them. We can condemn Fields for his actions without shaming people who live with mental illness. We can discuss hate without equating it with mental illness.
I agree wholeheartedly with the above.
There are probably terrible people who are mentally healthy who will not ever commit murder, and perhaps some of them would, if they were mentally ill. The blame, though, shouldn’t be given to the “mentally ill” part, but to the “terrible people” part.
Would James Fields have murdered Heather Hayes, and maimed all of those other people, had he been mentally healthy? Maybe not.
Regardless, he definitely wouldn’t have murdered them had he valued their lives. Had he thought of them as someone other than “the enemy.” Had he been, in any way, a decent person, with or without a mental illness.
Fields thought he was fighting a war, and that peaceful protestors were valid targets in that war. His mental illness didn’t cause him to think that: that’s a moral judgement, consistent with the ideology he participated with and espoused online. Did his mental illness made the difference of whether he performed the attack or not? I can’t say; probably no one can. However, I feel confident in saying that even if his illness pushed him over the edge, he willfully walked up to that edge entirely of his own volition. If he hadn’t allowed his moral fibre to decay to the point where fear of consequences was the only thing preventing him from committing murder, then, even if he did lose sight of those consequences momentarily, it wouldn’t have caused so much as a stubbed toe.
His family’s story is a tragic one. But nothing in it forced him to become a white supremacist, and without making that choice, without continually making that choice for years, James Fields would never have killed Heather Hayes, no matter how severe his bipolar disorder, anxiety, and ADHD were. That should be the take-away from this, and from nearly all of these mass killers: that these are not otherwise-good people whose illness causes them to do horrible things, but people who believe horrible things, and who may also have endured some pain due to their illness.
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It’s funny, there was a story going around years ago about how there was a guy who ended up making a sizable contribution to compiling the Oxford English Dictionary. He had time on his hands. He had time on his hands because he was in an asylum after having developed a paranoid fear of Irishmen culminating in his having knifed one to death. His pathology, interestingly, came about at a time of history when there was a centuries-old low-level civil war going on about the Irish Questions: religion. geography. class. business. families. He was a gentleman and the alternative was the noose.
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