A Therapeutic Society

Therapy – treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder

Psychology Today:  What Is Therapy?  Psychotherapy, also called talk therapy or usually just “therapy,” is a form of treatment aimed at relieving emotional distress and mental health problems. Provided by any of a variety of trained professionals—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, or licensed counselors—it involves examining and gaining insight into life choices and difficulties faced by individuals, couples, or families. Therapy sessions refer to structured meetings between a licensed provider and a client with a  goal of improving some aspect of their life. Psychotherapy encompasses many types of treatment and is practiced by a range of clinicians using a variety of strategies. The critical aspect is that the client or patient works collaboratively with the therapist and can identify improvement and positive change over time.

PK – Most therapy operates on the principle that every man is good at the core and life issues are the result of victimhood/bullying, one’s culture (ghetto/parent missing/poverty), or the influence of powerful people that coerced and influenced bad behaviors.  Therapy believes that with enough love, time, hugs, and sunshine – a person can re-orient and become calm and successful.

The Democrats are the party of therapy.  Thus the place of prisons, police, capital punishment and war are at best used only in the most extreme situations.  Rather, giving people housing, free education, loan forgiveness, and even reparations are good and proper and can bring an end to many of the evils besetting the country, thus ushering in a society of goodwill and peace.  The same holds true with foreign policy so 100 million dollars to Iran was a gesture of goodwill with the hopes of bringing about peace.

The Republicans generally are the party of law and order – the belief that all men are seriously flawed at the core and without clear and strong restraints and without a legitimate fear of significant punishment are capable of doing bad and even dastardly things.

Jeremiah 17:9, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked…

Philippians 2:15, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation…

John 3:19, That the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light.

The Therapeutic Society by Francis Fukuyama (excerpt from an article in the National Affairs Journal)

Traditional religions like Christianity understand man as sinful and seek to constrain this sinful nature by moral rules established by an authority higher than man himself. While discarding transcendental authority, the natural-right teaching of the Enlightenment similarly argued that reason dictated universal rules for the ordering of society based on a concept of human nature. 

Since then, of course, much of Western thought has reversed this understanding, arguing that human beings are by nature good and that evil and unhappiness can be located in the constraints put on them by external authority. In its contemporary psychologized version, the object of therapy is to liberate the authentic and unfettered self from these externally imposed rules. Alcoholism, drug dependence, sexual obsession, and the like have been reclassified from moral failings to diseases over which the individual has no control; even laziness is diagnosed as “attention-deficit disorder” and treated with the drug Ritalin. Imperceptibly, the object of worship has shifted from God to the self, a self that, at its core, consists not of reason but of feelings. Human beings become socially related primarily through the expression of emotion and by empathizing with its expression in others. 

Not therapy – JESUS! 

Philippians 4:6-7, Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

Mark 5:15, Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. 

Isaiah 26:3, You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.

II Timothy 1:7, For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

Ephesians 4:22-23, That you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind.