They say the definition of madness is repeating the same actions and expecting different results…
I do find myself worrying about Liz Truss. Not in the sense of worrying that she might actually get another attempt at destroying the country. I’m worried about Liz Truss herself. Like, is she okay? Does she need help? Are there loved ones who are concerned about her mental state?
Being a greedy self serving arsehole isn’t a mental illness.
I get that you’re probably joking and I’m not trying to have a go at you but I think it’s important to point out because it both gives people like her an out, and also deepens stigma of mental illness (when mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators of it).
I think it’s much more likely that she just doesn’t give a fuck about the poor plebs whose lives she’s playing with, she just wants to “play minister” because she feels entitled to. It’s just a reflection of how privileged and oblivious of (and unbothered by) the lives of regular people those in charge are.
See, that’s the thing. I don’t think Liz Truss is a greedy, self-serving asshole. She’s someone who is wrapped up in an ideology that makes a certain sense on paper, but completely falls flat when it hits reality. She’s clinging to ideas she learned in university, which she honestly believes will help, and despite everything that happened last year (and the interviews and such she did at the end were truly tragic - she was like a little girl completely out of her depth), she still genuinely believes her ideas are right.
Liz Truss isn’t evil. She’s emotionally stunted, clinging to ideas that make the world make sense to her, and has a profound lack of self-awareness. Since last year, which was obviously highly traumatic for her, she’s clinging harder rather than confronting the reality that she might actually… be wrong. Liz Truss is 100% someone who needs therapy.
In fact, I’d wager that an awful lot of people with her beliefs, and right wing beliefs in general, are not inherently evil. They just have unmet emotional needs that would benefit from getting some counselling. Genuine psychopaths and sociopaths are actually pretty rare. And the vast majority of people who would benefit from therapy don’t meet a diagnostic threshold for a specific, named mental illness - but they still need to take care of their mental health and can cause a lot of harm when they don’t.
So yeah, I’m sticking with my initial assessment: Liz Truss needs help. She’s caused a lot of harm, not through malice or selfishness, but through messed up core beliefs and coping mechanisms.
Your entire reply can be summed up on one word - entitlement.
And entitlement is born of privilege, not mental illness.
Everyone in society could do with fucking therapy, and there are millions of people who I would give it to before I gave it to Truss (who aren’t getting it, and often need it in the first place, precisely because of people like her and their actions), because they are in actual need rather than just being overly entitled and fucking up with the immense power they’ve been given as a toy.
She (or anyone like her) isn’t some innocent little lamb simply being led astray, you don’t become a conservative MP without being fully aware that you’re only fighting for some people in society, even if you don’t like admitting it, and all you are doing is providing her with excuses when there are none.
I think you’re wrong on that. While I don’t agree with the politics of conservatives, and I don’t share their views, I’ve met enough of them to know they genuinely think they’re helping everyone. Their version of “helping” is just summarised as “everyone should stand on their own two feet and being independent is better for them than relying on others”. It’s short-sighted, ignorant, and fails to account for all the circumstances of different people’s lives. Typically they have some level of privilege, whether that’s being born into wealth or power, or just being exceptional enough that they could overcome disadvantages that others couldn’t. Doesn’t make them evil. Just ignorant.
I live by “judge the action, not the person”. Liz Truss is exceptionally foolish, not evil. And I actually think it’s not helpful to demonise all conservatives as evil and only out for themselves. Plenty of them are ignorant, misinformed, and paternalistic (in the sense that they think they know what’s best for people, regardless of what those people say for themselves). Plenty of them are incompetent. But there’s a tendency in some circles to ascribe malice to what can very easily be explained by stupidity.
Also: the people who have enormous amounts of power in their hands are exactly the people that need therapy the most, because they need to be thinking straight and making rational decisions. Nobody should be allowed to be an MP without having extensive therapy first.
I think the donations Liz Truss received shows just how emotionally stunted she is when it comes to money. Her leadership campaign alone got her £500k. There is nothing idealistic with the Tories, they are driven by money and nothing else. Just look at the people she wanted to give honours to in her leaving list:
Truss’s list of life peers includes Sir Jon Moynihan, a big pro-Brexit donor to the Conservative Party, and Matthew Elliott, who ran the Brexit campaign in 2016, The Sun reported. Others are said to be Ruth Porter, Truss’s deputy chief of staff in No 10, and Mark Littlewood, head of the Institute for Economic Affairs think tank that backed her mini-budget.
You do realise that when people are driven by money, it’s because there’s some other hole that needs filling, right? Emotionally healthy people don’t need to grasp after money.
Liz Truss’ leaving honours shows her doing the same thing all Prime Ministers do: giving stuff to her allies. Is it the right thing to do? No. Is it an entirely normal human thing to do? Yes. People do favours for friends, family, and allies all the time. And while I think politics should be regulated in a way that doesn’t allow it to happen, due to the corruption it inevitably leads to, it stems from a natural impulse that everyone has felt (and most people have acted on) at some point. The big difference is in a matter of scale: one person getting a discount on goods/services because they know someone that works at the company is a much smaller “perk” than getting a peerage because they knew the Prime Minister, but it’s the same impulse.
I don’t hold politicians up on some pedestal, expecting them to be better than everyone else. Because they’re not. They’re humans, which means they’re flawed, but for the most part are not deliberately malicious. Better rules, which are better enforced, is what’s needed. Not some idealistic wish that politicians will somehow not have the same flaws as everyone else.
I am sorry but I do hold them to a higher standard than anyone else. This is a massive failure in the UK, and one that has been abused by the current batch of Tories. Truss is very much part of the corruption that has gone on for the last 13 years. She was complicit in £150m for PPE which could not be used. To say they should not be held accountable and they are just human after all is just plain contempt for the money we have lost because of them. Labour have said they will hold them to account as soon as they are gone. I for one will be waiting for that day.
I think the rules should hold them to a higher standard, because as human beings, they are not capable of living up to high standards unless there are consequences for not doing so. I specifically said that there needs to be better rules that are properly enforced, although it seems you simply skimmed over my post instead of actually paying attention to what I was saying. Saying “they’re humans that are flawed” is not the same as saying “they shouldn’t be held accountable”. The reason we need rules is because it has never been realistic or possible to expect anyone to behave perfectly unless there are enforced rules to hold them accountable. It’s nothing but wishful thinking to believe they’ll behave perfectly of their own accord, because they’re human like everybody else.
I read your post in its entirety. It negates the driven greed that has been the feature of the Tory policy machine. You try to justify their actions as just human nature. It is not, they have abused the power given by grabbing more power. They drawn up laws to penalise those with differing opinions. They have done all this from the playbook of the Republicans across the water, who have done exactly the same as the Tories only to a much higher degree. The phrases used by both parties are the same. The gerrymandering is done in exactly the same fashion. They have both changed voting procedures just to prevent opponent voters from getting to the polls. Much the same as the PiS party did in the recent Polish elections, who believe it or not are National Conservatives.
Nothing the Tories have done is because of misunderstanding; everything has been deliberate and to the playbook of advisors from the likes of the IEA. The Tories are not just single entities without any real direction. They have a lot of money advising them. By all means google 55 Tufton St.
It’s nothing but wishful thinking to believe they’ll behave perfectly of their own accord, because they’re human like everybody else.
This contradicts your opinion that they should be held to account. Being held to account does not mean you look for excuses. Being a human being does add up to mitigating circumstances.
I mean, if you look at the entire history of the human race, abusing power by grabbing power is human nature. This has literally been going on for thousands of years longer than the Conservative party has existed. Humans being shitty to each other is human nature. There has never been a point in history when humans have lived side by side in perfect harmony, without anybody taking more than their fair share or abusing whatever power they seized for themselves.
And no, believing Tories are humans doesn’t contradict holding them to account. Expecting (as in, anticipating that) people will behave perfectly contradicts holding them to account. That’s literally the basis for the “good chaps” principle in government: that people will behave themselves and therefore don’t need rules to hold them to account. Recognising that people don’t behave perfectly and are party to the base impulses of human nature is why we create rules to hold them to account; it sets a boundary for what is acceptable, and it creates consequences for when that boundary is broken. If you put politicians up on a pedestal, thinking that they must inherently be better than everyone else, that’s when you create the conditions that allow abuse of power, because they’re not inherently better than other people. They’re just people.
I think we’re actually in agreement in principle here, but are disagreeing on semantics. We both agree that rules should be in place to prevent abuse of power. We should expect (as in, insist that) politicians maintain high standards of behaviour. Where we differ is in how realistic we think it is for politicians to inherently meet those standards. I think it isn’t realistic, and that’s why rules need to exist, so that we can say “we set these rules, you knew about the rules, and you broke the rules, so this consequence is now being imposed”.
Most crimes stem from human nature too. Humans doing human things, in response to human emotions and human experiences with life. But they cross boundaries that have been set (generally in the name of ensuring the safety of others), so the fact that the action stemmed from human nature doesn’t mean we don’t impose consequences or hold people accountable for their actions. It’s in knowing that some people will break laws that mean we need to have them. We don’t have laws against things that nobody is going to do, and if nobody ever, say, committed murder, it would be unnecessary to have laws about it. The very fact that murder happens is what necessitates having laws saying that we don’t accept it in our society. And while it’s nice to hope that one day we can have a world where nobody murders anyone and everyone just lives up to that standard inherently, in the meantime we accept reality as it is: sometimes this is something that happens, and no matter what the very human motivation was behind it, we still hold murderers to account. And we (should) still treat murderers like humans, rather than dehumanising them.
Remembering that breaking laws/rules stems from human nature helps to ensure we don’t dehumanise those who cross the boundaries. When you start saying “it’s not human nature to do X”, it becomes entirely too easy to start dehumanising those who do X. That holds true for politicians too. We’d like them to behave perfectly, and we should hold them to account when they break the rules (and we should set those rules pronto), but we shouldn’t treat it as an aberration when they fail. We should anticipate that they will screw up sometimes. Because they will.
The thing that really changed for me when I started following politics closely was that I saw how incredibly human these people are. All of them. And yeah, lots of them are stupid, many of them are misguided, far too many are incompetent and in over their heads, and a few are malicious. Sometimes I want to grab them and shake them and tell them to stop being so short-sighted. But they’re not monsters or robots. They’re just… people doing what people do. They lack self-awareness and empathy, to levels that seem pretty consistent with the lives they’ve had, but ascribing some grand scheme to their largely disorganised flailing just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
Saying “they’re humans that are flawed” is not the same as saying “they shouldn’t be held accountable”
And yet you’ve spent this entire thread creating imaginary excuses as to why Truss shouldn’t be (and worse - claiming she needs help, the poor soul).
You’re pretending as if those who write the rules don’t it to maintain their own power, or as if they didn’t create a system that encourages and rewards her kind of behaviour (which is perfectly in line with every other Tory, are they all mentally ill?), because it’s simply easier for you to label her as mentally ill than it is for you to deal with the uncomfortable reality (which includes the fact that actually mentally ill people are some of the least likely to make it to positions of power because of how ableist our society is, and this thread is an example of that).
Where did I say Truss shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions? It was right that she was removed from being Prime Minister, it’s right that nobody is taking her seriously or would trust her with power again. The rules that allowed her to happen in the first place need to be tightened up and better enforced. I just don’t think there’s anything to be gained from continuing to punish her. Nor is there anything to be gained from assuming malice when incompetence is a better explanation.
Many, many politicians (Tory and otherwise) do actually suffer from mental illnesses. If they didn’t when they went in, by the time they’ve been doing it for a couple of years, they do genuinely suffer from diagnosable levels of depression, anxiety, cPTSD, and the like. This has actually been documented. Those who vehemently hate all Tory MPs on principle probably wouldn’t bother listening, but several Tory MPs have spoken out about their struggles with mental health - Steve Barclay (I think it was) gave a very eloquent interview on the subject, and Charles Walker has talked about it as well. I can empathise with the real emotions they experience as a result of their mental illnesses without agreeing with their political views or thinking their mental health problems mean they can do whatever they like with impunity.
But even without that, there’s more to someone’s state of mind than whether they’ve got something diagnosable or not, and the vast majority of politicians (of all parties) do suffer from distorted worldviews and maladaptive coping mechanisms, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t want the job in the first place. The world isn’t divided into the mentally ill and everyone else. Everyone is screwed up, it’s just a matter of degrees and how it impacts on behaviour - and this impacts the kind of careers people want to go into. There’s two types of people that go into politics: the ones who do it for power and influence, and the ones who do it because they feel driven to help others and that’s how they think they can do it. That’s not a guarantee that they can help others, or that they have the right ideas about how to do it; I’m speaking only about the motivation, not the methods.
I didn’t say Liz Truss was mentally ill. I said she’s emotionally stunted in ways that have led her to buy into ideologies that make sense to her, despite the fact they don’t work in reality. Just because she doesn’t meet the threshold to be diagnosed with a mental illness (that we know of - who’s to say she doesn’t have depression or anxiety? That’s between her and her doctor), doesn’t mean she’s 100% okay. And just like I believe criminals deserve to have health care while they’re in prison, I believe Tory MPs deserve therapy when they need it. That’s because I can judge someone’s actions without dehumanising them. Apparently my unpopular opinion of the day is that Tories are human, not monsters.
The mistake you appear to be making here is that because I’m not frothing with rage about how Liz Truss is evil incarnate, that means I don’t think she’s responsible for her actions. She is. She made choices and should have to face the consequences of those choices. Where we differ is you see entitlement and malice in her actions, and I see an emotionally damaged human being. I see that in Boris Johnson, too - once I realised that emotionally he’s a 3 year old child who never grew out of the “everything is about me” stage of emotional development, it actually became kind of sad. I’m angry about the things he did and about the flaws in the system that allowed him as much power as he had, and he’s still responsible for his own actions. But I can still recognise that as a person, he can’t help but be anything but a child, and in many ways he’s quite a pathetic figure.
And sure, we could argue about whether he should be an adult, given the position he was in, but reality is what it is: a lot of politicians, and indeed a lot of people in powerful positions elsewhere, are emotionally damaged, emotionally stunted people who cannot grow up. Boris Johnson is never going to be anything but a 3 year old yelling “ME ME ME”. Liz Truss is a 17 year old girl who’s learned some cool things at college and thinks the whole world would be better if those things were put into practice. Rishi Sunak is 21, thinks he knows everything, thinks hard work matters more than luck, and is very proud of how mature he is compared to the 17 year old Truss and 3 year old Johnson. Suella Braverman is 15 years old, has self-esteem so low you couldn’t find it if you dug a hole to the middle of the planet, and has turned to being a mean girl because if she’s bullying others, the other bullies will be her friend instead of bullying her. Jacob Rees-Mogg has never matured beyond the age he was when he was sent to boarding school, 7 or 8.
Most of these people could actually be better than what they are, but it’s not something they (or indeed any human) can just choose to do: it takes work, and often a lot of help. Once you stop being blinded by hatred and see them for what they are, you can be angry at their actions, and even dislike them, without seeing them as inhuman. Personally, I think Suella Braverman is a really nasty piece of work that utterly disgusts me on so many levels… but I can simultaneously see the insecure teenager that she so clearly is.
Obviously, in an ideal world, there would be systems in place to prevent such people from gaining power in the first place. That’s the kind of change I’d fight for, rather than yelling about how Tories are evil and therefore don’t deserve help. If only well-adjusted, emotionally mature people were allowed to be politicians, we’d have a much better political landscape overall, regardless of which party was in power. They would be more empathetic, and more focused on practical solutions to real problems over ideology and imagined threats. And I wish the politicians we already have would get help. You might write off their various emotional development issues as not being “real” because they don’t fit neatly into a diagnosis checkbox, but the reality is that if they got help, they would be more self-aware and empathetic, and would be better at their jobs as a result. That would be better for the country.
They say the definition of madness is repeating the same actions and expecting different results…
I do find myself worrying about Liz Truss. Not in the sense of worrying that she might actually get another attempt at destroying the country. I’m worried about Liz Truss herself. Like, is she okay? Does she need help? Are there loved ones who are concerned about her mental state?
Being a greedy self serving arsehole isn’t a mental illness.
I get that you’re probably joking and I’m not trying to have a go at you but I think it’s important to point out because it both gives people like her an out, and also deepens stigma of mental illness (when mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators of it).
I think it’s much more likely that she just doesn’t give a fuck about the poor plebs whose lives she’s playing with, she just wants to “play minister” because she feels entitled to. It’s just a reflection of how privileged and oblivious of (and unbothered by) the lives of regular people those in charge are.
See, that’s the thing. I don’t think Liz Truss is a greedy, self-serving asshole. She’s someone who is wrapped up in an ideology that makes a certain sense on paper, but completely falls flat when it hits reality. She’s clinging to ideas she learned in university, which she honestly believes will help, and despite everything that happened last year (and the interviews and such she did at the end were truly tragic - she was like a little girl completely out of her depth), she still genuinely believes her ideas are right.
Liz Truss isn’t evil. She’s emotionally stunted, clinging to ideas that make the world make sense to her, and has a profound lack of self-awareness. Since last year, which was obviously highly traumatic for her, she’s clinging harder rather than confronting the reality that she might actually… be wrong. Liz Truss is 100% someone who needs therapy.
In fact, I’d wager that an awful lot of people with her beliefs, and right wing beliefs in general, are not inherently evil. They just have unmet emotional needs that would benefit from getting some counselling. Genuine psychopaths and sociopaths are actually pretty rare. And the vast majority of people who would benefit from therapy don’t meet a diagnostic threshold for a specific, named mental illness - but they still need to take care of their mental health and can cause a lot of harm when they don’t.
So yeah, I’m sticking with my initial assessment: Liz Truss needs help. She’s caused a lot of harm, not through malice or selfishness, but through messed up core beliefs and coping mechanisms.
Your entire reply can be summed up on one word - entitlement.
And entitlement is born of privilege, not mental illness.
Everyone in society could do with fucking therapy, and there are millions of people who I would give it to before I gave it to Truss (who aren’t getting it, and often need it in the first place, precisely because of people like her and their actions), because they are in actual need rather than just being overly entitled and fucking up with the immense power they’ve been given as a toy.
She (or anyone like her) isn’t some innocent little lamb simply being led astray, you don’t become a conservative MP without being fully aware that you’re only fighting for some people in society, even if you don’t like admitting it, and all you are doing is providing her with excuses when there are none.
I think you’re wrong on that. While I don’t agree with the politics of conservatives, and I don’t share their views, I’ve met enough of them to know they genuinely think they’re helping everyone. Their version of “helping” is just summarised as “everyone should stand on their own two feet and being independent is better for them than relying on others”. It’s short-sighted, ignorant, and fails to account for all the circumstances of different people’s lives. Typically they have some level of privilege, whether that’s being born into wealth or power, or just being exceptional enough that they could overcome disadvantages that others couldn’t. Doesn’t make them evil. Just ignorant.
I live by “judge the action, not the person”. Liz Truss is exceptionally foolish, not evil. And I actually think it’s not helpful to demonise all conservatives as evil and only out for themselves. Plenty of them are ignorant, misinformed, and paternalistic (in the sense that they think they know what’s best for people, regardless of what those people say for themselves). Plenty of them are incompetent. But there’s a tendency in some circles to ascribe malice to what can very easily be explained by stupidity.
Also: the people who have enormous amounts of power in their hands are exactly the people that need therapy the most, because they need to be thinking straight and making rational decisions. Nobody should be allowed to be an MP without having extensive therapy first.
I think the donations Liz Truss received shows just how emotionally stunted she is when it comes to money. Her leadership campaign alone got her £500k. There is nothing idealistic with the Tories, they are driven by money and nothing else. Just look at the people she wanted to give honours to in her leaving list:
You only become that clueless about money, when you’ve never wanted for it.
That’s still not a mental illness.
Precisely.
You do realise that when people are driven by money, it’s because there’s some other hole that needs filling, right? Emotionally healthy people don’t need to grasp after money.
Liz Truss’ leaving honours shows her doing the same thing all Prime Ministers do: giving stuff to her allies. Is it the right thing to do? No. Is it an entirely normal human thing to do? Yes. People do favours for friends, family, and allies all the time. And while I think politics should be regulated in a way that doesn’t allow it to happen, due to the corruption it inevitably leads to, it stems from a natural impulse that everyone has felt (and most people have acted on) at some point. The big difference is in a matter of scale: one person getting a discount on goods/services because they know someone that works at the company is a much smaller “perk” than getting a peerage because they knew the Prime Minister, but it’s the same impulse.
I don’t hold politicians up on some pedestal, expecting them to be better than everyone else. Because they’re not. They’re humans, which means they’re flawed, but for the most part are not deliberately malicious. Better rules, which are better enforced, is what’s needed. Not some idealistic wish that politicians will somehow not have the same flaws as everyone else.
I am sorry but I do hold them to a higher standard than anyone else. This is a massive failure in the UK, and one that has been abused by the current batch of Tories. Truss is very much part of the corruption that has gone on for the last 13 years. She was complicit in £150m for PPE which could not be used. To say they should not be held accountable and they are just human after all is just plain contempt for the money we have lost because of them. Labour have said they will hold them to account as soon as they are gone. I for one will be waiting for that day.
I think the rules should hold them to a higher standard, because as human beings, they are not capable of living up to high standards unless there are consequences for not doing so. I specifically said that there needs to be better rules that are properly enforced, although it seems you simply skimmed over my post instead of actually paying attention to what I was saying. Saying “they’re humans that are flawed” is not the same as saying “they shouldn’t be held accountable”. The reason we need rules is because it has never been realistic or possible to expect anyone to behave perfectly unless there are enforced rules to hold them accountable. It’s nothing but wishful thinking to believe they’ll behave perfectly of their own accord, because they’re human like everybody else.
I read your post in its entirety. It negates the driven greed that has been the feature of the Tory policy machine. You try to justify their actions as just human nature. It is not, they have abused the power given by grabbing more power. They drawn up laws to penalise those with differing opinions. They have done all this from the playbook of the Republicans across the water, who have done exactly the same as the Tories only to a much higher degree. The phrases used by both parties are the same. The gerrymandering is done in exactly the same fashion. They have both changed voting procedures just to prevent opponent voters from getting to the polls. Much the same as the PiS party did in the recent Polish elections, who believe it or not are National Conservatives.
Nothing the Tories have done is because of misunderstanding; everything has been deliberate and to the playbook of advisors from the likes of the IEA. The Tories are not just single entities without any real direction. They have a lot of money advising them. By all means google 55 Tufton St.
This contradicts your opinion that they should be held to account. Being held to account does not mean you look for excuses. Being a human being does add up to mitigating circumstances.
I mean, if you look at the entire history of the human race, abusing power by grabbing power is human nature. This has literally been going on for thousands of years longer than the Conservative party has existed. Humans being shitty to each other is human nature. There has never been a point in history when humans have lived side by side in perfect harmony, without anybody taking more than their fair share or abusing whatever power they seized for themselves.
And no, believing Tories are humans doesn’t contradict holding them to account. Expecting (as in, anticipating that) people will behave perfectly contradicts holding them to account. That’s literally the basis for the “good chaps” principle in government: that people will behave themselves and therefore don’t need rules to hold them to account. Recognising that people don’t behave perfectly and are party to the base impulses of human nature is why we create rules to hold them to account; it sets a boundary for what is acceptable, and it creates consequences for when that boundary is broken. If you put politicians up on a pedestal, thinking that they must inherently be better than everyone else, that’s when you create the conditions that allow abuse of power, because they’re not inherently better than other people. They’re just people.
I think we’re actually in agreement in principle here, but are disagreeing on semantics. We both agree that rules should be in place to prevent abuse of power. We should expect (as in, insist that) politicians maintain high standards of behaviour. Where we differ is in how realistic we think it is for politicians to inherently meet those standards. I think it isn’t realistic, and that’s why rules need to exist, so that we can say “we set these rules, you knew about the rules, and you broke the rules, so this consequence is now being imposed”.
Most crimes stem from human nature too. Humans doing human things, in response to human emotions and human experiences with life. But they cross boundaries that have been set (generally in the name of ensuring the safety of others), so the fact that the action stemmed from human nature doesn’t mean we don’t impose consequences or hold people accountable for their actions. It’s in knowing that some people will break laws that mean we need to have them. We don’t have laws against things that nobody is going to do, and if nobody ever, say, committed murder, it would be unnecessary to have laws about it. The very fact that murder happens is what necessitates having laws saying that we don’t accept it in our society. And while it’s nice to hope that one day we can have a world where nobody murders anyone and everyone just lives up to that standard inherently, in the meantime we accept reality as it is: sometimes this is something that happens, and no matter what the very human motivation was behind it, we still hold murderers to account. And we (should) still treat murderers like humans, rather than dehumanising them.
Remembering that breaking laws/rules stems from human nature helps to ensure we don’t dehumanise those who cross the boundaries. When you start saying “it’s not human nature to do X”, it becomes entirely too easy to start dehumanising those who do X. That holds true for politicians too. We’d like them to behave perfectly, and we should hold them to account when they break the rules (and we should set those rules pronto), but we shouldn’t treat it as an aberration when they fail. We should anticipate that they will screw up sometimes. Because they will.
The thing that really changed for me when I started following politics closely was that I saw how incredibly human these people are. All of them. And yeah, lots of them are stupid, many of them are misguided, far too many are incompetent and in over their heads, and a few are malicious. Sometimes I want to grab them and shake them and tell them to stop being so short-sighted. But they’re not monsters or robots. They’re just… people doing what people do. They lack self-awareness and empathy, to levels that seem pretty consistent with the lives they’ve had, but ascribing some grand scheme to their largely disorganised flailing just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
And yet you’ve spent this entire thread creating imaginary excuses as to why Truss shouldn’t be (and worse - claiming she needs help, the poor soul).
You’re pretending as if those who write the rules don’t it to maintain their own power, or as if they didn’t create a system that encourages and rewards her kind of behaviour (which is perfectly in line with every other Tory, are they all mentally ill?), because it’s simply easier for you to label her as mentally ill than it is for you to deal with the uncomfortable reality (which includes the fact that actually mentally ill people are some of the least likely to make it to positions of power because of how ableist our society is, and this thread is an example of that).
Where did I say Truss shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions? It was right that she was removed from being Prime Minister, it’s right that nobody is taking her seriously or would trust her with power again. The rules that allowed her to happen in the first place need to be tightened up and better enforced. I just don’t think there’s anything to be gained from continuing to punish her. Nor is there anything to be gained from assuming malice when incompetence is a better explanation.
Many, many politicians (Tory and otherwise) do actually suffer from mental illnesses. If they didn’t when they went in, by the time they’ve been doing it for a couple of years, they do genuinely suffer from diagnosable levels of depression, anxiety, cPTSD, and the like. This has actually been documented. Those who vehemently hate all Tory MPs on principle probably wouldn’t bother listening, but several Tory MPs have spoken out about their struggles with mental health - Steve Barclay (I think it was) gave a very eloquent interview on the subject, and Charles Walker has talked about it as well. I can empathise with the real emotions they experience as a result of their mental illnesses without agreeing with their political views or thinking their mental health problems mean they can do whatever they like with impunity.
But even without that, there’s more to someone’s state of mind than whether they’ve got something diagnosable or not, and the vast majority of politicians (of all parties) do suffer from distorted worldviews and maladaptive coping mechanisms, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t want the job in the first place. The world isn’t divided into the mentally ill and everyone else. Everyone is screwed up, it’s just a matter of degrees and how it impacts on behaviour - and this impacts the kind of careers people want to go into. There’s two types of people that go into politics: the ones who do it for power and influence, and the ones who do it because they feel driven to help others and that’s how they think they can do it. That’s not a guarantee that they can help others, or that they have the right ideas about how to do it; I’m speaking only about the motivation, not the methods.
I didn’t say Liz Truss was mentally ill. I said she’s emotionally stunted in ways that have led her to buy into ideologies that make sense to her, despite the fact they don’t work in reality. Just because she doesn’t meet the threshold to be diagnosed with a mental illness (that we know of - who’s to say she doesn’t have depression or anxiety? That’s between her and her doctor), doesn’t mean she’s 100% okay. And just like I believe criminals deserve to have health care while they’re in prison, I believe Tory MPs deserve therapy when they need it. That’s because I can judge someone’s actions without dehumanising them. Apparently my unpopular opinion of the day is that Tories are human, not monsters.
The mistake you appear to be making here is that because I’m not frothing with rage about how Liz Truss is evil incarnate, that means I don’t think she’s responsible for her actions. She is. She made choices and should have to face the consequences of those choices. Where we differ is you see entitlement and malice in her actions, and I see an emotionally damaged human being. I see that in Boris Johnson, too - once I realised that emotionally he’s a 3 year old child who never grew out of the “everything is about me” stage of emotional development, it actually became kind of sad. I’m angry about the things he did and about the flaws in the system that allowed him as much power as he had, and he’s still responsible for his own actions. But I can still recognise that as a person, he can’t help but be anything but a child, and in many ways he’s quite a pathetic figure.
And sure, we could argue about whether he should be an adult, given the position he was in, but reality is what it is: a lot of politicians, and indeed a lot of people in powerful positions elsewhere, are emotionally damaged, emotionally stunted people who cannot grow up. Boris Johnson is never going to be anything but a 3 year old yelling “ME ME ME”. Liz Truss is a 17 year old girl who’s learned some cool things at college and thinks the whole world would be better if those things were put into practice. Rishi Sunak is 21, thinks he knows everything, thinks hard work matters more than luck, and is very proud of how mature he is compared to the 17 year old Truss and 3 year old Johnson. Suella Braverman is 15 years old, has self-esteem so low you couldn’t find it if you dug a hole to the middle of the planet, and has turned to being a mean girl because if she’s bullying others, the other bullies will be her friend instead of bullying her. Jacob Rees-Mogg has never matured beyond the age he was when he was sent to boarding school, 7 or 8.
Most of these people could actually be better than what they are, but it’s not something they (or indeed any human) can just choose to do: it takes work, and often a lot of help. Once you stop being blinded by hatred and see them for what they are, you can be angry at their actions, and even dislike them, without seeing them as inhuman. Personally, I think Suella Braverman is a really nasty piece of work that utterly disgusts me on so many levels… but I can simultaneously see the insecure teenager that she so clearly is.
Obviously, in an ideal world, there would be systems in place to prevent such people from gaining power in the first place. That’s the kind of change I’d fight for, rather than yelling about how Tories are evil and therefore don’t deserve help. If only well-adjusted, emotionally mature people were allowed to be politicians, we’d have a much better political landscape overall, regardless of which party was in power. They would be more empathetic, and more focused on practical solutions to real problems over ideology and imagined threats. And I wish the politicians we already have would get help. You might write off their various emotional development issues as not being “real” because they don’t fit neatly into a diagnosis checkbox, but the reality is that if they got help, they would be more self-aware and empathetic, and would be better at their jobs as a result. That would be better for the country.