The Therapeutic Turn

How emotion displaces reason in our institutions

Unfortunately for most Americans, it is not rare or unusual to witness rank ignorance or raw emotion (or worse, a combination of both) forming the basis for statements and policy proposals coming out of our governments at all levels. Over the past few months, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, and even the mild-mannered Lee Zeldin have handed Dem congresstwits their asses during hearings, not necessarily because they are super smart, but mostly because the Dems either know so much that isn’t so, or they simply know nothing their staff didn’t tell them.

I began this intellectual journey several months ago with the premise that feminization/emasculation of our society has led us to being ruled more by emotion than ever, but I could find no credible data to back that up. Men have been elected that are even more intellectually feminine than most women. Transgenderism is real in a political sense because we have AWFULs and Karens with penises all over the landscape.

I learn (or relearn) so much from observation, especially watching my granddaughter grow and largely thanks to her, I have been thinking about a simple observation that may explain far more about our current moment than any discussion of race, gender, class, or politics.

Human beings are born with only emotions with which to work.

We arrive in this world with fear, joy, anger, sadness, attachment, and a host of instincts that served our ancestors well long before anyone ever wrote a constitution, formulated a scientific method, or debated political philosophy.

Reason, by contrast, is not something we are born with. Reason must be learned. It must be cultivated because it requires knowledge, experience, discipline, and the willingness to submit our feelings to examination.

A child instinctively knows how to be afraid, but they must be taught how to think.

That distinction matters because civilizations themselves follow a similar pattern. Every society exists in a perpetual tension between emotion and reason. Emotion supplies motivation and moral energy. Reason supplies direction and restraint. One without the other creates disaster. Governance without emotion becomes cold autocracy. Government by emotion becomes anarchy by consent.

The challenge facing modern America is that we have increasingly elevated emotion above reason as the primary means of understanding the world.

This is what sociologist Philip Rieff identified decades ago as the therapeutic culture. In a therapeutic society, objective truth gradually loses authority while subjective experience gains it. Feelings become evidence. Personal authenticity becomes a moral virtue. Emotional harm expands from describing genuine suffering to encompassing discomfort, disagreement, and even exposure to unwelcome ideas. Institutions begin treating emotional validation not as a courtesy but as a duty.

Christopher Lasch, American historian, social critic, and professor, saw the same trend emerging in what he described as a culture of narcissism. Citizens become less concerned with obligations, traditions, and communal standards and more concerned with internal emotional states. The self becomes both the measuring stick and the object of worship.

The consequences are visible almost everywhere.

Politics increasingly resembles group therapy conducted with campaign signs and social media accounts. Opponents are no longer merely mistaken. They are harmful. Disagreement is recast as aggression. Debate becomes an exercise in emotional positioning rather than factual persuasion. The question is no longer whether a policy works, what it costs, or what historical experience teaches about its likely consequences. The question is whether it feels compassionate.

The same pattern appears in education. Schools once existed primarily to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Today, many seem equally concerned with managing emotional states. Social-emotional learning, trigger warnings, safe spaces, and therapeutic language increasingly compete with factual mastery and intellectual rigor. Students are encouraged to express their feelings, but often receive less instruction in history, economics, civics, or logic. They learn how to feel about events before they learn enough about those events to evaluate them critically.

This matters because ignorance creates a vacuum that emotion eagerly fills.

If a person does not understand the history of inflation, emotional appeals about corporate greed become persuasive. If a person does not understand constitutional government, emotional appeals about fairness may override concerns about due process. If a person does not understand human nature, emotional appeals about utopian social engineering begin to sound plausible.

Reason requires information. Emotion requires only a stimulus.

Reason frequently functions less as a navigator than as a press secretary, constructing arguments to justify conclusions our emotions have already reached. We feel first and rationalize later.

Civilizations flourish when institutions understand this reality and create structures to compensate for it. Constitutional limits, due process, scientific inquiry, free speech, and historical study all serve the same purpose. They force emotional impulses to pass through filters of evidence, procedure, and experience.

The therapeutic worldview reverses that process. It increasingly treats emotional reaction as self-authenticating. If someone feels harmed, the feeling itself becomes proof. If someone feels unsafe, safety becomes the paramount concern regardless of objective risk. Intentions become secondary to emotional impact. Evidence becomes subordinate to experience.

This does not eliminate emotion from public life. Emotion is unavoidable and often necessary. Antonio Damasio’s work on decision-making demonstrates that emotion plays an important role in human judgment. People deprived of emotional processing often struggle to make practical decisions despite retaining intellectual capability.

The lesson is not that emotion is bad but that that emotion is a tool, not a compass. A society governed entirely by spreadsheets and algorithms would be sterile and inhuman but one governed entirely by emotional impulses becomes unstable and self-destructive.

The challenge is maintaining a proper balance between the two.

Unfortunately, many of our institutions appear to be moving steadily away from that balance. Historical literacy declines while emotional rhetoric increases. Civic knowledge falls while political outrage rises. Objective standards weaken while subjective interpretations multiply. We are producing citizens who are extraordinarily sensitive to feelings but are increasingly unfamiliar with the historical, economic, and constitutional realities that shape the world around them.

That is a dangerous combination.

The answer is not to suppress emotion or pretend human beings can become purely rational actors. The answer is to restore respect for the disciplines that allow reason to perform its proper function. We need more history, not less. More civics, not less. More debate, not less. More exposure to competing ideas, not less. Resilience should once again be considered a virtue rather than a pathology.

A free society ultimately depends on citizens capable of subordinating immediate emotional impulses to enduring principles. Liberty survives only when people possess enough knowledge to distinguish what feels right from what is right.

We are are born emotional. Civilized societies teach us reason.

Our future may depend upon whether we remember the difference.