Quick Draw McGraw

[T]he problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose. -- Dr. Phil (McGraw)

Just as we reserve the use of Roman numerals for only the most lofty and dignified of designations such as monarchs, popes and Super Bowls, the use of first names as sufficient identification for public persons is reserved for only the most lofty and exulted in society such as Pope Benedict, Queen Elizabeth, Oprah and her media prince consort, Dr. Phil.

Of course, if I may digress for a moment, there is one other class of adult humanity routinely called by their first name, and that is you and I as customers. It matters not that we might be more than twice the age of the sales clerk behind the counter who has just gleaned our given name from our credit card and whom we have only just met for the first time and barely met at that. He will grasp every opportunity thereafter to call you by that given name as though you and he were the bestest of buddies back in camp last summer. This is called "the personal touch" and taught to such minions by order of their company's executives who would no more tolerate being called by their own first names by said minions than invite them to the club on Saturday for a round of golf.

Not counting government (that's for another rant), this tacit infantilization of one's customers finds the zenith of its expression in medicine, where even the receptionist, incongruously attired in hospital scrubs (does she have a surgery to assist after the filing is done?) blithely calls you by your first name as she finally informs you "The Doctor will see you now."

Ah, yes, the Doctor. You can just hear the capitalization in her voice, can't you? And so it is with Dr. Phil. Who, after all, would take seriously or seek advice from a television psychologist just named Phil? So we have in the case of Dr. Phil a bit of psychological jujitsu, asserting his distancing professional status on the one hand, while projecting a friendly familiarity with his first name on the other.

And who among medical professionals ("medical" broadly construed to include clinical psychologists) make a routine practice of this bit of trickery? Why, pediatricians and child psychologists, of course.

Who better, then, to shoot from the hip ("I'll do the thinnin' around here, Baba Looey!") as in the above quote and explain the psychological nexus between rage-filled sociopaths and psychopaths and video game violence? You or I might have thought just being a rage-filled sociopath would suffice for someone to engage in some sort of rage-filled sociopathic behavior, but it takes Dr. Phil's common sense to connect the dots for us with a "massive violence overdose" ingested from too many hours playing Mortal Kombat.

Now, in fairness, although the research on this topic I have seen shows no statistically significant long-term or lasting effect on children or adolescents in general from their playing violent video games, that isn't McGraw's point. What he is saying is that, whatever the general effect or lack thereof, the higher suggestibility among the mentally ill in particular is causing an escalation in the nature and degree of the sort of violent acts such people may be prone to commit.

Fair enough. I know of no research on that point one way or another and, alas, Dr. Phil cites only "common sense" to support his hypothesis. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a clinical psychologist and an experimental psychologist, never mind what counts as common sense among psychologists generally. But maybe he's right. Maybe there is a connection in that limited sense between the mentally ill and exposure to violence. Who knows?

Let's assume that it is true. Where does that leave us? Banning violent video games for the over ninety-five percent of the population who are not psychopaths or sociopaths? Following Dr. Phil's lead, I just pulled that number out of thin air, but, hey, you know, most of us ain't crazy.

To what extent are we willing to prohibit the population at large from something, anything that many of them want to do and that doesn't harm them because some tiny fraction of the population is thereby at risk? That, of course, is a question we can ask about any number of things including video games, drugs, gambling, et cetera ad nauseam.

But the libertarian takes the question a step further. What business is it of ours if such things do harm some small number of people or even if they contribute in some sense to their harming others in those still, thank God, extremely rare cases like the Virginia Tech massacre that gave occasion to Dr. Phil's thoughts on video games? How much freedom are we willing to sacrifice for a heightened sense of safety or security?

The answer to that question varies from person to person as a function of how important liberty versus security is to him. But there is one class of persons for whom we don't hesitate in asserting that security is more important; namely, children. And so as we allow ourselves increasingly to be infantilized, as we live on a diet of talk show guru prepared pablum and expert pronouncements for our own good and come to see ourselves more and more as children in constant need of protection from one another, Nanny State smiles warmly and waits to take us by the hand and tuck us into bed and read us a comforting fairy tale where they all lived happily ever after.