Wisdom of today, by Thomas Szasz

"The insane were also a new class, a product of replacing a theologi- cal with a medical perspective on dissent and deviance. Both indi- gence and insanity are thus the products of modernity, specifically, of individualism and of the new political relationship between the individual and the state. "It is a great law of social development," Arnold Toynbee observed a century ago, "that the movement from slavery to freedom is also a movement from security to insecurity of maintenance. There is a close connection between the growth of freedom and the growth of pauperism; it is scarcely too much to say that the latter is the price we pay for the former." There is a similarly close connection between the growth of freedom-as-reason and the growth of insanity- as-unreason. The factors responsible for the individualization of poverty as a personal trait were thus also responsible for its initial identification as a political problem, and its present perception as a medical illness." - Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion, Pyschiatric Control of Society's unwanted