Rhetoric therapeutic

As I have stressed throughout this book, the de-moralization and de-politicalization of social problems, and their transformation into problems of medicine and treatment, is a characteristic modern totalitarian states (both National Socialist and Communist) share with modern bureaucratic states. Moreover, although the degree and the directness of the destructiveness which such therapeutic rhetoric justifies may vary from one political system to another, its essential aim is always the same to identify, stigmatize, and control particular segments of the population. 

This book presupposes no special competence or training in the reader—only open-mindedness. But it requires of him one more thing—that he seriously consider, with Samuel Johnson, that hell is paved with good intentions, and that he conscientiously apply this caveat to the ideology, rhetoric, and rituals of the political organization characteristic of our age—the Therapeutic State. 

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