Upgrading Human Rights — with the Freedom of Mind
Following Donald Trump’s rise to power, mental health associations in the United States abdicated their responsibility under political pressure and kept silent about the unprecedented mental health emergency taking place in the country. As a result, a number of psychiatrists and other mental health experts, led by forensic psychiatrist and violence prevention specialist Bandy Lee, decided to step in where others placed self-preservation and profit over their ethical duty to protect society. They formed the nation’s first mental health association to address the issue of dangerous leadership and professional societal responsibility: the World Mental Health Coalition.[i]
Their work included conducting a fitness evaluation and a dangerous risk assessment of Donald Trump, releasing the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, and, in particular, authoring the Declaration of the Freedom of Mind.[ii]
The upcoming American presidential election comes at a most important turning point in the nation’s history. For this reason, the World Mental Health Coalition convened a major, unique and impacting conference: “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership”.[iii] Top national security experts and leading mental health experts came together as never before, on September 27, 2024, at the National Press Club in Washington DC, to participate in this historically significant gathering of great minds from different fields. Participants spoke about the following:
· The importance of fit leadership in this dangerous world
· A fitness evaluation that supporting psychiatrists were able to perform in 2019
· A dangerousness risk assessment that supporting psychiatrists were able to perform in 2024
· Research results revealing that mental health experts overwhelmingly believe it is our duty to educate the public about dangerous leadership
It was a great honor to be invited to this conference to present about my research and activism to develop and promote a human right to the freedom of mind, which is indelibly linked to the work of the World Mental Health Coalition. For the past few years, I have been assisting the World Mental Health Coalition to identify a political and legal pathway for freedom of mind to enter into the international human rights architecture. Here is the recording of my presentation:
“On February 27th 2020, President’s Day, the World Mental Health Coalition, led by Bandy Lee, held a meeting in New York City. They noted how the American lawmakers’ failure to conceive the Trump problem as one of mental health had resulted in the political failure to impeach, and how our understanding of oppression and warfare was failing to account for the psychological weaponry now being employed.
The World Mental Health Coalition said then: ‘to help protect the most sacred right to freedom of mind, we offer a tool for citizen groups to identify correctly and target precisely the problem’. And so, for the very first time in history, they drafted and released the Declaration of the Freedom of Mind.
The world will remember that day. The Declaration opens up unprecedented ways to protect the mind, including by submitting the Declaration to the United Nations for adoption. More than a tool, we now have a template and a blueprint that can act as the basis for a future international agreement guaranteeing the most fundamental of all freedoms: our freedom of mind.
The Declaration responds to the authoritarian takeover and public health emergency that marked the Trump presidency, and breaks new ground with its protections. It specifies and outlaws all the main variants and iterations of mind control. It defines and prohibits the phenomenon of mental slavery, and specifies a psychological right to individuate. And, with respect to today’s theme of presidential fitness and the duty to warn, the Declaration creates an unqualified prohibition of censoring speech, media and experts in relation to mental health issues, together with an unqualified right of the public to fully access information and expertise. By definition, an unqualified prohibition or right permits no exemptions. By contrast, current human rights law permits restricting freedom of speech in times of emergency, despite it being emergencies which most strongly call for the public intervention of experts.
Freedom of mind is the foundation of all rights, providing directly for the freedoms of thought and speech. What purpose does freedom of speech serve if one cannot formulate thought before expressing it as speech? And what purpose does freedom of thought serve if the mind is not free to develop one’s own thoughts in the first place? U.S. Supreme Court rulings have repeatedly cited freedom of mind to justify other First Amendment rights, such as freedom of speech. And yet, nowhere in the body of international human rights law is freedom of mind explicitly listed. It is a missing piece, perhaps the missing piece, in the human rights architecture.
The hallmark of authoritarianism is an imbalance and abuse of power within a human relationship: the blind submission to authority and the suppression of one’s free will. Authoritarianism begins at home and endures well beyond: in our schools, workplaces and institutions. Before it becomes a political or social problem, it is a psychological disorder afflicting individuals. This disorder afflicts both ruled and ruler, victim and victimizer, or predator and prey (in the words of none other than Donald Trump). This is the dividing line: not traditional left or right, but authoritarian or democratic, anti-or pro-social, pathologically disordered or not?
Authoritarianism is part of the human condition. But it need not always be. We have the tools to push back, with human rights at the centerpiece of this endeavor. Ensuring the freedom of mind is as much as a matter of education as it is of law. Rights and law, with their strict usages and limited applications, render them into blunt instruments. Education, by contrast, is far-reaching and transformative.
The public need to learn to proactively defend and exercise the right to freedom of mind against those who would violate it. By learning to form and articulate their own opinions and challenge the opinions of others, people can overcome their submissive attitudes. Ira Schaleff’s models of ‘courageous followership’ and ‘intelligent disobedience’ are the building blocks to this democratic revolution. In short: Think, Blink, Choose, and sometimes Just Say No. Lest we underestimate the ramifications of this undertaking, this entails a fundamental re-ordering of how human societies function. It will dismantle the last vestiges of authoritarianism in our cultures, and will help build a peace that humankind has never seen.
When one pushes the envelope, the world is never prepared. Violent attempts to preserve orthodoxy have taken the lives of many great pioneers from our past. Proponents of freedom of mind face extensive and wide-ranging opposition. Freedom of mind is not simply irrelevant to the rich and the powerful; it is an impediment to their modus operandi. Much of the academic middle, unable to account for the epidemic of destructive mind control and psychological warfare, remain perplexed by the rise of the elected authoritarians and even write away mind control as a ‘cult problem’ afflicting only the fringes of society. Proposals to update the law to reflect advances in the modern science of social influence have met stubborn resistance from legal traditionalists. In the domain of human rights, a rights violation is narrowly conceived as only involving situations where the violator is a governmental actor.
We stand well and truly on the precipice. The spread of democracy has halted and even reversed as dangerous leaders take charge of entire countries, as similarly disordered personalities have done prison blocks, street gangs or destructive cults. Destructive mind control techniques have spread from the cultic fringes of society into the mainstream. “The cult leader’s playbook has gone mainstream” is not yet a truism, but it soon will be.
But there is no despair without hope. An emerging body of mind-protective law — comprising undue influence, predatory alienation and coercive control — continues to develop and expand at the national level. The days in which it is legal to take away someone’s mental freedom appear to be coming to an end.
We are living through a golden age of cult awareness, with an abundance of cult mind control themes in the media and the public at a tipping point in how to recognize and prevent. The word ‘narcissist’ has well and truly entered the lexicon. Hundreds of thousands of families from Hong Kong, Turkey and Russia have embarked upon a new life in the free world, determined to protect and nurture their young children’s minds. And, when mass protests recently erupted in China, the protestors identified and skillfully pushed back against the destructive mind control wrought by the Chinese Communist Party, even translating and disseminating cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE Model of Authoritarian Mind Control into Chinese.
As this psychological awakening slowly extends across the world, it shows us that humanity is not too thin a community to base a universal right to be both physically and mentally free; it is the widest community we have. And that is why freedom of mind is so important”
References
[ii] https://worldmhc.org/declaration-of-the-freedom-of-mind/
