By proclaiming Carson’s youthful pathology to be incurable, Trump is going way beyond what Carson said. Carson is in a better position to judge the curability of a pathological condition than Trump, being an accomplished physician after all.
Furthermore, Trump’s simple-minded “pathological=incurable” is a gross oversimplification, and simply not true in a number of cases. Certain pathologies are much more likely to present during the rapid changes of adolescence, then recede naturally in adulthood.
Furthermore, the exact relationship between physiology and psychology is still unclear for many pathologies of the mind. A young person may have a perfectly healthy neurological system yet behave in extreme ways because they have been conditioned to that response by their life up to that point. There is no definite, “it always works this way” pattern. Every individual is different.
And let’s not forget the impact of a culture of extreme pharmacology. In countries where psychotropics are unavailable to large numbers of people, there is data that suggests they recover from psychotic breaks in larger numbers and for longer intervals than here. Perhaps our over-dependence on psychotropics is part of the alleged “incurability” problem.
And of course, Trump’s remark is completely out of phase with Scripture. God can cure anything. “Incurable” may make sense if all we mean is we don’t have a human cure for a given disease. But a blanket statement of “incurability” is never true in a universe where God is sovereign.
But the worst of this is Trump’s cleverness in this attack. He has plausible deniability because he can truthfully say he did not call Carson a child molester. But guess what. He just used a Jedi mind trick that works well on the average person. It’s called “transfer.” You don’t need logic to make it work. All you have to do is associate two things at a deeply emotional level. Associate a car with a sexy woman to sell the car. Associate German Jews with greed and cannibalism and launch a genocide. It is a very effective technique, and I would be shocked if someone with Trump’s excellent sales acumen was unaware of it. If he is doing this intentionally, it is a truly dastardly thing to do to anyone.
And no, I am not a Carson fan. Cruz booster here. I just don’t like seeing people do such bad things to each other.
Peace,
SR
Very well said, thanks.
And I would/will happily vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. But this was the lowest of blows.