Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz is picking a fight with a culture that wants the comforts of morality without the mess of judging anyone. Calling punishment "unfashionable" isn’t a nostalgic sigh for the whip; it’s a diagnosis of a modern aesthetic: we treat accountability like bad taste. The sting is in the phrase "moral distinctions among men". He’s arguing that egalitarian politics has mutated into a blanket aversion to ranking behavior as better or worse, because ranking implies hierarchy, and hierarchy triggers the democratic reflex to level.

The subtext is sharper: if nobody is truly blameworthy, nobody has to be truly responsible. Szasz frames "collective guilt" as a kind of moral fog machine. It produces the feeling of seriousness (we all share in the problem) while conveniently dissolving the hard work of naming an agent, an act, a consequence. That’s why he calls it "meaningless": it’s guilt without an address.

Context matters. Szasz spent a career attacking the medicalization of deviance and the psychiatric state’s power to re-label wrongdoing as illness. Read through that lens, the quote is less about prisons than about diagnosis as moral laundering: the more we explain behavior as symptom, the more punishment looks barbaric and responsibility looks naive. He’s warning that a democracy can become allergic to judgment and then outsource it to systems that claim neutrality - therapy, bureaucracy, public health. The result isn’t mercy; it’s a softer, more slippery coercion where no one is "bad", but everyone can be managed.