Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
— Beatrice Adler-Bolton (@realLandsEnd) February 23, 2026
Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEndSanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882
This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.
Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.
But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.
I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.
There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.
*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.
Utterly co-incidently enough I saw this today.
‘Trust the humanity’ fails when you meet an individual wearing a suicide vest or toting a loaded gun, or driving a car through a crowd. Machetes are an indicator of untrustworthiness.
This is why I’d rather live in Singapore than New York.
She is a not very bright NPD from an affluent middle class background. A pretentious narcissist. In real life people like her are totally nuts. I’m mean seriously unstable. Usually very medicated. And really really nasty.
People just like her is the reason why hundreds of mentally-ill people have died in total degradation and squalor over the last five decades on California city streets. People like her killed them.
People just like her is the reason why tens of thousands of mentally-ill people are living in total degradation and squalor on California city streets at the moment. People like her.
What I learned in San Francisco over the decades is that these “activists” are the very last people to actually offer help or do anything constructive when something happens. Some street person causing problems or just have a “crisis”. The “government” should do something. Its all “societies” fault.
Its people like me who either deescalate the situation, force the troublemakers to leave, or in some cases where it looks like Bad Luck not Bad Decisions put them on the streets, buy them something to eat. Or just listen to their story. Because the $ billions spent on the Homeless Industry never does anything to help them. Nothing.
Honestly, after what I have seen and heard over the decades, terrible terrible stories, I would not think twice about lining the Beatrice Adler-Bolton’s of the world up against the wall and joining the firing squad. They are responsible for so much evil in the world. In fact in places like California almost all the worst social problems of the last 100 years seem to lead directly back to the Beatrice Adler-Bolton’s of the world.
I never believed in evil until I saw first-hand the world the Beatrice Adler-Bolton’s caused.
I miss the days when nutcases like her were relegated to dusty academic journals because every time they opened their mouths in public someone shoved a valium in it.
People who are out-of-control, undergoing a mental “crises” – are indeed “disruptive”, they make the lives of other people (not only themselves – other people) worse, if the lady denies this – then she is a liar.
This is why, for example, putting disruptive children in a class with other children ruins the education of those other children – because the disruptive – disrupt.
It is necessary for reason to control the passions – contrary to the clever-clever double-talk of a Scottish philosopher of the 1700s, who amused himself by taking things that ordinary people knew to be true – and arguing the opposite case.
Although “sanism” may be meant ironically.
After all the alternative to “sanism” is insanism – turning the world into a vast bedlam, where public transport, libraries, and so on are unusable – because of people screaming, yelling, throwing things about, and-so-on.
If someone really “can not control themselves” (can not – rather than WILL not) then they need to stay away – or they will ruin life for everyone else, but a lot of this “can not” is really “WILL not” – because people know they will not be punished for bad behavior.
They behave badly because they know they will get-away-with-it.
As Snorri correctly says – people tend to respond to incentives, not always – but often.
If people know that if they make the lives of other people miserable in libraries, public transport, and so on, they (the people inflicting misery on others) will be punished, they are less likely to behave badly – it turns out that they can control themselves after all, if they know they will be punished if they do not.
@Tfourier is exactly right here. This woman is thinking she is helping these people with mental issues when in fact she is doing the opposite, really hurting them.
I mean irrespective of what they do to society, the biggest harm is to themselves. It is one of those challenging gaps for libertarianism which ultimately relies on people being accountable for their own actions. But what if those people are unable to be accountable for their actions? We readily recognize this with children or people with dementia: people with these sorts of condition are placed under some guardianship where their individual rights to injure themselves are put under the care of another who has a duty of care to them. And people with diseases like uncontrolled schizophrenia or even very serious cases of drug addiction are unable to be accountable for their actions because they do not have sufficient control of their minds. They too need to be placed under the guardianship of others, others who have a duty of care to them, and treated and perhaps have their conditions repaired to such an extent they can resume care of their own lives.
It would be the grossest form of child neglect to let your children wander the streets and expect them to feed, clothe and protect themselves. No less those whose mental state does not allow them to function. And that is precisely what public policy has done. A true humanitarian public policy would help these people by taking away from them some of the terrible, life destructive choices they are making. Ultimately we are probably going to do that anyway by putting them in jail, which is the worst place for them, and they will be there only after their inability to control themselves has left a wake of destruction, harm and death behind them.
Of course, as a libertarian, that is a horrifically slippery slope. I am reminded of the sixties when parents used to kidnap and “deprogram” their adult kids when they joined “religious cults” — whatever “cult” means. But sometimes we have to walk, however tentatively and gingerly, on a slippery slope.
And that doesn’t even address the impact such people have on the rest of society.
Fraser Orr – yes indeed Sir.
Count me (mostly) as a proponent of sanism, then. Although, people like this woman always feel the need to say that we are “denying their humanity”, when in fact we acknowledge it, which is why we’d rather cure their mental illness than simply shoot them or hide them away.
The very term “sanism” tells us all we need. As if being in favor and having a preference for sanity is somehow akin to racism or sexism.
I remember a story my man Elon told about a discussion he had with Sergey Brin (or the other Google guy, I don’t remember) when he was discussing how AIs should be tuned to advance human needs above the needs of some artificial intelligence. Something the Google guy described as “species-ism”. Me? I’m in favor of discriminating hard in favor of humans and sanity. I’m sure in some people’s eyes that makes me Jim Crow or Hitler, but I feel confident in ignoring them froot loops.
In this world of “equity above all else” when someone says something as crazy as “sanism” we really do need to laugh in their faces. It is such an incredibly stupid thing to say. Musk, for his part, says that that is the day his friendship with the Google guy ended.
BTW, in the world of AI there are three contenders for the winner, Grok, China and Google. Given what the Google guy says, let’s hope it isn’t Google. I might not like the CCP, but that are largely pro-human.
I’m an asylum-seeker, myself; I advocate the return of the great centralized asylums aka psychiatric hospitals. It’s the only realistic solution to the spreading chaos and filth of urban downtowns throughout the West.
That disorder is a direct result of ‘compassionate’ policies which in practice are exceedingly cruel, not only to the mad/ addicted, but to the average citizen. The OP here makes it almost explicit: we are to be subjected to fear and horror on our streets until we come round to the right way of thinking about it.
But the *right* right way to think about it is: people who manifestly cannot care for themselves need to be institutionalized. Those institutions need to be effective, affordable, and as respectful of the need for civic order as they are of individual liberties. They must also be humane, in a way that, admittedly, asylums of even the recent past often were not.
‘Carceral’? Coercive? Yes, to the degree required. For some patients/ citizens, the new asylums would be a permanent home, one they may not leave unsupervised. This reflects a fact RD Laing and his leftist heirs refuse to acknowledge: some people are never going to get better.
As for the rest, which on bad days might even include you or me, there should be strict legislation/ policy whose essence is: easy in, easy out. There should be a form of tripwire arrest in which, for example, if you thrice encounter state agencies while incoherent, reeking, and unable to pull up your pants, you can be easily booked in for a mandatory assessment period of say 10 days. If at that point you can pass a simple hygiene/ rationality/ sociability test, you’re sprung. If not – 20 more days of treatment and rest, without the option, then test again, and so on. Of course the periods of enforced ‘rehab’ will need to be gradually extended until it becomes clear there’s nothing to be done. Then the asylum becomes housing, with bars on the windows that protect civil society from you – and you from your damaged self.
At *all* points the subject should have the right to a legal advocate, to contact with the outside world, to an appeal and so forth. No one’s too nuts for due process.
And living conditions in the asylum must be clean, comfortable and safe. This is harder than it sounds, but good design plus internal checks/ enforcement should be able to prevent the re-emergence of Bedlam or Nurse Ratched situations, or inmates preying on each other.
The great asylums of the past, fearsome as they could be for the inmates, unknowingly served a crucial function in the preservation of what in my country we call ‘peace, order and good government.’ That utility has now been made obvious in the expensive, spectacular failure of ‘community treatment,’ deinstitutionalization and suchlike approaches.
Power in this realm will have to be wrested from a well-paid, useless class of vicious ideologues, but it can and should be done, posthaste. For liveable cities as much as for the sake of broken people, we all should be seeking asylum.
Earnest Canuck.
Yes – policy based on the Hollywood film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” has been a disaster – and policy both in the United States and the United Kingdom was based on this Hollywood film (i.e. – on FICTION).
The mentally ill were tossed out, at first into flats and council houses – neither of which they could manage, and then on to the streets to live in cardboard boxes and “self medicate” with booze and illegal drugs, a danger to themselves and to everyone else – and this was called “care in the community”.
As for the mental hospitals – the one in Northampton (the nearest one to where I am sitting) was a fine place, where the mentally ill, who could not look after themselves, were looked after with dignity – and even had their own farm, where they helped look after animals (whilst carefully supervised).
There were no scandals about the place – no “vicious abuse by Nurse Ratched” or whatever, it, and other places in the United Kingdom, were closed for ideological (not rational) reasons.
About three decades ago, aboard a local bus in Colorado Springs, a guy was being creepy and scaring some little old ladies. To stop the disruption I told him, “Dude, put a sock in it.”
“You can’t talk to me like that, I’m mentally ill!”
“Just ’cause you’re crazy doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole. Now shut the f*** up.”
I was 33, 6’2″, 220 lb. He looked put upon, but he shut up.