Daniel Penny
Originally Published as "Outrage, I"
This was originally published over a year ago, before the Daniel Penny trial. I’ve changed only some wording. At the time I thought he would be convicted. I’m happy to say that I was wrong. It was the second in a series about crime in New York City. I’m going to end with a postscript relating this to Spencer Ackerman, about whom I wrote yesterday.
Fear breeds repression; repression ignites rage. This is a story about race, crime, and schizophrenia—three forces we fear, suppress, and mishandle to disastrous effect.
Race and crime
I’ve lived it. In high school, I was a victim of several violent crimes, as were many friends. My assailants were all black. To be fair, they were not the only scary types who went to my high school. Ethnic intimidation, mostly coming from tough Italians, was routine. But actual violence was the sole province of blacks.
I feel uncomfortable saying this. I have to be honest about the facts, and about how uncomfortable I am writing it.
In 1981, by two black teenage boys. It’s a fact, not an indictment. The reason I was mugged was because I saw danger and repressed my feelings.
“Don’t be so silly and prejudiced,” I said to myself, “they’re just a couple of kids,” and went back to sleep. I got mugged.
On May 11, 2023, Daniel Penny was charged with manslaughter in Jordan Neely’s death. As much as I dislike Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, I don’t think he had a choice. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, and the outrage machine roared to life. Governor Kathy Hochul weighed in. I’m positive she put the thumbscrews on Bragg.
Normally, I avoid media-fueled trials, but this one feels pivotal — a test of justice versus mob rule. I’d like to believe Bragg’s playing a long game: let the uproar settle, stack a sane jury, and present evidence selectively. Maybe a grand jury refuses to indict. A girl can dream.
But I’m bracing for the worst. Penny will likely be convicted.
I always thought it was a matter of time before we slid back into the jungle. The attitude towards crime has changed. The woke are in power, and a generation of sick white leftists has moved the city and taken over. They can only learn one way — the hard way. It’s my misfortune to be around when they do. I so wish I could leave (again) and stay away, but I don’t have the bandwidth that I did in 1982.
When I look back on those plague years, I wonder how we got through it. They broke me. I put myself together again but they broke me. I spent several years wandering the globe to get away from New York. Anywhere but New York City. I returned for good (as it turned out) in 1992.
By 1993, I remember a feeling of liberation, like chains around your neck breaking. Literally. I was walking in Central Park, not feeling paranoid. Could it be? Was this real?
And to take the subway and not feel a stomach-churning sense of dread. Liberation!
That marvelous feeling became routine, but I always had a kernel of doubt in the back of my mind. This won’t last. And I was right. I’m not prescient. But I was about this.
Statistically, New York is still pretty good. But the crazies are in charge. And they’re the ones who are whipping up the mob against Daniel Penny.
The worst part of the crime wave was the self-censorship. Even in private we censored ourselves. We’d drop our voices to a whisper, “was he black?”, as if we were in a police state, evading listening devices. But we were hiding from ourselves. We were ashamed. Admitting racial fear was to go against everything we were taught. (This wasn’t the case with working class, mostly Italian friends. They were brutally honest about things. I won’t repeat their words here. Use your imagination.)
As the years wore on, the mask dropped — but only in private.
A friend’s mother was mugged. I asked him The Question, tentatively, furtively. He glared and shouted, “WHO ELSE?”
Dumbstruck, quivering, I said nothing. Again he shouted, “WHO ELSE?”
“I know,” I replied.
Another friend’s parents were tied up in the back of their store during a robbery. Luckily, they weren’t pistol-whipped or humiliated but their lives were destroyed. They fled to Florida.
This friend swore at them, using every word in the book, including THAT word. He didn’t care anymore. Also: he was Italian. (And the smartest guy I never met, who scored something like 178 on his LSAT.)
Meanwhile, blacks were allowed free reign to discuss race. As well as rob, rape, and humiliate whites, although you’d never know it from the carefully censored accounts in the Paper of Record.
Supposedly, with Twitter and the internet, this taboo is being eroded, but I have my doubts. The durability of the taboo is remarkable. Here is my explanation as to why that is.
I’m borrowing a concept from the late Norman Cantor. Cantor was a medievalist who wrote a cranky, insight (and error) filled book about Jewish history, The Sacred Chain. In it, he explained the laws prohibiting pro-Nazi speech in Europe this way: as anti-Semitism in Europe was a torch that had once burned the house down, they will not allow the lit match to be tossed carelessly again.
I think it’s the same way with Americans and race. Race is the torch that burned our house down. We tread very carefully around it for good reason.
Schizophrenia. I had a hard time writing this. But here goes.
My eldest brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia around 1961, probably the worst time to get a schizophrenia diagnosis. It was dawn of the age of psychotropic drugs, which we were sure were going to cure schizophrenia. This was part of a national consensus that we could cure cancer, reach the far side of the moon, and win a war in Southeast Asia.
In other words, the 1960s was the most ridiculously, childishly optimistic time in America. We believed a lot of things that in hindsight, were absolutely bonkers.
And who were the guinea pigs for this vast experiment? People in mental hospitals. At eighteen, my brother’s life was ended.
I’ve read a lot about the gulag. My brother might as well have been sent to a Soviet mental institution. In fact, from what I’ve read, they were superior to ours. Political prisoners, no. Mental patients, not so bad.
With help from a rich uncle my parents tried one thing after another. Nothing worked. I cannot give you an accurate chronology of my brother’s condition as I was a kid during this ordeal, I can only tell you that during this period of time the laws on committing schizophrenics changed and affected my brother’s life profoundly.
Another older brother studied neuroscience for some years. While he was in the business he observed to me, “The human brain evolved to get around obstacles.”
In the years since, I’ve thought about that a lot, particularly with reference to schizophrenia. Why is schizophrenia so resistant to treatment?
Because, in my non-expert opinion, the point of schizophrenia is to get around the obstacle of normality. When you say, “zig” they’ll go “zag.” When you say “zag,” they’ll go “zig.”
Everyone, right to left, chants the “invest in mental health” mantra. I just tune out because I know that none of it works and they don’t mean it anyway, it’s just what you say when you have nothing to say.
Whatever solution you have, the schizophrenic brain will find a way around it.
Here’s a good history of institutionalization and its downfall by Steve Sailer. Institutions weren’t created by Nazis. They were created by caring professionals.
OK, nothing works now but we’re going to keep on trying and by God, we’ll find “the cure” because we’ve discovered that schizophrenia is a biological, brain disorder. Right?
I used to think that.
In two minutes of googling I found six articles that contradict one another:
Schizophrenia is a complex brain disorder (“disorder” not “disease”)
Health advocates say schizophrenia should be reclassified as a brain disease (“disease” not “disorder”)
And finally:
Oh wait, there’s this:
“After Hundreds of years of research and spending billions of dollars, researchers have no clear evidence that schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders are the result of a diseased brain.”
I’m not going to delve into the intricacies of the controversy, just presenting it. What you thought was settled, isn’t. Read the links and make up your own mind.
Now apply this on a global level. The psychiatric industrial complex in the US is especially beholden to money and politics1. For what it’s worth, Japan and South Korea have abandoned the word “schizophrenia.”
I sometimes question my brother’s diagnosis. He didn’t have delusions and hallucinations. He was a gentle oddball whose main problem was a fatal lack of ambition to do anything other than live in a dream world of chess, baseball, comic books, and doo-wop music. He was like Laura in the Glass Menagerie crossed with Bartleby The Scrivener, disengaged from normal life, but otherwise inoffensive. He could get angry. But that was only because my parents (understandably) tried to make him “do things” and he didn’t want to do anything, he wanted to sit and watch life behind a plexiglass wall of disengagement. He was remarkably observant, which is something I read once is true of some schizophrenics. They can be outwardly disengaged while observing their surroundings acutely. 2
I honestly think he would have been better off had my parents simply kicked him out of the house and let him fend for himself. A few hard knocks might have straightened him out more effectively than drugs and electroshock therapy. It could hardly have been worse. Of course, he might have ended up like Jordan Neely — but I get ahead of myself.
Race and schizophrenia
At some point in the last few years, schizophrenia became a black disorder. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that blacks are diagnosed as schizophrenic, whites as bipolar. Class, race, and the criminal justice system are all entangled with mental illness, but again, I have no answers, only questions, and all I can do is present the mess to you and let you draw your own conclusions.
Which is where Jordan Neely comes in. Was he schizophrenic, or was he just a violent criminal with an act and an all too-supportive (but disastrously anti-social) support system?
I dunno. And I don’t think anyone does.
What do you do about guys like Jordan Neely? He was tracked quite carefully with all the services a modern society can offer, as the NY Times reports.
There will always be a politician to call a press conference and say, “And yet, we failed him,” dabbing her cheeks with a hanky.
But as officials describe it, the task force and the Top 50 list were formed precisely for the people whom the system had failed time and again. The death of Mr. Neely, 30, who had been homeless for years, also shows the limits of the tools the task force has at its disposal and the difficulty of keeping track of people who are transient and elusive, let alone getting them to accept help.
What do we do? We’ve done institutions. That didn’t work. We created a task force for the most troublesome recidivists and that didn’t work. We gave him housing. That didn’t work. Until the awful day when he got on a subway threatening to kill people and got his ticket punched.
Here is the unvarnished truth:
With our current assumptions about mental illness and the way our society is ordered, we cannot do a fucking thing.
Since everyone is so full of suggestions, here’s mine: a complete civilizational remake with respect to mental illness. It ain’t gonna happen, but it’s the only thing that will work, and a girl can dream.
In 2011, Evan Watters’ book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, came out. I read it out of sheer curiosity even thought I thought I didn’t have anything to learn from it. How wrong I was. It’s a truly enlightening book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I still believe that PTSD is one of the few legit diagnoses from the DSM, but I learned from Watters that treating it is more complicated and culture-based than I had assumed.
Watters cited a prime example of people who should have fallen apart but didn’t: the survivors of the catastrophic tsunami in 2004. American therapists showed up with their knitted brows and therapy dolls only to find that the survivors were bloodied but unbowed and were getting along with life. They had been through this before and had developed world-class coping skills. They didn’t need our help.
Schizophrenia is the tougher nut to crack. All around the world about 1% of people are schizophrenic. But even the cultural response to this intransigent thought disorder/disease varies.
Watters discovered that in Zanzibar, schizophrenia is thought of as spirit possession:
McGruder found that far from being stigmatizing, these beliefs served certain useful functions. The beliefs prescribed a variety of socially accepted interventions and ministrations that kept the ill person bound to the family and kinship group.
I don’t believe that schizophrenia is spirit possession but I have to acknowledge that belief in it is far more culturally fruitful and humanizing than our medicalized dehumanization — which doesn’t even work.
Someone with “spirit possession” is still a person with familial and societal connections. Belief in spirit possession is not a cure, or a treatment. It’s a cope, and a far more humane one than ours. There’s a wisdom to it. We can’t change this, but we can integrate this frightening behavior into our culture and manage it.
Let’s look to India. If sadhus were born in the west, they’d have been diagnosed schizophrenic. I don’t idolize India; it’s a violent, caste-riven, highly competitive society, not the otherworldly spiritual society that Westerners fantasize about. That said, the sadhu is integrated into the fabric of Hindu society. Instead of drugging and electroshocking schizophrenics, they drop out, smoke dope and commune with the ineffable by the side of a road.
I think that’s as good an answer as any.
I know us, and I know that we won’t learn anything from these cultures. As Western civilization covers the world like a sheet of concrete, middle-class Indian parents will try to cure their sons with Western therapies.
God help them.
Since I wrote this before Daniel Penny was arrested in May 2023, he was acquitted. A lot has been written about the trial. This is one of the better ones. I do think he somewhat overstates the controversy in NYC — mostly it was the outrage machine, not normal people.
Yesterday I wrote about a syndrome personified by a journalist named Spencer Ackerman. Someone who also remembered Ackerman responded with thoughtful comments. He reminded me that people change, writers change, and that’s true, but I’m referring not to a change in perspective but a fundamental shift in emotional orientation. Ackerman went from a blind, unthinking acceptance of a fantasy Israel to a blind, unthinking hostility.
What’s the commonality? Blind and unthinking. Maybe it’s not a fundamental shift in emotional orientation at all, it’s a change in the object of his emotional orientation.
I looked around and discovered that he’s got a website, called, (what else?) Forever Wars. “Forever Wars” is a phrase that was coined during the Obama administration, deployed by a certain faction of the left, and appropriated by the groyper-right.
Confession: this is a concept I used to subscribe to. October 7 cured me of that. We have forever responsibilities, and sometimes we have to back that up with military action.
Ackerman’s sidekick wrote an article about the Daniel Penny trial, Strangler In A Strange Land. Clever, no? Ackerman edited it, so he’s as responsible for the content as the writer. It’s a piece of absolute mediocrity, with not one original insight. Ackerman himself wrote The Killing of Jordan Neely In The Shadow of The Rent Guidelines Board, as if violent schizophrenics like Neely was a matter of homelessness. He manages to avoid mentioning that Neely did have a place to live, which he blew off, and had numerous violent crimes to his credit. Leaving out dispositive facts is simply lying.
There’s also an article on the Mangione/Thompson murder, which manages to exceed the Neely/Penny articles in unoriginality and denseness.
This is the Spencer Ackerman Syndrome: get a foothold in the media, slither up that greasy pole, and keep dishing it out. It’s a decent living.
Remember this when you read about the transgender madness. Every mistake that was made on schizophrenics is being made on gender dysphoric kids.
This fits in with the notion that mental disorders are adaptive to a degree, which is why they’ve been preserved in the genome.