As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 Policy Review essay, the United States has witnessed a hundredfold increase in the number of professional caregivers since 1950. Our society boasts 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000 mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, 30,000 life coaches—and hundreds of thousands of nonclinical social workers and substance abuse counselors as well. “Most of these professionals spend their days helping people cope with everyday life problems,” Dworkin writes, “not true mental illness.” This means that “under our very noses a revolution has occurred in the personal dimension of life, such that millions of Americans must now pay professionals to listen to their everyday life problems.”
Such a “culture of care,” as Dworkin calls it, is a logical end point for a society in which the religious instinct is oriented more and more toward every individual’s own Highest Thoughts and innermost spirits. Therapeutic theology raises expectations, and it raises self-regard. It isn’t surprising that people taught to be constantly enamored of their own godlike qualities would have difficulty forging relationships with ordinary human beings. (Two Supreme Selves do not necessarily a happy marriage make.) Learning to love ourselves and love the universe isn’t necessarily the best way to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, it turns out, and an overemphasis on the essential unity of all things—the Creator and creation, God and man, Yahweh and Elizabeth Gilbert—may be a good way to dissolve more intermediate loyalties completely.
The result is a nation where gurus and therapists have filled the roles once occupied by spouses and friends, and where professional caregivers minister, like seraphim around the throne, to the needs of people taught from infancy to look inside themselves for God.
— Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
Bologna 