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Does Progressive Ideology Make People Unhealthy?
Or: The internet wrestles with the finding that progressives (especially liberal women) are more likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness.
John Haidt seems to have kicked it off with good piece that goes over his usual points: cellphones cause problems by encouraging comparison and closing off real independent play that builds resilience , but liberal kids specifically are being taught "anti-CBT" - instead of learning resilience and an internal locus of control liberal kids are taught catastrophizing and believing things are outside of their control. I'm sure we've all seen adult liberals emphasizing how "traumatized" and "tired" they are made by events.
Noah Smith thinks it can be reduced to phones, and many problems - e.g. competition on Instagram depressing girls, a doomer media narrative making people sad - just come down to phones too.
(The one I found most interesting) Musa al-Gharbi has a great piece that does seem to come down to "conservatives are just generally more psychologically resilient in polling, for various reasons" - there are obvious ones like them being more religious or emphasizing an internal locus of control, but also more interesting ones I didn't consider like conservatives allegedly having less homogeneous groups and progressivism seemingly attracting more neurotic types in general.
The summary:
There are likely some genetic and biological factors that simultaneously predispose people towards both mental illness/ wellness and liberalism/ conservatism, respectively.
Net of these predispositions, conservatism probably helps adherents make sense of, and respond constructively to, adverse states of affairs. These effects are independent of, but enhanced by, religiosity and patriotism (which tend to be ideological fellow-travelers with conservatism).
Some strains of liberal ideology, on the other hand, likely exacerbate (and even incentivize) anxiety, depression, and other forms of unhealthy thinking. The increased power and prevalence of these ideological frameworks post-2011 may have contributed to the dramatic and asymmetrical rise in mental distress among liberals over the past decade.
People who are unwell may be especially attracted to liberal politics over conservatism for a variety of reasons, and this may exacerbate observed ideological gaps net of other factors.
As well as an interesting prediction:
I'll have to dig into this to confirm but this is something to watch: can conservatives "win" the cultural contest by providing a less neurotic example or will they all be assimilated into the same therapy mindset? Clearly the phenomenon of trad-larping seems to show some dissatisfaction with what liberalism has to offer but i'm not sure how p
From what I recall of Haidt, there does seem to be some "contagion" effect in terms of liberal tactics where, if liberals complain and use school services e.g. to resolve speech disputes, cons eventually try to do the same (I've seen similar things with female/feminist style complaints spreading to the other side).
TBH I also think there's a "capitalist realism" thing going on where no one can see outside liberal ideas even if they seem manifestly inert or outright unhelpful. They're just considered "the right thing". And it's repeated over and over. In fact: failure just leads to more calls to "promote mental health" and more demands, not less.
Reading Crazy Like Us after it came up here really reinforced this: As one user commented on Scott's review: "I found the trauma section of the book very compelling, in part because it squares with my impression of the United States as a society that is convinced it understands trauma better than any previous society but seems to achieve uniquely poor outcomes. It would be like a land that was convinced it had the best vaccine for polio but you look around and every fourth person is in an iron lung."
Even if conservatism offers a better outcome psychologically it doesn't matter, cause liberals won't listen to conservatives anymore than the well-meaning "trauma" counselors in Crazy Like Us cared to listen to the locals' own view of things.
This might be a bit rambling so bear with me.
My mum once said to me that she'd read somewhere that attractive people tend to be conservative, the theory being that attractive people tend to be treated well by society as it currently is: thus, it's not in their self-interest for society to change dramatically.
People often use "conservative" and "right-wing" interchangeably (likewise "progressive" and "left-wing"), but that's not quite the phenomenon I'm describing here. I rather mean that people who are generally satisfied with their lives will not see it in their own self-interest to radically change society from the ground up, and hence will tend not to endorse policies which promise to do that. By contrast, people who are generally dissatisfied with their lives will feel that they have nothing to lose by radically changing society. What kinds of people are dissatisfied with their own lives? Per my first example, physically unattractive people; but also (non-exhaustive list) people with poor social skills, people who can't hold down a steady job, mentally ill people and, per the OP, neurotic people.
"So you're saying that the only reason people are communists is because they're ugly, friendless, unemployable and crazy?" Well, yes and no. It's not hard to find examples of people meeting that exact description, and I won't pretend I'm completely innocent of this mean-spirited tendency to sneer. There was some recent discussion here about "bio-Leninism" which, as far as I understand it, basically boils down to this.
But it's not a phenomenon unique to far-leftists. There's a subreddit called r/beholdthemasterrace, which catalogues examples of white supremacists/white nationalists etc. who are obese, lanky, out of shape or generally unattractive. This is, to my mind, a perfectly legitimate rhetorical technique: "these guys think they're superior to others by dint of their ethnicity, but look how weak, frail and ugly they are!" But people are making a category error when they describe white supremacists as "conservative". To "conserve" means to keep things the way they are. Anyone who endorses transforming the US into an ethnostate cannot be a "conservative" when the US isn't an ethnostate. Rather, American white supremacists are reactionaries: the changes they propose making to American society are just as sweeping, radical and fundamental as any of those proposed by Marxists.
Hollywood actors talk a big game about being progressive, but it's mostly of a surface level which will have little impact upon them personally ("yay feminism", "yay LGBTQ+", "yay defund the police [I live in a gated community and am accompanied by one or more huge bodyguards everywhere I go]"). You will be hard-pressed to find an example of a wealthy, attractive, popular and charismatic person endorsing or trying to bring about truly radical changes to the society in which they personally live. Even AOC's alleged radicalism is mostly for show.
I guess probably this boils down to horseshoe theory: people who are generally satisfied with their lives (low neuroticism, good social skills, physically attractive, no trouble holding down a steady job etc.) will tend to be boring centrists (in deed, if not in word) who correctly intuit that it's not in their self-interest to radically change the society in which they live. People who are generally dissatisfied with their lives will be far more keen to make huge changes to society, and will be drawn to any movement which promises to do that, regardless of whether it skews right or left. Historic discussions of the horseshoe effect and mass political movements have made hay of the observable fact that neo-Nazi skinheads and antifa recruited from the same demographic: football hooligans (angry, disaffected young men spoiling for a fight); or that it isn't difficult to find historical examples of large groups of angry, disaffected young men jumping ship from a far-left party to a far-right one (or vice versa).
How does this tie in to the original post? Highly neurotic (also physically unattractive, mentally ill etc.) people throughout history will always be drawn to movements which promise to radically change society, but in most of the West, the far-right movements are so heavily stigmatised/suppressed that most neurotic people never encounter them (except in a "look how evil and lame these people are" sneerclub context; see the aforementioned /r/beholdthemasterrace). If you're dissatisfied with your life, you spend far too much time on a social media platform (as most dissatisfied people do these days), and that platform has a policy of banning swastikas on sight - but, crucially, not hammers and sickles - you will be drawn to a far-left policy platform by default: it's the only game in town. (The rare low-life-satisfaction person who ends up endorsing a far-right policy platform will tend to be someone who encountered it in person, unmediated by social media censors.) Even if the high-life-satisfaction centrist liberals in your social circle don't actually endorse far-left ideas, they will probably react with a great deal more tolerance and forbearance if you start ranting about evil capitalists and the cisheteropatriarchy than if you start ranting about die Juden or 13/52. Low-life-satisfaction far-leftists are generally treated by centrist liberals with passive tolerance at best* and amused condescension at worst; low-life-satisfaction far-rightists are (quite understandably) ostracized and shunned by centrist liberals. If you live in a liberal society and are generally dissatisfied with your life, it's much easier to get away with being a far-leftist than a far-rightist.
Before anyone takes offense and bites my head off, please accept my mealy-mouthed concession that this is a tendency rather than a law: one may occasionally encounter a high-life-satisfaction person who nonetheless really thinks that changing society from the ground up is the right thing to do, or vice versa. My point is that such people are the exception rather than the rule.
*It's a similar dynamic to how vegetarians interact with vegans: they aren't committed enough to actually adopt the other person's worldview, but feel sort of guilty about it and end up cowed into silence.
I have a counterpoint to offer. In every society women are treated much better than men and have more privileges. Yet women are overwhelmingly liberal progressive types who want to change society.
Women being generally treated better than men does not automatically translate into women having generally higher life satisfaction than men. What's more, many women who hold particularly radical opinions about how to restructure society can honestly claim to have legitimately suffered under the current system e.g. many radical feminists claim to have been the victims of rape or domestic abuse, which was a major factor in their becoming radical feminists.
I think Western women being disproportionately progressive liberal types supports my theory rather than contradicts it, as it's mostly "radicalism" of a shallow superficial type. Western women who claim to want to "smash the patriarchy" or who support an ill-defined Ibram X Kendi-style "racial reckoning" are a dime a dozen, but their ostensible support for these "policies" rarely seems to conflict with their being a #girlboss pulling down five or six figures working for JP Morgan or Meta. That is to say, they're generally progressives of the "we need more black female drone pilots" school, and their alleged radicalism is almost entirely performative and social in nature. (I absolutely include the aforementioned AOC in this category.) It's far rarer to encounter a woman who sincerely supports a radical restructuring of society along e.g. Marxist lines, and who has actively worked towards bringing that goal about.
Anecdotal and uncharitable, but I am under the impression that women with poor outcomes will adopt feminism as a coping strategy, and will exaggerate microaggressions even to the point of forming false memories of abuse in order to justify their position and frame their self-serving behavior as a struggle for social justice. Add to this a culture of always believing women and never doubting their claims, and a social requirement of always reaffirming them, and you get marvelous echo chambers in which women positively reinforce each others' tales of systemic sexism based on, substantially, very little.
Downvote this post as it deserves, but my lying eyes compel me.
Honestly, pretty much agree.
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