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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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I'd argue the "people in conservative households, etc." are happy comes from two main sources -
1.) Self-selection - all the people who'd be happier under more conservative living arrangements are in tha form of life, and people who want a more liberal situation are living that kind of life. Like, we tried this before, and when try to force people into this kind of life and allow even mild forms of mass communication, you get the 60's eventually, everywhere. Hell, Iran is dealing with this right now. I realize the median opinion on this site appears to be that women just need to get married at 22, start having babies, and they'd be much happier, but again, that happened. It turned out, a lot of people weren't happy with that arrangement.
2.) A more cynical interpetation is that ignorance is bliss. Of course, a bunch of religious people who think this is all God's will and that they can't change anything accept their lives and all that (unless of course they disagree, then weirdly they're happy to organize.)
in high school US history, during our unit on feminism and the 50s/60s, one thing we read was about the use of tranquilizers among women to demonstrate that being a housewife wasn't all it was cracked up to be. fair enough, but then what does the rate at which people today use antidepressants and other mind changing drugs say?
We've gotten better at diagnosing and treating mental illnesses, and thus, people who were depressed but were never diagnosed for various reasons are now getting treatment.
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I thought conservatives tended to have a stronger internal locus of control than liberals. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and all that - does that change between secular and religious conservatives?
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That doesn't explain why one group is happier than the other. Self selection should cause both to be happy (or equally miserable, if you're of the opinion people tend find things to be unhappy about).
Yeah, but they were happier than they are now, according the all the statistics we have. Now, I'm happy to throw these into the trash, as someone who doesn't take social science very seriously, but as long as we're pretending it has legitimacy, people shouldn't be allowed to ignore the inconvenient statistics.
I have no shortage of cynical interpretations of studies cited by progressives. When should we use the cynical interpretations, and when should we take them at face value?
First of all, I'm not shocked that conservative self-report, and that's the important thing, being more happy than liberals. The whole conservative worldview is that God, family, etc. all inhrently will make you happy, so why would say, a 29-year old conservative woman in rural Nebraska who got married at 21, and has a middle-class exurban life with a couple of kids and such admit to being depressed or unhappy, when she's been told that the whole undergirding of her world means she should be happy with what she has.
I do actually think a lot of current studies that basically try to paint liberal women and teenage girls as basically abnormal are at best, being misinterpeted by conservatives, as argued in this NYT piece - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/opinion/cdc-teenagers.html. As pointed out in that piece, twenty-five days, back in the 90's, now considered the Good Old Days, there was the same worry and overreaction. At least now, we largely don't have doctors telling girls with eating disorders, 'at least you're losing weight.'
As for studies showing women happier in the 50's, I'm happy to say most studies about anybody who wasn't a straight white male in the 50's I view with suspicion at best, but even if they are true, so be it - people have the freedom to make choices that make them unhappy.
I actually thnk the secret is the people who are actually probably happiest are moderates/apathetic/apolitical secular suburbanites, who may have been divorced, had multiple partners, smoke pot, but also drive an SUV, BBQ, etc.
But again, even if you were right about why that is, you're stuck with explaining why liberals used to be happier.
Academia is absolutely dominated by leftwingers, particularly in the social sciences, if anything their bias goes against painting teenage girls as abnormal, they're definitely not setting out to do so.
I made it about half way through that article, I can't say it contains a lot of substance. Where are the parts showing the study is being misinterpreted?
Yes, and? Seems like they were right and things only got worse?
Yes, we now tell these same girls that they're stunning and brave boys, and refer them for mastectomies.
It's a bit unfair to open with a relatively small and addressable objection like selection bias, when there's a much bigger one directly behind it like "I just don't trust studies from the 50's". OK, I generally don't trust studies that don't meet the criterion of embarrassment. Like I said, I'm happy to throw out the majority of social science, but this cannot be done selectively.
Sure, but my question is should we be advising people tomake choices which we know will make them unhappy?
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I mean, obviously the things people believe matters on some level- religious people exhibit better mental health than nones, and no one seems to dispute that- so there’s no reason to stop before political ideology, particularly one as all encompassing as US liberalism.
Unless you consider their religious beliefs to be a form of mental derangement. For example, can someone who is convinced that a man 2000 years was literally god incarnate and rose from the dead really be called mentally healthy?
Then the vast majority of the people on the planet for the vast majority of human history would be "mentally deranged", so what is mentally healthy? I think the query you're trying to pose here is whether intelligent and well educated people (that is, neither mentally disabled nor ignorant) can hold irrational beliefs, to which I would say yes.
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Yes. Even if we say that someone has major irrational beliefs, it does not follow that they are mentally unhealthy.
"Mental illness" is hard to define, but one plausible approach is a functioning account: a mental illness stops people from being able to carry out major life functions. Christianity doesn't do that, and hence Christianity is not a mental illness, even if Christian belief is irrational.
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Of course. Believing such things is a very common feature of a lot of stable civilizations in history.
Humans everywhere have had metaphysical beliefs of many sorts, and most of the ones that make it into long lived religions have to be healthy by the necessities of the memetic process.
Not believing in similarly silly things is actually a much better candidate for being a mental illness. And I say this as an atheist.
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If you consider religious beliefs to be a form of mental derangement, you are going to have to put a lot more effort into justifying that position.
Otherwise, do not just post something that just looks like low effort dunking on your outgroup.
I'm just going to say, I don't think this mod action is necessarily wrong with the rules as written, but I think it's inconsistently applied. It seems to me that there are quite a lot of short, low-effort takes making fairly debatable claims that never get modded (yes, I sometimes report them--doesn't seem to matter).
Here's the thing - a lot of "low-effort" comments are borderline, which means they are judgment calls. I can't claim we're 100% consistent about them, and I don't think we can be. We try, but I definitely let some comments slide that @naraburns might not and vice versa, and there are comments that I might mod one day while on a different day I wouldn't bother.
There's always a balance between allowing too many low effort comments, and being too overzealous about smacking every single one.
I'm guessing that you report mostly comments saying things you disagree with and you think we're harsher on "your" side than the "other" side. I'm guessing you also know that posters on every side have constantly accused us of this since the Motte was created.
I've definitely reported posts whose "thesis" I agreed with, or agree with some of what they said, but then made big sweeping claims that aren't supported or attack strawmen.
Rather than "guessing" you could have maybe asked for more detail?
I'm aware, and I didn't say it was bias, I just said it was inconsistent.
So what specifically would you like us to do? If you don't think it's the result of bias, all I can say is that yes, sometimes a kind of crappy comment will get modded and sometimes it won't. There are a number of factors that go into "Do I think I need to put on my modhat for this one?" and some of them are just plain human inconsistency.
To be honest I probably would have had no objection if you left your post at the first 2 paragraphs, because I realize modding is hard, and would have left it alone unless I saw particularly egregious examples in the future. The assertion that I was just being biased because I provided feedback is what got to me.
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Well, it's not. We're not going to allow "Religious people are crazy" as an unsupported opinion any more than we'd allow "trans people are crazy" or "wokes are crazy." You can hold those opinions, you can even argue them, but you can't just assert them as a demonstration of disdain.
Civilly.
I don't know ... From where I'm standing, @Goodguy was, in fact, civil and was unfairly modded. If you're not religious, religious actions sure look insane. He could have written an essay on why, but the theism-vs-atheism debates have all been done to death in the naughty aughties and should stay there. But it at least deserves a mention when people talk about mental health/sanity.
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Mental health as typically conceived hinges on whether your mindset impairs your day-to-day functioning. So by that metric, the answer to this is resoundingly yes:
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Just a stray thought: has this been adjusted for some common measures of personality traits? It could be that a certain set of personality traits is the driver behind both areligiosity and unhappiness. See e.g. the old saw that wisdom makes miserable.
IIRC there are interesting differences between different types of religious people(particularly Protestant v catholic differences) which point to religion being able to have an impact on behavior and personality, so even if differences in religiosity are largely innate we should expect religion itself to have an impact.
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I don't like 'external causes' theories. When you are in charge of your environment you create feedback loops for stimuli. The fact people seek out whatever stimuli in the first place is always the primary cause. Other than that, I find the scope of the question depressing.
Well, here folks are talking about forcibly modifying peoples environments to cut them away from stimuli they think is harmful for the very low stakes of lib/left/progressives being more mentally unstable than some obese conservative. This irks me quite a bit since, unless folks are intentionally proposing half measures, you can't stop at phones. It's computers, TV's and every other screen that can show you the equivalent of a Kardashian. It's magazines, pictures, makeup, mirrors, the next door neighbor. It's food, it's work, it's your home. There is no environmental fix for an innate cause, and there is no 'one neat trick' solution. And if your stakes are so low to begin with, how could you not justify such drastic measures of environmental modification for much more destructive things?
I get that modifying the eldritch horror that is modernity into something more hospitable to human life is a noble effort, but I don't see any of the liberal science men and free thinking rational bloggers as being in position to do any of that. They've constructed just as thick a barrier against any practical solution as the most hysterical bipolar liberal. They have their own feedback loops that they want to protect. Seeing them point at 'crazy liberals' and phones is just so whatever I literally can't even.
It's as if the question itself from ground up is constructed in such a way as to help whoever asks protect their own environment from scrutiny. I mean, hell, everyone here hates 'Group', right? Why not find an area where they are lacking and talk about how we can modify the environment of our outgroup to better suit our ingroup? Brilliant. What an interesting question! Very open minded.
Modernity is poison that finds and feeds on your worst innate predilections until you are no longer a functional human being. For most people that exists as sitting in front of a screen watching the life you wish you could have being lived by a millionaire whilst you grow ever weaker, dumber and more obese. For others its perpetual bipolar rollercoaster where the scenery is your life passing you by. I don't see why one would excuse musings of environmental control for one over another.
I think removing yourself from a harmful stimulus can be helpful short term. And really, for parents, I’d highly recommend no screens until they are old enough to properly process the material, and even then I’d probably be against unfettered access to media.
At the same time, I would strongly push things like Stoicism CBT/DBT style thinking, teach problem-solving in all spheres of life, and have chores and the like to teach responsibility. I think the sum of those things will build a resilient person much better able to handle the modern world. In fact, these kinds of folk-psychology traditions have built the kind of people who could handle situations far worse than anything we have going on today, including pretty serious oppression (as in it being illegal to be gay at all, legal segregation, hell, actual genocide) serious deficiencies in the environment (things like starvation, injuries before modern medicine, disasters in which no government was there to make you whole). The mindset of the earlier era was certainly more conservative, but it was also one that didn’t expect to live in a Utopian world. The people who experienced the Great Depression were a people who greeted hardship with a “it really do be like that sometimes” attitude. It was an era of the stiff upper lip, stop crying, either fix it or live with it.
And I think that the future will look back on our snowplow everything, feelings focused society as a backwards curiosity. It not only doesn’t work, but it seems to make things worse. Focusing on harms done, traumas experienced, and your feelings seems to create more depression than it solves. When you focus on you life from the view of “this sucks, I’m broken because of (trauma, disability, mental illnesses, etc.” then focus on how awful it feels to be depressed and broken and how bad being depressed and broken makes you feel, not only will you not get better, but you’ll get worse. But this is the dominant mindset, one we teach to our young. We teach them that they’re entering a world that sucks, that experiencing a sucky world is devastating and traumatic, and that you should focus on this and how you feel about it.
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Except that the entire point of the debate is that things have allegedly gotten worse over time, and it is the core argument of at least one of them that this can be mapped directly to adoption of smartphones. There can be multiple structural factors, but part of the debate is precisely over degrees of damage. Haidt doesn't have a monocausal explanation, he just weighs one cause more heavily.
Obviously, Playboy mags could be accused of objectification and "corrupting the youth" but that doesn't mean that on-demand UHD porn with algorithms feeding you more and more radical stuff is equally corrosive.
I don't think so either - but then, I'm a pessimist about political action in general. But that doesn't mean that they're actually wrong when they diagnose or blame something for the worsening situation.
What part of the debate is aimed at modifying the environment of the outgroup to suit the ingroup? Is social media coded as the outgroup here? I really don't understand.
How is that an exception to what I said? My point was that such a debate is contrived, obfuscatory and self serving. The more control a person has over their environment, the more powerful they can make their feedback loop. The mechanism for how they do that is irrelevant to that point. Limiting the scope of the debate to specific groups or mechanisms only serves to obfuscate the veracity of the problem.
The reason I said that liberal science men and rational free thinkers are not in a position to do anything about that is not because of their real world political power or influence. It's because they are at their core liberals who at every turn have fought for people to have more control over their environments. And that's the elephant in the room. Because the problem isn't specific mechanisms. It's people. When you give people control over their environments they will mold it to form feedback loops.
If one is a liberal, free thinking, open minded, live and let live kinda guy one is probably not going to have a big overarching vision about what kind of lives other people should live. No higher power to live up to, no universal or group specific ideal to strive for. In essence: no strictly enforced social norms that can infringe upon thy freedom. Such a person is probably more inclined to just say: 'as long as it's not hurting anyone and everyone consents'. The problem with that is that people are almost guaranteed to destroy themselves when they happen upon a stimuli they enjoy too much. We have been witnessing that for decades now. All under the noses of the liberal free thinkers who did nothing about it since the world around them happened to suit their predilections and preferences for an 'open and free society'. As well meaning as they may think themselves to be, they are simply put not equipped to deal with the problem in its totality. Their failure now surrounds us all.
Another issue I take with people like Haidt and the like broaching the topic the way they do is that it is inherently self serving. I mean, what a coincidence that the guy who doesn't like 'woke' politics is talking about how 'woke' women are mentally ill. Sorry, but I put about as much stock in the sincerity of the endeavor as when progressive science men create studies about how stupid racists are. To say nothing about the truth value of those claims, nor the actual sincerity of those involved. There are just too many arrows pointing in one direction, for a lack of a better explanation.
And to that end, if the people that are going on this navel probing expedition into the problems of progressive women are actually serious about solutions to the problems afflicting them, for instance by removing smartphones, then I'd expect them to be able to muster up many times the enthusiasm and effort for the host of issues of the same variety that are afflicting the majority of the western world today. But because of who they are, I hold no hope that they will. So I find their presence here as irrelevant and futile and the topic of their discussion as particularly self serving and gross. Not only because of the inherently otherizing nature of the endeavor but because it obfuscates the actual problem, which their liberal ideals helped maintain.
Ah, my misread. Sorry. I have less to quarrel with in this.
This I'm not particularly sympathetic to.
But then, I think we have very different views of the "people like Haidt" category. For one: he's pretty liberal himself (he is a social scientist, I mean...). These are his people, to be set right. For another: this topic is actually in line with his previous publishing. He's not just overreaching to own the wokes as some might be accused.
But I guess I'm just more optimistic about his motives. I've heard him beating the drum on the rising mental illness in young girls for years now - without emphasizing the woke element (he distrusts smartphones for kids and really hammers on limiting that as a solution, not merely "owning wokeness").
YMMV.
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Great post. I’m convinced there’s a solid link between liberal neuroticism, social contagion of said neuroticism, and many chronic mental health/pain issues.
Scott Alexander seems to be edging towards this conclusion recently, with this post about how transgender folks are more likely to have hyper mobility or EDS. I’ve actually been diagnosed with this condition and I’m convinced there’s a massive mental/social contagion aspect based on a decade of personal experience.
He also more directly confronts this in his review of *the Geography of Madness where he dives into the social contagion of things like penis stealing witches making entire communities of adults freak out and believe their genitals are being mutilated.
Clearly there is a strong cultural / mythopoetic element to most of our cultural neuroses and mental health issues. Unfortunately the dominant frame around these topics is that people are just born with their brains a certain way, and we should accommodate or pity them accordingly. In reality, the tried and true tactics of shaming and forcing people to become more resilient would be far more effective.
Psychiatry in general has clearly failed our generation, and is actively producing a host of messed up people that are incapable of dealing with even daily life. I for one am beyond disgusted with the psychological establishment, and think we need to burn it to the ground and start over.
That being said, I’m open to other suggestions.
I don't think psychiatry is innocent and it has a lot to answer for, but a lot of the problem seems to be society failing on multiple fronts and psychiatrists lacking the spine or humility to shut it down when progressives use their field as a panacea* since the other problems (e.g. cellphones, suburban living + overly restrictive parenting styles, all the other potential structural issues making people unhappy) are hard to fix even in theory.
I think there's a general hollowing of institutions and supports and liberals are clinging to the closest thing to a life raft.
There is a similar problem with education. A kid in is born into almost hilariously maladaptive social situations, doesn't have a father and his mother may also be poor and ill-equipped but we're supposed to blame lazy or racist teachers when he inevitably fails? Here even conservatives get in on the game (even though "education" is more likely to be seen as a panacea by liberals).
What is wrong with suburban living? Is this about some American suburbs being so utterly car dependant and lacking in services and commons that kids are effectively locked in their houses?
Yes. Which is why I also threw in more restrictive parenting styles (though the geography itself can pose problems).
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Maybe we could launch them into space, along with all the telephone sanitizers and other useless people.
I still maintain to this day that tales of the doom of Golgafrincham are carefully engineered psyops to make sure no telephone sanitizer ever dares approach it anymore.
I know because they have demonstrated the capability, and because it's what I'd do.
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It's an interesting phenomenon, but it makes sense structurally.
If "conservatism" means keeping things more or less as they are (or slower progress at least), then it would naturally attract people who find the current situation tolerable, and are optimistic about their chances of doing well within it.
If "progressivism" means more or less radical change to fix really big problems, then it would naturally attract people who find the current situation intolerable and are pessimistic about their chances of doing well under current conditions.
Whether either side is correct about their beliefs is completely orthogonal.
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