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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.
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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