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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.
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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