In this episode, Simone and I discuss exploding mental health problems within progressive women, and how the urban monoculture is contributing to these problems. We discuss a recent piece that explores why liberal women are less happy and lonely than conservative women.
00:24:38.700So what happened with Tumblr is this was the first time it became popular to list your mental illnesses alongside your, like, gender in your bio.
00:24:59.220No, it was clearly, like, a part of your status.
00:25:01.140It was alongside your gender, you would, and then you'd have, like, flags associated with, because, you know, when you've removed identity, when you've removed a person's connection to their ethnicity and religion and history, or you've made them ashamed of it, people need to find identity somewhere else.
00:25:18.600Well, no, in any community where they're trying to show status, there are things that you use as markers.
00:25:25.360Like, in the nouveau riche community that tries to pretend that it's not nouveau riche, it's how much lower piano you wear.
00:25:31.380And that's, like, there's all these little things that, like, people utilize and mental, that is so, like, such a bad sign when your amount of, it's like spoonies, you know, like, oh, well, you think you're sick?
00:25:48.940It's like a community, yeah, where it became cool to, like, get amputations or something, and then it's like, I got more amputations than you.
00:25:55.560I mean, literally the trans community.
00:25:56.900But, like, I was thinking recently, the way that we relate to gender transition, given that it appears to be a culture-bound illness, like anorexia, you know, overwhelmingly in autistic individuals at that exact same age, tied to body dysmorphia, it would be the same as treating anorexia by removing people's organs to make them lighter.
00:26:15.880Like, an anorexic person would tell you, like, this is great, like, they removed a few of my organs that I didn't 100% need, one of my lungs, maybe a uterus.
00:27:00.540So to continue here, Nagel described how on the other side of the political spectrum there was, quote, the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan, end quote.
00:27:09.600The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women, while 4chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men.
00:27:18.220So while there was an increasingly gendered nature of the online conflict, the two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war.
00:27:26.660The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence.
00:27:36.500While young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction, they brandish a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy.
00:27:47.740It was out of this reciprocal dynamic that experts on the podcast suggest that today's cancel cultures were born in the early 2010s.
00:27:57.300And I do think that that's what we're seeing here.
00:27:59.160This is also where the birth of what became the new right, the tech right, the MAGA Republicans came from.
00:28:03.940As we pointed out in one of our videos for people who want to see an interesting historical documentary, the new right, the modern MAGA right, the online right, was born out of the atheist movement.
00:28:15.860The online atheist and skeptic movement, which split into two groups.
00:28:19.640One group was like, oh, you guys weren't actually interested in the truth.
00:28:23.640You just wanted to dunk on conservatives.
00:28:25.380And then the other group was actually interested in the truth.
00:28:27.300And many of them have converted back into religions like ourselves.
00:28:29.940But very, very interesting to note that all of this started on Tumblr versus 4chan.
00:28:40.360And when I say 4chan got Trump elected, many people are like, well, 4chan wasn't that relevant in the general election, in his first general election.
00:29:15.160And keep in mind how much the culture of MAGA still has those 4chan roots, that Elon called Doge Doge, literally like a meme coin with like a dog that was commonly used on 4chan.
00:30:21.160Young conservative women were three times as likely to report being very satisfied with life compared to young liberal women.
00:30:27.080Moreover, liberal women are two to three times more likely to report that they are quote-unquote not satisfied with their lives compared to conservative women.
00:30:35.060And consistent with previous research, the effect of ideology on young women's happiness held up to controls for age, education, and race.
00:30:43.360And so, I'm putting a graph on screen here that says liberal women least likely to be completely satisfied with life.
00:30:48.820And you see it's just a huge difference.
00:31:32.900I think one is that there's a higher correlation of church attendance and therefore community membership.
00:31:36.920But I would also argue that a conservative woman and a liberal woman with the same amount of social interaction in their lives would probably define the state of their loneliness differently.
00:31:50.660And that a progressive woman would be far more likely to just perceive it differently.
00:31:54.760Yeah, perceive it as like, this is a problem.
00:31:57.240I don't feel perfectly satisfied or I feel like what I see.
00:32:01.220No, no, no. I disagree with the way you're framing this.
00:32:02.880I think that conservatives genuinely feel less lonely even if they are the same amount of interpersonal interactions because there is no status to be gained.
00:32:12.400And so your emotions, the way you relate to your emotional state is largely due to your internal framings.
00:32:18.180You can significantly alter your internal state.
00:32:34.500Well, they're also trained to know that if they don't feel 100% perfect, that that is a problem.
00:32:40.040Whereas I think conservatives are more likely to understand that this state is transient or not even think about it, not even be like, oh, this is, I'm feeling something bad.
00:32:47.680Like, ah, you know, they're just like, okay, you know, the bigger things to worry about.
00:32:52.740Your friend, right, when we were reading her quote, like, this, like, why is she posting that?
00:32:59.240Like, if you were feeling sad, would you post it?
00:33:02.480She's trying to post, she's, I think, she's signaling that she's a hot mess right now, that she's not happy, she's not feeling okay, that she thinks the world is terrible, and she's looking for social affirmation.
00:33:16.200And she does have some comments on that that are like, that's my friend, and like, oh, you look great, and things like that.
00:33:22.000So I think, I think it's, and maybe it's also-
00:33:27.200And I'd also point out with her post, her post is, as I think, very normal.
00:33:35.360It is, I consider, like, a very, I think you did a very good job of finding, like, a very average and normal post for a progressive to make that a conservative would never make.
00:33:44.260Yeah, it's not like, it's not an unhinged libs of TikTok thing.
00:33:46.740It's just what a, this, Simone's private friend from high school is randomly posting on, you know, a certain day of the week in spring.
00:33:56.340And, and that's, you know, and like, what are all my posts?
00:34:03.260They're often ideological, well, they're meant to have agency in the world.
00:34:06.440Like, your posts are either our kids, like, showing off, like, your family so that other people are jealous and hate their lives.
00:34:11.540Which is more like, I, I take pictures of our kids, and I'm like, oh, they're so cute, and I want to post them, because I hate wasting the pretty, because they're so pretty.
00:34:35.980So that our videos can be safe for kids.
00:34:38.540Well, I don't think kids need to be shielded from curse words, but I think they should be taught that curse words are, for lack of a better way to put it, like, low class.
00:34:46.300A sign, curse words are a sign of not having enough creativity to use a turn of phrase that actually gives the message that you want, the wit that you want.
00:34:55.560Well, I think we need to figure out ways to be vulgar without curse words, to be ideologically vulgar.
00:35:00.740When I read, when I read Emily Post from the 1940s, this woman has the sickest burns, but she doesn't use any slang.
00:36:17.080You know, people denying reality, saying, oh, actually, Trump, there was a huge thing of, like, people thinking that Trump wasn't actually going to be sworn into office.
00:36:28.620I was a little late to do a piece on it, but I thought it would be, you know, fun.
00:36:31.260Where people, there were all these conspiracy theories that, like, the Dems were going to, like, trick him at the last moment and they had been talking about it.
00:36:39.200Oh, so now they like January 6th as a concept.
00:37:01.660Did you know that the only time that CNN was filming any of Trump's speeches, they never filmed any of his speeches live, except for the one where he was shot?
00:38:37.640Well, this shows what happens when you put all these DEI people, you know, that was when the Secret Service was being run by a lady.
00:38:42.640And we know that a lady was not the most qualified person to run the Secret Service.
00:38:47.000I don't mean this in, like, a women don't know this stuff way.
00:38:50.200I mean this in a, I know, statistically, the number of men versus the number of women in the Secret Service means it's highly unlikely that the most competent person in the entire Secret Service was a woman.
00:39:01.660Oh, just because, yeah, if you have, like, 74 women candidates and you have 538 male candidates, we have a problem.
00:39:13.620Like, this was obviously DEI nonsense.
00:39:15.900So, maybe she was trying to protect her job.
00:39:18.680You know, Trump gets taken out and then she doesn't have to worry about the DEI cleanups because she was on the out after he came in anyway, given what's been going on within the government.
00:39:39.680Like, I think that one is noting that conservatives, whatever happened to progressives is now happening to conservatives.
00:39:46.900Whatever happened to progressives, it's continuing to happen and get worse over time.
00:39:52.640But the conservatives aren't just devoid.
00:39:54.340It's not like, you know, whenever you see a progressive, you know, tell them you're sorry and give them a benzo.
00:39:59.220It's like, actually, there's something going on here.
00:40:02.800You need to be aware that this is happening in our community as well and fight against it.
00:40:07.640And fight against it through focusing on, you know, an internal locus of control, promoting an internal locus of control, promoting self-responsibility.
00:40:34.800I had a friend reach out to me, a progressive, who heard me rant about this a long time ago and apparently thought I was being stupid or crazy.
00:40:41.980She recently emailed me and was like, you know, I started going to work on these issues with a number of psychologists.
00:41:57.120Well, there are also so many other interventions that would be so much more effective, like changing the context of the subject, because that's often so frequently at the root of their problems or their underlying health issues.
00:42:11.040There are just so many other things you can do first that will likely solve the underlying problem.
00:42:15.460And I think the problem with psychology is it often only deals with surface stuff when you can't solve that until you shift the underlying issue.
00:43:10.020But when it was founded, the medical profession had gotten so bad with quack treatments, they likely were better off not engaging with the medical field.
00:43:19.620It was likely an adaptive cultural evolutionary trait during its early period.
00:43:25.360It only became ill-adaptive as science got better.
00:43:30.540Like, there's a reason to distrust science again.
00:43:32.600And in addition to that, psychology, which used to be great, psychiatry, which used to, you know, serve a purpose, is getting worse.
00:43:39.140And I'd say that now we're back to sort of where it was in the 80s when people were doing, like, hypnosis and implanted memories and stuff.
00:43:47.740Your kids will be incepted to hate you if you send them.
00:44:22.460Because when you look at those chat apps that people, like, high school students are getting addicted to, like, my AI boyfriend, I can't quit him.
00:44:29.560It's not the boyfriend scenarios that are even the most popular on these platforms.
00:44:35.260The number one chat scenarios that are popular in all of these.
00:44:39.100And not because they're trying to fob this off on people.
00:44:41.300Well, the safer work ones, I should clarify.