Links to Consider, 5/28
Andrea Lan on mental health and extreme leftism; Ted Gioia says to study stupidity; Ryan Burge on non-Christian Republicans; Noah Smith on liberalism and information abundance
According to the 2022 SAMHSA National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a whopping 36.2% of respondents aged 18-25 reported a diagnosable mental illness according to the DSM IV in the last year.
…At the extremes, 57% of very liberal students in our study reported feelings of poor mental health at least half the time, compared to just 34% of very conservative students.
…Only 41% of very liberal males report feelings of poor mental health more than half the time, compared to 60% of very liberal females, and a whopping 70% of very liberal non-binary students.
She writes as if the causality runs from social justice extremism to emotional fragility. But I am inclined to think that it is the other way around. If you are mentally fragile, you are likely to be attracted to an extreme ideology that gives you an external source to blame for your discomfort.
Ted Gioia proposes a reading list for a course on stupidity. Among the essay questions he proposes for a final exam are these:
Sociologist Max Weber claimed that bureaucracies are efficient because they decide everything by clear and well considered rules. Yet people constantly complain that bureaucracies are stupid. How is this contradiction possible?
What political institutions are most valuable in resisting stupidity?
If you don’t know how I would answer those questions, then you have not been following my substack. I like his other exam questions, also. And a commenter on Gioia’s post points to historian Carlo Cipolla’s laws of stupidity.
We have a term for this in political science, it’s called being cross pressured. I consider this piece by Diana Mutz to be one of the foundational works in understanding the concept. The field of religion and politics presents me with a whole bunch of combinations of folks who would clearly fall into this cross pressured category. I wanted to focus on one today that may be the most incongruent - people who identify as atheist or agnostic on the religion question but then say that they are Republicans…
The Republican party is basically 85% Christians right now. So to be an atheist who also identifies with the GOP puts you in a really small subset of the population.
…One in twenty Republicans are atheists or agnostics. It’s one in five Democrats. There are four Democrat atheist/agnostics for every Republican.
Pointer from Razib Khan. If I understand the term “cross-pressured” correctly, then I think that Jewish conservatives are cross-pressured. I know that I feel that way. Even after October 7 and its aftermath, Jews have a really hard time wearing “conservative” on our lapel pins. But we should. Better to align with a party that is dominated by Christians than with a party that is increasingly dominated by social justice activists.
we can sketch out a general theory of how liberal democracy might be far less suited to the 21st century than it was to the 20th. As information technology has advanced, the costs of gathering information may have fallen to such a low level that the advantages of liberal institutions — markets, elections, and freedom of expression — may be attenuated. At some point, those advantages may fall well below the costs of information tournaments — the inevitable competitive negative-sum shouting, misinformation, campaigning, fundraising, and financial competition that has become an ever-larger piece of how Americans spend their time.
Highly speculative, and it fact he raises it as possibly true, but not likely true. One way I might criticize it is to say that “cheap information” only applies to what is already known. What is yet to be discovered may matter a lot, and liberal institutions are probably better at discovery.
substacks referenced above:
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Re Lan: I suspect causality goes both ways there. On the one hand being mentally fragile makes you seek external causes for it as Kling points out. On the hand, if your political team holds the mentally fragile in higher regard than others you are going to be inclined to identify as mentally fragile yourself. It isn’t as though anyone can objectively point out “No, your mental state is pretty normal, not special at all.”
Of course the worry then is whether or not identifying as mentally fragile over a long period of time makes you in fact mentally fragile. Fake it till you break it.
Of course, leftists suffer from depression; they've bought into claims that:
- They are either oppressors or oppressed because of their skin color.
- Because they can't change their skin color, they will always be oppressors or oppressed.
- They are citizens of a country that has no right to exist because it was founded by colonist settlers who stole the land from its rightful owners.
- They are citizens of a country that is responsible for all of the world's ills.
- Climate change will make the planet uninhabitable within their lifetimes.
- The world is rapidly running out of natural resources.
- Forests and rainforests are disappearing around the world.
- The oceans have become cesspools.
What sane person wouldn't be depressed if he believed all that?