How Does It Feel?

Princeton Professor Robert George recommends that we see ourselves living today in an Age of Feeling and Feelings. In other terms, terms that ought to be familiar to my readers, we are living in a therapy culture where the value of ideas depends on how much therapy we have had, and where those who disagree with us are said to be suffering from unresolved emotional distress. 

We no longer exchange ideas. We no longer debate propositions or policies. We fixate on our ideas, the ones we feel most deeply, and reject everyone else for having failed to have done enough therapy. They have not dealt with their issues and thus they are not just wrong, but not worth debating or even respecting.

The issue is complex. If therapists want you to get in touch with your feelings they are assuming that your feelings will show you something relevant about your reality. This involves introspection but it does not involve analyzing real world situations. It does not tell you what to do to solve problems. It limits itself to your subjective state.

As Professor George puts it:

That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth.

It gets more complicated. In Freudian psychoanalysis the issue is not how you feel but what you want. They ought not to be confused. Freud’s theory begins with wish fulfillment, not with emotional lability. 

Worse yet, the situation becomes more complicated when analysts decide that they want to figure out what other people want from you. It becomes less about what you really really want and more about how you are reacting to what other people want from you.

And that does not really answer the question of what truth is. After all, does your truth lie in your desire or your feelings? Or is there a truth that is impersonal, that is true regardless of whether or not you feel it. 

What about scientific truth or even philosophical truths? 

By definition, scientific truths are objective. They are not subjective. Evidently, those who make a fetish of feeling have little use for objective truths. The case of transmania makes that clear.

But then, what about tradition? What about policies that have been shown to have worked in the past? Ought we to respect tradition? Or ought we to reject tradition because it is not subjective?

Take the case of language. However much you are in love with your feelings, you are still obliged to use a language that other people understand. That means, a language that has evolved over centuries. You might want to impart your style to your sentences, but you cannot speak your own private language. As Wittgenstein famously said, there is no such thing as a private language.

In principle, the search for your true feelings is promoted as a way to improve your relationships with other people. And yet, if two people are not speaking a common language, and using words as they ought to be used, they are unlikely to connect. 

The Equality Hustle

Perhaps you want to know what our great minds are contemplating these days. Political philosophers Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, from Paris and Harvard, are about to publish a book about equality.

At a time when New York City has an idiot candidate for mayor who drones on about equality it does not feel like a bad idea to ask what equality is, whether it is desirable, and whether it is achievable.

In the most obvious and everyday sense of the term, equality is an ideal that never becomes realized. (except perhaps in mathematics) Perhaps that is why serious thinkers are contorting their minds in order to pretend that we can achieve it.

We will agree, without any disagreement, that we are not equal. We are not equal in height, weight, intelligence, ability, character, wealth, strength and even maturity. The notion that we are equal collapses once we ask the most obvious questions.

You might think that when Thomas Jefferson was intoning that all men are created equal he was not talking about these types of equality. He was suggesting that all human beings have the same and equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is a universalist theory, one that presumably will lead to the advent of a universal state, a Heavenly City, in which everyone will be equal to everyone else.

Otherwise, you will easily note that all citizens of our republic have rights that are not granted to non-citizens, like the right to vote. Nationhood and the identity that comes with it exist in relation to other nations. You might belong to one but you do not belong to all of them. 

And yet, cultures are not all created equal. Some are better; some worse. Some produce wealth and prosperity for their members while others avoid production in favor of more decadent pursuits. Richer or poorer, smarter or dumber, more or less peaceful… different cultures excel in different ways.

Besides, if no one was better than anyone else at badminton, what motivation would you have to improve your game?

Without inequality there would be no competition. There would be no pride in being successful at competition. And, let us not forget the words of New York Mayor Eric Adams-- there is no dignity in receiving a handout.

The principle of competition says that you can earn what you have. As for the notion that we should provide basic goods for everyone, thus redistributing income, it has been tried and it has failed. When you remove the motivation to work harder, people tend to work less.

A London Review of Books blog post about the book makes the point:

It is hard to shake the feeling that the centrality of these particular kinds of stigma in the book’s conversation stems more from their consequentiality for what is viewed as the left’s central political project of redistribution rather than a more general engagement with inequalities of recognition and respect. What about stigmatised groups who do not decide the outcome of elections, and their claims to equality?

Of course, this is traditional Western idealism. The Enlightenment philosophers thought that they had dispensed with religion, but, as Carl Becker famously argued, they were mining the tradition of the Heavenly City. They were doing secular eschatology, straight out of the book of Revelation.

For those who care about intellectual history, this idealism also comes from Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. The notion of a state that provides equally for everyone suggests a basic matriarchy, named a Mutterrecht by Swiss sociologist J. J. Bachofen in the mid-nineteenth century. 

Thinking that human society is best organized as a matriarchy suggests that it is like a mother who cares for her children equally. Obviously, this infantilizes people and makes them all dependent on the state. It has never ended well.

Fundraising

It’s that time of the week, again!

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. And, a special thank-you to paid subscribers.

Today is Sunday, so we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. It allows you to show that you want me to continue. Dare I say, requesting donations is preferable to tithing.

Not to be overly obvious, but it takes time and effort to put up a new post every day. Very few others manage to do so. Thus, it’s a job, one that, in my humble opinion, is worthy of compensation. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal link on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017. Please make the check out to my name, Stuart Schneiderman.

I’m counting on you. 

If you have already donated, please pass the word along to your friends, family, neighbors, associates and colleagues.

Please accept this expression of my gratitude for those who will donate and for those who have done so already. Many thanks!

Sturday Miscellany

First, in the matter of Zohran Mamdani, it keeps getting better.

When he was a high school senior applying to college Mamdani lied on his application to Columbia. He claimed to be Black, the better to game the DEI world. After all, if Elizabeth Warren could get away with it, why not try.

Also, Mamdani’s father was a professor of Columbia.

Put them together and the young man could not get into Columbia. He must have been astonishingly stupid.

Second, you remember the Boulder, Colorado fire bomber, by name of Mohamed Sabry Soliman. And you know that one of the victims of his terrorism has now died.

You might not be familiar with the fact that our federal government has chosen to deport Soliman’s family. That is, to deport his wife and children, apparently to Egypt.

Now, in the latest news, the family has lost its appeal and a judge has allowed the deportation to proceed.

Third, it turns out that the Democratic Party has fully embraced anti-Semitism. But, you knew that already.

The news comes from Harry Enten, crack pollster at CNN:

“What are we talking about here? All right, who do Democrats sympathize more with: Israelis or Palestinians? In 2017, the Democratic Party was a pro-Israeli party,” Enten explained. “Look at this. They sympathized with the Israelis by 13 points—more with the Israelis than the Palestinians. But look at this sea change. Now, Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians by 43 points.”

“Oh my God! That is a change in the margin of 56 points over the course of just eight years. So all of a sudden, it’s the pro-Palestinian position that actually reigns supreme in Democratic politics, not the Israeli position,” he continued. “And that is part of the reason why Mamdani was able to do so well in this primary, because those attacks over Israel, simply put, did not ring true for Democrats. They’re now on the side of the Palestinians, not the Israelis.”

Put that in your hookah and puff on it. Mamdani’s anti-Semitism resonates with today’s Democratic Party. He is a lot less of an outlier than Democrats would have you believe.

If you had not been alarmed before, it’s time to do so.

Fourth, it’s an astonishing divide. In America, 92% of Republicans and  24% of Democrats are proud to be Americans.

Just in case you were wondering why liberals have such poor mental health. If you feel no pride, in your nation or your community, you are more likely to be depressed.

Some people imagine, not without reason, that the cure for despair is hope. The truth is, the cure is pride, especially pride in achievement.

Didn’t a Navy admiral once recommend to a group of college graduates that they begin their day by making their beds. That is, by accomplishing something.

Try it; it works.

Fifth, once upon a time feminists declared “wife” to be a four-letter word. Women across America adopted the aberration and broke the American family. Large numbers of children are now being brought up without fathers. Many women who would want to be married find their prospects diminishing.

At the least, it made feminists feel empowered, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

As for putting the toothpaste back in the tube or putting the genie back in the bottle, recent cultural phenomena show women bucking the feminist current. Nowadays it is becoming more acceptable for women to want to be what are called trad wives, traditional wives who are homemakers and who do not spend half their time harassing their husbands over who is going to do the dishes.

And now we have the advent of the princess treatment, of who are not just tradwives but who want to be treated with a decent amount of courtesy when out on the town.

According to the New York Post, a TikTok post on the subject has garnered millions of hits.

The author is named Courtney Palmer. The Post reports:

“If I am at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food,” she said. She also addressed minutiae, like what to do at the coat check, at the valet, and at the host stand when your husband is checking on the reservation.

Amazingly, at a time when Democrats are whining about why men no longer support their candidates, the post suggests that the princess treatment works because it allows a man to be more manly. Who would have thought it?

“You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine,” she declared.

“He made the reservation, he’s taking you out — let him do the logistics. You’re just being a princess, you’re not being hoity-toity; you’re just letting him take care of it,” she explained.

Happy Independence Day

 

Wht Is the Intifada?

By now everyone knows that Democratic New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refused, on three occasions, to reject the phrase-- globalize the intifada. 

When asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker to denounce the phrase, Mamdani hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about free speech, and ended up refusing to eat his own words.

But then, how many of us really know what the intifada was? How many of us understand that it was a campaign of systematic terrorism against Israeli civilians, beginning in 2002. And, of course, it was globalized in terroristic attacks against Israelis and Jews in other parts of the Western world.

Yesterday morning New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recalled what it was like living and working in Israel during the intifada.

The notion that a politician in New York City cannot denounce this is beyond belief.

I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing. 

… Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit….

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. 

This is straight-up terrorism, directed at civilians, to redress a grievance that was not really a grievance.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

And then, in 2004:

The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

As for what it means to globalize the intifada, Stephens offers some examples:

But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

Stephens finds the Mamdani attitude unacceptable. I find him to be a bit wishy-washy here:

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

The obsession with the Palestinian cause involves making the weak feel strong, making the impotent feel powerless, and making the cowardly feel courageous. Worse yet, it makes a free people feel oppressed. Keep in mind, there have been no Israelis in Gaza for nearly two decades now.

And yet, the Palestinians, rather than build a nation, never stop whining and complaining… and blaming someone else.

The Palestinian cause is the ultimate in lost causes. Its adherents will never forgive Israel for succeeding where the Palestinians have failed. And, given their moral degeneracy, promoters of the Palestinian cause are always blaming someone else for their failings and their failures.

As a coda, I will add a point that Times columnist Tommy Friedman made recently. The Palestinian Gazas are monumentally stupid people. So, their cause is to make idiots feel smart:

Among Palestinians in Gaza, the question will be asked of their defeated Hamas leaders: “What in the world were you thinking on Oct. 7, 2023? You started a war with Israel, a vastly superior military foe, with no end game other than destruction, which only got the Jews to retaliate with no end game other than destruction. You sacrificed tens of thousands of homes and lives to win the sympathies of the next generation of global youth on TikTok, but now there is no Gaza.”

Therapy as a Pink Ghetto

Among its most conspicuous failures is this: therapy does a bad job treating men. A profession that has become overrun with females considers every patient to be a real or aspiring woman. Young female social workers tell men to get in touch with their feelings and to enhance their empathy.

The consequence: bad therapy results. And that merely counts those men who submit to the process. By now, enough men know that it is a waste of time, so they just do not go.

In more data-driven terms, men are 49% of the population, but 80% of the suicides. So said John MacGhlionn and he was surely correct to point this out. I have been writing about how therapy fails men for years now, so I am happy to discover that I have company.

The American Psychological Association succumbed to bias against men. MacGhlionn explains:

Unfortunately, not long after, the “sex is a construct” narrative started gaining traction, and the APA began denying that differences between the sexes actually exist.

Soon after, the APA decided to label qualities associated with traditional masculinity as “psychologically harmful.”

Having effectively turned its back on men, is it any wonder that the current system is so ill-equipped to help the men of America?

As for the difference between men and women, difference that escapes the ken of the APA, the answer lies in the fact that depressed men are looking for a way to function within the world. Women want to have their feelings validated.

In simpler terms, the relevant question for a man who is depressed because he is stymied by a problem is: What can we do about this? The relevant question for a woman is: how does this make you feel?

Perhaps this feels familiar. New York Times editorialist Michelle Cottle explained it well. This dates from my blog, on 7-22-23.

While women can maintain ties through conversation-heavy engagements, the experts say, men are better served by side-by-side bonding. That is, they participate in activities together, during which community and camaraderie are established. On occasion, between rounds of bocce or even rounds at the sports bar, the men may bring up how much they hate their boss or the results of their latest stress test. Behold! Male bonding in action.

Among the other problems in therapy world is the simple fact that therapy has become a pink ghetto. As MacGhlionn explains:

Sadly, there just aren’t enough male therapists to choose from.

Almost two-thirds of psychologists in the United States are female.

Eighty percent of clinical psychologists are female.

Some 75% of psychology graduate students are female.

This is one reason why therapy is failing men.

Female therapists do not understand men. They want men to feel loved and connected, but they leave men feeling loved and powerless, ineffectual.