Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Tyranny of the Depressed

Australian psychologist Nick Haslam calls it “concept creep.” Writing in the Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf commented extensively on Haslam’s idea.

Once upon a time people suffered from trauma and abuse. The incidents that provoked these negative psychological reactions were distinct and delimited. Nowadays, everything is potentially traumatic and abusive. Someone looks at you cross-eyed and you have a cause for legal action.

Worse yet, you and only you are the ultimate arbiter of how much your feelings were hurt by something that other people may or may not have seen as hurtful. By all the current definitions, if you think you have been abused, someone is responsible for abusing you. If you think that you were traumatized, it doesn’t matter what really happened, or whether a normally constituted human being would have found the event life-altering.

It’s the reign of the thin-skinned and the sensitive. But, it’s also the tyranny of the depressed. The more thin-skinned you are the more likely you are to feel that a microaggression—a flippant remark or even a reference to white people-- has damaged your delicate psyche beyond repair. People have been so weakened by the ambient culture that they feel forced to offer public displays of their sensitivity, the better to claim victim status.

In the past it would have been embarrassing to announce in public that you are hypersensitive to slights. Nowadays it’s a badge of honor, because it makes you one of those who are standing up against oppression. Or better, you become someone who is martyring himself for the cause.

Exposing your vulnerability invites aggression. It causes people to pity you. It makes you look like you cannot defend yourself, like you cannot take responsibility for your actions. People respect your successes. They do not respect you for mistaking excuses for failure.

These bad habits seem most endemic to the Age of Obama. If Barack Obama is a failed president, the reason must be racism. If students accepted into universities to fulfill affirmative action quotas cannot do the work, the reason must be racism… and a curriculum that does not sufficiently reflect their experience. If women do worse than men at one task or another, the reason can only be sexism. If trangendered people are far more likely to commit suicide, the reason must be transphobia.

When a high school student posted a Facebook rant about her teacher, the teacher brought the student up on charges of “cyberbullying.” When a parent allowed a 9 year old child to play alone in a park, she is arrested for child neglect. Let’s not forget trigger warnings, microaggressions and rape culture.

How did we get to this point?

Haslam points out correctly that professional therapists bear a considerable responsibility for this phenomenon.

In his words:

By misrepresenting normal sadness, worry, and fear as mental disorders, the mental health professions overmedicate, exaggerate the population prevalence of disorder, and deflect resources away from more severe conditions.

Were we to be slightly more cynical, we would note that mental health professionals are in business. If there is no need for their services they do not have any business. They have a vested interest in there being more mental illness.

Thus, if they can somehow persuade everyone that he or she suffers from one mental health problem or another, they will have more patients. Seeing therapists as selfless helpers is surely a distortion.

In addition, as Haslam notes, this is of a piece with leftist cultural politics:

I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. Its implications are ambivalent, however. Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.

I would only add one point here. The cult to victimhood involves a grand narrative, one in which the world is divided into oppressors and the oppressed.

If you proclaim your victimhood you are taking on a role within that narrative fiction. If you have not been a victim yourself you can do God’s work and side with victims. You can militate against the oppressors and visit the wrath of God on them. Even if their sins have been mild, you, if you live within the narrative, believe, as an article of faith, that small sins are merely the tip of a bigoted iceberg.

Perhaps more importantly, from my perspective, is that our overlords are forcing us to live in a guilt culture, one that defines behavior in terms of guilt or innocence, that wants to see the guilty punished, does not care about due process, and that is attempting to reorganize human society in terms of forbidden, not prescribed actions.

Since we have long since abandoned any pretense to politeness, decorum and propriety, since we no longer teach children to do the right thing, to have the right manners, to address their teachers with terms of respect or to observe codes of correct social behavior, we are reduced to punishing them when they do the wrong thing.

No one cares any more about what they should do. They are obsessing about whether their behavior has transgressed a new taboo and thus has subjected them to severe punishment. Yesterday, Curt Schilling was fired by ESPN for saying the wrong thing about transgendered individuals—because anyone who suggests that a boy who thinks he is a girl should not be allowed to shower in the girls’ locker room is a bigot. And this is not just a one-off case. America’s courts have affirmed this principle.

No one receives any praise for sending a thank-you note or performing an act of everyday courtesy. When it comes to dating or what they used to call courtship, there are no longer any rules. Young people are not allowed to follow the customary and traditional ways of developing relationships. In the absence of these rules, we have a generalized hysteria about sexual abuse and rape culture.

Everyone agrees that rape should be punished severely. Yet, the new rules on campus, dictated by the Obama administration, have sexual assaults on college campuses adjudicated, not by the criminal courts, but by administrative panels that systematically deprive the accused of his rights to due process. It’s not about prosecuting rape—which ought to be the province of the criminal court system—but about punishing anyone who is accused of a sexual assault. Note well, the punishment is meted out solely because the victim says so. As soon as she claims to be a victim, her word is sacrosanct. Presumably, any woman who feels that she was the victim of sexual assault was the victim of a sexual assault.

It shows what happens when you overthrow the traditional rules of courtship and abandon their goal: having sex with someone you know. It happens when the gestures of courtesy and respect, shown by men toward women, are rejected by women, thus making the dating scene into something that looks like a free-for-all.

Rulelessness, normlessness, or anomie, as it is called, produces a situation where repression feels better than anarchy, and where people attempt to affirm their moral being, not by building their character and doing the right thing, but by not doing the wrong thing.

We have filled our minds with all of the ways things can go wrong, to the point where we no longer know how to get anything right. We know why we have failed, so we can concoct endless narrative explanations for our lack of success. But we do not know how to succeed, how to work together, how to get along with each other, how to achieve consequential success in the world.

6 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

There's something here, but collectively it seems a little too convenient. Therapists are villains, convincing healthy people they are sick to make a buck. Leftists are villains, convincing healthy people they are oppressed, and need to blame bad words by insensitive people for the source of their problems.

There are surely many scapegoats to consider. I'll link Jonathan Haidt's recent review again for a similar attempt.
http://righteousmind.com/where-microaggressions-really-come-from/

Maybe human darkness is just a load of garbage, and if we'd just all get back to being rational productive citizens, following rules, acting respectful, (except when PCness is involved, and then you need to act disrepectful), but just restoring a sense of order, then all the bad dreams will disappear, and everyone will fit in their proper roles, just like Marx promised in his socialistic utopia, except a right-wing version of what's good and proper, and anyone who doesn't fit in can be banished until they agree to conform and not see what shouldn't be seen.

I've thought recently that perhaps self-pity is the greatest source of mischief in humanity, and dishonest narratives are build on self-pity in a way that protects people from seeing their own participation in their suffering.

Stuart: Exposing your vulnerability invites aggression. It causes people to pity you. It makes you look like you cannot defend yourself, like you cannot take responsibility for your actions. People respect your successes. They do not respect you for mistaking excuses for failure.

I don't think vulnerability is the right word, and of course acting pitiful is meant to encourage someone to take care of you, and people learn this defense mechanism because it worked for them in the past at some point.

So people need challenging at least, but we don't always know clearly what people can handle. If anxious helicopter parents fly in every time their children are in the smallest danger, they might teach passiveness. But on the other hand, brutality can also teach passivity - punishing children for the smallest of offenses, so they follow the rules, and depend upon external authority to handle all disputes. So over-helping or over-punishing may be problematic.

And if self-pity is a learned defense from being dominated, I do wonder how to help someone caught in such a trap. I wonder because I've tried, and see people caught in self-pity won't help themselves, and so they'll sabotage whatever help you offer, and blame you for failing.

Maybe yelling at people who think they're depressed, or think they've been victimized, maybe that'll "snap them out of it", but its a tough test to try to hurt someone to force them to defend themselves. Maybe if you don't mind being hated for a long while, it's what they need? Or maybe good-cop, bad-cop work together?

There's another word going around "toxic people", that seems overused. It seems to be a defense, to explain why other people don't deserve our compassion. Toxic people are people full of self-pity, and self-sabotage, and create their own problems, and they'll take you down with them, if you let them.

So I can see that, but I don't like giving up on people, so I keep thinking there's a middle ground, where you don't reward people with pity, but also don't reward them with contempt.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Stuart, that's your best post ever. Bravo! You nailed it. And what you are pointing to has limitless consequences.

"Nowadays, everything is potentially traumatic and abusive. Someone looks at you cross-eyed and you have a cause for legal action."

What is so striking about today's therapy-writ-large is its virulent projection. The new therapy is no longer inner work, it's outer work which imposes a new duty for everyone else. It's no longer the responsibility of the "victim" to get themselves worked out and have family, friends and wider society support them in their inner journey to re-integration with the wider social world. That kind of thing is for a society which is integrated, where these social structures are encouraged and available. Our country is moving away from these social structures. In fact, some media and political figures openly mock traditional human norms and memes. Everyone else must change to accommodate the victim's demands.

As a result, one's pain, anxiety and anguish are someone else's problem. It's up to THEM -- the "they" -- to change their lives. The problems are all "out there," and the individual can continue to live this narrative fiction as a perpetual victim, fancying themselves oppressed. But when they demand other change their behavior, choices, etc., it is the self-proclaimed victim who becomes the justified oppressor. It matters not whether the victim's pain is real or imagined. The victim simply emotes, and that is sufficient justification for all manner of societal change. Including bathroom designations.

The currency is the complaint. He with the most complaints or accumulated transgressions wins. So what's really changed is that the human person doesn't have to grow and become more integrated into the larger social world. It is now proclaimed that others have a DUTY to make accommodations and change behavior in order to make someone happy (as if that is possible).

That is new. And it is dangerous, because it is a horrible lie. All lies come back to the same thing, as the serpent tempted in the Garden of Eden: "You can get something for nothing."

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Another thing on this victimology topic...

I did some research about a year ago about the movement toward homosexual "marriage." I came across a new concept called "the politics of disgust," something created by respected academic Martha Nussbaum. She wrote a book on it, called "From Disgust to Humanity." She discusses things like sodomy laws, and how people's politics of disgust lead them to pass laws to prohibit behaviors between consenting adults. She thinks this is wrong, and has been an active voice in the gay marriage movement. Fair enough.

What I'm concerned about is that there is a definitive judgment about disgust. It is making we are proscribing a normal, universal human emotion. Some things can be disgusting, even if they are consensual. Just because a slim minority thinks it's a beautiful and loving expression does not make the larger majority wrong. We're talking about preferences. How do preferences rise to the level of a legal right? Just because you feel a certain way does not mean I am legally bound to honor or celebrate it. I vote nay.

Does society not have a right to decide what is acceptable or sanctioned in the public sphere? How is a transgendered man who identifies as a woman wanting to use the women's bathroom acceptable? We're not having arguments about the bathrooms in people's own homes, we're talking about public restrooms in schools, etc. Are we supposed to consent, even if we are disgusted with it? That's not consent, that's domination... because of someone's preference, which is what leads them to identify as a woman. But they are, in fact, a man. I find it disgusting. So now it is incumbent upon me to think it's okay, because a judge or a bunch of justices tell me to?

Where does this end?

If certain emotions are wrong in an age where emotions seem to reign supreme, who is making these distinctions? Who says what's wrong or okay? Government is way out of its scope in this regard. This is what I mean by thought control. Disgust is a normal human emotion, part of being a human being. Are we now telling people what they are allowed to be disgusted by and what they are not? It seems that we are. Where is the larger conversation going on about this? In courtrooms? This is not a sensible way to run a society.

Anonymous said...

Gender is a social construct.

Trans-Gender is an extreme social construct.

This is as clear as the nose on your face to all but the most 'Progressive'.

But this is just talk.

None of it is necessarily true.

- shoe

Ares Olympus said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ares Olympus said...

IAC: Does society not have a right to decide what is acceptable or sanctioned in the public sphere? How is a transgendered man who identifies as a woman wanting to use the women's bathroom acceptable? ...we're talking about public restrooms in schools, etc. Are we supposed to consent, even if we are disgusted with it? That's not consent, that's domination... because of someone's preference, which is what leads them to identify as a woman. But they are, in fact, a man. I find it disgusting. So now it is incumbent upon me to think it's okay, because a judge or a bunch of justices tell me to?

Part of your question needs to define society. Is this the opinion of a 51% majority that decides? Or maybe 51% isn't enough? Or maybe if a 0.01% minority issue has 90% who don't much care because it doesn't affect them, but 9% are passionately against the 0.01% issue on religious grounds, does the 90% "silent majority" count for or against the 0.01% or the 10% or neither?

And on the problem of disgust, we can consider this a personal feeling, not a collective one, so if 1% request unique treatment, like transgender bathroom choices, and 10% reject that treatment on grounds of personal disgust, who's job is it to conform? Aren't both sides trying to dominate the other? So each group will try to use sympathetic arguments of pity and oppression to bring people to their side.

IAC: ...Government is way out of its scope in this regard. This is what I mean by thought control. Disgust is a normal human emotion, part of being a human being. Are we now telling people what they are allowed to be disgusted by and what they are not?

I'd answer by imagining various jobs and skills in comparison. If a person wants to be a doctor, they probably need to understand biology in a systemic and objective matter, and suppress their disgust at tasks like surgery where you're cutting someone open, or even practicing on a dead body that used to be a person. Perhaps 90% of people never want to learn this skill of emotional supression, and so they'll never be doctors.

Or like CPR where you have to blow into someone's mouth, someone who might look repulsive to your sensibilities, and so you might prefer to let someone die than have a skill with requirements you're not willing to accept.

Similarly few city folk would willing choose the tasks of farmers in raising livestock, like Iowa's new 2014 senator Joni Ernst talking with a little too much pleasure in castrating hogs as a child. I note she didn't answer Kelly's question of anesthesia.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/11/epic-megyn-kelly-grills-joni-ernst-on-castrating-hogs-video/
https://youtu.be/0bow9OxqTD4 Megyn Kelly Grills Joni Ernst on Castrating Hogs

Maybe disgust isn't what city folk feel at the thought of castrating hogs, but its something close to it, more self-disgust against giving pain to higher mammals. Pigs are intelligent animals after all, perhaps more than our cat and dog pets in ways, and if you knew someone who castrated their own dog without anesthetic, you'd probably think you're in the present of a sadist.

So perhaps if someday the vegetarians hit critical mass, whatever that is, the antidisgust crowd will win and we'll make it a crime to cause unnecessary pain to farm animals, and call it child abuse for farmers who force this on their children.

Anyway, just one comparison, and I don't believe there is a right answer. Someone is going to be dominated, your feelings of discomfort, or their actions that only tangentally affects you.

Maybe we need "trigger warnings". Bathrooms could have a little flip-flag near the door that says "Transgender person" or "black person" or whatever, and when sensitive people see that, they can wait outside until the danger clears, although their imagination might still go wild at whatever smells are left over, so maybe better to just move on if they can't suppress their disgust.