You've Never Had It So Good

You have been barraged with stories about disinformation. Now, get ready for misperception. According to Adam Mastroianni things are nowhere near as bad as we think. If we think ill of today’s conditions, we are misperceiving. Things have never been better. If you don’t like it, tough.

Now, this mode of thinking pretends that, what with the Enlightenment, we have overthrown religious dogma and superstition, thus that we live in a brave new world where kindness reigns. The only thing that prevents us from enjoying it is our misperception-- we think that things are worse than they are.

Of course, this is Panglossian optimism, enshrined by Voltaire’s famous character, who intoned that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Then again, it’s all very dubious. First, and most salient is the fact that there are two Enlightenments. The Scottish-British variety is radically different from the continental variety. The continental variety, which emerged in the eighteenth century in France and Germany, ultimately led to the Third Reich, fascism and communism. If you thought that dispensing with religion would produce a new golden age of kindness, think again.

Mastroianni finds ways to measure the level of social kindness. For example:

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

And on the other side, lab rats suggest otherwise:

Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like genocide and child abuse.

Dare we say that there are other ways to measure human kindness. Take the phenomenon of trans mania, the systematic efforts to mutilate children in the service of an ideology. These forms of human sacrifice seem to have broken out in Europe, even though in many countries they are being dialed back.

Even in Great Britain, the home of empirical reasoning, people have latched on to this mania.

The following is an intervention in a recent British debate about transgenderism:

I am standing up for the 12-year-old allowed to use pronouns at school who is being sold a story that she can be something that she never can. I am thinking of her after her transition, when she wakes up one morning when she is 25 and realises that she can no longer have children. She is growing facial hair, her health is generally poor, her bone density is down, her voice has broken, she has no real friends, and she has probably fallen out with mum, who is now broken for letting her take those puberty blockers and hormone replacement tablets. I am thinking of that girl sold a lie by the influencers who have now moved on to another ideology to make them money.

Now, we find American judges refusing to outlaw these practices. And we find American states that want to mutilate children without even telling parents.

And then there is the prevalence of depression among American teenagers.

Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.

The rates of sadness are the highest reported in a decade, reflecting a long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic.

Now, you can attribute this to misperception, but still, when a third of the teenage girls considered suicide two years ago, this does not tell us that the country is better off psychologically than it was in the past. One might even conclude that things are getting worse.

So, the polls suggest that Americans believe that the country has suffered a moral breakdown. Mastroianni writes:

Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.

As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.

Oh really. It is good to have scientists telling us what we should or should not think. Anyone who thinks that Americans are basking in the glow of patriotism has been smoking the wrong cigarettes. Too many people hate the country. Too many think that national pride is an outmoded concept. Teachers teach schoolchildren that the nation is an organized criminal conspiracy. And then, the same teachers tell their pupils that they need to do penance for America’s sins. We will not even mention the declining test scores, the simple fact that children who missed two years of schooling have been rendered terminally ignorant and asocial. 

This is not an illusion. It is not going to be fixed by counting our blessings. We should begin by respecting the opinions of the general population. If an expert thinks that you have never had it so good and if a third of teenage girls want to kill themselves, which one do you think deserves more credence?

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