You may or may not have heard of the thigh gap. You may or may not think that the thigh gap has anything to do with the happiness gap, but apparently the latter exists.
It is all about cultural politics. People who have leftist political leanings tend to be less happy than people who have more conservative leanings. They also tend to be more depressed and to suffer more mental health issues.
Of course, a normal person will immediately think that people who are more stable and more connected are more likely to be more conservative. And they are more likely to be happier than those who think that all occasions do inform against them-- to coin a phrase.
As Thomas Edsell examines this enigma, he suggests that those on the right believe that the game is fair while those on the left believe that it is rigged-- against them. This implies, if I may, that identity politics was invented to render people miserable and dysfunctional.
If the game is fair, people can improve their performance by working hard or even by training. If the game is rigged, you need to mount a large-scale political revolution to change the game. Aside from that, there is little you can do.
He presents his case thusly:
Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.
Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.
If you believe in the theories propounded by the left you will believe that you need not feel responsible for your successes or failures. Your race, gender or ethnicity determines whether you will succeed or fail. If you belong to an oppressed group, you cannot succeed. If you belong to a privileged group, your successes are not your own.
One of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.
But then, Edsell goes off the rails, pretending that while the political right is not suffering from depression, it is suffering from anger:
Instead of despair, the contemporary right has responded with mounting anger, rejecting democratic institutions and norms.
One suspects that the people who have unleashed lawfare against the Republican presidential candidate are not in a position to criticize anyone for rejecting democratic institutions and norms.
Besides, when you believe that your successes or failures are the product of your own actions, and that you need to feel responsible for the way things work out, when large numbers of people devalue your successes, on the ground that you suffer from privilege, might very well make you angry.
In other words, Trump and his allies respond to adversity and what they see as attacks from the left with threats and anger, while a segment of the left often but not always responds to adversity and social inequity with dejection and sorrow.
Leftists believe that they are victims. They also believe that the solution to the problem lies in revolutionary transformation. They fail to notice that this has been tried before and has failed.
As for the research, Edsell first quotes a New Zealand psychologist by the name of Jamin Halberstadt.
[Halberstadt] argued in his emailed reply to my inquiry that “a focus on injustice and victimhood is by definition disempowering (isn’t that why we talk of ‘survivors’ rather than ‘victims’?), loss of control is not good for self-esteem or happiness.”
Notre Dame professor Timothy Judge explained it well:
I do share the perspective that a focus on status, hierarchies and institutions that reinforce privilege contributes to an external locus of control. And the reason is fairly straightforward. We can only change these things through collective, and often, policy initiatives — which tend to be complex, slow, often conflictual, and outside our individual control.
On the other hand, if I view “life’s chances” (Virginia Woolf’s term) to be mostly dependent on my own agency, this reflects an internal focus, which will often depend on enacting initiatives largely within my control.
These are not happy thoughts because they cause me to view the world as inherently unfair, oppressive, conflictual, etc. It may or may not be right, but I would argue that these are in fact viewpoints of how we view the world, and our place in it, that would undermine our happiness.
It’s nice to have an argument about agency, but ultimately the problem will lie in whether or not you think that the system is rigged. If you think it is not rigged, you have a right to enjoy your success. If you think that it is rigged, you will not feel responsible for your failures, but, at the cost of not feeling capable, short of taking radical political action, of changing anything.
Edsell continues, quoting Judge:
Identity politics, he continues, focuses “on external institutional forces that one cannot immediately alleviate.” It results in what scholars call the externalization of one’s “locus of control” or viewing the inequities of society as a result of powerful if not insurmountable outside forces including structural racism, patriarchy and capitalism — as opposed to believing that individuals can overcome such obstacles through hard work and collective effort.
So, leftist thinking is designed to make you miserable, the better to recruit you into the vanguard of the Revolution.
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