The Downside of Venting

You have certainly heard that it is good to vent. You have been told that if you bottle up your feelings you are going to get cancer. Our therapy culture is chock full of advice. It tells you how to live your life in the most therapeutically correct fashion.

Where the Bible tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, the therapy culture tells us to express our feelings, especially our feelings of anger and rage, fulsomely, openly and honestly.

Regardless of where this dopey idea came from, you know it and you probably believe it. When people on social media let loose with the most vile imprecations, with the most offensive and insulting and hateful defamations, they are merely following this dubious therapy culture rule. 

As it happens, psycho scientists have long known that this is all a bad idea. Unfortunately, once a dumb idea enters the cultural bloodstream it takes more than some scientific research to undermine everyone’s cherished beliefs, their favorite rules. Besides, what could really be wrong with intemperate expressions. You know that it is bad to repress your emotions, don’t you?

To offer some perspective, we turn to the Harvard Business Review. In a recent article Liz Fosslien and  Mollie West Duffy tell people that it is not a good thing to vent on the job, to express your feelings in the most histrionically inept way imaginable. With any luck you are not an aspiring celebrity.

They write:

Blowing off steam is not as productive as you might think, even though it’s long been presented as a cathartic activity. (Take, for example, the proliferation of “anger rooms,” where you can pay to smash TVs and dinner plates with a baseball bat.) Research shows that this type of “destruction therapy” causes your anger to escalate rather than diminish. Psychologist Brad J. Bushman studied people who used a punching bag to let out their anger, and found that “doing nothing at all was more effective” at diffusing rage.

Now they tell us. Rather than express your rage, you do better to repress it. You gain nothing by pounding the pillow with a whiffle bat-- as some therapists have been known to recommend.

So, no more trash talk. The unfortunate part of this is that if they banned trash talk, quite a few people would be struck dumb:

Similarly, chronic venting, where you rehash the same problems without trying to understand or solve them, has also been shown to make both you and the people listening to you feel worse. One of our readers, Paula, told us, “I finally had to put a limit on how much I trash-talked with co-workers. I found that using the time to instead focus on how I could learn or improve made me feel a lot better.”

And then there is the overriding question. What do you do when your boss keeps venting at you? How do you manage someone else’s anger. Here the authors explain clearly what to do-- and, for those happy few who have the least understanding of shame, it involves shaming the other person. 

More importantly, the authors do not recommend that you retaliate, that you fight back with more of the same. You need to keep in mind that your goal, in the circumstance, is not to get it off your chest, but to allow your manager to see the error of his ways. That means, you are working to produce a specific result, not to vent for the sake of venting:

While we were leading a corporate workshop in early 2020, a woman asked what to do when her boss yelled at her. Another participant spoke up. “I’m an executive assistant, and my boss used to frequently yell at me, even when he wasn’t angry at me but was angry about something else,” she told the group. “It would make me flustered, and then frustrated that he was making me flustered. One day I finally said to him, ‘I know that you’re upset right now, but when you yell at me, I’m not able to focus on my work.’” Her boss apologized and realized that he was inadvertently hurting her performance. His outbursts became much less frequent.

Mission accomplished. 

Less Workplace Drama, More Cooperation

In a country where politics has been polarized and where psychodrama is the order of the day, no one should be surprised to discover that people who work together are having trouble working together.

That is, their relationships are frayed and fraying. Their interactions are more likely to be contentious than cooperative. And the looming threat of being fired or canceled for saying the wrong thing, using the wrong pronoun or even looking the wrong way makes constructive and cooperative interaction nearly impossible.

Our woke culture has introduced a threat quotient into everyday conversations, to say nothing of a massive amount of confusion over who is which sex and who prefers what pronouns. So, instead of defaulting to trust, as one would do in a cooperative and collaborative relationship, we default to distrust and prefer to shut up and therefore to mitigate risk, to ourselves, to our families, to our careers.

In a world where the psycho profession touts the virtue of complete independence, full autonomy, and individual self-fulfillment, it is slightly strange to read an article about how much people want to live in a workplace environment that is characterized by social harmony. After all, if your goal in life is individual self-actualization, you can kiss social harmony good-bye.

It should be fairly obvious to everyone, but people are having trouble working together. Virginia Backaitis reports for the New York Post:

“One person makes a proposal about how we should package a deal, and the next one to speak cancels him,” said Tom (last name withheld), a 40-year-old Hoboken, NJ, resident, who said that while some team members don’t understand how things work, others have “weird” biases or are simply argumentative. “It can make the job frustrating,” he said. “We’re supposed to be working together, not against each other. We’re here to do deals.”

Of course, all of these people learned the lessons that therapy culture has been teaching, namely that they must give free and full expression to their deepest feelings, and that they should not fear turning the meeting into psychodrama. Besides, isn’t politics and isn’t the media based more on what we can shut down than on what we can discuss openly and dispassionately.

Backaitis continues:

While it might be nice if the world stood still so everyone could collectively catch their breath, it’s not likely to happen. So instead, it’s up to our leaders — and ultimately, ourselves — to find the tools we need to create work relationships where, in spite of external circumstances, we can work alongside one another more harmoniously.

To her credit the author asks executive coaches-- in whose ranks I sometimes find myself-- for some advice about how to solve the problem. Surely, this is better than asking a bunch of psycho professionals, who are likely to drool about the magical powers of empathy.

And yet, almost on cue, the coaches in question open with some nonsense about empathy. They are thus offering some genuinely bad advice. Apparently, empathy, which they do not understand, requires us to treat each other like children, specifically, like 5 year-olds. No kidding:

Think about the co-worker you’re in conflict with as a 5-year-old-child, innocent and ignorant. “Don’t let the adult they are showing up as stand in the way of who they are as a human being,” said Joel Garfinkle, executive coach, and author of “Difficult Conversations: Practical Tactics for Crucial Communication.” “Find something to talk about that’s not the subject of your difficulty.”

Had we been looking for muddled thinking, we could not have done better. In truth, if you treat adults like children they are going to be offended and are going to cease cooperating with you. The notion that an adult is really a child, because that is who he is as a human being, defies reason.

As though that were not bad enough, we have another coach advising us to pretend that we are at an AA meeting. They tell us that we should thank people for sharing, for exposing their vulnerability. One thinks well of AA meetings, but making them the model for corporate board meetings is monumentally stupid. It can only lead to dysfunction. For the record, people share at AA meetings because they are, in principle, anonymous. When you are titled and consigned to an executive position, the last thing you should do is to start acting like you were dealing with an alcoholic. Whereas company meetings are designed to accomplish something, to set policy and to implement it, AA meetings are decidedly not.

So, here is another lesson for how not to do it:

“I have to hold myself to being open and to truly hearing them without getting triggered, without getting defensive and without wanting to jump in,” said McCleary. “When they’re done speaking, we thank them for sharing. If they’ve shared something that has really crossed our values or even thrashed our values, we have language for that, and it’s respectful language, and it says, ‘I really hear what’s at stake for you. My values are this, and so I don’t agree with you. But it was a wonderful conversation to hear what matters most to you, and here’s something that matters to me.’ ”

The next piece of counterproductive advice begins somewhat promisingly, with a notion that reduces to-- making small talk. Surely, between seeing people as recovering alcoholics confessing their temptations and engaging in small talk about the furniture, we prefer the latter, largely:

When you enter a conversation, “lead with a question, one that genuinely wants to understand the seat that they sit in, the pair of glasses they are wearing,” said Edwards. “Our research has shown that in the end, people really want to work together. They want to collaborate. They want to be happy.”

But, she adds, when things get tight, we often jump to a judgment, which means we will never understand another person.

“Attempt to understand what it’s like from their lived experience,” she said. “We can bridge gaps and understand each other better.”

Again, there is the old empathy rearing its ugly head. This notion that we should try to understand everyone’s lived experience has been floating through the Zeitgeist. It is a very bad idea. You do not want to understand how people feel. You want to treat them as corporate managers or even staff members and to consider their contributions as a function of the task being addressed. We are not and should not be trying to understand each other better. We should work together to achieve a goal. In truth, there is no way you can understand anyone else’s lived experience. We should tell people to get over themselves and to cease whining about their lived experience-- which whining usually ends up defining people by their grievances. This will naturally cause people to grate on each other. And we do not want that.

So, we finally come to some advice that makes some sense:

Studies conducted by Harvard professors Julia Minson and Francesca Gino show that workers aren’t, for the most part, as diverse on a given matter as they think they are.

“In our executive education classes, we have found that teaching leaders how to find points of agreement with people who hold opposing views makes them more willing to engage with information from them,” the pair wrote in a Harvard Business Review article.

Of course, find the points you agree with and emphasize them. Do not look for the points you disagree with and denounce them. Cooperate and collaborate, don’t dramatize. 

If you were feeling complacent, the next piece of advice will disembarrass you of your optimism. The next coach quoted suggests that we should make it all about people as individuals:

Come from a place of acceptance versus resignation, said Sarah Noll Wilson. Not: “Throwing our hands up, saying, ‘That’s just how Terry is, there is no changing him.’ ” Acceptance is understanding the situation for what it is and even if you don’t agree, choose to work within the reality and show up in a way that best serves you and the situation.

So instead, “Say, ‘I know this is how Terry is and while I cannot change him, I can control me and how I show up.’ ”

How about not making it all about Terry. Consider what Terry has been saying and try to refashion it to make it sound cogent. Treat Terry like someone who is contributing, not someone you need to diagnose. Treat people like competent adults and they might just start acting like competent adults. Unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions, the advice that these coaches are offering is the problem, not the solution.

The Other War

Of course, there’s the war on the ground. You can read different opinions about how it is going, but it seems clear enough that we in the West are willing, as the old saying goes, to fight to the last Ukrainian.

And then there is the economic warfare, being waged by America and many, but not all of its European allies. We are imposing sanctions, not necessarily because they work, but because it all makes us feel good. Besides, we have denounced Vladimir Putin as a war criminal and as a genocidal maniac. 

As it happened, we have imposed all manner of sanctions on China, and are continuing to do so. Does this make it more or less likely that China will side with Russia or with us in the current Ukrainian conflagration? And, we note that we have been decrying China for genocidal practices and even war crimes, just as we have been saying about Russia. Since we have declared China to be an enemy, it is acting like an enemy.

To imagine that American policy, dating to the last administration, has nothing to do with this is naive beyond imagining.

So, we are imposing sanctions because it’s just about all we now know how to do. When it comes to military readiness, President Biden recently announced that American military hardware would be environmentally friendly. I trust that the powers in charge at the Kremlin and in the Forbidden City are quivering. 

Joe Biden’s America is hard at work fighting thought crimes in the military and is pledging eternal obeisance to the Goddess of the Planet. If you do not think that that looks pathetic, you need new spectacles.

In any case, as I have been reporting, the second battlefield involves the status of the dollar as a reserve currency. To be fair, many serious thinkers, people who know much more than I do about this, have suggested that this is a risk factor, but not just yet. Others have suggested that the possibility of overturning the dollar is seriously remote. Still others have pointed out that the nations allied with Russia, beginning with China, play a long game. They are not concerned with short term results.

So, here are some observations by one Christopher Irons, proprietor of a Substack called Quoth the Raven.

As for the current state of economic warfare, here is the QTR summary.

Over the last 48 hours, China and Russia have taken big steps toward separating themselves from the monetary policy and economies of the west – and nobody has even noticed.

Those who have been reading my blog for the last couple of weeks know that I have been predicting that China and Russia would grow far closer economically, creating, in essence, a second global monetary system where the US dollar is no longer the reserve currency.

As for the currency situation, we have cut Russia off from international currency transactions. As a result, and as one guru, by name of Zoltan Pozsar has predicted, Russia and China are setting up their own currency systems backed by commodities:

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article proclaiming that Russia would back the ruble with gold as a way to fight back against western economic sanctions. I also made similar predictions about the new digital Chinese currency last summer when I first started Fringe Finance.

This shift is happening as a result of the United States and the rest of the western economies foolishly thinking that they’re going to be able to effectively sanction Russia economically, despite the fact that Russia is a massive producer of oil and the country seems prepared to back its currency, the ruble, with this productive capacity.

So, there is a country that is acting in a way that we seriously disapprove of. It is also a major energy and food producer. We pretend that we are going to sanction it, without considering how many people are going to starve because of our sanctions.

QTR is not optimistic about America’s current condition:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we continue to run enormous deficits and have very little productive capacity, and even less to back our currency with. Our destiny seems to be to continue printing money regardless of the negative consequences. We’re nothing more than printing press junkies that won’t cease our inflationary addiction until we inevitably hit rock bottom.

He points out an action that seems trivial in size or that may be the canary in the coal mine. The Israeli government is shifting some of its foreign reserves out of dollars and euros and into-- yuan. 

Bloomberg reports:

First, it was little noticed yesterday when Bloomberg reported that “Israel’s central bank has made the biggest changes to its allocation of reserves in over a decade, adding the Chinese yuan alongside three other currencies to a stockpile that last year exceeded $200 billion for the first time ever.”

Following discussions held by the monetary committee last year, the pound and the yen will account for 5% and the currencies of Canada and Australia will have 3.5% each. Under the new approach, the yuan’s proportion is set at 2% for 2022, according to the Israeli central bank’s annual report published at the end of last month.

To accommodate the changes, the euro’s share will fall to 20% -- the lowest in at least a decade -- from just over 30%, while the dollar will account for 61%, down from 66.5%. The pound’s weighting, by contrast, will almost double to 5%, returning to a level last seen in 2011.

The “dramatic” rise in Israel’s foreign-exchange reserves led the central bank to lengthen its investment horizon, Abir said. “We look at the need to earn a return on the reserves that will cover the costs of liability.”

In other words, Israel is reducing its exposure to the dollar and to the Euro to add exposure to the Renminbi.

And so perhaps isn’t just little old me here chipping away at my blog daily that has noticed that China and Russia could be on the verge of effecting meaningful change to the global monetary landscape. It sure seems like Israel is catching on.

Of course, we do not know whether or not Saudi Arabia, which is going to host Chinese president Xi Jinping next month in Riyadh, is going to sell oil for yuan-- thus bypassing the dollar exchange mechanisms. That would certainly not be a canary in the coal mine.

As for those Russian assets that Western companies are recklessly abandoning, Chinese companies are now looking to buy them. As the old saying goes, in contrary investment strategy you should buy what no one wants and sell what everyone wants.

China’s key state-run energy companies are in talks with Shell Plc to buy its stake in a major Russian gas export project, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Cnooc, CNPC and Sinopec Group are in joint discussions with Shell over the company’s 27.5% holding in the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas venture after the European firm said it would exit Russian operations following the Ukraine invasion

I had previously argued on my podcast and on my blog that even though the west was going to be ignoring Russian investments, there would definitely be a strategic buyer who would come in and scoop up what can only be described as long-term strategic energy assets from Russia.

Many people smarter than I am, including macro analyst Luke Groman, predicted that China would be the strategic buyer for such transactions. I agreed.

While many serious thinkers insist that the dollar cannot be dethroned, some countries seem to have a different idea:

China and Russia continue on a cooperative path together: doing business together, backing their currencies with tangible commodities and, as I wrote just days ago, we’re in the process of watching the dollar become dethroned as the global reserve currency. We just don’t notice it yet.

As it happens, QTR is also a gold bug. He expects that China will back its currency with gold:

The next prediction I have, that hasn’t yet taken place, is that China will back its digital currency with gold. I’ve predicted this since August of 2021, long before the current macro picture has emerged. Now, my convictions are even stronger.

When the rest of the world catches on to what is playing out here, there’s going to be a mad dash for gold, in my opinion. I still prefer gold over any fiat currency and, as I wrote weeks ago, consider miners to be one of the market’s truly undervalued sectors.

Make of it what you will.

Transmania Takes over the American Mind

We are entering into a great battle, not just a small skirmish, in the culture wars. On one side are academics, teachers, therapists, woke parents, administrators, doctors and the Biden administration. On the other are certain brave journalists like Abigail Shrier, politicians in states like Florida, Texas and Alabama-- accompanied by the victims of trans madness.

Clearly, transmania is now a social contagion. Children are being-- dare we say it, groomed-- to think that they can choose their own gender, that biology can be canceled with the proper biochemical and surgical mutilations.

If you do not accept it, you are, to the Biden administration, a bigot.  

If this is not mass hysteria, the term does not mean anything.

One understands the larger philosophical issue behind this madness. Beginning with Kant, certain philosophers have asserted that reality is what we see or say it is. There are no rocks or even clouds except that we name them or see them as such. This implies, by the force of the logic, that if we fail to say that a rock is a rock, it isn’t a rock. By extension, a boy is not a boy unless you say and think that he is a boy. If you change your thinking, then he will magically become a girl, or even a eunuch. Then you need but persuade everyone to think that he is a she, and he will effectively be a she.

If you believe this, you need to cease thinking that you are a philosopher. And you also should stop pretending that you are a conservative thinker. This is straight-up idealism; it is the basis for the totalitarian movements that infested the twentieth century. It rejects empirical and pragmatic thinking, to say nothing of science.

The notion that the people who are talking about “gender affirming care” also talk about respecting the science is deranged. It shows how badly the American mind has deteriorated. If you were wondering why countries around the world are not emulating America any more, the truth lies in intellectual incoherence and moral degeneracy.

How bad has it gotten? This, from Pajamas Media, via Maggie’s Farm:

A mom writing for Substack’s “Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans” is claiming that her kid went full trans-tard after going to a new, woke, trans-happy school.

She starts her article with this: “My teenage daughter has decided that she is “trans”. So have all her friends. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every. Single. One.”

The anonymous mother also states that her daughter showed no signs of gender dysphoria and had never heard the word “transgender” before enrolling at her new school. That’s where she met a group of nerdy, artsy kids. They began looking into all things transgender on the internet.

Then, one day, sha-ZAM! They were all suddenly “trans.” They no longer had any desire to speak with the “cis” kids, (that means cisgender, i.e. normal, not trans, not interested in disfiguring their genitals to be cool).

How can a bunch of kids suddenly all be trans? It’s what we call a “social contagion,” which Oxford Reference defines as “The spread of ideas, attitudes, or behaviour patterns in a group through imitation and conformity. Also called behavioural contagion.”

It’s when a group of people all start imitating each other to fit in.

As we know, researcher Lisa Littman and journalist Abigail Shrier have been warning about this social contagion for some time now. Apparently, their best efforts have only had a limited impact.

In truth, being trans is now a sign of coolness:

Trans kids are now considered to be cool, accepted, special, important, protected victims who are on the road to a great career despite their actual talent. The real question now is, why WOULDN’T a kid want to be trans today?

In a culture of victimhood, children who are actively encouraged to deny biology are now glorified. In truth, and after a time, these children will invariably live to regret their decision and will find themselves friendless and bereft.

Suzy Weiss offers some details about children who detransition on Bari Weiss’s Substack. (via Maggie’s Farm) It is or it should be a terrifying warning to children, but especially to the adults who are encouraging and facilitating these mutilations.

Weiss offers the story of Chloe. She shows how a vulnerable child has been seduced into trans mania, thus damaging her body and herself. And she was doing so with the collusion of adults, like her parents:

Chloe, who lives in California’s Central Valley, always hated her body. She spent a lot of time on Tumblr and learned words like “pansexual” and “bigender.” She remembers when she was 12, sitting on her bed, thinking, “Maybe I’m meant to live as a boy.”

By 2018, at age 14, Chloe was well along the path to what she imagined was boyhood. She was going by Leo. She was taking puberty blockers. And her mother was administering her weekly testosterone injections. Two years later, in early June 2020, she went under the knife.

Chloe was the beneficiary of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” which means all the adults in her life—doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, parents—actively supported her decision to become the person she believed she was meant to be, even if that person required an elective mastectomy in high school. Or taking puberty-blocking drugs. Or injecting cross-sex hormones, like testosterone.

In this, Chloe is also the poster child for the Biden administration’s recently announced transgender policy.

But then, Chloe began to regret her decision and her “gender affirming care.” It did not make her a boy. It made her something else, neither boy nor girl. 

And then there is the growing chorus of young people, including Chloe, who had come to regret—deeply—the decisions they had made and the gender-affirming care they had received.

In the middle of this story are teenagers who are largely going unheard by a government and a medical establishment that’s plowing ahead. “I don’t think gender affirming care helps kids like me,” says Chloe. “There should be more regard to alternatives in treating dysphoria, especially when it comes to kids.”

Of course, adults who promote this care are lying to children. They are telling children that injections of opposite sex hormones will make them into members of the opposite sex:

“I thought testosterone would transform me from being short and pudgy to lanky and male, but in a graceful type of way, not muscley,” said Helena Kerschner, 23. Helena is from Cincinnati, and she is one of the country’s most prominent detransitioners, as people who transition genders and then change back are called. She has a Substack with thousands of subscribers.

Growing up in Ohio meant Helena could only transition with a parent’s consent. (This is true in most states. Washington, Oregon, and California gave minors more wiggle room to transition on their own). But she was 15, and her parents were definitely not on board. She wore boys clothes and a breast binder, and cut her hair short.

The terrifying part is the collusion of adults. They are almost a cheering section, encouraging children to submit to mutilation. Therapists thrill to the prospect that a child is transgender.

Since they remain dumbfounded by normal adolescent anguish and are happy to treat transgenderism, the result is-- children are induced to decide to become transgender.

One understands that these adults should be in prison. And one knows that in some states in this country, new laws are going to put them there.

The guidance counselor at her public school agreed with Helena that she was a man. She helped her make a budget for her transition, and referred her to the school psychologist, who was even more gung-ho. “I remember the psychologist saying, ‘Your mom is a transphobe,’ and telling me about suicide risks.” They had three or four meetings before inviting Helena’s mother to have a conversation with the both of them, which didn't go well.

“I had a ton of issues with my academics and my mental health, but I never really got help with that,” she said. “As soon as I said I was trans, it was all hands on deck.”

Aside from the fact that testosterone is not a drug, taking it did not produce the promised effects:

The drug made her feel irritable and angry, and it gave her sex drive a massive boost that she called “overwhelming.” She began hitting herself, and once she cut herself with a serrated kitchen knife, which landed her in a psych ward for a week. After a year-and-a-half on testosterone, it began to dawn on her that “the reality I was living was not lining up with the fantasy I’d had as a teen.”

And then came the wish to detransition:

But when Helena watched it, she saw herself becoming more despondent. (The roommate, as it turned out, eventually also detransitioned.) That was in early 2018. Slowly, Helena realized she wasn’t a boy. “It was a crushing and terrifying feeling,” she said.

There is no evidence suggesting that this treatment actually treats anything. And yet, groups like the American Medical Assocation support it:

Proponents of gender-affirming care say its benefits dramatically outweigh the risks. But there’s little data to back that up, and in any case this is still a new phenomenon about which a great deal is not known. The American Medical Association staunchly supports gender-affirming care. Same with universities, especially elite universities. Same with the president of the United States. It’s unclear whether there is any academic or professional space left for the skeptics.

Trans activists argue that trans patients knew the risks. The kids or their parents gave informed consent, they say.

Here is the case of one Mia Elias:

Mia Elias, who started identifying as trans at 12, agrees with Kerschner. She was spending a lot of time on Tumblr, and in trans groups online. “I thought it was going to solve all my problems,” she said. She and her family lived near Ottawa, the Canadian capital. At 15, she went on testosterone and a puberty blocker. A year later, she realized she’d made a mistake but didn’t want to admit that to her therapist, who was also trans, so she lied and said she was happy with her body, which was now partially masculinized. In fact, she just wanted things to go back to the way they had been. “I was ashamed,” she said. “This was my whole life.”

And Julie, who transitioned and detransitioned, calls the treatment something akin to a lobotomy. She coined the phrase "collaborative idiocy" to describe it:

Julie, 27, who also transitioned and then detransitioned, likens the policy to the practice of lobotomy. “I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me,” said Julie, who didn’t want to be identified out of fear of backlash from activists.

She called her treatment a “collaborative idiocy”—drawing together her parents, therapists and doctors. “It took a goddamn village.”

But, how much of the damage is irreversible? We are back with Chloe, now returned to becoming a female, though a female who had undergone a double mastectomy:

Detransitioning senior year was tough: She was dressing like a girl again, but still had “rough” features and a deep voice from all the testosterone. “I got looks from people, and other students would talk smack behind my back,” Chloe said. Her friends abandoned her. Another friend told her that “the gay side of my school hated me” because she detransitioned.

Recently, she met someone, a boy from two towns over, through a family friend. “I genuinely think he was a gift to me from God,” she said. She wished she still had her breasts. “I was looking for a niche to fit in and a sense of fulfillment,” says Chloe of those years of medicine, consultations, surgery, recovery, and self-discovery. Now? “I don’t really believe in gender identity at all.”

 

Dare we say that this is all beyond horrifying. Dare we add that it signals a culture in decline. We are not talking about a few cranks here and there. We are talking about medical officials, government officials, parents and teachers conspiring to mutilate children.

If it were not real, no one would believe it.

Understanding a Suicide

If such is possible, the book’s mystery is not as mysterious as it sounds. Journalist Laura Trujillo has written a book about her mother’s suicide. She believes that by advertising the facts of the case, and by pointing some part of the blame at herself, she will be contributing to-- God knows what. Or else, she imagines that she can exonerate herself for behavior that seems both heartfelt and vindictive.

So, the issue, as addressed by Michael Greenberg in his New York Times review-- full disclosure, I have not read the book-- involves the daughter’s involvement in the mother’s suicide. In truth, the circumstances are rather clear. Yet, they do not just point to Trujillo herself. They also point to the intervention made by a hapless therapist. 

You might think that the therapist counseled her patient, Laura Trujillo, to do the right honorable thing and rip away scabs, or you may see the therapist as having triggered a sequences of events that led to a suicide.

On April 26, 2012, Laura Trujillo’s mother killed herself by jumping from the edge of the Grand Canyon. Mother and daughter were extremely close, and the circumstances surrounding the suicide make the web of Trujillo’s emotions a challenge to untangle.

Several months earlier, a visit to her stepfather at a rehab center where he was recovering from a stroke provoked vivid memories of his repeated intrusions into her bedroom to rape her from the time she was 15. The abuse continued throughout her adolescence, and to protect her mother, who seemed rejuvenated by her new marriage, Trujillo bore it in frozen silence. “She had her confidence now, joy, and I couldn’t ruin that, I told myself, no matter what he did to me.”

Dare we say that we hesitate about questioning the judgment of a fifteen year old. It is worth noting that, given her own resilience, Trujillo had undergone her own healing, and had made for herself an apparently good and full life. 

Anyway, Trujillo was distressed by her feelings toward her now paralyzed step father, so she told her therapist about it. The therapist responded thusly. When Trujillo followed the therapist's advice, this led directly to her mother's suicide:

Trujillo was a happily married mother of four, with a fulfilling job as managing editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer. Recollections of her stepfather’s abuse shook the foundation of her life, to say the least, so her therapist suggested that she tell her mother what happened. Shock and guilt followed the revelation and their rich relationship became fraught and strained. Hoping to repair the rift and unburden herself of her trauma, Trujillo sent a long email to her mother, expressing all that she had felt and experienced. One of the haunting questions is whether her mother knew what was happening with her stepfather. “I told her I didn’t forgive her, because I didn’t need to forgive her. It wasn’t her fault. It was his.”

Two days after receiving the email, her mother killed herself. “I was certain I was responsible,” writes Trujillo. To make matters worse, her maternal grandmother and her mother’s siblings blamed her for the tragedy. They ostracized her and her children at the funeral, embracing the abuser, now a hobbled, elderly man, seemingly incapable of the crimes he had committed decades ago.

Now, you might think that it is worth destroying an elderly woman in the interest of exposing the truth. You might think that the woman deserved to be punished, because, as Trujillo points out, it is impossible to imagine that she did not know what was going on under her own roof. The woman had pimped out her daughter, had engaged in a form of human sacrifice, in order to save her own marriage. We are not dealing with a moral paragon here.

You  might also consider that the therapist basically put a gun in her patient’s hand, and that Trujillo pulled the trigger. It is surely an interesting question to ask how much responsibility the therapist bears for having given advice that led directly to a suicide.

You might imagine that nothing could possibly be gained by reviving old crimes. And as for the moral teaching that Trujillo offered her mother, it rings hollow. One understands that her mother would have read the email and understood that her daughter could never forgive her for failing to stop the abuse.

Had she been willing to forgive her mother, her mother might still be alive. While her mother is obviously not a rapist, she ought to have known what was happening and she ought to have protected her daughter. Her suicide was what Durkheim would have called an altruistic act; she was ridding the world of someone who had no other way to atone for her deeds. Heaven knows what advantage Trujillo gains by sharing these details with the world and by saddling her family with such knowledge.

Maskaholics Anonymous

To keep us all up to date about the ongoing debate over masking, I am happy to offer the views of John Tierney, from City Journal, (via Maggie’s Farm) and from Tom Nichols in the Atlantic. Thus, someone from the right side of the spectrum and someone presumably from the left side.

As of now, a federal judge has overturned the government’s mask mandate. Immediately, she was denounced as being sub-standard-- which means that her ruling contradicted the received wisdom of the woke political class. Then, after the president said that people could choose for themselves whether or not to mask up, his justice department decided to appeal the judge’s ruling-- because it threatens the exercise of arbitrary government authority.

The polls suggest that most people favor masking, and that detail is surely behind the decision to appeal. Others suggest that the mask mandate was wildly unpopular and that reinstating it will damage the Democratic Party’s political prospects.

One suspects that it was really all about politics anyway; science be damned. 

And, of course, people who are at very low risk of contracting the virus are still masking up, as though to signal their virtue. Making toddlers wear masks, as is happening in New York City preschools feels like gross overreach. 

Anyway, the burning question is: does masking work to control the spread of the virus.

To which John Tierney offers this analysis, beginning with the unintended consequences of this bit of virtue signaling:

The pandemic has eased, but not the compulsion of many Americans to cover their faces. Fully vaccinated adults are still wearing masks on their solitary walks outdoors, and officials have been enforcing mask mandates on airline passengers and on some city-dwellers and students. (Though today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa, declaring the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation unlawful, comes as welcome news.)

Maskaholics in the press are calling for permanent masking on trains, planes, and buses. High school students in Seattle staged a protest demanding that a mask mandate be reinstated, and psychologists now deal with the anxieties of children who don’t want their classmates to see their faces. They’re suffering from “mask dependency,” as this psychological affliction is termed in Japan, where a long tradition of mask-wearing during flu season has left some individuals afraid at any time to expose their faces in public.

Being as states are the laboratories of democracy, or some such, Tierney has chosen to compare and contrast the results of states with forced masking versus the results of states where such was not mandated:

Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.

As you can see from the lines’ similar trajectories, the mask mandates hardly controlled the virus. By the time the mandates were introduced in New York and other states in the spring of 2020 (at the left side of the graph), infections had already been declining in those states, and the mandates didn’t prevent a surge later that year, when cases rose and fell in nearly identical trajectories regardless of states’ mask policies. The pandemic’s second year saw slight deviations in both directions, but those reflected the seasonality of the virus and the geography of mask mandates, which remained more common in northern states. 

Cases were higher in the non-mandate states last summer, when the seasonal surge in the South disproportionately hit Republican states without mandates, but those states went on to have fewer cases during the winter, when the seasonal surge in the North hit more Democratic states with mandates.

He concluded:

If you add up all the numbers on those two lines, you find that the mask mandates made zero difference. The cumulative rate of infection over the course of the pandemic was about 24 percent in the mandate states as well as in the non-mandate states. Their cumulative rates of Covid mortality were virtually identical, too (in fact, there were slightly more deaths per capita in the states with mask mandates).

He found the same results when he compared Sweden with Germany:

The masks in Germany obviously didn’t “beat Covid.” From the start of the pandemic through this spring, the cumulative rate of Covid mortality has been slightly higher in Sweden than in Germany (by about 15 percent), but the rate of overall excess mortality has been slightly higher in Germany (by about 8 percent). Just as in the United States, the mask mandates in Germany produced no net benefits but plenty of inconvenience as well as outright harm. Covering up may give the maskaholics a false sense of security—but they could breathe more easily if they’d just face the facts.

And then, Tom Nichols, in the Atlantic drew something of the same conclusion:

Mask mandates were a stopgap, an emergency safety measure imposed by governments with few other options to stem the pandemic, and they fell away in other areas of public life once vaccines were widely available. The transportation masking rules proved hard to dislodge, however, and they serve as a good example of how prudent measures can turn into little more than symbolism.

Nichols suggests that masking was what he called, “safety theatre,” whose effect was to prevent us from living our lives. It also damaged the ability of human beings to socialize and this, of itself, caused significant mental health damage, especially to the student population:

It was time to end that mandate, and it is time to think as well about other kinds of pointless safety theater that we might bring to an end—including the security theater in schools and businesses that serves little purpose except to keep us all terrified of living our lives.

In closing, Nichols offers a sane and sensible remark about government policy. It needs to be clear, precise, comprehensible and seemingly rational. If it seems to be chaotic and arbitrary people will resist it:

Government mandates are necessary and serve an important purpose, but they should be used sparingly. Good public policy is simple, easy to understand, and easy to follow. “You must wear a mask on an airplane but not in a sports arena, and you must keep that mask on unless you brought a bag of candy or a large coffee, and the mask can be anything you want it to be as long as it looks like it’s hanging somewhere near your face” is not a good policy. It’s an attempt to calm the nerves of people whose tolerance for risk—often for perfectly valid reasons—is lower than that of others.

Experts, including doctors, can tell us only about numbers and probabilities. They cannot tell us what level of collective risk we should be willing to assume. Only we can make that decision, and we do, every day. We set speed limits that we know would save more people if they were lower; we allow products to be sold that we know will shorten the lives of some of the people who use them. Democratic societies routinely make such trade-offs. If the American public is willing to accept such risks, experts cannot countermand those decisions except by demonstrating that government action is immediately necessary as a response to an emergency that cannot be handled any other way. Our responsibility as citizens, however, is to make informed choices—and to always remember that a certain amount of risk and danger is the price of living in a free and open society.

Ah, yes. We are obliged, as citizens of the republic, to accept a certain quantity of risk in our lives. Those who want to impose masks on everyone want to eliminate all risk-- even though the lockdowns and mask mandates cause damage in and of themselves.