Canada's woke nightmare: A warning to the West | Documentary

The Lie of the Beholder (by Steven Tucker)

 

A female British IT worker recently sued her boss for sexual harassment in the workplace. According to her, the fact that her employer had placed the letters “xx” in his emails to indicate an unknown quantity (as in something like “do we need xx more print cartridges???”) was really a hidden sexual code for him sending her unwanted electronic kisses. Likewise, his use of multiple “???”s was a subliminal attempt to ask when exactly she was going to allow him to have “sexual contact” with her, she said.

When he wrote “I need date, date, date!” in regard to which specific day she was going to complete a project, her one-track mind thought it meant he required a specific date she was going to finally allow him into her knickers. Meanwhile, when he named a computer file with his initials “AJG,” she somehow perceived this really stood for “A Jumbo Genital,” the extra-large item he was boasting of possessing, and demanding she allow him to insert it inside her, posthaste.

Lying Eyes
Ruling against this lunatic, the tribunal judges suggested she possessed “a skewed perception of everyday events,” demonstrating “a tendency to make extraordinary allegations without evidence,” and ordered her to pay £5,000 in costs.

“We now live within a world haunted throughout by invisible new secrets that only designated victim groups perceive.”

You may say this individual was just paranoid, but, in an age in which we are solemnly told by neo-Marxist academics that everything is now simply a text to be read, and that the meanings of such texts are endlessly fluid, had she not in some sense actually been groomed to hold such fancies by ivory-tower idiots?

We now live within a world haunted throughout by invisible new secrets that only designated victim groups, primarily blacks, gays, transsexualism and radical feminists, possess the infallible ability to perceive. If you’re straight, white, and male and fail to see them too, this is just further proof that you have been blinded to the truth by your innate position of white, cisheteropatriarchal privilege—so get new glasses, granddad, and learn to see everything through a fashionably black/queer/anticolonialist lens. It seems the U.K. tribunal judges cited above were the last legal officials west of Budapest still not to have gotten the memo.

Able Semen
A prime example of this brand of perceptual witchcraft at work occurred in early August, when a Portsmouth museum devoted to preserving the sunken wreck of Henry VIII’s Tudor warship the Mary Rose published a blog by a young intern named Hannah asking, “How can we understand the Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a Queer lens?”—the answer to which was “Not very well at all.”

Sadly, no dildos, butt plugs, or treasure chests filled with vials of Tudor-era amyl nitrate were found within the wreckage of the Mary Rose. Thus, Hannah had to settle for queering various mundane, everyday, entirely non-gay objects instead, like 82 nit combs that, Hannah astutely observed, “would have been mainly used by the men [aboard] to remove nits from their hair.”

Nothing gay to see here, please move along? Not at all. As Homophilic Hannah continued, “for many Queer people today, how we wear our hair is a central pillar of our identity,” something that should obviously be kept in mind when examining Early Renaissance insect-killing implements.

A gold wedding ring is not a poignant reminder that the sailors left behind (female) wives and families ashore when their ship sank in 1545, meanwhile, but instead a far more upsettling prompt that “Today, same-sex couples cannot be married by…the Church of England, the Church that Henry VIII established.” Paternoster rosary beads were not really evidence of the crew’s religious faith, but a cautionary warning that Christianity traditionally taught gay sex was a sin. I’m surprised Hannah didn’t just try to claim they were strings of antique bum beads instead.

Ship of Fools
Opinion columnist Rod Liddle mocked this by proposing the Mary Rose was originally a male warship named Bob that had its prow chopped off on the NHS; homosexual novelist Philip Hensher tweeted skeptically that “I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators—you’re fucking mental.” In an essay, Hensher then elaborated that Narcissuses like Hannah clearly “aren’t half as interested in the past as they are in telling you all about themselves, at length.”

Indeed so. The most telling object “queered” by Hannah was an octagonal mirror that, to my own biased eye, looks a bit like a tasty jam biscuit. Yet I am self-aware enough to realize that the object is not in fact a jam biscuit, it is an antique looking glass, and my misperception just results from a personal excessive fondness for Jammie Dodgers. Hannah, though, gazes into the mirror and sees only herself: “For Queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities.” Dracula himself had fewer issues with mirrors than poor Hannah, it seems.

Hannah ends by emphasizing the importance of viewing objects in museums “through a Queer lens”—but that is really just a euphemism for transforming all such exhibits into perpetual mirrors, even when they are actually nit combs or rosary beads. And this masturbatory solipsism now has official institutional approval and imprimatur. You can see where the woman in the employment tribunal got her own delusional mindset from.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the queerest of them all? You are, Hannah, now carry on wanking at your own rainbow reflection endlessly on the public dime, it’s all museums are for now.

Curse of the Mummy’s Womb
Elsewhere, I once detailed the efforts of queer “Egyptologists” (i.e., ignorant benders who knew what pyramids and sand looked like) to disingenuously claim ancient Egypt was full of trannies. A mummy was found in the British Museum whose hips and chest had been stuffed with extra padding, like a flat-chested schoolgirl shoving tissue paper down her bra to pass herself off as Jayne Mansfield. This was taken by the perceptually enlightened as irrefutable evidence he was a drag queen of some sort. Yet it later transpired the man was just very fat during life, and his embalmers had tried to replicate this obese appearance; those swabs were not primitive breast implants, but an innocent attempt to replicate his wobbly moobs.

But what does actual evidence matter? Just so long as your eyes are woke enough to perceive it, such non-queer artifacts can easily possess a far deeper truth; if you can only feel this mummy is trans, then he is!

The online History Is Gay podcast, for example, which attempts to queer literally everything that has ever happened ever, ever, ever in the history of ever, provides photos of bearded female pharaohs like Hatshepsut (who only wore a stylized metallic beard to symbolize she had the authority of a male king, not because she thought she had a magic invisible penis…), and even possible gay jackals bumming one another on sarcophagus portraits, statuary, and tomb decorations. One is only grateful the hosts don’t give their further opinion on the fact there was once a famous male American Egyptologist called James Henry Breasted.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
It is a curious fact that, in ancient Egyptian myth, the creator-god Atum masturbated the universe into existence from his magical penis, an item that women by definition do not possess, not even Michelle Obama.

However, during Egypt’s Dynastic Period an analogous act of spiritual masturbation was needed from the recently deceased to enable their successful transition into the Egyptian afterlife. So, in the words of the unacceptably named Egyptologist Kathlyn M. Cooney, “[dead] Egyptian women had to shift their gender and ‘masculinize’ themselves to enter the Fields of Peace,” with their sarcophagus becoming “an excellent vehicle to transform the woman” into a male god temporarily, by facilitating “a kind of impermanent gender-shift.”

Therefore, to fool the Guardians of the Land of the Dead into thinking they were male like Atum, Osiris, or Ra, the three gods of creation, death, and regeneration, whose equally male human avatars and their penises were the only things actually allowed into Paradise, women of the time often had images of themselves looking inaccurately male painted onto the front of their sarcophagi, or were buried with items only men would ever usually possess, like weapons, condoms, Rohypnol, underpants, or copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

In De Nile
Initially, academic culture warriors were inclined to present such curious funerary phenomena in a (then) fashionably feminist light. Consider the Brooklyn Museum’s 2017 show A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt. According to the show’s website:

Egyptian medicine taught that a woman, once in her tomb, faced a biological barrier to rebirth…. To overcome this perceived problem, a priest magically transformed a woman’s mummy into a man [temporarily]…. This required representing a woman with red skin on her coffin—the color normally assigned to a man—and reciting spells that addressed the woman with masculine pronouns…. A woman later returned to her original female state and incubated herself for rebirth into the afterlife as a woman.

This was all then framed in a feminist light: Oh, how sexist were ancient Thebes and Memphis! But what seemed woke in 2017 now seems oh so very bigoted, passé, and TERF-ish. It does not take too much imagination to guess how the presence of enchanted gender-altering pronoun spells on an ancient Egyptian coffin might be deliberately misconstrued by the newly risen woke gender-benders of today like the Mary Rose museum’s Hannah, especially when you consider these magic words allowed the dead to successfully “transition” from one state of being into another.

One day, the very name of the 2017 show A Woman’s Afterlife may itself be reclassified as some kind of curatorial hate crime. Obviously, the women of ancient Egypt were not even women at all, but men. And if you disagree? You just need some new woke glasses, don’t you, Mr./Mrs. Magoo? Try pushing that transphobic line with a “tolerant” leftist young intern today, and you’ll soon find yourself on the wrong end of an employment tribunal. Someone as old-fashioned as you is viewed through woke eyes today as nothing but a total museum piece.

The Lie of the Beholder - Taki's Magazine (takimag.com)

 

EP39 - The Only Autogynephile - Debbie Hayton

"Trans Women Are Men … Including Me" - Debbie Hayton

Old Age (by Maxwell Bodenheim)

 

In me is a little painted square
Bordered by old shops, with gaudy awnings.
And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men,
Drinking sunlight.
The old men are my thoughts:
And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,
And quietly unload supplies.
We fill slim pipes and chat,
And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the square . . .
Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing children
Stroll past us, or into the shops.
They greet the shopkeepers, and touch their hats or foreheads to me . . .
Some evening I shall not return to my people.

Efforts to expand the lifespan ignore what it’s like to get old (by Robert S Gable)

As modern medicine extends the human lifespan, quality of life is not keeping up, raising thorny ethical dilemmas

Everyone dies sometime. But when and how? Those questions become more salient as birthdays roll by. It has been said that wherever old people gather there is an ‘organ recital’ of malfunctioning body organs and parts. I, too, have a recital.

Last year, at age 88, I woke up in a San Francisco hospital room after having my aortic heart valve replaced by one made of a metal spring and some cow tissue (an ‘Edwards Sapien 3 Ultra’). I was glad to be alive, and I was clearly better off than my roommate, an elderly gentleman with a wrinkle-ridden oblong face and no visible hair. Heavily sedated and apparently dying from double pneumonia, he was a convenient roommate: no idle conversation, no moaning in pain, no shouting for nurses, no snoring, no watching late-night TV game-show reruns.

I don’t know what happened to my roommate – I escaped after two days. Back home, my healing went well, ‘for a person my age’, as the doctors routinely reminded me. But it was not entirely good news. My artificial heart valve – by decreasing my chances of dying from heart disease – has increased the likelihood of my dying from something worse (such as pancreatitis or a brain tumour).

Biophysicists have calculated that, with maximal improvement in health care, the biological clock for humans must stop between 120-150 years. Biotechnology firms such as Calico, Biosplice and Celgene are putting this to the test by scrambling to extend our normal lifespan as far as they can. However, a basic problem, at least thus far, is that a sustained quality of life has not been extended to keep up with our expanded longevity.

As people get older, they are not gaining economic security, maintaining their usual level of independence, extending their social relationships, or avoiding chronic illnesses. For instance, about 85 per cent of older adults in the United States have at least one common chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, arthritis or Alzheimer’s. Thus, many routine tasks such as bathing, making the bed, doing errands, shopping, picking up items off the floor, or walking without falling cannot be performed without help. In short, as we live longer we are also unwell for longer.

Psychological depression, caused by physical illness plus associated medical expenses, often contributes to even more decline. Almost every day a new ache or pain, of uncertain duration, pops up and adds to ongoing maladies. Undesirable, but necessary, medical compromises gradually squeeze the vitality out of a chronically ill person. In most cases, death is not a sudden event at the end of life (except as a legally defined physical state). Rather, it is a long process of progressive functional decline.

Top of Form

From my perspective, preventing death is not always more important than promoting the quality of life. What value is there in existing if the ability to do and experience what you most value becomes unavailable? It is, indeed, possible to live too long.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra commented that:

Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time.’ … Many too many live, and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!

Nietzsche would have probably approved of the cult comedy-drama film Harold and Maude (1971), showing a timely and poignant death. Twenty-year-old Harold, bored and obsessed with suicidal thoughts, meets 79-year-old Maude at a stranger’s funeral service. Maude, who breaks many social taboos, teaches Harold to make life fun. A year later, she calmly arranges her own death. Harold is shocked into realising the value of present-moment awareness.

Unfortunately the popular press is apparently not ready to discuss the ‘rottenness’ and ‘worm-eatenness’ of the elderly. Take the July 2022 issue of AARP magazine, which offered older women ‘10 Things That Always Make You Look Stylish’ such as bold red lipstick, which they claimed will ‘help dingy teeth appear whiter’. Or the May 2023 swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, which featured the 81-year-old business woman Martha Stewart demonstrating, they said, ‘ageless living’ and showing a bit of cleavage without ‘much airbrushing’. Perhaps she won a genetic lottery – most of the old people I know have saggy skin and poor posture. They are sexually unattractive. They are a hazard as drivers on the road, or even as pedestrians. They forget things. They are expensive to maintain. Rational and open discussion of death is rare, especially in a culture where a charge of microaggression or ageism has become an all-too-common threat.

A notable exception to the death-discussion taboo was an item in KFF Health News in June 2019 that reported on an 86-year-old woman arranging a secret off-campus meeting with nine other seniors (who slipped away from their fancy retirement community near Philadelphia) to discuss ‘rational suicide’. Seniors currently account for about 18 per cent of suicides in the US. An unsuccessful suicide attempt can leave the person even worse off. As one of the participants in the Philadelphia meeting put it: ‘We only get one crack at it. Everyone wants to know what to do.’

At present, medical personnel are left to deal with the toxic underbelly of a death-phobic culture. Only pain medication that may, as a side-effect of treatment, hasten death is a generally acceptable life-terminating procedure. As defined by the World Health Organization, palliative care improves the ongoing quality of life of patients with life-threatening illnesses. In contrast, where it is available, legally authorised medical aid in dying allows a physician to prescribe a lethal dose of a drug at the request of a patient who intends to end their life. In my opinion, such a prescription would at least give suffering patients a comforting option, even if they ultimately chose never to use the drug.

In the US, 10 states plus the District of Columbia presently allow medical aid in dying. Relevant laws typically specify that the patient must be a mentally capable adult within an estimated six months of dying, and be able to self-ingest the medication. The legislation also usually includes more than a dozen safeguards, such as affirmation from two physicians and two independent witnesses that the patient was not coerced.

Countries other than the US that allow medical aid in dying (as of 2023 that’s Austria, Australia, Belgium, Columbia, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and New Zealand) have varying medico-legal requirements. For example, to prevent ‘suicide tourism’, Canada requires that a patient be a Canadian resident. Switzerland does not have that requirement. In her book In Love (2022), Amy Bloom details the voluntary death of her husband in Switzerland, where the patient does not need to be critically ill or within six months of death. Bloom’s husband had severe Alzheimer’s and she reportedly acted on his insistence that he would ‘rather die on my feet than live on my knees’.

Specific criteria and customary medical practice apparently have significant effects on patient utilisation of medical aid in dying. For example, in Canada, 10,064 patients received medical assistance in dying during 2021. By contrast, in California, with a similar population of about 39 million residents, only 486 patients received medical assistance in dying during the same year. California law requires that the patient self-administer the drug, and that the patient be within six months of death. Canada does not require self-administration, and medical assistance is available if the patient’s medical condition is ‘grievous and irremediable’. Nonetheless, in both Canada and California statistics show that, consistently over several years, more than 80 per cent of the patients who used medical aid in dying had previously been in palliative care. The average age was 76 years, and more than 60 per cent had cancer. It seems younger, healthy people are not routinely exploiting the system.

Medical aid in dying and other practices pertinent to end-of-life care are surrounded by enigmatic and controversial issues involving religious beliefs and civil rights. Many people believe that life is sacred, and therefore the beginning and end should be left to divine intervention. The doctrine of the ‘sanctity of life’, commonly based on a theistic metaphysics, holds that killing oneself or others destroys the God-given intrinsic value of life. By contrast, a secular utilitarian view holds that there is a duty to ‘maximise happiness’ and therefore a moral obligation exists to end a life when it is characterised by indignity and suffering. Some moral philosophers argue that, just as it is wrong to compel people to die, so it is wrong to compel people to live under conditions they find intolerable.

I do not have the wisdom or inclination to solve such ethical complexities. I do, however, hope that the ‘right to die’ becomes a civil liberty issue in the way that daily living options have been expanded for marginalised ethnic groups, women and gender minorities.

A few months ago, in order to dissolve some blood clots, my cardiologist prescribed the blood thinner warfarin – the principal ingredient in rat poison. I assume that I will die, not by choice, but by the lethal default of accumulated peripheral decisions. So far, I have been fortunate. My body’s awkward way to the exit has not diminished the gratitude I feel for the many undeserved blessings I have received.

Efforts to expand the lifespan ignore what it’s like to get old | Psyche Ideas

 

Color in the Wheat (by Hamlin Garland)

 

Like liquid gold the wheat field lies,
A marvel of yellow and russet and green,
That ripples and runs, that floats and flies,
With the subtle shadows, the change, the sheen,
That play in the golden hair of a girl,—
A ripple of amber—a flare
Of light sweeping after—a curl
In the hollows like swirling feet
Of fairy waltzers, the colors run
To the western sun
Through the deeps of the ripening wheat.

Broad as the fleckless, soaring sky,
Mysterious, fair as the moon-led sea,
The vast plain flames on the dazzled eye
Under the fierce sun's alchemy.
The slow hawk stoops
To his prey in the deeps;
The sunflower droops
To the lazy wave; the wind sleeps—
Then swirling in dazzling links and loops,
A riot of shadow and shine,
A glory of olive and amber and wine,
To the westering sun the colors run
Through the deeps of the ripening wheat.

O glorious land! My western land,
Outspread beneath the setting sun!
Once more amid your swells, I stand,
And cross your sod-lands dry and dun.
I hear the jocund calls of men
Who sweep amid the ripened grain
With swift, stern reapers; once again
The evening splendor floods the plain,
The crickets' chime
Makes pauseless rhyme,
And toward the sun,
The colors run
Before the wind's feet
In the wheat!

 

 

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗢𝗳 𝗣𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 (by Marge Piercy)

 

Under a sky the color of pea soup

she is looking at her work growing away there

actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,

then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

 

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

 

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

 

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after

the planting,

after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is liberal society making us ill? (by Gurwinder Bhogal)

 

Social contagions plague a vulnerable demographic

As rates of Covid-19 infection started to dwindle, there came signs of a much stranger pandemic: long Covid and its host of long-term complications. You might think that, since men and older people suffer the most complications from the virus, most of those with long Covid would be older men. But this is not so. According to a US Census Bureau survey, women are almost twice as likely as men to report having it, while transgender people are significantly more likely to do so than all other groups. A German study, meanwhile, concluded “there is accumulating evidence that adolescent girls are at particular risk of prolonged symptoms”.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, given that we can’t accuse a virus of transphobia, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included: 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid, and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reporting the symptoms of long Covid is only moderately associated with a prior Covid infection. In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before getting Covid almost doubled the chances of reporting long Covid.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s response to Covid and lead to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no evidence that anxiety or depression alters the body’s immune response to the virus. A much likelier explanation could be that, since symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking psychological distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Young people are reporting despair and distress at an unprecedented rate, and this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society — a society that is making people sick, by teaching them to feel sick. The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond reports of long Covid. Consider the surge in cases of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) increased by over 2000%. If the increase were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, it wouldn’t be mostly restricted to a single sex and age range, but it has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — appears to be the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. This is also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another illness.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems that young people, and their doctors, are viewing personal issues as medical disorders: we are living through a pathologisation pandemic.

Why are so many people confusing sadness for sickness? It’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do this would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologisation can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that could be exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. As the arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters ramps up, natural bodies seem ugly by comparison. This “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 people found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with poorer mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

The real reasons may be deeper. One idea, more than any other, underpins the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, backed by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasises the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasising the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as hapless puppets has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical. A common example is “trauma”, a psychiatric term that has become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused that even clinicians fear it has lost its meaning. Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

Pathologisation is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’s are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatise mental illness can end up glamorising it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing”, a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses”, fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, or “part of my dating appeal”.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologisation by influencers is causing unintentional pathologisation among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomisation makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologisation pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

Medicalisation — the tendency for clinicians to recategorise ever more things as medical issues — occurs because clinicians are just as human as their patients, and are therefore just as influenced by culture and their own personal biases. The 1973 Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatrists who have been told that a healthy person is insane will begin to reinterpret that person’s ordinary behaviours, such as note-taking, as manifestations of their mental disorder. We saw this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous Gids clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep occurs largely due to the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetise you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income. In the States, the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to have a lucrative annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicised by the media, people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems. In so doing, they began to conform, wittingly or otherwise, to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to do just that. Some even suddenly “remembered” being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, but clinicians’ diagnoses also influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by a hyperconnected world, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth has created a new illness: puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasises human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements such as: “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me”. They concluded that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls. Further, when the self-worth of teenagers was mapped, using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful”, the data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

And thus, as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else.

If there’s a vaccine for the pathologisation pandemic, then the best candidate is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is a form of talk-based treatment based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Contrary to modernity, it teaches that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. The aim is to reframe harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more accurate, agentic, and soluble. So, instead of “The world sucks”, one could think “I feel like the world sucks right now”. Where pathologisation places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologisation bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

No form of psychotherapy has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurisation and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT”, are the opposite of classic CBT because they seek not to cultivate strength but to validate feelings.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which has helped everyone from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”. The ultimate cure to rampant pathologisation is to prepare the young to do battle against their greatest foe — their own minds — and to teach them a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: you are more than the things that happen to you. And you have as much control over your life as you believe you do.

Many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, but if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. Look within for the causes and, most times, you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, of course, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, could be a Hell in Heaven, or a Heaven in Hell.

Is liberal society making us ill? - UnHerd