Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Progressives?

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

It is a general rule of thumb that richer societies are happier societies. This is true across countries, as GDP and life satisfaction are highly correlated. And it is true across time. Countries get happier as they get richer. But there is a caveat to this general principle. Which is that the United States is not nearly as contented as its gross national income would predict. In fact, the U.S. is, as we’ve covered on this show, in a bit of a gloom rut. It has now been nearly two decades since a majority of Americans have told pollsters at NBC that they’re satisfied with the way things are going. This hope drought has no precedent in modern polling. NBC itself reported that “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.” Polls show that faith in government, business, and other institutions is in free fall—especially among conservatives. But they also show that conservatives are generally happy with their life and in their relationships. If conservatives have happiness without trust, American progressives seem to have trust without happiness. In a recent paper called “The Politics of Depression,” published by the journal Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, the epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and several coauthors showed that young progressives are significantly more depressed than conservatives, have been for years, and the gap is growing over time. Other studies, including the General Social Survey, show the same. Why are young progressives so sad? Today’s guest is Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and coauthor of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind.’ He has written intelligently, critically, and emotionally about happiness, depression, politics, and progressivism. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Greg Lukianoff Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: "People in Richer Countries Tend to Be Happier" https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction "The Politics of Depression" by Catherine Gimbrone et al https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560321000438 "How to Understand the Well-Being Gap Between Liberals and Conservatives" by Musa al-Gharbi https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/ "The Coddling of the American Mind" The Atlantic essay by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ [book] https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224897 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings, it's Mal. Call your banners because it's time to head back to Westrose for House of the Dragon, season two. The ringers dragon riders will soar alongside you each week with a heron-hall-sized slate of conversations. The dragon has three heads, and on Sunday nights immediately after Hot D concludes, Chris Ryan, Joanna Robinson and I will be with you for Talk the Thrones. Then on Mondays, two more shows away. Dan Lath and Charles Holmes, Steve Allman, and Jomea Denneron, aka the Midnight Boys, Biu!

We'll head to the tourney grounds to share their reactions. And of course, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald will sip the Arbor's finest vintage on the watch. Then on Tuesdays, Joanna and I will head to the bowels of a pleasure den for our House of our deep dyes. Then on Thursdays, Joe, Neil Miller, and Dave Gonzalez will gather the Ravens for trial by content. In this season, full episodes of Talk to Thrones, House of Ar, and the Midnight Boys will also be available on video on Spotify and the new Ringervverse YouTube channel. Podcast episodes available on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today, the psychology of modern politics, or why American conservatives are happier than American progressives. It's a general rule of thumb that richer societies are happier societies.

This is true across countries, as GDP and life satisfaction are highly correlated. It's also true across time. A single country gets happier as its citizens get richer. But there is a caveat to this general principle, which is that the U.S. The United States is not nearly as contented as its gross national income would predict. In fact, the U.S. is, as we've covered on this show, in a bit of a gloom rut. It has now been nearly two decades since the majority of Americans have told pollsters at NBC that they're satisfied with the way things are going.

This hope drought has no precedent in modern Poland. NBC itself reported that, quote, we have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history. of the poll." End quote. Americans were once famous for their national buoyancy. In his 1954 book, People of Plenty, the historian David M. Potter marveled at, quote, the optimism with which Americans have confronted the future, and quote, the confidence with which they

have grappled with difficult problems. Reading that passage in 2024 is a bit surreal, like a description of a distant planet. Of course, the 1950s were no utopia for many Americans, black Americans, women facing rampant sexism. But America in the middle of the 20th century really was, overall, unusually optimistic. Public trust in government was about 75% for the entire presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. And then came the deluge. After decades of assassinations and riots and the Vietnam War and an oil crisis and about a severe inflation, public trust in government plummeted through the 19th.

1960s and 1970s. Today, it hasn't exceeded 30% in more than a decade. This trust drought, too, is the longest on record. There's even another data point suggesting that we are in a unique psychological moment in U.S. history. Between 1950 and 2000, every elected president in our era of modern Poland, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, had at least one full year, and often several years, with an approval rating over 55%. But since 2003, it's never happened. Not one president has enjoyed a full year with 55% approval or better.

That is also the longest spell of dissatisfaction with American leadership on record. In fact, every form of institutional trust is in freefall, especially among Republicans and young people. Fewer than half of the GOP says they have faith in higher education, big business, tech firms, media, the entertainment industry, unions. That doesn't leave much except mom-and-pop shops and the military. What's interesting about conservative sentiment, however, is that this profound lack of trust in institutions is combined with a surprising amount of joy. Conservatives report higher levels of happiness

and higher levels of meaning in their lives. They're more likely to be patriotic, and, by the way, religious, more likely to be happily married, less likely to divorce. If conservatives overall seem to have happiness without trust, American progressives have the opposite. trust without happiness.

In a recent paper called The Politics of Depression, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, mental health, the epidemiologist Catherine Jim Brone and several co-authors showed that young progressives are significantly more depressed than conservatives and have been for years. The gap, they said, is growing over time. Other studies, including the general social survey, show the same.

There are several reasons to care about the phenomenon, the progressives are less happy than conservatives and getting less happy over time. The first is that as long-time listeners know, I think one of the more profound facts of existence we have to grapple with society is that social media and phones are eating the world and people aren't happy about it. The second is, as long-time listeners know, I don't like to label myself, but I occasionally think of myself as a progressive. And one responsibility of adhering to that label is the responsibility of self-criticism. If the cost of any ideology is that it makes its adherence depressed,

that is a pretty serious side effect worth listing on the box. The third is that negativity might drive engagement online, but it doesn't necessarily drive persuasion. As the economist Tyler Cowan wrote in a post last week on what he perceived to be these shifting vibes in American politics and culture. Quote, Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are. Americans notice this, if only subconsciously. End quote. If the progressive movement wants to grow, I think it needs a message more alluring than come on in. The water is miserable. The message they want, I think,

is rather a message of abundance. If America makes a small number of important decisions, the future can be awesome, and it can be built. Today's guest is Greg Lugianoff, the president and chief executive officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the co-author of the coddling of the American mind. Greg is written intelligently, critically, and emotionally

about happiness, depression, politics, and progressivism. And today we spend a lot of time talking about why he thinks the left has taken this turn toward depressive affect. It's a theory he calls reverse CBT. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Greg Lukianna, welcome with the show. Thanks for having me. Why do you tell us a little bit about what it is that you do?

I am the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So I'm a constitutional lawyer who focuses on freedom of speech. My organization is devoted to defending free speech both on campus and now off as well, which we expand our mission in 2022. But I also have a really intense interest in psychology. I wanted to talk to you for a while. One of the most interesting facts about the electorate and American politics in general, I think, is this happiness gap between progressives and conservatives. It seems like from several reports there has been a happiness gap between liberals and conservatives. Maybe I should say progressives and conservatives to distinguish from classical liberals.

And it seems like this gap is accelerating. Before we go into the why, let's make sure that we nail down the what. How do we know for sure that progressives are more likely to be anxious and or depressed than conservatives? multiple studies, including a fire zone, you know, massive survey of student opinion. We do the largest survey of student opinions on freedom of speech each year, and we added to that questionnaire some questions about anxiety, depression to get down to that. But of course, it also matches what other studies have shown, whether you're talking about Pew, whether you're talking about some of the stuff that my co-author, Jonathan Haight,

is found as well. It's been quite consistent that there is a, that there's always been somewhat of a gap between progressive and conservative self-reports of happiness, but it's gotten much more severe in the past, you know, 12 years or so. In your opinion, is the best way to describe this gap

as a gap in happiness, well-being, contentment, or is it a gap in negative conditions? like depression, anxiety. Do you have a preferred way to describe what the thing is here that we're trying to talk about? I'm perfectly fine calling it a happiness gap, but to say it more colloquially, but it's more of a mood disorder gap that essentially, because mood disorders are important to distinguish, because if you're talking about things like schizophrenia or other psychological maladies, those are different kettle of fish quite dramatically.

but anxiety and depression are the key ones that we're interested in here. And definitely, you know, all the evidence points to there being a substantial gap in anxiety and depression between progressives and conservatives with progressives experiencing substantially more depression and anxiety than conservatives. And can you help us nail down when it is exactly that this, let's call it a happiness gap, between progressives and conservatives started to expand, because it seems to me, like, from the data that I look at, it was a relatively steady gap for several years, and only in the last few years, has there really been this yawning of the gap? How would you characterize the timing

of that divergence? You know, at least what I looked at, it looked like you start seeing a divergence accelerating around 2012, but definitely it's gotten a lot bigger. in the past three or four years. Greg, you have a theory about what is causing this gap, and the name of your theory is reverse CBT, reverse CBT. I think before we talk about reverse CBT, we should probably talk about what CBT is. What is CBT exactly, and how has it helped you?

Sure, okay. So, I mean, like, all my interest in this comes, you know, primarily from some realizations I had dealing with my own suicidal depression in 2007 and recovering from it in 2008. And I talk about it in some, you know, ugly detail in my book with Jonathan Haidt, coddling in the American mind. And, you know, I was, I went to the hardware store to figure out a foolproof way to kill myself. and as and you know had to be hospitalized for a while and as I was recovering I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy is it's an interesting intervention that's one of the best studied interventions I think it is the best study intervention for anxiety

and depression ever invented other than you know pharmaceuticals and what it is and it seems deceptively simple. But essentially, the realization was that anxious and depressed people have more kind of negative exaggerated chatter in their head. You know, and there are names for

these different types of negative exaggerated chatter. And they're called cognitive distortions. And some of them are exactly like what they sound like. So catastrophizing, for example. You know, like, when something relatively minor

that's bad happens to, you know, you and you, you know, your brain immediately screams at you, you know, like, this is, um, this is because the world is fundamentally broken. You know, and it's like, okay, I should talk that down a little bit. Or like when you, you know, you have a bad date and the person that you wanted a date on, or you think you had a bad date and you just kind of assume that, you know, you immediately go to, I'm going to die alone. this person obviously hates me.

That's actually called mind reading. I'm going to die alone. It's called fortune-telling. The overall tone of this is catastrophizing. And so some cognitive distortions include overgeneralization, binary thinking, which is everything is either, you know, zero or one. It has to be, you know, everything's fantastic

or everything's a disaster. Blaming, discounting positive. you know, like the idea that essentially you create a narrative around there is no, there is no upside. It's all, everything's negative. And what was really amazing about this is that you don't, it's not a question of understanding it intellectually. You have to actually do the work and get in the habit of talking back to your exaggerated

catastrophizing thoughts. And by talking back to them, what I mean is the actual, When you have one of these exaggerated thoughts, you just go through this process of like writing it down, labeling it at in terms of like what kind of cognitive distortion it is, and then trying to reframe it, not with the power of positive thinking, but really with the power of rational thinking, being like, is this really I'm going to die alone? Is this really a sign that the world is broken? Or is it something more mundane as I didn't think that date went very well in and now I'm kind of sad about it? Like this was transformative for me. Like I used to get pretty severe. depressions almost every year. I barely get them at all anymore. And while I was studying CBT, I was working on campuses and I was seeing situations in which it seemed like the adults in the room, you know, the residence hall directors, for example, or some of the administrators who interact with the students the most, the ones also most likely to punish students and professors for their speech, seemed to be kind of modeling behaviors that included catastrophizing definitely a ton of

overgeneralizing, a lot of binary thinking. Like, basically, there wasn't a cognitive distortion I'm familiar with that I didn't see kind of modeled for younger people. But back in 2008, 2009, the students weren't buying. They were kind of rolling their eyes at adults like they always had. But right around 2014, I started noticing a lot more students showing up on campus, demanding censorship, but using medicalized justifications. That essentially, you know, this speaker coming to campus is a catastrophe, you know,

and it will be mentally harmful to people if they come and that people will not be able to recover from it. And that's when I started working with John Haidt. And so we wrote the original article, Codling in the American Mind in 2015. And unfortunately, things got much worse after that. Let's talk about reverse CBT. So you've mentioned a couple. key psychology terms, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing. I'm just going to provide some quick definitions

to those before we talk about reverse CBT and why you think this is a philosophy that has taken root on the left specifically. But catastrophizing is basically this idea that something happens to you and you spin out the worst possible version of that story. So a quick example I think might be you get a C in economics as a 19-year-old college sophomore. You tell yourself, okay, that means I'm going to fail out of college. I'm going to fail out of college. That means I won't be able to find a job. I won't be able to find a job. That means I'm a failure and I'll be living on the street. It's this story that spins out of the single fact of the sea in economics. And then overgeneralizing, I think it can be similar, right? It's you have a fight maybe with a romantic partner.

And rather than see that one fight for what it is, one fight, you say, this is who I am. I always ruin my relationships. I always do this with my friends. I am the sort of person who. cannot be loved. And so in a way, both of these are a kind of trapped prior spinning themselves into a story of maximal negativity, right? The single grade on a test, the single fight with a partner or lover becomes this negative story about oneself that becomes all consuming. So tell me a little bit, if those are the maladaptive thought patterns that CBT is trying to unwind, what What is reverse CBT and why do you think it has found its home on the American left? Yeah, so reverse CBT, you know, is that process of implicitly or sometimes even explicitly

telling people effectively that they should catastrophize, that they should overgeneralize, that they should engage in emotional reasoning. So the way we talked about it in coddling the American mind was as if we were giving young people three terrible bits of advice that we call the great untruths. One is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, kind of a play on Nichi. Just the idea that essentially, and the way we talk about it, we were seeing it being sort of conveyed on campus, but also in K through 12, was the idea that people are inherently fragile, that they will be permanently harmed by words, and that there's, that there

and that you really just have to protect people as much as possible from these kind of stressors. And meanwhile, it's an untruth because actually the research is pretty strong that people are actually quite resilient and that they do recover from even horrible situations that lack that people come out of what we would consider to be traumatic experiences, oftentimes without PTSD, you know, for example. The second great untruth was the one I was getting at, and we call it always true. trust your feelings that I was getting at before with the emotional reasoning. The idea that, you know, your feelings are things that you should consider, but they don't always mean what you think they mean.

And telling someone that if you feel angry, sad, alienated guilty, there's something outside of you that needs to be done because you're actually not, you know, like, that basically you're always having an accurate view of the world through your feelings is terrible advice. And the last one is life is a battle between good people and evil people, which is overgeneralizing. It's binary thinking. It's just counting positives. And it's this hyper simplistic way of looking at the world. But that also, of course, is a really depressing way to look at the world.

Essentially, it's just good people like me versus in a sea of evil. You know, that's going to make you paranoid and depressed. And I also think it's an untruth. And so I'm thinking about these great untruths, right? What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. I suppose examples there would be some truisms of modern progressive campus like words or violence, microaggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces. In the second category of always trust your feelings, the example that it came to me is

sometimes you see debates playing out online where it feels like the emotional group is the one that wins or the one that expects to win. and so emotionality is stepping in for substance in the determination of, you know, who should, you know, win a certain argument. And then finally, in the category of life is a battle between good and evil, I do think that lots of political debates these days have this sort of oppressor-oppressed dynamic, which while there are certainly oppressors in the world and there are certainly oppressed people in the world, I think it often helps to see reality more clearly. by recognizing that in many cases, those who are oppressed, those who seem like oppressors also feel oppressed, and those who seem oppressed also can be oppressors. And so life is a little more gray than a battle between pure demons and angels.

I want to make sure that I understand the final piece here, which is why you think reverse CBT is a phenomenon of the left rather than the right. Because maybe someone listening could say, doesn't Trump say that good and evil people exist? Doesn't Trump suggest that feelings are more important than the feeling that I won the election is more important than the fact of what the State Secretary of Georgia counted up in his tally? Why is it your belief that reverse CBT is a progressive phenomenon? As far as the research that's ever been done into this, going back quite a ways, there has been a happiness gap between people on the left and people on the right. It's just as much greater now than it is.

And I think that there are reasons why you wouldn't expect that to be as strong on the right, partially from everything from people who tend to be more religious, tend to show a higher level. of happiness and well-being, and people on the right tend to be somewhat more religious. But on the left, the reason why I started noticing this on the left is because I work on campuses. And on campuses, the campuses overwhelmingly, particularly the administrators that I think are most responsible for modeling some of these distorted ways of thinking, they very much are on the left. And here's actually something that I will, that I do actually, that does actually anger me about this. And I saw this in my own life, because I'm, I'm on the left, like the, you know, left of center, I would say. But like, you know, earlier in my career, I was an ACLU guy.

Like, I, you know, I was entirely in a sort of lefty bubble. And the left liberalism of the, of like the 90s that I was used to had a lot more. to it, a lot more sort of playfulness to it, a lot more, you know, it wasn't quite as grim as what I would say is more like the left progressivism that has become more popular on campus. And something that I really bristled against was, but really, like, but also I think it's just dangerous, is there's an idea that if I overgeneralize or I teach you to catastrophize or I tell you that the world is absolutely doomed, that this will motivate. you to positive social action.

And I think that that's bad to teach people because it will leave them feeling disempowered, anxious and depressed. But also because, but even if, like, you took it as, like, maybe that's the price to pay if it actually solves some of the world's problems, just making some people a little bit more miserable to encourage them to go to be better people and do better things with their lives. I don't like that to begin with because I think it's a big harm to make people more depressed in the first place. But also, you know, depressed and anxious people aren't great activists.

They certainly aren't great with coming up with, you know, sensible, realistic policies. It tends to result in a more despairing way and hopeless way of looking at the world that sometimes goes to more extreme, sometimes even impractical solutions or even worse. And I definitely feel like I saw this, see this whole. a lot more on the current version of the left, a strategy in which the primary battles to be far are internal, not so much external. And I think that that's an unhealthy way to look at the world.

Like that basically I'm someone who's always being kind of like, like after the murder of George Floyd, you know, for example, I was like, wow, okay, now there are like five different, you know, reforms that we should be undergoing right away to make sure of stuff like this doesn't happen again, like pragmatic kind of ideas that could actually lower the number of police abuses. But instead it seemed to turn into primarily sort of a consciousness raising thing. Like basically kind of like we have to like change the way people feel internally.

And it's like, no, no, no, you should figure out things that actually will help prevent these things where you have to be sort of hard-nosed and empirical and all of these kind of things. So I also think it's a bad strategy, even if your only goal is, I don't care how miserable it makes people I want to save the world. It's not going to save the world. Ryan Grimm, the former Intercept reporter who just started a new website called DropSite, published an article in June 2022 called Elephant in the Zoom, the subtitle of which is meltdowns have brought progressive advocacy groups to a standstill at a critical moment in world history. And this is the piece that leaps to mind when you said that sometimes this ideology leads

to a phenomenon where the biggest battles are internal, that is non-profits fighting each other within the organization, rather than external, non-profits fighting the system in order to seek progressive change. I absolutely remember that article. I thought it was such an important article to be written because, you know, I'm plugged in in the nonprofit world. I run a, I run a medium size, not nonprofit myself. And I was hearing these stories, you know, from all over the country of organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, being paralyzed with sort of, with internal battles about the impressive environment, the oppressive environment at their workplace. And one of the first people who came to me was actually my, one of my wife's best friends from like college.

And it was funny. actually said, I want to talk to you about your book. And I was like, uh-oh, I'm going to about to get get an earful. She's going to, she hated coddling the American mind. And actually turned out she ran a nonprofit. And it was a direct services nonprofit. I'm not going to describe it too much more than that. You know, it's like the kind of things that actually goes out in the world and tries to like legally represent and help people. And it was completely paralyzed by some of these internal battles, you know, that were really more about, um, oftentimes sort of what, what would normally be considered an interpersonal squabble, um, was paralyzing their ability to

actually help people in the real world. Um, and meanwhile, kind of like, and that was the first time I heard of that. And I've heard stories like this, you know, for every, every month almost, like after, um, Codling came out. But I knew, like, I couldn't ever, you know, If I wrote that article basically saying, like, listen, this is what I'm hearing. Nobody would have cared. So Ryan actually going to some of these organizations and reporting on some of the ways in which these interpersonal, you know, sometimes social justice, but sometimes they seem to be almost like a more of like a stand-in for, again, like interpersonal battles between individuals were just making some of these organizations. horrible to work at and also extremely ineffective.

I want to summarize what I think I understand from this interview so far. Modern progressivism has, in your mind, shed its former optimism and embraced a philosophy that valorizes catastrophic thinking, negativity, high emotionality. And ironically, at a time when therapeutic language is more popular than ever, this approach is directly opposed to modern therapy practices like CBT. And this doesn't just make progressives miserable. and anxious, depressed, it hobbles progressivism, right? This isn't merely a side effect of social justice. It hobbles the project of social justice in your mind because it paralyzes

progressives' ability to help people in the real world by directing all of their emotional attention at infighting and interpersonal anger and catastrophic thinking. I want you to help me understand where this idea came from. Like, we're not going to go like, you know, full Nietzsche genealogy of morals here, but that's like kind of what I would love to do briefly. Like, where do you think reverse CBT came from? What problem do you think this philosophy was solving for people? Like, I can imagine a story that says there was an era in American politics in 2008 when Obama was rising to power, where American liberalism was defined by a kind of optimism and that

In the era of disappointment that emerged from the slow recovery out of the Great Recession and the rise in ostensible police violence, there was a moment around 2012, 2013, just as smartphones or getting into young people's hands, when this disappointment of the Obama age concretized into a kind of reverse CBT ideology that took root in campus. Why don't you wrestle and or entirely reject that particular? theory and tell me what you think happened. Where did this idea come from and what problem was it trying to solve? I mean, to a degree, I mean, that sounds like a very plausible explanation, too. So, and I think that I tend to think most social phenomena are caused from, you know, multiple different directions and

multiple different things happening at the same time. I do tend to take a little bit more of a longer view in the sort of battle between sort of progressivism and liberalism in the United States, like the sort of inter-left fight between those two polls. Yeah, and I'm not even sure I even necessarily describe some of the worst aspects of it as even being progressivism. Like I think of kind of like the, you know, the new kind of new left sort of Marxist thought of the 60s and 70s, having a much more apocalyptic kind of pessimistic view on the world and human nature, even though like it's grounded around kind of like the idea of getting to something

that ultimately looks like utopia, it ends up sounding an awful lot like the most depressing version of what our country looks like, what our fellow citizens look like, what, you know, what everything looks like, whereas liberalism always had a lot more of the optimism, of the idea that freedom is a good, that authenticity is a good, that all, and, you know, I even mentioned that I had a little bit more of an emphasis on things like pleasure and some of these things that might feel a little more trivial, but make life a little more pleasant. And so when you look at kind of like the thought of the 20th century, you know, I still relate very much to, um, that the liberals of the 20th century.

And I think that living in the world, you know, of what can I actually do to make the world better and what are things that actually work and how do I actually work? That is going to make you happier and more effective, whereas rigid ideology that is basically, you know, that I always think of as being wildly oversimplifying human nature is going to be darker. It's going to be less hopeful. It's going to be more moralistic, more filled with guilt and shame tactics. And just, and why I think that that, why I think, you know, like why that became more poppyo in the last 20 years is that, you know, it did seem by the 80s and 90s that essentially left liberalism had won. That essentially like the more optimistic version of it, the Soviet Union fell.

A lot of these dark kind of intellectual ideas seemed discredited. And, you know, as we got further away from the 80s, some of the 80s. the changes in the 80s and 90s, I think the elements of the darker version of progressivism were ascendant. I like that theory. I think I agree with parts of it. The other ingredient that I think has to be stirred into the stew

is the digitization of culture. We did an episode on the show a few months ago on the four dark rules of online engagement where we talked about, negative headlines empirically drive attention more than positive headlines, high arousal negative stories tend to be shared more. Us versus them narratives tend to drive higher engagement, and catastrophic thinking overall tends to be the better way to grab attention for any particular topic. And so it feels like if you were going to design any political ideology that was

Darwinianly fit to the medium of the environment of the internet, you would design a progressivism that is negative, high arousal, catastrophizing, and clearly adhering to a structure of us versus them, which is one of your very last untruth. Life is a battle between good and evil. So I think that many of these ingredients, a lot of these dynamics are playing out across the political spectrum, but I do think that it's conceivable that we're seeing them in particular driving depression and anxiety and negative affect and unhappiness among younger liberals in part because they have higher exposure to the internet. And they might just be more sensitive to this kind of messaging. Young people, teenagers are more sensitive to peer effects than older people are. And so that might be why we're seeing the effect concentrated among young liberals.

One of my personal theories is sort of runaway homophily, but essentially digitization has allowed for super sorting. And ability to actually be in communities of people who just have similar personalities and politics to you in a way that is really multiple layers deep in which you can, in a way that growing up in like a smaller town 100 years ago, you're kind of forced to interact with people you disagree with that have very different personalities from you. But I think that some of the effect that we're seeing in the increase

in anxiety and depression come from this digitization sort of effect. I think a lot of what we see as some of the distortions of American society in the past 20 years are super sorting or runaway homothly, as I call it. Yeah, it's interesting to think that the internet is just one big exercise in Kast Sunstein's principle of group polarization. Obviously, the internet allows people to find each other, and that's wonderful, right? If you are the mother of a child with a rare disability, the fact of the internet is a blessing, because it allows your micro-community to maximize mutual engagement. but a community for a mother with a disabled child is performing the exact same dynamic

as a community of white supremacist, right? It's still the internet serving as a means to help like-minded people find each other. And Cass Sunstein has this, I think, it's Cass Sunstein who introduced me to this theory of group polarization. It might not have been his who coined it, but this idea that if you get people together in a room,

whether it's a virtual room or a brick-and-mortar room, and you have them talk about one subject, they all tend to exit the room polarized on that subject because the loudest voices in those rooms tend to speak the most. The people who have mild disagreements, arising in their heads tend to suppress those mild disagreements. And as a result, overall, the people who exit the room are more polarized on that issue, more extreme on that issue than they were when they entered the room. And to a certain extent of the internet is one big

room in which we're talking to each other. It should be the world's most catastrophic. no sort of semantic confusion intended, the most horrible group polarization experiment. Let's talk about some possibility is that we're just wrong, that reverse CBT has nothing to do with this phenomenon. Have you thought about the possibility that what we're looking at, when we look at graphs showing a happiness gap between liberals, excuse me, progressives and conservatives, is that we're just looking at reporting bias, that liberal, progressives, are simply more likely to report their mental health problems, and conservatives are more repressed. So they suffer from depression at the same rate,

but they're less likely to admit it or seek help or seek treatment. Is there any way that this theory is the dominant explanation of the happiness gap that we see in data? No. I mean, like, it's one of these ones where I've just heard this argument so many times. it's hard for me not to roll my eyes at a little bit at this point. All the curves go in the same direction. Whether you're talking about, you know, people being hospitalized with self-harm or suicide,

the curves look exactly like the increase in anxiety and depression. When you look at, you know, doctors, reports of how many people they're diagnosing, if you ask the question in terms of, like, how you've been told by a psychologist that you have a mental, a mood disorder, they all go. you know, in the same direction. And the idea that kind of, that, um, uh, your subjective sense of whether or not you're happy is a really important part of whether or not you're actually happy. So like the idea that kind of like someone saying, oh, you're actually depressed,

but you answer every question, you know, saying that, no, actually I'm pretty fine, man. Like, like I'm great. It would take a very weird phenomenon, um, that would be all across the board, equally distributed, you know, of people on the right, basically all being secretly miserable, even though they act happy or diagnosed less often or not self-harming, you know, like, all of this stuff. So it's one of those answers that I feel like has so much less explanatory power than people think it does. My second challenge to the theory is that in the last few generations, and I'm writing an article about this right now, women have moved left and men have moved right. And I'm profoundly interested in this divergence for

many reasons. I certainly don't want America turning into South Korea where there is a widely reported gender war where thousands of women say they refuse to date men because they think men are absolutely toxic. And equally, thousands of men say they refuse to date women because they despise feminism. So I'm very interested in this fact of the gender war, which is what brought this to my attention. But any movement with disproportionately more women is almost certainly going to register higher and anxiety and depression because women are more likely to say they are anxious and depressed and are probably more likely to be anxious and depressed. There's a wrinkle I want to just throw in here, which is that around the world, women report being more distressed day to day, but they also report

being more satisfied with their lives in general. Larry Santos has this distinction between happy in your life versus happy with your life. And this distinction seems very appropriate for this particular statistic that women are more likely to be distressed today, say they're more satisfied with their lives in general. Anyway, is it possible, Greg, that what we're picking up here is partly the mechanical result of the population of anxious and depressed women sorting themselves into the progressive bucket rather than progressivism itself making them anxious and depressed. Well, I tend to think of this as a little bit as part of the runaway homophily argument. Because keep in mind, like when you look at conservative women, they actually are decidedly

less anxious and impressed than liberal women. So basically, if what you're talking about is kind of like the idea that, yes, that women are going farther to the left and men are going farther to the right and that the Democratic party is becoming more female and the conservatives are becoming more. more male-dominated. I think that's part of that cell-sorting phenomenon. And because women generally have substantially higher rates of anxiety and depression, you might expect that to be, that the more female-dominated side would actually have higher rates of anxiety and depression as well, but that's still sorting within a group because it is actually the people who are attracted,

either, because I tend to think a lot of, like, almost everything is kind of a feedback loop. And that's kind of the runaway homophily kind of effect, too, is that when you actually start having, you know, your female-led, you know, fans of Depeche Mode group getting together and talking about depressing music, they're going to get more depressed. But there's also the phenomenon of women, you know, on the right being more attracted to things that are actually probably reinforcing feeling less depressed. and possibly, you know, for a variety of reasons why generally people more on the right tend to report some better reports of well-being.

I suppose it's possible that if there was some kind of all-knowing alien who could understand everything about human psychology, they might have a way of listening to this episode and say, actually, you both missed by far the most important reason why progressives say they are. or are less happy than conservatives, you haven't mentioned it at all yet. If we take that to be true, if we take it to be a fact that so far, neither you nor I have put our finger

on the driving issue here, what do you think that thing is that we haven't mentioned yet? I can nominate some examples. Maybe this is about religion, right? Maybe, and to a certain extent, Jonathan Haidt wrote about this a bit in the happiness hypothesis, maybe religion is a kind of prophylactic against misery that simply

feeling like there's someone watching over you and an eternity waiting for you provides a kind of safety net against the sort of misery that secular progressives feel. Maybe it's religion. Maybe it's the fact that there's something about progressivism and the anxious lusting for a better world that makes progressive sadder than conservatives generally, and that fact of lusting after a better world has been amplified by the digitization of the commons. Maybe there's something else. What would you enter into evidence that might explain the happiness gap that we haven't touched on yet? Yeah, the one that I also am fairly dismissive of is just the idea that you know, things have never been worse, and just one side of the spectrum sees that better,

and of course, they're more depressed. And I always just point out, my dad was born in 1926 in Yugoslavia, his father, dad when he was six. He grew up as a refugee, as an orphan in Yugoslavia in 1930s. You cannot convince me that things are worse than they've ever been. Like, it just as impossible for me. And that's not one of the ones that you offered. I am, I do think a lot about the religiosity idea. I'm an atheist and an atheist in seventh grade, but do I envy, you know, the community that religion creates? And some of the things that we think actually result in happier conservatives probably do relate to,

you know, that they do tend to be more religious. But we did, I did ask my researchers, though, right before this interview, to look into, for our own reports about whether or not we could find a lot of correlation between, you know, mental health and well-being and religiosity. And the research we looked into, we couldn't quite find it in this, in this research in particular. But I do know existing research that Paul Bloom is written about says that it's not actually whether or not you're religious, it's whether or not you actually worship. That essentially, like, going, it's not the believing in God. It's the going to church on Sundays. Like, like, that's,

the part that actually really seems to matter. So I do think that there's potentially something there. And then of course just the super sorting kind of idea of variation of it being

like, yeah, I mean like progressives, there's just something about that side of the spectrum on the right side of the spectrum that's going to just naturally attract a personality type. But that gets us back to exactly where we were 30 years ago, when there was, like we said, there's always been a gap between left and right on happiness. Just won't explain why it's accelerated so much since 2012.

I think maybe the basic way to frame my final question for you is something along the lines of how do we fix this? Maybe the slightly less basic way of asking that question is to ask, who fixes this? Whose responsibility is it to change what is essentially a kind of airy philosophical ideology that has lightly permeated the minds of tens of millions of people where do you begin to look for a lever

to pull here on a phenomenon that is that diffuse who do you think fixes this problem? Yeah, that's a great question and I'm not going to pretend I have some kind of easy answer for it because it's just too big and difficult of a question. But I did think Abigail Schreer's bad therapy puts its finger on some of what's gone wrong here. And some of it is actually our attempts to fix the happiness gap and to fix sort of like the anxiety and depression that younger people are experiencing in ways that actually prompt a sort of, reverse CBT approach. And so I really recommend her book.

I wrote a follow-up to coddling of the American mind called canceling of the American mind that was more about cancel culture and about people losing their jobs, which on campus has gone completely just arm and arm. Like that's going completely off the rails in the past 10 years. But, you know, Abigail Shriars view to a degree is that getting people to think about their feelings all the time makes them miserable. So some of the interventions that we've been trying to actually help fix the anxiety and depression are actually probably getting people too much in their own heads and actually making it worse.

And who fixes that? I mean, that's something we've got to look into what we're doing in K through 12, what we're doing in higher ed. One of the points that she makes that I think she makes incredibly well in her book is just the idea that people treating their kids, like they're extremely fragile, getting them in therapy from when they're very young, and then kind of deferring to the therapist all the time can be a mistake. But it can also sort of signal to kids that nobody's really in charge, which really kind of stuck with me, which could be kind of a terrifying experience for a kid. So like I said, I'm not going to offer any simple fix for this,

but I think we're doing an awful lot. I think we're making things worse in some of our efforts to face. I'm glad you landed there. I talk a lot about happiness and well-being on the show as a reminder to myself that everything I'm interested in, science, politics, and technology, economics, all of it is interesting. But if progress makes our experience of reality worse, then it's not progress. Experience is all we have. And so I want to talk about happiness and anxiety, but I'm also very aware of the fact that

thinking too much about anxiety probably makes people anxious. is a Goldiloxone between not processing our trauma and dissatisfaction at all and thinking too much about trauma and dissatisfaction all day long. I think that's maybe the paradox of this particular subject. It's so important to think about and also so important to not think about all the time. Of course, it's convenient to end there after a 40-minute discussion about politics and well-being, but with that, Greg Lukianov, thank you so much. I'm so interested in your work and this topic, and I really appreciate the depth and the personal detail

that you gave to this subject. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Boraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English

for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.