Is Leftism A Mental Disorder?

Left Wing People Are Mentally Ill

This is a reworked version of my original YouTube video in which I make the argument that leftism among Whites is significantly associated with poor mental health and other negative costs for its adherents. I will make a further claim that such an association has a causal mechanism that is more influenced by environment than genetics.

It is widely accepted that the people on the left have significantly higher rates of mental illness. Both in the United States, as well as in Europe. This finding has been robustly consistent in social research since inception of studies on the topic, but has seen a giant spike in the 2010s.

In a rare instance that you may not be familiar with this, below is a quick recap of the scientific literature:

Before I proceed explaining this, I'd like to first start by addressing certain smug left-leaning individuals who might come across this essay and smirkingly suggest that, right wing people are “just as mentally ill!” they just don’t seek mental health diagnosis because of stigma around mental health.

The reality is actually surprisingly the opposite. If we control the data for the same symptoms, mentally ill Conservatives who are in the upper-third most sad, lonely, worried, anxious people have higher rates of being diagnosed than Liberals, whereas Liberals themselves barely get diagnosed at the lower most sad, lonely, worried and anxious category, where they do appear to be diagnosed slightly more.

With that settled, let's dive into the main topic. In the first half of 2010s mental health has suddenly started to rapidly deteriorate. It was an asymmetric form of deterioration in which Liberals experienced a much more impactful decline in mental health than Conservatives. This decline was much more pronounced with women.

People like Jonathan Haidt were tying it up with increased social media usage, however many experts agree that his research is highly flawed and relies on poor data.

Most critically however is that after 2021, the mental health situation has actually seen an improvement, despite continuous usage of social media.

The newest longitudinal data I could find^^

So it is not social media that causes poor mental health, but “wokeness”. It is most highly concentrated in places of higher education, queers and women in which leftism feels at home. At the peak of '“woke”, 60% of all college students had at least one mental ill disease. This is quite high, but considering mostly young, queer, White-women indoctrinated with left-wing ideology go to college it is perfectly in-line with my assumptions.

If you happen to be astute, you can already try to guess where I’m moving towards. Leftism and poor mental health are very highly intercorrelated and the ups and downs of the national mental health perfectly correlate with the phenomenon of the Great Awokening.

[Assuming I am right, mental health will continue to improve for as long as the leftist cultural hegemony would continue to wane away]

The core idea is that liberal-leftist ideology exacts psychological costs on its adherents, and spreads through its influence on institutions and culture. It is a form of social contagion that spreads through social-interactions rather than being genetically predetermined, and given that how mental illnesses partially spread through social interaction, this one is not an exception.

Should the prominence of this ideology decline, the mental burdens it imposes are likely to diminish as well. Because the causal relationship is from ideology to illness not to illness towards ideology (at least among most people).

But what is the causal mechanism and why is it so prominent among White leftists than non-White leftists?

I’ll first explain the basic mechanism. To do that, we first must understand what leftism is morally.

Most people have already seen this image floating around on Twitter, yet most came with an impression that for the left a rock is actually more important than their own family member. This is false, and this image simply shows a relative aggregate of attitudes, not averages. The image you are about to see below, does show the averages, and as you can see the left is much less group oriented.

This maps really well with Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundation theory that causes a significant moral divergence for the very upper liberal part of society. Whereas for Conservatives, all moral values are as equally important, the level only prioritizes “care” and “fairness” while evolutionary adoptive moral values such as loyalty and liberty are not being prioritized.

[chart]

However, this dynamic does not appear to be replicating among Blacks, just as the results are also pretty weak among non-Westerners. As Joseph Henrich and Kevin MacDonald suggest in their respective books, Western morality had a different evolution than non-Western morality. Only White people have evolved “White Liberals” that recently have proceeded to significantly impair themselves as well as the rest of the group in terms of the Darwinian survival.

Sean Last has compiled a great list of explicit and implicit anti-White behaviors that White Liberals often engage in.

One key theme in the book "Pathological Altruism" is the concept of pathogenic guilt, particularly survivor guilt or inequity guilt. This is the idea that individuals can be driven by a misplaced sense of responsibility or guilt over their own relative success or privilege, leading them to engage in "altruistic" acts that are ultimately harmful, ineffective, or self-destructive. Applying this lens, a critique could be leveled at certain strands of left-wing thought that heavily emphasize collective historical guilt or "privilege."

The basic mechanism is best articulated in the American Affairs journal

Research consistently finds that the Americans who give most frequently, give the highest shares of their income, or donate specifically to causes to alleviate human poverty and suffering are those who are right-leaning and religious. Despite these gaps in behaviors, liberals have a broader sphere of moral concern and tend to feel higher levels of empathy (even if those sentiments don’t lead them to incur actual costs and risks on others’ behalf in the same manner as conservatives). Liberals tend to be troubled not just by the state of their own nation and community, but by the plight of animals and nature, of people and events in other countries, by hypothetical and projected future trends as well as historical injustices—most of which the typical person has little-to-no meaningful control or influence over. This can be a source of significant depression or anxiety (or “moral distress” to borrow a term from health care).

Although liberals tend to be less emotionally stable than conservatives, they are also far more likely to prize emotionality and to dwell on their emotions and the emotions of others. They tend to react much more severely to unfortunate events—from public tragedies to political defeats to global catastrophes and beyond. Not only are their initial responses significantly more dramatic, but liberals are also adversely affected for longer periods of time.

Another consideration: highly-educated and relatively affluent white liberals are the Americans most likely to identify as “feminists,” “antiracists,” or “allies” or to hold far left views on “cultural” issues (here, here, here, here, here, here). However, according to many of the belief systems in question, affluent whites are the source of virtually all the world’s problems. That is, these ideologies villainize the very people who are most likely to embrace them.

Reflective of this mentality, white liberals view all other racial and ethnic subgroups more warmly than their own. There is no other combination of ideology and race or ethnicity that produces a similar pattern. This tension—being part of a group that one hates—creates strong dissociative pressures on many white liberals. This may help explain the racialized differences among liberals with respect to mental health.

Apparently this also has physiological ramifications. Liberals tend to have impaired self protection instinct and in many cases a mental degeneration relating to self-protection in conservative’s brain causes them to adopt left leaning attitudes.

To quote Jared Taylor:

Pathological Altruism may be the mirror image of autism, which is far more common in boys than in girls, and is characterized by an inability to sense the feelings of others. One author speculates that there are probably as many female pathological altruists as there are males with autism.

There are parts of the brain that light up and signal sympathy when we see people in pain or being punished. Psychological studies have been set up in which the brains of subjects were scanned while they watched the punishment of people who had cheated in a game. The sympathy circuits in women’s brains lit up; those in men did not. Men appear to lose their instinctive sympathy for pain when they think it is deserved; women remain sympathetic.

There is very strong evidence that altruistic behavior is under genetic control. The genetic abnormality known as Williams Syndrome has been called “the pathology of overfriendliness,” and people who suffer from it are excessively trusting and sympathetic. They are somewhat retarded and easily become victims of sexual abuse. They have abnormalities in the part of the brain known as the amygdala, which is involved in reading facial expressions and assessing threats. They are perhaps the only known group of people who show no racial bias.

Non-Westerners (including most Ashkenazi Jews) have not yet developed a “traitorous” mentally ill subsection of their population that would comprise at least a third of the group and guilt-trip themselves as well as lecture the rest about how good White people should behave.

While guilty based attitudes may be present within their respective cultures, in their totality they are most reminiscent of the White Conservative healthy equivalent as opposed to the White liberal.

Thus, given there are racial differences in left-wing moral foundations and mental illness, this only confirms my assumption that leftism is a disease for those who have moral foundations similar to “White Liberals” for adopting a leftist (anti-group) ideology constitutes lower mental health and overall negative performance in the battle for group selection. On the other hand, non-Whites that are adopting a left-wing ideology are not acting against their group interests from a Darwinian standpoint, and so consequently whether they be on the left or the right, they will be equally ethnocentric.

Non-Whites on both the left and the right who have good mental health precisely because ethnocentrism is associated with better wellbeing and Blacks with stronger ethnocentrism vote for the Democrats.

But is Leftism itself a mental disorder?