Humble Talent Comment of the Day Day continues with a stand-out post in a stand-out thread, which you can and should read here if you missed it. Here is HT’s second featured Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY)”:
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“The left tends to have more anxiety disorders”
Complete non-sequitur, but I’ve always been fascinated by this. It’s true: People who self-identify as being left of center on the political spectrum also tend to disproportionately report all varieties of mental illness. And when I say disproportionately, I mean disproportionately… The numbers change based on the type of mental illness and the methodology, but they all point the same way: The more extreme to the left you are, the worse your mental health is, and the further to the right you go, those issues are less reported. My impression is that mental illness rates of extreme progressives tracks at about 150% of average.
Thing is, everyone seems to have an opinion on why that is.
The low hanging fruit would be if there was a reporting problem; If people right of center were more loathe to report mental illness because of social stigma, that might account for some this. The problem with that argument is that the single largest classification of mental illness is depression, and if you look at happiness studies, they tend to find the same correlations. As an example: Both the mental health disparity and happiness disparity is strongest among young women in low income brackets. All that leads me to believe that while there might be some amount of reporting bias, the reality is probably that conservatives are generally happier people, that probably has positive mental health outcomes, and following that, I think the disparity is real.
Once you arrive there, the question becomes: 1) Does holding progressive values degrade your mental wellness? Or 2) are mentally unwell people more drawn towards progressivism?
I think the answer is probably “both”.
- I think that progressives tend to care about big issues that they can’t control. Climate Change, The War in Ukraine, Palestine… They view these as existential problems, which means that their temperature, their stress on these issues is always high, and to make it worse, these issues are also entirely outside of their control. Caring deeply about things that aren’t going the way you’d prefer them to while simultaneously being incapable of effecting change can’t be good for your mental health.
- Progressives seem to value victimhood… They’d balk at that, but the reality is that you have people in the progressive movement who fake their victimhood because it has social currency. People caught faking victimhood are treated similarly to how the right treats people who have stolen valor. As a general rule, they’re more welcoming, more affirming, and more enabling, to people with disabilities, and so I don’t think it should surprise that when someone is faced with some kind of mental health issue, the might tend to gravitate towards the group with arms wide open.
So uh…. Be conservative. It’s good for your health.
Ethics Alarms 
The old chicken and egg controversy. Does diminished mental health trend to the left or does the left trend to diminished mental health. Obserivng some friends who use to be menatlly sound but are now deeply entrenched into the ideology of the left now exhibit behavors that are congruent with mental ill health,. They shout in arguements, refuse to have dinne r with me, unfriend me on face book, then refreind me when they need soemthing.
A parrticular friend who was a career army intelligence guy is now in faovr of the soicialism/communism tactics of the left. His wife despises capitalism, once practicing Cahtolics they now profess the pro choice agenda..
Do people focus on things they cannot control to avoid having to face issues they can control and then bask in the glory of victim hood to assuage any sense of guilt?
I am familiar with some who tend to simply wanting to talk about about how something is bothering them but get rather upset when a solution is offered.
“I am familiar with some who tend to simply wanting to talk about about how something is bothering them but get rather upset when a solution is offered.”
In order to have Equal Rights, one must relinquish Special Rights, and if their problem is solved, that’ll involve less attention; tough sell both ways.
PWS
Really good arguments in this comment of the day. I’d like to see some opposing opinions.
There are many reasons why people identity with the left on politics, and others with the right. Some of these reasons are related to psychology and personality.
My preference would be to deemphasize mental illness as a significant factor for two reasons: a) as the majority of the people in the USA is mentally healthy, mental illness cannot serve as a main/sole reason for a preference for leftwing politics b) linking a political preference with mental illness can be used as a form of labeling, as in “You must be crazy to support position X and candidate Y”.
Both Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson have written and spoken about how personality and psychology relate to political preferences.
Jordan Peterson uses the OCEAN model to relate political preferences to personality. The OCEAN model, also known as the Big Five personality traits, describes personality using five broad dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. People who score low on openness and high on conscientiousness tend conservative, while people who are high on openness and low on conscientiousness tend liberal. This would explain why artists, actors, fashion designers tend liberal, as these people need a high level of creativity and freedom to do their work. Conservatives tend to be lower on openness as they have a stronger appreciation of tradition and common sense, and higher on conscientiousness as they value diligence and order. Agreeableness encompasses compassion and politeness. Liberals tend to be more compassionate than conservatives, whereas conservatives tend to be more polite. (Source: YouTube).
Jonathan Haidt introduces a Moral Foundation Theory in his book “The Righteous Mind”. He recognizes five adaptive challenges of social life as addressed by evolutional psychologists, and then connects these to virtues that are found in some form in many cultures; these virtues then inform our moral instincts and political outlook. The following five challenges were clearly identified 1) protection and care for children (care/harm) 2) reaping benefits from two-way non-kin partnerships (fairness/cheating) 3) forming of cohesive coalitions (loyalty/betrayal) 4) negotiating status hierarchies (authority/subversion) 5) avoiding contaminants (sanctity/degradation). Later in the book a sixth dimension is identified: liberty/oppression. How people weigh these dimensions is a predictor of moral and political outlook. E.g. a social conservative puts a high weight on sanctity, and feels disgust at certain sexual practices. Putting a high weight on care may incline somebody to favor generous welfare policies, open borders, and safety culture. Putting a high value on loyalty may incline somebody to join the military or the police. Certain dimensions with correlate negatively e.g. authority may correlate negatively with liberty.
Both the OCEAN model, and Haidt’s model are multi-dimensional, with each aspect/dimension operating on a spectrum. The flexibility of these models provide for a clearer explanation on somebody’s moral and political instincts.
As a side note: Haidt emphasizes instinct above reason to explain morals, he is more enamored by David Hume than by Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill.
Very good to include this data, and it’s appreciated, but two major counterpoints:
First and most important, no one is truly suggesting that anyone who leans left must be mentally ill. Rather, the (tongue-in-cheek) hypothesis is that the further left you go, the more likely you have a mental illness.
Second, it feels to me like this study from Haidt is more applicable to classical liberals, rather than the progressive faction that has largely taken over the left.
I would classify the 90s liberal, who valued free speech, drug legalization, criminal justice reform, and higher education (real higher education, not The Science that has replaced it) as high on openness. I have a hard time applying that term to today’s left, which is absolutely obsessed with anything that results in disparate results between blacks and whites (they don’t want to defund the police because of whites being arrested), shutting down free speech as “violence,” using cancel culture and Poe’s Law to enforce conformity, and dumbing down education to the lowest common denominator while propping up an education hegemony in higher ed.
It may be that today’s party is a natural endpoint of those classical ideas, once they’ve largely taken hold in society and now party leaders need new ideas to stay in power, or it could be a subtle distortion of those same ideas that get to where we are.
Haidt’s study is actually from 2012, in others from during the Obama administration. I wonder whether Obama can be described as a classical liberal, he seems to me to be more of a progressive.
My impression is that both the OCEAN model of personality and Haidt’s MFT framework still work, due to the increased prominence of the woke left in the Democrat party, plus a migration of blue collar moderates to the Republican Party the analysis may yield different results than in 2012. Within both parties there will be variance when applying both models.
My impression is that the woke progressivism has a lot of similarities with older left-wing ideologies such as communism. Both philosophies have a high emphasis of fairness interpreted as equity (as opposed to conservatives and libertarians who interpret fairness as merit or karma), emphasize the collective over the individual, and appreciate conformity to ideological doctrine.
I have always wondered why so many artists and academics support the hard left. Apparently the openness to experience domain in the OCEAN model of personality (active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, intellectual curiosity, and challenging authority) does not prevent somebody to adopt radical and rigid doctrines; it may be that the challenging authority facet of this domain may predict that people high on openness may be prone to radical and revolutionary ideologies that are at odds with how they have been brought up. E.g. young people who want to explore their sexuality but find themselves at odds with their parents and their church on these issue may find solace in woke LGTBQ+ supporting doctrines.
Yep, I am pretty familiar with Haidt and appreciate his work. I will admit to often confusing him with Chait who is as different as you can get.
2012 is, in my mind, a very pivotal time in the United States. Woke reared its ugly head and made idiots out of a large number of otherwise rational people. It would be interesting to see how things have changed since then in regard to the political parties.
This probably makes little sense, but I think it can be summed up with one statement: Progressives are happiest when they’re the most miserable.
I’d like to add a #3 to Humble Talent’s list:
3. I’ve observed that progressive activists (that’s an oxymoron, they’re regressives) appear to be driven purely on emotion and you can hear it in their immature rhetoric. Their “progressive” movement appears to be like a cultish group of rebellious adolescent minded people trying to face down logic, facts, critical thinking, and common sense with absurdly delusional arguments like a biological man is a woman if he simply says he’s a woman thus completely overriding long established existing fact based medical and psychological science and everyone in our society is expected to accept these delusions as fact. For progressive activists, immature adolescent reasoning reigns supreme over logic and facts and long established facts be damned.
Allow me to expand on my #3 a little bit.
Modern day progressive activists hate the United States of America, yes they literally hate (feel intense or passionate dislike for) the USA. They hate that the 1st Amendment applies to everyone, they hate ethical journalism, they hate the concept of innocent until proven guilty, they hate the justice system and anyone or anything that supports it, they hate civility, they hate the police, they hate anyone that opposes their ideology, they hate a Constitution that dares to allow others to oppose their ideology, they hate that our basic freedoms and Liberty allow some people to make more money than others, they hate that those they oppose have any rights, they hate the fact that equal opportunity doesn’t equate to equal outcomes, they hate our system of education, they hate that all our history (both good and bad) make us what we are today, they hate the status quo, they hate, Hate, HATE. They project a belief in rights for me but not for thee. It certainly sounds like ignorant, emotional, and immature rebellious reasoning to me and this way of thinking has been enabled for years. Their hate is a malignant cancer to our society, our way of life i.e. our culture, and our country and their anti-American ideology viewpoints are a cancer across the entire spectrum of our society.
Our society and culture are constantly under “attack” from immature emotional progressive activists. It’s crystal clear to me that progressive activists are out to destroy anything and everything that they consider the status quo all in the name of “change”, which seems to be their Holy doctrine. Progressivism is literally anti status quo in the 21st century, if something exists as a current status quo then it’s anti-progressive (see their Holy doctrine above) and evil and therefore must be changed and/or destroyed. Progressives consider their Holy doctrine of ideological changes to be an improvement to society and culture, facts be damned, and anyone that opposes their Holy doctrine is obviously evil and must be destroyed. Progressives really do have an unhealthy rebellious adolescent hate for the anything they consider the status quo, they’re immature adolescents plastering a bullseye on the status quo!
I’ll close with the following paragraph which is derived from a profoundly accurate statement written by Humble Talent back in July 2022…
Reckon that ’bout sums it up!
PWS
I’d point to Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem to describe conservatives and progressives in a way that does justice to both. Progressives tend to try and change a situation to address problems and create better outcomes for people who are suffering, while conservatives prefer to accept the status quo because for all its flaws it’s a known quantity that we have established ways to deal with. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
Speaking of which, The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce has a more cynical take on the concept.
“CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”
As far as progressives go, some people are close to a problem that affects them very much, and they join the faction that wants to try and address it. Others just naturally want to make things better in general. They will generally notice and take to heart suffering and inadequacies, although they may also draw hope and meaning from their efforts to improve a situation.
As far as conservatives go, some people would be most affected by a change in the status quo, while others just want to be cautious in general. Conservatives may be most content with a situation, but they may also be reluctant and slow (and grumpy) to learn how to take advantage of better options.
From what I can tell, conservatives are more likely to have tangible occupations like agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, or combat-ready occupations like the military and law enforcement. This is not a coincidence. In these jobs, there is a known way to do things, and making a mistake or experimenting on a whim can get people hurt or killed.
By contrast, progressives are more likely to have intangible occupations, like journalism, law, IT, psychology, and the arts. There are no hard natural laws that punish people for screwing something up. (That said, I think in IT those principles exist and people are just insulated from them.) Your success depends on how well you can present your work to other people and get them to accept it. There is a lot more room for idealism and creativity, but that’s partly because consequences are fuzzier. On the other hand, without the willingness to question the assumptions that conservatives take for granted, we would have no scientific or technological advancement, and the majority of humanity would still be oppressed in various ways.
The division between conservative and progressive is a false dichotomy, of course. Everyone has situations they would like to change and situations they would prefer to leave alone. Progressives often want to alter how the economy works to conserve the environment, while conservatives are often willing to alter the environment to keep the economic paradigm the same.
Going a step further, we don’t need to choose between negligent advancement and complacent stagnation. Those paths are for people who don’t know how to be constructive. Most of what robust improvement requires of us is being aware of our assumptions and acting accordingly. We can set things up so that if an assumption turns out to be incorrect, we can find out very soon with only a limited setback.
For example, instead of replacing every traffic light with a new system all at once, we can test the new system in key places to see if it functions under normal conditions. When we know the assumptions under which the lights were designed (like wind speed or snowfall), we can deliberately test what happens when those assumptions are wrong, or choose to accept that they may fail under certain circumstances and set up a backup system.
We create the political problems we’re facing when we expect to arrive at the best policies by having conservatives and progressives play tug of war using votes. Each side just pulls harder until the rope breaks. Even if it didn’t, the best policy isn’t found by taking the average of two extreme positions. It’s found by having each side put their concerns on the table and brainstorm ways to address all of those concerns simultaneously. When we zoom out of the narrow focus on the situation, suspend some assumptions, and apply any amount of imagination, addressing all concerns is easier than you’d think.
Extradimensional Cephalopod,
That’s a nice comparison write up, but I think you’ve conflated progressives and liberals. Sure there are some policy crossovers between progressives and liberals just like there are some policy crossovers between liberals and conservatives, but you can’t logically apply classic liberal values to a 21st century progressive especially progressives activists. All the progressives that I’ve ever met, conversed with, read in print, listened to, or seen on television are illiberal in a very pure sense of the word, they’re opposed to classic liberal principles. Really listen to what progressives say.
Tim Urban has talked about the differences between liberal progressives, liberal conservatives, and the liberal centrists saying that they “all have one major thing in common: they think liberalism is good”. As far as I can tell, this is objectively false. To my knowledge there is no such thing as a liberal progressive, it’s a fallacy, they simply don’t exist, you are either a progressive or a liberal.
I honestly think you should replace every instance of progressive in your opinion with the word “liberal” and objectively rethink your understanding of progressives and liberals.
I’m defining the abstract archetype of “progressive” as “wanting to change the status quo to try and improve outcomes for people.” That is, they want progress, as they see it. Whether they can competently achieve that progress is a different story. What that progress looks like is undefined, just so long as they think it’s preferable to the status quo. Just because many people calling themselves progressives are opposed to liberalism doesn’t mean progressivism itself is inherently opposed to liberalism.
I’m defining the abstract archetype of “conservative” as “wanting to accept the status quo to avoid creating new problems.” Two different conservatives from different parts of the globe could have two completely different status quos that they prefer to stick with, which might or might not be liberal. Historically, most conservatives have been illiberal, if for no other reason than the status quo was illiberal. The United States being founded on individual freedom and democracy was a radical paradigm shift in systems of government. We still have quite a few illiberal conservatives who occasionally try to have their specific religious beliefs (that is, their theological beliefs, not just moral values informed by their religion) explicitly incorporated into laws.
As far as I can tell, “liberal” seems like it deals with individual freedoms and equal treatment under the law, which is a perpendicular axis to the conservative/progressive axis. The political compass graph I favor has conservatism/progressivism on the horizontal axis, and libertarianism/authoritarianism on the vertical axis.
I break down the political compass in more detail in an article from several years ago. The concepts are still valid, although these days I use the tradeoffs of costs, risks, habits, and trust to explain things, because they’re simpler to remember and to apply to specific situations. https://ginnungagapfoundation.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/apoliticalypses-liabilities-and-the-political-compass/
EC,
I think what you describe corresponds with the domain openness to experience domain in the OCEAN model of personality (active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, intellectual curiosity, and challenging authority).
Openness to experience correlates positively with liberal attitudes, negatively with cultural conservative attitudes, but has little correlation with economically conservative attitudes. Entrepreneurs may score quite high on openness to experience. Take e.g. Elon Musk, who is not a social conservative, does not have a traditional family life, and is highly innovative in business and technology.
In the system I use, the “openness to experience” of OCEAN roughly corresponds to imagination, which I agree is likely higher with progressives on average. (Not that there aren’t exceptions; H. P. Lovecraft had a strong imagination, and mostly used it to convey how scary he found change and people of other ethnicities.)
Cultural and economic conservatism are both based on the idea that what we’ve got is good enough, and if we change it we could break something. That doesn’t inherently imply any particular culture or economic system–you can have conservative communists who grew up under communism and don’t want to change anything.
It’s certainly possible to be conservative in one context and not another, depending on how well you think you can navigate change in that context. If “economic conservatism” in this case is a shorthand for deregulation (just because that was how things used to be), I’m not surprised that entrepreneurs, with their high openness to experience, would be in favor of it. Regulations would restrict their opportunities.
“Progressives tend to try and change a situation to address problems and create better outcomes for people who are suffering.”
Do they really? And if they do, do they do so because they actually want to help or because, in maybe large part, they want to be seen as helping and/or gain “victimhood by proxy” and increased attention for themselves? (we discussed this on a previous post a day or so back). It’s known that even in other life choices they tend to be narcissistic, (actors, etc.) and desire being considered victims more than conservatives. Do they help with their own assets and their own efforts, if they’re not gaining attention, or try to force others to provide the means to support the actions they prefer?
Yes, many progressives do want to help. You may not have made friends with any of them, but they’re there. You might have seen some of them and made assumptions about their motivations. They don’t show up as much in media because, not being narcissistic, they don’t usually draw attention to themselves, particularly not over the people they’re trying to help.
I think you’re also glossing over the existence of narcissistic performative conservatives, who usually just make their relatives and neighbors miserable but sometimes start mega-churches.
There are legitimate reasons that people take a conservative or a progressive approach to political issues. Just people of bad character align themselves with factions taking one approach or another doesn’t mean nobody is taking that approach for sincere and well-considered reasons.