Chaos is a ladder

[Razgovory]

Saw this article on the Atlantic and I thought I would share it.  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-politicsl-science-concept/677536/


The Americans Who Need Chaos
They're embracing nihilism and upending politics.
By Derek Thompson

Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why people share conspiracy theories on the Internet. He and other researchers designed a study that involved showing American participants blatantly false stories about Democratic and Republican politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. The subjects were asked: Would you share these stories online?

The results seemed to defy the logic of modern politics or polarization. "There were many people who seemed willing to share any conspiracy theory, regardless of the party it hurt," Petersen told me. These participants didn't seem like stable partisans of the left or right. They weren't even negative partisans, who hated one side without feeling allegiance to the other. Above all, they seemed drawn to stories that undermined trust in every system of power.

Petersen felt as though he'd tapped a new vein of nihilism in modern politics—a desire to rip down the Elites, whatever that might mean. He wanted to know more about what these people were thinking. In further research, he and his co-researchers asked participants how much they agreed with several statements, including the following:

"We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over."
"I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on."
"When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking 'just let them all burn.'"
The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the "need for chaos," which they defined as "a mindset to gain status" by destroying the established order. In their study, nearly a third of respondents demonstrated a need for chaos, Petersen said. And for about 5 percent of voters, old-fashioned party allegiances to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party melted away and were replaced by a desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.

These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone," the authors wrote in their conclusion. "Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve." To sum up their worldview, Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Several months after I first read Petersen's paper, I still can't get the phrase need for chaos out of my head. Everywhere I look, I seem to find new evidence that American politics is being consumed by the flesh-eating bacteria of a new nihilism—a desire to see existing institutions destroyed, with no particular plan or interest to replace and improve them.


In a much-shared Politico feature from January, the reporter Michael Kruse profiled a 58-year-old New Hampshire voter named Ted Johnson, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Johnson explained his pivot only with vague, destructive allegories. "Our system needs to be broken," Johnson said. And only Trump, whom he acknowledged as "a chaos creator," could deliver the crushing blow. Johnson reportedly works out of his three-bedroom house, which he bought in 2020 for $485,000 and which has appreciated almost 50 percent during Joe Biden's presidency. He has a job, a family, and, clearly, a formidable financial portfolio. Still, he said he hopes that Trump "breaks the system" to create "a miserable four years for everybody." We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over.

Or take Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the more energetic MAGA mascots. Last August, she attended the first GOP presidential-nomination debate, which Trump declined to join. Ratings were abysmal, and Greene noted a certain lack of joie de vivre at the proceedings. "The number one comment I'm hearing in Milwaukee is 'it's boring without Trump here,'" she posted on X. I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.

White men in the conspiracy-theory study were the most sensitive to perceived challenges to status, Petersen told me. But the researchers wrote that the need for chaos was "highest among racial groups facing historical injustice—in particular, Black males." Anti-elite conspiracy theories and tear-it-all-down rhetoric can appeal to groups who feel, sometimes quite rightly, aggrieved by long-standing injustice. As we spoke, I recalled some of the radical rhetoric from the summer of 2020: "If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it," Hawk Newsome, the chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, said during an interview with Fox News. "I could be speaking figuratively; I could be speaking literally. It's a matter of interpretation." When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, "Just let them all burn."

Although a few BLM protests led to literal fires, and January 6 led to violent mayhem at the Capitol, the majority of chaos rhetoric isn't necessarily actionable. It's typically just talk: For some, it's catharsis; for others, entertainment. What Petersen and the other researchers identified wasn't a broad interest in political violence but rather a fondness for bull-in-a-china-shop bluster that promises total war against elites. Chaos is a taste, and it seems to be having a moment.

The concept of "need for chaos" can help explain the mess that is American politics in 2024, and more specifically why the most common criticisms of Trump have failed to dent his support.

Ever since Trump's 2015 candidacy kicked off, his rivals have accused him of being an agent of chaos, as if that were a turnoff for voters. Before the 2016 election, Jeb Bush called him a "chaos candidate." In the GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley said that Trump brings only "one bout of chaos after another." The Biden team has repeatedly hammered home the connection between Trump and chaos. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, described the 2024 election as a "binary choice"—democracy and freedom versus "extremism and chaos."

But Trump's chaos vibes might fulfill a significant and otherwise unmet demand in the electorate. In the conclusion to their paper, Petersen and his co-authors write that the need for chaos emerges from the interplay between "dominance-oriented" traits (i.e., a preference for traditional social hierarchies), feelings of marginalization, and intense anger toward elites. Together, these traits would seem to apply to several voting groups: white conservative men nostalgic for a diminished patriarchy; independents who are furious about elite institutional failures during and after the pandemic; and culturally conservative, nonwhite Americans, especially men, who might feel marginalized by racism and economic inequality but also rue the latest waves of #MeToo feminism. Indeed, all of these groups are shifting toward the Republican Party under Trump.

The need for chaos might also offer us a new "deep story" for the sort of disaffected and conspiratorial voters who could sway the November election. In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land, the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explained the far-right worldview using a psychological allegory, which she called her deep story. It went something like this:

You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. You've waited a long time. But the line isn't moving. You're stuck, and you're stigmatized. Liberals in the media say that every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And now, people are cutting in line in front of you. The old order is falling apart. And somebody needs to do something about it.

Deep stories are important, because they allow groups who might violently disagree about politics to understand the psychological origins of their disagreement. As I spoke with Petersen about the need for chaos, another allegorical scene came to mind—a kind of deep story of the chaos voter.

You are a middle-aged man playing a game; it could be checkers or chess. You are used to winning. But you've lost several times in a row, and all to the same people. Now you're losing again, and it doesn't feel right. You haven't made one wrong move. Something must be wrong. Something must be rigged. They must be cheating. In a rage, you turn the whole table upside down, and the pieces scatter and shatter. Why do this? Breaking the game makes things worse for everyone. But this isn't about making things better. It's about feeling a sense of agency and control. It's about not feeling like a loser. One could call it chaos. But at least it's the chaos you chose.

"You can think of need for chaos, in a way, like flipping the board over at a societal level," Petersen said when I shared this deep story with him on the phone. "This is a status-seeking strategy of last resort. A person feels stuck and wants to have recognition, but he feels that he cannot be recognized or valued in the current system of cultural norms, rules, and power. And so, to solve that problem, he says: 'Let's tear it all down.'"If the need for chaos helps explain the mess we're in, it might also offer the Trumpist opposition a clearer plan for wooing some (but certainly not all) voters back to normalcy. The need for chaos is rooted in people's feelings about status, power, and control. For example, independents with culturally conservative instincts might feel that progressive ideas—what some call "woke" politics—weaken their social status, or that COVID policies trampled on their ability to control their daily life. Democrats could emphasize the ways in which their policies and priorities build status, power, and control. Under Biden, pay has increased so much for low-income Americans that it's wiped out almost half of the past 40 years' rise in income inequality; that's a revitalization of economic status. Energy production is at an all-time high, and the U.S. has never been so energy independent; that's both national and physical power. A right-leaning Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade; now Democrats across the country are fighting to protect abortion rights to restore women's control over their own bodies. The antidote to a new American nihilism is a full-throated defense of American agency.

The need for chaos is not a problem likely to be solved quickly. It might be more like a chronic condition in U.S. politics to be studied and understood. I ultimately see anti-elite sentiment as downstream of several very real elite failures, including the many public-health errors during the coronavirus pandemic. But although burn-it-down sentiment may come from reality, it also feeds off virtual reality, or the stories that people are told about the world. Consumers face a bonanza of news-mediated despondency about quality of life, in part because news outlets are responding to audience negativity bias by telling the worst, most dangerous, and most catastrophic stories about the world. If journalists want to understand the need for chaos, it might be useful for us to scrutinize the ways in which we are partly responsible for growing the public's taste for narratives that catastrophize without promise of improvement.

[grumbler]

There's a lot to be said for this idea.  It's not new, but it is now much more documented.  Many, many people care less about their own absolute prosperity than their relative prosperity.  They are zero-sum thinkers, and if someone else is becoming more prosperous, it is at the zero-sum-thinker's expense.

[Razgovory]

It reminded me of the school shooter mentality.  "I don't get the respect I deserve so I'll make you all suffer".

[Admiral Yi]

I liked it.

But it begs the question, alluded to by Jacob in another thread, of how to deprogram people like that.

[Sheilbh]

I liked it.

But it begs the question, alluded to by Jacob in another thread, of how to deprogram people like that.

Two thoughts.

One is simply that if you want people to not vote for the burn it all down candidates then it needs to work for them and be seen to work. I think the last twenty five years we've had two failed wars and a financial crisis with a very slow recovery (plus a massive bailout of the institutions that caused the crash and, I think, one conviction). The mystery of an Obama to Trump voter doesn't seem that inexplicable to me. So I'd say it's less how to "deprogram" and how to earn back credibility or trust - especially when there will be political entrepreneurs out to capitalise on that desire for inchoate change.

I'd add from a European perspective you expand this of one and a bit failed wars (depending on who joined in in Iraq), the financial crisis, austerity, tighter energy relations with Russia, deepening economic dependence on China. That's the context that's fueled populism. All of those failed policies and the consequences we're still dealing with is not the legacy of the populists, but of Blair, Cameron, Merkel, Sarko, Obama etc. Looking at the record of our recent "mainstream"/"establishment", whatever you want to call them leaders, and wonder how you don't want to burn it all down.

The other is maybe more Euro - but I think it's true in the US too - is something Macron said a few years ago about post-modernism which I think is part of what's going on in the US right especially. It's the sort of thing that only a French President could say, but I think he's right (I'm not sure he's achieved it, but he's tried - I'm not sure if it's possible to achieve, but I feel like it's possibly necessary):

For me, my office isn't first and foremost a political or technical one. Rather, it is symbolic. I am a strong believer that modern political life must rediscover a sense for symbolism. We need to develop a kind of political heroism. I don't mean that I want to play the hero. But we need to be amenable once again to creating grand narratives. If you like, post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy.

In terms of grand narratives or metanrratives there's nothing "there" - and I think we're currently culturally incapable of even imagining it. And I think politically that's a particular problem because while all elections boil down to "time for a change" v "more of the same", if there's no myth (national or ideological or partisan) to cohere around then all you're left with is that: change v more of the same.

[Jacob]

Yeah the West is lacking a bit of a convincing narrative. Basically, there isn't a whole lot to believe in... and a general commitment to the vague goods of liberal democracy and capitalism seems to deliver mainly continual enshittification of our public goods, ridiculous wealth to morally dubious actors, a cost of living crisis, and a vague sense of guilt about ... * waves hand *... all of this.

People - generally speaking - need a sense of belonging, some shared narratives, and something to be proud of. And it does seem we're maybe getting a little weak at delivering those as societies.

[Razgovory]

This is was an article in the Atlantic last month.  It has a related theme, I think.  Where everyone thinks things are terrible.  It's something I've thought about lately since I see so much about people keep saying we live in some kind of Orwellian hellscape.

Chicken Littles Are Ruining America
Doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By David Brooks

Sometime around 1970, the American personality changed. In prior decades, people tended to define themselves according to the social roles they played: I'm a farmer, teacher, housewife, priest. But then a more individualistic culture took over. The University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Veroff and his colleagues compared national surveys conducted in 1957 and 1976 and found a significant shift in people's self-definition: A communal, "socially integrated" mindset was being replaced with a "personal or individuated" mindset. The right-wing version of this individualism (which emphasized economic freedom) and the left-wing version (which emphasized lifestyle freedom) were different, but it was individual freedom all the way down. This culture of expressive individualism hit a kind of apotheosis with a 1997 cover story in Fast Company headlined "The Brand Called You," in which Tom Peters, the leading management guru of the day, declared that "we are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc."

But cultural change tends to have a pendulum-style rhythm, and we are now at the dawn of another collective phase. Unfortunately, this new culture of communalism has got some big problems.

Twenty-first-century communalism is a peculiar kind of communalism. For starters, it's very socially conscious and political. Whether you're on the MAGA right or the social-justice left, you define your identity by how you stand against what you perceive to be the dominant structures of society. Groups on each side of the political divide are held together less by common affections than by a common sense of threat, an experience of collective oppression. Today's communal culture is based on a shared belief that society is broken, systems are rotten, the game is rigged, injustice prevails, the venal elites are out to get us; we find solidarity and meaning in resisting their oppression together. Again, there is a right-wing version (Donald Trump's "I am your retribution") and a left-wing version (the intersectional community of oppressed groups), but what they share is an us-versus-them Manichaeism. The culture war gives life shape and meaning.

Social scientists have had to come up with new phrases to capture this set of cultural attitudes and practices. In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified "vindictive protectiveness," which is what happens when an online mob rallies together to punish a perceived threat from an oppressor. Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen developed the concept of "hostile solidarity" to describe the ways that retaliatory action binds people against their foes. This mode of collectivism embeds us in communities—but they're not friendly communities; they're angry ones.


In this culture, people feel bonded not because they are cooperating with one another but because they are indignant about the same things. Consider the word woke, which has been so politicized, and has been used in so many sloppy ways, that it has outlived its usefulness. But when it entered the  mainstream—sometime between 2008 and 2013—it suggested that you could enter the circle of the enlightened, the inner ring of social belonging, simply by adopting a mode of awareness. To be woke was to perceive the world in a certain way, to understand how terrible everything is. You established solidarity by demonstrating that you were enlightened enough to see the pervasive rottenness of things.

In this way, pessimism becomes a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you're naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.

This culture has produced a succession of prophets of doom across the ideological spectrum, people who established their moral courage by portraying the situation as negatively as possible. In 2016, the conservative speechwriter Michael Anton unified the Trumpian right with his "The Flight 93 Election" essay, which argued that desperate measures must be taken to keep America from crashing to its ruin. Trump followed up with his "American carnage" inaugural address, depicting the country as a chaotic dystopia. Quotidian catastrophizing has become a staple of Republican discourse. Here, for example, is a transcript of a video that a U.S. representative sent out to his supporters last July 4:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It's we the people who are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they are coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God Bless America.

In other words: The left is coming after you to destroy your family! Enjoy the hot dogs.

But a pessimism just as pervasive reigns on the left. The upbeat ethos of Barack Obama and Lin-Manuel Miranda—in which racial progress was seen as slow but steady—gave way to the intractable pessimism of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the critical race theorists. Extreme pessimism is now the go-to conversational stance. This tweet from The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz captures the vibe: "People are like 'why are kids so depressed? It must be their PHONES!' But never mention that fact that we're living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic [with] record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world."

This deep sense of pessimism has become more and more predominant, especially among the young. Since about 2004, the share of American 12th graders who say it is "hard to have hope for the world" has been surging, according to surveys by Monitoring the Future, which has tracked the attitudes of high schoolers since 1975. There's also been a rise in 12th graders who agree with the statement "Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me." Since 2012, the share of 12th graders who expect to get a graduate degree or a professional job has plummeted.

The prevailing culture nurtures these attitudes. But there is a giant gap between many of these negative perceptions and actual reality. For example, since the mid-1970s the number of women who have earned college degrees and graduate degrees, and taken leadership positions in society, has risen dramatically; women's wages are also much higher than in previous generations. Yet, as the psychologist Jean Twenge shows in her book Generations, teenage girls today are more likely than teenage girls in the '70s to believe that women are discriminated against. Surely that's partly because successive waves of feminism have raised women's awareness of ongoing discrimination. But women are doing meaningfully better by these measures, and yet young women are feeling worse.

Many years ago, I auditioned to be a co-host of the CNN show Crossfire. Before the audition, one of the producers pulled me aside and told me that the key to the show was not what you say. No, the key to the show, I was told, was that you must wear a look of indignant rage as the other person is talking. That look of contemptuous fury, which the cameras featured in close-up shots, was what powered the show and kept viewers hooked. In the decades since, Tucker Carlson, who was a Crossfire co-host, has ridden that look—mouth pursed, eyes narrowed, eyebrows furrowed—to fame and fortune. With a single expression, he communicates that "they" are screwing the country and that "we" need to be outraged. Tucker happens to be on the right, but millions of people on both the left and the right now look at the world through a distorting lens like his.

The current culture confers status and belonging to those who see the world as negatively as possible. Once people learned this, they were going to perceive the world as a Hunger Games–like hellscape.

This negativity saturates everything. As The Atlantic's Derek Thompson noted recently, more than 5,500 podcasts now have the word trauma in their title. Political life is seen through a negative valence. A YouGov survey of 33,000 Americans found that both sides of the political debate believe they are losing. Liberals think the country is moving right; conservatives are convinced that the country is moving left. Whatever your perspective, everything appears to be going downhill.

Even institutions as wholesome as motherhood have come to be seen as horrific. In December, Vox ran an essay titled "How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood." A couple of weeks before that, The New Yorker published "The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World." In previous eras, people were enculturated to see parenthood as a challenging but deeply rewarding and love-drenched experience. Now motherhood is regarded as a postapocalyptic shit show. Recently published books on motherhood include Mom Rage, Screaming on the Inside, and All the Rage.

In a culture where negativity is aligned with righteousness, anything good can be seen as a mark of ill-gotten privilege. And if by chance one does experience pleasure, don't be so insensitive as to admit it in public, because that will reveal you are not allying properly with the oppressed: "When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers," Rachel Cohen wrote in that Vox essay, "I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly. Doing so could seem insensitive to those whose experiences were not as positive, or those in more frustrating relationships. Some also worried that betraying too much enthusiasm for child-rearing could ossify essentialist tropes or detract from larger feminist goals." Publicly admitting that you love and enjoy motherhood has come to be seen as a betrayal of feminism.

The culture of collective negativity has had a deleterious effect on levels of trust: In 1964, 45 percent of Americans said that most people can be trusted, according to a survey by American National Election Studies. That survey no longer asks this question, but a University of Chicago survey asked the exact same question to Americans in 2022 and found that number is now 25 percent. Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that, most of the time, people just look out for themselves, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Seventy-one percent say that most people "would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance."

Human relationships have come to be viewed through a prism of power and exploitation. Institutions are assumed to be fundamentally illegitimate, rigged. A friend who teaches at Stanford recently told me that many of his students would not assume he had gone into teaching to serve his students, or to seek their good; rather, they see him as a cog in the corrupt system holding them down. Recently, I was struck by a sentence in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article about how the economist Raj Chetty runs his research lab at Harvard. Chetty is the most important social scientist in America right now, because of his revelatory work on the relationship between income inequality and life opportunity. You might reasonably see getting to work in his lab as a tremendous honor, a great educational experience, and a professional launchpad. But that's not how several of his assistants saw it. "After landing the fellowship," The Chronicle reported, "some employees said they were also disturbed to find a culture of overwork that left them fried but feeling forced to impress in order to secure a letter of recommendation to a top Ph.D. program." If you see the system as legitimate, you will likely see the chance to work hard for a transformative scholar as an opportunity to achieve great things as part of a great team. If you see the system as illegitimate, that hard work is just a form of exploitation that will leave you "fried." If you see the system as legitimate, impressing mentors is a chance to earn the esteem of those whose esteem is worth having. If you see the system as illegitimate, the whole letters-of-recommendation business is a rigged game that allows the dominant to preserve their status.

Our most recent previous period of apocalyptic collectivism was the McCarthy era. During that time, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noticed that his fellow anti-communists were constantly demanding "that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor." It wasn't enough to disapprove of communism; one had to engage in collective moments of group hate. Meanwhile, on the left, intellectuals warned of a looming age of American fascism. This mode of escalating indignation led to what Niebuhr called "apoplectic rigidity," an inability to see the world as it is, but rather only those nightmarish elements that justify the hatred and rage that are the source of your self-worth.

Before long, apoplectic rigidity becomes the default mode of seeing things. This damages the ability to perceive reality accurately. One of the great mysteries of this political moment is why everyone feels so terrible about the economy when, in fact, it's in good shape. GDP is growing, inflation is plummeting, income inequality seems to be dropping, real wages are rising, unemployment is low, the stock market is reaching new peaks. And yet many people are convinced that the economy is rotten. These are not just Republicans unwilling to admit that things are going well under a Democratic president. The real divide is generational. In a recent New York Times/Sienna College poll, 62 percent of people over 65 who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 report that the economy is "excellent" or "good"—but of Biden supporters ages 18 to 29, only 11 percent say the economy is excellent or good, while 89 percent say it is "poor" or "only fair."

Is this because the economy is particularly bad for young people? That's not what the data reveal. As Twenge has pointed out, the median Millennial household earns considerably more, adjusted for inflation, than median households of the Silent Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X earned at the comparable moment in their lives; they earn $9,000 more a year than Gen X households, and $10,000 more than Boomer households did at the same age. Household incomes for young adults are at historic highs, while homeownership rates for young adults are comparable to previous generations'. All of which suggests that difference in the generational experiences is not economic; it's psychological.

Ican see why, in a lonely world, people would embrace the community that collective negativity offers. As the New York Times columnist David French has noted, Trump rallies are filled with rage, but they are also characterized by a festive atmosphere, a sense of mutual belonging; immigrants might be poisoning America's blood, but we're having fun singing "Y.M.C.A." together.

Being negative also helps you appear smart. In a classic 1983 study by the psychologist Teresa Amabile, authors of scathingly negative book reviews were perceived as more intelligent than the authors of positive reviews. Intellectually insecure people tend to be negative because they think it displays their brainpower.

Believing in vicious conspiracy theories can also boost your self-esteem: You are the superior mind who sees beneath the surface into the hidden realms where evil cabals really run the world. You have true knowledge of how the world works, which the masses are too naive to see. Conspiracy theories put you in the role of the truth-telling hero. Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.

The problem is that if you mess around with negative emotions, negative emotions will mess around with you, eventually taking over your life. Focusing on the negative inflates negativity. As John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister note in their book The Power of Bad, if you interpret the world through the lens of collective trauma, you may become overwhelmed by self-perpetuating waves of fear, anger, and hate. You're likely to fall into a neurotic spiral, in which you become more likely to perceive events as negative, which makes you feel terrible, which makes you more alert to threats, which makes you perceive even more negative events, and on and on. Moreover, negativity is extremely contagious. When people around us are pessimistic, indignant, and rageful, we're soon likely to become that way too. This is how today's culture has produced mass neuroticism.

The neuroticism problem seems to be especially acute on the left. Over the past decade or so, depression rates have been rising for all young adults, but they have not been hitting all groups equally, according to a 2022 study by psychiatric epidemiologists. Liberal young women experienced the highest increase in depression levels. Liberal young women are also the most likely to be depressed, followed by liberal young men, conservative young women, and, the least depressed, conservative young men. Why should this be?

In the substantial literature on how happiness intersects with ideology, one of the most robust findings is that conservatives are happier than progressives. That's long been explained by the fact that conservatives are more likely to be married and to attend church, two activities that correlate with higher happiness levels. (Also, it could be that true conservatives, by definition, are more content with the status quo.)

But another explanation for this phenomenon that I find persuasive is that contemporary left-wing discourse tends to rob people of a sense of agency, what psychologists call an "internal locus of control." For example, in one 2022 survey 53 percent of those who identify as "very liberal" agree with the statement "Women in the United States have no hope for success because of sexism." Meanwhile 59 percent of people who call themselves "very liberal" agree with the statement "Racial minorities in the United States have no hope for success because of racism." If you have no hope of success because you are a victim of injustice, how can you possibly be motivated to do anything? How can you have a sense of agency? A discourse that was intended partly to empower people who suffer from structural disadvantages, by revealing the underlying forces that produced their circumstances, may end up doing the exact opposite: It enshrouds people in their own victimhood, and in the feeling that they have no control over their life.

"Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life" are "vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt and a sense that life simply happens to them," the journalist Jill Filipovic wrote recently on Substack. And yet victimization, pain, and powerlessness are now the approved postures of our time.

I am not saying that America doesn't have real problems—Trump, climate change, racial injustice, persistent income inequality, a rising tide of authoritarianism around the globe. In our age, as in every age, there are things to protest and things to be grateful for.

What I am saying is that the persistent gaps between how things are and how they are perceived are new, maybe even unprecedented. In case after case, the data show one thing; conventional wisdom perceives another. President Joe Biden leads an economy that is producing millions of jobs and raising real wages, but his poll numbers about his economic stewardship are terrible. He passes legislation that invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy, but the people most agitated about climate change give him no credit. Biden's curse is that he is running not just against the Republicans but against the entire zeitgeist.

We have produced a culture that celebrates catastrophizing. This does not lend itself to effective strategies for achieving social change. The prevailing assumption seems to be that the more bitterly people denounce a situation, the more they will be motivated to change it. But history shows the exact opposite to be true.  As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman demonstrated in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, social reform tends to happen in moments of growth and prosperity. It happens when people are feeling secure and are inspired to share their good fortune. It happens when leaders can convey a plausible vision of the common good.

A recent paper by four economists reinforces the idea that the mood of a culture can directly effect material progress. The researchers analyzed 173,031 works published from 1500 to 1900, and discovered that words relating to progress proliferated starting in the 1600s. The researchers infer that the "cultural evolution" this evinced over the coming centuries helped give rise to the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant economic benefits. John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist for the Financial Times, recently extended this analysis to the present day using Google Ngram and found that "the frequency of terms related to progress, improvement, and the future has dropped by about 25 percent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common." That economic growth has slowed during this period is probably not coincidence, Burn-Murdoch notes. Doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The thought of a second Trump term appalls and terrifies me. But to the more apocalyptic and Chicken Little–ish of my progressive friends, I'll say this: You're only helping him. Donald Trump thrives in an atmosphere of menace. Authoritarianism flourishes amid pessimism, fear, and rage. Trump feeds off zero-sum thinking, the notion that society is war—us-versus-them, dog-eat-dog. The more you contribute to the culture of depressive negativity, the more likely Trump's reelection becomes.

The old late-20th-century culture of rampant individualism had to go. It liberated individuals but frayed the bonds that formerly united people. Somehow, our new communal culture needs to replace bonds of negative polarization and collective victimization with bonds of common loves and collective action.


One moment in history gives me hope. In the 1950s, as I've noted, the McCarthy era brought a wave of paranoia about communists under every bed. But that moment generated a cultural recoil that eventually led to, for instance, John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, one of the most lavishly optimistic addresses in American history: "Together, let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate diseases, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce." And it wasn't so long ago that Barack Obama thrilled millions with his gospel of hope and change. We shouldn't let our current season of gloom and menace become self-fulfilling, but rather should help make the country ripe for a communalism of belonging. History shows that it doesn't pay to be pessimistic about pessimism.

[garbon]

Yeah the West is lacking a bit of a convincing narrative. Basically, there isn't a whole lot to believe in... and a general commitment to the vague goods of liberal democracy and capitalism seems to deliver mainly continual enshittification of our public goods, ridiculous wealth to morally dubious actors, a cost of living crisis, and a vague sense of guilt about ... * waves hand *... all of this.

People - generally speaking - need a sense of belonging, some shared narratives, and something to be proud of. And it does seem we're maybe getting a little weak at delivering those as societies.

But then that just sounds like the old discussion of do voters just need happy, believable lies.

[Josquius]

Interesting the second one speaks of the toxic individualism I increasingly see as a huge issue in the UK.
Cars and associated community destruction are heavily to blame for this.

One moment in history gives me hope. In the 1950s, as I've noted, the McCarthy era brought a wave of paranoia about communists under every bed. But that moment generated a cultural recoil that eventually led to, for instance, John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, one of the most lavishly optimistic addresses in American history: "Together, let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate diseases, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce." And it wasn't so long ago that Barack Obama thrilled millions with his gospel of hope and change. We shouldn't let our current season of gloom and menace become self-fulfilling, but rather should help make the country ripe for a communalism of belonging. History shows that it doesn't pay to be pessimistic about pessimism.

I'm not sure that's something hopeful.
It's the dominant narrative of the far right that we live in a world controlled by ultra woke Coullective insanity (yeah. Reality is a choice apparently) and that they're the ones in the centre restoring normality.
Rather than a positve recoil at things going way backwards we've instead got a negative recoil at... Not beating children and guys holding hands and.... Stuff.


But yes on the first one. This kind of nihilistic destruction has really gone mainstream.
There's always been accelerationists. But these days it's worse than that. There's no plan for the rebuilding. The destruction is the end goal.

I wonder whether the recent popularity of post apocalyptic stuff like the walking dead and the idea that in the apocalypse, where they'll obviously be a survivor as they're the protagonist, things will be awesome.

[The Brain]

Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark

Enough with the fucking "based" crap.

[Josquius]

Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark

Enough with the fucking "based" crap.

Why?
In this age where people move around a lot it seems the most sensible thing to do.
"Report by Samuel Okundo (based) in Tokyo" is a lot easier and more relevant than wherever he's from.

[The Brain]

Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark

Enough with the fucking "based" crap.

Why?
In this age where people move around a lot it seems the most sensible thing to do.
"Report by Samuel Okundo (based) in Tokyo" is a lot easier and more relevant than wherever he's from.

 

[HVC]

No cap

[garbon]

The other is maybe more Euro - but I think it's true in the US too - is something Macron said a few years ago about post-modernism which I think is part of what's going on in the US right especially. It's the sort of thing that only a French President could say, but I think he's right (I'm not sure he's achieved it, but he's tried - I'm not sure if it's possible to achieve, but I feel like it's possibly necessary):

For me, my office isn't first and foremost a political or technical one. Rather, it is symbolic. I am a strong believer that modern political life must rediscover a sense for symbolism. We need to develop a kind of political heroism. I don't mean that I want to play the hero. But we need to be amenable once again to creating grand narratives. If you like, post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy.

In terms of grand narratives or metanrratives there's nothing "there" - and I think we're currently culturally incapable of even imagining it. And I think politically that's a particular problem because while all elections boil down to "time for a change" v "more of the same", if there's no myth (national or ideological or partisan) to cohere around then all you're left with is that: change v more of the same.

This feels like a rather romantic view of the past and quite conservative. That might sound like a great idea for those in power and with privilege to benefit from 'grand narratives'. I'm not sure those on the ground benefited or would benefit so much.

[Sheilbh]

This feels like a rather romantic view of the past and quite conservative. That might sound like a great idea for those in power and with privilege to benefit from 'grand narratives'. I'm not sure those on the ground benefited or would benefit so much.

I think that's fair.

It obviously depends on the nature of the grand narratives. Those can be national (Macron specifically mentions that), I think the heroic age of the European project was rallying around a metanarrative. But it's the same with the idea of "progress" or "enlightenment" or "freedom". With any of these the question of who is on or out of the story is really important. Although I think the grandest, defining narrative of the 20th century was Marxism. But I think maybe it is always inevitably paternalistic?

I think arguing over who they benefit might, perhaps, be the function of politics in the age of grand narratives. But I think Lyotard's question is right that without the narrative there's no great hero, great dangers, great voyage or great goal - and after that, "where can legitimacy reside?"

I also think there's a sense where our post-modern condition also bends to those with power and privilege.

I think the base layer of incredulity towards metanarrative is liberating. But (and this is where my leftiness shows), I think it's liberating if you've got the material comfort, the position, the access to education and culture to experience the liberation - otherwise I think you'll just experience the dissolution, or, perhaps, it'll be like one of those holograms that is simultaneously something but you can see through it and see that it it's insubstantial.

I also slightly wonder - and this is tied to Peter Mair's Ruling the Void on the decline of poliical parties in Europe - is whether those grand narratives are actually necessary for collective endeavour. I'm not sure - if it is then I think until we have a replacement getting rid of it may be almost structurally conservative or dissolutionary. I think it's interesting looking at politics now how personalised it is in many places: Trump; Macron (whose political party has "supporters" not members and where policy is decided by the centre); Wilders (political party with one member: Geert Wilders); Melenchon (similar non-party party) - plus rumours that Corbyn is going to start a party and even positive figures I admire a lot like Lula in Brazil. Perhaps what we've replaced the metanarrative with is simply the narrative about the individual hero and are then disappointed that it also fails? We still need a story but instead of one in which we could also participate we're moving to Astor Place riots - political, but we're reduced to the rioters in the audience not the actors.

Having said all that I don't know that this isn't inevitable. I don't think we can just wish back mid-century modern Euro social democracy, however much I'd like to (and fully accepting that it's a romanticised version of that moment which also depended on who was in and out and deeply culturally constrained). And I think for many, and for me, it is liberating, it is freeing - and maybe we just haven't yet worked out how to do post-modern politics. I always think of that John Cage quoted in The Rest is Noise on 20th century classical music that - "we live in a time not of mainstream but of many streams or even, if you insist, upon a river of time then we have come to the delta maybe even beyond a delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies." I feel we're now definitely past the delta - liberating, terrifying.

One very niche, parochial point is I wonder what this means for the UK because I agree with Linda Colley that the UK constitution basically lives in constitutional history. The content of the constitution was embedded in a Whig story of the British constitution: how it emerged, what it was about, what it was for, what it did. It was, in that sense, a metanarrative - and I don't know how a constitution fundamentally tied to the Whig historical interpretation of how it emerged can survive now we've (rightly) killed off Whig history