I recently quoted social psychologist Jonathan Haidt here as saying that radical liberal ideology (woke) imposes a ‘negative explanatory style’ on its adherents, exactly what leads to the morbid anxieties and depression that psychiatrists are trying to eliminate. This explains why young liberal women suffer from depression many times more often than young conservative women.
But the relationship has a flip side. Liberal ideology changes brains in ways that make them anxious and depressed. Conversely, anxious and depressed brains are attracted to liberal ideology. Both phenomena reinforce each other. In a way, this explains the persistence of such thinking. The depressive ideology changes the brain, and the brain then needs the depressive ideology.
I have quite a few of these people in my circle as well, and you can see in them that they desperately need new and new negative information. When you tell them that something isn’t so terrible or that things are just more complicated, they react angrily. After all, neuroscientists point out that an external event is rarely a trigger. When the brain learns to be depressed (or is that way from birth), it looks for an excuse, and the excuse is not really important. It just needs to be black enough.
When we observe such people, we wonder how they can believe something so stupid. But it doesn’t matter to them whether it’s clever or stupid, their brains just need something scary.
That’s been the case in all ages, but in recent generations it’s been increasing. Is it social media? Or new ideologies? Or greater economic pressure in an impoverished society? Or an overly liberal upbringing? There are many theories, but we can’t say for sure.
