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The Sickness of the Left: Escapism
How many theories are circulating in the conservative conversation about the reasons that the Left has gone crazy, striving for a Utopian existence, pointing to the tenets of Marxism, and rejecting any ideas that don’t fit into their narrow, bigoted philosophy? The theories are abundant, but the mistake that’s being made is that they don’t apply to the majority of the people on the Left; they apply to the Leftist elites, who act like they want to save the world, but instead, they actually want to save their center of power.
And there are some who seem to support them, but I believe the majority of people who find themselves on the Left are living a different existence. Most of the people on the Left are outside of the elite circle, and their reasons for allowing themselves to be controlled and manipulated by their elite is a very different mindset:
They have fallen into the doldrums of escapism, and either refuse to find their way out or simply don’t know how to. Escapism is a deadly condition, and may be the determinant of our country’s future. And it looks pretty dark.
What is escapism? Here is one definition:
Often escapism is dismissed as a character flaw, a refusal to face up to reality. Worse, some forms of escapism, addictive drugs for example, can trap people in a self-destructive cycle that only diminishes their quality of life. We need to be careful not to indulge our escapist urges too much in case we lose touch with reality.
Unfortunately, I believe that it’s already too late for some people to find their way back to reality. Wikipedia offers a psychological perspective:
Freud considers a quota of escapist fantasy a necessary element in the life of humans: ‘[T]hey cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction they can extort from reality. ‘We simply cannot do without auxiliary constructions’
However, if permanent residence is taken up in some such psychic retreats, the results will often be negative and even pathological. Drugs cause some forms of escapism which can occur when certain mind-altering drugs are taken which make the participant forget the reality of where they are or what they are meant to be doing.
I’m proposing that many on the Left have found reality so unbearable that they have emotionally retreated. We see the efforts to escape life in so many ways: expecting “safe spaces”; joining with idealistic organizations because they provide a communal haven (and not because they offer a perfect world); delaying the departure from family homes rather than finding independence through acquiring their own places; creating new worlds through a new vocabulary and nifty phrases like systemic racism, CRT, and DEI. Perhaps more than anything, the Left has discovered the ugliness, depravity, and loneliness of living in a world without meaning. Rather than seeking communities that provide spiritual meaning, which means opening themselves up to service, sacrifice, and connection, they languish in a self-inflicted, narcissistic existence, which provides little reward and satisfaction.
Depression plays an oversized role in seeking escapism. Jonathan Haidt has participated in writing a series on depression in teens. In the early part of that series, he and his co-author have discovered some alarming results:
To summarize, four trends emerged in the data from the USA, which we will call the ‘basic pattern.’ They include:
- A) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.
- B) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalizations begins in the early 2010s.<
- C) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).
- D) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).
In studying the societal changes of this period of time, here is what they learned:
At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users. So 2012 was the first year that very large numbers of girls in the developed world were spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls.
If you suddenly transform the social lives of girls, putting them onto platforms that prioritize social comparison and performance, platforms where we know that heavy users are three times more likely to be depressed than light users, might that have some impact on the mental health of girls around the world?
* * * *
So how do escapism and depression come together? We have a whole generation that feels isolated, depressed, lonely, and alienated in their world. Many are now addicted to their phones and can’t imagine freeing themselves from their addiction; their smartphones are the only instruments that make them feel they exist, even if their existence seems empty and meaningless; they have found communities of like-minded, alienated people that reinforce their sense of loss and hopelessness. Since many people on the Left at all ages depend on their phones to give them a sense that they exist in the world, as bleak as life might be, they escape into this alternate reality, too.
I’m also starting to wonder if the walls of escapism are starting to crumble. And if they are, the Left must be even more terrified than ever. Watch for more anger and violence from their ranks. They must, after all, protect themselves—from the real world.
* * * *
If you are wondering why the people on the Right have not become trapped in escapism, the signs are obvious. They are people who have values that include connection, healthy communities, marriage, families, a work ethic, and religion. They don’t look for the outside world to provide them with meaning on its own; life must be pursued, embraced, and served on an earthly and spiritual level.
We on the right realize that life is a blessing, with all its ups and downs, and must be lived fully.
Although we may periodically seek small opportunities to escape, we know the truth:
Life is about living.
[photo courtesy of unsplash.com]
Published in Culture
Beautifully written, Susan! I think it’s a very important distinction that you make at the beginning of your post between the elite and rank and file on the left. Making that distinction I think also helps us to view most people on the other side as people who can be persuaded and with whom we can try to bring back into the real world. Those people aren’t evil or our enemies.
My only minor disagreement is that I fear escapism is intruding on the right as well. It isn’t as widespread yet, but I think we should be more weary of the dangers it poses.
Great article and that conclusion is spot on.
I had just finished reading this article from The Brownstone Institute when I came over to read your post: The Inherent Deceit of Modern Medicine.
The article points out that “collective lying stifles science”. We saw much of this very up close in the Covid pandemic and it is present in the Global Climate Change project but the impacts have not yet hit with the force as happened with Covid. It seems to me that abject acceptance of the collective lying is a form of escapism and perhaps results from a sense of life being so good that its misfortunes cannot be accepted.
The final section of that article poses an answer to the question:
“Where to look for truth
The answer is obvious and staring most of us in the mirror. It is a depressing answer, but not as depressing as the answer to whether we are likely to see significant change in our lifetimes. For in what circumstances are we really going to become more mature in the future, raising our kids with a deep awareness of human imperfections and the need to tolerate deadly mistakes as just ‘one of those things?’ Only the experience of pain on a massive scale would seem able to reset our culture to one featuring a healthy tolerance of mistakes that kill a good number of us each year.
Looking across history and cultures, examples of healthier attitudes towards human error correlate with recent experiences of misery, enslavement, violence, or some other source of high risk to life. The “Don’t worry, be happy” attitude of the Caribbean emerged from a history of pain and loss associated with Colonial-era slavery.
The unconditional acceptance of human weakness featured in Christianity emerged at a time of high violence against Christians in the Roman Empire. Several Hispanic cultures in the US today teach a relaxed, “Que sera, sera” attitude towards life and all its ups and downs, and are downstream of intergenerational stories of immigration, risk, and loss.
The dominant Western culture of the modern era will not relinquish its ingrained deceitfulness without first going through a nasty and lengthy transformation in which we are acutely reminded that life is risky and humans are imperfect. It is conceivable that long-run side effects of the covid vaccines will help to remind us of this. The best we can hope for in the longer run is to design our institutions to lead the population gradually into a mindset of comfort with human limitations.
Escape from the sea of lies in which we now find ourselves requires, as a first step, islands of truth discovery and truth-telling. Universities used to be such islands of devotion to truth, but today’s universities have been thoroughly captured by the deceit industry. We need new ones, in which students are unable to hide from the reality of fallibility and the immense cost of pretence to the contrary.
In the meantime, we should listen more carefully to those in our society who have managed to retain their comfort with the fallible state of humanity. Que sera, sera.”
Immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries might really be something that will help get us out of this escapism mindset.
I’ll need to think that over–it would make sense. In a sense, why wouldn’t everyone want to escape our current situation?! Thanks, MD
A very thoughtful comment, Bob. We must once again value truth-telling, or we are doomed for sure. How we help students face the truth will be a challenge. Thanks!
It is evident that we need a redo on our university system. They are running on excess escapism.
Pain or the denial of unrealistic or unnatural desires might cause someone to withdraw into escapism. Leftism is less an escape than an active declaration of war on natural reality.
Imposing a fiction requires either the destruction of the real or blocking perception of the real. As in 1984 even though the Party has achieved complete control of political power, there is no endpoint, no cessation of attacks on thoughts, perceptions, experiences, and knowledge that do not derive from nor validate The Narrative because The Narrative is not true.
Consider the character in The Matrix (“Cypher” played by Joe Pantoliano) a traitor who bargains with the inhuman agents of the completely false reality so he can be placed back in a comfortable lie for the rest of his life. A guaranteed income and being anesthetized against the discomfort of real moral issues arising from the reality of our nature is something that a lot of people will opt for.
It is institutionalized. I think the first version that matured was the Black population on welfare in the urban areas. Then taking control of the urban public education system through the Teachers’ Union solidified that venture.
Then came a spreading of the Teachers’ Union control across all public schools in the country. This was facilitated by the creation of the federal Education Department during the Carter Administration. Gotta follow the money if you want to control. This then led very directly to the destruction of traditional education in our universities that gets us where we are today. The false university cost structure and federally guaranteed loans to all tied all this up very neatly with every move designed to compromise the reasoning of those subjected to the narrative so Joe Biden makes a move to forgive all these loans.
While this total destruction of education is going on the federal bureaucracy is also being transformed using the same techniques to establish a workforce committed to the narrative.
The traditionalists are attacked for encouraging the people to live their lives without allowing the fears promoted by the Progs to control them.
I was wondering what people were exactly escaping other than from daily reality or routine by indulging in daydreaming, fantasy, or entertainment.
What is this different existence, and how do they find themselves in it? What do they experience and how did they get there? (And what came first? Leftism? Or the cell phone?) And what have they found so unbearable about reality (I mean, relative to everyone else)?
By the way, I’m not disagreeing. And I’ve read that the Nashville suicide shooter became disaffected with family and life starting in 2011, just about the development of iphone culture.
But knowing how it happened and why is the first part of dealing with it. Was it all just an accident that no one saw coming and society slipped and fell on? Or have apps been designed to accomplish psychic disharmony, neuroses and narcissism?
Great questions, Flicker! I hope he addresses those questions in his follow up essays.
Here’s
what I think.
There are two parts to the Left, the leaders and the followers.
The leaders of the Left know what they are doing, they understand power and that it derives from wealth. But if the wealth producers determine who is in charge then those in charge will not be the leaders of the Left. The followers of the Left are not the wealth producers but they are attracted to the comforts that come from wealth production and the leaders of the Left will furnish those comforts without the followers needing to take risks. If the wealth producers determine who rules then the followers will not live in comfort unless they take on the risks of reality.
The corruption of our representative form of governing is the key for the leaders of the Left.
So that’s the Leftism part and it came first.
Then came the cell phone, social media, and mean tweets. Criticism of aberrant behavior is the reality that cannot be tolerated.
The left is always trying to recreate humans.
After the French revolution, they changed everything from number of days in the week to making the Notre Dame “the cathedral of reason”.
The USSR created the new Soviet Man
Mao created the great leap forward
It always end up the same
Fear is what motivates humans. If fear is promoted through ideological purity, then the utopian fantasy is certainly within our grasp. Human anxiety is palpable. Escape from this debilitating scourge, takes many forms. Seeking shelter from this storm, is what drives masses of people to religious fervor.
The postmodernist drivel, that is evangelized in the universities, seeks to offer a new reality. The distinct difference between say, Christianity, and this new religion, is that this non-theistic religion has no guiding moral principles. The zeolots demand that reality submit to their ideal. This will only increase their frustration, and disillusionment.
Normal people escape by reading, playing games, watching sports, etc. The left escapes by trying to ruin everyone else’s lives . . .
and are never happy – even when their changes are implemented.
Also, the never take responsibility for the end results – see leaders of California and the mess they made of homelessness, energy, forrest management/wild fires, water ….
In listening to the actions of the trans demonstrations in Kentucky, a number of thoughts have come to mind: (1) Are most trans on the political Left (whereas I know that there are lesbians and gays on the right)? (2) Do those on the Left who are into escapism live out their dreams through the Left demonstrators, which is so much safer than getting into the middle of the mess? I’m sure other questions will come up for me, but that’s my initial wondering . . .
I think you nailed it, Susan! One thing that I am just learning is “why do cell phones and social media make girls depressed?” I would have guessed the opposite because women thrive on their social skills and being in contact with each other. What I am hearing is that these social media platforms become some sort of a contest of who can be the best looking and most popular. And girls are depressed that they cannot live up to those ideals promulgated on social media. Have you got any other insights?
Could it have something to do with masculinity relating to physical performance and femininity relating to physical appearance? Social media seems good on the one, not so good on the other, although internet gaming seems to be the bane of the boys.
Thanks, Steve. At this point I don’t, but I’m looking forward to Jonathan Haidt’s follow-up substack on this issue. I think we’ve only begun to see the destruction that cellphones do to many people, besides teens. We have lots of adults who live lonely, isolated lives. In what ways can they potentially be manipulated to act destructively to themselves or society?
Protest is easy. It can be effective, and productive. Also it can easily tilt towards fanaticism. These protests are an inflammatory emotional reaction. When no one pauses to consider, then it’s a fight or flight paradigm. Their conscience has gone silent, and all that is left is the base human animal.
Trans people suffer from a disorder that I suspect can get to a point of what might be termed mental derangement that can lead to irrational acts. That might be where they are headed now as a community.
Democrats are doing their best to drive Trump supporters into this milieu now with what is going on in Manhattan with the DA Bragg and his so-called indictment of Trump. Democrats know that most Republicans saw many problems with the insurrection charges leveled at the Jan6 protesters and they are hoping for similar reactions sentiments and reactions so they can start throwing people in jail.
I escaped this evening. I watched the first hour-long episode of 77 Sunset Strip. Never seen it before in my life. The teamsters were legit, more or less. The police walked a beat. The 1958 music was syncopated, swinging and fresh. The evil DA went to prison. And the city of Westport was cleaned out of corruption. Ahh.
One of my favorite shows as a kid. I recall 4th and 5th grade boys keeping a comb in the back pocket to emulate Kookie with periodic use through Brylcreem-laden locks.