patrick.net

Why Progressives Can't Accept Progress
Dissatisfaction is built into their worldview, but they also consume too much media and often profit from change.

... From covid to climate change, from capitalism to the criminal justice system, it has become fashionable among many on the Left to reject good news, a mark of sophistication to deny that improvements have been made in the human condition.1 Today’s prophets of doom and sermonizing pessimists are near-universally of the progressive persuasion, and they walk in the footsteps of many past luminaries, including Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Michel Foucault. ...

It’s one of the many paradoxes of modern psychology that while people tend to view their own lives through rose-colored glasses, confident that they’ll never be impacted by crime or an illness or a layoff or what have you, as soon as they shift focus to society itself, they’re confident that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Public opinion researchers sometimes refer to this peculiar empirical phenomenon as the Optimism Gap. ...

To understand why people might think such a thing, look no further than the mainstream media. What they call “news” is almost always focused on stories about war, climate change, poverty, and of course all manner of things Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™, including the possible second coming of the Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets. It’s not just headlines, either. Articles and essays are often little more than panic porn nowadays. The New York Times and Washington Post are notorious for this, of course, but The Atlantic is in a class all its own, constantly churning out doom and gloom pieces. ...

The best way to capture attention is to incite strong emotions, and the strongest emotions are fear and anxiety. The mainstream media is fully aware of how fragile the national psyche is nowadays, and the nature of human cognition plays right into their hands. ...

It’s been established that liberals consume much more media than conservatives. This matters a great deal, as the more news someone consumes, the more distorted their worldview, if only because of the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut that leads people to estimate the frequency, probability, or prevalence of an event or thing based on how easily it comes to mind. The more readily someone is able to recall something, the more likely they are to overestimate its preponderance.

Availability errors abound in everyday life. People are known to stay out of the water after watching Jaws or reading about a shark attack. Plane crashes occur far less often than car crashes, but the former are always covered in the news, which is a big reason why more people are afraid of flying than driving. When asked in a survey, folks consistently rank tornadoes as a more common cause of death than asthma, even though asthma kills 70x more people. ...

But while there are many reasons why folks might be prone to seeing the world through a more negative lens, the new progressive religion of the Left is an entirely different matter. Adherents know nothing but dissatisfaction, and they often engage in a game of one-upmanship in which pessimism is equated with moral seriousness.

The refusal to entertain the possibility that things have improved is literally built into their worldview, which is predicated on the notion that the present must always be compared to unrealized and often unattainable standards (“End racism!”) that are kept intentionally vague and rarely delineated so as to always have a reason to be dissatisfied with the status quo. ...

People are rewarded for living in a bubble where delusion is a source of pride. You can spew nonsense that’s not based on any facts and you won’t even be challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism or sexism or whatever. Having a warped view of reality leads to policies that are warped, like all-black dorm rooms, along with the propagation of other idiocies such as the notion that “whiteness” is a malady and white people are irredeemable. ...

On all things trans-rights and whether or not it’s appropriate to teach minors about gender fluidity, for example, there’s only one acceptable position: Full approval, or else. If Becky Sue down the street doesn’t want her daughter sharing a locker room with a biological male, that’s because she’s a Literal Fascist™, an atavistic troglodyte who must either submit to the Good Side™ or run the risk of ostracization, loss of employment, and public pillorying at the hands of the digital mob.

The theory seems to be that the best way to make change in America is by coercion and threat and impugning the motives of anyone who questions the Left’s goals or tactics. The idea is that people will realize they’ll pay a high social price for opposing the latest agenda, shut up about whatever issues they may have, and just get with the program.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that America has become increasingly polarized since progressivism became the new face of the Left, and that politics has turned into a zero-sum game in which absolute truth supersedes the rights of those who fail to get in line. Progressives have ascertained the perfect wisdom of what is noble and good; anything else is, a priori, immoral, while nuance, critique, and skepticism are no less than blasphemous. An ideology as repressive as this, one with an allergy to acknowledging societal advantages, is self-defeating. ...