No, not that thing that the genderwoo Experts™ tell us that men can suffer from too, but Prolonged Mask Syndrome.
If it isn’t in the new version of the shrink-wrapped Bible known as the DSM, then why not?
They’ve added something called “Prolonged Grief Disorder” to it, so why not describe a weird fixation with wearing a mask as a disorder too?
I watched a clip of Matt Walsh talking about this PGD - and whilst my perspective differs a fair bit from his - he makes the point that stuff that used to be considered part of the ‘normal’ human condition is being pathologized these days. I agree with that.
People who grieve a lot, and for a long time, over the loss of a loved one are not ill. They are not suffering from some kind of ‘disorder’ - but maybe if it goes on too long and it’s affecting their ability to function, they do need some help. Calling it a ‘disorder’ is not that help.
It does help the shrinks though - it’s another condition they can add to their list of money-making ailments that plague us.
I’m looking forward to when PROGOG (Prolonged Grumpy Old Git disorder) is added to the DSM. Maybe I can get myself treated for it then.
Transwomen sometimes suffer from TITSY (Trans Inability To Sustain Young) and this causes some distress. To alleviate this distress, scientists are researching ways to enable men to breastfeed their children.
I am, of course, being unduly negative towards the head-fix honchos. Sometimes people really do need help, they are in considerable mental and emotional distress, and psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists do provide a valuable service - at least sometimes.
The key central element here is that of some form of distress which, it is hoped, some kind of mental health intervention can help to alleviate.
In the case of male breastfeeding, which often gets termed as chestfeeding so as not to cause extra ‘distress’ to those who may not have breasts, the focus of the research seems to be on helping the men, who can’t naturally breastfeed, feel better about themselves. There is less focus on what is, you know, actually best for the baby.
The ‘big picture’ zoom-out here is that of ‘distress’. At what point does distress cross that indefinable border between normal and abnormal?
Perhaps we need something akin to the Texan National Guard to come and install razor-wire fences so that a border can be more clearly defined and defended?
Now, on a good day, and with a following wind, I can, sometimes, sit down with some maths stuff and actually get it right. When it comes to understanding the human condition I’m at a bit of a loss. But I will press on regardless.
One of the most important books of the millennium so far has, in my view, been “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Lukianoff and Haidt. This might seem to be a rather strange thing to say about a book I haven’t (yet) read, but I did read The Atlantic piece of the same name, and have watched lots of in-depth commentary (including by the authors themselves). I promise to get round to reading the thing sometime this year.
What they describe is what seems to me to be a seismic shift in attitudes.
It seems to me that we don’t have Millennials and Gen-Z so much as Me-llenials and Gen-Me.
At some point, we started worrying far too much about ourselves. Or as one person on Twittocks (Twitter𝕏) described it
Who you are is not a fucking hobby. Get another one.
I haven’t quite remembered the quote correctly - but you get the gist.
Where we are, at the moment, is a society that places an extraordinary amount of emphasis on comfort and, in particular, on emotional comfort. I won’t even say safety - because the notion that one is made “unsafe” , for example, by hearing an opinion one disagrees with is so ludicrously stupid it’s not worth taking seriously. It’s stupid that has been promoted far beyond its capability - the new junior hire who gets promoted to CEO on its 2nd day.
This has been brewing for a long time. Recall when Stephen Fry said this?
It was said in 2006 in a debate on the de-facto religious ‘blasphemy’ law that was being introduced in the UK to criminalize “incitement to religious hatred”, whatever that is. The law was, of course, being introduced to primarily protect one major religion (bet you can’t guess which one, eh?).
The idea has grown that, more or less, people have the right not to be offended. It goes further than that, though. I’ve mentioned before about the guy in the UK who was arrested for causing someone else ‘anxiety’ by calling them a muppet.
It seems we just want a world where everyone is nice to one other.
Good luck with that.
What the judiciary in lots of places seem to be doing is making “not being nice” a criminal offence.
This kind of thing, it seems to me, can only happen when we’ve started to place far too much emphasis on what people feel, and ascribing external factors as being the primary cause of those feelings.
Thus we have things like safe spaces, trigger warnings, people being ‘traumatized’ by hearing the n-word spoken by someone who posseseth not enough melanin to legally use it without causing offence1, we are asked to be mindful of our microaggressions in case we cause offence or distress, we have to allow men into women’s spaces because denial will upset them, we have the impossibly vague notion of something called ‘hate speech’, and so on.
In order to police all this chaos you have to make a determination about whose feelings are more important in any given case. Thus, in the case of men’s access to women’s spaces, the feelings of men are prioritized over those of women, for example.
The feelings of children about their imagined ‘gender’ take precedence over the feelings of parents in this mixed-up world we’re busily creating.
I had arguments with people who said things like “even if masks don’t work, you should wear one to make other people feel comfortable”
Why in the everloving fuck should I do that?
Should trans-identifying males be prevented from behaving like some grotesque parody of a stereotypical feminine woman because it makes some people feel uncomfortable? Of course they bloody shouldn’t. Let them twirl and sparkle and mince and tilt their heads as they please.
It’s not my fucking job to “make” other people feel comfortable; that’s their fucking job2.
I once had a discussion with a Muslim guy (and this was very, very, much a minority view amongst Muslims I knew) who complained that when he was getting his degree at a UK university he went to pubs with his colleagues who then proceeded to drink beer. He was offended by that - and thought they should have accommodated his feelings and ordered orange juice, or something. What an entitled twat, I thought.
Why should I have to change my behaviour to accommodate someone’s belief in some imaginary cosmic being?
It is simply not possible to accommodate the feelings of every minority interest group.
And here’s the thing, not only does it seem that some people think they have some kind of ‘right’ not to be offended, but that they have a ‘right’ to emotional comfort also. Even worse than this is that they want some authority to step in whenever that comfort is threatened. We only need to see how many people now argue for things like censorship to understand the rise in this kind of thing.
It’s more or less like this : I’m important and you’ve upset me. You should be punished. Better still, you should be prevented from saying hurty-feeling things in the first place.
Instead, we should be giving our children the tools and self-confidence to be able to cope with their feelings. Not every day is going to be filled with teddy bears and chocolate. Furthermore, not all of our negative emotions are caused by others. And even if the initial trigger is external we have considerable latitude in many cases in how we let that trigger affect us.
Anyone remember this? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
If that’s not a call for self-management of one’s feelings, what is?
This means, for kids, that they’re going to have to practice feeling shitty occasionally. They’re going to have to learn how to cope with hurty words and conflicts. If all they’ve ever known is a world which caters to their every physical and emotional need, then they’re going to be horribly unprepared when they meet something that upsets that. We do our kids a huge, huge, disservice by trying to ‘protect’ them too much from conflict, or from things that upset them or make them feel bad.
There has to be a balance struck, in almost everything, and I think we’ve forgotten how to achieve that necessary balance.
Feelings are important, but they’re not that important when it comes to things like laws. Mental health is important, but not every negative thought or feeling is a mental health condition. And so on.
When it comes to something as complicated and varied as mental health it’s not obvious where any balance should be. But given the numbers of people, and particularly young people, who do struggle to find some sort of inner peace and equilibrium, it’s clear that something’s not going very well at all.
Take almost any ‘western’ society and look at the number of anti-depressants, or anti-anxiety meds that are prescribed and the numbers are truly mind-blowing. Obviously we must Pfactor in the influence of Pharma, but that’s not really the point. The point is that huge numbers of people feel unhappy enough or distressed enough to seek help in the first place.
I think a lot of that unhappiness stems from our perceptions of how the world is and our expectations of how it should be. In 2020 we had two quite extraordinary things that had a huge impact. One, of course, was the CoronaDoom™, but the other was the death of St George of the Fentanyl.
Type the words “trauma after George Floyd’s death” into your favourite search engine and you’ll see hundreds of pieces written about the ‘trauma’ this incident is said to have caused (to people, not to buildings or stock in shops). Here’s a screenshot of the headline of one of those articles
I’m sure many people are traumatized after witnessing violence, whether that be gang violence, or domestic violence, or even police violence, but the not-so-subtle messaging here is that black girls are particularly affected by witnessing police violence. There’s no comparator study done on how white girls feel, you’ll note.
The message pumped out by the media was this : police kill black people
If you couple this with the message that you live under crushing systemic racism with a daily struggle against overwhelming prejudice and white privilege, then you might well be ‘racially’ traumatized after seeing the videos of George Floyd’s death if you are a member of a racial group that is perceived to be embattled and continually under attack, even though there is still not a shred of evidence that GF died because he was black.
A white person, Tony Timpa, who died at the hands of the police 4 years previously in eerily similar circumstances, also recorded on video (bodycam footage), did not lead to any kind of national and international outrage.
The perception, however, is far from reality when it comes to police interactions. Heather MacDonald points this out in an article for USA Today, where she dismantles the myth that black people are suffering from some kind of ‘epidemic’ of fatal police shootings. She makes the point that there are about 1,000 fatal police shootings in the US every year (at the time she wrote this), the majority of whom were armed and dangerous.
She also notes that there are about 10 million arrests every year and that a 2014 analysis showed that in the 2/3 of the nation’s police forces who reported the data there were an average of 27 attacks per day on officers, with dangerous weapons.
Here’s an interesting little detail from 2014. In that year 990 people of all races were shot (fatally) by the police nationwide in the US. Also in that year, it was estimated that medical errors killed over 250,000 people. Sick Lives Matter, too, don’t ya know?
Wikipedia also maintains a list of unarmed black people killed by the police in the US (I was not able to find a list of unarmed white people killed by the police on Wikipedia). If you read the short summaries of events, you’ll see that there are a significant number of ‘resisting arrest’ situations in which the suspect has fought with the police - sometimes trying to obtain the officer’s taser or firearm. Other instances, however, do seem very unjustified.
But there’s a deliberate push to propagate the myth that police shooting of black people is out of control and is because of systemic racism. The facts say otherwise. But who is pushing this distortion and why?
Is it any wonder that people, and particularly young people, see this kind of distorted reporting and emphasis and think their society is some kind of irredeemably racist hell-hole?
Take something like dur Klimate™ and a good number of people believe that in a few short years they’re going to be boiled alive - or suffer some other similar fate because of dur Klimate™.
Whether it’s St George, dur Klimate™, or CovidAaaaaargh™, we’re being conditioned and pushed towards ‘trauma’ and ‘anxiety’. This will be most keenly felt by younger people who may not have been properly helped to establish any adequate coping mechanisms for negative emotions. Couple that with a school system that increasingly teaches people what to think, but not how to think, and you’ve got a great recipe for mental problems.
I’m sure the trauma and anxiety that young people report feels real to them - but much of it is a conditioned response, I think. Provided you haven’t got yourself completely out of whack (which may not be your fault) with a serious problem like clinical depression or similar, then there’s lots of simple things you can do to improve your feeling of mental well-being.
Here’s one that worked for me. Look for 5 things every day that you are thankful for. Write them down at the end of the day. It could be something small and seemingly unimportant as the cat who walked up to you to be petted. If you do that faithfully for a month, you’ll probably find your outlook on life has shifted quite remarkably. You might still be sad, still be a bit anxious, still angry, or whatever, but I’d be willing to put money on the fact that you will have experienced a shift towards more positivity and more balance in your emotional state.
Pop psychology - but it works.
There are other things that can help - like a simple and short mindful breathing exercise practiced for only a few minutes every day, or whenever needed.
These pop psychology tricks don’t ‘cure’ you, or transport you to some blissful state of being, but they help to restore equilibrium.
It’s that equilibrium that seems to be in very short supply these days.
Covid and St George led to a kind of nationwide hysteria - and a surprising rise in knee complaints for progressive white people.
The balanced position, the equilibrium position, was to neither ignore these things nor to dissolve into a puddle of tears (although the mostly peaceful riots protests were awesome if you wanted a new pair of trainers).
The whole DIE thing is a similar hysteria brought about by faulty perception.
We are, I think, in a bit of a mess, because there’s no middle ground anymore, no equilibrium. Everything is someone else’s fault and the world has split into the ‘good’ guys and the ‘bad’ guys.
It’s not all that surprising that we’re not right in the head any more - and we’re just making it worse.
The PMS we’re suffering from is Perception Management Syndrome - and the big question is who is doing this and why? Or is it all just some horrible natural extension of if it bleeds, it leads?
Whatever the drivers - we need to find a way back to equilibrium, and quickly - or people like the freaks at the WEF will step in and implement their own version of ‘equilibrium’.
I refer to the unfortunate chap in a Lloyds Bank DIE training session. The person leading the course was ‘traumatized’ and had to take some time off because unfortunate chap had asked about the n-word in the context of rap music. Unfortunately, he actually used the full word without possessing the necessary skin qualification - thereby causing an emotional meltdown in the course leader.
Obviously I don’t set out to be deliberately irritating or to ‘make’ people feel uncomfortable, but if it happens, then, meh.
Yesterday we watched "The Windermere Children" on German TV. If it is possible, over just one summer, to help children who survived a death camp to get back a grip on life (and the movie ends by showing some of the actual children, now very old men, and how they fared) then you really start thinking about what's wrong with us today. The breastfeeding example is particularly striking because at the point in life where you have children, your self-centered, whining, only-demanding days should be over.
Mental health disorders might all improve when Net 0 has ensured multiple extended blackouts due to no sun/wind and people's access to TV and the internet is severly curtailed.