Why can you almost hear REM’s “Everybody Hurts” playing when a certain group on the political spectrum talks and The Partridge Family’s “Come On Get Happy” in the background when their ideological opposites speak?
Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times about the stubborn happiness gap between conservatives and liberals. For those innocent of conversations with people imagining sandwich boards as always in fashion, Debby Downer and Gloomy Gus gravitate leftward. (READ MORE: Protest Much? An Academic Reckoning Is Overdue.)
“The happiness gap has been with us for at least 50 years, and most research seeking to explain it has focused on conservatives,” he explains. “More recently, however, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent — not only unhappiness but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.”
Edsall touches on some valid reasons why progressives do not go over well at parties. Then, he predictably veers off to psychoanalyze conservatives. (READ MORE: Boy Scouts Destroyed Itself By Accepting Girls)
So, why cannot liberals see the rainbow through the rain? Here are 10 reasons:
10. Change for Thee, Not for Me
Content people do not obsess over change. Unhappy people do. Rarely do they undertake the hard labor of self-improvement. Often they react to personal problems by seeking to change the world. Beyond this, change, for people marinating in it, causes tremendous internal upheaval. Eric Hoffer wrote in a time of intense revolutionary transformation nearly 60 years ago that “it is becoming evident that, no matter how desirable, drastic change is the most difficult and dangerous experience mankind has undergone.”
9. Staring into the Abyss
Like the man with the muck rake, leftists fixate on the dirt — troubles, injustices, grievances. “Beware that, when fighting monsters,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “you yourself do not become a monster.” And if you do not rectify the problems over which they obsess, terrible results occur. If you do not vote for their chosen candidate this fall, this means the end of democracy. If you do not agree with them on this or that environmental policy, the world perishes in an inferno or a flood or some other manifestation of Mother Nature’s displeasure. If you believed this, how could you be anything but a neurotic?
8. Impotence
Progressives strip humans of agency. External factors, such as big corporations or class structure or the various isms and phobias imagined as the height of human evil, control outcomes. This outlook necessarily cultivates a sense of powerlessness.
7. Political Neat Freaks
Rather than seeing inequality as natural, radicals see it the way an obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer sees a book upside-down on the shelf. Political neat freaks encounter a world with uncontrollable variables, unpredictable outcomes, and people taller and shorter, richer and poorer, stronger and weaker. This jars.
6. Holy Church of St. Madalyn Murray O’Hair
Gallup’s periodic survey on belief in God shows liberals (62 percent) as the subgroup least likely to believe in a higher power. A depressing future of eternal darkness tends to weigh down more than a vision of light, salvation, and redemption. Liberals replace religion with politics (which explains the heaven-on-earth delusion). Not only do Adam Schiff and Rashida Tlaib make for unsatisfying gods, but the accentuate-the-negative tenor of politics makes for a quasi-religion obsessed with devils, sins, heretics, and excommunication. God, private property, and marriage make people happy. Socialists, from Robert Owen through Karl Marx to today, wage war on all that.
5. All Politics All the Time
The total-politics mindset characteristic of contemporary progressives sees nothing for its own sake and everything as a means toward their political end. Thus, academia, late-night comedy programs, and sports become not about education, laughter, and competition, but transform through a jaundiced lens into stages to advance correct politics. Making laughter, music, or movies subservient to politics cultivates a joyless existence.
4. Grabbing, Not Giving
Conservatives donate more to charity. Liberals show a greater enthusiasm for conscripting other people’s money and often do so for ideological rather than philanthropic causes. This mania for forcing sacrifices from others, but reluctance to engage in self-sacrifice, denies that undeniably wonderful feeling of helping other human beings.
3. Moral Deafness
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt shows how the ethics of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) people differ from the norm. Whereas they score highly on sensitivity to care and fairness, they suffer from an almost deafness to the categories of sanctity, authority, and loyalty. This can translate to a lack of self-respect concerning the sanctity of one’s body, a greater disrespect toward police, clergy, and university administrators, and a disconnection from family, community, and nation.
2. Utopian Baselines
Liberals compare countries, outcomes, institutions, leaders, and much else to an ideal. Conservatives tend to compare to real-life alternatives. When you compare anything to the perfect, it falls short. When you compare, for instance, the U.S. to Candyland, America looks wanting. Compare America to, say, North Korea or Venezuela, and then America begins to look pretty good. Liberals allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.
1. Darn Praxis
Leftists remain obsessed with the genius of their ideology but are confounded by its failure to work anywhere outside of their cranial borders. This leads to not just frustration but a Groundhog’s Day loop in which leftists keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. This phenomenon inevitably depresses. (READ MORE: It’s Bigger Than NPR’s Katherine Maher)
By no means exhaustive, the list omits such obvious curbs to happiness as a Nosferatuian aversion to the sun, an allergenic relationship to protein, and a perpetual identity crisis that in its tamest manifestation results in affected speech betraying not a geographic origin but a sexual interest, listening fidelity to NPR, moneyed aloofness, or something else that separates them from themselves and from whence they came. These behaviors seem if not confined to lefties then at least more prevalent among them.
Some Christians seeking happiness wisely ask, “What would Jesus do?” Humbly, a better recipe for an enjoyable life asks, “What wouldn’t Rachel Maddow do?”
