Michael Shellenberger’s Concern with Nihilism

Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Michael Shellenberger. The first third of the interview has been released. I highly recommend watching/listening/reading it. Shellenberger once identified as a liberal, but now he declares himself an independent, taking good ideas wherever he finds them and rejecting bad ideas. I agree with much of what he has to say in this part of the interview. Here is an excerpt from the interview where Shellenberger argues that a big part of our problem is nihilism:

Michael: I'm really interested in defending the pillars of civilization and the pillars of civilization are, as I see it, cheap, abundant energy, law and order, and meritocracy. My first book, Apocalypse Never, addresses the attack on abundant and cheap energy. San Fransicko describes the attack on law and order and meritocracy. You start attacking those pillars of civilization and you just don't have a civilization left anymore

Tucker: Can you repeat those?

Michael: Cheap energy, law and order, and meritocracy. All three are under attack in a really systematic way. This is why I find myself as somebody that's traditionally been on the left and is now independent. I see what conservatives are doing and the role of conservatives as important. They have the role of defending civilization. The role of the left has always been to demand change and push for change. And in some cases, I support that. But, right now, you see that the left has gone so far that even more moderate liberals have been radicalized and are undermining the bases of our civilization.

Tucker: But the alternative to civilization — and I've seen glimpses of it a couple of times — is so horrifying. It’s the total domination of the week by the strong. A 15-year-old with an automatic rifle can rape, can do whatever he wants, and you have no power. We spent millennia trying to build an alternative to that and we now have it. Why would you ever want to revert to the 15-year-old with the automatic weapon being in charge?

Michael: That's maybe the most important question of our time. And it's not an academic question.

Tucker: It’s a very practical question! And there are parts of the world where there's no civilization. I have personally seen them so I know. You can just buy a plane ticket and go there if you're interested. Why would anybody want that?

Michael: That is a huge question. I think one question is, “Do the people who are undermining civilization really want that? Do they know what they want?” To some extent, I think they do. But where all of my work has led me, and this is where my third book is going, is that what we're dealing with — and it's a bit of jargon, but I can't figure out how else to say it — a crisis of nihilism, meaning that as people stop believing in traditional religion, as people stop believing in God, they start to adopt new religions.

Nihilism has two meanings that are related. The first is that life has no purpose or value. We're just like animals. We're born, we reproduce, and we die. There's no point to any of it. And so it doesn't really matter what you do. You're not going to be judged at the end of your life to determine whether you go to heaven or hell. So that's the first nihilism. But then this turns people toward a kind of will-to-power. It turns into a desire to feel powerful, which itself is just a kind of hedonism when you get right down to it.... And it’s not just from the radical activists. We see it among elite media basically saying, “Unless we go back to pre-industrial energy sources, we're going to end up in a climate apocalypse.” They've constructed a new apocalyptic religion out of nihilism. I think that is what's driving this crisis of civilization. It’s a crisis of nihilism that arguably began a couple of hundred years ago....

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The Correct Treatment for Gender Dysphoria

On the issue of gender dysphoria, I have followed Jesse Singal closely. I admire his willingness to dig deeply into the numbers and to let the numbers speak louder than the many one-size-fits-all "experts" out there (on both sides of the political spectrum). An enormous problem facing therapists and health care professionals is that the data is not clear yet. There are a lot of studies that are highly suspect for methodological reasons. Yet families are demanding treatment now and they want certitude. What should a therapist do when the evidence is not clear? To put it another way, where should they set their default? I'm not a therapist or health care professional, but I would set the default here: Don't surgically and permanently cut off an adolescent girl's breasts and inject her with male hormones (which will almost certainly render her sterile) when there is a reasonable possibility that the gender dysphoria is a consequence of other psychological and health issues that can be treated (or a consequence of cultural pressures). Do no harm. Singal recently summed up his current position, which is well worth considering:

My understanding of social transition is that it is a psychological intervention that may itself have downsides, such as making it harder for the kid to grow out of his or her gender dysphoria (I don’t think this is established, but I do think you can make a circumstantial case that it’s sometimes true from the available evidence). So even that shouldn’t be approached lightly — you should be certain the kid’s gender dysphoria is durable, severe, and causing problems. Is it “many” kids who fit these criteria? I dunno. Same deal with medical treatments. They really, really shouldn’t be taken lightly. The evidence base sucks, regardless of what major liberal media figures keep saying. A kid should go on blockers or hormones only if they’ve been assessed very carefully.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that treating gender dysphoria qua gender dysphoria with “therapy and medication” will do much good in most cases. I do think that in some subset of instances in which a kid tells a therapist they have gender questions, or definitely feel they are some “other” gender than their biological sex, basic exploration of other factors will reveal some other issue. Sometimes it might be recent trauma, sometimes it could be anxiety or depression, and sometimes it could be other issues involving, say, the onset of puberty. I think those issues probably can be treated with therapy and drugs, at least in a lot of cases, and that doing so may cause the gender issues to abate, because they weren’t the root issues in the first place.

There’s a lot of disagreement among clinicians over whether the causal chain (1) is always gender dysphoria → other psychological issues, or (2) whether it can sometimes go in the other direction. This is a pretty high-stakes question, because it obviously will affect the direction of therapy. If a kid has gender questions, anxiety, and depression, then a therapist operating under (1) will assume that ameliorating the GD will in turn ameliorate the other issues (so no need to pay them much mind at first), while a therapist operating under (2) will have more of a winding road to traverse.. ..

Anyway, all of this is to say that no, I haven’t been swayed from the idea that on balance, these treatments are probably good for kids who would otherwise suffer from severe, unremitting gender dysphoria. But even in these instances, no one should act like they know exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes even severe, prolonged cases of GD go away!

I am concerned that much of what passes as dysphoria is cultural dissing of women, passed by contagion. The following Tweet thread was well articulated.

Much of this resonates with me. Society has, in many ways, belittled women. If you think this is overstatement, go turn on your TV. Our culture continues to do this in thousands of ways. If I were about to be born and you could choose your sex and you would be growing up in the United States, what is the likelihood that you would choose to be a girl in our current cultural stew?

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Jordan Peterson: The Danger of Obsessing About Yourself

Jordan Peterson had a long and intense discussion with writer Helen Joyce about transgender ideology. It is a well-worth listening to the entire episode, including the discussions of social contagion, the reasons girls reject their own bodies, the disrespect shown to older women (by younger women) and the pervasive role of narcisism. Peterson, who has worked as a clinical psychologist, offers this advice for people who suffer from social anxiety. From my personal anecdotal experience, I think this is spot on and important to note:

Helen Joyce: And alongside that, that you must choose your identity off a list of dozens, and sometimes hundreds, that require the most intense, constant rumination and self-examination. I mean, I was talking to somebody just yesterday--who was telling me that who has this check sheet for how do I feel? ... But you were meant to be thinking all the time, like, how am I feeling right now? And it was, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how happy am I? This is all a terribly bad idea.

Jordan Peterson: Well, it's clearly bad. One of the things I learned when I was treating people who were socially anxious, I had a lot of anxious people in my, in my clinical practice, which is hardly surprising because that that's the kind of suffering that requires people to seek clinical intervention. Socially anxious people, when they go into a new social situation, think obsessively about how others are thinking about them. Yes. And so then they become self conscious often about bodily issues. But not only that, they might become self conscious about their lack of conversational ability, and the fact that they're not very interesting, and the fact that they're being evaluated by other people, it's a litany of obsessive thoughts. And you can, you might say, well, you can train people to stop thinking about themselves. But you can't stop people from thinking about something by telling them to stop thinking about something. But what you can train people to do is to think more about other people. And so one of the techniques that I used in my practice was okay, now, when you go into a social situation next time, like we'd go through the niceties of introducing yourself and making sure they knew your name, and get that ritualized, so that it was practiced and expert and therefore not a source of anxiety. But the next thing is, your job is to make the other person that you're talking to as comfortable as possible, to pay as much attention to them. And so we know that the more you think about yourself--this is literally true--there is no difference between thinking about yourself, and being miserable. They load on the same statistical axis. And so these kids that are constantly being tormented by 150 identities, that's a front not of freedom, but of utter chaos. And then asked to constantly reflect on their own state of emotional well being and happiness is the surest route to the kind of misery that's going to open them up to psychogenic epidemics. The clinical data on that are clear.

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