5 Ways Progressivism Hurts Mental Health
and how to fix it for yourself
My loved ones are mostly progressive and I just want them to be happy. So I’m alarmed by the conflict between progressive beliefs and good mental health. For example:
Progressive theory suggests that you’re not responsible for what happens to you, but believing in your own agency is the key to good mental health.
Progressivism trains you to focus on those who have more than you, but good mental health comes from appreciating what you have.
Progressivism tells you that society should meet your needs, but mental health rests on confidence in your ability to meet your own needs.
Progressives demand loyalty to the team no matter what the circumstances, but mental health requires the ability to interpret circumstances independently.
Progressivism defines your life’s purpose in terms of rescuing others, but mental health requires the ability to set your own purpose.
Progressivism needs you to be unhappy so that you “rise up” and “change the system.” You’re supposed to feel the pain of oppression all the time. If you’re happy, you’re not doing your fair share, according to this mindset.
I do not want my loved ones to have a mindset that requires them to be unhappy.
But here’s the double-bind: I don’t want my loved ones to suffer the ridicule and ostracism that progressives inflict on non-believers. That would stifle their careers as well as their social lives.
Progressive beliefs claim to be proven by Science, but progressives decide which research gets funding and which data are reported. Big chunks of reality are left out when facts are filtered through the progressive lens.
For example, we’re told that genes play a big role in mental health and the healthcare system can fix it if you didn’t get good genes. This may sound like science, but it fits the template that says “the system is responsible for your happiness and you are not.”
What’s left out of this paradigm is the fact that mental health takes work. Humans have inherited a brain that goes negative easily. Redirecting this brain toward the positive is a complex skill that requires practice, like any other skill.
You don’t build this skill if you are taught that some people get the good life easily and you’ve been shortchanged. You don’t do the work if you’re taught that society is the cause of your distress. You just learn to see yourself as a powerless victim of a bad system. People who question this are shunned and excommunicated, so it’s tempting to just accept it as THE Science.
It want my loved ones to know why mental health is hard work for everyone.
We’re All Born Crying
We’re born with the ability to feel urgent needs but no ability to meet those needs. This is why infants surge with distress. As the years go by, we slowly learn to ease distress by building skills for meeting our needs.
A happy chemical turns on when you meet a need, and a stress chemical turns on when you see a threat or obstacle to meeting a need. These chemicals are controlled by brain structures inherited from earlier mammals. They can’t process language, so they can’t tell you in words why they turned on a good or bad feeling. Our conscious verbal brain is always struggling to make sense of these ups and downs.
Each brain learns to interpret its feelings by building links between experiences and the chemicals associated with them. This experience includes the explanations that people around you give for their feelings. If a child hears people blame their distress on the evil eye or on Satan, they build that link. If people blame “the idiots in power,” a child builds that link. If people blame racism, sexism, and capitalism, the young brain wires in that interpretation for its distress.
We rarely challenge our interpretations because they feel like facts. Neurons connect when emotional chemicals turn on, creating super-efficient neural highways. The electricity in your brain flows so effortlessly into those highways that you feel like you are just seeing the truth.
You can redirect this flow with your conscious verbal brain, but it’s hard. Conscious thoughts are like a rider on a horse. The rider guides the horse, but sometimes the horse bucks, freezes, or runs in the wrong direction. Lecturing the horse doesn’t help the rider get where they want to go. Ignoring the horse doesn’t work either. A rider needs to understand the horse in order to redirect it. And we need to understand our mammal brain in order to redirect it.
We can relieve distress by redirecting our attention toward a step that meets needs. The skill of redirecting your attention from threats to rewards determines your quality of life. No one is born with this skill. We are all challenged to hone it throughout life.
The progressive mindset makes it harder. It teaches you that rewards are unreachable in our awful society. Your inner mammal responds with threat chemicals. You deprive yourself of happy chemicals when you tell yourself that our terrible system makes it impossible to meet your needs. And you don’t know how you’ve created the bad feelings with your own thoughts. No one benefits from this mindset except people recruiting for an “army of discontent.”
The progressive paradigm sees happiness as an entitlement. It asserts that the good life comes easily to others, so you are wrongly deprived if it doesn’t come to you. You’d be better off knowing the facts about this brain we’ve inherited. It releases happy chemicals in short spurts when it sees a way to meet a need. It releases threat chemicals when it sees an obstacle to meeting a need. No one has happy chemicals all the time, and everyone has plenty of threat chemicals.
The Angry Toddler Inside Us
Imagine a child trying to tie their shoes. When they fail, threat chemicals are released and the child has a meltdown. They do not consciously think their survival is threatened, but threat chemicals make it feel that way. The chemicals pave a neural pathway that turns on bad feelings faster the next time they try to tie their shoes.
The brain wires itself in youth, so we all have toddler tantrums at the base of our neural network. Exploding with frustration makes it harder to get things done, so we are all challenged to manage this impulse. Yet the progressive mindset prizes and even cultivates the impulse. It applauds those who explode with rage, as if it’s a contribution to civilization. It allows you to tell yourself that your rage is justified by your empathy for others or the cruelty of others.
But this leaves you feeling bad, a lot.
Here’s a better alternative. Imagine an adult helping a child tie their shoes by breaking the task into small steps that the child can succeed at. Each success triggers happy chemicals, which makes the next step easier. Repeat this method and the child gets wired to expect success.
Today, adults often try to “help” by eliminating shoelaces and other potential frustrations. This leaves children without enough practice in managing frustration. It condemns them to face adult life with their angry toddler intact.
Instead, we can help children find the joy of getting things done. We can train ourselves to find that too.
This will seem selfish if you’ve adopted the progressive mindset. You’ve learned to deny your concern for your own needs and flaunt your concern for the needs of others. Your happy chemicals do not respond to this mindset because they evolved in a world of real needs. Our ancestors spent hours searching for food and their happy chemicals turned on when they found it. You can say you don’t care about your own needs, but your happy chemicals are not controlled by your conscious verbal philosophizing.
If you do not give your inner mammal a natural healthy path to happy chemicals, it is more tempted by fast, easy pleasures.
If children do not learn the natural healthy path to happy chemicals, they are more tempted by fast, easy pleasures.
Addictions come to mind. One that gets less attention is addiction to “helping” others. Even when it does not actually help them, you can’t stop yourself because it’s the way you’ve learned to feel good.
You would be better off knowing how your brain works. But progressive science does not teach that. It tells us that happiness is the natural default state. It says that animals are happy, children are happy, hunter-gatherers are happy, and we would be happy too if “our society” hadn’t messed things up. You are led to believe that “our society” stole your happiness, so eliminating “our society” is the path to happiness. You are even encouraged to hate people who seem happier than you.
But if you rip off the progressive goggles, it’s obvious that animals have a lot of distress, children have a lot of distress, and hunter-gatherers have distress. Modern humans have distress in all cultures and all income levels. When we blame our distress on “society,” we don’t learn to manage the fretful brain we’ve inherited. We don’t develop our internal power when we blame externals.
Treating People Like Dogs
A wolf goes hungry until it finds food, but a dog has its bowl filled without making an effort. Dogs don’t build skills for meeting their needs, so they have no choice but to defer to whoever fills their bowl.
You become a pet if you don’t learn to meet your own needs. You defer to anyone who fills your bowl.
Fortunately, we have a choice. You can choose to build skills. You can blaze your own trail through your jungle of neurons whether or not others do. Let’s break it into small steps using the five mental health challenges we saw in the opening.
You can believe in your own agency by taking small steps over and over. This trains your inner mammal to expect your steps to succeed and thus to feel safe. You needn’t feel guilty about focusing on your own needs because it’s the job our brain evolved to do.
Mammals are highly competitive in their herds and packs and troops, and we have inherited this social comparison impulse. You can manage your feelings about social comparison when you understand that they come from your brain rather than “society.” Each time you find yourself dwelling on what others have, you can shift your mind back to the path in front of you. Your steps will fail sometimes, but each step forward builds the pathway to your happy chemicals.
If you expect the world to meet your needs for you, you will be disappointed a lot. Each disappointment builds the neural pathway that anticipates more disappointment. But you can learn to anticipate rewards instead by returning your focus to your own next step.
Mammals seek safety in numbers, but they do not follow the herd in every moment. They choose when to a step toward the herd and when to step toward greener pastures. There’s no one right answer – that’s why the mammal brain is designed to weigh the costs and benefits of each step. If you leave the herd, you pay a price, but following the herd has a price too. You can build your skill at making this choice.
You can spark happy chemicals by setting goals and moving toward them. It starts with giving yourself permission to set your own course instead of relying on the progressive agenda to set it for you. This is hard because failure and frustration are inevitable when you step toward a goal. But you can build the skill of managing this frustration, and thus free yourself to find the joy of steps forward. You can enjoy piloting your own ship instead of being a passenger on a ship of grand illusions.
You can choose to build emotion-regulation skills whether or not progressive thought leaders approve. We are lucky to have a choice. For most of human history, terrible things happened to people who deviated from the prevailing belief system. Each time you face a difficult step, remind yourself that you’re lucky to have a choice.