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The Feminization of Society and the Stigmatization of Normalcy | J.D. Haltigan
01:11:06
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A
You can't abandon that concept of normality, or societies will just completely fall apart.
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In this episode, I sit down with JD Haltigan, a social science scholar and developmental psychologist. He's an honorary research fellow at the University of Buckingham, uk.
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We've come to basically hijack the feminine ethic of care, the feminine impulse to be empathetic.
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A key difference between the two sexes, Haltigan says, is that men tend to systemize while women empathize.
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Anything that is masculine is demonized. It's really like the feminine fighting the masculine.
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He warns that the push to destigmatize mental illness has now gone too far in the other direction.
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It's being seen as sort of a positive almost in terms of, I have a disorder, I am defined by that disorder, and I'm some sort of heroic person for having this disorder.
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This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janje Kelik. JD Halt, again, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
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A
My pleasure to be with you, Jan.
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B
So when you look at these anti ICE protests in Minnesota, you look at it through a bit of a different lens than the rest of us. What is it that you see?
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A
I come at it from my background as a developmental psychopathologist or somebody who studies mental health, mental illness, and in particular, how that manifests differently in the sexes. And one of the things that has been most notable to me with a lot of the anti ICE stuff is the predominance of females, white females, who are engaging in it, which is consistent with other things that we've seen politically recently in terms of the Kirk assassination and so forth. And what I see there is really a manifestation of cluster B type personality behaviors that tend to especially borderline and histrionic personality dispositions. I see those as more heavily influencing what's happening with these anti ICE protests, and they're being manifested more specifically in women who are disproportionately represented amongst these protesters and these anti ICE activists.
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B
When you mentioned the Charlie Kirk assassination, what do you mean exactly?
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A
Well, in the wake of the Kirk assassination, we saw the same sort of behaviors being displayed online by predominantly white females. Or disproportionately would be the correct term to use there. But saying that Kirk got what was coming to them and basically just sort of being very, you know, unforgiving that Kirk got just blatantly assassinated in front of millions of people, but more or less that he had it coming to them, much like the ICE officers have. Whatever's coming to them in terms of resistance, interference and so forth.
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Okay. Now let's go a bit further back. Okay. What is it that, what study have you done that makes you see things this way or notice this particular trait? And what can you bring in terms of your actual work in studying these various psychopathologies? And also on the one side, empathy, on the other side, systemizing.
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Well, when I did my graduate work, I did a lot of work in autism to begin, and I was always interested in sort of how autism manifested in different ways. And one of the things that came out of my research and background literature review is knowledge of the autism literature. And one of the sort of, I guess you could say more important things in the autism literature that came out of Simon Baron Cohen's work was the idea that males tend to systemize more. They tend to order objects, they tend to follow rule based systems. You might see men gravitating towards more, doing things like ordering train timetables, mathematics, quantitative, whereas women tend to be more empathetic, tend to be, for lack of a better way to explain it, more emotional. That's just the way the species have evolved. We're evolutionally sort of ingrained that way. And so that was always with me as a researcher and as a psychologist. And then as I moved on in my career and studied mental health, you begin to see how certain disorders, mental health disorders, predominate. And in women, you know, there tends to be a rise in depression and internalizing anxiety symptoms in adolescence that's hormonally mediated. Men tend to be more aggressive. These are just sort of basic population level observations. And so that's always been with me. But what's really been striking about the recent, I guess you could say, anti ice demonstrations, which is where we started. And more generally, what's happening on the left with this sort of resistance movement to what I would say is more or less, we could go all the way back to 2016 when Trump came in. It's sort of a reaction to the masculine element. And what you're seeing as a consequence is sort of a disproportionately feminized leftist resistance movement that's being expressed in the mental health issues that would characterize that group of people even regularly. It's just so disproportionately now expressed on one side that you're seeing it more strikingly. It's much more clear.
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B
Okay, so one thing you mentioned is that men tend to be more aggressive. Okay. When I look at these protesters, which it does indeed seem there's a disproportionate amount of women, I wonder if Anyone actually looked at that empirically? I'm not sure, but. But they seem to be pretty aggressive.
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A
Yeah, I would say it's more a passive aggressive, antagonistic demeanor. Certainly there are episodes of direct confrontation, but even with the recent situation tragedies, two killings, as you know, in Minnesota with Renee Good and Alex Preddy, but both of those situations, one being a male, they were characterized initially by sort of this indirect antagonizing of the ICE officers rather than an initial direct confrontation. Even in the case of Preddy, even though it ended that way, there was more of this sort of feminized aggression rather than a male, you know, confrontation.
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B
Yeah, it wasn't like a slug in the face or whatever. This kind of. I see what you're saying.
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It was preceded by antagonism, passive aggressiveness, taunting, and, you know, more or less undermining the ICE agents sort of at a deeper level than just sort of wanting to, you know, interfere with what they were doing, which is trying to, you know, apprehend illegal criminals. So indirect versus direct aggression. And I would say this is much more of an indirect type of form, at least starting that way before it ends in what we saw.
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B
Okay, so from everything I've learned, sort of watching from the distance, watching the TVs and so forth, it's hard to give mental health related diagnoses. Right. Because you mentioned cluster B, you mentioned a number of things there. Is your contention that the people you're seeing that are involved in this kind of resistance movement have these profound mental health issues, is that what you're saying?
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A
Well, what I want to be clear is a couple different things it's important to point out. So I'm not a clinician, I'm a developmental researcher. So I study the symptoms that give rise to what clinicians would use to diagnose someone with, let's say, a cluster B personality disorder. And just for your viewers, cluster B personality disorders are. They're personality disorders of a cluster which include histrionic, narcissistic, borderline and antisocial. So it's a cluster of disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Mental disorders. But the two that seem to jump out at me as characterizing this resistance movement are the borderline and the histrionic. There's obvious.
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Describe them to me as one would find them, say, in the dsm. Right? Yeah.
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Borderline is very tumultuous. Relationships relating, triangulation of relationships, pitting one person against another, threats of abandonment. So it's a very deep interpersonal sort of disorder where there's A lot of fears of abandonment, fears of being unloved. Histrionic is sort of more or less what you would think. It's, you know, very emotional, overly emotional, antisocial is what we typically think of rule breaking, conduct problems. And then the narcissistic is sort of this over involvement with oneself. There's different forms of narcissism that have been described in the literature, but more generally it's an inflated sense of oneself morally superior. You know, they can do no wrong type of sort of personality orientation. But what I see is as far as whether or not these individuals have a disorder, I can't say that. But what I can say is I notice the elevated symptom patterns in them. And one of the big issues in mental health research that's going on right now is whether disorders should be considered disorders categorically or we can just speak in terms of how high or low one is on the symptoms that track with those disorders. So it's really a measurement question. But what I would say is that these symptoms are elevated in these resistance, I guess you could say actors, if you will. So it's the symptoms of borderline disorder. It's the symptoms of histrionic personality disorder.
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B
And this is very interesting because I've been having a number of people working in the, let's call it the mental health space that are talking about, for example, over prescription of all sorts of psychiatric medications which have lower efficacy generally than we've been led to believe, kind of in the social consciousness, things of that nature. And also just this idea recently, in past years that there's almost like a kind of feature fetishizing of mental illness. Like people are kind of proud to have certain types of things, or they're trying to figure out which thing they have so they can kind of identify with it. And that itself is creating over diagnosis and so forth. So just, can you just speak to that space a little bit? Because I know a lot of our viewers are kind of thinking about the programming I've done in the mental health space from that perspective.
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Yeah, mental illness as identity is really something that is. Is coming on. So the sort of idea that mental illness, rather than being stigmatized in a good way in the sense that, look, if someone is suffering from mental illness, we typically would say they need help, they need to be treated. What's happening now is the mental illness is becoming valorized. So it's being seen as sort of a positive almost in terms of I have a disorder, I am defined by that disorder, and I'm Some sort of heroic person for having this disorder. And it. It's really happening across the disorders, mostly for the mood disorders like depression and anxiety. But what's happening in the public space is that the disorder is being. There's been such a big destigmatization push around mental illness that it's become just the opposite now. It's become valorized and it's become so destigmatized that there is no stigma. There is no sort of. When you have a mental health issue, it is a problem, but now it's becoming completely valorized and sort of a heroic thing to have a disorder. Say you have it. Say you have adhd. You see this, I think, a lot social media, and I published a paper discussing that where there's sort of this idea that if you're on social media and you claim disability or you claim you have a mood disorder, you get a lot of affirmation for that. And so that feeds back into the first, you know, one of the first reasons they might have the disorders. You're feeling lonely, you're feeling sad, you're feeling depressed. But by becoming an identity that's defined by the disorder, you get into this sort of niche group that valorizes it and affirms it. And that's not really helpful treatment to eliminate the disorder or eliminate the problem,
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you know, come to think of it. And I'm going to bounce around here a little bit, but isn't this exactly what's been happening with gender identity?
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It just strikes me it's exactly the same thing, right? It's a. Claiming gender identity has a long history or gender dysphoria, should say, in the dsm. But it used to be just a very tiny, tiny proportion, typically males, that would be struggling with some sort of, you know, they're not born in the right body and so forth. But what happened is, in my opinion is that personality mental illness became sort of the way to make gender identity something that it wasn't. You know, it wasn't gender dysphoria. We took basically mood disturbance. Someone could say, I'm depressed or sad. I feel like I need to be in a different body. That's the problem there. So now I'm a female that wants to be a male, and that sort of transition is a way to cope with the underlying mood disturbance. So gender identity is a great example of what we're talking about. It's basically mental illness, specifically mood and personality mental illness valorizes a new identity. Affirm it, affirm it, affirm it. Rather than get to the underlying issue.
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Well, and just, and I mean more so than that because like the entire kind of system was constructed with, you know, best practices and everything to promote that whole way of being. Like the moment you would come in with this sort of, there might be a question about gender identity. Affirm, affirm, affirm. And that was, I wouldn't say it was the policy. Right. But there was this strong, let's say, social pressure, especially in all these major organizations which are now, since this landmark court case in New York, are kind of backtracking on this and saying, well, maybe galloping towards surgery, you know, life, you know, body altering surgeries quickly on this gender affirming care track is not the way to go. But up to just very recently it was kind of what you kind of had to do or you would face, you know, huge professional repercussions even. Right?
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Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned the detransition lawsuit that was recently successful. That kind of is going to what most people seem to think, at least in the circles that I know and the colleagues that I know and certainly on social media you've seen this from a number of high profile detransitioners, that it's going to open up the floodgates to a lot more of these lawsuits in your term. They're galloping towards these surgeries that were life altering was crazy. It was insane craziness. To do that for what really was an underlying mood issue. And you already see one of the major organizations or a major organization, the American Plastic Surgeons Association, I believe that's the correct moniker. But plastic surgeons group have already said, you know, they've put out a statement for under 18 or under 19 that we don't accept the sort of narrative of, you know, how to approach gender dysphoria and gender identity, which is sort of the going still the current going, I guess you could say standard for how you treat gender dysphoria and gender identity. So they've backed away from that because of, because of this lawsuit that was successful. But even before then, the statement they recently put out seems to have been crafted well in advance of this successful lawsuit. So you can't really just say, well, it's surgeons who perform these surgeries, there's a lawsuit. So they're trying to, you know, protect themselves. I think this was a little bit more evolved over time and they really started to realize as a group this was crazy. This was crazy.
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B
Right. Well, so there's this whole social contagion element in here and you know, I've been thinking about that. You know, Abigail Schreier wrote about this extensively and the, you know, kind of gender dysphoria among young girls. Right. But this, I think the same type of social contagion is probably also involved in these kind of protesters as well. I would love to hear your opinion on this. Before we go there, though, I want you to tell me about your work. Okay. Just explain to us where you started, what your work is, how you've come to think about this from this very unique vantage point.
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A
Well, yeah, I started off. I was undergrad. I started off as an athlete, did some criminal justice work, but really found that, I guess you could say not fulfilling or as challenging. Got into psychology. And that's really where I felt challenged in terms of my intellectual thought, but also empirically, quantifiably, quantitatively, statistically. I did a terminal master's in forensic psychology. Then I spent two years working in residential care. Saw a lot of the behaviors that we've been discussing in both adolescent males and females play out in front of me and caring for these kids. But I was always determined to do a PhD research in sort of these behaviors, understand why these kids are acting out the way they are. So ultimately did my PhD at the University of Miami in Florida in developmental psych, which is just understanding personality development over the lifespan. And then subsequent to that, I started doing a number of postdocs. This was all during a time when academia is starting to go a little crazy and woke. And to make a long story short, I got into more of an evolutionary psychology mindset, working with some colleagues who were evolutionary psychologists. And so rather than seeing things
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more
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from an environmental lens, I started to see things more from an evolutionary lens. And what I mean by that is, rather than sort of coming from a more nurture approach to behavioral development, I started to become a little bit more nature minded, even though you still have the mix of the two in play. And then, you know, I got into mental health research because of my methodological background. So studying how these symptoms that we see in these disorders track and covary together. And that's really where that's kind of the lens I see all this through. So my research really came to, I guess you could say, a point now where it's about mental health, how social media is impacting mental health, the social contagion element there, and how that basically more or less allows things like personality as mental illness being valorized to emerge in our culture. And you can also see too, how social media can create networks of these sort of Bubbles of symptoms that just continue to percolate and percolate and percolate. And they're basically what's happening on social media is you're having these niche groups of people who say they're suffering from a mental health disorder, which they may or may not be, more or less normalize the mental illness rather than keep it really as what it should be, which is something that needs to be treated rather than something to be affirmed and to be celebrated and to be seen as something welcome to have because it makes you somebody that you weren't.
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B
Well, so we can use kind of an extreme example, right? And this is so social media. It's just fascinating as a phenomenon. It's completely changed in a lot of ways how we interact, especially the younger generations. I had a young man recently in an interviewer, probably will have been published by the time we published this one, explaining to me how young people really live a lot of their lives online in a way that I couldn't even have grasped until he started saying, no, no, Yan, you don't understand, like really a lot of what we do. Even though of course, you know, we're encouraging people to do stuff in the real world, but there's so much of it is done online with social media. We ended up with a situation where people, for example, like during COVID people that were getting vaccine injuries, of which there were a substantial number, were having huge trouble finding each other because there's this huge. Again, you weren't allowed to say that, right? There's this. The narrative was that that's impossible, basically, and you're kind of, it's in your head and stuff like that. However, through social media, even though some of this was shut down, many people found each other and were able to actually, you know, support each other. This is like kind of the good version, right? And create groups and, you know, react. 19 is one of these groups that did this that I'm very familiar with. My wife and I made a film actually that involved many members of that group about people not getting the help they needed, Right? But the flip side, the other extreme would be pedophiles finding each other, right? And just saying, hey, look, actually, you know, this really isn't a problem. Our particular attractions that we have, in fact, hey, let's kind of celebrate and actually let's make a group to help us enact our perverse desires. We probably wouldn't say that, but anyway, you see what I'm saying here is social media. And that's of course the extreme, right? But there's everything kind of in between, including, I remember Pamela Paresky, who's a friend introduced me, she gave me some hashtags on X which were, you know, cutting. Twitter it was too. So like these are people who valorize, literally cutting designs into their bodies and comparing and you know, trying to be the best at. I mean, just really pretty extreme stuff. I couldn't even believe that this existed, but it was just sort of active on there if you just, you just had to know exactly where to look. So there's just, it's like this weird mixed bag where it created the opportunity for people who would never get to know each other, right. To figure out how to knit well together. There's knitting groups which itself, some of them had their own problems with canceling people that were politically on the wrong side and so forth. But then there were also these other types and this kind of valorizing starts sliding in that direction of more extreme mental illness. And then there's also this part where, you know, there's also things which are defined as mental illness which may not need to. Like people are medicalized for things like they get depressed, you know, a kid. This is, I've had people on the show like this who are kind of, you know, helping, trying to help people deep de. Prescribe from huge cocktails of medications that they're on. Right. Because they were medicalized over a, you know, they had a bad, bad day, their girlfriend left and you feel bad and you got a drug and it kind of didn't work, so you got another drug. And eventually it's the symptoms of these, the side effects of these drugs which are the symptoms this person's dealing with for 10 years. Right. So what I mean is it's like a mess, right? We have this kind of mess and you're coming in with this with your viewpoint, you know, sort of as a, as a researcher looking at both the nature and the nurture.
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A
Yeah, no, I think you bring up a great point with the sort of double edged sword of social media. And the sort of double edged sword is this like you say, you have the groups, people that can find themselves and find others who have afflictions of the same sort that gives them sort of a support network. But then it can spiral out of control when in the case specifically of mood disturbance, the, the mood disturbance is reinforced. It's emotionally resonated in these niche fandoms, we can call them fandoms. And what's happening on social media because you have so many niche groups that can form like you mentioned for people that are interested in finding somebody else who have a similar interest or what have you, when you have niche groups that form around sort of a problem behavior, it can spiral out of control. So what you have, in the case of. You mentioned the cutting hashtag, that was a big thing on Instagram. And sort of a lot of this started back in the anorexia day where it was sort of a competition amongst anorexics to see who could be the leanest or, you know, bulimia. But more broadly, for your audience, it's the sick role identity that becomes glamorized, that becomes who they define themselves by. They're defined as sick, sick in the sense of sad, depressed. The sick role is what becomes who they see themselves as embodying. And the social contagion element is such that when you're in these niche groups and all you have is affirmation and emotional resonance, you don't have any outside feedback. And so you adopt these personalities and these sort of views of oneself that just completely reinforce the problem itself. And social contagion spreads. And, you know, it relates back to what we started talking about. You see these behaviors that become glamorized and as something to do to give the person meaning, a sense of who they are. And it gets act it out. Unfortunately, when once you have a sort of threshold reached online, the person just carries it out in the real world and you end up with situations like you had even recently with the. With the anti ice stuff going on.
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Right.
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I see that as really personality mental illness symptoms being enacted in the service of some sort of way of achieving identity or feeling like they're doing something heroic that gives them meaning that they don't otherwise have.
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B
So a few thoughts on this. Right. Number one, are there bad actors that realize this and are weaponizing it in your mind?
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I think so. I think there definitely are. Particularly on the, you know, you have these people that run these groups. And we can take gender ideology as an example. I think the people who were sort of propagandizing this stuff to the young, vulnerable adolescents know in some cases they're mentally ill themselves. But in other cases, particularly the ones that push the, you know, push the surgeries, push the cosmetic intervention, I think they are. They're weaponizing it for their own financial gain and for whatever else other sort of, I guess you could say psychopathic gain, they have in the case of the more politically oriented stuff that we see going on, I think, and this is again, just my personal opinion, but we know there is Sort of an elevation of neuroticism as you go more liberal, more left. And I think that the leaders, the leaders of people on the left know that. And they can play to the neurotic dispositions of a base, an increasingly highly feminized base that will sort of buy the idea that ICE is a threat or ICE are fascists, or Donald Trump is a fascist. And if you get a very impressionable, neurotic mind and you push enough propaganda and you maybe show, for example, one isolated incident where, you know, an isolated officer did behave maybe inappropriately out of the millions of others where they don't, you can, you can weaponize that sort of neurotic predisposition against themselves. And what you end up with is sort of this base of highly feminized, neurotic foot soldiers, if you will, who will buy it and go out and serve as, you know, anti ICE activists or activists for whatever. I mean, you can think of environmental activists, you can think of activists for any calls on the left tend to have all these traits that we're talking about. Particularly you could see it with the environmental activists, the Greenpeace activists, throwing paint over art, gluing themselves to art in these museums and filming that same idea.
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B
I mean, this is fascinating. I'm just remembering something, you know, I want to share with you. I'm going to see if we can find this video. I remember watching a video of a young man, years, this is years ago who was filming a woman who was clearly extremely agitated about maybe something he had said or maybe something. I don't remember exactly, but it was like he would say something that might have been triggering to her or just his presence kind of him not behaving the way she wanted. She needed him to behave. And she's behaving this very kind of extreme, perhaps histrionic would be the term. I would use it not clinically, but just broadly way. And he's just sort of calmly filming all this, right? And I remember thinking, so this is the part I'm getting to, you know, what's wrong with this guy, right? Like, he's, you know, why, like, why does, why does he kind of keep triggering her like this? That's, that's not reasonable. Like, why, why doesn't he just, you know, in a way, I think I was thinking, why doesn't he just give in and let her, kind of let her calm down, right? And my thinking about this has changed a little bit over time, right? Because I just. This, this, this, this whole scene, I just remember it so vividly I hope we can find the video. But, you know, of course, the way she's behaving is inappropriate. Right. And problematic. And she probably needs some help because him just being there and saying something unpleasant is not justification for such behavior. But I had. I found my. I realized I've been kind of programmed myself, for some reason, to acquiesce or want to get the person to acquiesce to this somehow to just kind of stop the problem. To stop the problem, to stop the weird behavior. And I wonder if, as a society, we haven't been kind of programmed this way a bit. Right? And this is why a lot of these kind of behaviors, people don't say, hey, look, get a hold of yourself. This is inappropriate. I know you're suffering, but you can't behave this way, as opposed to just kind of saying, okay, well, I'm gonna back down because I don't want you to be legitimately. Because these people are legitimately perturbed. Like, you can see it, right? And for me, I feel bad about that. Like, I don't want. I don't. I want to. I don't want to cause them suffering. Right? Even, you know, but I feel like that's somehow being weaponized. My empathy for them is somehow being weaponized. Does that make sense?
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A
Yeah. No. I think we've gotten to a point in culture, and particularly mental health culture, where the hard intervention, which is maybe to say, cut it out, stop it. Is being seen as intrusive, or it's being seen as unfair or somehow, you know, somehow unjust. We've gotten away from some of that, and that the consequences are that you just basically have these tyrants who continue to be tyrants without proper discipline. Really. I mean, you can really use the analogy of parental discipline in this case, but because clinicians, because the mental health industry and mental health research architecture has gone from such a. You know, the destigmatization push in mental health has been enormous because there was sort of this idea that mentally ill individuals were too stigmatized. They were seen as evil, and they were ostracized from society. And the main sort of case would be schizophrenia, where schizophrenics were housed in institutions and removed from the streets. But cultural stigma has existed for centuries for reasons that allow for cultures and societies to function. Obviously, we don't want individuals to be stigmatized to the extent that they're mistreated. But it's gone so far the other way in the mental health architecture with this destigmatization. I mean, I know in academia they won't even call a course journal or they won't even call a course Abnormal Psychology anymore. They want to call it Problems in Living because they feel abnormal. Saying something is abnormal is too stigmatizing. And it's the same idea. We've lost a sense of limits and when to say enough or when to say you need help and to be forceful with that. And I think in part that's because we become a little bit softer. Empathy has been weaponized wholesale. And that's a good example of some
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B
of that I'm also reminded of. I reviewed a really fascinating book by James Lindsay and Logan Lansing, the Queering of the American Child. I don't know if you've read that one familiar with that. But I mean, this queer theory, which is one of these critical theories that have developed. The idea is if you're looking at the oppressed, it's an oppressor, oppressed, sort of Marxian dichotomy. But it's normalcy, which is the issue that they see as a problem. Imposing normalcy on people is the oppression. And the oppressors have to fight normalcy. That's their activism. Right. And so this is what I'm kind of reminded of, that it feels like this kind of queer theory approach to the world has somehow pushed itself into this whole space and making whatever it is that's not normal, we need to kind of normalize it.
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A
Correct.
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B
Right. If that makes sense.
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A
Yeah, 100%. And in fact, you just reminded me. But queer theory is what undergirds the destigmatization effort. I just have a paper coming out in Theory and Society where I highlight exactly this. So the idea is that normalcy itself is stigmatized, so we have to abandon the concept of normality. There was recently a paper in one of the still one of the most prestigious developmental psychopathology journals where it was the headline that the commentary was it's time to abandon the concept of normality. And it wasn't a, you know, it wasn't a. Obviously the Marxian themes are there, even though it's not a journal where that kind of would come into play. But a couple of years ago we saw in the Scientific American they wanted to abandon the concept of statistical normality, the whole statistical normal distribution on which we base a lot of our frequentist statistics. In fact, the lion's share of all the research done in mental health is used using the statistical normal distribution. But because clinicians and because researchers have in the academy have gone so far left, they see Any deviation from normality shouldn't be seen as a deviation from abnormality. We shouldn't stigmatize deviations from normality. So in other words, it's like, abolish the construct. Nobody's normal. We're all different. Right. We all have idiosyncrasies and. And so forth. That's true. But there are average levels of behaviors that we all use to gauge whether a given person's behavior is aberrant. And you can't abandon that concept of normality or societies will just completely fall apart.
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B
Well, no, absolutely. And I mean, take your pick, right? You know, getting rid of policing or like, there's all these different. Why? Because you might stigmatize the people who are committing crime. We wouldn't want to do that.
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A
You might exclude somebody.
- [40:32]
B
I mean, I'm not even being glib here. I'm sure that's exactly what's happening, actually. Right. Like, this is the justification, right, for why one would do this. Right. Like, I mean, at least a very poignant one. If we're talking about this kind of queer theory approach, I want to jump back to this talking because you're a big thing. I remember when I first came across you, you were looking at empathy versus systemizing. Right. And these are the systemizing being the more male behavior and empathy being the more female behavior or approach. And as you highlighted. Right. These, of course, are statistical distributions. Of course, some women are much more systematizing than some men, and some men are much more empathetic than some women. That's all true. It's not like forced into thinking of all these things in black and white. No, it's a distribution. Right, but you've basically been arguing that things have really been pushed way too far into the empathy side, whereas the systemizing side is actually incredibly important, even for, like, just for civilization to function. I don't know. Explain to me what you think about this. That's what strikes me anyway.
- [41:51]
A
No, 100%. I think what's happened is we've come to basically hijack the feminine ethic of care. The feminine impulse to be empathetic, particularly on the left, has become what I view as a completely feminized democratic party where empathy is weaponized. And so, you know, we see more women in college, we see less men, you know, in the humanities, in social sciences, and sort of the systemizing element, which is really what underlies how things are ordered in society, how things function has been, you know, there has been basically more or less discarded or seen as not important. Masculinity is really what will track personality wise with systemization. And femininity is really sort of the analogy with empathization. And if a society becomes completely feminine, all kinds of chaos will ensue because you don't have any sort of rule based, lawful, statistically minded, quantitatively focused orientation to why we have laws, why we have rules, why we need order, why we need immigration law and so forth. And so I think that's really what's happened is we've reached a threshold in society where one party is completely feminized. They see the Trump side, right, you know, conservative as sort of the masculine embodiment. And they're just these two forces are clashing right now. And you see this playing out all over the place. And you know, masculinity has been a huge topic of pundit writing online and so forth. But, you know, it's all the same thing.
- [43:56]
B
I'm thinking of Warren Farrell's the Boy Crisis. This is a book that I reviewed and was absolutely fascinated by back in, I think, 2019. There's so many levels in which, you know, the sort of the basic boy behaviors that are kind of necessary. And this is all coming kind of, perhaps amusingly, from a quite effeminate man, right, who actually a kind of wonderful, quite effeminate man were just not being viewed as positive. Whereas these are actually important developmental things that boys need to do, like roughhousing. I didn't know that term until Warren explained it to me. And just a whole bunch of developmental things that boys need to have are kind of seen as sort of toxic or problematic. You really shouldn't be doing that. That's too aggressive, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you must be looking at this squarely, right?
- [44:47]
A
Well, I certainly am aware of that research, aware of that literature. And one of the things that people don't seem to understand, particularly about with masculinity as a construct, is that traits track together. So masculinity is really defined by a number of traits. Aggression, boys who engage in rough and tumble play, but other things track with that, other traits that aren't so good. So you get the good with the bad. When we had this whole discourse about Andrew Tate on the right, and you know, Tucker Carlson had Andrew Tate on, and that was that a good thing or a bad thing? But the thing is to understand is the construct of masculinity will embody a range of things. And how we define masculinity is going to include those good things and those bad things. But ideally, in an Ideal world. We want really the normative, healthy masculinity that even if they had some of those bad traits that you get socialized. And so what you end up with is just a masculine male, or in some cases, females that are pro social. But what people don't understand is that masculinity has a range of traits that can track with it. Some that aren't good, some that are. And what's happening now in the discourse is that anything that is masculine is demonized. Anything that is authoritative is demonized. Enforcement of law, which is sort of a masculine type of behavior, is demonized. And you see that with ice. And we're at this point now in society where there's these forces that are clashing. And I don't know. I really don't know how it ends because the left and the right are really now just characterized by these two distinct forces. Obviously there's some variation within them, but it's really like the feminine fighting the masculine right now.
- [46:50]
B
Well, so here's the really interesting thing. The last person I interviewed in that seat, actually John Butcher, he wrote a book called the Polarization Mythology. Okay. Which caught my eye because I'm always interested in trying to. I want to believe that we're not as polarized as what you just said might make us think we are. Right. And his research was fascinating. He did a bunch of substantive surveys across society. And this has been actually replicated in multiple surveys from think tanks to the left and the right. There's a whole bunch. There's a whole range of issues. And I suspect that. I don't think they asked specifically about systematizing and empathy or male and female and so forth would be interesting. There's a whole lot of issues that are not really polarizing at all, even though we're being told that they're highly polarizing. Like, for example, this gender identity, gender affirming care sort of approach to. Most people, whether they're left or right, are not interested in calling someone that's biologically a boy, a girl. Like, they just. They don't want to do that. Right. This is what these surveys show. Right. But the discourse, as you say, kind of suggests otherwise. And we've been led to believe that that's kind of not the case because there's these elements in society that have a very large megaphone which allows them to appear, which allows it to appear as if there's a much larger group of people that believe something than they really do. And there's a whole bunch of issues around this as well. Right. That's just one example.
- [48:38]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, I think you led there with this sort of gender. Most people don't want to call a boy or girl and vice versa. So it was considered an 8020 issue. And we saw this play out in the 20 election where, you know, one of the big ways in which Trump sort of trolled the Harris campaign was sort of her ad for, you know, trans individuals, you know, for they them. We're for you, Trump was saying. So he used that. But on the other hand, you have what's these small groups, progressive activists, who basically are forming the architecture or undergirding a lot of the Democratic Party. So even now, even though you think it's an 8020 issue, that particular one, you have politicians like Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emanuel, who have to waffle around what they say about that because they're worried about offending those tyrannical minority elements who have that enormous power in their party because they don't want to say the wrong thing. So it is an 8020 issue for the population, but it's not really an 8020 issue still. And that's just talking about the gender stuff.
- [50:05]
B
But isn't the population what's supposed to matter?
- [50:08]
A
It is. It is. But now with social media, and I don't have the answer or know the truth of this matter, but when you have an issue like gender identity as part of the election, you do wonder how much party allegiance comes to matter. But even for independent voters, if you think, you know, if you think Trump's a fascist versus whether you call someone a girl, a boy or a boy or girl, where are you going to roll the dice? Where are you going to pull the lever? I don't know. And I think social media, because we've gamified politics so much via social media, you hear a lot of people say, well, you know, Twitter's not the real world. Well, social media is not the real world, but it kind of is the real world in some ways, because a lot of this discourse that shapes the media narratives gets played out there. The media narratives. We still have legacy media, newspapers, evening news. The discourse feeds the narrative on those newscasts, which then get blasted and disseminated to the population.
- [51:18]
B
Hence the megaphone. Right. As I was describing.
- [51:21]
A
Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily, you know, it might be an 8020 issue, but it still has a very prominent role in some of what's happening. And so we are, you know, to get back to where we started this point of topic, whether we're Polarized or not. Sure, there's probably a lot of issues that Americans agree upon, but I think you're, you're being a little naive if you think that we're not a highly polarized culture in society right now. It's just. And it's only going to get increasingly that way with social media.
- [51:56]
B
Well, yeah, there's a lot of evidence that social media as a media structure is driving that. And this is something I've been studying and I'm incredibly concerned about because, well, again, it seems like around a lot of critical issues, Americans tend to agree, actually. Right. Especially things that we're led to believe they don't. Right. But your point is incredibly good in that having access to that megaphone, that ability to push these ideas into the population, that changes how people think. And indeed even some, you know, one of my observations has been that there's some portion of the population which seems unusually susceptible to these, you know, mass opinion forming pushes. Okay. Through the megaphone. And I'm curious if you've thought about this at all. Like, this is something that I, this is the, you know, if I'm going to have another book in the future, I think it might have to do with this. I want to try to understand why it's the case that some portion of the population is so susceptible to these media pushes and how do we deal with that as a society if people can be led to very believe something that's grossly inaccurate when it comes to reality incredibly quickly because of powerful media narratives.
- [53:23]
A
I think I would answer that question with just one word, really. Neuroticism. That's a public health significance. There was a paper published maybe a decade ago, if not more about the public health significance of neuroticism as a trait. Neuroticism is negative emotionality. That's what it is. It's people have higher or lower baseline levels of how neurotic, how easily upset they are. And what has media always been characterized by?
- [53:58]
B
Fear.
- [53:59]
A
Fear is what sells. If it bleeds, it leads. Every newscast that I've heard from, you know, Pittsburgh to LA to, you know, Washington, D.C. leads with something that engenders fear or anxiety. And so that's going to prime people who have elevated propensities to become fearful, neurotic, negative to imagery, to violence they see or even aggressive encounters that they see. And so I would say even more so than something like paranoia, which is another personality trait. Neuroticism is what is much more important. And you see this now too with social media because everything is viral Immersive video footage. All these, I mean, everything we're seeing now with the ICE thing, it's just video footage. People will literally go out with their camera phone. You know, the famous book, the image that was written, this was decades ago, I can't remember the author offhand now, but this was back before even handheld phones with cameras on them. And so you get these pseudo events,
- [55:21]
B
hyperreality, because there's been so much video done of them. Is that the reason? Yeah, the video just explain the concept depicted in the image. Yeah.
- [55:30]
A
So you take the ICE protests, for example. Not just the ones that led to the unfortunate consequences of good and pretty, but that's what these activists will do. They'll just go out with their phones and film all day long and that film gets uploaded onto TikTok. Some of it might be AI enhanced or not, but it's just constantly feeding everybody on their phone, this immersive imagery. And it just sort of is a feedback loop that increases sort of the negative emotionality, the fear, the neuroticism, and it's basically just sort of this insane coagulation of negative emotion. Neuroticism that just spools out. And I think that's really what we should be concerned about now. Sort of this disposition amongst people to be easily triggered by negative emotion that is being absolutely hijacked by social media.
- [56:36]
B
So in other words, something that would be helpful would be to train our children as early as possible to deal proactively and positively with negative emotion as a way to, you know, just deal with this crazy media social virtual environment that was being increasingly foisted upon us.
- [57:01]
A
Yeah. And typically the role of children and adolescents learning how to metabolize negative affect is scaffolded and ushered in or helped upon them by their parents who provide sort of modeling of how to successfully emotionally regulate. But there's also a biological component to that where each child's going to have their own baseline level of how easily they can metabolize negative affect.
- [57:32]
B
Metabolize meaning, like just deal with it.
- [57:34]
A
Right. Digest it.
- [57:35]
B
Okay, yes. Right, right. Okay.
- [57:36]
A
So a clear eyed understanding that we're dealing with an environment now where those different baselines of ability to deal with negative affect are going to be highly, highly enhanced because of social media, because that's where we're all living now, at least to some degree, on our phones. So what might have before been, yeah, they have elevated baselines, but we're still living in the real world now. Those elevated baselines are going to be much more reactive to this Environment that's completely mediated by everything we see on the screen.
- [58:18]
B
And now with AI, that's just going to take it to a whole new level. Wow. So we really need to figure out good ways to, to get off it or to.
- [58:30]
A
There's two approaches, really. You have sort of the John Haidt approach, which is to ban social media, get it out of the classrooms, at least for, you know, younger children. And to some degree I can, I can resonate with that approach a little bit. On the other hand, if you think social media is going away, you're.
- [58:53]
B
It's not going away.
- [58:54]
A
So a better approach might be, okay, so we know it's here, we know everybody wants to be on it. You can certainly eliminate it in classrooms for sure to improve learning, but everybody's going to go back on it. So teaching ways about, okay, what are the harms of social media? And if you're going to be on it, here's some strategies that are helpful to understand when you're being triggered by it, when you need to do something else, or ways to sort of. If you're going to still be on it and you're going to be on it heavy and you can't put it down and you're quote, unquote addicted, you still got to find ways to successfully manage that environment without becoming completely well
- [59:41]
B
and not allow it to brainwash you, basically. Right. That's what you're saying. I mean, so it strikes me you kind of want both, on the one hand, minimize the screen time at whatever cost. I keep seeing more studies that show just, it's really bad. I knew it was bad. And then I see the next study. I'm like, wow, this is like worse than I thought. You know, it's really so toxic. These screens are so toxic for, especially for young people, 100% and probably for older people too, as I've got this screen sitting here in front of me. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time figuring out how to be able to create a distance from this and understand that it's having a profound impact on me and somehow mitigating that, I feel like we need both simultaneously even to just remotely get a handle for it. There must be ways to train your mind to deal with this in a better way. All this stuff is developed without any guardrails, basically. Right. And it's like, we know even the American social media companies specifically tried to make their products addictive because they would get more market share and more people using it was all about getting the users clicks and everything. Right. The regular Users and it still kind of has a lot of guardians. I just saw headline on ntd, our sister TV network today as I was walking into my office, was that the EU is somehow suing TikTok for addiction, for creating addictive, particularly addictive technology, I would guess, which for me, you know, so there's another whole element, right, where, you know, a whole social media can be weaponized by an adversary power to create instability. Right. So there's a whole other dimension to it as well, beyond just kind of, you know, sort of the basic psychopathological realm that we've just been describing where there's, you know, bad actors that seek us harm.
- [61:49]
A
Yeah, there's a lot of rabbit holes you could go down. I mean, on X you see all the time is what foreign country is trying to undermine MAGA or disrupt them and what foreign country is spouting pro Palestinian talking points. And so it's happening on both sides, no doubt about it. But that's just going to be a reality. You have to just be able to figure out a way to teach users of the media. Look, you're going to have to parse and be able to parse truth from reality. We're evolving. The human social brain is evolving in a completely different landscape than our ancestors did. We're evolving in real time and I think people lose sight of that. So a lot of what's happening now in terms of social media, its role and how people are developing behaviorally and cognitively, we don't know. I mean, you're going to have people that are going to get lost and natural selection is going to act on social media now in the social brain. So 400 years from now, it'll be interesting to see, looking back, for those that are still here or those that come after us, what was really the sort of selective impact of social media on human social functioning and human social survival, how is it shaping the species long term? Nobody really knows at this point beyond some of the obvious correlational associative evidence we see with distractibility with mental health. But this whole new sort of phenomenon of personality is mental illness. You know, mental illness as personality is really what social media has given rise to in my world, my field. That is extremely alarming.
- [63:55]
B
So did you read Helen Andrews essay about the Great Feminization?
- [64:03]
A
Yeah, no, I read it and when I read it I was struck, you know, obviously I agreed with more or less everything that was in the piece, something that I've been sort of observing for a long time now. And I'd even written on my own substack prior to her piece, similar things regarding that. So what she did in that piece, which I found really impressive and more important to some degree is that she really highlighted how the feminization can play, can wreak havoc when it gets into matters of law and how law gets sussed out, how law and behavior get determined in terms of how court cases are determined. And so her piece kind of tackled the legal ramifications of the feminization, but it' sthe feminization in the legal sphere has the same ramifications that it's going to have in other spheres as well. It's just that the legal sphere is very rules based logic, but yet at the same time, it's the legal system that undergirds society. So her piece really kind of focusing in on some of that, some of how debate ensues, how we determine matters of legal behavior or not, I thought was highly, highly important and also very. It added to the discourse that was already emerging about what people were seeing with the feminization of America, not just with respect to mental health. What's happening in the academy. We've had pieces like the Longhouse written and how sort of the interpersonal style of boardrooms has become much more feminized. But Helen Andrews really took an arrow to the legal aspect of it, which I felt was really great.
- [66:06]
B
Maybe tell me a little more specifically on how you feel this impact on the legal system affects the mental health space.
- [66:18]
A
Well, I think the legal system, in terms of how we adjudicate legal matters will ultimately impact how we determine questions around mental health. So, you know, there's no real easy answer or direct answer to that question because, you know, in terms of the legal system, only a certain portion of the legal system applies to mental health issues. Of course, obviously, you know, criminal, criminal legal system applies to antisocial behavior. But to the degree that we see now in society where a lot of judges are, this whole restorative justice mentality of not really punishing criminals legally and holding them accountable because of this feminine impulse to care for the offender,
- [67:17]
B
that
- [67:17]
A
can lead to a very severe society destabilizing situation when criminals are being basically punished more leniently because the judicial system has become feminized. And the idea of punitive, you know, punitive incarceration or punitive punishment is seen as is too unfair or unjust. And that's really where the legal, the feminization of the legal system could come into a situation where it really impacts the mental health of a society is if these if criminal conduct is not punished appropriately.
- [68:03]
B
Well, and also, like I keep seeing these statistics that show really the vast, vast majority of crimes done by a very small number of people. Obvious thing is remove them from society, of course, treat them humanely and everything else that would be, I think, the right way, but remove them. Otherwise you keep having tons of crime
- [68:27]
A
that you don't need to recidivism. Wow.
- [68:31]
B
This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Perhaps a final thought as we finish.
- [68:39]
A
I guess the final thought that I would say is how social media is impacting not just mental health, but everything is tied together now. Politics is tied to mental health, politics is tied to personality. There's nothing that's left untouched with really social media as sort of the fulcrum on which everything is riding now. You know, it is here, it's here to stay, but it's influencing everything from mental health to politics. And now, even as a final, final thought, politics is inextricably intertwined with mental health now. Undeniably. And the left is characterized by certain mental health issues that track with their political ideology a little bit. And the right certainly has their problems as well. But what you're seeing now on the left is what I view as really a manifestation of certain cluster B elements that are, that are being played out in real time. So mental health and politics is going to be a really rich area to explore in the coming years.
- [69:58]
B
Well, and figure out how to deal with, to have a proactive, flourishing society. Right.
- [70:08]
A
And I don't know if that's going to be possible in the social media political landscape, but we have to find ways to educate, disseminate, call things for what they are, and then hopefully go forward. But I don't see, you know, how we're going to get there quite yet.
- [70:28]
B
It's, it's really a difficult thing to say. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but we have to, we
- [70:35]
A
have to say it's a dark thing. Yes.
- [70:37]
B
Well, we have to say it's a dark thing, but we also have to figure it out.
- [70:41]
A
I agree. Or else.
- [70:42]
B
Yeah. Others, it'll be really bad. Yeah. Well, J.D. halt, again, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
- [70:49]
A
Great talking with you on and I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss these issues.
- [70:55]
B
Thank you all for joining JD Haltigan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janje Kellick.