PTSD

Motivation under trauma

pnrj current events, ethics, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , ,

May 3 JDN 2458971

Whenever I ask someone how they are doing lately, I get the same answer: “Pretty good, under the circumstances.” There seems to be a general sense that—at least among the sort of people I interact with regularly—that our own lives are still proceeding more or less normally, as we watch in horror the crises surrounding us. Nothing in particular is going wrong for us specifically. Everything is fine, except for the things that are wrong for everyone everywhere.

One thing that seems to be particularly difficult for a lot of us is the sense that we suddenly have so much time on our hands, but can’t find the motivation to actually use this time productively. So many hours of our lives were wasted on commuting or going to meetings or attending various events we didn’t really care much about but didn’t want to feel like we had missed out on. But now that we have these hours back, we can’t find the strength to use them well.

This is because we are now, as an entire society, experiencing a form of trauma. One of the most common long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder is a loss of motivation. Faced with suffering we have no power to control, we are made helpless by this traumatic experience; and this makes us learn to feel helpless in other domains.

There is a classic experiment about learned helplessness; like many old classic experiments, its ethics are a bit questionable. Though unlike many such experiments (glares at Zimbardo), its experimental rigor was ironclad. Dogs were divided into three groups. Group 1 was just a control, where the dogs were tied up for a while and then let go. Dogs in groups 2 and 3 were placed into a crate with a floor that could shock them. Dogs in group 2 had a lever they could press to make the shocks stop. Dogs in group 3 did not. (They actually gave the group 2 dogs control over the group 3 dogs to make the shock times exactly equal; but the dogs had no way to know that, so as far as they knew the shocks ended at random.)

Later, dogs from both groups were put into another crate, where they no longer had a lever to press, but they could jump over a barrier to a different part of the crate where the shocks wouldn’t happen. The dogs from group 2, who had previously had some control over their own pain, were able to quickly learn to do this. The dogs from group 3, who had previously felt pain apparently at random, had a very hard time learning this, if they could ever learn it at all. They’d just lay there and suffer the shocks, unable to bring themselves to even try to leap the barrier.

The group 3 dogs just knew there was nothing they could do. During their previous experience of the trauma, all their actions were futile, and so in this new trauma they were certain that their actions would remain futile. When nothing you do matters, the only sensible thing to do is nothing; and so they did. They had learned to be helpless.

I think for me, chronic migraines were my first crate. For years of my life there was basically nothing I could do to prevent myself from getting migraines—honestly the thing that would have helped most would have been to stop getting up for high school that started at 7:40 AM every morning. Eventually I found a good neurologist and got various treatments, as well as learned about various triggers and found ways to avoid most of them. (Let me know if you ever figure out a way to avoid stress.) My migraines are now far less frequent than they were when I was a teenager, though they are still far more frequent than I would prefer.

Yet, I think I still have not fully unlearned the helplessness that migraines taught me. Every time I get another migraine despite all the medications I’ve taken and all the triggers I’ve religiously avoided, this suffering beyond my control acts as another reminder of the ultimate caprice of the universe. There are so many things in our lives that we cannot control that it can be easy to lose sight of what we can.

This pandemic is a trauma that the whole world is now going through. And perhaps that unity of experience will ultimately save us—it will make us see the world and each other a little differently than we did before.

There are a few things you can do to reduce your own risk of getting or spreading the COVID-19 infection, like washing your hands regularly, avoiding social contact, and wearing masks when you go outside. And of course you should do these things. But the truth really is that there is very little any one of us can do to stop this global pandemic. We can watch the numbers tick up almost in real-time—as of this writing, 1 million cases and over 50,000 deaths in the US, 3 million cases and over 200,000 deaths worldwide—but there is very little we can do to change those numbers.

Sometimes we really are helpless. The challenge we face is not to let this genuine helplessness bleed over and make us feel helpless about other aspects of our lives. We are currently sitting in a crate with no lever, where the shocks will begin and end beyond our control. But the day will come when we are delivered to a new crate, and given the chance to leap over a barrier; we must find the strength to take that leap.

For now, I think we can forgive ourselves for getting less done than we might have hoped. We’re still not really out of that first crate.

Authoritarianism and Masculinity

pnrj core principles, current events, personal, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 19 JDN 2458957

There has always been a significant difference between men and women voters, at least as long as we have been gathering data—and probably as long as women have been voting, which is just about to hit its centennial in the United States.

But the 2016 and 2018 elections saw the largest gender gaps we’ve ever recorded. Dividing by Presidential administrations, Bush would be from 2000 to 2006, when the gender gap never exceeded 18 percentage points, and averaged less than 10 points. Obama would be from 2008 to 2014, when the gender gap never exceeded 20 points and averaged about 15 points. In 2018, the gap stood at 23 percentage points.

Indeed, it is quite clear at this point that Trump’s support base comes mainly from White men.

This is far from the only explanatory factor here: Younger voters are much more liberal than older voters, more educated voters are more liberal than less educated voters, and urban voters are much more liberal than rural voters.

But the gender and race gaps are large enough that even if only White men with a college degree had voted, Trump would have still won, and even if only women without a college degree had voted, Trump would have lost. Trumpism is a white male identity movement.

And indeed it seems significant that Trump’s opponent was the first woman to be a US Presidential nominee from a major party.

Why would men be so much more likely to support Trump than women? Well, there’s the fact that Trump has been accused of sexual harassment dozens of times and sexual assault several times. Women are more likely to be victims of such behavior, and men are more likely to be perpetrators of it.

But I think that’s really a symptom of a broader cause, which is that authoritarianism is masculine.

Think about it: Can you even name a woman who was an authoritarian dictator? There have been a few queen tyrants historically, but not many; tyrants are almost always kings. And for all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was assuredly no Joseph Stalin.

Masculinity is tied to power, authority, strength, dominance: All things that authoritarians promise. It doesn’t even seem to matter that it’s always the dictator asserting power and dominance upon us, taking away the power and authority we previously had; the mere fact that some man is exerting power and dominance on someone seems to satisfy this impulse. And of course those who support authoritarians always seem to imagine that the dictator will oppress someone else—never me. (“I never thought leopards would eat my face!”)

Conversely, the virtues of democracy, such as equality, fairness, cooperation, and compromise, are coded feminine. This is how toxic masculinity sustains itself: Even being willing to talk about disagreements rather than fighting over them constitutes surrender to the feminine. So the mere fact that I am trying to talk them out of their insanely (both self- and other-) destructive norms proves that I serve the enemy.

I don’t often interact with Trump supporters, because doing so is a highly unpleasant experience. But when I have, certain themes kept reoccurring: “Trump is a real man”; “Democrats are pussies”; “they [people of color] are taking over our [White people’s] country”; “you’re a snowflake libtard beta cuck”.

Almost all of the content was about identity, particularly masculine and White identity. Virtually none of their defenses of Trump involved any substantive claims about policy, though some did at least reference the relatively good performance of the economy (up until recently—and that they all seem to blame on the “unforeseeable” pandemic, a “Black Swan”; nevermind that people actually did foresee it and were ignored). Ironically they are always the ones complaining about “identity politics”.

And while they would be the last to admit it, I noticed something else as well: Most of these men were deeply insecure about their own masculinity. They kept constantly trying to project masculine dominance, and getting increasingly aggravated when I simply ignored it rather than either submitting or responding with my own displays of dominance. Indeed, they probably perceived me as displaying a kind of masculine dominance: I was just countersignaling instead of signaling, and that’s what made them so angry. They clearly felt deeply envious of the fact that I could simply be secure in my own identity without feeling a need to constantly defend it.

But of course I wasn’t born that way. Indeed, the security I now feel in my own identity was very hard-won through years of agony and despair—necessitated by being a bisexual man in a world that even today isn’t very accepting of us. Even now I’m far from immune to the pressures of masculinity; I’ve simply learned to channel them better and resist their worst effects.

They call us “snowflakes” because they feel fragile, and fear their own fragility. And in truth, they are fragile. Indeed, fragile masculinity is one of the strongest predictors of support for Trump. But it is in the nature of fragile masculinity that pointing it out only aggravates it and provokes an even angrier response. Toxic masculinity is a very well-adapted meme; its capacity to defend itself is morbidly impressive, like the way that deadly viruses spread themselves is morbidly impressive.

This is why I think it is extremely dangerous to mock the size of Trump’s penis (or his hands, metonymously—though empirically, digit ratio slightly correlates with penis size, but overall hand size does not), or accuse his supporters of likewise having smaller penises. In doing so, you are reinforcing the very same toxic masculinity norms that underlie so much of Trump’s support. And this is even worse if the claim is true: In that case you’re also reinforcing that man’s own crisis of masculine identity.

Indeed, perhaps the easiest way to anger a man who is insecure about his masculinity is to accuse him of being insecure about his masculinity. It’s a bit of a paradox. I have even hesitated to write this post, for fear of triggering the same effect; but I realized that it’s more likely that you, my readers, would trigger it inadvertently, and by warning you I might reduce the overall rate at which it is triggered.

I do not use the word “triggered” lightly; I am talking about a traumatic trigger response. These men have been beaten down their whole lives for not being “manly enough”, however defined, and they lash out by attacking the masculinity of every other man they encounter—thereby perpetuating the cycle of trauma. And stricter norms of masculinity also make coping with trauma more difficult, which is why men who exhibit stricter masculinity also are more likely to suffer PTSD in war. There are years of unprocessed traumatic memories in these men’s brains, and the only way they know to cope with them is to try to inflict them on someone else.

The ubiquity of “cuck” as an insult in the alt-right is also quite notable in this context. It’s honestly a pretty weird insult to throw around casually; it implies knowing all sorts of things about a person’s sexual relationships that you can’t possibly know. (For someone in an openly polyamorous relationship, it’s probably quite amusing.) But it’s a way of attacking masculine identity: If you were a “real man”, your wife wouldn’t be sleeping around. We accuse her of infidelity in order to accuse you of inferiority. (And if your spouse is male? Well then obviously you’re even worse than a “cuck”—you’re a “fag”.) There also seems to be some sort of association that the alt-right made between cuckoldry and politics, as though the election of Obama constitutes America “cheating” on them. I’m not sure whether it bothers them more that Obama is liberal, or that he is Black. Both definitely bother them a great deal.

How do we deal with these men? If we shouldn’t attack their masculinity for fear of retrenchment, and we can’t directly engage them on questions of policy because it means nothing to them, what then should we do? I’m honestly not sure. What these men actually need is years of psychotherapy to cope with their deep-seated traumas; but they would never seek it out, because that, too, is considered unmasculine. Of course you can’t be expected to provide the effect of years of psychotherapy in a single conversation with a stranger. Even a trained therapist wouldn’t be able to do that, nor would they be likely to give actual therapy sessions to angry strangers for free.

What I think we can do, however, is to at least try to refrain from making their condition worse. We can rigorously resist the temptation to throw the same insults back at them, accusing them of having small penises, or being cuckolds, or whatever. We should think of this the way we think of using “gay” as an insult (something I all too well remember from middle school): You’re not merely insulting the person you’re aiming it at, you’re also insulting an entire community of innocent people.

We should even be very careful about directly addressing their masculine insecurity; it may sometimes be necessary, but it, too, is sure to provoke a defensive response. And as I mentioned earlier, if you are a man and you are not constantly defending your own masculinity, they can read that as countersignaling your own superiority. This is not an easy game to win.

But the stakes are far too high for us to simply give up. The fate of America and perhaps even the world hinges upon finding a solution.