I suspect a big part of the issue is applying emotional standards for interpersonal conflict to a situation they can't hope to handle.
When we get in a dispute with someone usually we either get told by our friends nope sorry you're in the wrong and we forget it or they side with us and we feel supported and cared for by our community.
The nature of politics in the modern age is the constant feeling we are the victims of genuine harm and that a.largw fraction of what we still see as part of our community doesn't care. That is deeply hurtful. Before social media we didn't feel personally wronged in the same way because we didn't feel the same clear sense of others saying such hurtful things about us.
It's like in a relationship, if your spouse doesn't back you on something and you eventually realize you were wrong and they shouldn't have it goes away, if they back you it's fine. If there is a persistent sense you were genuinely injured and they aren't willing to be on your side it can fester.
Politics is the mind killer, not just in creating feelings of outrage but in creating feelings of safety. My mantra for these circumstances: Believing the politician might help you is like believing the stripper really likes you.
> It’s a plot by STEM people to feel self-satisfied about their own intelligence and superior to more well-rounded types.
I mean, it's not exactly a "plot", but...
From what I understand, one of the reasons why people get caught up in conspiracy theories is the feeling of being special. The sheeple go on about their daily lives, unaware of the perils they face, but you -- you're smarter than that. You know the real truth that is hidden from the rest. You can expose it, and in doing so, perhaps save the world.
I think it would be weird if the AI-risk community was somehow immune from this impulse; they're human after all. This does not automatically imply that believers in AI-risk are wrong (just like it does not necessarily imply that believers in Illuminati-risk are wrong), but still, it's a potential source of bias that should at least be acknowledged.
Loved this part --- "Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts'
I think we're going to look back and think about cable news as "Cigarettes for your mind" --- small doses probably fine, but as a daily practice will kill you.
I knew somebody who became paranoid in old age, with his paranoia directed at a family member, which caused a lot of distress. The family tried to get the oldster to redirect his paranoia outward toward more distant concerns, such as the President, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, the other political party, the CIA, the IRS, the Russians, etc., But he remained frustratingly level-headed and realistic about politics.
Eventually, after an adjustment in his blood pressure medicine, his paranoia declined overall and became focused instead on the supermarket checkers union spying on him rather than on his own family, which caused many fewer problems for all concerned. (The checkers never noticed.) The last half decade of his long life was happier than the preceding half decade had been.
In general, there is a lot of mental illness out there all the time. What type of mental illness it manifests itself as (e.g., paranoia) and what sub-type (e.g., political paranoia vs. personal paranoia) and what sub-sub-type (e.g., grocery store checkers) seems pretty contingent and hard to predict.
1) Why now? Is it about technology? Overall degradation of civil society? Increased polarization (a la Ezra Klein) reaching some sort of inflection point?
2) How do we get out of it? For individual trauma, there’s therapy. For societal trauma? Perhaps a matter of fixing whatever the causes are, I suppose.
Thanks for sharing. And I’m sorry about your experience in college. That sounds really upsetting and unfair.
I don't think I'm trauma addicted to politics. I read a lot of political news, but mostly when I'm bored or when it's on an interesting topic. For the most part I don't have strong emotions about it.
Occasionally I do go and read through the opinions of people who outrage me though, which might be extreme sexists, extreme feminists, anti-rationalists, or some other group I strongly disagree with. I might do this once every few months on average when a link to some outrageous subreddit is shared with me, or I'm feeling- so not something I'm compulsively check like an addiction. I do think I get some sort of chemical rush in my system although I don't know if it's endorphins, if nothing else it makes me feel pretty outraged and I'm sure there must be some sort of neurochemical associated with outrage.
Don't have anything smart to add but wanna say that "Bitch Eating Crackers Syndrome" is the best description of anything I've heard in a while
Also think the whole brightline for "trauma" discussion at the start has a neat workaround even in the context of discussions of physical trauma - chronic traumatic encephalopathy is an example of what I'm talking about. The conventionally-understood brightline for "brain injury" is generally getting concussed or knocked out, but football players have brains like swiss cheese partly because it's exacerbated by smaller collisions *all the time*. In fighting, the showings that make you concerned for brain trauma aren't as much "guy gets smoked in 30 seconds", more stuff like Gaethje/Ferguson - where an insanely tough guy is taking a bunch of cumulative damage but none of it is "someone stop the damn fight", but after a point, every jab is getting to him badly til he's never the same again
I think you can understand some part of this through that lens. "Normally" politically-engaged people go into the machine, hang out there taking "traumas" that none of us would consider trauma in isolation, and eventually you hit the brightline with no obvious inciting incident. And then the mechanisms you described make it worse by making the feedback loop practically impossible to bail out of
great writeup! given the ceaseless 24/7 media complex, our shortened attention spans, and the sorta 'clickbait culture,' you know our collective neurochemistry HAS to be outta wack :/
So...what action would you take based on "politics is trauma" vs "news is dumb and makes you angy"?
I mean, I get it, I catch the vibe, news is bad, don't watch, I'm down but...is the trauma angle a rhetorical tool to help convince people or is there something specifically actionable about casting this as trauma?
For example, and I imagine it's the easiest point of concern, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." By which I mean, even if you avoid news and political media, it will directly impact your personal life in ways that are unavoidable; the difference in Covid policy between California and Florida had dramatic and obvious differences that directly impacted people's lives even if they ignored the news.
So is there some guidance from psychology on how to manage this. Like, a rape victim might be irrationally afraid of rape and that's detrimental but it's not completely irrational, rape is totally a thing that happens, it's more of a large miscalibration of threat levels and likelihood. How do you maneuver that in a productive way?
You write, "I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
Is there a sense in which this is just simulating understanding by taking a phenomenon we don't understand and lumping it with another phenomenon we don't understand, and calling them the same?
I found this post interesting, but I had that worry throughout, that it's collapsing two poorly-understood behaviors into one in the name of understanding. I find the move to describing everything in terms of trauma both confusing and concerning, and I also find the change in our political behavior confusing and concerning. Come to think of it, maybe this is a reason to believe you're right and they're really the same phenomenon.
Anyway, interesting and something to think over. Thank you.
Excellent observations. I think what has made me stop imbibing has been the queasy similarity of feeling after I’ve doomscrolled a few hours of cable news - very reminiscent of other addictions I’ve experienced. It made me instinctively step away after awhile, beginning in 2022 and even moreso last year. I don’t watch any domestic news anymore. I focus my efforts on being close with my neighbors while avoiding discussing politics at all costs.
I think the things you're naming "politics" and "trauma" would, for a large majority of human history, have been called "life."
I don't mean that sarcastically or dismissively. I mean it literally.
In Paleolithic societies (i.e., the large majority of human history), when people lived in small clans and tribes, it was a baseline, normal, and accurate expectation that people outside of your clan or tribe would, often enough, try to kill you. Experiencing a trauma reaction to many interactions with outsiders would be common. "Conspiratorial" reasoning that maybe they will try to kill you would also be common (because it was often correct).
I think the resulting emotional and cognitive patterns, however unpleasant we might find them, are a human norm. It precisely the strong default expectation of peaceable interaction that is WEIRD, in Henrich's sense.
I think analogizing this to trauma is a very apt and good idea. Just reading the post makes me feel relieved. The whole political miasma is a discrete phenomenon that everyone can agree is not healthy. Seems promising
I initially liked to describe Trump as the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to her. But catharsis was looming. Suddenly as he became relevant all these people and organizations I felt traumatized by were very very unhappy. I loved it. I still love it
If we hold hands in hostile co-trapped priors there will be more and more trauma like experiences. This is a very memeable concept that could be popular for getting off the outrage treadmill
Great post. It's helped me look more clearly at a topic that's been puzzling me, and which is political, albeit not in a classic partisan way.
This is a bit niche, but here we go.
I follow some forums that focus on me/cfs, a chronic disease. The disease has a big problem, which is that people use the lack of clear somatic etiology to argue it is psychosomatic. That has led to a cycle of underfunding which has left the etiology unclear.
A subset of sufferers set up a forum called s4me, which is supposed to be the pre-eminent place for people to discuss Science, for the illness. However by far the most popular kind of post there is one where some dodgy researcher has a hypothesis paper arguing ME is psychosomatic. Such posts quickly garner 100,000 views and 90+ pages of comments, while a good proper expensive study from an Ivy League uni on cytokine patterns in the illness will be lucky to collect 2 pages of comments.
I've long been confused by why the people who perceive themselves as the biggest fans of serious science give most of their attention to the worst science. Your post has helped me understand that these people are traumatised - by not being believed. For these people, this is a political issue and the psychosomatic researchers are *the other side*. Looking at it like this makes me more forgiving of their apparent inability to actually focus much on the science that is trying to help them.
I take quite a different lesson from "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD." As Greg Cochran says, the obvious explanation is that the proliferation of weapons that cause concussive blasts made soldiers into boxers -- their brains got all screwed up, and more screwed up the more combat they saw. Physical damage, not psychic damage.
Tying into that, I find the medicalization of what I'd call quite reasonable responses to American political trends annoying. This cycle of polarization has happened before and it ended in lots of deaths, and the domination of one faction by the other on a very deep level - the total annihilation of one side's core value system and way of life - forevermore. Stakes are high. You probably should be pretty worried about it. If a bunch of people are feeling a certain way about something, and they aren't a cohort whose brains have been constantly pulverized by pressure waves, the first thought should be -- there might be something to it!
"Everyone agrees we’re “addicted to outrage”. I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
If you saw a bunch of ants or baboons line up to slaughter each other would you say they got infected by a rage virus, or they are addicted to outrage, or any other thing you could grab out of that hat, or would you just say -- yeah, looks right, it's happened before about a billion times and it makes perfect sense?
Additionally, in a technologically advanced democracy (in which votes bring power, and attention brings votes) we have to reckon with supernormal stimulus. A fake parasitic stimulus can afford the resources to be much more triggering than the genuine article. Like how the moth prefers the orchid that camouflages itself as a moth to actual moths. An invented threat can super stimulate fear, not having to worry about pesky facts. An invented persecution can super stimulate anger, not having to spend any resources on actually existing.
And, in a democracy, you have a civic duty to expose yourself to all these stimuli.
I took a class with Sheila Jeffreys - the radical feminist - at university. It was a pretty good basic intro to feminism and quite eye-opening. Later she got cancelled though for not being pro-trans. I think her perspective on society would be even more valuable now but of course we don't get to hear it.
Was there actually much of a scientific basis for the concept of PTSD? My understanding is that there was a political push for it in the wake of Vietnam. And a priori we should expect typical humans of the EEA were more like those ancient warriors https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
> For example, it has been found that women who were sexually abused as children are more likely to be sexually or physically abused in their marriages.
I'm guessing those studies make something like "the nurture assumption" and don't attempt to control for genetic confounds.
The craze of politics seems similar to the craze of religion vis-à-vis mental illness diagnosis. The DSM / diagnostic criteria (or at least an older version of them) carved out an exemption from delusions, for common ones, such as those which are parts of religions:
>The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith) (APA 2000: 821).
Trump Jr, among others, started talking about “triggering the libs” long before libs started accusing conservatives of being triggered.
I am alarmed that you missed this, and also alarmed by your defense of students triggered by college courses--in that case because college is explicitly for broadening one’s knowledge base, let alone horizons and tastes, etc. Any person so legitimately triggered by hearing or witnessing college material has no place being in college--legitimate or real though their perceived trauma may be.
And as for the thrust of the article, I think you on one hand miss the forest for the trees (some of us, especially rape victims, saw and heard all of Trump’s speeches and were “triggered” by the familiar behavior of an entitled, power-grabbing bully who could and did respond to every accusation with “she’s lying” (or he or they or whatever it was in any given instance.)
On the other, almost every individual involved in the political and media apparatus is incentivized to make every single citizen feel as anxious and betrayed as possible. People are responding quite understandably, even predictably, to what they are being explicitly manipulated to respond to.
Though it is not germaine to your point I think it is worth adding context that, when the diagnostic criteria add that carve-out for trauma from consuming media in a work context, what the authors probably have in mind are the social media censors whose duty is to trawl through thousands of pieces of media per day that were reported as depicting child abuse or pedophilia.
I too feel warm and fuzy when I see a well argued point. Thank you for this.
Trauma, as a word more so than a true understanding of the concept, gets thrown around more aggressively these days, presumably due to social media.
Just like a dish you've had far too much of that it eventually loses its appeal. Words like trauma has done the same for me. I can't take it seriously anymore.
I feel sorry for people with "real" trauma. Perhaps we need a new word.
> that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke
In Ireland? Seems odd. Irish universities have largely escaped the extreme wokeness of some US universities.
This all reminds me of that poor woman who joked about AIDS prior to getting her flight. It was clearly an anti-racist joke, and yet the pile on was incredible. It was just then that o became wary of social media and Twitter in particular - which up to then had been great.
This is a good analysis, and helps to explain two oddities that, as an outsider, I have when interacting with Americans.
The first is that Americans bang on about politics A LOT. It's all over media and your public discourse, to the point that I know about as much about your internal politics and political discourse as I do my own country's, despite having no interest in it at all and actively avoiding it whenever I can. And, invariably, the first thing that an American tries to do when a topic of conversation strays into anything that their politics has touched, is try to peg which side you are on (i.e. determine if you are a team Red or team Blue supporter). Being on neither side, because you are not an American, is not an acceptable answer and makes people angry.
The second is that, from the outside, a lot of the specific planks seem very strange and nonsensical. The ostensible party of (since a few years ago) free speech, economic liberty, gun rights, social conservatism and religion, for instance. Or the ostensible party of (until a few years ago) free speech, economic regulation, decriminalization of drug offences, environmentalism, freedom from religion, social justice and social programs. I get that the parties are big tents, and that there are social-historical reasons for these various stances, but from outside it seems even more arbitrary than our own political parties and their policies (and at least we have many to choose from). Yet it is treated as not just normal but right in a sort of cosmic sense that these should all fit together just so, and that such a system is not just normal but ordinary and true across time and space. And any suggestion that you might pick and choose between different planks is treated as heresy that puts you in the other team. At the outside, you're allowed to have one deviation only (a democrat who likes guns, for instance. Or a pro-union republican) and that's it.
So the idea that it's two groups huddling ever closer together as they traumatise and demonise each other makes complete sense to me.
"Everyone agrees we’re 'addicted to outrage.' I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
I think of it this way: What people are addicted to isn't outrage per se, but the feeling of moral certitude that comes with it. When you see someone you hate doing something outrageous, it reinforces how correct you are to oppose them. "See! I'm right! These people really *are* dumb/crazy/evil!" That's the part that feels so intoxicating, at least to me.
I don't disagree with the trauma analogy, though. Maybe it could be either, or some mix of both, depending on the person?
A good example of the addiction to trauma or distress is the reluctance of the more doomsterish adherents of climate change to accept relatively good news. You can be downvoted to oblivion on reddit by pointing out that the more extreme projections are crazy, even if you link to the ISPCC reports or to NASA‘s climate website.
For instance I’ve seen maps on how flooded certain cities will be by 2050, some showing these cities under metres, or several feet, of water while the official statistics show sea level increasing by 3.4mm a year. That rate is accelerating but not significantly.
Assuming some acceleration there will be maximum 100mm increase by 2050 (without acceleration it’s 88mm).
Anyway it’s about 4 inches in American. Most cities don’t flood at the very highest tide in any one year (absent a storm surge) - and the difference between the highest tide of the year and the average high tide is significant*.
Which means that cities will not be under water either at all, or at the most slightly more - and only during extreme conditions - by 2050. (2100 is a different story if acceleration continues but that’s an era that even teenagers can’t personally worry about).
Anyway pointing out that 2050 will be ok can get you downvoted on sites where people are traumatised by climate change.
Is it really trauma, then. Wouldn’t you like to get rid of trauma? Or is it the thrill of something like a roller coaster - something that feels scary but really isn’t.
My personal anecdote suggests that this is a major part of it. I wouldn't have minded a lot of the other stuff, but seeing people whom I had trusted, whom I had thought of as friends, say things which implied that my suffering was good and righteous, that was what got to me in the end. So to pick a not-me example, it wasn't just Trump being elected that caused the trauma, it was that half the country supported this **monster** , and were cheering him on, and celebrating that you were now **threatened and powerless** , and whenever you walked down the street you were passing people whom you **knew** would just as soon Thanos-snap you away to make the world a better place in their eyes.
> It was the worst experience of my life.
I hadn't heard this story before. I think I feel your pain.
> entirely new kinds of social technology
That's just plain brilliant!
> John Smith is a Nazi pedophile
After Rufus Sewell's wonderful performance playing Obergruppenführer John Smith in "The Man in the High Castle", both the name and the actor give me the creeps. Most particularly in the "Victoria" miniseries. (I don't recall him being pedophilic, though.)
> traumatic reenactment
I have not read the rest of the post yet, but in my experience, the thing I **really** want is to view the triggering event through a safe and supportive lens. So if I'm left-wing and traumatized by Trump, I'd look up sites where fellow left-wing people point out all the bad things about him, and condemn them and mock them. I'm feeling safer by finding a community where everyone feels the way I do. If my trauma is less common, and it's harder to find a community, there's still a sort of distance involved on the Internet. Or there would be, if I didn't have PTSD. So I constantly try to find examples so that I can calmly sit back and critique them from a distance, but then I come to and realize that I've been pounding my fists bloody on the floor for the last minute. (That's one of the rarer and more extreme examples, but I think it's illustrative enough.) Perhaps some of the re-enactment is similar, in that the traumatized person is looking to build new memories, to reassure themselves that "not all men who act like that are bad", but then...
> I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.”
Looks like I nailed it. :-)
> suppose you are so afraid of everyone that it is impossible to have a good experience with a new person
The most convincing explanation that I've heard is that, with normal memories, the emotional salience fades over time, and it gets "sepia-toned". But with PTSD memories, there's a malfunction somewhere (I've heard the amygdala), and the full, fresh emotional content gets dumped into our nervous system whenever the memory is recalled, thus leading to the creation of new memories with the same salience as the old. Possibly this relates to that thing where, unlike in a classical computer, in the human brain's neural network, memories are written each time they're accessed.
> you are absolutely sure your side is right
See, the thing for me (and possibly you?) is that the side that traumatized me **was** my side. I dunno how that fits into your model, but it feels very significant to me.
> On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
Oh, yes, here we go.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
They did, however, suffer episodes of possession, as well as whatever happened to poor Ajax. See above about pounding my fists bloody; I spend a lot of time alone because I don't want to see what happens if I'm around someone who triggers me personally. I used to try to "integrate" my PTSD with my old personality, but the desire for vengeance was stronger than anything else I felt. So then I started treating it as a separate thing, talking about how I felt and how my PTSD felt, and that seems to have worked better. But if I had to give it a name, I know exactly what it would be: Nemesi, pteroessa biou rhopa, kyanopi thea, thygater Dikas.
> they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing
So did we, in June 1914, and before Vietnam. Turned out we were wrong.
> this theory is dangerous even if it’s true
Heh, I was just discussing with Villiam the difference between "rationality as truth-seeking" and "rationality as systematized winning".
> making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil
~~~But hey, it attracts eyeballs and sells ads! So if that's what the Algorithm determines that you want to see in your Feed, what could possibly be wrong with that!~~~ But seriously, I've been flippantly blaming Facebook (and later Twitter) for this shit, but the true culprit is ad-supported Internet hosting and crowd-sourced content combining with an algorithm that only measures "time spent viewing" and "interaction". I stopped using Facebook as soon as it started making it difficult to see all and only what I chose. I also made sure to make sure news sites never gave me personalized news or ads, just the generic stuff, because I didn't want them playing to my biases. Alas, it didn't magically protect me, but perhaps I am ever so slightly more aware because of it. **shrug**
Magnificent piece. I'm not sure that our current media machine is maximally traumatic, though - media machines in the past have surely gone further in this direction. If your media consumption was German protestant pamphlets in the 16th century, for example. Or Soviet or Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Or the tradition of martyrology - Foxe's Book Of Martyrs was surely more prominent in the media diet of the English in the late 16th/17th century than its equivalents are today, and its illustrations more traumatising to those at the time than modern day equivalents.
The modern media machine incorporates the profit motive; maybe that mitigates the drive to cause the maximum amount of trauma.
I have noticed a tendency for my friends to not be very political. Most of them are onto embodiment, meditation, and different experiences that plausably trigger memory reconsolidation.
Given the trapped prior model, I'm curious what the uptick in psychedelics will do to the political landscape.
Fascinating. Great article and many of the comments provide yet more insights. I feel passionately that psychologists should be working on this topic to provide new insights into human thinking. Something like an update to Jon Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which for sure had its flaws but dug into aspects of this topic. If anyone can point me towards current psychology that does develop these ideas, please let me know.
This also fits with the theory of negative polarization (Nate Silver, Ezra Klein and others have written about). That basically a lot of the source of current political dysfunction is that people are very negatively polarized against the other side, but not strongly positive to their side. Which makes sense with the trauma analogy. Fear of dogs doesn't cause you to love cats
I was going to write something about tribalism and trauma not really being mental illnesses since they're just standard brain function, but... god damn it, what's even the point? It's not like we can fix any of this. Humanity is irredeemably flawed at its core. Knowing that doesn't mean we can suddenly solve it... We're still just human.
I find it interesting that most of these problems seem weirdly US specific.
I'm a European (living in Europe) with a lot of exposure to English-language media, and there's definitely a huge difference between our respective media environments. Not that there isn't politics here, but people seem far less outraged about it. Major news programs still find plenty of time for the "somebody had an accident, please drive safely" or "our national museum just bought some Rembrandt pictures nobody really cares about" kind of stories.
To give a few examples, "dogwhistles" and "triggers" don't have equivalents in my language, the latter are sometimes used by sources that identify themselves as far left, but that's about it. The "<x> are only doing <y> because they hate <z>" rhetoric seems to be entirely missing, I can't think of a single example here while I can think of a dozen in the US. Namecalling also seems to be a lot less common, the worst you hear is usually something along the lines of "are they insane or what?"
I can't figure out why this difference exists. Many people blame polarization on tech and social media, but yet we use almost exactly the same tech and social media (maybe with less X and more Facebook) and polarization is much smaller, so there must be more to it. The UK seems to be closer to the US than the rest of Europe in this regard, so language isolation probably plays a part here, I wonder how Australia and European countries with extremely high English proficiencies are doing at this.
This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I also suffer from the obsessive habit of engaging with written material that 'triggers' me in one way or another, and I have also begun to come around to the position that it's due to an unconscious wish to reenact certain events, but give them a better ending. Also agree 100% with disengaging (or at least strategically minimising) exposure to outrage/fear inducing media.
One book I've read recently included its own definition of trauma, which featured, in part, the subjective criteria "The person feels they are powerless to control the circumstance or event"
Looking through that lens at how many people approach politics - that seems to fit strongly. Even for a person with an superlatively internal locus of control, almost everything that goes on in politics - and especially the payload of political news - involves things that are objectively entirely outside one's power to influence.
The supreme court is deciding whether you're allowed to get gay-married? with the exception of a lawyer and a handful of plaintiffs, the rest of the country can do nothing but sit back and watch.
worried about what topics - and viewpoints - are getting taught in schools? Even if you're active in your own PTA, there's an entire nation out there shifting in ways you can hear about, but can't impact.
Political news is a never-ending stream of things that might be going wrong, things that might make your life worse, that you have effectively no power to stop.
* rather than adding politics to the list of potential triggers, it might make more sense to slim down the list of 'mental illnesses' that has been so expanded in recent times. For example, much of what is now called depression used to be called that plain old thing.... unhappiness.
* One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention is that it saw a retreat from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised. People drunk on their own self esteem will have inflated expectations that they deserve never to be made 'unhappy' by anything so annoying as 'reality'.
> Is this actually a good way to express a concept for public consumption?
The snag is that claims of trauma not directly related to violence and tragedy are themselves triggering because they feel like emotional blackmail, weaponised "hurt feelings", and narcissism.
"already maxed our our ability to feel" < s/our/out/
That cancellation experience as part of your experience to draw on has made you one of the most well-rounded thought leaders I'm aware of. Great for society and those who read you. Not great for you.
I've skirted the edges of cancellation (I've been, how do I say... micro-canceled?) and it's deeply unpleasant and unsettling. Finally understanding how shallow and fleeting is "friendship" is hard. Approval or even willingness-to-associate-with-you can be removed by the slightest whim.
Realising what you thought were deep and personal connections were in fact tenuous threads... a very disconcerting world-view adjustment.
I am very sorry you had to endure it.
I suppose, for those who are going through cancellation, or whatever, I should link two resources I found helpful. Warning: both of these are going to be from people who are probably your outgroup.
I was going to link a video, but now I can't find it. So I shall summarise. When you are canceled, or go through a struggle session, or whatever you want to call it, it is quite literally one of the worst things that can happen to you, and those who trivialise it saying things like "oh poor snowflake lost your job and now you have to find another one" or whatever are failing to grasp the level of pain those individuals are going through.
Now that I think about it, maybe avoiding trauma-inducing media is the opposite of what you want to do. The problem is that the triggering content is only consumed intermittently, reinforcing trapped priors. But there is a physical limit to how much distress a situation can cause. If you constantly consume the triggering content without pause, you will eventually grow completely numb to it. This is the idea behind Exposure Therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy , and presumably the same thing that causes Stockholm Syndrome.
...You know, maybe this is why I was able stop caring about things. I used to have plenty of empathy, far too much of it, even. Reading about horrible things happening on the other side of the world was enough to make me suicidal. But I guess there's a limit to how bad you can feel about things, because I eventually just stopped being able to feel empathy. It's definitely better this way, but... I'm still so miserable. Am I still caring too much? Is it even possible for me to feel happy?
A slight flaw in this theory is that politics has existed for literally the entire existence of humanity, but this love affair with political trauma has only showed up among the general population in the past 20 years or so, and has conspicuously coupled itself primarily with one political view of the world. Similarly, it's pretty suspicious that rates of mental illness are ludicrously high these days, and this leads to rates of medication being ludicrously high. And the rates are politically lopsided. Strangely, lopsided in favour of the side that broadly thinks about "systemic" things, and "alienation" and "group identity."
I believe Scott has talked about contrarians before, mostly negatively. Well, an obvious good thing about contrarians is they reject nonsense about belonging to groups, or believing school yard taunts. The more you hear it, the more you reject it. In this particular case we can call it being psychologically anti-fragile. Of course, back in my day we had sayings about sticks and stones, and talk being cheap, so it wasn't just contrarians who could ignore this stuff. Funny how I've seen modern young people outright and explicitly reject the sticks and stones theory, and now it's just a truism that "words have power."
I'm not saying the concept of trauma is a conspiracy to sell pills. I am saying this entire way of thinking is both dangerous and wrong. Very very obviously, nobody is being helped by psychology and therapy in this case, and the entire political discourse will obviously make everybody who believes it trauma victims. Or to more neutrally say it, it will awaken in them a true class consciousness. It's designed to do this. Nobody acted in a conspiracy to do it, it's just in the water.
“Ever since then, when I read arguments promoting social justice and cancel culture, or saying that their victims are probably bad people and shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, I get all kinds of easily noticeable unpleasant bodily and emotional reactions.”
This is called a schema, and you can manually rewrite this belief/emotional response. After the rewrite, the autonomic nervous system activation won’t get triggered either.
Does this mean that if as a victim of sexual abuse I speak (outside therapy) about the abuse I am traumatizing others, that I should obtain consent before doing so? It seems like yes, it does mean that
> I had my bad cancellation experience before “cancel culture” entered the national scene. But once it did, I found myself over-focusing on cancel culture stories, especially the most outrageous ones (“college students attack white yoga instructor for culturally appropriating ancient Indian practice!”) Looking back, I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.” Or, even if that didn’t happen, getting to retell it in a way that had moral clarity, where no reasonable person was on the side of the cancellers - even if things ended badly for the yoga instructor, I could tell it in a way that ended with “but she was clearly a misunderstood martyr, and this proves the rightness of the anti-woke cause.”
---
Scott, isn't the simplest psychological explanation that you got set upon by a mob, and that the best thing an individual facing a mob can do is get a crowd of their own to back them up?
Even if you aren't bonding and connecting directly, knowledge that the people who made you suffer are getting pushed back, so they aren't likely to make you suffer again, can provide relief, but if you don't know whether they're getting any pushback or not, your mind is free to submit the worst-case scenarios at its leisure.
To use war as an example, the fact that you were victimized by it is even more reason to keep constantly abreast of the state of the fighting, because that's the only way to know your side is winning. (And this is important, because if your side loses, you're gonna get victimized all over again.)
As an old white man, I had less motive to feel traumatized by Trump than most people. Of course am a Liberal and so could feel some threat. But I have a secret weapon. I am an economist and can write (then on facebook now on Substack https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com ) criticizing specific Trump policies like trade wars and tax cuts for the rich that create deficits. This means I'm not a HELPLESS victim. It also provided a reason to limit the range of issues I will pay attention to and potentially few outraged by.
"ut I’m skipping entirely over the non-optional Section C: “persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event”. "
Um .... blocking people on Facebook and X. There are some people on X who use an automated blocking system. E.g. anybody who followed Andrew Tate got blocked by 3rd Wave Feminists, anybody who follows J.K.Rowling gets blocked by Transfolk.
"Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things."
If anybody ever asked me that, I would not assume it was "can you perform addition or subtraction, as it might be?" but that there was some opinion searching going on ("do you think Democrats ought to be shot dead and we need extra guns to make sure we get them all?") and yeah I'd go off on a tangent about "no shooty no gunz no Demz".
As for that article:
(1) It's from 2014, anyone remember what the Big Threat at that time was? I notice Klein pulls in Scalia as a Partisan Bogeyman to get Science Guy to agree with him on this, which probably proves Science Guy's point for him, but I can't remember what we were all supposed to clutch our pearls about back then
As a therapist, this is interesting, but I think the addiction framing is a lot more useful than the trauma framing in explaining why people seek to be outraged. I think people are more dopamine-seeking than ever before thanks to technology and optimized algorithms that are able to give us immediate stimulation (higher in both frequency and magnitude). And one of the most stimulating things is to be outraged.
That said, I do think the trauma analogy is useful when explaining the symptoms people experience after being exposed to the politically outraging material. Someone with military PTSD might experience heightened anxiety when in front of a window for example. Someone with political “PTSD” will experience higher vigilance around domains where the other party might be present.
Important, insightful, generous in human sympathy--I love this essay. I can think of three related sub-points that might be worth adding, all connected with history and especially the way history is often constructed and taught (I spent my working life as a college history teacher). First, history does seem to contain not a few moments in which political events led to dramatic, unpredictable, and often violent change, occasionally leading to things like war, reeducation camps, or major social reordering. Consider the French Revolution, or the 1860 US presidential election, or the Communist victory in China in 1949. That's not *at all* to say we are on the verge of such changes--just that the models are there to influence the way people think and, especially, fear. Second, the way historians teach and write about their subject tends to emphasize such dramatic changes, the strong beliefs and disagreements that led to them, and their consequences (=dangers, at least for some); and then we assign papers or tests to get students to think about these, etc. A European history survey is likely to spend two weeks on the French Revolution, with lots of dripping guillotine blades, etc., but little time at all on, say, the relatively tepid 1720s and 30s. So we emphasize the sudden change model and its risks. Third, history is often told according to a trope of trauma. Sometimes this means trauma followed by vindication (think about the ways the stories of Alfred the Great or Robert the Bruce have been told), or trauma followed by "we're still waiting for vindication," or trauma and "this may happen again at any time." I realize that many students are just trying to get through a course requirement and may not be paying that close attention--but I think all this may have some effect nevertheless.
Why is almost everyone taking the "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD" claim at face value? The simplest explanation is that it's not true. They simply didn't have the language to describe PTSD, and in warrior cultures where combat was valorized, people would've been strongly incentivized to cover up symptoms of combat-related trauma. The really extreme cases that couldn't be covered up would just be attributed to individual "madness."
That's not to say that all of the other explanations are wrong: It's easy enough to believe that modern warfare is *more* traumatic for various reasons. But the idea that pre-modern combatants didn't get PTSD at all just seems like an erroneous assumption.
You keep bringing up the racism = trauma thing and it keeps persuading me in the opposite direction. That seems like made-up bullshit in exactly the same way as "it's okay to ignore lockdowns to attend a thousand-person George Floyd protest": who benefits? And if one element of trauma is made-up, probably others are too.
You say the DSM exists to draw a boundary around what counts and what doesn't, why should we assume this boundary corresponds to what actually exists rather than what psychologists would prefer we gave our sympathy to?
Scott, always love your thoughts, though I don't find this argument particularly persuasive.
The question is whether is provides a good explanation or is useful to frame politics as trauma. If the argument is essentially the principles of astrology (cherry picking and flexibly applying nebulous dimensional criteria), then it is not a useful for explanation. For example, zero-ing in on "avoidance" components of PTSD and "re-enactment" components as explanations of behavior - while real phenomena in PTSD - can obviously be used as a carte blanche for any type of behavior. In this framing, avoidance or engagement or anything in between (so all behavior) are seen as evidence of trauma. But this is about as useful as hearing from Geico that you could save up to 15% or more.
There are many other features of political engagement that are better explained by other threads - tribalism, meaning making, connection, motivated reasoning, appreciation of threat. Further, political engagement is a large enterprise that is going to involve the whole breadth of human cognition, and because of this complexity nothing is every going to reduce down to something like trauma psychology.
I agree there are underlying structures and organization to the brain that pervade all of our functioning, and something like predictive processing seems to have a lot of value. I don't suppose that DSM diagnoses represent categorically distinct processes - that the circuits and learning of trauma are just absent in people. But it is also a mistake to reify a DSM diagnosis, and use its ill defined margins to explain cognitive phenomena.
I've long thought that political doomscrolling is similar to cutting--both forms of self-harm that are incomprehensible to me. There does seem to be that weird element of trauma addiction in both, but people seem to think they are doing something virtuous with the doomscrolling. "I'm staying informed!" As far as I know, cutters see it as something secret and shameful. But I could be easily mistaken here.
This is an excellent piece that I suspect people are going to nitpick the details of in order to avoid engaging with the central point, which strikes me as quite plausible. In fact, casting the discussion in terms of trauma and psychiatric disorder in general is likely to be a major distraction for a lot of people. Perhaps a slightly milder way of putting things is this: trauma represents a set of normal psychological processes under extreme conditions. Politics seems to engage those same normal psychological processes, often to a surprising degree.
From my own personal experience, I have noticed that my reaction to a lot of political issues can be surprisingly vibes-based, depending on my own personal interaction with that issue. For example, immigration is just not a hot-button for me. I have opinions about policy and I have opinions about the culture war aspects of immigration, but I can't pretend to have a ton of emotional energy around them. On the other hand, there are some issues related to identity politics where I personally have gotten enmeshed in arguments and accusations and find that I have emotional reactions that seem disconnected from my actual beliefs about those issues. I might find myself reacting defensively or with an internal eyeroll toward certain statements even if, objectively, I don't think those statements are invalid opinions to hold. (I might not agree with them, but there are lots of opinions I don't agree with that I'm respectful of.)
I wouldn't call my reactions here trauma per se, but they have convinced me that in general the right stance toward most political news and discussions is disengagement, the opposite of Scott's depiction of trauma addiction. That is, I've recognized that a lot of my experience of politics is a sort of low-key unpleasant emotional reactivity that seems at best pointless and at worst actively harmful.
> D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others.
> As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics.
Doesn't it? It seems to me that the political trauma syndrome includes plenty of distorted thinking about why the other side does the traumatizing thing, or the consequences thereof, and plenty of blaming. This very blog post cites an excellent example:
> I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies. And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission.
This kind of topic exploration shows an unparalleled ability to simulate the mind of another person, plus the ability to express the resulting exploration such that a third person can feel like they themselves understand the second person.
I regularly wish I could debate on one topic or another, and I don't love every post, but this feels a lot like "to whom shall we go" -- I've never found comparable insight elsewhere.
> The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia
This is not true. This is a dynamic that actually happens with authoritarian backsliding countries (e.g. Turkey); as governments turn authoritarian and consolidate power over elites (especially in journalism), elites race to cut deals with people in the security apparatus to be early investors/adopters of the winning side/team.
They don't actively plot to dismantle everything good in the world, but they sure do plot to dismantle what's left of democratic institutions in their particular country (or just continue market competition).
If outrage-based political media can succeed brilliantly by using trauma addiction as a marketing principle, I worry that this suggests a scary vulnerability in consumer psychology in general.
It's common for products to use addiction dynamics to maintain high levels of consumer demand, but we tend to think about that as a manipulation of the customer's pleasure circuitry (putting small amounts of sugar in our bread and chips, putting addictive reward systems in our smartphone games, getting kids hooked on smoooth relaxing nicotine, etc.). If it 's just as easy to get someone addicted by traumatizing them, then that lays the groundwork for an entirely new level of consumer hellscape, because it's on average much easier and cheaper to frighten or hurt someone than to figure out how to please them.
Arguably some products work like this already, reaching out to make your life suddenly much worse in order to get you obsessively returning to them for solutions that never pan out. A lot of cosmetic marketing starts by highlighting how a previously-unnoticed feature of your body is actually horrifyingly gross and ugly, you should definitely buy something to fix it so that people don't sneer at you behind your back (as they are almost certainly already doing). Porn exposure in childhood can lead to sex addiction and compulsive porn habits in adulthood, so places like PornHub will definitely benefit from having graphic sexual content widely available to kids on the internet. It's not a new dynamic - trauma marketing is basically how Harold Hill sells trombones to the rubes in _The Music Man_ - but something about the individual's vulnerability to uninvited pop-up memes in an online environment makes it feel particularly threatening in the context of twenty-first century virtual life. In the old days, the protection racket had to actually move in and take over your neighborhood, but these days they can just blast out a scary link on Twitter and work on converting whoever clicks.
I've noticed that it seems like every sexual assault is about every other sexual assault. For example, when Kavanaugh was getting accused, the focus didn't really seem to be on "What actually happened in this case?". The focus was more on "Are we a society that takes sexual assault seriously?", with women had been victims in unrelated cases acting like the result of that case was a referendum on their situation.
This post gives me a framework to make sense of that phenomenon.
> Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
This is actually what powers the motivation pyramid scheme that fuels the far-left (maybe the far right too). On some level, they feel they need to participate as much as possible maximize other people's motivation, in order to minimize the number of people on their side who end up not showing for election day.
This is a good piece, and it makes me want to be more charitable toward people who get triggered by politics (for whatever reason, I'm not one of them).
It also helps me understand how contemporary culture seems so effective in fostering a sort of learned helplessness (also a trauma cause and/or effect, yes?) in so many people. Part of it must also have to do with the diversion of people's social brains from local and irl toward more distant concerns.
Helplessness can be seductive if you're living a depressing but comfortable life. You get to enjoy a sense of moral superiority without taking responsibility for anything. You're affirmed in taking refuge in whatever soothing or sedating amusements you're inclined to fill your time with, while admiring the impressive person you could and would be if it weren't for all those factors beyond your control. Maybe this plays a role in political trauma addiction?
I'm currently reading this post, but... where did PTSD come from, then? I thought that it was ~first recognized in veterans of WW1, so the reasons why that blog offers don't seem to hold up if that's the case.
"I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare"
My understanding was that the countries and soldiers went into WW1 with tremendous gusto to protect/expand their country or allies. Nobody considered it a necessary evil, at least at the start.
"But I also suspect that the raw ubiquity of the experience mattered too."
War was still pretty common at that point, and WW1 itself was so all-encompassing that it seems like everyone they knew would either have died or understand it themself, and they would have known their comrades from before as well (I believe WW1 was the end of putting everyone from 1 town in the same unit, as some towns lost their entire young adult male population).
"Moreover, these societies tended to have rituals surrounding the transition out of war."
If this is the case, when did it stop and why? If medieval Europe had these rituals, why not the Europe of 1918, which was still very Christian?
Was WW1 just so overwhelmingly horrible, with so many deaths in such horrible and hopeless conditions (e.g. trench warfare and war of attrition), continued over such a long and continuous time period (ancient armies typically couldn't do much in winter or fight continuously for months), and at such a scale and death rate (maybe you observe literally every other man in your age group in your town and the surrounding towns die in the first few months), that it just completely overwhelmed all of these mechanisms? No placebo ritual, no pre-existing belief in the glory of war, could overcome such an experience? And there was nobody to talk to, because they were all dead?
>>>[Part 4] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work-related.
>>>Did someone prove it was a natural law that you can only be traumatized by seeing a story on TV if it’s for work? Or is this another unprincipled compromise?
Great article, and good point, but here's some potentially useful anecdotal material:
In Google Search it used to be that you could go work in Zurich, which was attractive, but you'd work on the safe search team, and they'd retire you from it after a year, because they determined that any more than that caused serious damage.
Looking at the really bad stuff that Google filters out of search results directly causes observable PTSD. I think. And I think this is what they're getting at, not a natural law but an experientially determined special case.
A regular person with a regular breakable brain could and probably would look away when it felt like too much, but if it was your job, and you felt a moral obligation to do it because it was helping mitigate the problem for everyone else, you probably wouldn't look away when you should.
... And it seems like some of the problem here is that regular people have been convinced that doomscrolling is their job and moral obligation.
(Edit: I changed "regular people have decided" to "regular people have been convinced that")
This line of argument reminded me of a quote I keep in my quotes file:
"Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrust upon us by the world we live in, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again.
"And, as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.”
- Tim Kreider, "Isn't It Outrageous?" in the NYT
I know that's not quite the mechanism that Scott proposes here. In Kreider's essay, this behavior is about the "high" of righteous indignation; in Scott's, it's about trauma and re-enactment.
I think the best formulation about the effect of politics is that it fucks people up.
My training in psychology was old-school, and I was taught that PTSD was essentially shell-shock, and that events that caused the same syndrome in people who were not in combat had the same characteristics as combat: violence & injury, or danger of injury or death far beyond what most people ever experience — suddenness & unexpectedness — situation in which you have virtually no power to protect yourself. PTSD symptoms were things that you mostly do not see in other disorders: nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance of innocuous things that were reminders of the trauma, desperate efforts to push the memory out of awareness, loss of the basic sense of everydayness and reasonable safety we walk around with, a weird sense of numbness and separateness. Had a training with famous psychologist Donald Meichenbaum who described some of his cases, and all were caused by events involving a combat-level of horrific violence: prisoners who had been tortured; a truck driver who had had to brake suddenly, and when he did a steel rod from his cargo broke through the back of his cab and went all the way through the skull of his hitchhiker; a woman who accidentally shot her daughter.
While I have no doubt that other sorts of bad experiences can do terrible damage to people that can last a lifetime, it seems to me that there really is something unique about the damage done by combat-like experiences. I myself have had 2 experiences that probably make it into the less severe end of that category, and both caused a unique cluster of symptoms. The first occurred when I was about 12. I witnessed a young guy who had had a motorcycle accident lying in the street with a terribly mangled leg, screaming like I did not know it was even possible to scream. For quite a long time afterwards I had dreams of the event, and also extremely vivid involuntary replays of the memory when I was awake. I did not like looking at the part of the road where the guy had lain. And I felt weird all the time . It was pretty much the way the Harry Potter dementors made people feel — like I would never be happy again. I couldn’t get away from the dark glimpse I’ve gotten of somebody’s agony, the knowledge that that could happen to anyone.
The second incident happened when I was an adult. The electricity was out, and I lit my little backpacking stove in the bathroom to make a cup of tea. Saw that the rubber ring on the tank was on fire, and realized that was going to lead to the pressurized gas exploding out of the tank. Started to reach for the knob that would shut off the tank, then changed my mind and yanked my hand back. A nanosecond later the ring burned through and stove turned into a giant blowtorch and lit parts of my bathroom on fire. I was unhurt and the fire department put out the fire quickly so that the damage was not too bad. But for about a week I could not sleep, and kept having involuntary replays of the incident, plus involuntary imaginings of what would have happened if I hadn’t yanked my hand back at the last moment. I had to leave work on a couple of afternoons because I simply could not pay attention to what people were saying — my mind was completely taken up by replays of the event, and of the event that had almost happened. And I had again that same feeling of no longer being in the land of the living.
These 2 events actually would not make it onto the list of the worst things I’ve been through. They were shocking and grisly, but unlike the things on the Really Bad list, they did not damage my self esteem, or my feeling of fellowship with other people, and they did not involve a loss. However, they caused a syndrome that the worst things in my life have not.
I really think there is a good case for reserving a special word for the syndrome some people get after sudden shocking, grisly life-or-death events. If you want to use the term PTSD for the effects of a much broader class of harmful events, that’s OK I guess, but then you need a new word for the special class of harmful events that get stuck on replay in the mind, and cause that dementor-bled feeling. I don’t think politics causes anything remotely like that experience. Politics just fucks us up
“ So for example, in 1979 some psychologists asked partisans to read pairs of studies about capital punishment (a controversial issue at the time), then asked them to rate the methodologies on a scale from -8 to 8. Conservatives rated the pro-punishment study at about +2 and the anti-execution study as about -2; liberals gave an only slightly smaller difference the opposite direction.”
I know this is nitpicky, and doesn’t invalidate the broader point, but the above is actually a perfectly valid example of bayesian reasoning. Suppose I believe P(death penalty reduces crime) = 0.8, that 30% of studies on any given topic are flawed, and that all good studies will be accurate but flawed studies always return the wrong result. Thus, if a study agrees with me the probability that it is correct is 0.7*0.8/(0.7*0.8 + 0.3*0.2) = 0.9, so only a 10% chance that it is flawed, while my estimation that the death penalty is effective is also now 90%, because this is wrong if and only if the study is flawed.* On the other hand, if I encunter a study which contradicts my prior, I calculate the probaiblity of the study being flawed is 0.3*0.8/(0.3*0.8 + 0.7 * 0.2) = 0.63, meaning a 63% chance the study is flawed, but also only a 63% chance that I am right about the death penalty. So studies which contridict my priors are about 6 times more likely to be flawed than studies which don’t.
Of course, in practice I doubt the particpants updated their beliefs about the death penalty at all, but this was also rational. Given they were in a lab, and that they probablly rightly suspected relavent information about the studies was being withheld, the optimal strategy would be “evaluate studies based on my priors, because I lack a better way to do so, but don’t update in the way the studies would otherwise suggest.” Not that they were thinking this, but human behavior often comes closer to what the math would say is optimal than their concious thoughts would lead you to believe.
*this isn’t very realistic, which is why I orignally modeled flawed studies as random, but that makes the math harder to follow
> persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event
This is "safe spaces", I think? Not in the original sense, but in the sense of "anyone with possibly Republican-leaning views must be banished from the entire campus and all speakers vetted beforehand". Also, the kind of person that thrived in pre-Musk twitter but has now quit in disgust, because the previous owners had figured out that one way to maximise engagement/retention was to not confront you with people or ideas you don't want to hear.
Regarding PTSD before the era of Van der Kolk: an interesting data point comes from Kate Summerscale's book The Haunting of Alma Fielding. The setting is 1930s Britain, everyone knows that a catastrophic war is just round the corner, and people need outlets for their anxiety. No-one has heard of PTSD yet (shell shock maybe, but you don't get that from living in London). But, polite society does believe in the supernatural, and the title character expresses her trauma (as we'd call it in modern terms) in hauntings, apparitions and becoming a medium.
To quote one review: "Nandor Fodor - a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research - begins to investigate. In doing so he discovers a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss - and the foreshadowing of a nation's worst fears. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor's obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed."
You bring up complex PTSD in passing, but at times approach political trauma in this post as if there is a discrete initial traumatic event that later symptoms and retraumatization stem from. I'd like to point out that societal and environmental sources of trauma often last over long periods of time. In my experience, the people who are most passionate about the discourse are currently in horrible situations, not responding to them after the fact. If I look at my own history I became more chill online about religion and gender-related issues after I moved out of the Bible Belt, and again after I stopped living with my mother. (There are a bunch of confounding factors there, of course, both moves also marked significant changes in my lifestyle.) The strategies for dealing with ongoing trauma look different from the response to trauma's aftermath.
Separately: you mention but don't go into self-harm as a cause of addiction to trauma. I am aware that I live in a bubble of mental illness but I do think self-harm accounts for some of the more dramatic cases of that condition known as Terminally Online Disorder. I don't know comorbidity rates but it isn't controversial that depression and trauma can go hand in hand, and if you want to make yourself miserable on purpose digging deep into the blogs of people who hate your in-group is a fantastic way to do it.
I'm generally not a fan of Big Diagnostic turning every behavior at every standard deviation from the mean a diagnosable condition, but I think you're onto something here.
I think I had trauma around growing up gay (among other things). Being born in 1993 and realizing my orientation around 2003 I was old enough to where I guess it felt like there was a lot of ambient anti-gay sentiment. I'm aware many people clearly think this is absurd, and should objectively not be traumatizing.
Probably legalization of gay marriage 'cured' this trauma but also became a sort of obsession, and finding out someone voted against it (especially a younger person) would feel deeply violating in a way where it felt somewhat rape-adjacent in my mind. It was like they wanted to remove autonomy and dignity from me, in a very personal way and for no clear reason, and that was layered on top of the other stigma-related trauma I had around my sexual orientation. The trauma says “GET AWAY FROM THE HOMOPHOBIA! FIND SAFETY!!!” but it feels like you can’t do that if it’s the law of your country.
I think tho thankfully with legalization in Western countries and things settling down I've become center-left slightly anti-woke (I'm also a cis white man). The gay marriage thing, in terms of its psychic meaning, can easily be interpreted as "then society decided homophobia was bad", and I think this allowed me to move on. Maybe I’m fortunate.
I only seem to get traumatized around things that specifically affect me. I also consume ~no news or social media which seems to have palpably improved my mental health.
The Latvian pine slug (Album ashkeniger) is a large and rare species of slug that lives in the forests of Latvia, Pskov Oblast (formerly part of the Soviet Union). It is the largest land slug in Europe, reaching up to 30 cm in length; being slightly longer than the Turkish giant slug and Russian tundra snail. Male snails are slightly larger but with smaller nervous systems compared to females. It feeds exclusively on fresh and locally sourced organic matter. Its shell is dark grey with a distinct “cracked” texture, marked with white spots vaguely resembling the letter “Z”. It is also known as the grey cracker slug or the Latvian japper.
The life cycle of the Latvian pine slug is complex and intriguing. All individuals are born as males, with some transitioning to females as they mature. The trigger for this process is unclear; debate is ongoing whether this is genetically predetermined or influenced by the sex ratio of the population. The male slug aggressively pursues females and repeatedly attempts to initiate copulation. As the female is smaller in size, the male eventually corners her and deposits his sperm. She then lays up to 200 eggs in moist soil or under logs. The eggs hatch after a few weeks: slug parental care is infrequent and highly variable between subspecies, seemingly having substantial effects on the fitness of its offspring.
The slug is abundantly found, but may be threatened by climate change as increased drought spells would lead to desiccation of the eggs and massive population drops. However, some researchers suggest that the slugs would simply adapt by migrating and laying eggs in moister areas.
This resonated with me particularly given my experience with my dad and brother who got into Rush Limbaugh early. I remember being with my dad and hearing Limbaugh repeating over and over again "Liberals HATE YOU! They HATE YOU!" Like a mantra. It's forcing a trapped prior. Any disagreement if with them if you're not part of that isn't just a disagreement. It's reinforcing that "liberals hate you and don't respect you". It's not about facts anymore. It's about reliving that.
> they find listening a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space.
If only that was all of the problem. The problem is they find the knowledge that somebody, somewhere on campus (or even off campus) is listening to a discordant opinion is equally intolerable. It's like a claustrophobic person that thinks there should be no enclosed spaces in the universe, at all.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
The correct analogy would be "imagine somebody giving a diversity training where the participation is completely voluntary and you free to not go there at all, but you still are offended by the fact that somebody goes there". Which, admittedly, happens, but I think less frequently than the original one.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD. Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by cross-cultural comparisons and research on depression: thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
Poverty in the US seems PTSD coded as well. I've never experienced poverty, so maybe this is my ignorance talking, but my parents and aunts and uncles all did. Like third-world, grim meathook poverty including death from preventable illnesses, not having enough to eat, and the random bout of horrific violence. When they escaped they lived as illegal immigrants in another country. Don't get me wrong, they weren't fleeing the Khmer Rouge or anything, but it was closer to that than US poverty. And... as far as I can tell, none of them have PTSD from it. They're not supposed to feel traumatized by this, because everyone went through this, so... they're fine?
Meanwhile a bunch of friends here in the US grew up in relatively cushy (but probably still bad) first-world poverty and they seem scarred for life from it. They're "supposed to" feel traumatized by it, so they are.
Here's a theory: maybe the reason so many people feel traumatised is that society's just got much bigger than any human mind can track, meaning that we feel -- often accurately -- that our lives are at the mercy of impersonal forces we can't hope to control. Look at all the worry about AI taking our jobs, for example -- lots of people seem to agree that this is a worrying prospect, but nobody says "Well, let's just stop producing advanced AIs, problem solved." It's like technological development has gained a momentum of its own, and can't be stopped even if there's broad societal agreement that it's bad. (Aside: yes, I know not everybody thinks AI research is bad; my point is that, even among those who think it is, nobody seems to consider "don't develop AIs that will put people out of jobs" to be a feasible solution.) Or look at the economy. Even experts disagree on what is actually good for economic growth, or whether a given step to boost the economy will be good for actual people; from the perspective of an ordinary person, "the economy" might as well be some kind of capricious Lovecraftian god, which could choose to make you unemployed tomorrow for no reason whatsoever. As I understand it, perceived lack of control is a risk factor in being traumatised -- hence, for example, the theory that PTSD first became prevalent in the Great War because soldiers were spending so much time sitting in trenches getting shelled, without being able to make even token retaliation. So maybe a perceived lack of control over how our lives turn out is partly responsible for why everybody seems so crazy nowadays.
(Note 1: I'm aware that out-of-control events have always been a risk -- a medieval peasant might get his crops destroyed by the blight, or burnt by an invading army. But at the day-to-day level, most of his life would be lived among the same villagers he'd always known, people whom he'd know quite well, so there wouldn't have been this impersonal quality which we find in modern life. Even if he was a serf and only partially free, his lord was a specific individual whom he could appeal to, at least in principle, if he didn't like how his village was being run. You can't appeal to the global economy if you don't like how its affecting your community. Even appealing to your MP, or local equivalent, is unlikely to have much effect, and the chain between you writing to your MP and meaningful structural economic change occurring is going to be much longer and more convoluted than the chain between you petitioning your lord to do something and your lord doing it.)
(Note 2: This theory would also explain why things seem to have got so much crazier since the Covid lockdowns. "The government can and does repeatedly shut down society for indefinite amounts of time, at unpredictable intervals, with virtually no prior warning" is like a textbook case of a situation where ordinary people lack control over their own lives.)
While it was a pretty minor one compared to what Scott personally experienced I actually did feel a period of secondhand trauma during the nyt incident.
Yeah! I stopped paying attention to the news several years ago, (sometime around Trumps first impeachment, I had TDS before that.) The news media now makes money by pushing your buttons so that tomorrow you'll come back for more. I encourage everyone to get off that tread mill, and pay attention to what is going on around you. (locally)
There’s a scene in the movie Dream Scenario (minimal spoilers) where Nicholas Cage’s students have to undergo a group cognitive behavioral session consisting of Cage standing on the other side of the gymnasium, and taking a few steps closer to them at a time - the goal being he can stand right in front of then without freaking them out.
I think this basically needs to happen with voters.
I suspect that this definition of trauma proves too much and that basically anything could be called trauma by these lights.
Take going to the grocery store (I work at a grocery store, so it's the first example that comes to mind). Anecdotally, people are worse at math in grocery stores than elsewhere, given some of the questions that I've been asked about people's receipts. The people whom I discuss politics with sound a good deal less paranoid than customers, who are sometimes convinced that we're trying to overcharge them or think that the credit card reader is stealing their information. Unlike political trauma, people physically experience going to a grocery store. Not everybody experiences being hypervigilant, irritable, and persistently negative as a result of grocery shopping, just like not everybody experiences that about politics, but a lot of people do. Some people avoid the trauma by doing Instacart, but others become unhealthily obsessed with comparison shopping.
Are grocery stores generally traumatic? I find the idea ridiculous, but many of Scott's reasons for politics being traumatic apply equally well or better to shopping. Maybe the people I know are just bizarrely well-behaved around politics, though. For that matter, I could make a similar argument about capitalism, communism, sleep (that one makes people really bad at math), school, having children, or loads of other common activities.
The most reasonable conclusion is to reject this redefinition of trauma as an overreach, and so politics aren't traumatic unless you want to hold that basically every activity is traumatic.
I remember when Less Wrong had the policy, Politcs is the Mindkiller. I thought it was so obviously true of American politics (and perhaps one reason that Canadians, as an outside party, were so successful at comedy). But it wasn't true of Canadian politics! Canadians could talk about Conservative vs NDP vs Bloc without all the "all heat, no light" of American politics.
Now Canadian politics has the same mindkiller-ness as Americans. Even discussing American politics causes a lot of (most) Canadians to forget all rationality and go completely tribal.
Am I looking at my youth with rose-coloured (note the U in 'coloured') glasses? I don't think so, but I can't think of a good way to prove it one way or another.
I haven't read it, but I've been curious about it. If correct, that would be another angle on Scott's point.
It's very tempting to assume that Nehls is just crazy, but we're all witnessing people around us being crazy, so something we don't understand is clearly going on.
So, by any chance, would anyone here have an educated opinion on Nehls' view? Obviously right, obviously wrong, sort of correct but completely wrong angle, professional, amateurish, sounds like nonsense for a certain reason - what is it?
Didn't find this post interesting as usual. Felt like I already believed something similar and didn't need to be convinced that many people are traumatized by politics or more generally that politics is overly emotional.
But of course, the topic of improving political discourse is important, so I'm not sure what I'd have preferred. I'm tempted to say a call to action, but IDK if that's Scott's thing. Maybe more speculative prescriptions, beyond consuming less outrage clickbait.
EDIT: Just remembered my speculation about dog whistles--mainstream media takes for granted that every message is optimized, and so any potential ambiguity is necessarily intentional. The average person thinks that's insane. Maybe subtext is real, but not everyone can or will make use of it, so it's wrong to assume.
I'm not convinced by this article; the usual political nonsense doesn't feel like trauma, emotionally.
It seems more lime: to demonstrate our allegiance to the in-group, we publicly denounce the outgroup. This is east to do when the outgroup is Trump.
=====
Those real life crime channels seem strange to me. What are we doing, watching these documentaries about horrible murders?
Maybe there's something of the same quality to Trump coverage. He's enough material for not just an episode, or a series, or a two season DVD boxed set, but an entire tv channel of his crazy criminal antics.
The unfortunate Captain Cook failed to ask some obvious questions, beyond oh, how nice, they hunk I'm the God Lono. We may forgive his ignorance of Hawaiian religion. But even if you were only familiar with Christianity, some questions along the lines of, hey what happened to that Jesus guy at the end? Might come to mind.
.and so to Trump, who seems worryingly unconcerned with how the story ends.
So, he's competing to be elected as some kind of God-King, locally known as "The President". In his case, the role of the candidate seems to be to be as rituallly impure as possible, violating the sacred taboos of kingship. In the religion of the United States of America, intercourse with a young virgin girl is regarded as maximally ritually polluting.
So, you have this guy, you set him up to be as impure as possible, you elect him God-king ... then what? Does a large wicker Whitehouse lie ahead?
I suffer a lot from this, especially since my latest smartphone now receives automatic news-feeds. I wish I could just stop reading them but they are addictive and I always fall prey to the (lame?) excuse of wanting to stay informed. So I end up getting worked up a lot (being a social conservative, but not a particularly economic one, I get the feeling - probably not wrong? - that I am part of a vanishing minority these days). I want to feel that my point of view is rational, that I am not the crazy one. Seeing a bunch of news articles which constantly disagree with you, "triggers" you because suddenly you are the crazy one! But I would stop short of calling all of this trauma (that certainly seems - as some have mentioned here - offensive to people with real trauma). And I am definitely convinced that media in general is purposefully trying to wratchet up our levels of outrage for profit-seeking reasons (for which we should all be outraged!).
My attempt at a remedy for 2024: put the f***ing phone down and enjoy the real world more and try hard to believe that the other side means well, even when I think they are dead wrong. Lastly, deal with everyone around me (and myself) as an individual, not part of any group. See how it works out for me...
[epistemic status: weakly informed speculation] If we do accept that PTSD exists now but not in the past, could that just be because modern wars have all kinds of skull-rattling explosions going on and ancient wars didn't? Didn't PTSD used to be called "shell shock"? WWII was pretty valorized and I believe those soldiers still suffered from PTSD.
Shit like loss aversion, the brains conflation of psychic and physically traumatic pain, and Toni Morrison saying it doesn’t matter if u your fear is real, just if you really fear,
Has had me think similarly, and the exhaustion, and the initial turn to, fear-campaigning in major US elections is the kinda pattern I’d look to see this kinda society sick
Interesting approach, I agree there seems to be quite a strong fit between the psychology of political partisanship and this concept of trauma addiction. Thanks for introducing that this aspect of reenactment, btw, I don't think it's so well known.
Regarding section VI on the science of trauma, what I've read about trauma was mostly from Bessel Van Der Kolk, Deb Dana and associated figures, and IIRC the psychological description they give is a bit more detailed than just a system of trapped priors. The kind of trauma they talk about seems to be primarily a failure of integration; the stimulus is so strong, so overwhelming, that the parts of the brain that keep track of our "larger I", with its wider identity, history, self-narratives, etc., more or less shut down, and one is unable to integrate the event. The practical result is that the event never becomes part of normal memory, it remains in a kind of eternal present, so that recalling it literally amounts to reliving it, right here and now. This inhibits the whole regular way in which we normally allow events (even strikingly bad ones) to fade away with time, and to become subsumed into a larger self-story. I don't recall the exact details, but this probably maps pretty well to different areas of the brain suddenly switching off or disconnecting from each other, probably as an evolutionarily ancient response to overwhelming danger activated at the amygdala.
A close friend of mine (probably) has "complex PTSD" due to extremely incompetent parenting, and when it comes up, it's a kind of disconnection, a dissociation, which is barely perceptible from the outside because he has learned to hide it. Much of the therapy he has done has been about noticing how this internal shutdown happens, and how it seems to happen at a very low level of the nervous system. I don't know if the notion of priors even applies at such a level - maybe it does, but still, there is something qualitatively completely different between that and a relatively simple trapped cognitive prior that dogs or liberals or the Catholic Church or whatever are evil.
Maybe what I'm trying to talk about is trauma proper, and the craziness of politics is only trauma-adjacent, or trauma-lite. From your description, I'd say the shoe fits... at least from what I've seen at a distance, because personally I find myself rather incapable of being invested in politics of any kind!
I think in the future the acquiescence to the belief that “words and opinions can be violence, and people have a legitimate right to be protected from language they may find harmful” will be regarded as the gravest error Western societies have made culturally over the past 20 years
Have you considered comparing politics to OCD instead of trauma? A political person who is addicted to the news because being well-informed can somehow prevent their country from sliding into dictatorship does not seem too different from someone who obsessively washes their hands out of a fear of germs.
Cherrypicking some definitions from [this table](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56452/), political thoughts (at least about the other side) could be viewed as obsessions ("persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as inappropriate or intrusive and that cause anxiety and distress. The content of the obsession is often perceived as alien and not under the person's control.") and getting into fruitless political debates seems to fit the criteria for compulsions ("repetitive behaviours or mental acts that are carried out to reduce or prevent anxiety or distress and are perceived to prevent a dreaded event or situation").
There are of course notable differences. Political thoughts and behavior can also be motivated by hope, whereas definitions of OCD revolve about negative things. In OCD people usually think they themselves are in some way contaminated, in politics the others are at fault, but that seems less awkward than relying on traumatic re-enactment, which I hope is more of a fringe phenomenon (it sounds awful).
I've written a speculative essay about trauma being the best way to understand the phenomena of ideology, political or otherwise - An ideology being the memetic coordination mechanism for culturally embodied stuckness. Wrote about it here: https://primatesofcosmos.substack.com/p/clenchings-of-body-and-mind
Ok hear me out: maybe the problem is caused by the political system and improving it will end the cycle of trauma...
It annoys me a lot that seemingly the vast majority of people will complain about a common problem but be either uninterested or even hostile towards discussing systemic solutions. Often they prefer individual solutions, i.e., people or groups who cause problems should be punished and that's that.
One thing I think is missing in this analysis is the *magnitude* of the trauma. If we're taking the DSM as a reference point, I note that for PTSD it requires "Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence". And yes, we can recognize that this is not an exhaustive list and that e.g. emotional abuse can qualify, but it would kind of have to be emotional abuse on par with (serious, non-hyperbolic) death threats.
Which doesn't seem to apply to the sorts of "trauma" we're talking about here. Particularly with regard to the hypothesis that the media is causing all of this in its relentless pursuit of eyeballs and clicks. Media, traditional or social, can't kill or injure you, can't sexually assault you, and rarely threatens to kill you in any serious way. It usually even cuts away from graphic images of death or serious injury, and in any event the DSM tells us that, get real, seeing this stuff on TV doesn't count. Unless it's for work-related purposes, somehow.
And I think it used to work this way. The media is just words and (usually tame) images, and we used to consider it at least aspirationally true that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". Yeah, maybe the *first* time someone calls a white kid "racist" or a black kid the N-word, they go lock themselves in their room for a month. But we used to expect them to learn better, grow out of it, and come back as the sort of person who can e.g. stand up to the New York Times and come away bloody but unbowed.
Now, we've got lots of people experiencing almost crippling levels of "trauma", from things the DSM says don't make the cut for PTSD. And yes, when the media finds someone vulnerable to that sort of thing, they'll pounce on it for the profit they'll make selling those outrage-fixated eyeballs to their advertisers. But there has to be something else that's making so many people fragile enough that they are susceptible in the first place.
And there are some obvious theories as to what that could be, but I distrust obvious, easy answers to hard questions and I think this needs further exploration.
I humbly plead for you to change the post image, due to the following reason:
When I share a post, the image shows up in the embed. Thus, when I share this empathic and humanizing article, the image the recipient sees is the 2016-era "triggered" meme, which is (as the kids say) "right-coded".
Thank you, and yours truly,
- Nicholas Kross
PS: Yes, i can sometimes rdmove the default embed (yes on discord, not when texting). However, the embed makes people more likely to click (image! Yay!) as long as it's not actively turning them away (triggered meme! Boooo, an article I won't read because the image makes it look like a more-stereotypical conservative meme!).
As a result of this article, I've been thinking about Jews and holocaust material.
I know people who go to holocaust museums and watch holocaust movies. I don't do that, my feeling about holocaust museums is "Why would I do that to myself? I haven't even read Maus.
However, I do read a fair amount about the holocaust and I can feel the pull.
It's rather clearly not about learning in the cognitive sense. One holocaust museum (maybe two or three if you have regional interests) should be enough to grasp that the holocaust happened, it was extraordinarily bad, and one should do what one can to flee, fight, and/or prevent holocausts and to help others do so.
At this point, I'm just trying to understand what's going on. Perhaps there's a desire for the sort of learning which causes action combined with a lack of trust that cognitive learning will be enough.
"Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments."
Apart from replicability, the Kahan study doesn't show that politics is the mindkiller -- only that modern US politics is. See Andrew Marshalls comment about Canadian politics.
>Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
For any single individual, voting on election day doesn't make logical sense if their time is worth anything. A single vote has an infinitesimally small chance of changing an election. Even if the single vote does change the election, having one party rather than another in power is likely to have only a small effect on their life. Playing the lottery would a higher expected value.
Funny example. Doing my taxes has been mildly traumatic for me. I should probably pay someone to do them but (like the political news junky?) I feel there's value in being aware of the horrific details.
Great post! Most of the news and comment I read is by Catholics or First Things-style ecumenical conservatives. These folks aren't immune to triggering (John Zmirak got fraud-pilled, as did Ed Peters, Fr Z). Nevertheless I tend to think to the extent that people believe there are important social goals which exist independently of politics, politics just becomes less consequential and less triggering, and things can be discussed fairly rationally. David French vs Sohrab Ahmari on Drag Queens was a difficult debate to watch, but the debate wouldn't have even happened in most cases. Being Christian gave them an opportunity to debate and repair any bridges that got burned in the debate. But I get the feeling something similar is going on for rationalists too.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a convincing comparison, between being forced to pretend you agree with discordant ideas for six weeks, and merely hearing a discordant opinion or knowing it exists.
At any rate, people will be as reasonable as they must, or as intolerant - as willing to work themselves up into a fanatic frenzy - as they can get away with, depending on which ideology holds power, and can send you into a six week reeducation, or lose you your job.
Another possible factor: if you're in a noisy environment, you have to get louder to be heard.
I'm reminded about a bit in _The Wisdom of Whores_ (a book about international charities trying to help prostitutes) about how a charity can't get attention for what is just a problem, it has to be amplified to sound like an emergency to be noticed.
One way to deescalate it is to stop straw manning. One way to prevent straw manning is a norm of requiring specific receipts whenever anyone makes a claim about what someone else has done or said or believed. Also, avoiding all hyperbole. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Some trauma gurus are now asserting that "capitalism" causes trauma. Others say, "Modern life" is traumatic. Talk about an ever expanding definition of trauma! It's a totalizing ideology that predisposes people to experiencing normal challenges as traumatic assaults.
It was so long substack crashed four times well I was trying to read it. I am now addicted to long posts that crash when I read them and will be expecting more from you
Wouldnt Kevin Simlers old article Crony Beliefs be a sufficient model to explain these behaviors? (except the addiction one, but that one I do not relate to) https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
In there he writes you have some beliefs because you think they are true, and some because they are socially desirable. The more you use truth-seeking to root out the socially desirable ones, the more you protect them. And it lists behaviors like anger that seem to work exactly like what you describe. I more think when it comes to politics, peoples brain see "aha, this concern a socially desirable belief", not a truth-belief, and therefore runs that program and so sound a bit stupid. And if someone says, no that cannot be true, they get very defensive about it.
The solution Kevin suggests in the article is to create a community of truth-seekers around you
I have just noticed that Geoffrey Miller is very, very angry about those protestors who threw soup at the Mona Lisa; plus certain other protesters I shall avoid explicitly mentioning here.
Conjecture: those protestors are serving approximately the same function for the right as Trump does for the left.
Thank you for writing this. It's very informative.
Question: have you look into the crisis in family court from the same perspective, where a narcissistic/borderline/dark triad individual decompensates ina to persecutory delusion due to the divorce?
Most doctors working in family court do not seem to know any of this.
I have C-PTSD... it actually turned me into an activist and a politician from the age of five onward.
All I can say is that, maybe I'm lucky, my traumatic stimuli were from different political groupings, so I became more-focused on power and dishonesty (I literally describe my trigger as "Hypocrisy in the Face of Harm")... in that I've gone after both the [Not-Really] Left and the [Mythology over Commonsense] Right over all manner of different issues.
I think the most-important thing in terms of being able to make politics less-traumatizing is habituation. Engage with your political enemies, defend them when it comes to things you agree with, and try to respond as much as possible, outside the emotional part of your brain.
Politics is life-and-death... we don't need to add any more emotional up or down regulation to it... there's tonnes there already.
And yeah, listening to those narratives you tell me to turn-off has managed to help me find out who is and is not a good-faith actor. Max Igan trying to show people that transition is a plot to sterilize people was so thinly argued and so dependent on leveraging disgust, that he showed a trans man and a trans woman raising their newborn to 'prove' his point.
There's a guy either lost or hoping you will be or both.
Same with people who talk about immune injury from COVID but won't look at the Cleveland Clinic data...
Heck, to see masks on the faces of people chanting about genocide, when 30 million children died of malnutrition as a result of our response to COVID, and they'd rather focus on 15 thousand, replicates that trauma.
But increasingly, thorugh engagement, I'm habituated... and I think you're right about something else:
I now don't believe the mendacity of the people whose actions outrage me goes unpunished... and I feel better about taking it on as a result.
It seems to me that one factor in whether an experience is "traumatic" is whether it violates one's expectation of how the world is or ought to be. I.e., in an aristocratic warrior culture, aristocratic warriors aren't going to be traumatized by dreadful things happening in battle as those are expected and accepted as part of the structure of the world.
Within that framework, I notice the phrase "lots of people did experience feelings of fear and helplessness around Trump’s election". That's odd because of course one is relatively helpless vis a vis political trends that move away from one's preferences. "XYZ got elected and that's against my interests!" should be considered a *normal* event in life. But for some reason, people expect that they live in a world of people who have their best interests at heart.
This reminds me that Caitlin Flanagan once explained why teenagers are vulnerable: "... and most of all their innocent belief, so carefully nurtured by parents and teachers, that the world rewards kindness and fairness, that there is always someone in authority to appeal to if you are being treated cruelly or not included in something ..." That is, upper-middle-class parents work very hard to ensure their children never interact with people who *don't* have the child's best interests at heart. Needless to say, when the child starts dealing with the Real World, it's a shock.
I think my main update from this is that Scott's lived experience is that people who are really into politics are often actually scared and angered by the stuff they say they are scared and angered by, its not just some kind of performative signaling game about how your are so in-group-pure the out-group burns your mind like a vampire exposed to the sun. Most of my social circle isn't into this stuff, so I guess I wasn't quite sure whether to take these claims seriously.
So this article has me assigning more weight to the emotional distress people experience from politics and modern social media madness in general.
I am less sure that I buy the trauma framing. I am skeptical of the studies mentioned on general principle. They sound to me from the brief description like The Kind Of Thing That Does Not Replicate, never mind being actually correct, which is a higher bar. Every other symptom named seems pretty generic to me?
Is there some kind of actual difference in how you best help or not-hinder people who feel sad and angry and scared due to "trauma" compared to people who feel sad and angry and scared for other generic reasons? If not, I'm not sure if the diagnosis is helpful here, and I don't much buy that it carves reality at a joint in the description either.
Just wondering why you feel a need to argue with "people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses." Who knows whether they do or not, actually? What has become apparent is that they don't 't care at all about women. As evidenced by the many women who have been denied medically necessary abortions, sometimes being told to wait in the hospital parking lot until they go into sepsis or start hemorrhaging. Anti-abortion activists' behavior has given us a big clue about where their priorities lie.
A# I said, I'm really skeptical that much politicking can be explained as trauma.
Except, maybe, COViD related craziness. I don't mean trauma from actually getting covid (though I'm sure that exists), more trauma from fear of covid/lockdown isolation. Would seem, a priori, to be potentially traumatic. And we find, that yes, there is a bunch of conspiracist politics around covid.
There was a good post on one of the conspiracy groups in which the guy tells the story of how he came to be involuntarily committed in a psychiatric hospital, during which time he met some new friends, who had some very interesting ideas that he is now about to explain. (This completely breaks the usual model of psychiatry textbooks, that clinical psychosis and political conspiracy theories are entirely different phenomena.@)
This really makes a lot of things fall into place for me. One thing I'm really curious about is why do some people not seem to be susceptible to this pattern? I lean more left-wing (though technically, more anarcho-syndicalist), but don't feel constantly triggered by what strike me as crazy right-wing talking points. I just roll my eyes or feel concerned that this stuff is being distributed. But I don't feel personally triggered by it. What is different about me?
I'm curious about how different this take is from what the psychological/ psychiatric establishment think. As far as I can tell, the mental health profession seems pretty unanimous - the 24/7 news cycle and social media is really bad for you. The topic on politics specifically seems to have gotten a bump mid Jan, from a study from U Toronto.
Anecdotally, a lot of social movements implicitly or explicitly create cult-like conditions, especially on social media. When I was a friendless teenager, I fell prey to radical feminism, and only recovered to be a functioning adult after I somehow succeeded in making friends (despite how poorly I was behaving). The combination of convincing a victim of the hostility of wider society, that the only safe place is within the political movement, and then insane rules intended to foster control over the victims (radfeminism is really really weird about romantic relationships and sex). My radfem phase didn't last long, but I'm now always vigilant when a social or political movement does similar stuff.... And a lot of the fringe online ones do the exact same thing.
So my contribution: we know that cults are traumatizing to their members. Politics is increasingly using cult tactics, incidentally traumatizing people, but due to the reach and inescapability of politics, it's able to do this on a massive scale.
To me, it makes complete sense that people can become obsessed with a source of trauma, even if it is very harmful to their mental health. In fact, it is pretty surprising to me when someone *doesn't* have this reaction.
If you are an ancestral tetrapod and you are nearly killed by a predator, your survival odds go down if you bury your head in the sand and try to think about predators as little as possible. The better response is to become more vigilant against predators from now on. Jumping at shadows is a small price to pay for living another day.
It's a shame that we are prone to being traumatized by events that do not merit this reaction, but our trauma response likely evolved long before the complexities of modern civilization were a twinkle in an australopith's eye.
I searched for the word "identification" in the post and the comments and it did not appear once.
The discussion of the "psychopolitics of trauma" doesn't make sense without talking about identification first. When we just take for granted that people identify with either team red or team blue (or with wokeness or the countermovement, with gender as a spectrum or "two biological sexes", and so on), then we might as well take for granted how all those issues can give rise to trauma. Why not. It obviously affects people, thus it's just about finding an instance where some political issue affects me negatively to the right degree and there you have your trauma.
What is weird about it?
Well, why should some news about some abstract event affect me emotionally at all? People who got scared when Trump become president probably argue that he was about to enact policies that will affect them, eventually. However, it is quite telling to see how people in European countries were triggered, too. Less in number and intensity, but here we need an explanation.
And that explanation is identification. Humans have the tendency (maybe even the need) to become part of a group and make the concerns of the group their own, individual concerns. When he was 8 years old, a friend of mine heard about Germany exporting tanks to other countries and thought "we can't just sell those tanks to other countries, we have to keep these to be stronger then them!". This is a beautiful example of a somewhat naive identification with "team Germany".
Once I identify with some group, I opened the flood gates. All kind of remotely relevant, abstract issues that are being discussed in media, social media, books, and bars might affect me. When I identify with a local transgender activism group, the fact that my national ID card states my biological sex and doesn't leave space to put a gender, might feel like some existential threat. But see: It's because of identification. I worked hard towards this being true. While identification comes naturally and seems to be ubiquitous with humans, it involves a series of decisions and actions. I.e. I don't have to identify with the that local transgender activism group to the degree that I get triggered by my national ID card.
For someone who does not happen to identify with the same group as me, the whole thing just looks like some theater, in which I play a chosen role. And this is what identification really is: a chosen drama. An enactment.
There is no really good reason, why I should identify with "my country", either. When people shout "USA! USA! USA!" they just seem like absolute morons to me. I can't help but to think of the North Korean mass games, or some random football fan (that is soccer fan in American English) who cries when his team looses and feels aggression towards fans of some other club.
**When I identify with some group/cause/institution, I open up the possibility of arbitrary news items affecting me negatively.**
And this is why quite literally everything, can be traumatizing. Construct a traumatizing expression like this:
X = [arbitrary statement here]
I identify with a group that says *not X* and moreover, X is kind of worse than the holocaust.
Someone: X
Me: Someone made me suffer! Members of my identified group: look!
Astralcodexten: Interesting, politics seem to be traumatizing. How come?
So maybe we should talk about the need for identification. I would suggest that there is a fairly linear spectrum from strong/healthy to weak/sick where the on the strong/healthy side, the need for identification is controlled. When you are on the strong/healthy side, you might still choose to support a football club and you might even find yourself shouting "USA! USA! USA!", but once your team looses you will remind yourself that watching football is your leisure activity and any negative emotion is just part of the rollercoaster ride that you opted in to.
A less neurotic version of Jordan Peterson probably wouldn't have been scared to hell by the geopolitics that played out during his youth.
The same healthy distance can be applied to the politics of your country. People on the strong/healthy side of the spectrum differentiate between love for their home country and identification with the political system. This healthy differentiation, in principle, can go so far that people are can identify with team red or team blue (or with Atheism or Christianity, or ...) and even have a fair debate with some opponent. I can even have fun and jump into a debate just for the sake of it, and advocate the opposite of my personal believes.
So, how about rephrase the question "why are politics apparently traumatic" to "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I agree with Scott that the trauma is (probably) real. It's a subjective experience, anyway. But: Your traumatizing experiences are a matter of choice nowadays. You can believe that you were born this way or the other and thus have to identify with a certain group, because otherwise you are left completely disenfranchised and have to suffer or die because of how bad the world is. Interestingly enough, you can also stop believing that.
You would arguably be a better trans-rights activist, a better republican, a better atheist when you could keep the reins in your hand while playing your chosen role and engaging in the respective drama.
----
So a bit of a scope drift, but is there an actual answer to the question of "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I gave a partial answer already: I think there are healthy people who don't do that. Remains the question where the all sick people come from. Have they always been there? Isn't the whole triggering and polarizing a recent phenomenon?
There are plenty of ways to destroy the healthy self in an individual and there probably has been an army of neurotics during most of the history of mankind. Globalized communication, e.g. the sharing of ideas beyond your family dinner table and the monthly townhall meeting of your village of 5000 inhabitants gives the neurotics a new outlet.
A clickbaity title has quite literally viral characteristics: A virus is not a living organism. A virus is just barely enough to manipulate a living organism to reproduce the virus. Similarly, a clickbait article isn't actually a message or some shared knowledge. And like biological organisms live inside some balance with viruses and other parasites, communication in the modern society is a a balance between knowledge sharing and parasitic contents. And like with viruses, it's probably not a good idea to try to eliminate all parasitic content and cleanse modern, global communication. Rather we should rely on the resilience of actual communication (like we rely on the immune system of the human body).
Politics is in general a domain where it's both high stakes and low ability to control outcomes, which is bad for mental health, and when you combine it with a viewpoint that everything is out of your control and catastrophization is rewarded makes it even worse.
This is why I generally advocate for more depoliticization of our lives, and why it's so important to have an internal locus of control.
FYI the Kahan et al study you’re indirectly referencing at the top doesn’t fully replicate https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027721001876
I suspect a big part of the issue is applying emotional standards for interpersonal conflict to a situation they can't hope to handle.
When we get in a dispute with someone usually we either get told by our friends nope sorry you're in the wrong and we forget it or they side with us and we feel supported and cared for by our community.
The nature of politics in the modern age is the constant feeling we are the victims of genuine harm and that a.largw fraction of what we still see as part of our community doesn't care. That is deeply hurtful. Before social media we didn't feel personally wronged in the same way because we didn't feel the same clear sense of others saying such hurtful things about us.
It's like in a relationship, if your spouse doesn't back you on something and you eventually realize you were wrong and they shouldn't have it goes away, if they back you it's fine. If there is a persistent sense you were genuinely injured and they aren't willing to be on your side it can fester.
Politics is the mind killer, not just in creating feelings of outrage but in creating feelings of safety. My mantra for these circumstances: Believing the politician might help you is like believing the stripper really likes you.
> It’s a plot by STEM people to feel self-satisfied about their own intelligence and superior to more well-rounded types.
I mean, it's not exactly a "plot", but...
From what I understand, one of the reasons why people get caught up in conspiracy theories is the feeling of being special. The sheeple go on about their daily lives, unaware of the perils they face, but you -- you're smarter than that. You know the real truth that is hidden from the rest. You can expose it, and in doing so, perhaps save the world.
I think it would be weird if the AI-risk community was somehow immune from this impulse; they're human after all. This does not automatically imply that believers in AI-risk are wrong (just like it does not necessarily imply that believers in Illuminati-risk are wrong), but still, it's a potential source of bias that should at least be acknowledged.
Loved this part --- "Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts'
I think we're going to look back and think about cable news as "Cigarettes for your mind" --- small doses probably fine, but as a daily practice will kill you.
I knew somebody who became paranoid in old age, with his paranoia directed at a family member, which caused a lot of distress. The family tried to get the oldster to redirect his paranoia outward toward more distant concerns, such as the President, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, the other political party, the CIA, the IRS, the Russians, etc., But he remained frustratingly level-headed and realistic about politics.
Eventually, after an adjustment in his blood pressure medicine, his paranoia declined overall and became focused instead on the supermarket checkers union spying on him rather than on his own family, which caused many fewer problems for all concerned. (The checkers never noticed.) The last half decade of his long life was happier than the preceding half decade had been.
In general, there is a lot of mental illness out there all the time. What type of mental illness it manifests itself as (e.g., paranoia) and what sub-type (e.g., political paranoia vs. personal paranoia) and what sub-sub-type (e.g., grocery store checkers) seems pretty contingent and hard to predict.
Fascinating argument! Pretty compelling.
The questions to me then become:
1) Why now? Is it about technology? Overall degradation of civil society? Increased polarization (a la Ezra Klein) reaching some sort of inflection point?
2) How do we get out of it? For individual trauma, there’s therapy. For societal trauma? Perhaps a matter of fixing whatever the causes are, I suppose.
Thanks for sharing. And I’m sorry about your experience in college. That sounds really upsetting and unfair.
I don't think I'm trauma addicted to politics. I read a lot of political news, but mostly when I'm bored or when it's on an interesting topic. For the most part I don't have strong emotions about it.
Occasionally I do go and read through the opinions of people who outrage me though, which might be extreme sexists, extreme feminists, anti-rationalists, or some other group I strongly disagree with. I might do this once every few months on average when a link to some outrageous subreddit is shared with me, or I'm feeling- so not something I'm compulsively check like an addiction. I do think I get some sort of chemical rush in my system although I don't know if it's endorphins, if nothing else it makes me feel pretty outraged and I'm sure there must be some sort of neurochemical associated with outrage.
Don't have anything smart to add but wanna say that "Bitch Eating Crackers Syndrome" is the best description of anything I've heard in a while
Also think the whole brightline for "trauma" discussion at the start has a neat workaround even in the context of discussions of physical trauma - chronic traumatic encephalopathy is an example of what I'm talking about. The conventionally-understood brightline for "brain injury" is generally getting concussed or knocked out, but football players have brains like swiss cheese partly because it's exacerbated by smaller collisions *all the time*. In fighting, the showings that make you concerned for brain trauma aren't as much "guy gets smoked in 30 seconds", more stuff like Gaethje/Ferguson - where an insanely tough guy is taking a bunch of cumulative damage but none of it is "someone stop the damn fight", but after a point, every jab is getting to him badly til he's never the same again
I think you can understand some part of this through that lens. "Normally" politically-engaged people go into the machine, hang out there taking "traumas" that none of us would consider trauma in isolation, and eventually you hit the brightline with no obvious inciting incident. And then the mechanisms you described make it worse by making the feedback loop practically impossible to bail out of
great writeup! given the ceaseless 24/7 media complex, our shortened attention spans, and the sorta 'clickbait culture,' you know our collective neurochemistry HAS to be outta wack :/
I also think about the many subliminal and subconscious manipulation tactics employed... https://eccentrik.substack.com/p/protecting-your-head-and-heart-in
So...what action would you take based on "politics is trauma" vs "news is dumb and makes you angy"?
I mean, I get it, I catch the vibe, news is bad, don't watch, I'm down but...is the trauma angle a rhetorical tool to help convince people or is there something specifically actionable about casting this as trauma?
For example, and I imagine it's the easiest point of concern, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." By which I mean, even if you avoid news and political media, it will directly impact your personal life in ways that are unavoidable; the difference in Covid policy between California and Florida had dramatic and obvious differences that directly impacted people's lives even if they ignored the news.
So is there some guidance from psychology on how to manage this. Like, a rape victim might be irrationally afraid of rape and that's detrimental but it's not completely irrational, rape is totally a thing that happens, it's more of a large miscalibration of threat levels and likelihood. How do you maneuver that in a productive way?
You write, "I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
Is there a sense in which this is just simulating understanding by taking a phenomenon we don't understand and lumping it with another phenomenon we don't understand, and calling them the same?
I found this post interesting, but I had that worry throughout, that it's collapsing two poorly-understood behaviors into one in the name of understanding. I find the move to describing everything in terms of trauma both confusing and concerning, and I also find the change in our political behavior confusing and concerning. Come to think of it, maybe this is a reason to believe you're right and they're really the same phenomenon.
Anyway, interesting and something to think over. Thank you.
Excellent observations. I think what has made me stop imbibing has been the queasy similarity of feeling after I’ve doomscrolled a few hours of cable news - very reminiscent of other addictions I’ve experienced. It made me instinctively step away after awhile, beginning in 2022 and even moreso last year. I don’t watch any domestic news anymore. I focus my efforts on being close with my neighbors while avoiding discussing politics at all costs.
I think the things you're naming "politics" and "trauma" would, for a large majority of human history, have been called "life."
I don't mean that sarcastically or dismissively. I mean it literally.
In Paleolithic societies (i.e., the large majority of human history), when people lived in small clans and tribes, it was a baseline, normal, and accurate expectation that people outside of your clan or tribe would, often enough, try to kill you. Experiencing a trauma reaction to many interactions with outsiders would be common. "Conspiratorial" reasoning that maybe they will try to kill you would also be common (because it was often correct).
I think the resulting emotional and cognitive patterns, however unpleasant we might find them, are a human norm. It precisely the strong default expectation of peaceable interaction that is WEIRD, in Henrich's sense.
I think analogizing this to trauma is a very apt and good idea. Just reading the post makes me feel relieved. The whole political miasma is a discrete phenomenon that everyone can agree is not healthy. Seems promising
I initially liked to describe Trump as the male Rosie O'Donnell, with apologies to her. But catharsis was looming. Suddenly as he became relevant all these people and organizations I felt traumatized by were very very unhappy. I loved it. I still love it
If we hold hands in hostile co-trapped priors there will be more and more trauma like experiences. This is a very memeable concept that could be popular for getting off the outrage treadmill
Good gosh golly, this is an important article.
There's a compelling argument in here but I fear the genuine threat to people's livelihoods that bad actors (fascists) in politics pose is undersold.
Great post. It's helped me look more clearly at a topic that's been puzzling me, and which is political, albeit not in a classic partisan way.
This is a bit niche, but here we go.
I follow some forums that focus on me/cfs, a chronic disease. The disease has a big problem, which is that people use the lack of clear somatic etiology to argue it is psychosomatic. That has led to a cycle of underfunding which has left the etiology unclear.
A subset of sufferers set up a forum called s4me, which is supposed to be the pre-eminent place for people to discuss Science, for the illness. However by far the most popular kind of post there is one where some dodgy researcher has a hypothesis paper arguing ME is psychosomatic. Such posts quickly garner 100,000 views and 90+ pages of comments, while a good proper expensive study from an Ivy League uni on cytokine patterns in the illness will be lucky to collect 2 pages of comments.
I've long been confused by why the people who perceive themselves as the biggest fans of serious science give most of their attention to the worst science. Your post has helped me understand that these people are traumatised - by not being believed. For these people, this is a political issue and the psychosomatic researchers are *the other side*. Looking at it like this makes me more forgiving of their apparent inability to actually focus much on the science that is trying to help them.
I take quite a different lesson from "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD." As Greg Cochran says, the obvious explanation is that the proliferation of weapons that cause concussive blasts made soldiers into boxers -- their brains got all screwed up, and more screwed up the more combat they saw. Physical damage, not psychic damage.
Tying into that, I find the medicalization of what I'd call quite reasonable responses to American political trends annoying. This cycle of polarization has happened before and it ended in lots of deaths, and the domination of one faction by the other on a very deep level - the total annihilation of one side's core value system and way of life - forevermore. Stakes are high. You probably should be pretty worried about it. If a bunch of people are feeling a certain way about something, and they aren't a cohort whose brains have been constantly pulverized by pressure waves, the first thought should be -- there might be something to it!
"Everyone agrees we’re “addicted to outrage”. I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
If you saw a bunch of ants or baboons line up to slaughter each other would you say they got infected by a rage virus, or they are addicted to outrage, or any other thing you could grab out of that hat, or would you just say -- yeah, looks right, it's happened before about a billion times and it makes perfect sense?
Additionally, in a technologically advanced democracy (in which votes bring power, and attention brings votes) we have to reckon with supernormal stimulus. A fake parasitic stimulus can afford the resources to be much more triggering than the genuine article. Like how the moth prefers the orchid that camouflages itself as a moth to actual moths. An invented threat can super stimulate fear, not having to worry about pesky facts. An invented persecution can super stimulate anger, not having to spend any resources on actually existing.
And, in a democracy, you have a civic duty to expose yourself to all these stimuli.
I took a class with Sheila Jeffreys - the radical feminist - at university. It was a pretty good basic intro to feminism and quite eye-opening. Later she got cancelled though for not being pro-trans. I think her perspective on society would be even more valuable now but of course we don't get to hear it.
Was there actually much of a scientific basis for the concept of PTSD? My understanding is that there was a political push for it in the wake of Vietnam. And a priori we should expect typical humans of the EEA were more like those ancient warriors https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
> For example, it has been found that women who were sexually abused as children are more likely to be sexually or physically abused in their marriages.
I'm guessing those studies make something like "the nurture assumption" and don't attempt to control for genetic confounds.
The craze of politics seems similar to the craze of religion vis-à-vis mental illness diagnosis. The DSM / diagnostic criteria (or at least an older version of them) carved out an exemption from delusions, for common ones, such as those which are parts of religions:
>The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith) (APA 2000: 821).
Trump Jr, among others, started talking about “triggering the libs” long before libs started accusing conservatives of being triggered.
I am alarmed that you missed this, and also alarmed by your defense of students triggered by college courses--in that case because college is explicitly for broadening one’s knowledge base, let alone horizons and tastes, etc. Any person so legitimately triggered by hearing or witnessing college material has no place being in college--legitimate or real though their perceived trauma may be.
And as for the thrust of the article, I think you on one hand miss the forest for the trees (some of us, especially rape victims, saw and heard all of Trump’s speeches and were “triggered” by the familiar behavior of an entitled, power-grabbing bully who could and did respond to every accusation with “she’s lying” (or he or they or whatever it was in any given instance.)
On the other, almost every individual involved in the political and media apparatus is incentivized to make every single citizen feel as anxious and betrayed as possible. People are responding quite understandably, even predictably, to what they are being explicitly manipulated to respond to.
Though it is not germaine to your point I think it is worth adding context that, when the diagnostic criteria add that carve-out for trauma from consuming media in a work context, what the authors probably have in mind are the social media censors whose duty is to trawl through thousands of pieces of media per day that were reported as depicting child abuse or pedophilia.
I too feel warm and fuzy when I see a well argued point. Thank you for this.
Trauma, as a word more so than a true understanding of the concept, gets thrown around more aggressively these days, presumably due to social media.
Just like a dish you've had far too much of that it eventually loses its appeal. Words like trauma has done the same for me. I can't take it seriously anymore.
I feel sorry for people with "real" trauma. Perhaps we need a new word.
> that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke
In Ireland? Seems odd. Irish universities have largely escaped the extreme wokeness of some US universities.
This all reminds me of that poor woman who joked about AIDS prior to getting her flight. It was clearly an anti-racist joke, and yet the pile on was incredible. It was just then that o became wary of social media and Twitter in particular - which up to then had been great.
<3
This is a good analysis, and helps to explain two oddities that, as an outsider, I have when interacting with Americans.
The first is that Americans bang on about politics A LOT. It's all over media and your public discourse, to the point that I know about as much about your internal politics and political discourse as I do my own country's, despite having no interest in it at all and actively avoiding it whenever I can. And, invariably, the first thing that an American tries to do when a topic of conversation strays into anything that their politics has touched, is try to peg which side you are on (i.e. determine if you are a team Red or team Blue supporter). Being on neither side, because you are not an American, is not an acceptable answer and makes people angry.
The second is that, from the outside, a lot of the specific planks seem very strange and nonsensical. The ostensible party of (since a few years ago) free speech, economic liberty, gun rights, social conservatism and religion, for instance. Or the ostensible party of (until a few years ago) free speech, economic regulation, decriminalization of drug offences, environmentalism, freedom from religion, social justice and social programs. I get that the parties are big tents, and that there are social-historical reasons for these various stances, but from outside it seems even more arbitrary than our own political parties and their policies (and at least we have many to choose from). Yet it is treated as not just normal but right in a sort of cosmic sense that these should all fit together just so, and that such a system is not just normal but ordinary and true across time and space. And any suggestion that you might pick and choose between different planks is treated as heresy that puts you in the other team. At the outside, you're allowed to have one deviation only (a democrat who likes guns, for instance. Or a pro-union republican) and that's it.
So the idea that it's two groups huddling ever closer together as they traumatise and demonise each other makes complete sense to me.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the New York Times isn't out to doxx you.
"Everyone agrees we’re 'addicted to outrage.' I find this phenomenon fascinating, and analogizing it to trauma addiction is the only way I’ve been able to make sense of it."
I think of it this way: What people are addicted to isn't outrage per se, but the feeling of moral certitude that comes with it. When you see someone you hate doing something outrageous, it reinforces how correct you are to oppose them. "See! I'm right! These people really *are* dumb/crazy/evil!" That's the part that feels so intoxicating, at least to me.
I don't disagree with the trauma analogy, though. Maybe it could be either, or some mix of both, depending on the person?
A good example of the addiction to trauma or distress is the reluctance of the more doomsterish adherents of climate change to accept relatively good news. You can be downvoted to oblivion on reddit by pointing out that the more extreme projections are crazy, even if you link to the ISPCC reports or to NASA‘s climate website.
For instance I’ve seen maps on how flooded certain cities will be by 2050, some showing these cities under metres, or several feet, of water while the official statistics show sea level increasing by 3.4mm a year. That rate is accelerating but not significantly.
Assuming some acceleration there will be maximum 100mm increase by 2050 (without acceleration it’s 88mm).
Anyway it’s about 4 inches in American. Most cities don’t flood at the very highest tide in any one year (absent a storm surge) - and the difference between the highest tide of the year and the average high tide is significant*.
Which means that cities will not be under water either at all, or at the most slightly more - and only during extreme conditions - by 2050. (2100 is a different story if acceleration continues but that’s an era that even teenagers can’t personally worry about).
Anyway pointing out that 2050 will be ok can get you downvoted on sites where people are traumatised by climate change.
Is it really trauma, then. Wouldn’t you like to get rid of trauma? Or is it the thrill of something like a roller coaster - something that feels scary but really isn’t.
* can be metres
> Former friends turned against me
My personal anecdote suggests that this is a major part of it. I wouldn't have minded a lot of the other stuff, but seeing people whom I had trusted, whom I had thought of as friends, say things which implied that my suffering was good and righteous, that was what got to me in the end. So to pick a not-me example, it wasn't just Trump being elected that caused the trauma, it was that half the country supported this **monster** , and were cheering him on, and celebrating that you were now **threatened and powerless** , and whenever you walked down the street you were passing people whom you **knew** would just as soon Thanos-snap you away to make the world a better place in their eyes.
> It was the worst experience of my life.
I hadn't heard this story before. I think I feel your pain.
> entirely new kinds of social technology
That's just plain brilliant!
> John Smith is a Nazi pedophile
After Rufus Sewell's wonderful performance playing Obergruppenführer John Smith in "The Man in the High Castle", both the name and the actor give me the creeps. Most particularly in the "Victoria" miniseries. (I don't recall him being pedophilic, though.)
> traumatic reenactment
I have not read the rest of the post yet, but in my experience, the thing I **really** want is to view the triggering event through a safe and supportive lens. So if I'm left-wing and traumatized by Trump, I'd look up sites where fellow left-wing people point out all the bad things about him, and condemn them and mock them. I'm feeling safer by finding a community where everyone feels the way I do. If my trauma is less common, and it's harder to find a community, there's still a sort of distance involved on the Internet. Or there would be, if I didn't have PTSD. So I constantly try to find examples so that I can calmly sit back and critique them from a distance, but then I come to and realize that I've been pounding my fists bloody on the floor for the last minute. (That's one of the rarer and more extreme examples, but I think it's illustrative enough.) Perhaps some of the re-enactment is similar, in that the traumatized person is looking to build new memories, to reassure themselves that "not all men who act like that are bad", but then...
> I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.”
Looks like I nailed it. :-)
> suppose you are so afraid of everyone that it is impossible to have a good experience with a new person
The most convincing explanation that I've heard is that, with normal memories, the emotional salience fades over time, and it gets "sepia-toned". But with PTSD memories, there's a malfunction somewhere (I've heard the amygdala), and the full, fresh emotional content gets dumped into our nervous system whenever the memory is recalled, thus leading to the creation of new memories with the same salience as the old. Possibly this relates to that thing where, unlike in a classical computer, in the human brain's neural network, memories are written each time they're accessed.
> you are absolutely sure your side is right
See, the thing for me (and possibly you?) is that the side that traumatized me **was** my side. I dunno how that fits into your model, but it feels very significant to me.
> On the other, it might be dangerous to create an expectation of traumatic consequences for minor wrongs.
Oh, yes, here we go.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
They did, however, suffer episodes of possession, as well as whatever happened to poor Ajax. See above about pounding my fists bloody; I spend a lot of time alone because I don't want to see what happens if I'm around someone who triggers me personally. I used to try to "integrate" my PTSD with my old personality, but the desire for vengeance was stronger than anything else I felt. So then I started treating it as a separate thing, talking about how I felt and how my PTSD felt, and that seems to have worked better. But if I had to give it a name, I know exactly what it would be: Nemesi, pteroessa biou rhopa, kyanopi thea, thygater Dikas.
> they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing
So did we, in June 1914, and before Vietnam. Turned out we were wrong.
> this theory is dangerous even if it’s true
Heh, I was just discussing with Villiam the difference between "rationality as truth-seeking" and "rationality as systematized winning".
> making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil
~~~But hey, it attracts eyeballs and sells ads! So if that's what the Algorithm determines that you want to see in your Feed, what could possibly be wrong with that!~~~ But seriously, I've been flippantly blaming Facebook (and later Twitter) for this shit, but the true culprit is ad-supported Internet hosting and crowd-sourced content combining with an algorithm that only measures "time spent viewing" and "interaction". I stopped using Facebook as soon as it started making it difficult to see all and only what I chose. I also made sure to make sure news sites never gave me personalized news or ads, just the generic stuff, because I didn't want them playing to my biases. Alas, it didn't magically protect me, but perhaps I am ever so slightly more aware because of it. **shrug**
Magnificent piece. I'm not sure that our current media machine is maximally traumatic, though - media machines in the past have surely gone further in this direction. If your media consumption was German protestant pamphlets in the 16th century, for example. Or Soviet or Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Or the tradition of martyrology - Foxe's Book Of Martyrs was surely more prominent in the media diet of the English in the late 16th/17th century than its equivalents are today, and its illustrations more traumatising to those at the time than modern day equivalents.
The modern media machine incorporates the profit motive; maybe that mitigates the drive to cause the maximum amount of trauma.
I have noticed a tendency for my friends to not be very political. Most of them are onto embodiment, meditation, and different experiences that plausably trigger memory reconsolidation.
Given the trapped prior model, I'm curious what the uptick in psychedelics will do to the political landscape.
Fascinating. Great article and many of the comments provide yet more insights. I feel passionately that psychologists should be working on this topic to provide new insights into human thinking. Something like an update to Jon Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which for sure had its flaws but dug into aspects of this topic. If anyone can point me towards current psychology that does develop these ideas, please let me know.
This also fits with the theory of negative polarization (Nate Silver, Ezra Klein and others have written about). That basically a lot of the source of current political dysfunction is that people are very negatively polarized against the other side, but not strongly positive to their side. Which makes sense with the trauma analogy. Fear of dogs doesn't cause you to love cats
I was going to write something about tribalism and trauma not really being mental illnesses since they're just standard brain function, but... god damn it, what's even the point? It's not like we can fix any of this. Humanity is irredeemably flawed at its core. Knowing that doesn't mean we can suddenly solve it... We're still just human.
I find it interesting that most of these problems seem weirdly US specific.
I'm a European (living in Europe) with a lot of exposure to English-language media, and there's definitely a huge difference between our respective media environments. Not that there isn't politics here, but people seem far less outraged about it. Major news programs still find plenty of time for the "somebody had an accident, please drive safely" or "our national museum just bought some Rembrandt pictures nobody really cares about" kind of stories.
To give a few examples, "dogwhistles" and "triggers" don't have equivalents in my language, the latter are sometimes used by sources that identify themselves as far left, but that's about it. The "<x> are only doing <y> because they hate <z>" rhetoric seems to be entirely missing, I can't think of a single example here while I can think of a dozen in the US. Namecalling also seems to be a lot less common, the worst you hear is usually something along the lines of "are they insane or what?"
I can't figure out why this difference exists. Many people blame polarization on tech and social media, but yet we use almost exactly the same tech and social media (maybe with less X and more Facebook) and polarization is much smaller, so there must be more to it. The UK seems to be closer to the US than the rest of Europe in this regard, so language isolation probably plays a part here, I wonder how Australia and European countries with extremely high English proficiencies are doing at this.
Thanks for being vulnerable and describing your traumatic experience.
I feel like Scott has recently been publishing some very good and insightful posts in the spirit of the old slatestarcodex.
I never understood why roughly half of the articles on the front page of msnbc.com are Trump-related.
This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I also suffer from the obsessive habit of engaging with written material that 'triggers' me in one way or another, and I have also begun to come around to the position that it's due to an unconscious wish to reenact certain events, but give them a better ending. Also agree 100% with disengaging (or at least strategically minimising) exposure to outrage/fear inducing media.
One book I've read recently included its own definition of trauma, which featured, in part, the subjective criteria "The person feels they are powerless to control the circumstance or event"
Looking through that lens at how many people approach politics - that seems to fit strongly. Even for a person with an superlatively internal locus of control, almost everything that goes on in politics - and especially the payload of political news - involves things that are objectively entirely outside one's power to influence.
The supreme court is deciding whether you're allowed to get gay-married? with the exception of a lawyer and a handful of plaintiffs, the rest of the country can do nothing but sit back and watch.
worried about what topics - and viewpoints - are getting taught in schools? Even if you're active in your own PTA, there's an entire nation out there shifting in ways you can hear about, but can't impact.
Political news is a never-ending stream of things that might be going wrong, things that might make your life worse, that you have effectively no power to stop.
A couple of musings on this:
* rather than adding politics to the list of potential triggers, it might make more sense to slim down the list of 'mental illnesses' that has been so expanded in recent times. For example, much of what is now called depression used to be called that plain old thing.... unhappiness.
* One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention is that it saw a retreat from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised. People drunk on their own self esteem will have inflated expectations that they deserve never to be made 'unhappy' by anything so annoying as 'reality'.
> Is this actually a good way to express a concept for public consumption?
The snag is that claims of trauma not directly related to violence and tragedy are themselves triggering because they feel like emotional blackmail, weaponised "hurt feelings", and narcissism.
If (big if!) religious thought and behavior deserves its exemption from pathologization, then why shouldn't politics?
"already maxed our our ability to feel" < s/our/out/
That cancellation experience as part of your experience to draw on has made you one of the most well-rounded thought leaders I'm aware of. Great for society and those who read you. Not great for you.
I've skirted the edges of cancellation (I've been, how do I say... micro-canceled?) and it's deeply unpleasant and unsettling. Finally understanding how shallow and fleeting is "friendship" is hard. Approval or even willingness-to-associate-with-you can be removed by the slightest whim.
Realising what you thought were deep and personal connections were in fact tenuous threads... a very disconcerting world-view adjustment.
I am very sorry you had to endure it.
I suppose, for those who are going through cancellation, or whatever, I should link two resources I found helpful. Warning: both of these are going to be from people who are probably your outgroup.
Struggle Sessions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4RE3RPI120 - Basic summary: it's a form of torture.
Jordan Peterson:
I was going to link a video, but now I can't find it. So I shall summarise. When you are canceled, or go through a struggle session, or whatever you want to call it, it is quite literally one of the worst things that can happen to you, and those who trivialise it saying things like "oh poor snowflake lost your job and now you have to find another one" or whatever are failing to grasp the level of pain those individuals are going through.
Now that I think about it, maybe avoiding trauma-inducing media is the opposite of what you want to do. The problem is that the triggering content is only consumed intermittently, reinforcing trapped priors. But there is a physical limit to how much distress a situation can cause. If you constantly consume the triggering content without pause, you will eventually grow completely numb to it. This is the idea behind Exposure Therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy , and presumably the same thing that causes Stockholm Syndrome.
...You know, maybe this is why I was able stop caring about things. I used to have plenty of empathy, far too much of it, even. Reading about horrible things happening on the other side of the world was enough to make me suicidal. But I guess there's a limit to how bad you can feel about things, because I eventually just stopped being able to feel empathy. It's definitely better this way, but... I'm still so miserable. Am I still caring too much? Is it even possible for me to feel happy?
A slight flaw in this theory is that politics has existed for literally the entire existence of humanity, but this love affair with political trauma has only showed up among the general population in the past 20 years or so, and has conspicuously coupled itself primarily with one political view of the world. Similarly, it's pretty suspicious that rates of mental illness are ludicrously high these days, and this leads to rates of medication being ludicrously high. And the rates are politically lopsided. Strangely, lopsided in favour of the side that broadly thinks about "systemic" things, and "alienation" and "group identity."
I believe Scott has talked about contrarians before, mostly negatively. Well, an obvious good thing about contrarians is they reject nonsense about belonging to groups, or believing school yard taunts. The more you hear it, the more you reject it. In this particular case we can call it being psychologically anti-fragile. Of course, back in my day we had sayings about sticks and stones, and talk being cheap, so it wasn't just contrarians who could ignore this stuff. Funny how I've seen modern young people outright and explicitly reject the sticks and stones theory, and now it's just a truism that "words have power."
I'm not saying the concept of trauma is a conspiracy to sell pills. I am saying this entire way of thinking is both dangerous and wrong. Very very obviously, nobody is being helped by psychology and therapy in this case, and the entire political discourse will obviously make everybody who believes it trauma victims. Or to more neutrally say it, it will awaken in them a true class consciousness. It's designed to do this. Nobody acted in a conspiracy to do it, it's just in the water.
“Ever since then, when I read arguments promoting social justice and cancel culture, or saying that their victims are probably bad people and shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, I get all kinds of easily noticeable unpleasant bodily and emotional reactions.”
This is called a schema, and you can manually rewrite this belief/emotional response. After the rewrite, the autonomic nervous system activation won’t get triggered either.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ
Does this mean that if as a victim of sexual abuse I speak (outside therapy) about the abuse I am traumatizing others, that I should obtain consent before doing so? It seems like yes, it does mean that
> I had my bad cancellation experience before “cancel culture” entered the national scene. But once it did, I found myself over-focusing on cancel culture stories, especially the most outrageous ones (“college students attack white yoga instructor for culturally appropriating ancient Indian practice!”) Looking back, I feel like the attractive aspect of this was bonding with other people who were outraged by the event, and getting to retell the story in a way that ended with “and everyone agreed the woke cancellation mob was in the wrong, and the students apologized to the yoga instructor, and she was reinstated and lived happily ever after.” Or, even if that didn’t happen, getting to retell it in a way that had moral clarity, where no reasonable person was on the side of the cancellers - even if things ended badly for the yoga instructor, I could tell it in a way that ended with “but she was clearly a misunderstood martyr, and this proves the rightness of the anti-woke cause.”
---
Scott, isn't the simplest psychological explanation that you got set upon by a mob, and that the best thing an individual facing a mob can do is get a crowd of their own to back them up?
Even if you aren't bonding and connecting directly, knowledge that the people who made you suffer are getting pushed back, so they aren't likely to make you suffer again, can provide relief, but if you don't know whether they're getting any pushback or not, your mind is free to submit the worst-case scenarios at its leisure.
To use war as an example, the fact that you were victimized by it is even more reason to keep constantly abreast of the state of the fighting, because that's the only way to know your side is winning. (And this is important, because if your side loses, you're gonna get victimized all over again.)
As an old white man, I had less motive to feel traumatized by Trump than most people. Of course am a Liberal and so could feel some threat. But I have a secret weapon. I am an economist and can write (then on facebook now on Substack https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com ) criticizing specific Trump policies like trade wars and tax cuts for the rich that create deficits. This means I'm not a HELPLESS victim. It also provided a reason to limit the range of issues I will pay attention to and potentially few outraged by.
"ut I’m skipping entirely over the non-optional Section C: “persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event”. "
Um .... blocking people on Facebook and X. There are some people on X who use an automated blocking system. E.g. anybody who followed Andrew Tate got blocked by 3rd Wave Feminists, anybody who follows J.K.Rowling gets blocked by Transfolk.
Thank you for writing this; it really spoke to me and helps me understand the world a little bit better.
"Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things."
If anybody ever asked me that, I would not assume it was "can you perform addition or subtraction, as it might be?" but that there was some opinion searching going on ("do you think Democrats ought to be shot dead and we need extra guns to make sure we get them all?") and yeah I'd go off on a tangent about "no shooty no gunz no Demz".
As for that article:
(1) It's from 2014, anyone remember what the Big Threat at that time was? I notice Klein pulls in Scalia as a Partisan Bogeyman to get Science Guy to agree with him on this, which probably proves Science Guy's point for him, but I can't remember what we were all supposed to clutch our pearls about back then
(2) Forget it, Jake, it's Vox
Spectacularly interesting. I think I learned something invaluable here.
As a therapist, this is interesting, but I think the addiction framing is a lot more useful than the trauma framing in explaining why people seek to be outraged. I think people are more dopamine-seeking than ever before thanks to technology and optimized algorithms that are able to give us immediate stimulation (higher in both frequency and magnitude). And one of the most stimulating things is to be outraged.
That said, I do think the trauma analogy is useful when explaining the symptoms people experience after being exposed to the politically outraging material. Someone with military PTSD might experience heightened anxiety when in front of a window for example. Someone with political “PTSD” will experience higher vigilance around domains where the other party might be present.
Important, insightful, generous in human sympathy--I love this essay. I can think of three related sub-points that might be worth adding, all connected with history and especially the way history is often constructed and taught (I spent my working life as a college history teacher). First, history does seem to contain not a few moments in which political events led to dramatic, unpredictable, and often violent change, occasionally leading to things like war, reeducation camps, or major social reordering. Consider the French Revolution, or the 1860 US presidential election, or the Communist victory in China in 1949. That's not *at all* to say we are on the verge of such changes--just that the models are there to influence the way people think and, especially, fear. Second, the way historians teach and write about their subject tends to emphasize such dramatic changes, the strong beliefs and disagreements that led to them, and their consequences (=dangers, at least for some); and then we assign papers or tests to get students to think about these, etc. A European history survey is likely to spend two weeks on the French Revolution, with lots of dripping guillotine blades, etc., but little time at all on, say, the relatively tepid 1720s and 30s. So we emphasize the sudden change model and its risks. Third, history is often told according to a trope of trauma. Sometimes this means trauma followed by vindication (think about the ways the stories of Alfred the Great or Robert the Bruce have been told), or trauma followed by "we're still waiting for vindication," or trauma and "this may happen again at any time." I realize that many students are just trying to get through a course requirement and may not be paying that close attention--but I think all this may have some effect nevertheless.
Why is almost everyone taking the "ancient warriors didn't get PTSD" claim at face value? The simplest explanation is that it's not true. They simply didn't have the language to describe PTSD, and in warrior cultures where combat was valorized, people would've been strongly incentivized to cover up symptoms of combat-related trauma. The really extreme cases that couldn't be covered up would just be attributed to individual "madness."
That's not to say that all of the other explanations are wrong: It's easy enough to believe that modern warfare is *more* traumatic for various reasons. But the idea that pre-modern combatants didn't get PTSD at all just seems like an erroneous assumption.
You keep bringing up the racism = trauma thing and it keeps persuading me in the opposite direction. That seems like made-up bullshit in exactly the same way as "it's okay to ignore lockdowns to attend a thousand-person George Floyd protest": who benefits? And if one element of trauma is made-up, probably others are too.
You say the DSM exists to draw a boundary around what counts and what doesn't, why should we assume this boundary corresponds to what actually exists rather than what psychologists would prefer we gave our sympathy to?
Scott, always love your thoughts, though I don't find this argument particularly persuasive.
The question is whether is provides a good explanation or is useful to frame politics as trauma. If the argument is essentially the principles of astrology (cherry picking and flexibly applying nebulous dimensional criteria), then it is not a useful for explanation. For example, zero-ing in on "avoidance" components of PTSD and "re-enactment" components as explanations of behavior - while real phenomena in PTSD - can obviously be used as a carte blanche for any type of behavior. In this framing, avoidance or engagement or anything in between (so all behavior) are seen as evidence of trauma. But this is about as useful as hearing from Geico that you could save up to 15% or more.
There are many other features of political engagement that are better explained by other threads - tribalism, meaning making, connection, motivated reasoning, appreciation of threat. Further, political engagement is a large enterprise that is going to involve the whole breadth of human cognition, and because of this complexity nothing is every going to reduce down to something like trauma psychology.
I agree there are underlying structures and organization to the brain that pervade all of our functioning, and something like predictive processing seems to have a lot of value. I don't suppose that DSM diagnoses represent categorically distinct processes - that the circuits and learning of trauma are just absent in people. But it is also a mistake to reify a DSM diagnosis, and use its ill defined margins to explain cognitive phenomena.
I am very disappointed that you just made up the Latvian pine slug. I don't know if I can trust you anymore, Scott.
I've long thought that political doomscrolling is similar to cutting--both forms of self-harm that are incomprehensible to me. There does seem to be that weird element of trauma addiction in both, but people seem to think they are doing something virtuous with the doomscrolling. "I'm staying informed!" As far as I know, cutters see it as something secret and shameful. But I could be easily mistaken here.
This is an excellent piece that I suspect people are going to nitpick the details of in order to avoid engaging with the central point, which strikes me as quite plausible. In fact, casting the discussion in terms of trauma and psychiatric disorder in general is likely to be a major distraction for a lot of people. Perhaps a slightly milder way of putting things is this: trauma represents a set of normal psychological processes under extreme conditions. Politics seems to engage those same normal psychological processes, often to a surprising degree.
From my own personal experience, I have noticed that my reaction to a lot of political issues can be surprisingly vibes-based, depending on my own personal interaction with that issue. For example, immigration is just not a hot-button for me. I have opinions about policy and I have opinions about the culture war aspects of immigration, but I can't pretend to have a ton of emotional energy around them. On the other hand, there are some issues related to identity politics where I personally have gotten enmeshed in arguments and accusations and find that I have emotional reactions that seem disconnected from my actual beliefs about those issues. I might find myself reacting defensively or with an internal eyeroll toward certain statements even if, objectively, I don't think those statements are invalid opinions to hold. (I might not agree with them, but there are lots of opinions I don't agree with that I'm respectful of.)
I wouldn't call my reactions here trauma per se, but they have convinced me that in general the right stance toward most political news and discussions is disengagement, the opposite of Scott's depiction of trauma addiction. That is, I've recognized that a lot of my experience of politics is a sort of low-key unpleasant emotional reactivity that seems at best pointless and at worst actively harmful.
> D3: Persistent distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events that lead the individual to blame himself or others.
> As stated, this doesn’t really apply to politics.
Doesn't it? It seems to me that the political trauma syndrome includes plenty of distorted thinking about why the other side does the traumatizing thing, or the consequences thereof, and plenty of blaming. This very blog post cites an excellent example:
> I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies. And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission.
With posts like this and the trapped priors, I genuinely don't understand what people valued before and feel is missing now. (Thinking about complaints like this: https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1750349914490446297)
This kind of topic exploration shows an unparalleled ability to simulate the mind of another person, plus the ability to express the resulting exploration such that a third person can feel like they themselves understand the second person.
I regularly wish I could debate on one topic or another, and I don't love every post, but this feels a lot like "to whom shall we go" -- I've never found comparable insight elsewhere.
> The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia
This is not true. This is a dynamic that actually happens with authoritarian backsliding countries (e.g. Turkey); as governments turn authoritarian and consolidate power over elites (especially in journalism), elites race to cut deals with people in the security apparatus to be early investors/adopters of the winning side/team.
They don't actively plot to dismantle everything good in the world, but they sure do plot to dismantle what's left of democratic institutions in their particular country (or just continue market competition).
If outrage-based political media can succeed brilliantly by using trauma addiction as a marketing principle, I worry that this suggests a scary vulnerability in consumer psychology in general.
It's common for products to use addiction dynamics to maintain high levels of consumer demand, but we tend to think about that as a manipulation of the customer's pleasure circuitry (putting small amounts of sugar in our bread and chips, putting addictive reward systems in our smartphone games, getting kids hooked on smoooth relaxing nicotine, etc.). If it 's just as easy to get someone addicted by traumatizing them, then that lays the groundwork for an entirely new level of consumer hellscape, because it's on average much easier and cheaper to frighten or hurt someone than to figure out how to please them.
Arguably some products work like this already, reaching out to make your life suddenly much worse in order to get you obsessively returning to them for solutions that never pan out. A lot of cosmetic marketing starts by highlighting how a previously-unnoticed feature of your body is actually horrifyingly gross and ugly, you should definitely buy something to fix it so that people don't sneer at you behind your back (as they are almost certainly already doing). Porn exposure in childhood can lead to sex addiction and compulsive porn habits in adulthood, so places like PornHub will definitely benefit from having graphic sexual content widely available to kids on the internet. It's not a new dynamic - trauma marketing is basically how Harold Hill sells trombones to the rubes in _The Music Man_ - but something about the individual's vulnerability to uninvited pop-up memes in an online environment makes it feel particularly threatening in the context of twenty-first century virtual life. In the old days, the protection racket had to actually move in and take over your neighborhood, but these days they can just blast out a scary link on Twitter and work on converting whoever clicks.
I've noticed that it seems like every sexual assault is about every other sexual assault. For example, when Kavanaugh was getting accused, the focus didn't really seem to be on "What actually happened in this case?". The focus was more on "Are we a society that takes sexual assault seriously?", with women had been victims in unrelated cases acting like the result of that case was a referendum on their situation.
This post gives me a framework to make sense of that phenomenon.
> Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
This is actually what powers the motivation pyramid scheme that fuels the far-left (maybe the far right too). On some level, they feel they need to participate as much as possible maximize other people's motivation, in order to minimize the number of people on their side who end up not showing for election day.
This is a good piece, and it makes me want to be more charitable toward people who get triggered by politics (for whatever reason, I'm not one of them).
It also helps me understand how contemporary culture seems so effective in fostering a sort of learned helplessness (also a trauma cause and/or effect, yes?) in so many people. Part of it must also have to do with the diversion of people's social brains from local and irl toward more distant concerns.
Helplessness can be seductive if you're living a depressing but comfortable life. You get to enjoy a sense of moral superiority without taking responsibility for anything. You're affirmed in taking refuge in whatever soothing or sedating amusements you're inclined to fill your time with, while admiring the impressive person you could and would be if it weren't for all those factors beyond your control. Maybe this plays a role in political trauma addiction?
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD.
I'm currently reading this post, but... where did PTSD come from, then? I thought that it was ~first recognized in veterans of WW1, so the reasons why that blog offers don't seem to hold up if that's the case.
"I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare"
My understanding was that the countries and soldiers went into WW1 with tremendous gusto to protect/expand their country or allies. Nobody considered it a necessary evil, at least at the start.
"But I also suspect that the raw ubiquity of the experience mattered too."
War was still pretty common at that point, and WW1 itself was so all-encompassing that it seems like everyone they knew would either have died or understand it themself, and they would have known their comrades from before as well (I believe WW1 was the end of putting everyone from 1 town in the same unit, as some towns lost their entire young adult male population).
"Moreover, these societies tended to have rituals surrounding the transition out of war."
If this is the case, when did it stop and why? If medieval Europe had these rituals, why not the Europe of 1918, which was still very Christian?
Was WW1 just so overwhelmingly horrible, with so many deaths in such horrible and hopeless conditions (e.g. trench warfare and war of attrition), continued over such a long and continuous time period (ancient armies typically couldn't do much in winter or fight continuously for months), and at such a scale and death rate (maybe you observe literally every other man in your age group in your town and the surrounding towns die in the first few months), that it just completely overwhelmed all of these mechanisms? No placebo ritual, no pre-existing belief in the glory of war, could overcome such an experience? And there was nobody to talk to, because they were all dead?
>>>[Part 4] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work-related.
>>>Did someone prove it was a natural law that you can only be traumatized by seeing a story on TV if it’s for work? Or is this another unprincipled compromise?
Great article, and good point, but here's some potentially useful anecdotal material:
In Google Search it used to be that you could go work in Zurich, which was attractive, but you'd work on the safe search team, and they'd retire you from it after a year, because they determined that any more than that caused serious damage.
Looking at the really bad stuff that Google filters out of search results directly causes observable PTSD. I think. And I think this is what they're getting at, not a natural law but an experientially determined special case.
A regular person with a regular breakable brain could and probably would look away when it felt like too much, but if it was your job, and you felt a moral obligation to do it because it was helping mitigate the problem for everyone else, you probably wouldn't look away when you should.
... And it seems like some of the problem here is that regular people have been convinced that doomscrolling is their job and moral obligation.
(Edit: I changed "regular people have decided" to "regular people have been convinced that")
This line of argument reminded me of a quote I keep in my quotes file:
"Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrust upon us by the world we live in, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again.
"And, as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulses to judge and punish and get us all riled up with righteous indignation.”
- Tim Kreider, "Isn't It Outrageous?" in the NYT
I know that's not quite the mechanism that Scott proposes here. In Kreider's essay, this behavior is about the "high" of righteous indignation; in Scott's, it's about trauma and re-enactment.
"thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms"
Sounds like a trapped prior.
I think the best formulation about the effect of politics is that it fucks people up.
My training in psychology was old-school, and I was taught that PTSD was essentially shell-shock, and that events that caused the same syndrome in people who were not in combat had the same characteristics as combat: violence & injury, or danger of injury or death far beyond what most people ever experience — suddenness & unexpectedness — situation in which you have virtually no power to protect yourself. PTSD symptoms were things that you mostly do not see in other disorders: nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance of innocuous things that were reminders of the trauma, desperate efforts to push the memory out of awareness, loss of the basic sense of everydayness and reasonable safety we walk around with, a weird sense of numbness and separateness. Had a training with famous psychologist Donald Meichenbaum who described some of his cases, and all were caused by events involving a combat-level of horrific violence: prisoners who had been tortured; a truck driver who had had to brake suddenly, and when he did a steel rod from his cargo broke through the back of his cab and went all the way through the skull of his hitchhiker; a woman who accidentally shot her daughter.
While I have no doubt that other sorts of bad experiences can do terrible damage to people that can last a lifetime, it seems to me that there really is something unique about the damage done by combat-like experiences. I myself have had 2 experiences that probably make it into the less severe end of that category, and both caused a unique cluster of symptoms. The first occurred when I was about 12. I witnessed a young guy who had had a motorcycle accident lying in the street with a terribly mangled leg, screaming like I did not know it was even possible to scream. For quite a long time afterwards I had dreams of the event, and also extremely vivid involuntary replays of the memory when I was awake. I did not like looking at the part of the road where the guy had lain. And I felt weird all the time . It was pretty much the way the Harry Potter dementors made people feel — like I would never be happy again. I couldn’t get away from the dark glimpse I’ve gotten of somebody’s agony, the knowledge that that could happen to anyone.
The second incident happened when I was an adult. The electricity was out, and I lit my little backpacking stove in the bathroom to make a cup of tea. Saw that the rubber ring on the tank was on fire, and realized that was going to lead to the pressurized gas exploding out of the tank. Started to reach for the knob that would shut off the tank, then changed my mind and yanked my hand back. A nanosecond later the ring burned through and stove turned into a giant blowtorch and lit parts of my bathroom on fire. I was unhurt and the fire department put out the fire quickly so that the damage was not too bad. But for about a week I could not sleep, and kept having involuntary replays of the incident, plus involuntary imaginings of what would have happened if I hadn’t yanked my hand back at the last moment. I had to leave work on a couple of afternoons because I simply could not pay attention to what people were saying — my mind was completely taken up by replays of the event, and of the event that had almost happened. And I had again that same feeling of no longer being in the land of the living.
These 2 events actually would not make it onto the list of the worst things I’ve been through. They were shocking and grisly, but unlike the things on the Really Bad list, they did not damage my self esteem, or my feeling of fellowship with other people, and they did not involve a loss. However, they caused a syndrome that the worst things in my life have not.
I really think there is a good case for reserving a special word for the syndrome some people get after sudden shocking, grisly life-or-death events. If you want to use the term PTSD for the effects of a much broader class of harmful events, that’s OK I guess, but then you need a new word for the special class of harmful events that get stuck on replay in the mind, and cause that dementor-bled feeling. I don’t think politics causes anything remotely like that experience. Politics just fucks us up
“ So for example, in 1979 some psychologists asked partisans to read pairs of studies about capital punishment (a controversial issue at the time), then asked them to rate the methodologies on a scale from -8 to 8. Conservatives rated the pro-punishment study at about +2 and the anti-execution study as about -2; liberals gave an only slightly smaller difference the opposite direction.”
I know this is nitpicky, and doesn’t invalidate the broader point, but the above is actually a perfectly valid example of bayesian reasoning. Suppose I believe P(death penalty reduces crime) = 0.8, that 30% of studies on any given topic are flawed, and that all good studies will be accurate but flawed studies always return the wrong result. Thus, if a study agrees with me the probability that it is correct is 0.7*0.8/(0.7*0.8 + 0.3*0.2) = 0.9, so only a 10% chance that it is flawed, while my estimation that the death penalty is effective is also now 90%, because this is wrong if and only if the study is flawed.* On the other hand, if I encunter a study which contradicts my prior, I calculate the probaiblity of the study being flawed is 0.3*0.8/(0.3*0.8 + 0.7 * 0.2) = 0.63, meaning a 63% chance the study is flawed, but also only a 63% chance that I am right about the death penalty. So studies which contridict my priors are about 6 times more likely to be flawed than studies which don’t.
Of course, in practice I doubt the particpants updated their beliefs about the death penalty at all, but this was also rational. Given they were in a lab, and that they probablly rightly suspected relavent information about the studies was being withheld, the optimal strategy would be “evaluate studies based on my priors, because I lack a better way to do so, but don’t update in the way the studies would otherwise suggest.” Not that they were thinking this, but human behavior often comes closer to what the math would say is optimal than their concious thoughts would lead you to believe.
*this isn’t very realistic, which is why I orignally modeled flawed studies as random, but that makes the math harder to follow
> persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event
This is "safe spaces", I think? Not in the original sense, but in the sense of "anyone with possibly Republican-leaning views must be banished from the entire campus and all speakers vetted beforehand". Also, the kind of person that thrived in pre-Musk twitter but has now quit in disgust, because the previous owners had figured out that one way to maximise engagement/retention was to not confront you with people or ideas you don't want to hear.
Regarding PTSD before the era of Van der Kolk: an interesting data point comes from Kate Summerscale's book The Haunting of Alma Fielding. The setting is 1930s Britain, everyone knows that a catastrophic war is just round the corner, and people need outlets for their anxiety. No-one has heard of PTSD yet (shell shock maybe, but you don't get that from living in London). But, polite society does believe in the supernatural, and the title character expresses her trauma (as we'd call it in modern terms) in hauntings, apparitions and becoming a medium.
To quote one review: "Nandor Fodor - a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research - begins to investigate. In doing so he discovers a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss - and the foreshadowing of a nation's worst fears. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor's obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed."
You bring up complex PTSD in passing, but at times approach political trauma in this post as if there is a discrete initial traumatic event that later symptoms and retraumatization stem from. I'd like to point out that societal and environmental sources of trauma often last over long periods of time. In my experience, the people who are most passionate about the discourse are currently in horrible situations, not responding to them after the fact. If I look at my own history I became more chill online about religion and gender-related issues after I moved out of the Bible Belt, and again after I stopped living with my mother. (There are a bunch of confounding factors there, of course, both moves also marked significant changes in my lifestyle.) The strategies for dealing with ongoing trauma look different from the response to trauma's aftermath.
Separately: you mention but don't go into self-harm as a cause of addiction to trauma. I am aware that I live in a bubble of mental illness but I do think self-harm accounts for some of the more dramatic cases of that condition known as Terminally Online Disorder. I don't know comorbidity rates but it isn't controversial that depression and trauma can go hand in hand, and if you want to make yourself miserable on purpose digging deep into the blogs of people who hate your in-group is a fantastic way to do it.
I'm generally not a fan of Big Diagnostic turning every behavior at every standard deviation from the mean a diagnosable condition, but I think you're onto something here.
I think I had trauma around growing up gay (among other things). Being born in 1993 and realizing my orientation around 2003 I was old enough to where I guess it felt like there was a lot of ambient anti-gay sentiment. I'm aware many people clearly think this is absurd, and should objectively not be traumatizing.
Probably legalization of gay marriage 'cured' this trauma but also became a sort of obsession, and finding out someone voted against it (especially a younger person) would feel deeply violating in a way where it felt somewhat rape-adjacent in my mind. It was like they wanted to remove autonomy and dignity from me, in a very personal way and for no clear reason, and that was layered on top of the other stigma-related trauma I had around my sexual orientation. The trauma says “GET AWAY FROM THE HOMOPHOBIA! FIND SAFETY!!!” but it feels like you can’t do that if it’s the law of your country.
I think tho thankfully with legalization in Western countries and things settling down I've become center-left slightly anti-woke (I'm also a cis white man). The gay marriage thing, in terms of its psychic meaning, can easily be interpreted as "then society decided homophobia was bad", and I think this allowed me to move on. Maybe I’m fortunate.
I only seem to get traumatized around things that specifically affect me. I also consume ~no news or social media which seems to have palpably improved my mental health.
The Latvian pine slug (Album ashkeniger) is a large and rare species of slug that lives in the forests of Latvia, Pskov Oblast (formerly part of the Soviet Union). It is the largest land slug in Europe, reaching up to 30 cm in length; being slightly longer than the Turkish giant slug and Russian tundra snail. Male snails are slightly larger but with smaller nervous systems compared to females. It feeds exclusively on fresh and locally sourced organic matter. Its shell is dark grey with a distinct “cracked” texture, marked with white spots vaguely resembling the letter “Z”. It is also known as the grey cracker slug or the Latvian japper.
The life cycle of the Latvian pine slug is complex and intriguing. All individuals are born as males, with some transitioning to females as they mature. The trigger for this process is unclear; debate is ongoing whether this is genetically predetermined or influenced by the sex ratio of the population. The male slug aggressively pursues females and repeatedly attempts to initiate copulation. As the female is smaller in size, the male eventually corners her and deposits his sperm. She then lays up to 200 eggs in moist soil or under logs. The eggs hatch after a few weeks: slug parental care is infrequent and highly variable between subspecies, seemingly having substantial effects on the fitness of its offspring.
The slug is abundantly found, but may be threatened by climate change as increased drought spells would lead to desiccation of the eggs and massive population drops. However, some researchers suggest that the slugs would simply adapt by migrating and laying eggs in moister areas.
This resonated with me particularly given my experience with my dad and brother who got into Rush Limbaugh early. I remember being with my dad and hearing Limbaugh repeating over and over again "Liberals HATE YOU! They HATE YOU!" Like a mantra. It's forcing a trapped prior. Any disagreement if with them if you're not part of that isn't just a disagreement. It's reinforcing that "liberals hate you and don't respect you". It's not about facts anymore. It's about reliving that.
> they find listening a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space.
If only that was all of the problem. The problem is they find the knowledge that somebody, somewhere on campus (or even off campus) is listening to a discordant opinion is equally intolerable. It's like a claustrophobic person that thinks there should be no enclosed spaces in the universe, at all.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
The correct analogy would be "imagine somebody giving a diversity training where the participation is completely voluntary and you free to not go there at all, but you still are offended by the fact that somebody goes there". Which, admittedly, happens, but I think less frequently than the original one.
> Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD. Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by cross-cultural comparisons and research on depression: thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
Poverty in the US seems PTSD coded as well. I've never experienced poverty, so maybe this is my ignorance talking, but my parents and aunts and uncles all did. Like third-world, grim meathook poverty including death from preventable illnesses, not having enough to eat, and the random bout of horrific violence. When they escaped they lived as illegal immigrants in another country. Don't get me wrong, they weren't fleeing the Khmer Rouge or anything, but it was closer to that than US poverty. And... as far as I can tell, none of them have PTSD from it. They're not supposed to feel traumatized by this, because everyone went through this, so... they're fine?
Meanwhile a bunch of friends here in the US grew up in relatively cushy (but probably still bad) first-world poverty and they seem scarred for life from it. They're "supposed to" feel traumatized by it, so they are.
Here's a theory: maybe the reason so many people feel traumatised is that society's just got much bigger than any human mind can track, meaning that we feel -- often accurately -- that our lives are at the mercy of impersonal forces we can't hope to control. Look at all the worry about AI taking our jobs, for example -- lots of people seem to agree that this is a worrying prospect, but nobody says "Well, let's just stop producing advanced AIs, problem solved." It's like technological development has gained a momentum of its own, and can't be stopped even if there's broad societal agreement that it's bad. (Aside: yes, I know not everybody thinks AI research is bad; my point is that, even among those who think it is, nobody seems to consider "don't develop AIs that will put people out of jobs" to be a feasible solution.) Or look at the economy. Even experts disagree on what is actually good for economic growth, or whether a given step to boost the economy will be good for actual people; from the perspective of an ordinary person, "the economy" might as well be some kind of capricious Lovecraftian god, which could choose to make you unemployed tomorrow for no reason whatsoever. As I understand it, perceived lack of control is a risk factor in being traumatised -- hence, for example, the theory that PTSD first became prevalent in the Great War because soldiers were spending so much time sitting in trenches getting shelled, without being able to make even token retaliation. So maybe a perceived lack of control over how our lives turn out is partly responsible for why everybody seems so crazy nowadays.
(Note 1: I'm aware that out-of-control events have always been a risk -- a medieval peasant might get his crops destroyed by the blight, or burnt by an invading army. But at the day-to-day level, most of his life would be lived among the same villagers he'd always known, people whom he'd know quite well, so there wouldn't have been this impersonal quality which we find in modern life. Even if he was a serf and only partially free, his lord was a specific individual whom he could appeal to, at least in principle, if he didn't like how his village was being run. You can't appeal to the global economy if you don't like how its affecting your community. Even appealing to your MP, or local equivalent, is unlikely to have much effect, and the chain between you writing to your MP and meaningful structural economic change occurring is going to be much longer and more convoluted than the chain between you petitioning your lord to do something and your lord doing it.)
(Note 2: This theory would also explain why things seem to have got so much crazier since the Covid lockdowns. "The government can and does repeatedly shut down society for indefinite amounts of time, at unpredictable intervals, with virtually no prior warning" is like a textbook case of a situation where ordinary people lack control over their own lives.)
While it was a pretty minor one compared to what Scott personally experienced I actually did feel a period of secondhand trauma during the nyt incident.
The Latvian pine slug is apparently not a thing, or at least a little cursory Googling didn't find it.
However! It turns out you can buy a rainbow articulated 3d printed slug and more people should be aware of this: https://paradoxartistcollective.com/products/3d-printed-articulated-slug
Yeah! I stopped paying attention to the news several years ago, (sometime around Trumps first impeachment, I had TDS before that.) The news media now makes money by pushing your buttons so that tomorrow you'll come back for more. I encourage everyone to get off that tread mill, and pay attention to what is going on around you. (locally)
There’s a scene in the movie Dream Scenario (minimal spoilers) where Nicholas Cage’s students have to undergo a group cognitive behavioral session consisting of Cage standing on the other side of the gymnasium, and taking a few steps closer to them at a time - the goal being he can stand right in front of then without freaking them out.
I think this basically needs to happen with voters.
I suspect that this definition of trauma proves too much and that basically anything could be called trauma by these lights.
Take going to the grocery store (I work at a grocery store, so it's the first example that comes to mind). Anecdotally, people are worse at math in grocery stores than elsewhere, given some of the questions that I've been asked about people's receipts. The people whom I discuss politics with sound a good deal less paranoid than customers, who are sometimes convinced that we're trying to overcharge them or think that the credit card reader is stealing their information. Unlike political trauma, people physically experience going to a grocery store. Not everybody experiences being hypervigilant, irritable, and persistently negative as a result of grocery shopping, just like not everybody experiences that about politics, but a lot of people do. Some people avoid the trauma by doing Instacart, but others become unhealthily obsessed with comparison shopping.
Are grocery stores generally traumatic? I find the idea ridiculous, but many of Scott's reasons for politics being traumatic apply equally well or better to shopping. Maybe the people I know are just bizarrely well-behaved around politics, though. For that matter, I could make a similar argument about capitalism, communism, sleep (that one makes people really bad at math), school, having children, or loads of other common activities.
The most reasonable conclusion is to reject this redefinition of trauma as an overreach, and so politics aren't traumatic unless you want to hold that basically every activity is traumatic.
Jon Ronson recently had a related episode about trauma on “things fell apart”:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/things-fell-apart/id1592984136?i=1000640051663
I remember when Less Wrong had the policy, Politcs is the Mindkiller. I thought it was so obviously true of American politics (and perhaps one reason that Canadians, as an outside party, were so successful at comedy). But it wasn't true of Canadian politics! Canadians could talk about Conservative vs NDP vs Bloc without all the "all heat, no light" of American politics.
Now Canadian politics has the same mindkiller-ness as Americans. Even discussing American politics causes a lot of (most) Canadians to forget all rationality and go completely tribal.
Am I looking at my youth with rose-coloured (note the U in 'coloured') glasses? I don't think so, but I can't think of a good way to prove it one way or another.
I read this, and I think to myself... what is the difference between "trauma" and "I don't like this."?
Between "I hate my job" and "I'm too mentally unwell to go in today."? I really don't know
There's a book by someone called Michael Nehls who thinks he understands how isolation and exposure to propaganda changes the brain:
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/has-neuroscience-found-the-key-to
I haven't read it, but I've been curious about it. If correct, that would be another angle on Scott's point.
It's very tempting to assume that Nehls is just crazy, but we're all witnessing people around us being crazy, so something we don't understand is clearly going on.
So, by any chance, would anyone here have an educated opinion on Nehls' view? Obviously right, obviously wrong, sort of correct but completely wrong angle, professional, amateurish, sounds like nonsense for a certain reason - what is it?
Didn't find this post interesting as usual. Felt like I already believed something similar and didn't need to be convinced that many people are traumatized by politics or more generally that politics is overly emotional.
But of course, the topic of improving political discourse is important, so I'm not sure what I'd have preferred. I'm tempted to say a call to action, but IDK if that's Scott's thing. Maybe more speculative prescriptions, beyond consuming less outrage clickbait.
EDIT: Just remembered my speculation about dog whistles--mainstream media takes for granted that every message is optimized, and so any potential ambiguity is necessarily intentional. The average person thinks that's insane. Maybe subtext is real, but not everyone can or will make use of it, so it's wrong to assume.
I'm not convinced by this article; the usual political nonsense doesn't feel like trauma, emotionally.
It seems more lime: to demonstrate our allegiance to the in-group, we publicly denounce the outgroup. This is east to do when the outgroup is Trump.
=====
Those real life crime channels seem strange to me. What are we doing, watching these documentaries about horrible murders?
Maybe there's something of the same quality to Trump coverage. He's enough material for not just an episode, or a series, or a two season DVD boxed set, but an entire tv channel of his crazy criminal antics.
First, some sources consulted:
J.G. Fraser, The Golden Bough
Marshall Sahlins, How "natives" think
René Girardeau, I see Satan fall like lightning
Robi Hardy (dirctor), The Wicker Man
The unfortunate Captain Cook failed to ask some obvious questions, beyond oh, how nice, they hunk I'm the God Lono. We may forgive his ignorance of Hawaiian religion. But even if you were only familiar with Christianity, some questions along the lines of, hey what happened to that Jesus guy at the end? Might come to mind.
.and so to Trump, who seems worryingly unconcerned with how the story ends.
So, he's competing to be elected as some kind of God-King, locally known as "The President". In his case, the role of the candidate seems to be to be as rituallly impure as possible, violating the sacred taboos of kingship. In the religion of the United States of America, intercourse with a young virgin girl is regarded as maximally ritually polluting.
So, you have this guy, you set him up to be as impure as possible, you elect him God-king ... then what? Does a large wicker Whitehouse lie ahead?
I suffer a lot from this, especially since my latest smartphone now receives automatic news-feeds. I wish I could just stop reading them but they are addictive and I always fall prey to the (lame?) excuse of wanting to stay informed. So I end up getting worked up a lot (being a social conservative, but not a particularly economic one, I get the feeling - probably not wrong? - that I am part of a vanishing minority these days). I want to feel that my point of view is rational, that I am not the crazy one. Seeing a bunch of news articles which constantly disagree with you, "triggers" you because suddenly you are the crazy one! But I would stop short of calling all of this trauma (that certainly seems - as some have mentioned here - offensive to people with real trauma). And I am definitely convinced that media in general is purposefully trying to wratchet up our levels of outrage for profit-seeking reasons (for which we should all be outraged!).
My attempt at a remedy for 2024: put the f***ing phone down and enjoy the real world more and try hard to believe that the other side means well, even when I think they are dead wrong. Lastly, deal with everyone around me (and myself) as an individual, not part of any group. See how it works out for me...
[epistemic status: weakly informed speculation] If we do accept that PTSD exists now but not in the past, could that just be because modern wars have all kinds of skull-rattling explosions going on and ancient wars didn't? Didn't PTSD used to be called "shell shock"? WWII was pretty valorized and I believe those soldiers still suffered from PTSD.
Shit like loss aversion, the brains conflation of psychic and physically traumatic pain, and Toni Morrison saying it doesn’t matter if u your fear is real, just if you really fear,
Has had me think similarly, and the exhaustion, and the initial turn to, fear-campaigning in major US elections is the kinda pattern I’d look to see this kinda society sick
Interesting approach, I agree there seems to be quite a strong fit between the psychology of political partisanship and this concept of trauma addiction. Thanks for introducing that this aspect of reenactment, btw, I don't think it's so well known.
Regarding section VI on the science of trauma, what I've read about trauma was mostly from Bessel Van Der Kolk, Deb Dana and associated figures, and IIRC the psychological description they give is a bit more detailed than just a system of trapped priors. The kind of trauma they talk about seems to be primarily a failure of integration; the stimulus is so strong, so overwhelming, that the parts of the brain that keep track of our "larger I", with its wider identity, history, self-narratives, etc., more or less shut down, and one is unable to integrate the event. The practical result is that the event never becomes part of normal memory, it remains in a kind of eternal present, so that recalling it literally amounts to reliving it, right here and now. This inhibits the whole regular way in which we normally allow events (even strikingly bad ones) to fade away with time, and to become subsumed into a larger self-story. I don't recall the exact details, but this probably maps pretty well to different areas of the brain suddenly switching off or disconnecting from each other, probably as an evolutionarily ancient response to overwhelming danger activated at the amygdala.
A close friend of mine (probably) has "complex PTSD" due to extremely incompetent parenting, and when it comes up, it's a kind of disconnection, a dissociation, which is barely perceptible from the outside because he has learned to hide it. Much of the therapy he has done has been about noticing how this internal shutdown happens, and how it seems to happen at a very low level of the nervous system. I don't know if the notion of priors even applies at such a level - maybe it does, but still, there is something qualitatively completely different between that and a relatively simple trapped cognitive prior that dogs or liberals or the Catholic Church or whatever are evil.
Maybe what I'm trying to talk about is trauma proper, and the craziness of politics is only trauma-adjacent, or trauma-lite. From your description, I'd say the shoe fits... at least from what I've seen at a distance, because personally I find myself rather incapable of being invested in politics of any kind!
I think in the future the acquiescence to the belief that “words and opinions can be violence, and people have a legitimate right to be protected from language they may find harmful” will be regarded as the gravest error Western societies have made culturally over the past 20 years
Have you considered comparing politics to OCD instead of trauma? A political person who is addicted to the news because being well-informed can somehow prevent their country from sliding into dictatorship does not seem too different from someone who obsessively washes their hands out of a fear of germs.
Cherrypicking some definitions from [this table](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56452/), political thoughts (at least about the other side) could be viewed as obsessions ("persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as inappropriate or intrusive and that cause anxiety and distress. The content of the obsession is often perceived as alien and not under the person's control.") and getting into fruitless political debates seems to fit the criteria for compulsions ("repetitive behaviours or mental acts that are carried out to reduce or prevent anxiety or distress and are perceived to prevent a dreaded event or situation").
There are of course notable differences. Political thoughts and behavior can also be motivated by hope, whereas definitions of OCD revolve about negative things. In OCD people usually think they themselves are in some way contaminated, in politics the others are at fault, but that seems less awkward than relying on traumatic re-enactment, which I hope is more of a fringe phenomenon (it sounds awful).
I've written a speculative essay about trauma being the best way to understand the phenomena of ideology, political or otherwise - An ideology being the memetic coordination mechanism for culturally embodied stuckness. Wrote about it here: https://primatesofcosmos.substack.com/p/clenchings-of-body-and-mind
Ok hear me out: maybe the problem is caused by the political system and improving it will end the cycle of trauma...
It annoys me a lot that seemingly the vast majority of people will complain about a common problem but be either uninterested or even hostile towards discussing systemic solutions. Often they prefer individual solutions, i.e., people or groups who cause problems should be punished and that's that.
One thing I think is missing in this analysis is the *magnitude* of the trauma. If we're taking the DSM as a reference point, I note that for PTSD it requires "Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence". And yes, we can recognize that this is not an exhaustive list and that e.g. emotional abuse can qualify, but it would kind of have to be emotional abuse on par with (serious, non-hyperbolic) death threats.
Which doesn't seem to apply to the sorts of "trauma" we're talking about here. Particularly with regard to the hypothesis that the media is causing all of this in its relentless pursuit of eyeballs and clicks. Media, traditional or social, can't kill or injure you, can't sexually assault you, and rarely threatens to kill you in any serious way. It usually even cuts away from graphic images of death or serious injury, and in any event the DSM tells us that, get real, seeing this stuff on TV doesn't count. Unless it's for work-related purposes, somehow.
And I think it used to work this way. The media is just words and (usually tame) images, and we used to consider it at least aspirationally true that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". Yeah, maybe the *first* time someone calls a white kid "racist" or a black kid the N-word, they go lock themselves in their room for a month. But we used to expect them to learn better, grow out of it, and come back as the sort of person who can e.g. stand up to the New York Times and come away bloody but unbowed.
Now, we've got lots of people experiencing almost crippling levels of "trauma", from things the DSM says don't make the cut for PTSD. And yes, when the media finds someone vulnerable to that sort of thing, they'll pounce on it for the profit they'll make selling those outrage-fixated eyeballs to their advertisers. But there has to be something else that's making so many people fragile enough that they are susceptible in the first place.
And there are some obvious theories as to what that could be, but I distrust obvious, easy answers to hard questions and I think this needs further exploration.
Dear Scott,
I humbly plead for you to change the post image, due to the following reason:
When I share a post, the image shows up in the embed. Thus, when I share this empathic and humanizing article, the image the recipient sees is the 2016-era "triggered" meme, which is (as the kids say) "right-coded".
Thank you, and yours truly,
- Nicholas Kross
PS: Yes, i can sometimes rdmove the default embed (yes on discord, not when texting). However, the embed makes people more likely to click (image! Yay!) as long as it's not actively turning them away (triggered meme! Boooo, an article I won't read because the image makes it look like a more-stereotypical conservative meme!).
As a result of this article, I've been thinking about Jews and holocaust material.
I know people who go to holocaust museums and watch holocaust movies. I don't do that, my feeling about holocaust museums is "Why would I do that to myself? I haven't even read Maus.
However, I do read a fair amount about the holocaust and I can feel the pull.
It's rather clearly not about learning in the cognitive sense. One holocaust museum (maybe two or three if you have regional interests) should be enough to grasp that the holocaust happened, it was extraordinarily bad, and one should do what one can to flee, fight, and/or prevent holocausts and to help others do so.
At this point, I'm just trying to understand what's going on. Perhaps there's a desire for the sort of learning which causes action combined with a lack of trust that cognitive learning will be enough.
"Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments."
Apart from replicability, the Kahan study doesn't show that politics is the mindkiller -- only that modern US politics is. See Andrew Marshalls comment about Canadian politics.
>Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.
For any single individual, voting on election day doesn't make logical sense if their time is worth anything. A single vote has an infinitesimally small chance of changing an election. Even if the single vote does change the election, having one party rather than another in power is likely to have only a small effect on their life. Playing the lottery would a higher expected value.
> than I would on some boring topic like taxes.
Funny example. Doing my taxes has been mildly traumatic for me. I should probably pay someone to do them but (like the political news junky?) I feel there's value in being aware of the horrific details.
Great post! Most of the news and comment I read is by Catholics or First Things-style ecumenical conservatives. These folks aren't immune to triggering (John Zmirak got fraud-pilled, as did Ed Peters, Fr Z). Nevertheless I tend to think to the extent that people believe there are important social goals which exist independently of politics, politics just becomes less consequential and less triggering, and things can be discussed fairly rationally. David French vs Sohrab Ahmari on Drag Queens was a difficult debate to watch, but the debate wouldn't have even happened in most cases. Being Christian gave them an opportunity to debate and repair any bridges that got burned in the debate. But I get the feeling something similar is going on for rationalists too.
> imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail
I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a convincing comparison, between being forced to pretend you agree with discordant ideas for six weeks, and merely hearing a discordant opinion or knowing it exists.
At any rate, people will be as reasonable as they must, or as intolerant - as willing to work themselves up into a fanatic frenzy - as they can get away with, depending on which ideology holds power, and can send you into a six week reeducation, or lose you your job.
There have been a number of instances of
A) organisers of some event (e.g. vibecamp, science fiction convention) propose banning someone
B) argument is made that they might be innocent
C) substantial discussion is had, to the eventual conclusion that yes, they are indeed a bad guy
(E.g. Marion Zimmer Bradley and partner Walter Bremen; more recent vibecamp issue...)
Step (c) is kind of unedifying, but I guess it has to happen in order to achieve (a), kicking them out, given (b).
Another possible factor: if you're in a noisy environment, you have to get louder to be heard.
I'm reminded about a bit in _The Wisdom of Whores_ (a book about international charities trying to help prostitutes) about how a charity can't get attention for what is just a problem, it has to be amplified to sound like an emergency to be noticed.
One way to deescalate it is to stop straw manning. One way to prevent straw manning is a norm of requiring specific receipts whenever anyone makes a claim about what someone else has done or said or believed. Also, avoiding all hyperbole. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Some trauma gurus are now asserting that "capitalism" causes trauma. Others say, "Modern life" is traumatic. Talk about an ever expanding definition of trauma! It's a totalizing ideology that predisposes people to experiencing normal challenges as traumatic assaults.
This post was very good but it traumatized me.
It was so long substack crashed four times well I was trying to read it. I am now addicted to long posts that crash when I read them and will be expecting more from you
Wouldnt Kevin Simlers old article Crony Beliefs be a sufficient model to explain these behaviors? (except the addiction one, but that one I do not relate to) https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
In there he writes you have some beliefs because you think they are true, and some because they are socially desirable. The more you use truth-seeking to root out the socially desirable ones, the more you protect them. And it lists behaviors like anger that seem to work exactly like what you describe. I more think when it comes to politics, peoples brain see "aha, this concern a socially desirable belief", not a truth-belief, and therefore runs that program and so sound a bit stupid. And if someone says, no that cannot be true, they get very defensive about it.
The solution Kevin suggests in the article is to create a community of truth-seekers around you
This is one of the best pieces you’ve written in a while Scott, really fascinating and convincing argument/concept. Nice work.
I have just noticed that Geoffrey Miller is very, very angry about those protestors who threw soup at the Mona Lisa; plus certain other protesters I shall avoid explicitly mentioning here.
Conjecture: those protestors are serving approximately the same function for the right as Trump does for the left.
Thank you for writing this. It's very informative.
Question: have you look into the crisis in family court from the same perspective, where a narcissistic/borderline/dark triad individual decompensates ina to persecutory delusion due to the divorce?
Most doctors working in family court do not seem to know any of this.
Thank you again.
I have C-PTSD... it actually turned me into an activist and a politician from the age of five onward.
All I can say is that, maybe I'm lucky, my traumatic stimuli were from different political groupings, so I became more-focused on power and dishonesty (I literally describe my trigger as "Hypocrisy in the Face of Harm")... in that I've gone after both the [Not-Really] Left and the [Mythology over Commonsense] Right over all manner of different issues.
I think the most-important thing in terms of being able to make politics less-traumatizing is habituation. Engage with your political enemies, defend them when it comes to things you agree with, and try to respond as much as possible, outside the emotional part of your brain.
Politics is life-and-death... we don't need to add any more emotional up or down regulation to it... there's tonnes there already.
And yeah, listening to those narratives you tell me to turn-off has managed to help me find out who is and is not a good-faith actor. Max Igan trying to show people that transition is a plot to sterilize people was so thinly argued and so dependent on leveraging disgust, that he showed a trans man and a trans woman raising their newborn to 'prove' his point.
There's a guy either lost or hoping you will be or both.
Same with people who talk about immune injury from COVID but won't look at the Cleveland Clinic data...
Heck, to see masks on the faces of people chanting about genocide, when 30 million children died of malnutrition as a result of our response to COVID, and they'd rather focus on 15 thousand, replicates that trauma.
But increasingly, thorugh engagement, I'm habituated... and I think you're right about something else:
I now don't believe the mendacity of the people whose actions outrage me goes unpunished... and I feel better about taking it on as a result.
It seems to me that one factor in whether an experience is "traumatic" is whether it violates one's expectation of how the world is or ought to be. I.e., in an aristocratic warrior culture, aristocratic warriors aren't going to be traumatized by dreadful things happening in battle as those are expected and accepted as part of the structure of the world.
Within that framework, I notice the phrase "lots of people did experience feelings of fear and helplessness around Trump’s election". That's odd because of course one is relatively helpless vis a vis political trends that move away from one's preferences. "XYZ got elected and that's against my interests!" should be considered a *normal* event in life. But for some reason, people expect that they live in a world of people who have their best interests at heart.
This reminds me that Caitlin Flanagan once explained why teenagers are vulnerable: "... and most of all their innocent belief, so carefully nurtured by parents and teachers, that the world rewards kindness and fairness, that there is always someone in authority to appeal to if you are being treated cruelly or not included in something ..." That is, upper-middle-class parents work very hard to ensure their children never interact with people who *don't* have the child's best interests at heart. Needless to say, when the child starts dealing with the Real World, it's a shock.
I think my main update from this is that Scott's lived experience is that people who are really into politics are often actually scared and angered by the stuff they say they are scared and angered by, its not just some kind of performative signaling game about how your are so in-group-pure the out-group burns your mind like a vampire exposed to the sun. Most of my social circle isn't into this stuff, so I guess I wasn't quite sure whether to take these claims seriously.
So this article has me assigning more weight to the emotional distress people experience from politics and modern social media madness in general.
I am less sure that I buy the trauma framing. I am skeptical of the studies mentioned on general principle. They sound to me from the brief description like The Kind Of Thing That Does Not Replicate, never mind being actually correct, which is a higher bar. Every other symptom named seems pretty generic to me?
Is there some kind of actual difference in how you best help or not-hinder people who feel sad and angry and scared due to "trauma" compared to people who feel sad and angry and scared for other generic reasons? If not, I'm not sure if the diagnosis is helpful here, and I don't much buy that it carves reality at a joint in the description either.
Just wondering why you feel a need to argue with "people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses." Who knows whether they do or not, actually? What has become apparent is that they don't 't care at all about women. As evidenced by the many women who have been denied medically necessary abortions, sometimes being told to wait in the hospital parking lot until they go into sepsis or start hemorrhaging. Anti-abortion activists' behavior has given us a big clue about where their priorities lie.
> ancient warriors didn’t get ptsd
They also engaged in animal slaughter on their farms on a daily basis. Most Americans probably haven’t tried to cut a cows head off
A# I said, I'm really skeptical that much politicking can be explained as trauma.
Except, maybe, COViD related craziness. I don't mean trauma from actually getting covid (though I'm sure that exists), more trauma from fear of covid/lockdown isolation. Would seem, a priori, to be potentially traumatic. And we find, that yes, there is a bunch of conspiracist politics around covid.
There was a good post on one of the conspiracy groups in which the guy tells the story of how he came to be involuntarily committed in a psychiatric hospital, during which time he met some new friends, who had some very interesting ideas that he is now about to explain. (This completely breaks the usual model of psychiatry textbooks, that clinical psychosis and political conspiracy theories are entirely different phenomena.@)
A correction: Ted Cruz said that *Donald Trump,* not Hillary Clinton, had New York values (during the brief period Cruz was opposing Trump outright)
This really makes a lot of things fall into place for me. One thing I'm really curious about is why do some people not seem to be susceptible to this pattern? I lean more left-wing (though technically, more anarcho-syndicalist), but don't feel constantly triggered by what strike me as crazy right-wing talking points. I just roll my eyes or feel concerned that this stuff is being distributed. But I don't feel personally triggered by it. What is different about me?
Is there a name for paranoia about paranoia existing? A meta-paranoia?
I'm curious about how different this take is from what the psychological/ psychiatric establishment think. As far as I can tell, the mental health profession seems pretty unanimous - the 24/7 news cycle and social media is really bad for you. The topic on politics specifically seems to have gotten a bump mid Jan, from a study from U Toronto.
Anecdotally, a lot of social movements implicitly or explicitly create cult-like conditions, especially on social media. When I was a friendless teenager, I fell prey to radical feminism, and only recovered to be a functioning adult after I somehow succeeded in making friends (despite how poorly I was behaving). The combination of convincing a victim of the hostility of wider society, that the only safe place is within the political movement, and then insane rules intended to foster control over the victims (radfeminism is really really weird about romantic relationships and sex). My radfem phase didn't last long, but I'm now always vigilant when a social or political movement does similar stuff.... And a lot of the fringe online ones do the exact same thing.
So my contribution: we know that cults are traumatizing to their members. Politics is increasingly using cult tactics, incidentally traumatizing people, but due to the reach and inescapability of politics, it's able to do this on a massive scale.
To me, it makes complete sense that people can become obsessed with a source of trauma, even if it is very harmful to their mental health. In fact, it is pretty surprising to me when someone *doesn't* have this reaction.
If you are an ancestral tetrapod and you are nearly killed by a predator, your survival odds go down if you bury your head in the sand and try to think about predators as little as possible. The better response is to become more vigilant against predators from now on. Jumping at shadows is a small price to pay for living another day.
It's a shame that we are prone to being traumatized by events that do not merit this reaction, but our trauma response likely evolved long before the complexities of modern civilization were a twinkle in an australopith's eye.
I searched for the word "identification" in the post and the comments and it did not appear once.
The discussion of the "psychopolitics of trauma" doesn't make sense without talking about identification first. When we just take for granted that people identify with either team red or team blue (or with wokeness or the countermovement, with gender as a spectrum or "two biological sexes", and so on), then we might as well take for granted how all those issues can give rise to trauma. Why not. It obviously affects people, thus it's just about finding an instance where some political issue affects me negatively to the right degree and there you have your trauma.
What is weird about it?
Well, why should some news about some abstract event affect me emotionally at all? People who got scared when Trump become president probably argue that he was about to enact policies that will affect them, eventually. However, it is quite telling to see how people in European countries were triggered, too. Less in number and intensity, but here we need an explanation.
And that explanation is identification. Humans have the tendency (maybe even the need) to become part of a group and make the concerns of the group their own, individual concerns. When he was 8 years old, a friend of mine heard about Germany exporting tanks to other countries and thought "we can't just sell those tanks to other countries, we have to keep these to be stronger then them!". This is a beautiful example of a somewhat naive identification with "team Germany".
Once I identify with some group, I opened the flood gates. All kind of remotely relevant, abstract issues that are being discussed in media, social media, books, and bars might affect me. When I identify with a local transgender activism group, the fact that my national ID card states my biological sex and doesn't leave space to put a gender, might feel like some existential threat. But see: It's because of identification. I worked hard towards this being true. While identification comes naturally and seems to be ubiquitous with humans, it involves a series of decisions and actions. I.e. I don't have to identify with the that local transgender activism group to the degree that I get triggered by my national ID card.
For someone who does not happen to identify with the same group as me, the whole thing just looks like some theater, in which I play a chosen role. And this is what identification really is: a chosen drama. An enactment.
There is no really good reason, why I should identify with "my country", either. When people shout "USA! USA! USA!" they just seem like absolute morons to me. I can't help but to think of the North Korean mass games, or some random football fan (that is soccer fan in American English) who cries when his team looses and feels aggression towards fans of some other club.
**When I identify with some group/cause/institution, I open up the possibility of arbitrary news items affecting me negatively.**
And this is why quite literally everything, can be traumatizing. Construct a traumatizing expression like this:
X = [arbitrary statement here]
I identify with a group that says *not X* and moreover, X is kind of worse than the holocaust.
Someone: X
Me: Someone made me suffer! Members of my identified group: look!
Astralcodexten: Interesting, politics seem to be traumatizing. How come?
So maybe we should talk about the need for identification. I would suggest that there is a fairly linear spectrum from strong/healthy to weak/sick where the on the strong/healthy side, the need for identification is controlled. When you are on the strong/healthy side, you might still choose to support a football club and you might even find yourself shouting "USA! USA! USA!", but once your team looses you will remind yourself that watching football is your leisure activity and any negative emotion is just part of the rollercoaster ride that you opted in to.
A less neurotic version of Jordan Peterson probably wouldn't have been scared to hell by the geopolitics that played out during his youth.
The same healthy distance can be applied to the politics of your country. People on the strong/healthy side of the spectrum differentiate between love for their home country and identification with the political system. This healthy differentiation, in principle, can go so far that people are can identify with team red or team blue (or with Atheism or Christianity, or ...) and even have a fair debate with some opponent. I can even have fun and jump into a debate just for the sake of it, and advocate the opposite of my personal believes.
So, how about rephrase the question "why are politics apparently traumatic" to "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I agree with Scott that the trauma is (probably) real. It's a subjective experience, anyway. But: Your traumatizing experiences are a matter of choice nowadays. You can believe that you were born this way or the other and thus have to identify with a certain group, because otherwise you are left completely disenfranchised and have to suffer or die because of how bad the world is. Interestingly enough, you can also stop believing that.
You would arguably be a better trans-rights activist, a better republican, a better atheist when you could keep the reins in your hand while playing your chosen role and engaging in the respective drama.
----
So a bit of a scope drift, but is there an actual answer to the question of "what makes people unhealthily seek identification with some group"?
I gave a partial answer already: I think there are healthy people who don't do that. Remains the question where the all sick people come from. Have they always been there? Isn't the whole triggering and polarizing a recent phenomenon?
There are plenty of ways to destroy the healthy self in an individual and there probably has been an army of neurotics during most of the history of mankind. Globalized communication, e.g. the sharing of ideas beyond your family dinner table and the monthly townhall meeting of your village of 5000 inhabitants gives the neurotics a new outlet.
A clickbaity title has quite literally viral characteristics: A virus is not a living organism. A virus is just barely enough to manipulate a living organism to reproduce the virus. Similarly, a clickbait article isn't actually a message or some shared knowledge. And like biological organisms live inside some balance with viruses and other parasites, communication in the modern society is a a balance between knowledge sharing and parasitic contents. And like with viruses, it's probably not a good idea to try to eliminate all parasitic content and cleanse modern, global communication. Rather we should rely on the resilience of actual communication (like we rely on the immune system of the human body).
Politics is in general a domain where it's both high stakes and low ability to control outcomes, which is bad for mental health, and when you combine it with a viewpoint that everything is out of your control and catastrophization is rewarded makes it even worse.
This is why I generally advocate for more depoliticization of our lives, and why it's so important to have an internal locus of control.