Maggie's Farm

The New York Sun reports that those who give generously are happier people. Is that news?

The problem with the article is the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Do happy people give, or does giving make people happy? Or are there other variables that independently produce those results, as it turned out with eating broccoli?

I think that happy people take joy in much of what they do, whether it is giving or anything else. Still, giving is a pleasure for many reasons. Receiving isn't always enjoyable, for even more complicated reasons.

As regular readers know, we all seem to have been thinking recently about the cost of liberty and the human ambivalence about freedom. See, for a few examples:

Freedom? No thanks, and a word about Erich Fromm

Is Liberty Obsolete?

Of mice and men: Dems want the US to be like Denmark

Live Free or Die. How come Liberals never talk about Liberty?

Individual liberty erodes, one little trans-fat molecule at a time

The dignity trap of "positive liberty"

Liberty

"Freedom to" vs. "freedom from," the duties of citizenship, plus Dostoevsky

Shrinks, Thoreau, Pencils and Freedom

A few Sundays ago our preacher spoke provocatively about the cost of Grace. We want to think of Grace as being, by definition, a freebie. My pastor says not. Roger Kimball recently discusses the cost of freedom. Perfect.

Freedom and liberty are costly in money, lives, bruises, setbacks, and effort. And freedom is messy, too. All valuable things are costly, like relationships with man or God. Over time, the Left has actually managed to find a way to permit people's consciences to allow them to accept things and money from their neighbors which are not willingly given. Old-fashioned American dignity would not permit that.

In the end, the issue is whether we, as citizens, want to pay the price, or whether we want somebody else to pay for it like the old bowl of lentils. There is no free lentil lunch.

The infant in all of us wants everything good to be free to us, like mother's milk. If adults want to live in freedom, they need to get beyond that, because liberty is not for babies. Good things are costly.

Related: Popular Dictators at Econlog, and The Allure of Tyranny by Stephens at Opinion Journal.

A caveat: This is the sort of piece that I am always reluctant to write. I write this as a favor to our Editor but, in general, I am a skeptic about making any depth psychological speculations about groups of people, or about anyone I do not know in depth. It is all too easy to say that anyone who disagrees with me about something is either crazy or stupid, and that is not the respectful American way - nor is it necessarily accurate either.

What are we to make of this report from Gallup?

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

Dems see themselves as more mentally/emotionally impaired. (In an egregious logical error (cum hoc ergo propter hoc), the article suggests an independent causal relationship wherein party identification effects emotional well-being.)

Although I have no idea about whether a self-report of "mental health" has any validity at all, I would speculate that Republicans, statistically, with the Conservative and Libertarian flavorings of many Republicans, may tend to be more optimistic, hopeful, self-reliant, and to feel less needy and to feel less deprived. In other words, happier and probably better-adjusted people.

That is pure speculation, but it matches my personal experience that Lefies tend to be more bitter and dissatisfied - also with no relationship to income, education, church-going or age.

Externalization is a dangerous defence mechanism. It distorts reality by permitting a person to imagine that happiness and peace of mind - and likewise unhappiness - are usually generated externally rather than from within.

Also, as I have mentioned in the past, I see a difference in the "transference" towards government between Conservatives and others. I think that those who are more prone to unconscious parental transferences are more likely to turn to, rely upon, and to trust or hope to trust, the State. Am eagerness for childlike transferences in adulthood is not a predictor of emotional well-being.

Conservative-Libertarian types like me, I think, tend to view the people involved in politics and the State as being at least if not more venal, self-serving, corrupt, egotistical, foolish and ineffective as other areas of human endeavor like business, academia, non-profits, etc.

I like to think that this view has been arrived at through a lifetime of experience, a lifetime's interest in history and public affairs, and repeated (very educational) disappointments and disillusionments during my foolishly naive, idealistic, Liberal youth. Experience and psychoanalytic training powerfully introduced me to the dark side of human nature - against my will.

Yes, mine is the old story: mugged by reality. Literally mugged too, once, by a couple of barbarians with a handgun, in Boston. Alas, I was innocent and unarmed at the time, and therefore unable to give them a little toxic-lead lesson about my view of reality and of citizenship.

"I gave at the office, pal." Boom!

I was invited by our editor to comment on a piece, Talking Back to Prozac, in the paleo-Commie and reliably long-winded NY Review of Books.

The essay/book review by Frederick Crews is semi-hysterically worried about antidepressants, but the real theme motivating the essay seems to be the astonishing and scandalous fact that Big Pharma makes money from developing and selling medicine.

Well, slap me with a mackeral and call me Mildred. That's terrible news. Maybe non-profits, or the government, or the UN should be developing the new treatments, and giving them away for free.

OK, one of the books, the one by Christopher Lane - How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, sounds like it makes some good points. Everything is pathologized today (and granted a fancy diagnosis to get insurance coverage) - and every child is supposed to be perfect. The assumption is that we/they could be, if only the government or somebody really smart ran the world, like the people at the New York Review of Books.

I don't have time to comment further, except to say that antidepressants - the older ones, and the SSRIs and the hybrids, have, overall, been a great boon to mankind. The point is correct that depression and anxiety disorders are not really a "chemical imbalance" - except in the case of true Bipolar Disorder (and not the faux bipolar disorder that everybody and their kid and cousin is diagnosed with these days). That would be equivalent to claiming that a headache is a Tylenol deficiency. Anxiety and depression are usually symptoms of complicated mental states - time-consuming, expensive, and often frustrating if not impossible to get a grip on.

Some people chose to try to get to the bottom of it, some choose the band-aid alone, and some people refuse medicine. It's a free country.

I have always valued Joyce McDougall's A Plea for a Measure of Abnormality: I am not a psycho-utopian, or any other kind of utopian, but I think we all should be grateful for what the drug companies do. Eliminating pain is God's work. And no, shyness is not a disease.

Feeling like a fraud or impostor is not a "syndrome," but it's a not-uncommon feeling, and sometimes it's a symptom.

Sometimes feeling fraudulent it can be a reflection of reality: many do not feel that they know all they should, or have all of the skills they believe they should have, to present themselves as sufficiently expert in something - and they might be right. That's the point Right Wing Prof is making in his piece about the "impostor syndrome" in academics. Feeling like an impostor can be simply the result of a forceful self-critique. For example: "Here I am applying for a job teaching literature, and I can't remember a darn thing about Beowulf."

Similarly, many people puff themselves up, polish their presentations to the world, to conceal their flaws and weaknesses and to exaggerate their strengths. It often makes sense in life to do so - to put one's best foot forward - but at some point it can also leave a person prone to feeling that his life is an act or a sham, with only the illusion of substance or authenticity. For examples, "I know I'm a coward, but I need the world to see me as brave," or "I know I'm no genius, but I need people to think I'm a sophisticated intellectual." (Related: our recent post on masquerades and Social Signaling)

Getting one's confidence in line with one's personal reality, one's potential, and one's achievements, without false humility and without false advertising, is not always easy.

There are also more neurotic reasons for a person to have, as a symptom, a feeling of fraudulence, such as masochistic self-doubt or failed narcissism, but I won't go into those right now.

Mirror neurons might help to explain empathy, and even autism. h/t, Flares

Almost everybody is diagnosed as Bipolar nowadays. h/t, Dr. X

It's the same game, whether played from the right or from the left. Scare you into herding yourself into a malleable collectivist mass.

Well, maybe from the Conservatives a bit when they weaken, but the power-greedy Left in America rarely misses an opportunity to declare "market failure", followed by a grandiose plan to expand the power of the Federal state. FDR wrote the playbook, with Lenin's help.

Whether it's oil profits, climate, medical treatment, schools, risky mortgages, income differences, etc, there's always a "plan" for a grab for money and power.

That is why I am always highly skeptical about manufactured and trumped-up crises.

Medical insurance is a case in point. TigerHawk has a solid piece on the subject, in response to a piece by Ezra Klein which tries to convince the reader that American medical care is terrible, and the NYT piece by Mankiw that we linked yesterday. All worth a read.

And one more comment, re the "fully-socialized VA system." I have worked in a VA hospital attached to a major teaching center, and it worked just fine as long as you worked within the decreed limits. That's beside the point. VA patients have the choice of where to go for medical treatment, and they use those choices because the VA only offers clinic-style medicine, much like the charity clinics most kindly hospitals provide to their communities.

The Post Office works pretty well too (except for the USSR-style lines at the window), but we also have UPS, FedEx, etc as welcome alternatives to a government-controlled, lazy-bureaucrat-operated, arrogant monopoly which has no incentive - and no heart - to give a damn about you.

A conversation I heard yesterday on Sean Hannity's radio program was a stark reminder to me of what Conservatives and the liberty-loving are up against with the woman voter.

The caller was an obviously bright, cheerful, likeable, married young mom from Long Island. Sean was his usual polite and friendly self, but he did press her on her points. She wanted free medical care for her kids, and for herself. Then it evolved that she also wanted free day care, and then it became clear that she wanted free housing available too, and auto insurance and medicine. Sean asked her if she felt that the government should give her a free car, to which she said no, noting that the government already provides bus service where she lives - but her family has cars. She said twice that in Europe, people are "taken care of." I think Sean also asked her about free food, but I don't recall.

Sean was, appropriately, trying to find the limit of what she thought other people should buy for her. She believed that everyone should be taxed at 50% as a minimum, in exchange for "services." The notion of markets was irrelevant to her, as were such abstract notions as freedom.

I believe that this is a particularly female view of life, and related to my post of neo-neo's 2-part essay on marriage and divorce today. Women with kids want to feel safe and secure. It's the biological priority. In a world full of divorce, without tribe or the tight extended families of the past, it should be no surprise that women look elsewhere for security.

Women's Lib, with its leftist leaders, spoke about independence and autonomy and freedom but acted, politically, as if they wished to exchange dependence on men for dependence on the taxpayer: that has become the family farm, and the "village," and the "tribe" of the present.

Neo-neocon, who is a rara avis - a conservative psychotherapist - has a fine piece on marriage (and divorce), titled Getting Married: What's in it for me?

Part 1 

Part 2 

We posted Bruce Thornton's fine piece in City Journal titled Fighting at a Disadvantage a while ago. I wish to correct his use of the concept of a "therapeutic sensibility" which makes excuses for Islamist war and terror.

BT has probably never been in therapy: if he had been, he would know that finding excuses ain't part of it - nor is sympathetic hand-holding and commiseration. If you were in therapy with me, Mr. Thornton, you would  find me pushing you towards your maximal degree of responsibility for your own fate and your own life. The notion that therapy entails making people feel good by the shrink allying themselves to the patient's weakest parts is way off. The best therapeutic sensibility is usually to be kind and respectful, and yet tough as nails, I believe, which is why many people cannot handle it. It can be like surgery without anesthesia.

We therapists do not charge money for hugs: it is another, older profession which does that.

I like everything else Thornton writes, however.

Our editor sent me this report in the useless rag USA Today, which says it ranks jobs by incidence of depression, with the implication that the job is the problem.

Rather than using it as a starting point for a discussion of depression, it looks like a better opportunity to step on The Barrister's turf and say that is is a fine example of the informal logical fallacy of cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

Reporters are notoriously ignorant of science and statistics. More likely than not, an arrow of causality can be postulated such that people with emotional frailties tend towards certain lines of work in which they can succeed, and in which they will not feel overly stressed.

I enjoyed The Barrister's intro to Signalling Theory, especially the lengthy biology link. It's really all just about non-verbal communication, isn't it?

To what extent is my public presentation (hair, clothes, deportment,  jewelry, etc.) designed to signal things about myself which I might want known, or to signal things about myself which might not be true?

And how much of conventionality and conformity is an effort to not signal anything personal? After all, there are many occasions in life when one's personal "stuff" is not welcome, wanted, or appreciated. And signaling one's conventionality is, in fact, signaling that one is clued in enough to know how to do that, when necessary.

At work in the office or at my Boston hospital, I tend towards Ann Taylor and Brooks  Brothers business wear, with either simple jewelry, or none. If everything is "text," as the dopey lit profs say these days, what's my message?

I suspect that people get into the most trouble when they signal messages unwittingly.

Our Editor wonders what this young Theo lady in the photo might be signaling, above and beyond "Check me out, dude."

The American Academy of Pediatrics has gone over to the dark side. The sort of distrust that this sort of routine interrogation of kids could engender is alarming, and goes far beyond the rightful domain of medical care. Big Brotherism.

I would advise any parent to ask their kids what their pediatrician asks them about, and fire the doctor if he is doing this sort of thing. The number of beers I drink at a Red Sox game (2-3) is none of his damn business, and the potential for harm is enormous. If a child has emotional symptoms, the doctor should send them to a shrink who knows how to handle things.

U VA's Mark Edmundson writes about his new book, The Death of Sigmund Freud: the legacy of his last days, in The Chronicle Review. One quote:

The Death of Sigmund Freud began as a book about death and dying. I wanted to understand what it might mean to die a good death — a good secular death. From what I knew of Freud's last days, when he was dying of cancer, he had done exactly that. In fact, as I studied his life, I found that to the end he was tough, brave, and resolutely secular. His final public act was to publish his most controversial book, Moses and Monotheism. "Quite a worthy exit," he said of the volume, and it was. So I began writing about Freud's heroic demise.

But the true subject of a book is often about 20 degrees away from the author's original intention, and so it was here. As I studied Freud's old age and his late work, I came to see that the problems he encountered were in many ways still ours. Both religious fundamentalism and political tyranny threatened Freud in old age, and in quite immediate ways. Freud worked on his Moses book under the shadow of the repressive Roman Catholic Church of Austria, which surely would have moved to suppress the book if he had tried to publish it in Vienna. When he was 81 years old, Nazi Germany invaded Austria and threatened Freud and his family with death.

Read the whole piece. Quite remarkable the way Anna was brought for interrogation by the Gestapo - with a suicide pill in her pocket. Tyranny has always been fearful of psychoanalysis due to the centrality it grants to the individual soul and spirit.

Remember that famous lady who sued Winnebago after she put her RV into cruise control on the highway, then walked to the back for a cup of coffee?

She claimed that Winnebago had not made it sufficiently clear to her that cruise control couldn't drive the vehicle.

When some people do idiotic things that defy the most elementary common sense resulting in "accidents," they see dollar signs. When most people do dumb things, however, they just blame themselves and leave it at that. What is the difference between those two categories of people?

Read about Slate's Emily Bazelon at Overlawyered. How can any manufacturer anticipate every moronic thing a person might do with a product? They would need to hire teams of morons as product testers.

Are such cases really about personal responsibility, or are they just about a class of greed-intoxicated people who are comfortable with ripping off businesses and their insurors?

Image: A Winnebago of the sort that cannot drive itself down the road. For that, you need the more expensive model.

I met Erik Erikson on a couple of occasions, and was an admirer of the man. A lovely, sweet, gentle, dignified guy. Apparently, some think his work is obsolete. I think Young Man Luther, about Martin Luther, is wonderful work even if I don't agree with most if not all of his premisses.

His outlining of the typical "stages" of life, with their typical conflicts, holds up very well. The psychological capacity to handle the challenges that life presents is the key to relative satisfaction in life (the links in the quote box don't work):

1. Basic trust v. Mistrust. Birth to 1 year. From warm, responsive care infants gain trust or confidence that the world is good.

2. Autonomy v. Shame and Doubt. 1-3 years. Children start to use new mental and motor skills, and want to choose for themselves. Autonomy is created when the parents alow reasonable freedom and don't force or shame the child.

3. Initiative v. Guilt. 3-6 years. Children use play to experiment with what kind of person they might become. If the parent demand too much self-control the child might become insecure with who they are.

4. Industry v. Inferiority. 6-11 years. Children learn to work and cooperate with others. Negative experiences may lead to feelings of incompetence and inferiority.

5. Identity v. Identity diffusion. Adolescence. The adolescence tries to discover 'Who am I, and what is my place in society?' The resolution (or not) of this will result in your views on your future adult roles.

6. Intimacy v. Isolation. Young adulthood. Young people work on establishing intimate ties with others. Because of early disappointments an individual may not be able to form lasting relationships.

7. Generativity v. Stagnation. Middle adulthood. Generativity means giving to the next generation through work, children, or caring for other people. Failing to do this can make you feel that your life is meaningless.

8. Ego integrity v. Despair. Old age. In this final stage, people reflect on what type of life they led. If they are not happy with their life, they feel despair and fear death overmuch.

Like all stage theories, his is just a rough guide based on a lifetime of talking with people. "Typical" does not mean "right," and everybody struggles, at least at times, to do life.

Erikson's work fits in well with that of George Vaillant, whose life work has been studying the way people cope with life. Good solid stuff.

The News Junkie referred to academic blackballing this morning. Here's an excellent example of the academic McCarthyism that goes on today, from the NYT. (I hate to use the term "McCarthyism" because, although he was a crank, I am not convinced that Joe McCarthy was all that far off.)

It's about Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a sex and gender researcher. Scientific debate is fine, but you are not supposed to use live ammo. When scientists begin using live ammo they have abandoned persuasion, so it makes you rightly doubt their confidence in their positions.

By the way, we wrote about the Transgender thing here and here. At this point, I believe that there is more politics than science in the whole subject.

A piece in the Boston Globe makes the case that Americans play with their kids too much. I wonder whether this fits, a bit, with my piece yesterday on The Death of the Grown-Up.

It's worth thinking about, but I do not regret one minute of playing Chutes and Ladders, Milles Bournes, Monopoly, Checkers, Chess or tennis with my kids. From the article:

"Adults think it is silly to play with children" in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, "but adults aren't part of the picture." Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans -- abetted, he says, by psychologists -- are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

Trust me - no psychologist or social worker in the world is an expert on how to raise a smart, well-adjusted kid. Read the whole thing.

Our editor sent me a piece at Hatemonger's Quarterly, in which they note schoolkids using the phrase "You have issues" as an insult. I think that is pretty funny.

That is a new one to me, but I know a phrase that is going around the high schools is "emo." The high school kids call people "emo" who are overly emotional, moody, who take themselves too seriously and appear self-obsessed.

However, my main point is to mention the classic which Hatemonger referred to: Philip Rieff's 1966 The Triumph of the Therapeutic.

It's worth reading, but far from an easy read. The wonderful Robert Coles said of the book:

Philip Rieff has become out most learned and provocative critic of psychoanalytic thinking and of the compelling mind and character of its first proponent. Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist remains the sharpest exegesis yet to be done on the moral and intellectual implications of Freud's work. It was a critical masterpiece, worthy of the man who inspired it; and it is now followed by a work that suffers not at all in comparison. No review can do justice to the richness of The Triumph of the Therapeutic."

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

George Orwell

Stuck in Reagan with the Memphis blues again, with a delayed flight to Boston. We have written about the notion of "good intentions" by people with power on this blog, but I cannot find the piece. Found this quoted at Driscoll:

Fortunately, the Daily Gut has a running tally, "For those of you keeping score at home, here's a partial list (in no particular order) of leaders who have meant or mean well":

Hitler
Stalin
Lenin
Mao
Big Kim and Li'l Kim
Castro
The Khmer Rouge
Ceausescu
The Taliban
Saddam
Ayatollah Khomeini
Ahmedinejad

I'll take an incompetent leader over one who means well any day!

The thing about Mehlman's column is it lays out the central tenet of lefty thought: All that matters is that you mean well.

In the 1940s and '50s many lefties (including some if not all of the Hollywood Ten) were apologists for Stalin? Who cares - they were "idealists" who meant well.

Decades of welfare programs actually hurt the already poor and and caused more to join them? Doesn't matter - we meant well.

Read the whole piece. As CS Lewis said, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

George Orwell

I predict that every life problem will eventually be labelled a "disease."

I wrote a piece on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder earlier this week, in which I suggested that some new diagnoses are being invented in psychiatry more for insurance and pursuit-of-disability reasons than because new diseases are being discovered.

Perhaps the trend began in the 1970s, when addictions were declared diseases rather than very bad habits, for the purpose of obtaining insurance reimbursement for addiction rehab. Then "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" came along around the same time as "Sleep Disorders." Currently, we even have a diagnosis called "nicotine addiction," but I'm not sure whether we have "sex addiction" yet. "Morbid obesity" is surely a disease diagnosis nowadays, but I don't know whether being a fat slob is a diagnosis yet.

We should no longer term such labels "disease diagnoses": We should just call them "Insurance-Codable Conditions (ICC)." For example, pregnancy is not a disease, and to term it a "diagnosis" is odd. Best just to term it an ICC.

To support my view, we have two stories this week:

AMA to vote on whether video game addiction is a disease. They vote on whether something is a disease? 

Disability for heavy metal addiction in Sweden.

See what I mean?

If medicine ever becomes politicized in the US, watch for an explosion of wacky ICCs. I have a few suggestions: Anger Disorder, Television Addiction Disorder, Unhappiness Disorder, Geriatric Disorder, Politics Addiction Disorder, Shopping Disorder, Hates-To-Go-Shopping Disorder, Can't Stand my Spouse Disorder, Carbon Abuse Disorder, and Ordinary Imperfect Person Disorder. Almost forgot an important one - Conservative-Thinking Disorder: the Libs will want to lock me away for that one.

Photo: Dr. Emil Kraepelin, the father of Psychiatric diagnosis

That is, "Post-traumatic stress disorder." Our readers don't know me, or my credentials, so you have no reason to believe me. I will tell you anyway: "PTSD" is a highly dubious diagnosis about which there is little agreement - but much recent discussion - in Psychiatry.

Because "trauma" is entirely subjective, and "stress" is entirely subjective - and often a positive thing - the notion of PTSD is difficult to discuss.

My colleagues are known to use it as a "diagnosis of convenience." We may put it down on a form, but that doesn't mean that we mean it. Psychiatrists are forced to write diagnoses on government forms and insurance forms, but human difficulties do not commonly lend themselves to such labels, and we tend not to take them overly seriously.

There is a recent story about PTSD in our soldiers, at WaPo. I strongly disagree with blog friend Raven, who views PTSD as a disease and not as an ordinary part of life.

Life events impact people. Life is traumatic, by definition, unless you live in bubble-wrap. That is not a disorder; it is normal. Many jobs are scary and "stressful", whatever "stress" is. Recent work shows that those who cope poorly with life events - and end up diagnosed with PTSD - generally have pre-existing, underlying vulnerabilities which may deserve attention.

PTSD is on its way to becoming a legal scam, in my opinion. In fact, the entire movement to create new diagnoses, and to label more folks "disabled," is destructive to human dignity.

Wasn't the whole idea of the "Americans with Disabilities Act" to get the disabled back to work, and to help them regain their autonomy and dignity? Switzerland recently decided that "job therapy" might be a good treatment for the disabled, and I think most shrinks would agree with that.

I was stumped today by a question about how a 9 year-old and an 11 year-old should address their divorced dad's new wife.

"Mom"? No way.

"Peggy"? No. Children should never address adults by their first names.

"Aunt Peggy"? Hmmm. Not sure.

"Mrs. H." Seems strange.

Maybe some invented nickname, the way some grandparents like to be called? Like Muffie or Buffy? (So they don't have to be called "Granny." Many modern women hate to be called Granny: it seems to detract from their sex appeal.)

Ideas?