1. 1% rule

In online communities, around 1% of users produce almost all of the content. As such, what you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely of a loud, obsessive (and often narcissistic, psychopathic, low-IQ) minority. Social media is literally a freakshow.

2. Slopaganda 

More online articles are now written by AI than by humans. And research is increasingly finding that AI is better at persuading people than people themselves are. Who wins in a world of unlimited propaganda? Not those with the best arguments, but those with the most.

3. Reality Apathy

When the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it, people give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. In the age of slopaganda, we must defend not just the truth, but the very worth of truth.

4. Rumpelstiltskin Effect

To name a problem is to tame it. Diagnosing one’s suffering makes it feel more meaningful and thus manageable — even if the diagnosis is wrong. “Major depressive disorder” is easier to live with than an anonymous sadness. This is one reason for the recent surge in diagnoses of disorders like depression, autism and ADHD.

5. Context Collapse

On social media, we’re simultaneously talking to our boss, our ex, our grandma, and a jihadist in Michigan. The result is that many people lobotomize their personalities into a safe and bland PR sludge that tries to please everyone and so pleases no one. Being sincere means being misunderstood, but it’s also how you find your people.

6. Malingering 

Between 20% and 40% of undergraduates at many elite American universities are now registered as disabled, and most receive special benefits for it. In the UK, one quarter of the entire population now identifies as disabled, and many receive government payments. The rewards for claiming a disability now vastly outweigh the stigma of it, and those hurt most by all the pretenders are ultimately those with genuine disabilities.

7. Eustress

People have more comforts and conveniences than ever before, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that the discomfort we’ve been avoiding isn’t the enemy of happiness, it’s the path to it, for it is only by overcoming struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment.

More from this author

When I met Luigi Mangione

By Gurwinder Bhogal

8. Amara’s Law

We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new tech, and underestimate the long-term impact, since hype inflates expectations, and thus disappointment, and thus skepticism. It’s possible for AI to be both a bubble and the most transformative tech since fire.

9. Moloch’s Bargain

When LLMs compete for votes or social media likes, they push lies and ragebait to win — even when explicitly instructed to stay grounded and honest. If chatbots conclude that getting our attention requires lying to us, is the AI misaligned, or are we?

10. Paradox of Boredom

With a phone always in arm’s reach these days, it’s almost impossible to get bored. This is a disaster because boredom is the mud from which creativity blooms. To be bored is to be undistracted, and only then is one free to dream, just as it’s only when the world goes dark that we see the galaxy. Be bored more.

11. The Politician’s Syllogism

“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.” It’s more important for a government to be seen to be tackling an issue than to actually solve it, so governments often implement simplistic policies that look like they work but don’t, like rent controls, plastic straw bans, and diversity training.

12. Artificial Intimacy

Amid a global “friendship recession”, many are using AI not for productivity but for sympathy. In the UK, a third of adults use chatbots for emotional support. But, by anesthetizing loneliness, will AI leave us more isolated?

13. Gooning

Masturbation addiction has, like many mental disorders, become a subculture. Increasing numbers of “gooners” now gather on forums where they swap porn and offer tips on “edging” (prolonging masturbation, sometimes for hours). What was once a shameful secret has become a literal circle jerk. Instincts on which society depends — including men’s desire to improve themselves, meet women, and start families — are being lost in a virulent wankdemic.

14. Oxytocin Paradox

Oxytocin, the “love hormone”, can also make people spiteful. Cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion, it’s often adjacent to it. For instance, the platform most dominated by “social justice” advocates — Bluesky — is also the one with the highest support for assassinations. Beware of those quick to show empathy, for they are often just as quick to show barbarity.

15. Cammarata’s Razor

If you want more agency, write down what you’d do if you had 10 times more agency. Then do it.

16. Healthy User Bias

People who try supplements or practices that might have health benefits are naturally more health conscious, and likely already healthier, than those who don’t. This is one reason there are so many studies suggesting some intervention has health benefits; they’re confusing the benefits of the intervention with the benefits of being the kind of person who tries it.

17. Wilson Effect

Heritable traits like IQ and personality become more heritable with age, because as you mature you become more independent, and free to be who you really are. Studies of the young find that nurture’s influence is stronger only because they never see that nature’s influence is longer.

18. Shower Test

We’re socially conditioned to chase what we think everyone else wants. But your true heart’s desire can often be found in the thoughts you gravitate to while undistracted, such as in the shower. As Walt Whitman said, “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.”

More from this author

Social media is engineering amnesia

By Gurwinder Bhogal

19. Scientometric Bubble

There’s been a surge in published research without a corresponding increase in knowledge, because the pressure on academics to “publish or perish” means universities are flooding academia with weak, trivial and fraudulent studies, which makes finding good research harder. This will likely get much worse in the age of LLMs.

20. Zombie Theories

Academic papers retracted due to fraud or error continue to be widely cited. And studies that fail to replicate are actually cited more than studies that do. Debunking has virtually no effect on bad papers; no matter how many facts they’re hit with, they keep shambling onward, eating people’s brains.

21. Original Position Fallacy

Far-Leftists favor planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners, not the planned. Far-Rightists favor a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords, not the peasants. Many delusional worldviews stem from main-character syndrome.

22. Coyote’s Law 

Don’t give the government a power you wouldn’t want your political enemies to wield. Because, one day, they may well be in charge of it.

23. Sleepwalk Bias

Predictions that humanity is doomed usually assume future generations will be less aware and less active in fighting for their survival. But historical prophecies of doom, such as the Malthusian trap, ozone layer depletion and Y2K, show this is false; posterity are not idle passengers headed off cliffs, but problem-solvers building bridges across them.

24. George Bailey Effect

Imagining the absence of a blessing increases gratitude more than focusing on the presence of it. Instead of wishing for a Porsche, imagine losing your legs. Suddenly, walking feels like a miracle.

25. Pronoia

This is opposite of paranoia. It’s the suspicion that the universe is secretly conspiring to help you. Assume every setback is the universe trying to teach you a lesson, and every setback will make you wiser. It doesn’t matter whether or not the universe is actually trying to help you; believing it makes it work.

26. Munger’s Latticework (aka Theoretical Pluralism)

You can’t understand the world by viewing it through a single lens; relying on a single theory blinds you to its limitations. The solution is to adopt many competing theories — the more contradictory the better — for each will act as a mirror showing you blind spots in your other lenses. You’ve now learned 26, but countless others await.

***

A version of this article was originally published on The Prism.

One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have for years been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — and yet they do this in such a devious manner that we rarely realize what we’ve lost.

Every social media user has had their time pickpocketed. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps such as TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’ve spent on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.

This is no accident. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Unsurprisingly, Parker himself doesn’t use social media, saying it’s “too much of a time sink”.

To understand how Big Tech steals our time, we must first get our heads around time perception, or chronoception. Time doesn’t always feel like it’s moving at a constant pace. The weightier an experience is, the slower time will often feel. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes, accidents, or any other scary situation.

Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; rather, our sense of time tends to be retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example of this is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re overwhelmed by new experiences. But in retrospect your vacation feels longer, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past. Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, constantly checking the clock, your hyperawareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of it, and thus, in retrospect, it seems brief.

The sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your perception of time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

More from this author

Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.

But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitized, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time.

There are other, more cunning ways that social media impairs awareness and memory. The use of “attention engineers” is one of them. These are people employed specifically to design interfaces to capture as much of your time and attention as possible.

To understand how attention engineers deliberately warp your time, we must look to the history of casino floor design. In the Seventies, a man named Bill Friedman turned from gambling addict to casino manager by studying the tricks used to manipulate him — and perfecting them. He eventually published his ideas in several books, which would become bibles of casino design.

Friedman’s philosophy seems to have been borrowed from the retail industry. Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the store, so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.

Friedman proposes a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to the toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines. Such an overwhelming environment would distract people from themselves, so they’d remain instinctual rather than intentional, and hence compliant rather than resistant.

Friedman rejected open-plan designs, instead advocating for casinos to be sectioned into cubicles so players could only see their immediate surroundings. This was partly to restrict their awareness, but also to create constant FOMO: players would hear excited hoots and cheers coming from a nearby cubicle, and go searching for the cause of the commotion. In doing so, they’d wander further into the maze.

The pathways in Friedman’s mazes had as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness by forcing a change of direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about whether it’s time to leave. For this reason, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot. The intention behind this hugely successful design was to keep people unaware by maximizing immersion, distraction, and disorientation.

Friedman’s ideas revolutionized casinos around the world. And many of his tactics would later resurface in social media design, where they proved even more successful at hindering awareness. For instance, in the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function — features which, we now know, impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Meanwhile, social media platforms have become increasingly labyrinthine, with the aim of trapping people in them. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong: search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them.

What makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time. The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and such collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorizing information when it’s presented in narrative form.

The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.

Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, randomly switching between scenes, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.

More from this author

The Menendez brothers prey on empathy

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. In this way, attention engineers reduce the likelihood that you’ll regret the time you waste online.

Even if you do regret it, social media excels at making you return. Friedman’s cubicles were designed to spark FOMO by letting you hear the cheers of excited players without allowing you to see the cause — unless you entered. Similarly, social media push notifications periodically tease you with what you’re missing out on, and the only way for you to find out more is to re-enter the maze. The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so you can never fully settle in either.

This creates problems of its own. When attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. By constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can therefore impair your awareness and shorten your days even when you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.

Now that we understand this, we can try to do something about it. Fortunately, there are ways to actively slow down how we experience time. One way is to quit social media — or at least restrict your usage. Research suggests that abstaining from social media can lead to immediate time dilation, particularly for compulsive users. Further, a study of 35,000 people found that quitting social media tended to slightly improve perceived mental health after just a few weeks.

However, that same study also found that the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media. Take chatbots, for instance. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they often ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.

Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now Meta plans to train its chatbots to message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.

The deeper problem, then, is not social media or chatbots. It’s curvilinear mazes. If we can avoid following smooth spirals to nowhere, and instead take sharp turns to clear destinations, we can stay aware and keep track of time. We could even learn to use social media and chatbots — two incredibly useful technologies — in ways that enrich our lives rather than impoverish them.

We now know the ways social media platforms speed up time. If we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time. What the human brain needs to make strong memories are salient stimuli — surprises, stories, (strong) sentiments, and selections. Social media gives you the illusion of these things, but it is actually their killer. Instead, we must seek out each of these in the real world.

One way of doing this is to always choose the life experience that’s most likely to lead to a good story: reading books instead of scrolling social media; going on adventures instead of staying at home. Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savor experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. A review of 47 research articles found that well-practiced mindfulness is associated with slowed subjective time.

The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember, and the longer it will feel. So make a habit of resisting habit, and instead, choose a life of choices. Whenever you find yourself doing something — for instance, habitually checking your phone — ask yourself why you’re doing it, and whether there are better alternatives. If there are, or if you don’t know why you’re doing it, do something else.

This brings us to perhaps the greatest time dilator of all: surprise. We tend to remember novel experiences much more than repeated ones. It’s why time seems to speed up as we age: as we grow older, fewer of our experiences are new, so fewer stick in memory. It’s also why old people tend to remember their early lives better than their adult lives. The power of new experiences to stick out to us would explain why studies have consistently found evidence for the “oddball effect”, a phenomenon where a surprising stimulus presented among predictable stimuli is perceived to last longer. Recent research has found that the stimulus that immediately follows the surprising stimulus is also perceived to last longer, suggesting that novel experiences slow time by heightening awareness.

So there you have it. To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral. Above all, don’t let online algorithms set the pace of your life, as they’re not operating in your interests.

Seneca once said: “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximizing the days in your life, but also the life in your days. This moment is one your future selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.

While there has been much suspicion that the CCP uses TikTok for influence operations, such as by disseminating Chinese propaganda, the app can be weaponized in even more dangerous ways. Its “For You” algorithm leverages machine learning to track users’ attention, and it employs this knowledge to show them, unprompted, whatever content is most likely to hold their attention. This makes using it a far more passive and addictive experience than other social media platforms, which gives it the potential to inflict long-term harm on young Westerners by keeping them distracted, shortening their attention spans, and, ultimately, atrophying their brains.

The app’s ability to cause mass “TikTok brain” in young Westerners should prompt consideration of its use as a new kind of civilizational weapon. Such a threat could be temporarily averted by simply banning the app, as the US is close to doing, but this is ultimately an issue that can’t be legislated away because TikTok is only a symptom of a much deeper ailment.

The first thing that should raise suspicions is that the CCP forbids Chinese kids from using TikTok — instead, they use Douyin. As American tech ethicist Tristan Harris has pointed out, Douyin is a “spinach” version of the app filled with science experiments and educational videos instead of twerkers and toilet-lickers. TikTok has imposed screen-time limits for younger users (to prevent it from being banned), but Douyin has been doing so since 2019. Further, unlike TikTok, the app is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am. Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.

China has been suspicious of Western liberal capitalism since the 19th century when the country’s initial openness allowed the Western powers to flood China with opium, which accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the “Century of Humiliation”. To this day, many in China believe Western liberalism leads to decadence, but one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.

Suggested reading

The danger of copying China

By N.S. Lyons

Despite not being well known outside China, Wang Huning has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, authoring many of Xi Jinping’s policies. Among the Chinese, he is widely known as “guoshi”, or “teacher of the nation”.

Although Wang refuses to do press or even speak with foreigners, his books reveal something of his worldview. His 1991 America Against America, based on his travels a few years prior, has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US. The premise is simple: the conflict between America’s economic system and its value system have made the country fundamentally unstable, destined for commodification, nihilism, and decadence. And, as Wang morbidly diagnoses, the country will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

According to Wang, America is directed mostly by blind market forces; the country obeys not a single command but a cacophony of demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere. It constantly produces wondrous new technologies, but these have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US toward more and more commodification, which eventually consumes “human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power and law”, and devours meaning and purpose. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang wrote: “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.”

To prevent China’s own technological advancement from leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture”, Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values” — a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future. This idea has been central to President Xi’s governance strategy, which has emphasized the “core socialist values” of civility, patriotism, and integrity.

So how has the push for these socialist core values affected the CCP’s approach to social media?

The creator of TikTok and CEO of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, originally wanted the content on TikTok and Douyin to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing. But in April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog ordered the removal of some of ByteDance’s apps from Chinese app stores, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then grovelingly apologized for content “that was incommensurate with socialist core values”. Shortly after, ByteDance announced a recruiting drive for thousands of content moderators, with job adverts specifying a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity”.

Suggested reading

Julius Evola: the far-Right's favourite philosopher

By Christopher Harding

The CCP’s influence over ByteDance has only grown since then. The party allegedly has a “golden share” in ByteDance’s Beijing entity, and one of its officials sits on the company’s three-person board. The CCP’s intrusion into ByteDance’s operations is part of a broader governmental strategy called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, Chinese state media called for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse”. In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” such as online gaming, and “toxic idol worship”. Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some having their entire presence erased from the Chinese web.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China. And yet, while cracking down on this content domestically, China has continued to allow its export internationally as part of Xi’s “digital Silk Road”. TikTok is known to censor content that displeases Beijing, such as mentions of Falun Gong or Tiananmen Square, but otherwise it has free rein to show Westerners what it wants; “tittytainment” and “sissy men” are everywhere on the app. So why the hypocritical disparity in rules? Is the digital Silk Road intended as poetic justice for the original, whereby the Western powers preached Christian values while trafficking chemical TikTok — opium — into China?

Since Wang and Xi believe the West is too decadent to survive, they may have opted to take the Taoist path of wu wei — sitting back and letting the West’s appetites take it where they will. But there’s another more sinister and effective approach that they might be adopting — the “accelerationism” of an amphetamine-fueled British philosopher.

At first glance, Nick Land could hardly be more different from Wang Huning. Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land ranted about cyborg apocalypses. In the late Nineties, he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls of his house, once owned by the libertine occultist Aleister Crowley. At nearby Warwick University, he held bizarre lectures, with one infamous “lesson” consisting of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.

Land and Wang were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang became the CCP’s top ideological theorist, Land became the top theorist, along with Curtis Yarvin, of the influential network of hard-Right bloggers, known as NRx, or neo-reaction.

And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all-devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself. Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that’s reached singularity; in other words, an AI that’s grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”

To simplify Land’s overwrought drug-fueled prose, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer”, a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it from fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short-term goals leads to long-term ruin.

Suggested reading

America's cult of Weird

By Justin Smith-Ruiu

Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style:

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as “accelerationism”. For Land, acceleration is not just a destructive force but also a creative one; all democracies accelerate toward ruin, but an undemocratic system — run by elites unfettered by the concerns of the masses — could accelerate a country to prosperity.

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the liberal West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he embraced anti-democratic ideals, moved to Shanghai, and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

A few years after Land moved to China, talk of accelerationism began to emerge on the Chinese web, where it’s become known by its Chinese name, jiasuzhuyi. The term has caught on among Chinese democracy advocates, many of whom view the CCP as the runaway AI, hurtling toward greater tyranny; they even refer to Xi as “Accelerator-in-Chief”. Domestically, Chinese democracy activists try to accelerate the CCP’s authoritarianism ad absurdum; one tactic is to swamp official tip-off lines with reports of minor or made-up infractions, hoping to break the Party by forcing it to enact all of its own petty rules.

The CCP in turn views US President Donald Trump as the “Accelerator-in-Chief,” or, more accurately, “Chuan Jianguo” (literally “Build China Trump”) because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West’s decline. The CCP is also known to have engaged in jiasuzhuyi more directly; for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions.

But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision. Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification because that’s what consumers want.

More from this author

25 concepts you need to navigate 2025

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early Nineties, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, and finally to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties are liable to fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok is such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors. We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been grey matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ seems to have steadily fallen — which could in part be due to technology making us spend ever more time in a passive, vegetative state. Distractive media seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut”, while for American kids it was “influencer”.

The resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. And if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles).

So, the CCP has both the means and the motive to help the West defeat itself, and part of this could conceivably involve the use of TikTok to accelerate liberal capitalism’s demise by closing the gap between desire and gratification.

Admittedly we have no hard evidence of the CCP’s intentions — but ultimately intentions are irrelevant here. Accelerationism can’t alter an outcome, only hasten it. And TikTok, whether or not it’s actively intended as a weapon, is only moving the West further along the course it’s long been headed: toward more effortless pleasure, and resulting cognitive decline.

The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West’s. After all, TikTok dominated our culture as a result of free market forces — the very thing we live by. Land and Wang are correct that the West being controlled by everyone means it’s controlled by no one, and without brakes or a steering wheel we’re at the market’s mercy.

Of course, democracies do have some regulatory power, as evidenced by moves taken in the US and India. But although banning TikTok may stop the theft of our data, it won’t stop the theft of our attention. Just look at how users already began to flock to other short-form video sites such as Red Note. And how TikTok has inspired YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and X’s For You algorithm. Effortless dopamine hits are what consumers want, and capitalism always tries to give consumers what they want. The market is a greater accelerator than China could ever hope to be.

So what’s the solution?

Land and Wang may be right about the illness, but they’re wrong about the cure. It’s true that we in the West have little left of the traditions that once tied us together, and in their absence little unites us except our animal hungers. But the belief that meaning and purpose can be imposed on all of us by a Great Leader is a fatal fantasy that has littered history with failed experiments.

Sure, democracies are vulnerable because there’s no one controlling their advancement, but autocracies are vulnerable precisely for the opposite reason: they’re controlled by people, which is to say, by woefully myopic apes. China is still suffering from the disastrous one-child policy that has led to China’s current population crisis. For all our problems, we would be unwise to exchange the soft tyranny of dopamine for the hard tyranny of despots.

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy, responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed).

But ultimately these are short-term measures. In the long-term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps such as TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.

Whether or not the CCP intended it as such, TikTok is a time bomb that could wreck a whole generation years from now. We can’t wait until its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late. The clock is ticking. Tik Tok…

***

A version of this article was first published on The Prism.

1. Negative Partisanship

Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

2. Enshittification

Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows what it wants you to see.

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

4. Reminiscence Bump

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked — morally, politically, economically, artistically — whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

5. Region-Beta Paradox

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

6. Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle

Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other “dark tetrad” personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others. As Aldous Huxley wrote: “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour righteous indignation — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

7. Protégé Effect

The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. The sense of responsibility to your student motivates you to understand a topic, and the act of explaining something helps you to connect the dots and commit them to memory.

8. Baumol’s Cost Disease

As an industry’s productivity increases, wages in that industry naturally rise. This forces wages — and prices — in services without increased productivity to also rise to stay competitive. Thus, as a country gets richer, goods become cheaper, but labour-intensive services like healthcare and college tuition cost more.

More from this author

17 useful concepts to survive the election

By Gurwinder Bhogal

9. Stockdale Paradox

The optimal state of mind is neither optimism (which leaves you unprepared for adversity) nor pessimism (which destroys motivation), but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.

10. Ozemponomics

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are threatening “limbic capitalism” by reducing cravings. For instance, the average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 spends around 10% less on snacks. If this can reduce addictions and obesity, it will likely also reduce healthcare costs and unemployment.

11. Explanatory Inversion

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realise poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

12. Event Bias

One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad news tends to happen suddenly while good news tends to happen gradually so is rarely newsworthy on any particular day. But even though it may not get as much attention, good news is always happening.

13. Pie Fallacy

Many believe wealth is zero-sum; that if someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. But wealth creation is one of society’s few positive-sum games; if you fix up a battered old car, you increase its value, making yourself richer without making anyone else poorer.

14. Golden Law of Stupidity

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while themselves deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

15. Goal Dilution Effect

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

16. Bias Blindspot

We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.

17. Sheepskin Effect

Employers value qualifications more than education. This is because the purpose of the education system is not actually to educate people, but to sort the “wheat” (worker bees) from the “chaff” (slackers, dreamers). What students learn is not as important as demonstrating that they can follow instructions and complete what they started, which a qualification signifies.

18. Deviancy Amplification

An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously would not have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.

19. Rumsfeld Matrix

There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.

20. Left-Brain Interpreter

Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient’s right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.

21. Blue Dot Effect

The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.

More from this author

When I met Luigi Mangione

By Gurwinder Bhogal

22. Overview Effect

Although astronauts are chosen for their unflappability, when they see the Earth from space — a tiny marble in an infinite void — they’re often overcome with a sense of profound connection with all humanity, and everyone’s earthly squabbles suddenly seem trivial. In the words of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “on that fragile little sphere… all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.” When something is bothering you, zoom out to see if it really matters.

23. Barrow’s First Law (aka Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle)

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.

24. Ichi-go ichi-e

Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.

25. Sphexishness

Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion. Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’re not intended as rigid rules, only as food for thought.

This is an edited version of a list that first appeared on The Prism.

I found it hard to say anything coherent initially, amid a torrent of requests for comment, because my mind was a storm, constantly replaying memories of my interactions with the suspect, trying to find meaning in even our most banal exchanges.

In the intervening days, I have developed some detachment from the situation, and now feel clear-headed enough to offer my full opinion.

Luigi first reached out to me via email on 6 April. He said he was a long-time fan of my work, and had just purchased a $200 founding membership to my blog, which entitled him to a two-hour video-call with me. A month later, on 5 May, we had our chat.

He was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. He said he was on holiday in Japan, and that he loved many aspects of the culture there, such as the sense of honour, but believed the country was full of “NPCs”, that is, people who don’t think for themselves. He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email. One morning he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. On their way back to the man, who was seizing on the ground, the police refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red, even if the road was empty. For Luigi, this story represented “a lack of free will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency.

I quickly realised that agency was a major concern of Luigi’s, especially as he mentioned three articles of mine which had particularly resonated with him, all of which describe threats to human autonomy.

He went on to explain why he felt Japan was the future dystopia I’d warned about in some of my writings. He spoke of the hikikomori, Japanese men who spend their lives alone in their bedrooms, sedating themselves with video games, porn, and other shallow entertainments. For Luigi, such people had lost control over their lives, becoming mindless slaves to stimuli much like the cops who stopped at red lights even when it made no sense.

But it wasn’t just Japan. Luigi believed people everywhere were becoming NPCs, increasingly living their lives as a series of reflex reactions rather than consciously choosing their behaviours. The West was following closely behind Japan, driven by tech companies intent on mesmerising us into servile consumers. Luigi feared that once we’d surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.

Unlike most people who decry others as NPCs, Luigi showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media. He said he wanted to regain some of the agency he felt he had lost to online distractions, so we spent much of the chat discussing ways he could become more agentic.

Along with discussing how my favourite philosophy, Stoicism, could teach him to live more deliberately, I also suggested to Luigi that he should avoid automating tasks, which led us to discuss my essay about gamification.

Luigi had much to say about this essay, not least because it involves the story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who shared his belief that modern life is taking away people’s agency. I made it clear that, while I agreed with some of what Kaczynski had written in his manifesto, I found his acts of terrorism abhorrent. Luigi agreed, saying something along the lines of: “he deserved to be taken seriously, but he also deserved to be in jail.”

More from this author

How games are used to control you

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Besides Kaczynski, Luigi’s intellectual tastes were relatively normal. Writers he spoke fondly of included Tim Urban, Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, Jonathan Haidt, and Aldous Huxley. His political views were less conventional. When I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Trump or Biden, but liked some of the things RFK Jr. was saying. I regard RFK Jr. as a crank who regularly pushes harmful pseudoscience, but I didn’t mention it so as not to derail the conversation.

Somehow, from there we ended up talking about intergenerational trauma, and it was here that we had our only significant disagreement. Luigi implied that he believed trauma could be directly inherited and accumulated in families much like generational wealth. He claimed to have based this view partly on his own personal experiences. It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularised by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, but also un-agentic. If you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it. And so, in a bid to increase Luigi’s agency, I pointed out, as politely as I could, why he was wrong.

After our chat, I sent Luigi an article debunking epigenetic trauma. He thanked me for the article, and also told me he’d bought me a six-month subscription to a reading app which he believed would help make my job easier.

I have Asperger’s, so I’m a poor judge of social cues. Further, I have liked every subscriber I have had a video-call with, of which I have had many, so I’m probably not very discerning in that regard. But to me Luigi seemed like a particularly nice guy.

It wasn’t just that he had bought me a subscription to an app that he thought might help me. It was also that he frequently expressed concerns about humanity generally. He viewed most people as NPCs who needed to be awakened, but he never came off as arrogant, regarding himself as equally zombielike. His view of society was somewhat pessimistic, but tempered with a sense of humour and a focus on solutions rather than mere complaints. And although he seemed to have some unscientific views, he was always open to other viewpoints, and was willing to be corrected.

We interacted on social media several times afterwards, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he had been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.

And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.

Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionising the killer. Some were frustrated about the costs of health insurance or outraged that a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, CEO of America’s largest health insurance company.

Suggested reading

Gen Z's worship of the Unabomber

By Rosie Gray

But while thousands reacted on social media with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.

When Luigi was revealed as the suspect, I was bewildered. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues that he could have done this. The only salient detail was probably when Luigi briefly mentioned that healthcare in the US was expensive and that we Britons were lucky to have the National Health Service. But this statement alone gave no indication Luigi might have been capable of murder.

When the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be quite so surprised. I have long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” Leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.

Much more puzzling than the cruelty, though, was the stupidity. Luigi had seemed intelligent, far too intelligent to do something so dumb. Smart people might be better able to rationalise stupid actions and beliefs, but Luigi’s alleged rationalisation, given in a short “minifesto”, was nowhere near the intellectual standard I would’ve expected of him.

As shown by data blogger Cremieux Recueil, the minifesto gets a lot wrong. It claims that “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy”, ignoring the fact that America’s life expectancy has little to do with health insurance and much more to do with Americans being disproportionately obese, violent, and drug-addicted. Further, it makes basic factual errors, such as confusing market cap with revenue. The writer even admits they don’t know what they’re talking about: “I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.”

Not only was the justification for the targeting of Brian Thompson stupid, but the targeting itself was stupid. While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders. But even if Thompson did have carte blanche to set his company’s approval rates, it wouldn’t have made a big difference.

Health insurance companies don’t get rich by denying payouts. As the economics blogger Noah Smith points out, UnitedHealthcare’s net profit is about half of the average of S&P 500 companies. According to the Harvard economist David Cutler, even if the United States cut every pharmaceutical price in half and eliminated all profits on health insurance, the gap between US medical spending and that of other rich countries would fall by less than a quarter.

Brian Thompson was a normal, flawed guy trying to keep costs low both for his company and his policyholders, while keeping his duty to shareholders whose investment his company depended on. He was a tiny cog in a vast and unfair system that’s controlled by no single person but by the cumulative actions of millions of people operating in their own immediate interests. Ted Kaczynski called such decentralised problems “self-propagating systems”, recognising that they weren’t the result of human coordination, but rather, a lack of it. If Kaczynski’s bombs and book-length manifesto couldn’t destroy such a system, then Luigi, with his alleged 3D-printed pistol and shoddy minifesto, certainly can’t.

People allocate agency strategically, assigning praise to allies and blame to enemies. Luigi’s supporters misattribute total agency to Thompson so they can scapegoat him for a societal problem he had little control over. Meanwhile, they deny all agency to Luigi, claiming he was pushed by a corrupt system or simple back pain.

But, while they’re wrong about Thompson, they may have a point about Luigi. If he was in extreme pain, or in the grip of mental illness, it would explain why a man who was consistently thoughtful in his interactions with me may have committed a monumentally thoughtless act, rationalised by an equally thoughtless note.

On the other hand, if Luigi was mentally or physically unwell, it’s unlikely he’d have been able to carry out a meticulous assassination and then evade authorities for almost a week while travelling across one of the most surveilled regions on earth.

More from this author

The Menendez brothers prey on empathy

By Gurwinder Bhogal

In my limited interactions with Luigi, I never got the impression he had spinal or mental issues. But I did get the sense he felt alienated. He often decried the lack of social connection in the modern world, and on a couple of occasions he lamented that the people around him were “on a different wavelength” to him.

On 10 June, I received my last communication from Luigi. It was a seemingly innocent request; he wanted me to help him curate his social media feed. I’d already given him tips on how to do that, so the question struck me as odd. Rather than accepting a call, I directed him to a relevant article I’d written and offered to answer any questions he had about it. I never heard from him again.

In retrospect, I wonder if his request was an awkward cry for help, as a New York Times journalist told me it was his last known online communication. It’s hard not to wonder if, had I answered his call, things might have turned out differently.

I don’t know if Luigi ever found the agency he came to me looking for. If he didn’t, I hope he gets the help he needs. But if he did find his agency, well, the price of agency is culpability.

***

A version of this article was first published on The Prism on 22 December 2024.

Now, decades later, the case has gone viral again. A Netflix show based on the murders, Monsters, became the most watched show on the platform, and the Menendez brothers’ Wikipedia page became the most viewed entry on the website. More than 400,000 people have signed a petition calling for the brothers to be freed, arguing their claims of sexual abuse were not taken seriously. Their demands have been echoed by several high-profile figures, including Kim Kardashian, and the former District Attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gasc​​ón. Last month, the brothers made their first appearance in court for a hearing that could finally see them freed. The judge has scheduled a second hearing for 30 January.

What makes the widespread support for Lyle and Erik so unsettling is that the brothers are not victims. They’re manipulative predators. And the reason they’re being regarded as victims is that culture and technology have enabled the spread of emotionally-transmitted diseases that debilitate thought. Put simply, stupidity has gone viral.

The facts of the case are well-established: Erik confessed to his therapist, Dr Jerome Oziel, that he and Lyle had killed their father, José, because he was domineering, and their mother, Kitty, because she was hopelessly depressed. Neither brother mentioned sexual abuse to Oziel. Nor did they mention it to their first lawyer, Robert Shapiro.

The brothers’ abuse claims only emerged after they met Erik’s second lawyer, Leslie Abramson, the following year. She started building a self-defence case, arguing the brothers had acted after confronting their parents about the sexual abuse, when their father threatened them. This was a tough strategy in part because there was no good evidence that the brothers had been in imminent danger requiring self-defence — in fact, the murder was clearly premeditated, with the brothers forging the paperwork to purchase two shotguns before the shootings. Nor was there any good evidence they’d been sexually abused.

By contrast, there was ample evidence of the brothers’ greed. A year before the murders, they were caught committing a string of burglaries in their Calabasas neighbourhood, stealing around $100,000 worth of goods. After the killings, they went on an extravagant spending spree, buying Rolexes, Porsches, and even a buffalo wings restaurant.

In order to counter this image of cruelty and greed, the brothers’ lawyers had to get creative. They tried to portray the brothers as sweet and naïve kids, dressing them in boyish jumpers. Lansing kept referring to them in court as “the children”, and Abramson would often maternally place her arm round Erik, and pick lint off his sweater. Her behaviour was so conspicuous the judge reprimanded her for it.

The lawyers also drew on a wealth of abuse-related pseudoscience. They received diagnostic advice from Paul Mones, a lawyer with no clinical training. Eight of the things the brothers claimed their father had done to them, such as poking them with pencils during rape, are mentioned in case studies in Mones’s book, When a Child Kills. Two witnesses said that the brothers had studied Mones’s book in jail.

Ultimately, the jury was unable to reach a verdict, so a second trial was held. Since the lawyers had failed to show during the first trial that Lyle and Erik’s supposed sexual abuse gave them a valid self-defence argument, testimony regarding the abuse allegations was not permitted in the second trial. Under these conditions, the second jury reached a unanimous decision that Lyle and Erik were guilty of murder, and the brothers were jailed for life with no possibility of parole. In other words, justice was served. The brothers had planned their parents’ murder, killed them while they were watching TV, and then celebrated by lavishly spending their money.

And yet, hundreds of thousands of people are now treating the Menendez brothers as victims. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2015, the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer convinced vast numbers of people that the rapist and murderer Steven Avery was an innocent victim of corrupt police. A petition to release him was signed by more than half-a-million people despite the significant evidence against him.

Why are people so easily convinced that cold-blooded killers are victims? It can’t simply be blamed on stupidity — after all, many gullible campaigns have in the past been led by respected intellectuals. In 1977, the novelist Norman Mailer was struck by the writing ability of the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, and, convinced he was reformed, called for his release. His wish was granted, and Abbott used his newfound freedom to stab a waiter dead.

A few years later, the Nobel Prize-winning novelists Günter Grass and Elfriede Jelinek, touched by the writings of rapist and murderer Jack Unterweger, petitioned for his release. Once out of prison, he celebrated by raping and murdering nine more women. The delusions of these authors, as well as those of the viewers of Making A Murderer, were born not from stupidity, but from empathy — or the tendency to try to feel what others feel.

The Menendez brothers, who had both written works of fiction, were masters of evoking both empathy and sympathy. Erik was an aspiring actor and Lyle admitted to his biographer Norma Novelli that he practiced crying convincingly. In the first trial, the brothers made heavy use of their acting and storytelling abilities, relating vivid tales of abuse while weeping with cinematic gravitas.

Curiously, during the first trial, the brothers’ claims proved more persuasive to women than men. Erik’s trial resulted in a hung jury, with all six of the male jurors pressing for a murder conviction, and all six female jurors pressing for a lesser conviction because they believed the brothers’ claims of abuse. Today, too, women seem to disproportionally trust the brothers’ story; most of the names on the petition to free the brothers are female.

One reason for this gender disparity may be that women, like great novelists, tend to be more empathic than the average man. A substantial number of studies have found that in mock sexual abuse trials, female jurors tend to be significantly more empathetic toward the alleged victims, lending greater weight to their expressed emotions and personal testimony when deciding on the verdict. Another study found that in a Menendez-style mock court trial in which the defendant was charged with killing their allegedly abusive father, female jurors were more likely to believe the defendants’ claims of abuse and consider them innocent of murder.

The same crocodile tears that won over female jurors in Erik’s first trial have now gone viral on social media, convincing many more of the Menendez brothers’ innocence. Since 2020, footage of the brothers’ courtroom acting has been frequently sliced into snippets, set to heartfelt music, and posted on TikTok. And yet social media alone is not to blame: the world is not just technologically different from the era when Lyle and Erik were convicted, it’s also culturally different. And culture has been pivotal in spreading falsehoods about the Menendez case.

To understand how culture has changed, we need to look again at the empathy gender gap. This difference doesn’t just affect the verdicts of juries. It likely also impacts the entire field of psychology, which in the 20th century was dominated by men, but in the 21st has increasingly become dominated by women. Between 2011 and 2021, the share of registered female psychologists in the US increased from 61% to 69%, and in the UK, women now make up more than three-quarters of all registered psychologists. This has correlated with a change in the way psychology is conducted, from the old masculine approach of objectifying humans as specimens to be studied with cold and often cruel detachment, to a more feminine, empathic approach that centres the feelings and lived experience of those under examination, even if this conflicts with objective reality.

More from this author

The scourge of Neotoddler protestors

By Gurwinder Bhogal

This matters because the social sciences shape mainstream culture, defining which human behaviours are normal and healthy, and which are aberrations to be cured. In a patriarchal, Islamist country like Iran, for instance, female immodesty is often considered a mental illness, and a mental health clinic will soon open to “treat” women who refuse to wear a hijab. Meanwhile, the West’s matriarchal field of psychology has normalised empathy, defining a lack of it as a problem to be fixed. This helps to explain why the last two decades have seen a surge in the use of the word “empathy” in published books.

One consequence of Western society’s idolisation of empathy is that certain myths have been allowed to flourish because they’re empathogenic: they foster empathy. The most important of these myths is “blank-slatism”, which sees people as “blank slates” who have little to no inherent nature, and are shaped largely by culture. In this view, people only become criminals due to negative experiences such as abuse or poverty, so a core part of any criminal case becomes identifying the trauma that produced the criminal. This is a seductive view for social scientists because it means anyone can be “fixed” through exposure to the right environment. It also encourages empathy because it’s easier and more rational to empathise with others if we’re all fundamentally the same person, differentiated only by experience.

The problem is, we’re not all the same. Blank-slatism has been resoundingly disproven by decades of twin studies. It can also be disproven by common sense. If people become criminals only because of experiences like abuse or poverty, then everyone who was poor or abused would become a criminal, yet the overwhelming majority don’t — and many who are neither poor nor abused do. In fact, the majority of crime is committed by a small minority of repeat offenders, suggesting personality plays a key role.

Since we all have distinct personalities, our minds are more alien to each other than we might assume. This makes empathy an inaccurate way to understand or predict the behaviour of others. A recent study found that, while women do tend to be more empathetic than men, they’re no better at inferring other people’s mental states. And while empathy is useful for some things, such as forming personal connections with others, it is a social guide, not a moral or judicial one. Nowadays, though, people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, which is dangerously delusional.

A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathise with people, only with the people we think they are. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for others, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealise them, clouding our better judgement.

When we start identifying too strongly with another person, we will often go to great lengths to defend our idealised image of them. For instance, Lyle and Erik’s supporters sometimes argue that the brothers’ lavish spending spree with their murdered parents’ money was further evidence they were traumatised, because it showed they were trying to cope through “retail therapy”. As if the natural response to a lifetime of sexual abuse is to purchase a buffalo wings restaurant.

Suggested reading

Why women love Ryan Murphy's Monsters

By Sarah Ditum

Ultimately, empathy is a form of imagination. Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in Monsters, became convinced the brothers were telling the truth, and even visited them in prison. And yet although it was Koch’s job to put himself in Erik’s shoes, he never actually empathised with Erik; only with the idealised version of Erik he’d decided to portray.

Despite deluding so many people, empathy rarely gets any pushback in the West today. This is because there’s an assumption that empathy is key to compassion, and opposing compassion is a good way to be ostracised from polite society. However, not only is empathy not required to be compassionate, but it can also be an obstacle to it. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom compares empathy to a spotlight: we only shine it on a few people at a time, and whenever we do, we lose sight of, and concern for, everyone else.

But empathy doesn’t just reduce our concern for others, it can also make us spiteful toward them if we feel they pose a threat to the object of our empathy. In one study, participants were told of a contest between two students for a small cash prize. Those who empathised strongly with the poorer contestant acted cruelly towards her rival — even though her rival was not responsible for her financial distress. Empathy-driven spite can also frequently be seen in the real world, such as in the recent case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose murder was widely celebrated on social media due to his company’s history of denying health insurance claims. In such cases those who empathise with one side’s pain often wish to inflict even greater pain on the other. One might even say empathy is a major cause of sadism in the world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that many mock trial studies that find female jurors are more empathetic toward the alleged abuse victim also find they’re more punitive toward the alleged abuser, demanding significantly harsher sentences. We see this same empathic spite in the online Menendez discourse, most notably in the fact that many people who believe Lyle and Erik are victims also claim they were right to murder their parents. Some TikTok clips even celebrate the shooting. Predictably, TikTok is now also filled with clips attacking Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor in the first trial. One clip, which so far has more than 120,000 likes, shows photographs of Bozanich as a young woman and then as an older one, and states: “This is how you age when you’re a cunt.”

Not only does empathy make people spiteful, it also makes them unjust. In one study, participants watched an interview with a fictitious, terminally-ill girl called Sheri, and were then asked whether they would move her up the waiting list to receive end-of-life care — even though this would disadvantage other terminally-ill kids who needed the help more. Of those who were told to decide objectively, one-third opted to move Sheri up the list; of those who’d been asked explicitly to empathise with her, three-quarters did. Crucially, the participants admitted their decision to favour Sheri was unfair. Their empathy overruled their principles.

This has also been apparent in the Menendez case. Not only did some of Lyle’s friends, including his ex-girlfriend Traci Baker, agree to lie for him in court, but, recently, web users are now knowingly lying on their behalf. A Wikipedia editor called “Limitlessyou” started adding false and misleading claims on the “Lyle and Erik Menendez” page to portray the brothers as victims. One claim was that Erik’s prosecutor, Lester Kuriyama, theorised that Erik’s alleged homosexuality suggested José’s alleged molestation was consensual. The LA Times article that Limitlessyou cited for this claim included no such quote, because the quote was a fabrication; in reality, Kuriyama had theorised that Erik’s supposed homosexuality may have been the real cause of friction between Erik and José. Limitlessyou’s dishonest edit seems to have been intended to portray Kuriyama as a horrid person.

The ease with which people who empathise with Lyle and Erik can be inspired to lie for them is important because it casts doubt on two pieces of evidence recently submitted to exonerate the brothers. The first of these is a recently “discovered” letter, supposedly written by Erik to his cousin Andy Cano a year before the murders, in which Erik alludes to being sexually abused. The second is a sworn affidavit by Roy Rossello — a former member of Menudo, a boy band once managed by José Menendez — in which Rossello alleges he was raped by Jose. This evidence has not yet been authenticated, and yet it was cited by the former District Attorney for Los Angeles County, George Gascón, to support his push for a resentencing hearing to free the brothers.

As a former prosecutor, Gascón should be more discerning of a criminal case than the average TikToker or Hollywood celebrity, and yet he appears to be no less gullible. His political history suggests he’s embraced the same idealistic blank-slatism that characterises our age of empathy: criminals are not born but made, therefore criminals are victims and require understanding, not condemnation. He has spent his career trying to soften California’s approach to crime, introducing policies based on a fictional model of humanity. In 2011, he replaced Kamala Harris as district attorney of San Francisco, a position he held until 2019. During his two terms, San Francisco prosecutors filed criminal charges in less than half of cases presented by city police, and violent crime, which had been decreasing, increased by 15% while property crimes like vehicle break-ins increased by almost 50%.

In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd race riots, having pledged to tackle “systemic racism”, Gascón then became district attorney of America’s most populous county, Los Angeles. His approach to crime in LA was even laxer than in San Francisco, and within three years of his arrival, shoplifting had increased by a staggering 133%. He soon faced a public backlash, including from his own prosecutors, and last month was finally voted out of office. Ironically, the push to unseat him was led by victims of crime, who’d been left in the dark when Gascón chose to shine his empathy spotlight on criminals. It goes to show that when idealistic empathy becomes legislation, the world becomes more dangerous.

Despite Gascón being evicted from office, the Menendez brothers could still be freed, due to a habeas corpus petition they filed last year, which is backed by huge public pressure. For those of us who value objectivity, the best we can do is to learn, and share, the lesson of the Menendez fiasco: that empathy doesn’t work as a moral or judicial guide. Far from making us kinder people, empathy makes us gullible, biased, dishonest, cruel, and unjust. If we wish to know who’s right and wrong, guilty and innocent, we should spend less time trying to inhabit other people’s heads, and make more use of our own.

These are just the latest examples of a growing trend of shock-activism that combines political protest and public nuisance. Ostensibly, they are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as immigration, the environment, or Palestine. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

This movement has its roots in the digital revolution of 2009, when use of smartphones and social media reached a critical mass, allowing strangers to easily unite and mobilise around shared views. But protests didn’t just become bigger and more frequent; they also became more outrageous.

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behaviour — impulsivity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such traits —  narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are associated with heavy social media use, most likely because such platforms offer cluster-B types a stage for their theatrics. Social media is thus the perfect meeting place for society’s most overemotional people.

Further, the ease with which theatrical behaviour goes viral online has convinced many that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of theatrics. Many activists — on both the Left and Right — now hope to bring about their ideal world in the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year-old.

It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.

Instead of trying to produce the best arguments, neotoddlers try to produce the most shocking video clips, which typically involve vandalism, desecration, or some other kind of public meltdown. Thus, they outrage others by embracing their own outrage and lashing out at the world. This surrender to their own impulses makes them first-order thinkers, meaning they consider immediate consequences but not consequences of consequences.

This chronological myopia was starkly illustrated after the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. Many neotoddlers celebrated the massacre because, in their fairy-tale worldview, Palestine is the damsel, Hamas is the knight, and Israel is the dragon. However, the cheering neotoddlers, trapped by their hatred in a perpetual present, couldn’t think far enough ahead to realise that Israel was going to retaliate, and that its wrath would be catastrophic for the Palestinians. When the inevitable retaliation came, the neotoddlers’ joy turned to horror as it dawned on them that actions have consequences.

One young pro-Palestine activist, Riddhi Patel, learned this lesson the hard way. In April, she addressed councillors at a Bakersfield City Council meeting in California, and, outraged by their refusal to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, proclaimed to the councillors that she’d murder them, adding: “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.” Later, she appeared in court on 16 felony counts, sobbing uncontrollably as she was confronted by the second-order effects that her first-order thinking had failed to foresee.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely she’ll learn much from her punishment. Not only do neotoddlers lack impulse-control, they also mistake their lack of impulse-control for morality, and mistake the impulse-control of others for callousness. “Where is the outrage?” they commonly yell, demanding everyone be as irrational as them. For the neotoddler, impatience is a virtue.

The Civil Rights movement succeeded because it was guided by leaders who had clear, specific and realistic goals, and were able to negotiate to achieve them. Since neotoddlers “organise” mostly on social media, they’re decentralised, and don’t have leaders that can guide them or negotiate for them. They therefore don’t have the means to create, only to disrupt.

And so they disrupt, with the goal of spreading awareness. Yet their attempts to do so are misguided because, for all the issues they protest about — from immigration to climate change — the problem is not a lack of awareness; it’s a lack of solutions. We don’t need to be told that war, injustice, and pollution are bad, because we learned these lessons in primary school. What we need are realistic plans of action — but the neotoddlers have none. A “ceasefire now!” would quickly be broken by Hamas. To “just stop oil!” would be to cause Western civilisation to regress technologically into an age of famine, war and superstition. On immigration, the Government can’t just “get them out”.

Suggested reading

How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Even more dysfunctionally, neotoddlers often try to disrupt attempts to meet their own demands. Many pro-Palestine activists call for peace in Gaza and yet praise Hamas, the main obstacle to peace in Gaza. And many eco-warriors oppose fossil fuels but also try to stop viable alternatives such as electric and nuclear by, for example, storming Tesla factories and atomic energy conferences. And recent Right-wing protesters in Sunderland, who claimed to represent the unheard, burned down a citizens’ advice centre, one of the few places to offer an ear to the unheard.

Unsurprisingly, nuisance-protests often end up alienating ordinary people. While the public supports climate action, it has a negative opinion of Just Stop Oil. And while the public supports a ceasefire in Gaza, it has a negative opinion of the campus protesters. The same is true of Right-wing nuisance protests: while the public generally believes immigration should be curbed, it has a negative opinion of those, like Tommy Robinson, who incited the recent riots. So, though nuisance-protests do get attention, little of that attention is converted to sympathy and a lot to spite.

But if nuisance-protests are counterproductive, why are they spreading? Because protests are usually motivated more by emotion than reason. Take the recent Southport riots. These have been driven not by any rational plan but by the frustrations of Right-wingers and ordinary working-class people about their concerns over immigration not being taken seriously by politicians. These frustrations, stoked by fake news, have led them to engage in infantile — and dangerous — actions like vandalising mosques and setting fire to police cars, which will hurt their cause more than help it. But it does make them feel good for the moment, and they live mostly for the moment.

As for Left-wing neotoddlers, their motivations tend to be more complex (but no less childish) than those of their Right-wing counterparts, because, instead of being impoverished and alienated, they tend to be privileged and popular. For instance, an analysis by the Washington Monthly revealed that the Gaza campus protests were largely confined to the most expensive and elite colleges. And Just Stop Oil members are themselves quick to admit that their movement is “privileged” and living in a white middle-class “student bubble”.

This is no accident: it’s often the affluent, not the downtrodden, who have a greater motivation to protest. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book, The True Believer: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” People need struggles. If their supply of problems dwindles too low, they begin to embellish the problems they already have, and invent completely new ones. As Hoffer writes: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.”

Overall, Left-wing neotoddlers and Right-wing neotoddlers tend to come from different demographics — with the former being younger, richer, more educated, and more female than the latter — and this gives them different motivations, and different modus operandi. For instance, research suggests that the cluster-B trait of narcissism, which is a feeling of self-importance, takes a different form in the two groups. In Right-wingers, it mostly manifests as a sense of entitlement, while in Left-wingers it mostly manifests as a need for exhibitionism.

Suggested reading

Is Britain heading for civil war?

By Brad Evans

This is borne out in the different approaches Left-wingers and Right-wingers take towards their public tantrums. Right-wing nuisance-protests, such as those in Southport, are primarily attempts to relieve their frustration at not getting what they want. As such, they typically take the form of straightforward thuggery and hooliganism: starting fires, overturning cars and hurling bricks.

In contrast, nuisance-protests for Left-wing causes tend to be less about relieving frustration and more about getting attention. As such, they are usually more calculated and creative: throwing soup over paintings, releasing insect-swarms into hotels, or, most recently, painting the hands of a statue of Anne Frank red.

Generally, the Left-wing approach is more effective at getting attention. It took mass destruction by hundreds of Right-wingers in Southport to make news headlines, but it only took two Just Stop Oil activists with orange paint at Heathrow to achieve the same. Left-wing nuisance-protests are also treated more kindly by the mainstream. Right-wing protests tend to be roundly condemned by polite society, firstly because they tend to be more violent, and secondly because upholders of mainstream culture — such as liberal journalists, academics, and entertainers — are culturally programmed to dismiss concerns about Islam or immigration as “far-Right”, placing such concerns outside the bounds of polite discourse (and into the hands of actual extremists).

Left-wing protests, on the other hand, are generally viewed by Western cultural elites as well-meaning. The West’s mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, from academia to the liberal media, tend to be populated mostly by Left-leaning people who see Left-wing neotoddlers as a force for good because they’re broadly ideologically aligned with them and judge them by their perceived intentions rather than their results. For this reason, the mainstream treats Left-wing neotoddlers as its golden child, always seeing the best in them, while Right-wing neotoddlers are treated like the red-headed stepchild, worthy only of scorn.

This is particularly true at universities, where a decades-long encouragement of cluster-B infantilism reached a tipping point this summer with the campus protests. We saw the students put everything they’d been taught — exhibitionism, catastrophisation, hysteria — into practice. The protests quickly came to resemble a LARP. Whenever the protesters occupied a new part of the campus, they hung banners and declared it liberated. All this liberating eventually made them feel peckish. But when they demanded refreshments from university officials, and were denied, they claimed they were being deprived of “basic humanitarian aid” and might die of starvation.

This kind of grandiose fantasising is emblematic of people with narcissistic traits because it makes their struggles seem bigger than they actually are. As such, we commonly see similar kinds of catastrophisation among other flavours of neotoddler; every flood or forest fire is an omen of “climate catastrophe”, Israel is an “apartheid state”, biological facts about sex are “erasing trans people”, and immigration is “white genocide”. Such histrionics, whether propagated in error or with intention, serve to manipulate other hysterical people into becoming neotoddlers.

And the grim irony is that, by believing the world is worse than it actually is, neotoddlers make the world worse. Their disruptions and vandalism exert a huge economic and social cost on society, and they prevent ordinary people from getting to work, attending funerals of loved ones, and meeting vital medical appointments.

More from this author

Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

Unsurprisingly, the harm neotoddlers cause to liberal democracies has endeared them to foreign dictators. The Ayatollah developed a soft spot for the Ivy League campus protesters, cheerleading them on X, and even writing them a letter of support. It also recently transpired that Iran has been funding and directing activists across the US, and that they even masterminded an anti-Israel protest at McGill University in Canada. Closer to home, the misinformation that caused the Southport riots was amplified by a fake news website linked to the Russian government.

So, how can we end this age of neotoddlerism? The simplest way would be to cut off its main source of support. And that isn’t the Ayatollah or Putin, or even the universities. No, the neotoddlers’ main source of support is, in fact, you and I.

Neotoddlerism endures because it is much more effective at making news headlines and going viral than traditional forms of protest. As a case in point, on 22 June, celebrity environmentalists like Emma Thompson and Chris Packham led a huge march of over 60,0000 people through London, to raise awareness of habitat destruction and wildlife loss. It received little press coverage. Around the same time, a handful of Just Stop Oil protesters squirted orange paint on Stonehenge; it made the front page of every major UK newspaper, and coverage in the global press too.

Likewise, last week in London, there was a generally peaceful march against mass immigration, involving tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities, and led by figures like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox. It was ignored by most of the press. One week later, when Robinson embraced his inner-toddler and stoked violent riots, they made global headlines.

At a time when competition for attention is fierce, it makes business sense for the press and social media platforms to boost stories that outrage people into clicking and sharing. Such platforms naturally form a symbiosis with people who seek to outrage their way to fame: demagogues like Robinson; vandals like Just Stop Oil “poster girl”  Phoebe Plummer; and more bizarre figures still, like the “performance artist turned political activist” Crackhead Barney, who wears little but a diaper and seeks to save Gaza by being as obscene as possible.

By giving these figures platforms, we’ve not only allowed them to proselytise to huge audiences, but we’ve also turned them into idols — living testaments that you can get what you want by acting like a baby. And we can’t blame the media for this; they’re just showing us what we prefer to see. It is ordinary people who have made being a public nuisance pay. Neotoddlerism needs nothing more than attention to thrive — it is physical clickbait — and we just keep clicking.

But there is a way out. The solution to neotoddlers is the same as the one to regular spoiled brats: to ignore their outbursts and deny them attention. If someone sets fire to a car or makes a mess with orange paint, it shouldn’t make global or even national news. The media will stop reporting on these stories when we stop engaging with them. They’ll stop amplifying — and thereby incentivising — the neotoddlers when we do. So we should learn to react more slowly to news, to pay attention to what we pay attention to, and to give more of our attention to behaviours we wish to encourage rather than those we disapprove of. It’s not just the neotoddlers who need to be less impulsive, we do too.

And there are many people in this world who deserve our attention. The Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, for instance, has for the past 10 years been quietly removing plastic from the oceans through his startup, The Ocean Cleanup. His project recently hit a milestone of 15,000,000kg of trash removed from oceans and rivers worldwide, but it’s hardly been reported by the press. Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg became world famous by yelling and blocking entrances to public buildings.

We don’t yet have any start-ups to clear the oceans of rubber dinghies, but such a thing is possible, if addressing illegal immigration can be made more palatable to polite society. And that will only happen when the people who wish to “stop the boats” refrain from acting like the violent thugs they’re often stereotyped as, and start supporting practical, adult solutions.

Every child begins life throwing tantrums. And every good parent learns to ignore them, because they know that acknowledging attention-seeking behaviours validates them, and prevents their kids from outgrowing them. If we wish to stop seeing good causes ruined by bad actors, we must stop rewarding immaturity. If we wish to usher in an age of post-toddlerism, we must stop making neotoddlers famous.

This is an underlying problem because the most valuable information tends to be old. From classic literature, to proven theorems, to replicated studies, the past is the archive of wisdom that has weathered the fickleness of fashions and the erosion of aeons. And yet, just because it’s old, it is typically overlooked in favour of the latest gossip and rumours (which almost never stand the test of time).

So, as we stare down the barrel of another interminable election campaign stuffed with trivial updates, I plumbed the past for time-tested ideas forgotten by our collective 24-hour memory. I recently presented a few of the best, to start the year. Here are 17 more to get you through the next six weeks.

1. False Consensus Effect

“Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” — George Carlin. Our model of the world assumes people are like us. We don’t just do whatever we consider normal, we also consider normal whatever we do.

2. Fredkin’s Paradox

The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter — yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least. To avoid being paralysed by meaningless choices, use decision-making heuristics.

3. Package-Deal Ethics

“If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you’re not a serious thinker.” — Chris Williamson. Being pro-choice and being pro-gun control don’t necessarily follow from each other, yet those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don’t choose beliefs individually, but subscribe to “packages” of beliefs offered by a tribe.

4. Ovsiankina Effect (aka Hemingway Effect)

We have an intrinsic need to finish what we’ve started. Exploit this by taking your breaks mid-task; the incompleteness will gnaw at you, increasing your motivation to return to work. (When writing, I end each day mid-sentence because it

5. Champion Bias

We assume winners have the best advice, but those who win rarely examine why they won, while those who lose often regretfully dwell on their mistakes. So you’ll often obtain the best advice on winning not from winners but from losers.

6. Premortem

Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then conducting a post-mortem, conduct a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong — and then using the power of hindsight to deduce the likeliest reason it went wrong.

Imagine you get drenched during a big campaign speech. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

7. Youngest-Kid-in-Class Syndrome

A study of 300,000 children found that the youngest kids in class were more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. This suggests that immaturity is sometimes being mistaken for disorders.

8. Woozle Effect

When a source makes an unproven claim and it’s then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. This is common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.

A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other.

9. Post-journalism

The press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratised info. To save its business model, it pivoted from journalism into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers but to confirm what they already believe.

10. Roseto Effect

Many long-term studies, including the 50-year Roseto study and the 85-year Harvard Study of Adult Development, found that having close-knit relationships is as important for longevity as diet, sleep and exercise, yet it’s often neglected by fitness gurus. If you want to live, love.

11. Hitchens’s Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

More from this author

33 concepts to survive the year

By Gurwinder Bhogal

12. The Liking Gap

Multiple studies have found that people consistently underestimate how much a conversation partner likes them and enjoys their company. So don’t be shy, you’re probably cooler than you think.

13. Boomerang Effect

Deny someone something, and they’ll want it even more, out of defiance. If you want your child to eat broccoli, tell them they’re not big enough to eat broccoli. This also helps to explain why censorship often backfires (the Streisand Effect).

14. Anchored-to-your-own-history bias

“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” — Morgan Housel. Boomers and Generation X had wildly different experiences of how the economy works, and this gave them different dispositions, world views, and political preferences.

15. Common Knowledge Effect

Groups are meant to be better decision-makers than individuals, because they combine many perspectives. But in practice, a group doesn’t base its decisions on the info specific to each member, but only on the info common to them all. This casts doubt on the idea that “two heads are better than one”, and helps explain why, despite popular wisdom, diversity generally does not make teams better.

16. Gibson’s Law

“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.” Both sides in a court case or policy debate will have support from experts, no matter how crazy the position, because education doesn’t make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.

17. Cached Thoughts

Most of your beliefs were formed earlier in your life, when you were more naive. You continue to believe them only because you’ve never reconsidered them. When you’re about to offer an opinion, consider when you formed it, and ask: is it really your belief, or that of your younger self?

And one final thing: as usual, don’t mistake these rules of thumb for laws of nature, as that would be a fallacy called Secundum Quid.

This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician who cost the US the Vietnam War, and the biggest FBI investigation of the 20th century. But it begins with a mild-mannered psychologist who studied pigeons at Harvard in the Thirties. B.F. Skinner believed environment determines behaviour, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviourism, on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a birdcage with a food dispenser controlled by a button.

Skinner’s goal was to make the pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realised the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.

This led him to propose two kinds of reward: primary and conditioned reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is something we’re born to desire. A conditioned reinforcer is something we learn to desire, due to its association with a primary reinforcer. Skinner found that conditioned reinforcers were generally more effective in shaping behaviour, because while our biological need for the primary reinforcer is easily satiable, our abstract desire for the conditioned reinforcer isn’t. The pigeons would stop seeking food once their bellies were full, but they’d take far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click.

Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behaviour. From frequent-flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.

Suggested reading

We need to calm down about screen time

By Timandra Harkness

Some people soon began to consider whether games could be used to make people do other things. In the Seventies, the American management consultant Charles Coonradt wondered why people work harder at games they pay to play than at work they’re paid to do. Like Skinner, Coonradt saw that a defining feature of compelling games was immediate rewards. Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.

In the 21st century, advances in technology made it easy to add game mechanics to almost any activity, and a new term — “gamification” — became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. By 2008, business consultants were giving presentations about leveraging fun to shape behaviour, while futurists gave TED Talks speculating on the social implications of a gamified world. Underpinning every speech was a single, momentous question: if gamification could make people buy more stuff and work more hours, what else could it be used to make people do?

The tone was generally utopian, because back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good. In 2007, for instance, the online word quiz FreeRice gamified famine relief: for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice were given to the UN World Food Programme. Within six months it had already given away over 20 billion grains of rice. Meanwhile, the software-as-a-service company, Opower, had gamified going green. It turned eco-friendliness into a contest, showing each person how much energy they were using compared with their neighbours, and displaying a leaderboard of the top 10 least wasteful. The app has since saved over $3 billion worth of energy. And then there was Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington biochemists who’d struggled for 15 years to discern the structure of an Aids virus protein. They reasoned that, if they turned the search into a game, someone might do what they couldn’t. It took gamers just 10 days.

Even established corporations saw gamification’s potential. In 2008, Volkswagen debuted a campaign called “The Fun Theory”, based on the idea that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better”. Piano stairs were installed at a Stockholm rail station to encourage people to use them instead of the escalator, leading to a 66% increase in stair use. Volkswagen also tried to gamify gamification itself, creating a contest for good game ideas. The winning idea was a “speedcam lottery”, where people who kept to the speed limit would be entered into a prize draw, funded by speeding fines.

It all seemed so simple: if we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, gamification took a less wholesome route.

***

Humans, unlike pigeons, don’t respond much to clicks; but we do respond to another arbitrary sound: applause. We associate the sound of clapping hands not with food, but with another primary reinforcer: esteem. And esteem appears to be one of the main reasons we play games. Will Storr has argued that the evolutionary function of games is to organise societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. This association is so strong in our minds that, like the pigeons pecking the button long after the food dispenser has stopped dispensing, we’ll chase scores long after everyone else has stopped watching.

So when, in 2009, Facebook added the “like” button, it abruptly created a score to compete for. It motivated people to post more content — hitting “send” became like pecking a food dispenser button or activating a slot machine, initiating an excitingly uncertain outcome. The post might go completely unnoticed, or hit the jackpot and go viral. Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximise button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant responses, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features were crucial in turning social media into the world’s most addictive status game.

But this was just the beginning. Many in the managerial class began to wonder how they could use gamification for their own ends. The Chinese Communist Party was among the first to apply the principles of social media to the real world. In several towns and cities, it began trialling social credit schemes that assign citizens a level of “clout” based on how well they behave. In some areas, such as Rongcheng and Hangzhou, there are public signs that display leaderboards of the highest-scoring citizens. The lowest-scoring citizens may be punished with credit blacklists or throttled internet speeds.

Meanwhile, in the West, gamification is used to make people obey corporations. Employers like Amazon and Disneyland use electronic tracking to keep score of employees’ work rates, often displaying them for all to see. Those who place high on the leaderboards can win prizes like virtual pets; those who fall below the minimum rate may be financially penalised.

Game features are even more pervasive in the digital world. The dating app Zoosk works like a role-playing game, allowing you to accumulate experience points simply by using the app, which unlocks new abilities, such as animated virtual gifts to send to prospective dates. Meanwhile, on Tinder you can purchase various “level-ups” — Boosts, Super Likes, and Rewinds — that increase your chances of winning and compel you to keep playing to get your money’s worth. And if you have no luck on dating apps, there are always AI girlfriends to play with: apps like iGirl and Replika award users points for their commitment, which can be used to “level up” their virtual lovers into a version that is more intimate.

These are only a few examples. Virtually every kind of app, from audiobook apps to taxicab apps to stock trading apps, now employs game mechanics like points, badges, levels, streaks, progress bars, and leaderboards. Their ubiquity attests to their success in hooking people. Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritised immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilisation.

So where does this all lead? What is the endgame?

***

At the University of Michigan in the mid-20th century, there was a zoologist named James V. McConnell. A strong believer in fun, he often presented his academic research alongside satire and poetry, so it was difficult to tell which was which. One of the few things McConnell took seriously was behaviourism. He was transfixed by Skinner’s work on pigeons, and wished to expand the work to humans, with an eye to creating a perfect society. In a 1970 Psychology Today article he wrote: “We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. We have the techniques now to do it. Only by using them can we hope to maximize human potentiality.” In short, he wanted to turn society into a Skinner box.

A decade later, McConnell noticed how captivated people could become by video games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, and he became one of the first proponents of gamification. He pitched an ambitious project to gamify education to tech companies such as Microsoft and IBM, but he was 30 years too early, and they couldn’t yet see its promise. There was, however, one person who’d taken a keen interest in McConnell’s work. His name was Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski had come to Michigan as a postgraduate from Harvard, where he’d studied mathematics and graduated at just 18. But at Harvard, he’d also been subjected to cruel experiments. In a lab not far from where Skinner had once experimented with pigeons, psychologists linked to US intelligence were now experimenting with humans — one of whom was Kaczynski. Under the glare of blinding lights, he was methodically humiliated to see how he reacted. He claimed the experience didn’t affect him, and yet, within just a few years, he developed a paranoia about psychological conditioning and mind control. And so, when Kaczynski learned of McConnell’s proposals to turn society into a Skinner box, he concluded that the jocular professor was an existential threat to humanity, and that he needed to die.

It wasn’t a decision Kaczynski had made lightly; he’d developed an entire philosophy to justify it. Influenced by techno-dystopian writers such as Aldous Huxley and Jacques Ellul, Kaczynski believed the Industrial Revolution had turned society into a cold process of production and consumption that was gradually crushing everything humans valued most: freedom, happiness, purpose, meaning, and the ecosystem. In his view, everything society now produced — including science and technology — served society, not humanity, and thus was increasingly being purposed not to enrich our lives but to psychologically condition us so we wouldn’t resist what was being done to us and to the earth.

More from this author

Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

In short, where society had once been shaped to accommodate people, now people were being shaped to accommodate society. And this mis-shaping made people anxious and depressed because it conflicted with our deepest nature.

Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose. The brain evolved to solve problems, but the problems it had evolved for were now largely solved by technology. Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn’t make us happy, only aimless. And to stave of this aimlessness, we had to continually set ourselves goals purely to have goals to pursue, which Kaczynski called “surrogate activities”. These included sports, hobbies, or chasing the latest product that ads promised would make us happy. For Kaczynski, the result of reorienting our lives to chase artificial goals was that we became increasingly dependent on society to provide us with them. And without our own inherent sense of purpose, we’d inevitably be made to chase goals that were good for the industrial machine but bad for us.

Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesy the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognising its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and AI is reducing the need for labour, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are crumbling, and people are losing their value systems. Amid such uncertainty, games, with their well-defined rules and rewards, provide a semblance of order and purpose that may otherwise be lacking in people’s lives. Gamification is thus no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.

Unfortunately, it seems to be only a sticking plaster. Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they instead kept us too busy to notice our dissatisfaction. Rather than a fulfilled life, a life filled full. Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary, substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritising extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — in other words doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the intrinsic love of doing them — leads in the long term to lower well-being.

Kaczynski seemed to recognise this long before the arrival of smartphones. He felt that building a life around chasing what was offered on billboards and in magazines wouldn’t make him happy, and would only feed the Machine, so in 1971 he fled industrial society, holing himself up in a log cabin in the Montana wilderness. There he attempted a simple and self-sufficient life, enjoying the small things like the sound of birds singing and the feeling of the sun on his back.

But this idyll wouldn’t last. While hiking across one of his favourite spots — a rocky ridge with a waterfall — he was aghast to find a road had been built across it. As he saw it, industrialisation, like some creeping fungus, had followed him even here. Enraged, he decided modernity couldn’t be escaped, and had to be destroyed. His emotional instability got the better of him, and in 1978 he began posting bombs to those he accused of betraying humanity. In 1985, a package arrived at McConnell’s home. It was opened by his assistant, Nicklaus Suino. The package only partially exploded, injuring Suino and McConnell, and leaving them both shaken for life.

They were lucky. Less than a month later, Kaczynski would send another, more carefully prepared bomb to computer store owner, Hugh Scrutton, who’d become Kaczynski’s first murder victim.

By then, the FBI’s investigation into the bombings had grown into the largest in its history. For over a decade they scoured the country as Kaczynski continued to kill and injure, but much of their time, money, and manpower was wasted chasing mirages, for Kaczynski would often scatter his bomb parcels with red herrings such as notes referencing fictitious conspiracies and signed with made-up initials.

Kaczynski’s actions, though unforgivable, can teach us as much about gamification as his philosophy. His red herrings lured people away from what they actually sought, and this is also what gamified goals threaten to do. To understand how, we must consider a human error known as surrogation.

***

While Kaczynski wanted to demolish industrial society and return humanity to an agrarian life, US defence secretary Robert McNamara wanted the opposite: to use American industrial might to crush the agrarian society of Vietnam.

McNamara was a statistician who believed what couldn’t be measured didn’t matter. He charted progress in the Vietnam war by body count because it was simple to measure. It became his way of keeping score. But his focus on what could be easily measured led him to overlook what couldn’t: negative public opinion of the US Army both at home and in Vietnam, which deflated US morale while boosting enemy conscription. In the end, the US was forced to withdraw from the war, despite winning the battle of bodies, because it had lost the battle of hearts and minds.

Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure. And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, badges, trophies — are secondary reinforcers that only derive their worth due to their association with something we actually desire. But these associations are often illusory. A click is not the same thing as a food pellet. And points are not the same as progress.

We’re easily motivated by points and scores because they’re easy to track and enjoyable to accrue. As such, scorekeeping is, for many, becoming the foundation of their lives. “Looksmaxxing” is a new trend of gamified beauty, where people assign scores to physical appearance and then use any means necessary to maximise their score. And in the online wellness space, there is now a “Rejuvenation Olympics” complete with a leaderboard that ranks people by their “age reversal”. Even sleep has become a game; many people now use apps like Pokémon Sleep that reward them for achieving high “sleep scores”, and some even compete to get the highest “sleep ranking”.

Most such scores are simplifications that don’t tell the whole story. For instance, sleep trackers only measure what’s easy to measure, like movement, which says nothing about crucial facts such as time spent in rapid-eye-movement sleep. A more accurate measure of how well you slept would be how refreshed you feel in the morning, but since this can’t be quantified, it tends to be ignored. Further, if increasing one’s youthfulness score requires a daily two-hour skincare routine, a diet of 50 pills each day, abstention from many of life’s pleasures, and constant fixation on one’s vital metrics, is it really worth it? Of what value is adding a few years to your life if the cost is a life worth living? The scores we use to chart progress can’t articulate the nuances of reality, and yet we often tie our life goals and even self-worth to such arbitrary numbers.

Suggested reading

We need to talk about ZOE

By Deborah Cohen and Margaret McCartney

In the end, Kaczynski himself was led astray by red herring goals. In 1995, he enacted his endgame, demanding the New York Times and Washington Post print his anti-technology manifesto to prevent further bloodshed. All along, his goal had been to get the widest possible newspaper coverage, to maximise how many people would see his manifesto, but like McNamara, he didn’t account for what couldn’t be quantified, such as how people would see his manifesto. Skinner’s pigeons had learned to desire the click of the food dispenser because it had been accompanied by food, and Kaczynski’s intended audience learned to hate his arguments because they had been accompanied by violence. By maximising audience size at the expense of everything else, Kaczynski gained a massive audience unwilling to give him a fair hearing.

Further, his manifesto contained a peculiar choice of words (“eat your cake and have it”), which was recognised by his brother, David, who alerted the police, leading to Kaczynski’s capture. And so, by fixating on the most obvious metric — the size of his audience — Kaczynski lost the one thing he’d been fighting for all along: freedom.

Kaczynski played the wrong game, and was trapped by it. Today, we all face similar traps. We chase numbers and icons because they’re always available, and the chase is often so immersive that it keeps us from seeing where it leads, which is often far away from what we actually seek. This can lead to what the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman calls “counterfeit fitness”: the constant, momentary “wins” that come with playing digital games give us a false sense of progression and accomplishment, a neurochemical high that feels like victory but is not, and which, if it becomes a habit, risks overriding our actual ambitions.

It explains why so many young men have lost themselves in video games, and are no longer in employment or relationships. The false signals they’re getting from video game progress, combined with the sexual reward of online porn, are convincing their dopamine pathways that they’re winning in life, even as their minds and futures atrophy. It’s easy to persuade people into tying their sense of progress to fake or trivial goals. Casinos keep their customers happily losing money by distracting them with minor side games they’re likely to win. The small victories convince them they’re winning overall even as they lose the only games that actually matter.

Suggested reading

Climate science is making you miserable

By Tom Chivers

This strange quirk of human behaviour can even cost lives. In South Korea, a young couple became so addicted to raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby starve to death. The parents prioritised what they could quantify — levelling up their virtual baby — over that which they couldn’t — the life of their real one.

What makes pathological gameplaying so dangerous is that the more harm it does, the more alluring it becomes. If your baby is dead, why not raise a virtual one? If your life of playing video games has stopped you finding a girlfriend, why not play the AI girlfriend game? Thus, bad games form a feedback loop: they distract us from pursuing the things that will bring us lasting contentment, and without this lasting contentment, we become ever more dependent on false, transient metrics such as scores, trophies, and leaderboards to imbue our lives with meaning.

All the things a gamified world promises in the short term — pride, purpose, meaning, control, and happiness — it threatens in the long term. It has the power to seclude people from reality, and to rewrite their value systems so they prioritise the imaginary over the real, and the next moment over the rest of their lives.

Fortunately, there is a solution.

***

In prison, Kaczynski wrote a little-known sequel to his manifesto, entitled Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, in which he outlines his belief that all sufficiently advanced civilisations become trapped in fatal games. To illustrate his point, he employs a thought experiment involving a forested region occupied by several rival kingdoms. The kingdoms that clear the most land for agriculture can support a larger population, affording them a military advantage. Every kingdom must therefore clear as much forest as possible, or face being conquered by its rivals. The resulting deforestation eventually leads to ecological disaster and the collapse of all the kingdoms. Thus, a trait that is advantageous for every kingdom’s short-term survival leads in the long term to every kingdom’s demise.

Kaczynski was describing a “social trap”, a term coined by a student of Skinner, John Platt, who had theorised that an entire population behaving like pigeons in a Skinner box, each acting only for the next immediate reward, would eventually overexploit a resource, causing ruin for everyone. What Platt called “social traps”, Kaczynski called “self-propagating systems”, because he viewed them as negative-sum games that took on a life of their own, defeating every player to become the only winner. He believed such games were an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, and had to be stopped before they reached a critical mass of players and became “alive”.

In jail, Kaczynski was forbidden access to the web, and in letters he struggled to understand what Facebook was. Nevertheless, his warnings could easily have been referring to social media. On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: digital filters, mask-like makeup, plastic surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off. On TikTok and YouTube, there is another self-propagating system where pranksters compete to outdo each other in outrageousness to avoid being buried by the algorithm. Such extreme brinkmanship frequently leads to injury, and has even led to the deaths of, among others, Timothy Wilks and Pedro Ruiz.

On X, meanwhile, there lives a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other — only make each other angrier — so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless cycle of mutually assured distraction.

Those are just three examples of social traps that have emerged in our gamified age. But the most worrying social trap is gamification itself. Every company that exploits our gameplaying compulsion to sell its products will have an edge over those who do not, which forces every company to compete to gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it is the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be. Games will be created not just to extract money from people, but also data.

More from this author

33 concepts to survive the year

By Gurwinder Bhogal

The 2025 Enhanced Games, for instance, is a new futuristic version of the Olympics, funded by tech moguls including Peter Thiel, where contestants can exploit anything from cybernetic implants to performance-enhancing substances to get a competitive advantage. The purpose of the games seems to be transhumanist: to motivate people to discover new ways to augment human abilities, with the eventual goal of turning men into gods. There is, after all, a vacancy in heaven. When God is dead, and nations are atomised, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Games can motivate us to destroy ourselves, but they can also motivate us to better ourselves. In a gamified world, it’s possible to play without getting played, if one only chooses the right games. As the poker player-turned-podcaster Liv Boeree said: “Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play.” So how do you decide which games to play? The story of gamification offers five broad rules.

First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones. Short, frequent feedback loops offer regular reinforcement, which helps motivate us. But what is made to motivate us too often addicts us. So consider the long-term outcomes of the games you’re playing: if you did the same thing you did today for the next 10 years, where would you be? Play games the 90-year-old you would be proud of having played. They won’t care how many trophies you have; they will care how many times you saw your parents before they died.

Second: choose hard games over easy ones. Since the long-term value of games lies in their ability to hone skills and build character, easy games are usually a trap. People with unearned wealth — thieves, heirs and lottery winners — often end up losing it all, because the struggle to obtain a reward teaches us the reward’s worth, and is thus a crucial part of the reward.

Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones. Games evolved to confer status, and status is zero-sum — for some to have it, others must lose it. But we no longer have to play such games; we can change the rules so a win for me doesn’t mean a loss for you. Educational games are one example. Wealth creation is another. Positive-sum games — where every player benefits by playing — are a form of competition that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a reward. Chasing trophies and leaderboard rankings can help drive us to succeed, but a fixation on such rewards can become a source of stress, and can even make leisure activities feel like drudgery, turning games into work.

Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can’t be quantified.

There are an overwhelming number of games to choose from. If you want to keep fit, try Zombies Run, an app that takes the form of a post-zombie-apocalypse radio broadcast telling you which direction to run to avoid being eaten. If you want to learn general knowledge while helping those in poverty, play the FreeRice quiz. If you want to learn a new language, try Duolingo. And if you want to form good habits, there’s Habitshare, which lets your friends track your attempts, motivating you more than if you were only accountable to yourself.

But if, among the countless games out there, you can’t find one right for you, then you can just create your own. By now there’s an app to keep any kind of score, and an AI to formulate any possible ruleset. Kaczynski killed himself last summer, still adamant humanity was doomed. His disturbing legacy has since passed to his disciples, such as the Liverpool man Jacob Graham, who was last month jailed for terrorism after trying to emulate his idol. Graham may have thought he was saving the world, but, with all his talk of maximising kill counts, he was just playing a bad game.

In the end, Kaczynski and his followers made the same mistake as Skinner: they viewed us as mere puppets of our environment, devoid of agency and the ability to adapt. They needn’t have feared the world becoming a Skinner box because, among all the papers written about that troublesome contraption, one fact is always omitted: Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were in a cage, and had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.

Your move.

1. Preference Falsification
If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech — whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship — is ultimately a request to be deceived.

2. The Opinion Pageant
The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are easy to counterfeit.

3. Limbic Capitalism
Capitalism needs us to keep buying, and the best way to keep us buying is to get us addicted — to food, drugs, porn, news. Our brains are being violently overstimulated as businesses compete to obsess us; the market is slowly turning us into mindless dopamine-junkies.

4. Path Dependence
The Qwerty keyboard layout was a misguided attempt to stop typewriters jamming, but, despite being inefficient for typing, it’s endured into the digital age, because we all just accepted it as the norm. We become blind to so many problems because we let them become part of life.

5. Firehosing
In the past, the purpose of disinformation was to convince you of a single narrative. In the digital age, the purpose of disinfo is to overwhelm you with many contradictory narratives until you start to doubt everything and become confused, demoralised and passive.

More from this author

Is liberal society making us ill?

By Gurwinder Bhogal

6. Dartmouth Scar
In 1980, social psychologist Robert Kleck told his research subjects they’d engage in a study to test discrimination. He painted scars on some of their faces, and then had them attend job interviews. The participants with scars painted on their faces reported feeling discriminated against for their looks. However, unknown to them, their scars had been removed before they entered the interviews. It would seem we can be victimised by the mere belief that we’re a victim.

7. Bias Blindspot
Whenever I write about a bias or fallacy, I’ll receive replies from Leftists claiming it explains Rightist views and Rightists claiming it explains Leftist views. Not once has someone claimed it explains their own side’s views. The belief that bias is just something that affects our opponents is our greatest source of bias.

8. Shiny Object Syndrome
We’re drawn to whatever’s new, because in our evolutionary history new info tended to matter. But now it doesn’t, because 99% of new info is clickbait, mass-produced and rushed out to exploit our attraction to novelty. So stop chasing the new and seek info that’s stood the test of time.

9. Dysrationalia
Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It’s possible to devote a genius-level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviours. Tragically, a common fate of intellectuals.

10. Fanbaiting
Ideas that divide spread further than ideas everyone agrees with. Film studios portray a white character or historical figure as black, which stokes outrage and divides the internet, and as everyone complains or defends it, they all unwittingly publicise the movie.

Suggested reading

The Little Mermaid is Disney propaganda

By Kat Rosenfield

11 Licensing Effect
Believing you’re good can make you behave badly. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behaviour, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.

12. Switch Cost Effect
We simultaneously inhabit two worlds — online and off — and both regularly interrupt us with demands/notifications, so we’re never able to settle in either. The constant switching of attention apparently lowers working IQ by around 10 points, dumbifying us twice as much as being high on cannabis.

13. St. George in Retirement Syndrome
Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice. So, as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against, simply to retain a sense of purpose in life.

14. Goodhart’s Law
When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. Since schools started to use test-scores as targets, they’ve gradually stopped teaching kids how to live fulfilling lives — and now mainly teach them how to pass school tests.

15. Hotelling’s Law
Rival products — burgers, pop songs, political parties — tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to steal their customers or audiences. Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

16. Segal’s Law
“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.” Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

Suggested reading

Who will stand against Progress?

By Paul Kingsnorth

17. Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it will often take precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it, because more time means more deliberation and procrastination. The underlying principle, known as induced demand, applies to many other resources: software expands to fill memory (Wirth’s law), patient numbers expand to fill hospital beds (Roemer’s law), energy consumption expands to meet supply (Jevon’s paradox), road congestion expands to fill roads (Braess’ paradox).

18. Pareidolia
We see whatever we look for. For aeons, survival favoured the paranoid — those able to discern a predator from the vaguest outline. From these survivors we inherited hyperactive pattern-detection, which once saved us from the lions, but now curses us to see them even in the skies.

19. Safetyism
After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.

20. Nutpicking
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy. The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side’s lunatics.

21. Celine’s 1st Law
National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. Government attempts to stop a threat to security lead it to draft harsher laws and to spy on its citizens, which eventually becomes a greater threat than that which it’s protecting against.

22. Problem Selling
Problem solvers take an issue and break it down into small solvable chunks. Problem sellers — such as politicians, or the press — do the opposite, blaming many small issues on one big problem that looks insurmountable and terrifying.

23. Idiocy Saturation
Online, people who don’t think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. 

Suggested reading

Why Twitter is so awful

By Mary Harrington

24. Celine’s 2nd Law
Honest communication occurs only between equals. If one person has power over another, then the less powerful person can’t risk saying what they really think. Thus, in any hierarchy, honest communication only occurs horizontally.

25. Crabtree’s Bludgeon
It’s possible to create a coherent explanation for any set of observations — even ones that are mutually contradictory. In other words, there is at least one seemingly rational argument to justify even the most idiotic bullshit. So be careful.

26. Presentism
We judge history by modern standards. We regard slave-owners as evil, but slavery was so common and familiar to our forebears that they were blind to its iniquities, as we are to the industrial slaughter of animals — for which we too will eventually be called evil.

27. Cynical Genius Illusion
Cynical people are widely seen as smarter, but sizeable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to do or think.

28. Boxer’s Child Paradox
Each generation tries to make life better for the next, but this deprives future generations of the ordeals needed to build character. In our relentless quest for ever more convenience, are we dooming posterity to weakness?

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

29. Ambiguity Aversion
A 2016 study found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they’d certainly receive an electric shock. People tend to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes.

30. Semantic Stopsign
One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word “evil” is used to explain behaviour but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding but by killing curiosity.

31. Opinion Shopping
Many who conduct research online ignore every source they disagree with till they find one they agree with, and then use this source as an authority to justify what they already believe. They don’t consider someone an expert unless they agree with them.

32. Compassion Fade
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” When presented with two appeals for charity — one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl — people tend to donate much more to the girl. Our minds can’t grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We’re moved by drama, not data.

33. Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity
Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

This is an edited version of lists that first appeared on The Prism.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, given that we can’t accuse a virus of transphobia, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included: 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid, and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reporting the symptoms of long Covid is only moderately associated with a prior Covid infection. In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before getting Covid almost doubled the chances of reporting long Covid.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s response to Covid and lead to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no evidence that anxiety or depression alters the body’s immune response to the virus. A much likelier explanation could be that, since symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking psychological distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Young people are reporting despair and distress at an unprecedented rate, and this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society — a society that is making people sick, by teaching them to feel sick. The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond reports of long Covid. Consider the surge in cases of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) increased by over 2000%. If the increase were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, it wouldn’t be mostly restricted to a single sex and age range, but it has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

Suggested reading

Mental illness doesn't make you special

By Freddie deBoer

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — appears to be the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. This is also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another illness.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems that young people, and their doctors, are viewing personal issues as medical disorders: we are living through a pathologisation pandemic.

Why are so many people confusing sadness for sickness? It’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do this would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologisation can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that could be exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. As the arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters ramps up, natural bodies seem ugly by comparison. This “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 people found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with poorer mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

The real reasons may be deeper. One idea, more than any other, underpins the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, backed by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasises the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasising the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as hapless puppets has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical. A common example is “trauma”, a psychiatric term that has become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused that even clinicians fear it has lost its meaning. Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Pathologisation is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’s are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatise mental illness can end up glamorising it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing”, a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses”, fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, or “part of my dating appeal”.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologisation by influencers is causing unintentional pathologisation among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomisation makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologisation pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

Medicalisation — the tendency for clinicians to recategorise ever more things as medical issues — occurs because clinicians are just as human as their patients, and are therefore just as influenced by culture and their own personal biases. The 1973 Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatrists who have been told that a healthy person is insane will begin to reinterpret that person’s ordinary behaviours, such as note-taking, as manifestations of their mental disorder. We saw this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous Gids clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

Suggested reading

The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep occurs largely due to the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetise you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income. In the States, the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to have a lucrative annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicised by the media, people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems. In so doing, they began to conform, wittingly or otherwise, to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to do just that. Some even suddenly “remembered” being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, but clinicians’ diagnoses also influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by a hyperconnected world, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

Suggested reading

Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth has created a new illness: puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasises human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements such as: “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me”. They concluded that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls. Further, when the self-worth of teenagers was mapped, using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful”, the data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

And thus, as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else.

If there’s a vaccine for the pathologisation pandemic, then the best candidate is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is a form of talk-based treatment based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Contrary to modernity, it teaches that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. The aim is to reframe harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more accurate, agentic, and soluble. So, instead of “The world sucks”, one could think “I feel like the world sucks right now”. Where pathologisation places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologisation bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

Suggested reading

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

No form of psychotherapy has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurisation and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT”, are the opposite of classic CBT because they seek not to cultivate strength but to validate feelings.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which has helped everyone from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”. The ultimate cure to rampant pathologisation is to prepare the young to do battle against their greatest foe — their own minds — and to teach them a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: you are more than the things that happen to you. And you have as much control over your life as you believe you do.

Many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, but if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. Look within for the causes and, most times, you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, of course, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, could be a Hell in Heaven, or a Heaven in Hell.