Are we unwittingly heading towards a “Global Personality Disorder”?

The world has been steadily getting better. Extensive analysis of hard data on ambient levels of violence, infant mortality, health, literacy, environmental pollution, income and suchlike, demonstrate an overwhelmingly positive trend, when tracked over the decades and centuries. It is clear that humanity’s search for a better existence has succeeded so far; although not perfectly, and with setbacks in between, such as the many great wars that we fought in the last century.

There is one such setback we seem to be experiencing right at this moment. It involves a transformation of our ideals in the space of interpersonal human relations. It is a transformation that has an opposite shade to what took place during the enlightenment, and the various emancipation movements that followed it. Whether information technology is the cause of this looming dark cloud is questionable, but it certainly has played an important role in its formation.

We are in a zeitgeist where individual freedoms are actively under attack, and where a reasonable perspective of history, justice and human nature is being substituted – nah overthrown – by a variety of flippant mob culture.

What exactly are we talking about? Let us examine the salient characteristics of this rather alarming zeitgeist.

1. Widespread intolerance of divergent opinion, and the emergence of a Cancel Culture

Its one thing to call for the “cancellation” of unrepentant, criminally minded persons, owning to the imminent physical danger they’d pose to society, if they were to be given a platform to operate.

But when we see cancelation attempts on the likes of Joanne Rowling and Steven Pinker, for their dissenting opinions on transgender medicine and free speech, we need to wake up from our slumbers, and get both alarmed and armed. This “conform or shut up” mindset is what led to the burning of "witches" and the censuring of Galileo, and is the surest way to bring all intellectual and material progress to a halt.

Progress doesn’t happen by conforming to the status core and silencing dissent; it happens through a healthy clash of contradictory ideas, aided by the tools of scientific thinking, such as evidence, reason and mathematics.

From another perspective, pushing ostensibly silly people – far be it that Pinker and Rowling are, but let us assume so for argument’s sake – away from the discussion only hides and breeds the problem. This thesis was amply proven in America some years ago, in a social experiment which produced President Donald Trump.

2. A hypersensitivity to offensive ideas  

We see today a hypersensitivity to being offended, to a point where being offended in a mere conversation of an ideological nature, can make us stop living and working together in ordinary daily life. So if you are uncomfortable with a person who admits they are uncomfortable with homosexuality, Marxism, capitalism, abortion, transgender medicine, UBI, Islamism, voodoo or even the Flying Teapot (if you happen to believe in it), then you must get them fired if you can, or at least remove them from your acquaintanceship.

In this emerging paradigm, we bear zero individual responsibility towards social change; to engage, confront, and convert our ideological opponents, and in the process give ourselves a fair chance to discover if we might be indeed wrong. The time-tested, progressive value that one must coexist with ideological opponents on common ground, and look for opportunities to reconcile differences through example, evidence and persuasion, has been lost in a single generation.

3. The mainstream media being completely overwhelmed by identity politics

We see a massive invasion of the mainstream media by identity politics, to the point where their allegiance to ill-defined, imaginary sociopolitical group identities like blocks (West/East), wings (Far Left/Left/Center/Right/Far Right), parties (Democratic/Republican), or other compound positions, trumps (pun intended) a healthy dissemination of divergent opinion and expert debate. We hardly see a fair and intelligent analysis of affairs in the news, or even see an impartial cut or spread of newsworthy events for that matter. Instead, we hear a constant background mantra that emerges from these mainstream media, that screams “join us or die”.

The occasional snippet of genuine news, of say a fire, an election or a bomb explosion, is studded with interjections of journalistic trope. For example, “That’s the latest about the forest fire in Transylvania. By the way, it has long been alleged that Transylvania is ruled by Dracula, who drank the blood of a million people. Don’t you forget that. Moving on…”

One has to tune into an emerging world of progressive cybermedia, like for example the YouTube channels of Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Lex Fridman or Skeptic, to hear a more thoughtful, intellectually honest and ideologically diverse analysis of what’s going on in the world today. BBC shortwave had a similar appeal over four decades ago. Alas, BBC’s news app cannot even get its grammar right today.

4. Believing that progress entails equal outcomes for all groups

There exists a widespread belief that equality of outcomes is the ultimate measure of progress, across all historically marginalized groups, be it ethnicity, race, gender or other creed, and that an introduction of quota systems is the best way to right past wrongs. For example, if the ratio of Male:Female is 1:1, then the same ratio must be enforced across all forms of employment, be it software engineering, nursing, teaching or lumberjackary. Or if there is an “underprivileged” district, we lower the entry requirements for applicants from this district, to medical school.

The belief is that we can rapidly eliminate historical prejudices and “bad ideas” prevalent in our culture using a top down approach, by imposing quotas. Rather than approach these issues bottom up, by inculcating values, and setting stern rules and procedures to eliminate these prejudices at an individual level.

Alas, these quota systems overshadow individual performance and suitability, and deny equal opportunity and fair, healthy competition between individuals. To quote an old Lankan proverb, this is like changing your pillow when you have a headache. A softer pillow might possibly help, but the problem is still in your head, and not in the pillow.

5. Tearing down the statues of historical figures, on account of their immorality, as judged by today’s moral standards  

We see a reactionary, irrational perspective of history emerging, with the tearing down of statues of historical figures of the likes of Churchill, Washington and Jefferson, celebrated for their contributions to human progress. We now live in a world where a historical figure’s contribution to society cannot be celebrated, if the life that that person led cannot be considered squeaky clean when compared to today’s moral standards.

On this basis, everyone from Jesus (because of his placid stance on slavery) to Einstein (a “bad” father and profligate) would have to be expunged from our history books. We’d have to bunch Elvis with Epstein, on account of his alleged sexual involvement with adolescents, and shut down Graceland. Heck, we might even have to rip out Michael Landon’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for portraying child-marriage in a positive light, in his famous 1970s children’s TV serial “Little House On the Prairie”.

6. An attitude of victimhood amongst liberal-thinking young adults

There is an atmosphere of seething anger against authority figures, even when they are democratically and fairly appointed, and a general attitude of victimhood underpinning this anger. As a part of this defeatist attitude, retribution through any means including assault, arson and rioting, is touted as game for righting systemic wrongs. A kind of terrorism against sweeping categories of humanity is on the rise, like against “the police” after the Floyd incident for example.

As one famous contemporary moral philosopher recently said, the invention of the police is the next best discovery humankind made, to the invention of the cooking fire. And yet many people think that one must disarm or worse dismantle the police, to mitigate violence during arrests and encounters. A similar animosity is seen against politicians. Animosity in itself is perhaps excusable when bad things happen, as in the case of Floyd, but a nullification of legitimate roles in society is dangerous. So if all politicians are bad, and we therefore don’t vote, then who runs the country?

7. The denial of genuine expertise, and the emergence of an intellectually flat society

The denial of genuine expertise and a revulsion towards experts who rely on evidence, data and statistics is a serious problem in today’s world. This phenomenon might possibly be an outcome of the rise of social media, and the consequent "intellectual flattening" of society, although one can’t be certain. Social media amplifies messages based on how loud and rude we are, and not based on how factually accurate or rationally compelling our argument is. The “baser” the emotions we stir (be it happy or sad, love or hate), the further the message carries.

And there is a cross-domain snowball effect. Once we have built our following based on how physically attractive we are, or on how many bananas we can eat a day, we suddenly find that our opinion carries more weight than experts, on unrelated topics such as Brexit, Covid-19 or Systemic Racism. Maybe we don’t even intend it, but it ends up this way.

In the bad old days, one had to have some kind of reputation or prequalification in the domain, prior to getting oneself on center page, on a technical matter. Center page opinions were far from perfect, but there was some form of respect towards the concept of expertise, and an editor would try to understand the rationale before publishing. Scientific journals were much tougher to get published in, and they were a significant source of informed opinion to the general public.

Today we have a few billion people who have simply disappeared into social media. Journals and the more erudite, non-trashy media still exist, but they hardly reach anyone anymore.

8. Ignorance of facts indispensable for navigating today’s world   

There appears to be mass ignorance of important big picture facts and trends in the world, the knowledge of which could immunize us against fads or canards, and help us make better individual decisions in daily life. This problem persists in spite of the internet, which allows us to gain this knowledge in seconds, if only we ask the right questions on Google.

How many of us know that the world has been getting steadily less violent? That the death penalty is ineffective? That racism in the police in America has steadily reduced over the last 25 years? That HIV is the biggest pandemic of the 21st Century, killing 700 000 people every year? That absolute pacifism is not an option for a stable, free society? That medical misadventure is the third-leading cause of death, and that its safer to fly in an airplane than enter a hospital, disease notwithstanding?

These are not crank opinions; they are not even mainstream opinions. They are established facts echoed by big data and expert analysis. We aught to know these things like we know the number of fingers on our hands. So how could you justify a riot against the police and the public in general, if the police have been steadily improving? How could you justify going under the surgeon’s knife on the basis of a first opinion, when you know you are more likely to die from the slip of the knife than from COVID-19, after contracting it?

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We might not be burning witches at the stake and feeding christians to lions today, but we seem to be putting capable, well-meaning people out of work, school and our social circles, because we don’t agree with their ideals and personalities, or dislike the people they associate. This mindset is at odds with the commonest interpersonal skills that evolved through millennia of culture, like having a high tolerance level for personal offense, listening carefully to grasp ideas that initially don’t make much sense, giving people a second chance, practicing forgivingness and suchlike. These interpersonal skills need careful and purposeful analysis before we decide to discard them as irrelevant to today’s world.

This neo-postmodernist zeitgeist seems to have acquired traits akin to those found in people diagnosed with personality disorders, as defined in human psychology. People with personality disorders lack the said interpersonal skills, and instead display traits such as black and white thinking, splitting, projection, gas lighting, victim mentality, irritability, irrational fear, needing others to walk on eggshells, and a general intolerance of a free manifestation of the personalities of those around them. They want others to conform or f... off.

Whether entire segments of the population are stressed too much by the modern way of life and are suffering from a kind of mass PTSD, making them withdraw into depressive or narcissistic states, or whether this zeitgeist is simply a random uptake of bad ideas and thinking patterns, one cannot say. But all folks who consider themselves to be leaders should ponder about this phenomenon.