Green Neuroticism
Using some of his own concepts, as well as those of others, Matthew Yglesias, an American journalist writes a piece called “Why are young liberals so depressed?” In 2014, Yglesias co-founded Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell. The article is essentially about the connection between left thinking and high neuroticism. The chart below illustrates that the most depressed among American youth are liberal females and even liberal males are more depressed than conservative females.
Relative to criminality and the legal system, interesting Yglesias writes, “If there were more Republicans working as professors, we’d probably balance out this line of inquiry with papers asking whether rising levels of shootings and homicides also contribute to racial disparities in mental health. But there aren't. So even when all the research being done is good, we primarily see research looking at the questions that progressives think are interesting.
Yet obviously, much of the research is biased to the political left, as is Yglesias himself, when one reads the paragraph starting with, “Adolescents in the 2010s endured a series of significant political events . . .”
While the article provides few examples of the anger and acrimonious action of progressive youth, one has only to think of hysterical student protests when conservative or traditionalist speakers arrive on campus, or when demonstrations and protests of climate change erupt. There is little comparison to the antagonism and violence exploding during an Antifa confrontation.
The Benjamin Franklin quote, “Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame”, is certainly a long passé. Aggravation and antagonism, in the progressive left, simply generate more anger, especially when it is discovered that their anger achieves no results. This eventually leads to depression and despair.
Climate change is a political, not a physical science issue and can be assessed as such based solely on the ideology of its advocacy. Progressives are the angry protestors – there is no need for the study of science or evidentiary research, the issue is progressively political and emotional and a principled sense of righteousness is the only prerequisite. This is exactly the position progressive politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alludes to when she says, “There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
Thus the progressive person, especially in youth, reasons that all societal amendments, reparations, regulations, and recompense should be adjudicated on feelings alone. The ultimate result, in many cases, of furiously protesting pipelines, climate change, and other environmental issues is a high degree of neuroticism leading to depression, eco-anxiety, or climate despair and creating a well-worn path to a therapist’s office.
This youthful desolation and despair is simply a consequence or inconvenience for the progressive politician and, advocate bureaucrat who exploits climate change simply as a conduit for power and control.
And of course, the conservative is confident that at some point, after relentless and unremitting observation, the world will come together and discover a compromising fuel – at the moment the one right under everyone’s nose. Nuclear energy - this energy source is the ultimate proof of climate change being exploited as political propaganda.
