Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?
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This is Honestly. I'm not on TikTok, but my youngest sister is, and she's been showing me these videos over the past few years of girls. They're usually American or British, and they're these videos that they post of themselves living with what they say are severe mental health problems.

So I can play any type of sport. Fuck men. Physical activity is actually a lot better. For some of the girls, it's Tourette's. Up top, Girl Scout.

For others, it's bipolar disorder. Sometimes when I'm not in a bipolar episode, I miss being in a bipolar episode. Like, I'm not even gonna lie. Like, I don't enjoy them per se, but there's something about the confidence that comes from mania that I wish I could just put into like a pill and take that every day.

But the one that's probably gotten the most attention are these videos where young influencers claim to be documenting life with multiple personality disorder, or what's now often called dissociative identity disorder. My name's Alaska, I'm 22 years old, and I am the emotional protector of the blue valve system. Nice to meet you.

In these videos, and many of them have millions of views. Yo, my name's Indy. I'm 19. I'm the host of the Bluebell system. These influencers document themselves switching through their multiple personalities on camera. Oh my God. Right, my name's River. I'm 27, and I'm the secondary protector.

Some of these personalities, or they call them alters, have different accents. So a switch takes place when two alters basically trade places with consciousness. So right now, I'm fronting as Cole.

If my primary protector Landon was to front, we would have to switch. Basically, switching who's in control of the body, who's fronting. Some change their ages. Some switch genders. Being a male alter in a system with a non-binary host is a lot of fun. Let me tell you why. One, see this piercing? This is new. They decided to do this...

last night. So for example, a person might be a vegan transgender man and 20 seconds later become a seven-year-old girl. It's Jane. Look what I did all by myself today. What they claim is not that they're playing different people or putting on costumes. They claim that they're just documenting their everyday life. Hi, I'm Zach. I am 12 years old. I am a middle in our system.

And that basically means that, like, I'm not a little kid, but I'm not a grown-up either, or what we call bigs in our system. Now, as you might expect, these influencers have become the butt of a lot of jokes and the subject of mockery. But I don't think mocking this trend is particularly helpful. I think we need to ask ourselves, why are they doing this? What is driving people to almost aspire to being sick, often horrifically sick?

And what does this trend say about the deeper cultural changes happening in our society? Because it's not just a few teenagers online. For evidence of the change, look no further than the New York Times. Recently in the magazine, a writer named Daniel Bergner published a story about a paradigm shift that's underway, in which people suffering from severe psychosis, like schizophrenia, should not be seen as people suffering from a disease, but as people merely with a different identity.

And that to suggest otherwise, to suggest that the paranoid schizophrenic is not engaging with reality as it is, is to diminish that person's lived experience. Instead of psychosis, the piece suggests using the term non-consensus realities. In the days after that Times article was published, my guest today, writer and author Freddie DeBoer, released a video response. Hi, this is...

pretty much entirely off the chest and I'm pretty emotional right now. So I apologize in advance if this is the most coherent video. He spoke not just as a journalist, but as someone who actually suffers from bipolar disorder. You know, when I was 31 or 32, I had an episode and I became convinced that an ex-girlfriend who I had not seen in years was putting...

The video was very hard to watch because it was so vulnerable and moving.

And it made me want to have a longer conversation with Freddie about this broader change and why it matters. I think Freddie is one of the best writers in America, and I often don't agree with him. He's a proud lefty. He identifies as a Marxist. But he's also one of the most potent critics of the left and the identity politics that have taken hold there. His critique of what he calls the gentrification of disability...

has helped me understand the rise in the number of people who identify with being sick or disabled and why too much acceptance or really glorifying or valorizing sickness actually hurts the sickest among us. Stay with us. Freddie, thank you so much for being here and talking with me. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I want to talk about a lot of things today, but I want to start off by focusing on the question of disability.

There are lots of things that we have debates about in our culture where there's clearly views that are legitimate on both sides. But disability has never been one of them. I always thought that there was a consensus that disability is just a tragic reality of life. When a child's born with cerebral palsy or when someone loses their ability to hear or see, that it's just a heartbreaking reality of being human.

But recently, you've been writing about how there's a change afoot, especially in elite culture, around what a disability is and how a society should think about people with disabilities. So, Freddie, can you explain to me what you've described as the gentrification of disability? Sure. So, you know, disability has risen to become a kind of identity category in a way that many other things in American life have become in the past hundred years or so.

So that a disability is not just something that you have, but it's something that you are.

And, of course, the degree to which this is true varies a great deal from individual to individual. But some people place tremendous stock in their self-identification as someone with a disability. And so these are the sort of things that go, for example, into people's online dating profiles front and center or if they are a writer onto their professional website, if they listed it as one of their first key interests or whatever. Yeah.

A disability varies a great deal, and some of them are quite debilitating. They ask us really intense questions about quality of life and what it means to be alive and to be happy. And so, of course, it's appropriate for people to think deeply about them and even to identify with them if that identification is

helps them to deal with the specific disability that they're grappling with. When I talk about the gentrification of disability, I'm talking about the fact that due to the very nature of disabilities that are related to cognition or behavior, disabilities that are related to personality, the people who are in the best position to talk about having those disabilities and to thus guide those conversations

are usually going to be the people who are the least debilitated by those conditions.

So I have used the analogy before of autism. Now, I want to be upfront because I get yelled at about this. I am not saying that autism is a mental illness. I think that they are separate things. But I do think that it is an important analogy because, as I've said several times, you know, I know people who are the parents of severely autistic children, children who would now be considered level three autistic, according to the DSM.

Who are the kind of kids who repetitively try to claw their own eyes out, who try to bite their fingers off, who have to be in protective gear 24 hours a day because of these self-injurious behaviors? Or some of them who are not quite as bad are simply people who can't control their own bathroom functions even though they're in their 20s or 30s, people who have been completely verbal their entire lives and can neither read nor write, etc.?

People like that are a special class of people who need society's accommodation. And that's the entire point of the whole sort of suite of disability accommodations that we've created legally and socially in our culture for people to be helped who need those.

by their very nature, those people are not going on TikTok or Twitter or Tumblr. They're not writing Harvard Crimson op-eds about what it means to be autistic, right? Like those people by their very nature are going to be less visible in the autism discussion than people whose autism represents itself as essentially a set of personality quirks. Now, those people who have

high-functioning autism who have autism of the type that represents itself as social awkwardness or inability to look people in the eye, those sorts of things. I respect their situation. I would never attempt to tell them that they're not autistic or don't have the right to claim autism as part of their identity, etc. But the problem is, by the very nature of how the conversation works, they come to dominate the airwaves. So this guy that I know

Whose son is someone who he has, you know, who has autism to the degree that he has come to terms with the fact that his son will never be able to live without without care with that he has to make eventually make arrangements for his son to have care after he dies because his son cannot care for himself because of his level of his autism.

he always says, you know, he would like to have his next conversation about autism not have the other person reference like the Big Bang Theory or something, right? Like the definition of autism as this particular sort of set of very sort of photogenic personality quirks has just sort of eaten the whole of the conversation. Okay, so you're saying that as disabilities become a part of what's typically called identity politics—

that there's been a change taking place in how many think of disability. And part of that change is that the face of something like PTSD or autism or bipolar disorder is not the person for whom their life is absolutely turned upside down by the disability, but instead the person with a far less severe diagnosis.

Or as we're increasingly seeing, people who self-diagnose as having these disabilities, whether they really do or not. Yeah, and I mean, and the thing is, is like, look, one of the things that I don't do that I'm accused of doing, I don't, number one, try to police other people's diagnoses. It's not in my interest to say, yes, you have this or no, you don't have that. I don't have that knowledge and I don't really...

It wouldn't be helpful for anyone if I tried to do that. And I also don't think that we should try to create a hierarchy of suffering and say, okay, you get to really talk about disability, but you don't. What I do think we have to take very special care about, though, is when the conversation about these things becomes so dominated by a particular perspective that it risks threatening people from the other group. And so with autism in particular, the question has been,

Is autism a disorder? And should there be efforts to find a cure? The sort of disability studies community has come down very harshly saying, no, it's not a disorder. And it's in fact eugenics to look for a cure. There was a panel that was going to be at Harvard earlier this year.

in which the topic was how best to help people with autism, but it was decried by student activists as violently ableist and was shut down because it talked about looking for cures for autism.

There are millions of parents in the country who are struggling desperately to have access to the resources and to the help that they need to shelter badly, badly disabled children with severe autism through their day-to-day lives.

And I find it profoundly vulgar that, for example, people whose autism is so high functioning that they're flourishing at Harvard to then turn around and say, oh, no, it's not a bad thing and you can't say it is. I think that there has to be, at the very least, an ability to honor multiple sides of that conversation. Well, I kind of see two things happening right now in the culture. One is that people who are

let's be generous, questionably disabled or don't fit the typical definition that we've long thought of as being truly disabled are actually claiming that they're suffering from a disability. And they're doing it, it seems, for status and attention, which seems crazy on the surface but makes sense in a culture where people are rewarded for having different kinds of claims to victimhood.

The other thing that I'm seeing happen is that people who are suffering from dangerous psychotic disorders are being recast not as sick, not as needing help for their sickness, but as different. Can you give us some examples of what these things look like in the real world to make it clear for people who maybe don't follow this debate as closely as you do? Sure. So...

Let me like – the way that I would like to cast it is the fundamental brokenness of this new approach, which is growing more and more common and harder and harder to avoid, is the thinking that the process of helping someone with a mental illness is the process of monitoring.

massaging their ego and their feelings about themselves and their own feelings of validity and self-esteem and self-confidence in such a way that you never make them ever feel invalid or make them feel like they've done something wrong. It's very much a customer service mentality of mental health treatment. It

The idea seems to be the way that you are supposed to treat a mentally ill patient is to never question that which arises naturally from themselves with the sense being that because it is natural, it is somehow legitimate. And, you know, there's a lot of problems with that. This is a particular sensitivity to me because, first,

I have a psychotic disorder and I have struggled with it for 20 years. And I have increasingly seen this sort of new disability studies sort of inflected vision of what treatment is and for filter into the public consciousness about mental illness. And I find it dangerous because one of the things that naturally arises from my authentic self, if I am unmedicated and manic, you

You know, that one of the things that commonly, you know, sort of naturally arises from my authentic self is my belief that an ex-girlfriend of mine is trying to break into my bank account and steal my money. Okay. Like it is sometimes, you know, authentic and real to me. And, you know, my personal truth thing that I believe is that someone is putting broken glass into my cereal. Right.

These are delusions. I mean, these are beliefs that I believe for no reason that are incorrect and that the way that I believe them cause damage in my life.

There is an effort now to pander to delusions rather than to confront them as the elements of unreality that they are. So, okay, so this argument about the true self, right? There are tons of examples we could point to, but the one that really struck a nerve with you and with so many other people was recently published in the New York Times Magazine.

And this piece reported on a movement that aims to reframe people with psychosis and paranoid schizophrenia as not sick so much as just different or maybe even special. Here's a quote. What psychiatry terms psychosis, the hearing voices movement refers to as non-consensus realities. And the piece sort of cheered on this social change.

Freddie, tell me about how you read that story. I mean, my initial reaction to that story is just a feeling of like a Groundhog Day feeling. It's very new in the sense that there is a sort of social justice flavor that is getting sort of attached to a lot of these concepts. But a lot of this stuff goes back to the anti-psychiatry movement, to the Hungarian philosopher Thomas Sáza, to

to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that whole sort of set of anti-psychiatry sort of movement, which is real and large and has a lot of people in it. And so reading it for the first time, it was just again, right? Like, again, I'm hearing this. Again, we have to sort of deal with this. But if there's one thing that I feel like I should be able to trust from The New York Times, right, it should be that something would be reported out adequately and there would be at least some attempt to balance perspectives.

But if you look in that piece, there's not a single interview with a skeptical psychiatrist.

There's not a single interview with a patient who knows that they couldn't live under those conditions. I want to say up front, if you're someone who has schizophrenia and you have the ability to live with the voices or whatever, if you have the ability to go unmedicated and to be able to use therapy and other techniques to manage your disorder in a way that leaves you healthy and happy, of course, that's fine by me.

But there's no attempt at all in that piece to understand the scale of these problems. So there's a reference to some Israeli programs where this is happening. But if you actually do a little minimal research into those programs, they're very small. There's not like it's the norm in Israel or anything like most psychiatric medicine in Israel is performed in the same way that it is over here.

So it's exactly my problem with the gentrification of disability in the sense that you have this small, well-connected, right, able to talk to the New York Times group of patients who are there to be interviewed when you can easily imagine that the patient who would not succeed in that kind of a program, say someone who is so terribly schizophrenic that they're currently living under a bridge or they are in a long-term institution right now,

That person has been systematically left out of the conversation because they don't have the wherewithal to be interviewed for The New York Times for those kind of pieces. What really bothers me about pieces like that is they convince people that we have an overtreatment problem, which is literally the opposite of the reality.

I mean, it is a matter of great frustration to me that there are so many American liberals whose general perspective on medication and medicine in general are that they're too hard for ordinary people to come by, too expensive, too hard to get their hands on. But when it comes to psychiatric medicine, they're suddenly convinced that there's an overtreatment problem.

We know for a fact that the biggest problem in psychiatric medicine is that too many people need it and don't have access to it. It's hard not to like walk around L.A. and come to that conclusion, frankly. I mean, look, better than 60 percent of practicing psychiatrists don't take Medicaid. Something like 40 or 40 plus percent of practicing psychiatrists don't take commercial insurance.

There's a huge number of psychiatrists who only take patients who can pay cash because that does them the favor of eliminating many of the hardest and most aggravating cases.

60% of American counties have no practicing psychiatrists at all. There's literally not a single prescribing psychiatrist in 60% of the counties in the United States. Wow. And, Freddie, why is that? Well, it's, you know, we have the tattered quilt of American health care, which is an unholy amalgam of...

the worst of both public and private investment in anything. It's a system that absolutely no one would devise and that no one defends, but that we can't seem to get out of. It's important to say psychiatric medicine is an unusual financial prospect in that many of its patients are chronic, people who often tend to psychiatric problems for long periods of their life.

The treatments themselves are not particularly expensive outside of a few rare things like electroconvulsive therapy. I mean, generally you're talking about talk therapy and drugs, which don't have to necessarily be super expensive. But you also have patients who are very noncompliant. Patients often are going to be entering into treatment in a time in which they have no ability to decide or figure out or even care what's in-network or what's not in-network.

which can mess up a lot of things. I mean, I can tell you from personal experience that being in a psychotic state and confronting the mess of American health insurance and having to be able to say, okay, how can I go get help without ruining my financial future is not a very nice prospect.

So I just – I resent the implication that too many people are getting too much treatment in the United States. It's simply not true. There are masses of people who would desperately need psychiatric help, yes, including medication, but who have been left out of it by systemic problems in America's medical health system.

And it amazes me to think of, you know, hundreds of thousands of affluent New York Times subscribers nodding along and saying, oh, yeah, you know, the problem with schizophrenia is it's over-treated. Right. It's hard to find evidence to make that claim. And I think that there have been spectacular cases where it's become very clear that the problem is not that we're over-institutionalizing people. The problem is that, again, we have inadequate access.

in inadequate compliance. And you can look at two major American tragedies. We need rescue inside the auditorium, multiple victims. I got seven down and feet are not. Seven down.

You have the James Holmes shooting in Aurora, Colorado. At least 12 people are dead, 50 others are hurt after a shooting at a movie theater at midnight. James Holmes is absolute clinical schizophrenic, paranoid schizophrenic. Like many shooters, James Holmes has been described as a loner, but he's also apparently brilliant, studying for a Ph.D. in neuroscience. It was over the last few months that Holmes, who was Phi Beta Kappa in college, saw his academic and career dreams collapse.

as he withdrew from a PhD program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado's Denver campus. Everything about his story perfectly fits the ideology of the disease. He's a guy that has so left reality that he now is in this make-believe world that he's part of

of the Batman world. The age at which he started to develop symptoms is absolutely classic. The way that they manifested themselves was classic. As his issues with delusion, paranoia got greater, he just couldn't deal with what was going on around him. People around him, his peers, said, "Something's wrong with this guy." His professors identified him as someone who could be a danger. He was flagged. He was given an evaluation. He was identified as someone who was potentially dangerous, but nothing happened.

At 12:30 a.m., he went inside his vehicle, which was parked right outside the exit. He called the Student Mental Health Emergency Hotline at the University of Colorado, where he had received treatment before. He called a mental health crisis line right before he went on his rampage. They hung up on him, so he killed 12 people and wounded 70 more people. Holmes said he called them just because he wanted a last chance to turn back.

The Virginia Tech shooter. The deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history. At this afternoon hour, at least 30 people believed to be killed on the campus of Virginia Tech University. Sun Hui-cho was someone who was re-flagged from elementary school as someone who was potentially dangerous. Members of his family said to officials that he was a dangerous person.

multiple of his professors said that he was a dangerous person. One of his professors refused to have him in class anymore because she was afraid of him. He was given a psychological evaluation. He was found to be a danger to himself and to others. But because there was no one at the top who actually had specific responsibility to make this happen, and because our mental health system is such a tattered canvas, he was never pulled into the system. And as a result, he killed 32 people and then himself.

And if we really want to focus on patient rights, well, here's one way that we could do that. We can focus on the fact that had James Holmes been forced into treatment, there's a world where he is a functioning neuroscientist right now, where he's living a normal life rather than being on 24-hour lockdown in a maximum security federal prison. There's a world where Cho found a way to be a productive member of our society. And for every one of those guys, you

There are people who just do the more mundane thing, which is to kill themselves, right? People who had been flagged, who were investigated, but nobody wants to be the asshole to pull the trigger and to push someone into treatment. So nothing gets done. And I'm very afraid that there's going to be one of these mass shootings where, as with James Holmes, the evidence that schizophrenia was at play will be overwhelming because

And the person won't have been given appropriate care because of a desire to let them live their truth or whatever the fuck else is.

And that that will ultimately result in that person being shot by police or killing themselves or spending the rest of their lives locked up. That will result in unnecessary death and carnage. And yes, also a lot more stigma, which is what happens whenever these things happen. Because there's no one at the top of these systems whose specific responsibility it is to say you need to go into care now and you don't get to say no.

Freddie, I think it's important for people who don't know you that they understand that you know of what you speak when you talk about this subject. Can you just explain for people a little bit about your personal story and the kinds of lengths you've gone to to get your situation under control? Yeah. I...

I had a difficult childhood and adolescence for various family reasons, and I merged into my late teen years suffering from really punishing depression that I did not really have a vocabulary for.

You know, just the kind of depression that would leave me curled up on the floor in the fetal position for hours and just not moving. And it turned out eventually when I was 20 that that was part of a cyclical pattern of bipolar disorder, bipolar one, which is a psychotic disorder where people move through cycles of both depression and mania.

And depression, I think, is fairly well understood. Mania, it's important to say, is not just a feeling of or edgy or energetic, although for many people it involves that. But mania in a psychiatric sense entails a break from reality. I will gradually become more and more convinced that

that there is something world-changing going on based on my existence. Like a lot of people with bipolar disorder, I become extremely grandiose when I'm manic, even more grandiose than I am normally. I also become terribly, terribly paranoid. My manic periods are dominated by paranoia, by fear that people are conspiring against me,

This very often will manifest itself in my completely baseless decisions that people who have been close to me have, for whatever imagined reason, they've lost loyalty to me. They've turned against me. They're no longer tight with me. I will...

make theatrical demands of their attention and of their, uh, their support. Eventually I become so aggressive. I pushed them away and pushing them away. I proved the point that I thought I was making, which is that they've abandoned me, which feeds into the larger sense of paranoia. Um, I become extremely skinny. I mean, I, I work out like a demon and I don't eat. Um, I, I sleep very little. I write, um,

meaning that I, to the point where I can't stop even when I know that it's hurting me. And eventually when I was 20, this led to my first real psychotic break where I got into a

heated argument with a neighbor in the apartment complex where I was living and the cops came and got me and they took me to the hospital and they stuck me up with Haldol and sent me to a psychiatric facility where I stayed for a long period after that with that diagnosis.

For the next 15-ish years, I kind of did a very classic bipolar pattern. It's very, very common for bipolar people to, you know, work the program for a little while, take the pills and see the doctors and kind of decide that you're okay now and you can handle it on your own and go off the pills. You know, I should say that the medications that I take, I mean, currently...

I'm taking four psychiatric medications a day. There have been times in my life when I've taken seven a day. They cause immense weight gain. So the last time I had a break was in 2017 when I went to the hospital. I weighed 177 pounds.

that morning. Three months later, I was 235. And that has always been a very, very difficult part of my managing medication is just the way it gains really hard on me psychologically. But, you know, my hands shake sometimes so much that I can't bring a glass of water to my lips. I have to pee all the time. I sweat constantly. I have terrible focus and attentional difficulties because of the antipsychotics. So it's a lot. But

Yeah, the good news is that, like I said, five years ago, I went back in and I came out, and finally this time it stuck. I had threatened someone with violence, and they called me and said, like, look –

You know, if you don't get your ass to the hospital, I'm definitely calling the cops on you. So, I mean, I didn't like come to Jesus. I just was literally just dodging the cops and I went in. And my younger brother had to come and take care of me. And it was something like I was just sitting around and just like, you know,

I'm 35 years old and my little brother is here to rescue me once again, and I can't keep doing this. And for whatever reason, it's taken. And so now I've been amidst five years straight this coming August. Freddie, help me understand the distance as you see it between this nightmare experience that you're describing and what this piece in the New York Times and other pieces like it are championing as letting people be their true selves.

I try to, you know, the rationalist community talks about steel manning, you know, like trying to think of the most generous argument you can for the other side. And I understand the basic perspective that because this is a thing that we cannot change, people are often looking for ways to turn bad things into good things psychologically and things to draw, gather strength from. If there are people out there whose psychotic disorders are

are best handled by being thought of as some sort of an authentic self, provided that they're not hurting anyone else and that this is actually helping them in their recovery goals, then by God, I, you know, I wish them well and I hope that they go about doing it. What is, you know, just...

What's unspeakably frustrating to me is how often that attitude is now projected onto me by others. I cannot tell you how many people I barely know have seen fit to tell me that my psychotic disorder is a blessing and a curse, right? Or that...

You know, that I'm lucky as a writer because it gives me these special powers I wouldn't have otherwise or that it's, you know, something that I should see as a blessing. And to which my response is like, you know, fuck you and mind your business. You know what I'm saying? Like it's.

Everything that I hate about myself the most is who I am when I'm at my most manic. There's literally one thing that I like about my manic self, and that's my abs. And everything else about my manic self I don't like. Barbara Ehrenreich is a hero of mine, and she wrote a book called Bright Side. And it was about her experience of being diagnosed with potentially fatal breast cancer...

And she wrote the book because she said, you know, she went out into life and she broke the news to people. And she could not believe the number of people telling her to her face, oh, this is going to be very good for you. This is actually a blessing. You're going to see, you know, in time, you're going to see that this is the best thing that could happen to you. And she was just, you know, writes about just being stunned that people would just tell her to her face, oh, yeah, the cancer that might kill you, you're obligated to see that positively.

And I think that there's a real disease in contemporary culture of just an inability to just accept some things just suck. Where does that disease come from? Because you said it in other places that I, and I just find the idea...

very clear and countercultural, which is simply not everything is good and some things are just bad and your bipolar is just bad. Why is there such a resistance in mainstream culture to the idea that certain things like your bipolar or Barbara Ehrenreich's breast cancer are just random and shitty and bad? I think like a lot of the worst things in American life, it is a...

wonderful amalgam of drawn from every imaginable political direction and angle you can imagine. You have, you know, capitalism's insistence on selling everything to you that can be sold to you. So one of the things that Aaron Reich writes about is, you know, just the fact that breast cancer awareness has become an immensely profitable industry for people and you don't become an immensely profitable industry by, you

Just saying, hey, you know what? This is a terrible disease that kills people and that's it. It is the liberal insistence that like anything that comes from the self is somehow valid or justifiable or good, right? I mean it is – so often people speak about this to me as though it is almost tautological. Oh, well, but it comes from yourself, right? And it's like, well, yes.

The fact that, you know, 10 or whatever years ago, I wanted to kill an ex-girlfriend because I had been become convinced that she was siphoning money out of my bank account.

Based on literally nothing. The fact that that comes from myself does not seem to me to be some sort of defense. It seems instead to be a deeply, deeply sad thing. But, you know, the liberal sense that like the self is this inviolate thing that, you know, anyone who makes you feel bad about it at all is participating in stigma, which is one of my least favorite words because it's overused, that they're not respecting your truth or whatever.

But I also think it's, you know, it's just a product of a certain kind of American romanticism that, you know, that always wants to see the possibility of what's, you know, of what might be a little bit better. There is a, this isn't too abstract, kind of like the same drive to the frontier, right? Like the idea that just over the next hill, things will be a little bit better and then a little bit better and a little bit better. There's a sort of wandering spirit in American life, which,

wants always to find the rosier perspective to look from things. And that has, it's obviously has its advantages in terms of pushing people to fight for change when it's necessary. But I think that there really has to be a rebirth of,

of a shared sense of just quiet and dignified tragedy that attends these conversations that, you know, I don't want to talk anyone else out of, out of feeling good about their psychotic disorder. If they've achieved that and they're healthy and stable, then God bless them. But,

You know, I did a podcast a month ago with three women who are the mothers of severely schizophrenic children. And just in my brief interactions with them, it was so clear how incredibly exhausted they are and how

how much they've spent and given up their whole lives to try to shepherd these children into adulthood without them killing themselves or being locked up forever. And what made me so depressed is that on several occasions, they kind of apologized for having perspectives. They said, you know, we were so moved by your video because, you know,

We're only the mothers of psychotic patients. We're not psychotic patients ourselves, so we're not really allowed to talk about this. And to me, that speaks to the dominance of a very narrow and quite ugly perspective on who actually gets to have an opinion about all of this. Well, this is just the more general idea that has a lot of cachet on the left right now, that unless you are something, you can't have an opinion about it. You can't write about it. You can't criticize it.

I think it's called standpoint theory, right? Yeah, and it doesn't make any sense in general to me. I mean, I've said this before and will say it again. I just don't think that the basic notion of standpoint theory is correct. The notion that the people who are best able to understand and thus comment on a phenomenon are those with the most personal experience seems straightforwardly wrong to me. I mean, you can think of all manner of experiences, but...

That, first of all, we can't have such a thing as standpoint theory. So they're kind of besides the point. So, for example, there's no such thing as a standpoint theory on being executed for a crime, right? Because you're too dead to do it. But there's also the sense that, like, I would not want, if someone had been the victim of a hate crime—

I would not want that jury to be staffed only with people who had also been – were members of the same group who had been victims of similar hate crimes precisely because that experience would override our basic notion of like some sort of existing liberal ideal outside of this particular perspective, right?

But all that stuff makes even less sense to me when we're talking about psychotic disorders. I mean, I cannot stress enough that when I go off meds, I believe things that are not true.

And I become a genuinely dangerous individual about them, right? I am a large gentleman. I'm a big guy. And I think back to times when I was on the edge of sanity and around people who I know were frightened of me. And it's not a good feeling. And the notion that like my having been in that position gives me greater say over what was true than them doesn't make any sense, right? Like,

Look, those mothers of those schizophrenic children I just mentioned, they do have a standpoint. They have the standpoint of being the parents of schizophrenic children, and that is just as valid. Freddie, a few weeks after the New York Times published the piece that we've been talking about, you published your own piece, which was called 17 Theses on Disability. I want to read the first few to you. I've read the piece a half dozen times at least.

Number one, disability in general is not an identity. It is unhelpful to look for meaning and identification in the random and unfortunate reality of disability. Two, the urge to seek identity in disability does not stem from the actual disabling elements of any given disability, but from broader dissatisfaction with one's life and with the modern condition.

People do not seek to be identified as disabled because they're hurt by their disorders, but because they're otherwise lacking in fulfillment and confidence. Disability is net negative by definition. If a condition is not a net negative, then it cannot be said to be disability.

Tell me about why you decided to write this piece, what the reaction to it has been, and why you think it's so important to raise the alarm around this subject.

I mean, the piece is a provocation, I acknowledge. And so obviously, I provoked some people. You know, I have a flourishing comments section. And anyone can feel free to check those comments. They'd say many people felt very differently than I did about that piece. But look, there is an absolute desperate hunger among seemingly all kinds of people to have a

specific and discrete elements of a personality that they can display online so that people see them as cool and interesting and someone they want to be friends with. To me, it often resembles creating a character in a video game, like a role-playing game. I'm going to give this guy a 12 in strength, and he's going to be proficient in kayaking or whatever, right? Like,

There just seems like there's this generalized need to assemble the self with things that are specific and nameable.

When in fact, like the self, what we fall in love with when we meet someone are precisely the things that are least describable about them, right? Like if you could actually just list out the things that will make you love someone on a dating profile and someone else could read them and you'd have perfect information about, okay, this is, you know, this is the person who I want to, who I want to date or marry, then like we

We would only ever have one first date and then you'd get married the next day. Right. But it doesn't work that way. Like we what we are, who we are is our integrity. It's our values. It's the choices that we make. It's our gentleness. It's, you know, courage in the face of physical danger. It's, you know, what we do and don't get mad about what, you know, all these things are the things of personality. Right.

But it seems like many, many people, for whatever reason, find those elements of themselves to be inadequate in contemporary life. I think that this is very deeply connected to the Internet. You know, one of the things that the Internet does is that, you know, it is digital. So it literally, right, it renders us zeros and ones that, you know, it atomizes us into this sort of discrete things. If you can say, oh, I have this.

disorder, I have this condition, and that conveys a lot of information about you that differentiates you from people, then that seems to be very valuable. But for me, I'm telling people out there, as someone who's been doing this for 20 years, I just, I don't think that it's actually in your best interest to think of yourself as your disability first.

I think that that, first of all, it gives you reason not to get better, right? If you are really invested in being, you know, the bipolar guy or the schizoaffective gal or whatever, then you, we're going to gravitate away from effective treatment, right? Because that means that you're gravitating away from what makes you, you. But I also think that, look, this shit just gets a lot less sexy as you get older. And I can, I can tell you like,

Being manic is never good, okay? But being manic can definitely be seductive, right? Like when it starts, when it's early on. Like I said, I shed weight so easily and I'm very social and

I'm more forward with women. I am the life of every party. Writing like more of a beast than usual. Yeah, more of a beast than usual. And I become more sort of gregarious and grandiose. And everything is turned up to 110%, which, you know, it's easy for that to feel kind of sexy and romantic when you are young. But someday, if you really have these conditions –

You're going to be 45 and you're going to be carrying 30 extra pounds that you don't need because of the meds. And you're going to have a ton of debt because of all the bad decisions you made while you run under the influence of your condition. And you're going to look back at all these terribly broken relationships.

I mean, you know, I would just say to anyone who's a 19-year-old who's flirting with, like, making dissociative identity disorder her identity, you know, I would just say, like, you do not understand the level of regret that you will accumulate over a lifetime spent with serious mental illness because there are people that you can never get back. That's, like, the hardest thing for anyone to understand is...

You know, I think one of the most tragic feelings I've ever felt in my life is the times when I have lost someone and realized that I have lost them and then have had the moment of clarity where I realize that like,

them kicking me out of their life was the best possible decision for them to make. That is not something that anyone should want to endure. And that's the stuff that that endures. You know, this shit like when you're 19 now and you're posting up TikToks about your crazy life or whatever, it doesn't last. And the shit gets old and you're just...

You're worn out and you're fat and you're exhausted and you're broke and you're tired of running. And I can promise, like, if you actually really have these severe illnesses, the bill is going to come due sooner or later. This is maybe kind of an existential question, but bear with me and see if it makes sense.

We're talking about what is the self, right? In this New York Times story, they're claiming that these are their authentic selves, these versions unmedicated that hear all of these voices. And this has to do with people with disability and just in general, what makes us us, right? A person that commits suicide, are they out of their mind or are they acting as themselves in that moment? Right?

When you think about your own manic episodes, do you think of that person that's psychotic and paranoid and maybe even violent and wanting to act out? Is that you or is that your illness? How do you understand that version of yourself? How do you discern one from the other?

Yeah.

I do not have anything like that.

You know, what is very easily understandable about my condition for other people is most of us have been at some point unreasonably paranoid about something. I mean, I will often use the analogy of like if you are in a relationship that's going bad and you become convinced that the person is cheating on you or is about to break up with you or something. Right. And that can be a thought that occupies your brain and that digs into you and that you cannot get rid of.

despite the fact that it has no evidentiary basis, right? It's like that, but potentially for months and about things that are potentially much more capable of inducing violence, right? And it gets progressively worse as I go on. So when I am manic,

And I self-harm or I threaten someone or I otherwise do things that are socially undesirable. I am still me and my consciousness is there. I am not erased, but I am operating on faulty information. Right. I fundamentally it's like it's like you take a computer program and you feed it bad data. It will spit out a bad result. Right.

So I find it so profoundly strange to associate psychotic disorders with the true self because what's at issue is not the self that ends up acting on the voices. What's at issue is the fact is that the voices are not real. They are a fictive reality that's being imposed by some problem of neurology, right? And the worst things that I think an article like this

Daniel Bergner one does is that it sort of plays at the, well, these are just non-consensus realities, which is not correct, right? Again, when I think someone who's close to me is committing some completely inscrutable crime against me for no reason. That's not your truth. That's just not true. That's just, it's just not true, right? And it's like if you created an elaborate ruse and

and then like a prank or something and then noted my reaction to it. You wouldn't say that's my real self because I was operating under bad information and it's the same thing there. In this broader sense of like,

People need to have cells that they can sell to each other. I mean, I just I think that this is another delirious, excuse me, deleterious effect of the of the Internet, which is that we are literally constantly being told to put who we are into a box. Right. How many times in your life have you signed up for something? And it's like, now tell us who you are. Right. And that's not comfortable because that's not comfortable.

what makes us who we are, right? And we're all aware that we can put the exact same stuff into the box as somebody else and be two completely different people. But again, the internet forces us to have an immense number of relationships, you know, of quote unquote relationships with an immense number of people. And so we have to digest ourselves down into these bite-sized chunks that are the most easily sort of interpreted by other people. And if you're looking for attention, and most of us are most of the time,

Particularly if you're an adolescent, you're going to – I have dissociative identity disorder, an extremely rare condition that might not even be real, right?

But I have dissociative identity disorder is grabs you a little bit more than, you know, I'm into scrapbooking. Right. Like it's just in the in the marketplace of identity. Right. You know, when there's a conflict between I want attention and that person wants attention. Well, there are multiple cells that live within my brain and they pop in from time to time and they have quirky personalities and different accents and they put on different clothes like that's going to win. Right.

After the break, why this phenomenon is so powerful, at least for now, among young people on the American left and how this all relates to our crisis of meaning. Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

It says something, it must, about our current culture and our current politics that young people are searching for exactly what you say, for meaning and identity in disability. So why do you think that this, I don't know what to call it, movement, which sort of comes and goes throughout the years, why do you think it's finding such resonance, such legs in left-leaning spaces, especially among young

the elite in America right now? So I think that probably my biggest picture on this is a point that I tried to make in my first book, which is that

We have more visions or more paths to being a loser than we do to being a winner in our society. In contemporary American life, it's easier to think of ways to be a loser than it is to be someone who's considered cool and respectable or whatever. So if you look over the course of the 20th century, right?

Famously, the 20th century is the birth of modernism in all kinds of forms, the sort of collapse of traditional meanings, a rejection of a lot of religiosity, the death of a lot of social mores and the growth of individual expression, et cetera. And obviously, we're still living with all the repercussions of that and what parts of that were good and what parts are bad will be fought about for the rest of our lives. But one way or the other,

Right.

One of the things was undermined was you are a happy housewife, right? And that should point us in the direction of the fact that, yeah, of course, a lot of these changes happen for good reason because that's a boring ass life. But that was a sort of shared vision of what it meant to be successful. That was to at least some degree sort of scalable, right? Yeah.

Well, we start to have these, all of these sort of assaults on the malaise of modern living. The 60s come and we have a lot of social changes that come with them, but, you know, it's very much a more noise than it is actual change. You can look at like sort of the late 90s where you have all these movies like Office Space. Where do you work, Peter? In a tech. And yeah, what do you do there? I sit in a cubicle.

And I update bank software for the 2000 switch. Or Fight Club. I'm gonna need you out of town a little more this week. We got some red flags to cover. It must have been Tuesday. He was wearing his cornflower blue tie. You want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise of a status upgrade? Make these your primary action items. Or even The Matrix, where there's this constant parodying of the sort of white-collar professional. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson.

Either you choose to be at your desk on time from this day forth, or you choose to find yourself another job. Do I make myself clear? Yes, Mr. Reinhardt, Professor.

So now we're in a situation where we know that the sort of being a breadwinner vision of society is now associated with a sort of conservative vision of what human life should be. We also have the sense that if you go to work and even if you have a good job and make good money, like Ben Stiller in Reality Bites, to date myself, that if you have that kind of a job, you're also a loser, right? So sort of white collar respectability is also for losers, right? Yeah.

So then you ask yourself, like, okay, like, what is then not for losers, right? Well, being artistic, right? Artistic creative fields are cool, right? Artistic and creative fields are seen as personally fulfilling in some way or the other, right?

Unfortunately, nothing's less cool than being a failure in those, right? Like few things are sadder than like the 40-year-old guy who's still trying to sell his first screenplay, right? Or the stand-up comedian who's still doing open mic nights and has been for 20 years and people are saying, just give it up, just let go, man, right? So like if you actually sort of like break it down to like, you know, how can you be someone who is –

Cool, makes enough money to live a stable middle class existence and is in some sense enviable to the other people around them. There just aren't that many slots. You know, I've long said that I think part of my problem with with media is that it's filled with people who kind of sort of got into the field because it was just it seemed like a way to not be a complete loser.

And so I think people are just desperate for markers of being something else than what everybody else is in a ocean of other people. And this is the other big thing, right, which is that the sheer number of human brains we're rubbing against now is so totally insane.

Like the number of networks and like even if it's the most meaningless, you know, you tweet at somebody three times a year kind of relationship, you're still like the number of other human brains you're coming into contact with every day is just immensely greater than it once was. And so life is constantly reminding us that we're not actually unique, right? Because there's people all around us all the time. So I think there's a terrible desire to be seen as something smart, something savvy, something special, right?

This has become filtered through a lot of kind of substance-free left politics framing as like I'm a socialist critic who sort of sees through the veil and knows why it's all bullshit. And there's just this endless, endless, endless status anxiety and competition with a billion other people who graduated from Brown or whatever, if that makes sense. Yeah.

So not to be too cynical about it, but if what gives a person cachet in a lot of these elite spaces is being different in some kind of way, then having a seat at the table, being able to be different, well, one quick way into that slot is by claiming –

some kind of disability. Is that too cynical? Again, like, it's never in my interest to tell any individual human being, you don't have the thing you say you have. But what I would really love to achieve is where, like, a society where people didn't feel like they had to medicalize their pain in order for it to be taken seriously as pain. I think the word trauma to me

Of course, I have sympathy for people with trauma, but I also have sympathy with people who have pain that is not classified as trauma. Right. And in the midst of this therapeutic culture where everyone and everything wants to be your hype man and, you know, and your life coach where people will not stop fucking telling you, you know, to live your best life, which, you know, mind your business. I'll live whatever life I want to live.

Even in the midst of all that, we're also very stingy with sort of like, look, you can just be tired. You don't have to tell me that you have fibromyalgia. You can just be tired and I have sympathy for you as a tired person. Right. So I think what you're saying is there is a lot of deep, deep suffering happening in our country and in the world right now. And

You know, we're supposed to be live, laugh, loving, you know, and living our best life, hashtag, all the time. And maybe because of that, in order to get the recognition for the pain, the sincere pain that they feel, people feel motivated to claim all these kinds of disabilities where you're saying, okay,

No, you're just suffering in the way all human beings are suffering in modernity because of its crisis of meaning or because of its loneliness or atomization or because of our shitty healthcare system or just because life is hard. And that's enough. I mean, my general stance is just that, you know, life's not fair is the original answer that underlies all other answers.

And I'm often told that that's a conservative sentiment. I actually find it quite the opposite. I think that a proper understanding that life isn't fair motivates us so that if we see a starving child, we say life's not fair and we acknowledge that and we take that as the reason to feed them. But there's a refusal to allow people to grapple with the fact, again, that some things suck and are hard and

I look at the average 20-year-old in this country, let's say a upper middle class 20-year-old who is enjoying the benefits of a liberal arts education. And you're talking about someone who has been trained from birth to believe that everything that leaves them unhappy is the hand of injustice. Right.

That every obstacle that they've ever failed to climb has become because someone has broken a rule somewhere. That every time that they have not gotten everything that they've wanted, that isn't just like the fact that life is hard and sucks and we all have to eat it sometimes and you're allowed to find it all very overwhelming and tragic.

But that has to be on some level something that they can go to talk to somebody's supervisor about, right? Like a really basic modern instinct is to look at what is simply human tragedy and to decide...

It's insufficient for this to be tragedy. This needs to be a crime against me, an identity crime, you know, a crime that violates my, you know, various rights as defined by, you know, whatever critical thinker of the day. And I think that I genuinely do think it's the case that you are training people to be unable to deal with the fact that life's challenges and obstacles are

are relentless and nobody gets to opt themselves out of them. And I really do worry for what happens to, I mean, you know, you look at all these constant controversies in media about like what's going on in Slack and how the junior staffers are never satisfied. And it's like, well, they've been trained and rewarded in a structure where,

The more they complain about everything, the more they get. And no one has yet put them in a position to say, hey, look, the world is what it is sometimes, and you have to take it on the chin a little bit. Freddie, you're not just a leftist. You even go so far as to proudly describe yourself as a Marxist. And yet you've become one of the most trenchant critics of the social movement that's taken over a lot of the left, especially young leftists. Some call it wokeness. You called it social justice politics. Right.

The thing I want to ask is, what is it about this movement that you see as fundamentally at odds with your conception of what it means to be on the political left?

The sort of – the social justice movement to which I frequently criticize is not leftist because it is fundamentally about the cult of the individual, all right? Leftist politics emphasize the collective over the individual. The point of leftist politics, what stitches it all together are claims of universality and of equality. But –

Those universality and equality have to be understood as like being arrows that point in two directions at once, meaning that if I say that I have a universal right to health care, then I, the individual, have a right to that health care. But it also means that no one has any less right than I do. There is no sense in which I am distinguished from anything else.

If I say that I have an equal right to free speech, then I have the exact same right as the other person, which means that, again, we are the same in some sense. And the motivating factor behind contemporary social justice politics is for people to always say, I am not the same, right? You go to an academic conference and you will find panel after panel after panel of people slicing the onion thinner and thinner and thinner.

to create smaller and smaller and smaller groups. And so you have things like the term of BIPOC, you know, so Black and Indigenous People of Color, because we want to promote

for whatever reason, not include other kinds of people of color. Or you have the LGBTQ acronym, which I think a thing that keeps happening is I will see someone's LGBTQ acronym that's like 12 letters long. I'll assume it's a crude joke and investigate and find out that it's actually the term people are using. The basic woke demand is what about me?

And that is contrary to the fundamental orienting principle of communitarianism, right, of the desire to function as a we, of collectivism, where the individual, while entitled to rights and certain guaranteed protections, is not elevated as being the basic unit of politics. And one thing I will say is

I am a Marxist because Marxism is, for me, the culmination of the Enlightenment. I think one of the big misunderstandings about all of this is that Marxism is anti-Enlightenment. That is not the case. It has never been the case. In fact, it's in Marxism that you find the most consistent expression of the Enlightenment. The knee-jerk Twitter socialist, like, oh, you're a liberal, is opposed to a Marxist.

It's just an indication of that person's lack of knowledge of what Marxism actually is. You know, Marxism, like liberalism, is about an order of rules that operate and bind everyone. It's just a slight disagreement about where the interest of the many versus the few comes down. Picking up on the idea that people don't really know what socialism is or, for that matter, what Marxism is,

I think most Americans or many Americans, let's say, that I know hear those phrases and they think about the Soviet Union. They think about gulags. They think about the reality of a country like Venezuela right now. I know we don't have two hours to do this, but take a stab, if you would, at reframing these political philosophies for them, for the person that thinks you sound really sensible and then hears you describe yourself as a Marxist, you know,

Help them understand how you understand what those philosophies are about. Sure. I think the first thing that I usually say when explaining Marxism to people who only have gotten it through the U.S. history kind of lens is Marxism has nothing to do with equality. Equality itself is not and has never been a goal of Marxism.

And the constant obsession with equality and why it can't be achieved is where – like Jordan Peterson, for example. I find his critiques of Marxism to be quite toothless because he's attacking Marxism for a belief that it doesn't hold.

Marxism is an approach to economic history that says that value is created by workers, but that the majority of the value that those workers create is in fact sequestered in the hands of a few – a small ownership class. And that that creates the great socioeconomic divides that we see in Marxism.

In a capitalist economy that from an objective sense the labor theory of value the theory of surplus value the process through which value is created so Capitalism relies on the notion of equal equivalent exchanges, right? I pay a guy for a bunch of a bundle of wood and

And then I go and I make that wood into a table and then I sell it off to somebody. The only way capitalism works is if the guy who buys the table pays me more than I paid for the wood, right? But if it's a series of equivalences but also there's a creation of value, there has to be something powering that. And Marx – and to be fair, he didn't invent the labor theory of value. But for Marx and Engels and people like him, the creation of value comes from labor, from the worker, right?

And the relationship between the worker and the boss is fundamentally exploitative because the boss is taking more than their fair share. And so that what would be best for everyone is a system of shared ownership where that rather than there being a boss who owns the factory and hands out wages at the end of the day, which again must be less than the value that the workers actually created, that we build a society based on shared ownership.

And which enables all of us to move forward and to make sure that all of us are served. And to be clear, this does not entail an end to private property. It is a myth that Marxism forbids private property. It is not true and has never been true of Marxism that there is no such thing as private property. You still get – you don't have to share your pants with anybody else. You can still have your favorite –

The person listening to this who's skeptical will say, sounds great. Shared ownership sounds awesome. But, you know, sorry, the Soviet Union, just to choose one example. How do you explain that? Just wasn't done correctly? I mean, the thing is that I would say that like the rejoinder to, you know, the Soviet Union is...

doesn't that show how bad communism is? Is to say the post-Soviet Russia, doesn't that show how bad capitalism is, right? Like the salience of these comparisons are always dependent upon our priors, right? If you look at a graph of Russian life expectancy, right?

And you watch it as it approaches the end of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union dies, the Soviet life expectancy collapses. The draft goes dramatically downward in a way that you just don't see in modern societies because generally life expectancy goes up. If that were the other way around,

If the Soviet Union had ended and suddenly Soviet life expectancies had risen, you would never stop seeing that graph being plastered on the page of the American Heritage Foundation or whatever, right? What I will say is this. I'm not one to try to convince anyone that there was anything good about the Soviet Union or China, which is, you know, not even theoretically communist in any meaningful sense. I will say that this...

The sort of the core of the philosophy of shared enterprise and of a ethic of resistance to exploitation, those are no more sort of dismissed by the failures of Venezuela or wherever else you want to talk about. Then, you know, Somalia shows a failure of free market ideas, right?

even if you wanted to be particularly a stickler about what you call communism and what you don't, and I'm not someone who's that way for the record, I think that you can always ask the simple question, right? Is there not a very easily achieved universe where we twist the dial a little bit and suddenly those who have very, very much have a little less and those who have nothing have a little more? And once you start that conversation, once you start from this perspective of,

Okay, it's not 1917 in Russia anymore, right? Now we're in 2022 in the United States. What could we do right now? I think that you can have productive conversations. Well, that's a great question. I think we need to have you back on for a debate about communism and capitalism. But this question of if you turn the dial a little bit, if you could do a few things now –

to make the country more sincerely socially just and not a vision of social justice that relies on smearing anyone that disagrees with you as an ignorant, racist transphobe. You know, what would those two or three things be right now? I will say, so I'll start first with what we talked about today. Healthcare, you know, healthcare is...

A seemingly impossible problem to break, which is kind of crazy because literally no one supports the status quo. I mean, you would think based on how much trouble we have changing this thing that there was some constituency that was fighting like mad to keep things the way that they are. But like the most sort of like.

Arch-capitalist, free market, laissez-faire person hates the American healthcare system too, right? It's not like it's only being assailed from one side. I think that if you look at the world's best functioning healthcare systems, you see that all medicine, all medical care, these systems that work,

you are pushing cost from the sicker and older onto the healthier and younger. And that is just like the way that it functions. The only way that you can have a pool that can possibly accommodate people

the immense costs of keeping your society healthy is through that basic action. You take costs from the older and sicker and you push them onto the younger and the healthier. And the deal is someday the younger and healthier become the older and sicker, so it's a good deal for them. The systems through which you can do that are varied, but it's very difficult to imagine a purely free market experience that makes that happen. So healthcare, number one. So healthcare, one. I think that the number two thing

is rewiring the educational system to reward more and different kinds of paths for more and different kinds of people. And this one that I can keep short because you guys can all read my first book, The Cult of Smart, where I lay out everything that's wrong with our educational economic system and how to fix it.

We're trying to take a nation of square pegs and fit them into round holes, and it's not working. And so we need to create an education system that is better able to capture what people are actually good at and provide them with stable, financially secure lives. So a vision of American success that doesn't rely on having a college degree. Yeah. And then third and finally, I would like to somehow attack this crisis of meaning. Yeah.

I don't know what it's like to be, have been alive in 1700 or, you know, whenever else. And so I might be wrong to think that people feel uniquely pointless and worthless right now, but I just detect around me a rising sense that no one seems to truly feel like they know what their goals are. They don't know how happy to feel when they reach them. They feel lost and alienated and that they're

something has been really been missing. I mean, I mentioned before this big 20th century, like, okay, let's get rid of all this old stuff. But the problem is, of course, we didn't really bring in any new zones of meaning. And as an atheist myself, I am profoundly aware of the challenge of, you know, you can't just tell people it's a cold and empty, meaningless universe. So live with it. And I wish I had a good approach to helping people feel a little more deeply about where they were in their lives.

Okay, one more break, and then a lightning round with Freddie DeBoer. Stay with us. Okay, Freddie DeBoer, lightning round, let's go. Why has forgiveness fallen out of favor as a virtue?

I mean, the sort of above the board like reason that people will give you is because forgiveness like places the power back in the hand of the abuser or whatever. I mean, the whole point is to empower the victim. But of course, like abuser and victim are words that beg the question. I think forgiveness has fallen out of favor because it's hard to forgive. Right. Like, I mean, a huge part of our cultural industry is just forgiveness.

justifying back to ourselves our most sort of selfish and self-motivated thinking. And it's hard to forgive people, even though it's a beautiful and important thing to do. And so, of course, there's a million essays and books telling you, hey, you don't got to forgive anybody.

What is Voldemorting? Voldemorting refers to when you forbid referring to your politics as a way to make them unspeakable. And in that way, people can't take them on. So used specifically in reference to things like identity politics, which is a term people say you shouldn't use. Political correctness is a term people say you shouldn't use. Critical race theory is a term people say you shouldn't use.

Woke is a term people say you shouldn't use. By mystifying the air in that way, by saying, okay, you can't use any of these terms, you're functionally saying you can't argue against me. And unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Best movie you've seen this year? The best movie I saw this year is not a movie from this year, but it's The Invisible Man.

with Elizabeth Moss. It's a Blumhouse horror movie. And I think that it is really a good example of how you can have progressive...

ideas and themes in your art that deepen and strengthen the movie and make it a better movie without turning it into a lecture. It's a movie about a woman whose husband is like an abusive and he's also a brilliant inventor and he fakes his own death and creates an invisibility suit to torment her.

And so it's playing on abuse and gaslighting, but those things are worked seamlessly into a plot. So there's never a point in the movie where you feel like someone is like, and now let me give you a lecture for 15 minutes. What do people get wrong about Rachel Dolezal? I think that they fail to understand that

It can simultaneously be true that it's obviously very hard in many ways to be black in America. And also that someone like Dolezal could have found considerable social and professional benefit in appearing to be black. It's the same thing with these constant controversies over university professors who are found out to not actually be indigenous and

Of course, it doesn't make it better to be indigenous or easy to be indigenous. But we've created in spaces like academia or like in the NAACP where Rachel Dolezal worked, we've created these spaces where there are rewards associated with being members of these minority groups. And it's one of liberalism's weirder little pathologies is liberalism.

Like, it's refusal to see its own influence in spaces in that way. Julian Assange, hero or villain? As a journalist, he's a hero. As a person, I don't know and I don't care. Is there anyone you'd be excited to vote for in 2024? No. Karl Marx is, fill in the adjective. Misunderstood. The most important leader on the American left is...

It's still Bernie. The fact that he is 80 and that's true is depressing, but it's still Bernie. Do you have a hero? I try not to, but to the extent that I have any heroes, I think Eugene Debs is definitely up there. The kind of person we don't really have anymore who had both was like,

a socialist intellectual, but also, and leader, but also a real working man who put his life on the line over and over again, who fought tirelessly for the labor movement, who went to jail for opposing a senseless war, who was speaking out against anti-Chinese immigration laws when it was suicidal for a person in his position to do so. Uh, he was also one of the most brilliant orators that anyone has, uh, has ever been in, uh, American life. And, uh,

I recommend anyone look up his speeches. They're amazing. What will America look like in 50 years? I'm hoping that it will be running on a steady supply of minimally carbon-creating nuclear power to help us in the transition to renewables, which is going to take longer and be harder and more expensive than anybody thinks. Okay, last question. Where do you find meaning?

Books. I mean, books have been my only interest for pretty much my entire life. And I finally got to write one.

And now I'm working on a second one, which I hope people actually read. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it? The working title is No Justice, No Peace, No Progress. It's a change, but it's a story of why social movements fail. Why do social movements flare up and burn brightly and then fail?

Well, Freddie, as with all of your work, I really can't wait to read it. Thank you so much for coming on and being so open with me today. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. My thanks to Freddie DeBoer. Please go find and subscribe to his smart, funny, and always provocative newsletter. You can find it at freddiedeboer.substack.com.

And thanks as always for listening. Share this story with people in your community and have an honest conversation of your own about this or anything else. Our post office is open 24-7. Write us at tips at honestlypod.com. And last and most important, if you want to support our work, please become a subscriber today at commonsense.news. See you next time.