Ace of Spades brings up a great point about how our culture now glorifies–instead of discourages–mental illness and other behaviors that healthy societies should want less of:
[YouTuber] Ya Boi Zach makes a point, inadvertently, which is also made by Greg Lukianoff.
Ya Boi Zach notes that people who have mild bits of insanity or character defects are often put on the right path by people just telling them “You’re being weird, you should stop that.”
Ya Boi Zach, for example, is maybe a bit on the spectrum, and used to just walk into the middle of a group discussing some topic and completely ignore their topic to declare that he now wanted to talk about comic books (or whatever).
After being told a few times that this isn’t normal, that you’re supposed to let people talk out their current topic before trying to conversation-jack, he got the message and stopped doing that. He was told he was being weird, so he learned the social cues and norms and stopped being weird. (In that way, at least.)
But what happens when people stop chiding you for your weird behaviors? What happens, in fact, when the dominant leftwing culture begins praising you for your weirdest, most mentally-ill behaviors?
This phenomenon where weird, mentally-ill behaviors are no longer discouraged but in fact encouraged explains a lot of where we are now as a country.
This is of course exactly what’s happened with emotional fragility and meltdowns and “triggering.” In the past, more mentally stable people would tell the less mentally-stable/emotionally labile people to stop freaking out, and to start acting like a normal, mentally-healthy person.
But the dominant leftwing culture decided that being “triggered” and having bizarre childlike tantrums over everything was somehow virtuous, and so they began teaching children and young adults that it was healthy and noble to start quivering and shrieking any time you saw something you didn’t like.
And thereby: Our dominant culture stopped reigning people in from mental illness, and started instead affirmatively training people to be mentally ill, and to in fact cultivate mental illness the way one might cultivate a wine connoisseurship or gourmet’s palate — cultivating aspects of insanity as a badge of cultural prestige.
The political left — already proven by every single test ever given — was already by far the most neurotic and hysterical cohort on earth. And yes, the group most likely to have been diagnosed with a mental illness.
And now they’ve reshaped society to mirror their own inner lunacy, so that lunatic behavior is now deemed sane and very lunatic behavior is now deemed saintly.
Ace was commenting on this ridiculous article posted in the Washington Post by a woman who was bragging about the extreme measures she takes to keep herself safe from… 😱😱😱THE VIRUS 😱😱😱.
You can find some quotes from the article at Ace’s website, but here are a few of the most outlandish:
I start each morning by taking my temperature with an infrared thermometer and my oxygen level with my oximeter. I check the conjunctival tissue in my eyes in the mirror; examine my feet for covid-19 toes, which are skin lesions or bumps. I take a quick whiff of something smelly like peanut butter or perfume.
If I pass all these tests, I can enter the world. I fold a tissue and place it inside the top of my mask to absorb moisture and prevent steaming or sweating. I wear a face shield over my mask should anyone sneeze or cough on me, which might protect from droplets, although I know that aerosols can creep around facial shields. I protect my eyes with “onion goggles” that have a sponge around the inside and provides a tighter fit than regular glasses. I wash them with soap and water, which seems to reduce fogging better than the “fog cloths” I purchased.
…
I remove everything before I get in my car (or house) if I’ve been somewhere like a doctor’s office. In the car, I put everything in a large brown paper bag and drench my hands with sanitizer I keep away from the sun, so the alcohol doesn’t start a fire. I sanitize the car’s indoor and outdoor door handles, steering wheel, gear shift and radio buttons before I turn the air conditioner off and open the front and back windows during the trip so anything left will hopefully fly away.
“Gender non-conformity” and the dozens of letters that have been tacked onto the end of “LGBT” (including “T” itself), Covid hysteria, Trump Derangement Syndrome are all part of the same phenomenon: mentally-ill behaviors that are now encouraged instead of discouraged.
NFL coaches are fined $100,000 if they take their masks off on the sidelines during games, even though everyone around them has been tested. “Mask culture” is glorified in almost every commercial and television event nowadays.
What we really need to be doing is laughing at perfectly healthy, very low-risk people who nevertheless go to ridiculous extremes to avoid a media-hyped virus that amounts to little more than the flu.
Again, I’ve had Covid. It’s the flu. The fact that we have shut down the entire country for seven months because of it is nothing short of insanity.
We need to be making fun of people who are afraid of Covid. We need to be socially shaming them for being so neurotic and irrational about this virus, so that the rest of us can go back to normal. I hate to put it in such stark terms, but we should not be encouraging and validating these irrational and insane people. Our whole society should not be bending over backwards for these brainwashed idiots because they’re terrified of the flu.
I understand if someone is high risk and wants to take precautions–and maybe the lady that wrote the WaPo article is, in which case I can sort of understand where she’s coming from. But there are so many people out there that are not thinking rationally about the Coronavirus. We have all seen them out in public, and we all probably know at least one.
Let the rest of us go back to normal. We’ll accept the risks.
As to Ace’s point about leftists being mentally ill, it’s scientifically proven that the further left you are, the more likely you are to be mentally ill:
This long article goes into the matter in pretty exhaustive fashion, if it’s a topic that interests you.