In previous columns I discussed projection and habituation. Today’s psychological topic is learned helplessness, which can be seen as a negative and maladaptive type of habituation. It is a state that results when a people’s past experiences teach them that their decisions cannot change their situation, so they adopt a helpless passivity.
The concept originated in some very depressing animal experiments, which I don’t like to think about, since I like most dogs more than many people. The short version is that dogs in a partitioned cage were given electric shocks that affected both sides of the cage, so that moving to the other side wouldn’t help. After enough of that, even when the other side of the cage was not electrified, the dogs wouldn’t attempt to move in order to escape the shocks.
What does that teach us, other than that some psychologists should be put in cages and randomly shocked?
Heartbreakingly, once the dogs learned that their decisions made no difference, their will was broken, and though they could easily escape the shocks by crossing the cage, they would no longer take those simple steps.
Clear similarities to human behavior abound. Sometimes external forces can push people toward learned helplessness. A society that is racist or sexist or religiously bigoted can tell you that nobody of your race or gender or religion can ever get an education, or be financially successful, or amount to much. Bad or abusive parents or spouses can tell you that you’re stupid or worthless. Many people give up after they are told that – and experience that – often enough.
Sometimes internal forces can do the same. An instinctively pessimistic person will look for obstacles and problems rather than opportunities or solutions, and you tend to find or notice what you are looking for. Since there are always plenty of obstacles around – and plenty of people to agree that they cannot be overcome (or just that YOU cannot overcome them) – it can be very easy to hunker down and stop trying.
Self-sabotaging behavior creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, which then reinforces the pessimism and helplessness. If I tell myself I’m the kind of dummy who doesn’t do well in school, I don’t study very much (because what’s the use?), and then I fail the test. Which proves that I’m stupid and destined to drop out.
The end result is often depression, substance abuse, and a self-reinforcing spiral of negativity and failure. As I once heard a fellow Midwesterner say of someone in this condition, “He’s got a lot of quit in him.”
The best path out of learned helplessness usually involves a combination of strategies to create positive habits. Cognitive therapy can help, as can setting defined goals, become more consciously grateful, and learning to be more optimistic. (There’s a reason CO started a site focusing on optimism!)
As a Christian, I also find that it helps to meditate on the fact that God made me in His image. So I have that going for me!
It also helps to think about inspiring people who overcame negative circumstances. Take JD Vance, for example. His early life had “learned helplessness” written all over it: absent dad, addict mom, raised by eccentric grandparents in Appalachian poverty, the deck stacked against him six ways to Sunday.
Never did the phrase “white privilege” sound so hollow and ridiculous. (Spoiler alert: it usually is, especially when being wildly exaggerated by naïve elitists who’ve never been within 100 miles of a holler or a trailer court.)
What picture of himself would society paint for a young JD? Toothless hick, Hillbilly, white trash. Bound for a life of coal mining or a Dollar Store or prison, with stops at bar fights and corn-liquor-involved DUIs along the way.
(By the way, racial slurs are supposed to be bad, right? But can you think of a more insultingly dehumanizing term than “white trash?” Anybody in polite society would sooner cut their own tongue out than be caught using the N word, but you can call poor whitey “trash” in any faculty lounge or posh dinner party, safe in the knowledge that you’ll get knowing nods or condescending smiles all around.)
So what does all of this have to do with my usual focus on politics and culture? A lot actually. Learned helplessness is devastating to individuals, but it can be very useful to politicians. Especially if those politicians are leftists, skilled at inculcating and profiting from the anger, pessimism, and depression of most lefties.
(Side-bar, chicken-and-egg question: Does leftism make people depressed and angry, or are depressed and angry people naturally drawn to leftism? Discuss amongst yourselves.)
Such leftist pols cleverly set up an ecosystem of identity politics in which the most valuable currency is victim status. (“Victim” is practically a synonym for someone with learned helplessness.) Then they set about trying to convince voters that they are all powerless victims trapped in a cage built by evil conservatives, even as they themselves are the mad scientists conducting a heartless political experiment.
They see some black and brown people, and they hit them with a relentless sequence of rhetorical “shocks” to teach them to see themselves as impotent: Amerikkka is a racist society, built on slavery and stolen land and immigrant labor. The leading cause of death for black men is being shot by white cops while unarmed and black, and for brown people it’s being “disappeared” by Gestapo ICE agents. The white power structure has been keeping you down for 400 years, and it’s never going to stop.
They see women and they pull out the verbal cattle prods: The patriarchy has been brutally oppressing women for 4000 years. Sexism is in the air you breathe and the language you speak, and men want to force you all into handmaid costumes. All heterosexual sex is rape, and it’s called “the battle of the sexes” because brutish men are going to fight you to the death, and beat you if you don’t submit.
They see poor people and they attach the connected electrodes of communism and socialism to their cage: Capitalism is the evil force beneath all of your troubles, and capitalists are voracious slave-masters who will exploit you for their bloodthirsty greed and profits until you are worked to death in their infernal mills, factories, and cubicles.
They see sexual eccentrics and they attach the electrified nipple clamps of gender re-education: All of those hetero-normative cisgender bullies want you to conform to their Aryan beauty standards and engage only in pregnancy-producing sex in the missionary position because their small, bigoted minds can’t appreciate the appeal of your many piercings and body-modifications, your unidentifiable genitalia, and your erotic squirrel and raccoon outfits. They prudishly refuse to accept that you can be healthy at any weight, and want to body shame you out of their ignorance of how good transgressive sex can be, especially when it requires the deployment of a forklift and a complicated system of chains and pulleys to lower you onto each other.
Okay, sorry about that “nipple clamps” thing and that last image. Got a little carried away there, and it’s too late for a trigger warning. So mea culpa.
Anyway, you can see the results in the generational dependence among those who have listened to the left’s siren song. They’ve been in that cage for a long time, and they’ve learned that they can’t get themselves out. They get their housing, their food, their education, their health care, and their spending money from the government, and they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for the party who promises to keep taking care of them in their box.
You can also see it in the mostly younger people – whose depression has turned into anger – in the nihilistic riots of Antifa and BLM, and in the pro-Hamas thugs on campuses, and in the murderers of Charlie Kirk, and of the Christian kids in Nashville and Minneapolis. The armies of the left have been miseducated in thousands of Skinner Boxes on campuses and chatrooms, and they’ve internalized all the wrong lessons.
They see America, capitalism, free markets, stable families, and the Judeo-Christian West as oppressive forces. They see themselves as oppressed victims, powerless in the face of a threatening, fascist omni-enemy, cowering in the corner of a small box…
Until some manipulative, authoritarian leftist leaders come forward and promise them a way out, and a moral crusade that directs their anger at a demonized enemy, and recasts their insurrectionist violence as a noble, anti-Nazi “Resistance.”
They don’t have to feel guilty when they’re assaulting cops and shooting at ICE agents who are just doing their jobs, enforcing our democratically passed laws, and wanting to go home to their families at the end of each day. Because they’re ACTUALLY bravely stopping the Gestapo from rounding up and killing salt-of-the-earth, undocumented Americans.
Meanwhile, we conservatives are offering them a very different way out of the Skinner Box they have been manipulated into. We’re telling them the truth, that America is not a capitalist dictatorship, and that there is no white, patriarchal “system” that is hell-bent on keeping them down. That this is still a land of opportunity, and that their fate is in their hands.
We’re trying to show them that the left has lied to them about the cage they’re in, and that it’s not really electrified, and that the door is open. They can walk out any time they want, and breathe the free air, and take advantage of the possibilities and opportunities all around them.
We’re praying that they’ll do it, for their own good, and for America’s.
Hopefully in time for the mid-terms.
Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!
Martin Simpson 