Do people turn to weird ideologies out of contentness and boredom?

[ProgressiveModerate]

Like these Conservatives who believe the biggest issue in America is LGBTQ books being in school libraries or Liberals who are obsessed with widespread acceptance of some really strange and frankly confusing pronouns.

In the grand scheme of things, these just seem like non-issues when there are people struggling with actual discrimination, poverty, hunger, can't get healthcare, can't afford homes, struggle to find work, ect. It's almost like they're purposely trying to invent a problem just for the sake of a problem existing.

Do these people just not have more serious problems so make something up to fill the void? Do they obsess over these fringe culture-war issues to ignore actual real-life problems? I'm genuinely curious as to how these people think.

[PSOL]

The examples you pointed out are usually in positions of privilege, but most people do have skin in the game as to why they believe the things they believe.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     As someone who moves in conservative circles, I find a lot of the fixation on LGBT books and teachers roots itself in a certainty that the things being demonstrated are so outlandish that surely they will wake up Middle America and deliver a new conservative majority. I won't comment on the liberal side as someone who views it from the outside, but I do notice that the Atlas consensus has gone from regarding culture war issues as ridiculous and unworthy of consideration to full-throatedly engaging with them and repeating the progressive talking points on them. Make of that what you will.

[PSOL]

Also, this extends into politics by any other name, religious opinions and orientations. Converts to Islam in the west are usually dogmatic loons trying to get something out of stressors in their personal life and extremely fringe religious groups like Pentecostals, traditionalist Catholics, and Eastern Orthodoxy outside of admitted status advancement usually behave the same way.

There’s the culture war aspect seen in the above post as well that plays a role in it, in which a lot of the extreme capitalist identity politicizations are usually so out of touch to what the youth and/or their peers dealt with when they were young or what they go through now. It’s a lack of life experience and rigid adoption of beliefs without actually living in the real world and engaging with people or accepting data. The above poster certainly had a way of going about this through them saying, and I paraphrase, that the order of facts presented and their outcomes are not real (in that it purportedly goes against their learned theology and accepting it as true and then changing from it would endanger their huge sinkhole spot of making it to heaven and account for immoral consequences of their beliefs, interpretation enclosed here mine).

Liberals also do this in having blind faith in that the people in charge know better and that it is ineffective to change to a different system (as that would be thoughts unpopular in this capitalist world). On “social issues” it would probably be nonsense said here that “opposing Israel is reactionary”, “you can’t call people self-haters or uncle toms if you aren’t from that in-group”, “things swing toward justice (under this current system)”, or that cops and advertisements belong in pride parades. When it becomes policy or affects things is when the SDS destroyed itself over calling communists white supremacists for wanting to talk about class, foolish initiatives to rename police departments instead of working towards establishing institutional power, having fake holidays like Kwanzaa, and the reparations movement as the fix to end institutional racism. On the opposite side are when people are deliberately trying to split up sexual minorities with LGB or some other restrictive acronym, calling anti-gentrification activists anti-white, or when white moderates on both sides of the aisle support slimebags like Tim Scott or Eric Adams to prove that their support of white supremacy isn’t racist.

Oh and before it gets in anyone’s thoughts, my “opinions” are largely fact and based on the way things work in the objective world.

[HisGrace]

Periods of relative stability tend to lead to extreme social views while a crisis (either economic or a war) does the opposite. Particularly Millennials and Zoomers seem to have this permanent existential angst about their lives having no meaning without a great crusade. So they manufacture all these microscopic social issues and pretend it's as important as WWII or the Civil Rights Movement.

[PSOL]

Periods of relative stability tend to lead to extreme social views while a crisis (either economic or a war) does the opposite. Particularly Millennials and Zoomers seem to have this permanent existential angst about their lives having no meaning without a great crusade. So they manufacture all these microscopic social issues and pretend it's as important as WWII or the Civil Rights Movement.

lol

[Vice President Christian Man]

I'm pretty bored but then again that's anecdotal.

[Ancestral Republican]

People with reactionary social views (like Moms for Liberty) tend to be 1) scared and 2) stupid, which magnifies the fear. Fascist regimes and genocides have been built off a scared and stupid populace, especially when they've been misled into thinking the "other" group is a threat to their children.

[John Dule]

Yes. For example, most of the ardent communists I've met have been the children of upper-middle-class consultants, lawyers, or bankers. They have never experienced scarcity in any meaningful sense of the term, and they think guerrilla warfare would be a fun way to spend their summer vacation.

[Ancestral Republican]

Yes. For example, most of the ardent communists I've met have been the children of upper-middle-class consultants, lawyers, or bankers. They have never experienced scarcity in any meaningful sense of the term, and they think guerrilla warfare would be a fun way to spend their summer vacation.

There's a comforting notion on the right that the only people who support leftist economics are well-off themselves, blue-haired Starbucks baristas who went to Sarah Lawrence College, and therefore those views are invalid. Yet most of the privileged children I've met have viewpoints that reflect that - "my dad pays my rent. Also, I don't understand why people are mad about the minimum wage??"



Is this more or less legitimate than the "ardent communists" you allegedly know with consultant, lawyer, banker parents?

[John Dule]

Yes. For example, most of the ardent communists I've met have been the children of upper-middle-class consultants, lawyers, or bankers. They have never experienced scarcity in any meaningful sense of the term, and they think guerrilla warfare would be a fun way to spend their summer vacation.

There's a comforting notion on the right that the only people who support leftist economics are well-off themselves, blue-haired Starbucks baristas who went to Sarah Lawrence College, and therefore those views are invalid. Yet most of the privileged children I've met have viewpoints that reflect that - "my dad pays my rent. Also, I don't understand why people are mad about the minimum wage??"

Is this more or less legitimate than the "ardent communists" you allegedly know with consultant, lawyer, banker parents?

I'm going to ignore most of what you've said here to point out that I wasn't talking about people with leftist economics generally. There's nothing wrong with supporting left-wing causes as a rich, successful person. I am talking here about tankies who enthusiastically want to see revolution and chaos in the streets, not regular progressives.

[DaleCooper]

Yes. For example, most of the ardent communists I've met have been the children of upper-middle-class consultants, lawyers, or bankers. They have never experienced scarcity in any meaningful sense of the term, and they think guerrilla warfare would be a fun way to spend their summer vacation.

It's not just weird political ideologies either. I can't imagine any blue collar working class people aspiring to sell their home and live in van. I can't imagine any blue collar people pursuing the Jordan Peterson raw hamburger meat diet or replacing their medicine with the Joe Rogan 4 hour a day sauna and ice bath treatment. I don't want to romanticize the working class too much, but there does seem to be a certain kind of stupidity that they just don't have the time or patience for.

[Ancestral Republican]

Yes. For example, most of the ardent communists I've met have been the children of upper-middle-class consultants, lawyers, or bankers. They have never experienced scarcity in any meaningful sense of the term, and they think guerrilla warfare would be a fun way to spend their summer vacation.

There's a comforting notion on the right that the only people who support leftist economics are well-off themselves, blue-haired Starbucks baristas who went to Sarah Lawrence College, and therefore those views are invalid. Yet most of the privileged children I've met have viewpoints that reflect that - "my dad pays my rent. Also, I don't understand why people are mad about the minimum wage??"

Is this more or less legitimate than the "ardent communists" you allegedly know with consultant, lawyer, banker parents?

I'm going to ignore most of what you've said here to point out that I wasn't talking about people with leftist economics generally. There's nothing wrong with supporting left-wing causes as a rich, successful person. I am talking here about tankies who enthusiastically want to see revolution and chaos in the streets, not regular progressives.

The problem is it's basically a caricature at this point.

[PSOL]

Yes. For example, most of the ardent communists I've met have been the children of upper-middle-class consultants, lawyers, or bankers. They have never experienced scarcity in any meaningful sense of the term, and they think guerrilla warfare would be a fun way to spend their summer vacation.

It's not just weird political ideologies either. I can't imagine any blue collar working class people aspiring to sell their home and live in van. I can't imagine any blue collar people pursuing the Jordan Peterson raw hamburger meat diet or replacing their medicine with the Joe Rogan 4 hour a day sauna and ice bath treatment. I don't want to romanticize the working class too much, but there does seem to be a certain kind of stupidity that they just don't have the time or patience for.

On the point of Dule: I think this is more reflective of your social circle than anything else. Furthermore to say that you have to be broke and destitute to suffer enough to be a communist is oppression Olympics and victimization of the lowest order. Everyone’s place is different in society and there are different issues that are just as necessary to fix as does the poor situation regarding poverty in this country.

On Dale: a lot of people do that because of weird ideologies based off of not trusting science and the advice of doctors. Crap a lot of working class people do believe are racial stereotypes being true and stuff like astrology.

Also, there technically are working people living in trailer parks and living nomadic lifestyles working odd jobs. Most are either born or forced into it, but stuff like being a carnie kind of calls for it.

[Santander]

Culture warriors on both sides are often like this, yes.

[Mr. Smith]

Just boredom really.

[Sol]

Like these Conservatives who believe the biggest issue in America is LGBTQ books being in school libraries or Liberals who are obsessed with widespread acceptance of some really strange and frankly confusing pronouns.

I can't speak to the former, who frankly scare the shıt out of me. But I can speak to the latter, although I've never been a person who uses neopronouns and don't know anyone well who does. (This actually gets to one issue, which is that neopronouns are very rare but extremely high salience, so they seem much more common than they actually are.)

I think there's always a kind of gap between people's experiences and the labels that get put on them, and sexual and gender identity labels often fall in that gap. The process is even more complicated because these identities are deeply stigmatized, so the incentive to not identify with a negative-seeming label is pretty strong. Think about how many men who sleep with men don't identify as gay or bisexual, for example. On the other hand, there's also a desire to be easily legible to your peers in a way that feels meaningful, so there has to be some kind of label if you want that legibility.

This is why you've seen a variety of terms emerge and then get divided and supplanted with varying degrees of success. These are often predicated on somewhat ticky-tack distinctions. Witness the supplanting of transsexual with transgender in the 1990s and 2000s, based on the dogma that you hear fairly often now about the distinction between sex and gender [1]. Or the emergence of pansexual as a label distinct from bisexual.

These processes, which include the stereotype of "a million random pronouns" are easy to critique, and people do, I feel myself drawn to that urge in writing this post. But what these all stem from is the inherent impossibility of reconciling language with something as important as how you feel about yourself in relation to other people.

Imagine you're a young person figuring out who the hell you are. You don't feel like a guy or a girl, which is already kind of terrifying. But even more complicatedly, the kids at school or on social media [2] are all kind of different from how you feel -- maybe you have a different assigned sex than most of them, and what's affirming to them is dysphoric to you. Maybe they're all super rich and have affirming parents, and you don't. Maybe it's one of a host of different things. So you gravitate to a label or a set of pronouns which is a little unusual, but feels right.

This may sound invalidating, but I don't mean it like that. Well, I do, actually, but my critique encompasses everyone, not just trans people -- nobody is "valid" in their gender or their sex [3]. All of us, cis people included, are modulating ourselves in relation to other people and our bodies, in pursuit of a kind of ideal gender expression which works socially appropriate way, informed by our personal histories and by society. Needless to say, that ideal expression isn't attainable.

[1] Trans thinkers nowadays like to critique this, because trans people who undergo various hormone treatments, surgeries, etc. are literally changing their sex, not just gender.
[2] In my day it was Tumblr, I assume it's TikTok now?
[3] An unusually on the nose example of this is the deranged world of transvestigators.

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

This doesn't answer your question, and other people have given more sophisticated answers, but there seems to be no question that especially some percentage of young young men turn to nihilism or anarchy (I mean the same thing: random violence to destroy things for what they consider fun) due to boredom/ennui.

It could be media sensationalism and not borne out based on data, but this seems to be especially prevalent in England (the yobs.)

[RINO Tom]

The examples you pointed out are usually in positions of privilege, but most people do have skin in the game as to why they believe the things they believe.

Even if they have "skin in the game," their general outlook and values can still remain much more mature and cohesive than what we see among especially radical (practically just for attention) younger people, IMO.  The Best Man in my wedding and his husband obviously care deeply about LGBT rights, but they roll their eyes at the general tone and tactics of some of their more delusional "allies" sometimes.  And I think people turn to those more delusional tones/attitudes/tactics when they generally want to feel "a part of something."