Religion is a Mental Illness

"The cold, hard truth is that nobody gives a fuck about your political opinions anymore. You are some of the least qualified people in the world to be lecturing normal people on how to think and vote. Because you're not normal people. You don't work normal jobs. You don't live normal lives. You exist in a nice, comfortable bubble that protects and insulates you from reality, where you're surrounded by other people just like yourselves.

And the thing is, we don't actually hate you for that. There's nothing wrong with being rich and successful if you've earned it. And part of being rich and successful is that you get a bit detached from the mundane reality of daily life. Again, we understand.

And let's be honest. It's kind of fucking cool to be an actor. You guys get to do stuff and go places that most of us could never dream of. And we're happy to cheer and boo the characters that you play. We're happy to be captivated by the performances you deliver. We're happy to listen to you talk about your craft and share stories and insights into what it's like making movies.

But what we're not prepared to do anymore is be lectured by you, or told what causes we're supposed to support by you, or how to think and vote by you. This next bit is going to take a bit of humility and self-reflection, which I realize are two qualities you're not exactly hot on, but it's time to shut the fuck up about this stuff.

It's none of your business, it's not your area of expertise and it never was. Learn that lesson and you might just get back the respect and attention that you won. Learn it not, and, well, you might just find out how fickle a mistress fame really is."

www.youtube.com

"All gods are myths, all religions are lies, all faith is delusion."

Empirical…ish

Do liberals like Jonathan Chait want a comprehensive debate on pediatric gender medicine?

City Journal

Both critics and supporters of so-called “gender-affirming care” appreciated the candor of transgender activist and author Andrea Long Chu’s recent cover story for New York magazine.

Chu’s piece, titled “Freedom of Sex: The Moral Case for Letting Trans Kids Change Their Bodies,” makes a principled case for letting children dictate their own hormonal and surgical treatments. Chu believes that “trans kids” shouldn’t have to get a mental-health assessment before initiating hormones, and that, “in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.” Remarkably, Chu does not deny that biological sex is binary and determined at conception but argues that humans have no ethical obligation to come to terms with reality, calling this purported duty “a fine definition of nihilism.”

While trans activists often pretend that only “right-wing reactionaries” and “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (“TERFs”) oppose their claims, Chu refreshingly observes that this isn’t true. The most “insidious” pushback, Chu says, has come from “TARLs,” or “trans-agnostic reactionary liberals.” Indeed, polling has shown that Americans with liberal views largely reject such policies as schools keeping students’ gender “transition” secret from their parents and allowing trans-identified males to compete in female sports.

Chu’s essay went viral, prompting New York staff writer Jonathan Chait to pen a “Liberal Response.” Chait has a history of opposing trans activists’ censoriousness, particularly about medical transition for youth. Last December, for example, he responded to transgender advocacy groups’ fury that the New York Times had acknowledged the ongoing scientific debate over how best to treat gender-distressed minors, which they claimed had abetted state-level Republican efforts to ban pediatric transition. Chait called for “carefully following the evidence,” and observed that “the whole reason leftists try to associate reporters at the Times with Republican-backed laws is precisely that their targets do not agree with the conservative position on transgender care.”

Chait’s December piece correctly identified the tribalist logic informing elite discussions of gender medicine in the United States, and progressive journalists’ efforts to banish from the liberal tribe those who raise questions about this controversial area of medicine. His response to Chu’s essay, however, fails to extend to conservatives the charity he expects trans activists to extend to liberals like himself. If Chait is worried about tribalism obscuring the pursuit of truth, he might consider how his own writing may contribute to this problem.

Consider his characterization of the debate over “trans rights.” Chait claims that “[c]onservatives dismiss trans rights altogether, while liberals completely support trans rights as it pertains to employment, housing, public spaces, and other adult matters, disagreeing mainly in how it is applied to children (as well as, in limited cases, addressing the problems raised by trans female athletes competing in women’s sports).”

Whether this is true, of course, depends entirely on what Chait means by “trans rights.” “Rights talk,” to borrow Mary Ann Glendon’s term, obscures the hard trade-offs and real-world costs that unavoidably confront those entrusted to make policy choices. Chait should have spelled out what “trans rights” mean in practice, but he doesn’t. His failure is especially puzzling considering two claims he makes in his essay. Chait claims, first, that “Trans-rights activists and their allies have relentlessly presented their entire agenda as a take-it-or-leave-it block, attacking anybody who criticizes any piece of it as a transphobe.” Second, he argues that rights claims generally render empirical questions irrelevant. As Chait puts it, “if, say, you consider firearm ownership an absolute right, then no evidence about how many lives any particular gun-control reform is likely to save is going to make you support it.”

Whatever Chait means by “trans rights,” the notion that all liberals support permissive trans policies outside the pediatric medicine and athletic contexts is unfounded, according to the data. Partisan affiliations are not a perfect proxy for voter ideology, but it’s telling that a 2022 PRRI poll found 31 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Independents favor laws that require people to use bathrooms that accord with their biological sex. A more recent YouGov poll found that 26 percent of surveyed Democrats backed such laws, with 22 percent unsure.

Assuming the “liberal” position on public accommodations is that people should be legally allowed to use bathrooms that accord with their subjective definition of being male or female (and many liberals would dispute that this is in fact a liberal position), and if the “conservative” position is that no such law should exist or even that laws should require bathroom access based on sex, then almost half of Democratic Party voters appear to hold views about bathroom access that could qualify as “conservative” under Chait’s scheme.

Liberal opinion similarly divides on the issue of trans-identifying inmates’ prison placements. According to the same YouGov poll, most Democratic voters either supported (35 percent) or weren’t sure about (33 percent) laws requiring prisons to house inmates according to their biological sex. In this case, support for “trans rights,” here defined as a legally protected right to be housed according to “gender identity,” appears to be a minority position within the Democratic Party.

Has Chait accurately characterized the conservative position in this debate? Despite his claim that “[c]onservatives dismiss trans rights altogether,” there’s no evidence that the standard “conservative” position on, say, employment is to allow adverse action against trans-identified people tout court. The YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Republican respondents said they support “banning employers from firing employees on the basis of their transgender identity.” Fifty-seven percent of Independents, which presumably includes some conservatives, answered the same way. Recalling the abstract nature of “rights talk,” what is framed as “employment non-discrimination” often comes down to policy questions about how employers should treat trans-identified employees or candidates in circumstances where sex presumably matters, for instance access to workplace bathrooms.

When asked whether there should be specific provisions for “transgender people in hate crime laws,” 42 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of Independents agreed that transgender status merits special protection, while 24 percent and 27 percent, respectively, said they weren’t sure.

In short, it is highly misleading to say that liberals support trans rights while conservatives do not. When the abstraction “trans rights” is broken down into concrete policy questions, as inevitably it must be, many liberals seem to disagree with policies favored by trans rights activists while many conservatives agree with them. Chait himself recognizes the uselessness of abstract rights talk when he turns his attention to Chu’s argument for “freedom of sex.”

Chait’s response to Chu’s arguments about pediatric medical “transitions” admirably makes the case that “empiricism” must be part of the liberal position on trans rights. However, his commitment to political “rights” seems to constrain his commitment to empiricism and evidence in crucial ways.

First, Chait notes that the supposed consensus that “gender-affirming care” is “settled science” is the result of “a power struggle between advocates of unmediated gender-affirming care and their more cautious colleagues,” but he doesn’t really explain what makes these colleagues “cautious” or whether there are divides within the “cautious” group. By this point he must know that there are three main positions in the debate: those, like Chu and parts of the gender medicine industry, who support unrestricted access to hormones and surgeries; those who support medical transition but call for rigorous mental health assessments; and those who believe that “gender-affirming” hormones and surgeries are inappropriate for minors regardless of circumstances. Those, like myself, who belong to the third group make evidence-based arguments. We regard members of the second group, many of whom are well intentioned, as cautious compared with the first group but overall misguided in their support for harmful practices.

While Chait mentions systematic evidence reviews from Europe and Canada, he fails to disclose that these reviews found no credible evidence of benefits for any pediatric cohort, including those treated under the “gold standard” and more “cautious” Dutch approach, which Chait notes involves “extensive evaluation and screening for mental health.” Left unstated is his apparent hope that after “extensive evaluation and screening,” some kids will benefit from early medicalization.

If liberals like Chait are truly committed to empirical medicine, they must at some point read and respond to the most important scholarly paper on pediatric gender medicine in recent years: “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine: A critical evaluation of the Dutch studies—and research that has followed,” published last year. It’s hard to read this paper and come away with any impression other than that this entire medical field is based on fraud.

More fundamentally, Chait needs to grapple with a problem that runs deeper than the empirical questions discussed in clinical studies. Empirical debates about medical evidence generally presuppose a coherent conceptual framework of health and disease. We can debate, for example, whether a new drug for treating cancer is “safe and effective” because we agree that there is a condition to be treated (cancer), that it constitutes illness, and that doctors have an objective diagnosis to confirm its presence in humans.

Gender medicine, by contrast, lacks a coherent conceptual framework. The discipline is riddled with deep and abiding contradictions. Advocates argue that “gender incongruence” is not a pathology but a normal variation of human development, but they also insist that this phenomenon is a potentially life-threatening medical condition that requires “medically necessary” hormonal or surgical interventions. Advocates argue that “gender identity”—a term whose definition is either circular or reliant on stereotypes—is fixed, immutable, and infallibly knowable from early childhood, but they also say that “gender identity” is fluid and a “journey.”

Above all, thoughtful discussion of youth gender transition is not possible unless one is willing to interrogate the very notion of the “transgender child.” And this, I think, is still a bridge too far for liberals like Chait. What does it mean to say that a child “is transgender”? That she was “born in the wrong body”? That’s metaphysical talk, and absurd. It’s also dangerous to suggest such a thing to vulnerable teenagers who are going through the throes of puberty. Nor is there evidence for the transgender brain hypothesis—and even if there were, gender clinicians (even the “cautious”) ones are not calling for, and most would actively oppose, brain scans as part of the diagnostic process.

Liberal journalists who continue to use the term “trans kids,” as if it’s obvious what this means, without trying to define the term and defend it against rational, good faith criticism, are not truly interested in an empirical debate about youth gender medicine. They care about evidence and research, but only within limits.

A final note on Chait’s piece. He mentions the National Health Service of England’s recent decision to decommission puberty blockers as routine care for gender dysphoric youth. Chait should keep in mind that the Dutch first proposed using puberty blockers as part of the diagnostic process—halting puberty to create a window of time for the adolescent to sort out his feelings and decide whether to proceed with transition. We now know that these drugs do not provide neutral “time to think” (the title of a book about the Tavistock clinic) but more likely lock in a child’s incongruent gender feelings and make further “transition” all but a foregone conclusion. Chait seems to have read the Tavistock book and should at least be open to the possibility that the NHS’s decision is a step toward an eventual full national ban on medical transition for minors—similar to the restrictions enacted in two dozen Republican states that Chait presumably believes are extreme.

To his credit, Chait recognizes the potential for golden mean fallacies in the debate over youth gender medicine. He argues that we should not assume that “ideas located at the extreme at any given moment are always wrong.” I agree. But Chait should acknowledge the possibility that empirically minded, principled liberals like himself are still getting pediatric gender medicine wrong. He should be open to the possibility that one day in the not-too-distant future, he will find himself among the “conservatives.”

"Sex is real… But the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism." -- Andrea Long Chu, 2024

"The facts may tell you one thing. But, God is not limited by the facts. Choose faith in spite of the facts." -- Joel Osteen, 2014

Is white privilege the modern day Original Sin? How is mass denial about the truth of gender, any different from Catholic transubstantiation? Is woke culture today's dogmatic religious mob? Join me and @drpeterboghossian as we explore these questions and more in another episode of The Poetry Of Reality.

Peter Boghossian: I wrote, you know, "A Manual for Creating Atheists," and I was trying to make the world more sane and more rational. And I was trying to help people become more thoughtful and reflect on their beliefs, have reliable epistemologies upon which they could rely. And one of the things that I noticed since maybe 2013, maybe 2012, was that as religiosity decreased, deranged woke beliefs increased. And I guess my first question to you is -- uh, I don't know who came up with this, I might have come up with this, I don't know who came up with this -- but the Substitution Hypothesis.

Richard Dawkins: Yes.

Boghossian: So, do you think, and I honestly do not know the answer to this question, do you think that as one religion fades another -- like default is the belief state for humans, they just have to believe something -- and as one, as the old religion fades, a new one has to come in?

Dawkins: Yeah. Gullibility expands to fill the vacuum.

Boghossian: Exactly. Precisely.

Dawkins: I suppose that's right. I hadn't really thought of it before, but it sounds plausible to me. I think G.K. Chesterton, who was a very religious man said, "when people stop believing in God they they believe in anything." And he was a very witty, clever man, although he was a devout Roman Catholic. There's something in it I think, and there's no doubt about it that we seem to have exchanged one form of superstitious religiosity for another, and the analogy goes pretty deep. I think John McWhorter pointed out that there's a strong relationship between original sin in the Christian religion...

Boghossian: No, that was me pointing that out. 2014, with my article with James Lindsay. "Privilege is the original sin," but yeah, go ahead.

Dawkins: Good for you. So, original sin being we're all born in sin, we all inherit the sin of Adam. And we white people inherit the sin of slavery and colonialism and because we're white we have to feel guilty for what are, not necessarily our ancestors but people of the same color as us, in past centuries did. So that's that's one analogy. And then, well, transubstantiation which in the Catholic religion you know, the wine literally turns to blood, where "literally" doesn't quite mean literally, it means what Aristotle called the "accidentals" stay wine but the true "substance" of the wine becomes blood. So when somebody stands up and says "I am a woman," although they've got a male body, that's transubstantiation. In the accidentals they still have a penis and they still have Y chromosome, but in the true substance, they have become female. So trans -- that's where the word transubstantiation comes from, the transubstance, and there's a very strong analogy to transubstantiation in transsexualism.

Boghossian: Tell me more, how so?

Dawkins: Well, the wine becomes blood where the priest simply declares it as it is. And a male person becomes female when he declares himself to be female. And in the Aristotelian terms, the substance has changed, the substance of wine has changed to blood, the substance of maleness of changed to femaleness, but the accidentals, the incidentals are what are regarded by Catholics as trivial and by trans people as trivial. So they really believe that they have become the other sex.

Boghossian: It's remarkable how obvious it is that those are delusions. I mean it's crystal clear to anybody not caught in the orbit of the ideology that that is a delusion.

Dawkins: Yes. They get around it by this word "gender," which is separate from sex. And there are some who I think even think their sex has changed.

Boghossian: Correct.

Dawkins: And others who think that, they admit that their sex hasn't changed but their agenda has.

Boghossian: So, I guess I have two questions. One is, it seems to me that there are degrees of delusion that one can have. So, if we accept that, like there are certain things that are -- if I told you those books are really aliens from another planet and they've come down, okay that's another level of delusion. And so, I often think -- this is the thing that that's been causing me to think about this. I'm utterly incredulous at the sheer madness that people believe now. In a way that I was not incredulous, you know in 2010 or 2000 or so. So, let's take a look at, somebody walked on water. This guy named Jesus, he walked on water, you know, this is intervention in the space time continuum by a supernatural being and it caused this individual to walk on water. Okay, that's clearly a delusion if somebody believes in it, if someone accepts that is true. And then you have the belief that men can get pregnant. That to me seems like a significantly more profound delusion. Or am I wrong?

Dawkins: Yes. But doesn't it come from the postmodern belief that feelings are more important than facts?

Boghossian: Yeah, standpoint epistemology. And it comes, I guess they could just say that it's the redefinition of the word. But they actually like, they literally believe men can get pregnant. And the thing that I've been thinking about is, kind of goes back to Plato, is it better to let people believe benign delusions? I mean, in an ideal world, people wouldn't believe, people would proportion their confidence in the belief to the evidence they have for the belief. But humanity is sloppy and messy and the thing that I've been thinking about recently is, if it's true that there are degrees of delusion and if it's true -- and I don't know if it's true -- that there's a substitution hypothesis, then should rational people step out of the way or -- not encourage people to believe things that are false, because I would never do that and I think that's grossly unethical -- but there are certain delusions that are better for people to believe in en masse than others.

Dawkins: Yeah, so if you've got to believe in a delusion, if there's something, some law that says there's a certain quotient of deludedness that everybody's got to have, and certainly some are more harmless than others.

Boghossian: Correct.

Dawkins: I mean, I sort of feel there's a little bit about Islam and Christianity that -- Islam is such an evil at the moment, or Islamism is such an evil at the moment, that in Africa especially, maybe Christianity is a better alternative and it may be that it's no good trying to preach atheism in Africa, and Christianity might be a better a better alternative.

[..]

Dawkins: I think Stephen Pinker in his latest book has evidence that when we make our political judgment -- we, I mean humanity -- it tends to be not based on evidence, but tends to be based upon tribal loyalty, And that's a very depressing conclusion. And, by the way, one of the things that's been depressing me about my being sort of anti-woke and anti-the militant trans lobby, is that people think I must be right wing. And I've never been right wing. I voted left all my life and, I mean, I detest Donald Trump, for example, but there are people out there on Twitter especially who think that because I detest Donald Trump, therefore I must be an apologist for trans-wokeism or vice versa.

Boghossian: Yeah, so let's talk about that. I think that that is an intentional tactic of people. I think that that is what woke people use, people who have fallen -- have had their cognitions hijacked to this ideology, and I think it's very easy to write you off entirely if they say, "oh Richard Dawkins, he's just a right-wing extremist," you know, "Pinker he's a right-wing extremist," although he's the second largest donor to the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and Harvard, or who whoever it is. I've never voted for Republican candidate my whole life. I'm constantly getting that I'm on the right, but I think it's a tactic both because they don't have to do the intellectual work to rebut the arguments, so they can just a priori say that's not true. And it's a tactic because the left-wing media won't have me on, for example, so left-wing media won't, it has a kind of allergy to any self-criticism. So, then I'll go on the on the right-wing media, and the people on the left will say, "well look Boghossian's a right-winger." Well, no I'm only going on the right because -- I'm more than happy and nobody's ever invited me. I've actually invited myself and they won't have me. So, I think it's a kind of strategy to not do the intellectual work to rebut the position. Because it's hard to rebut the position.

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." -- Saul Bellow

Living in an ‘As If’ World

Gender ideologues pretend to care about the truth, but their position boils down to 'because we say so.'

realityslaststand.com

In 1942, the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch published a landmark paper in which she described a particular type of person who relates to the world and to other people in ways that appear normal but who, over time, comes across as inauthentic. “Every attempt to understand the way of feeling and manner of life of this type forces on the observer the inescapable impression that the individual’s whole relationship to life has something about it which is lacking in genuineness and yet outwardly runs along ‘as if’ it were complete.” Hence the term she coined to denote such people—the “As If” Personality.

When these individuals come for therapy, they often appear to engage enthusiastically in the psychotherapeutic process, though over time, no progress is made; a feeling of futility might plague the therapist. The challenge is to recognize and address a fundamental dynamic crippling the work: rather than being used to convey meaning, the words employed by the client instead conceal and ward off an internal truth felt to be intolerable. The personality enacted for the therapist’s benefit embodies a kind of performance, the simulacrum of an actual person with emotions and connections to other people, when in fact, the person feels empty inside and unable to engage authentically with anyone.

In the early years of my practice, one client (a highly intelligent and verbal young man) once asked, “If you tell me what you believe my unconscious is saying based on what you hear, how am I to know if you’re right? How do I know if some other formulation isn’t what’s actually true?” It’s ultimately up to the client to decide whether an intervention is accurate, of course, but this young man couldn’t connect my words with his inner world to assess their accuracy, largely because he relied upon language to obscure rather than to illuminate. He appeared to be a willing client, but the way he communicated instead made sure I’d never get anywhere near him.

As the treatment progressed, he began to offer alternative interpretations to my own. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he might say. “But it could also be …” At that point in my career, I viewed such client-therapist interactions through the lens of dependency and the common defenses against it; I would have pointed out how he was relating me as if we were colleagues or co-therapists and couldn’t allow himself to be a client depending upon me for help. While that formulation is true, I would now add this: while it appeared as if we were engaged in a psychotherapeutic process, he was thwarting my attempts to make contact by substituting an alternative reality for each one that I proposed. Therapy became a competition via language to define what was “true”; he ultimately won that contest and moved on.

Historians of psychoanalytic thought view Deutsch’s formulation of the “As If” Personality as a precursor to our understanding of borderline conditions and pathological narcissism, and my own clinical experience bears that out. The use of language to obscure or annihilate hated truths regularly features in psychotherapy with clients afflicted by disordered personalities; helping them to connect with and tolerate acute psychic pain is a central challenge of this work and means developing a more authentic language connected to emotional truth.

* * *

In my more recent work with gender-distressed youth, I find myself again confronting this disconnect between language and emotion, but it feels less to me about disordered personalities than a social media-induced kind of dissociation. One teenage girl, trans-identified, talks at length about her daily interactions with her mother, her peers at work and at school, but the space between us feels dead. At times, I have a feeling of futility, that if I try to make sense of the actual words she employs and events she describes, we’ll remain stuck in a place without meaning.

Another client, a highly intellectual young man, uses sessions to expatiate on the socio-cultural construction of gender, explains to me why he rejects masculinity and embraces the feminine, but has no connection with his body. He never masturbates and finds his nocturnal emissions to be disturbing. Now and then for reasons that mystify him, he will begin to weep in session. He feels relieved by his tears but has no words to describe what he might be feeling.

Yet another teenage girl, also trans-identified, adamantly insists upon her desire for cross-sex hormones. Like my other two clients, she has no relationship with her body. She spends much of her free time playing video games online, inhabiting her avatar, and interacting with the avatars of other online players she’s never met in real life. The possibility that testosterone will make her sterile or eventually lead her to have a hysterectomy bothers her not at all; she finds the idea of sexual intercourse to be disgusting and has no intention to marry or have children. She has never masturbated and finds the idea “gross.”

Like many young people who survived the lockdown years by going online, these clients have spent so much time inhabiting virtual worlds that they’ve lost connection with what’s visceral, immediate, and real. They live in a realm of imagination where anything is possible, where infinite malleability has taken the place of a physical world with reality-based limitations. By changing your name and your avatar, you can transform yourself into someone entirely new. The laws governing this alternative space give rise to a belief that you can change the very nature of reality simply by describing it in a different way.

The apparent re-creation of reality via language lends an “as if” quality to their personalities. They seem to have an internal psychic life that’s meaningful to them, they appear to have friends and other social relationships, but their emotional lives lack depth. Because their words have become untrustworthy guides to truth, I’ve taken to teaching my clients about how we human beings come to recognize our own feelings as they arise—when it comes to sadness, for example, through the perception of bodily sensations around the eyes, chest, and back of the throat. With the first client I described above, most times when I ask her to move her attention down into her body, she will begin to cry.

For many young people, social media usage has severed the connection between specific words denoting feelings and the visceral indicators that help us to identify those feelings. The signifier has become detached from the signified. As a result, language becomes a disembodied and self-contained set of internal rules and interrelationships without connection to psychic truth and often external reality.

* * *

In our daily interactions with other people, we usually assume that the words they use to communicate accurately represent the meaning they intend to convey; this fundamental assumption underlies all cooperative efforts to engage with other human beings. But in our modern world, it’s increasingly difficult to believe that much of the language exchanged conveys meaning or objective truth, especially in the contentious realm of social media. Like my patients described above, the public language deployed in this space often serves to deny or obscure truth, to replace it with an alternative reality constructed via language. Life on Twitter often boils down to a war of words to determine whose version of “reality” will prevail, a dynamic obscured by the misleading appearance that both sides are using language in the same way.

In her keynote address last month at Genspect’s historic “The Bigger Picture” conference in Ireland, Helen Joyce, author of the book Trans, drew attention to this issue. While proponents of the affirmative care model for gender-distressed youth speak and write in the empirical language of fact-based science, they actually disdain it. Gender ideology is like a cuckoo bird invading the nest of empiricism says Joyce, appropriating its language and apparently respecting its methods while all the while subverting them. Like my long-ago patient who spoke as if he was authentic and in contact while deploying language to obscure truth, the gender ideologues publish studies in professional journals, written in language that appears to respect the empirical method but actually undermines its assumptions and replaces objective reality with their own disembodied version of “truth.”

The work of Jack Turban, for example, relies upon copious footnotes and citations to other studies which, upon closer examination, either have nothing to do with the position he claims they support or directly contradict it. Turban writes as if he were devoted to the scientific method and its standards of proof but actually cares nothing about them. Colin Wright, Jesse Singal, and Leor Sapir have devoted thousands of words to debunking Turban’s claims, highlighting his factual errors and misleading citations; for those of us firmly rooted in reality, their efforts are crucial, but for Turban and his acolytes, they are irrelevant. Gender ideologues only pretend to care about empiricism, mimicking its techniques for understanding objective reality; what they really intend is to replace immutable facts and objectivity with their own subjective version of the truth.

This dynamic reflects core tenets of post-modern thought and critical theory, where so-called reality is supposedly determined by the discourse around it, and whoever controls that discourse has the power to determine what counts as “true.” While it appears as if gender ideologues are engaged in good faith debate over what scientific studies can tell us about, say, the reality of biological sex, their position really boils down to “because we say so.” They amass flawed and flimsy studies published in professional journals and devote entire books to “proving” sex actually occurs along a spectrum of possible expressions, all in order to control the discourse around the nature of sex. Objective truth is irrelevant; whoever speaks with the loudest voice gets to decide what is true.

Helen Joyce’s observations were inspired by a philosophy symposium she attended focused on the work of British philosopher Roger Scruton; she was particularly struck by his delineation of two opposing views of human nature that give rise to very different ideas about how a society should be governed. One views human nature as a blank slate and believes it can be improved and eventually perfected; from this perspective we are evolving toward an ideal society. The other, “constrained” by the facts of biology and our evolutionary heritage, believes humans cannot fully transcend their bodies, and society must therefore pass laws and uphold traditions that restrain the more brutal aspects of our nature. The American economist Thomas Sowell believes these conflicting visions characterize the conservative versus progressive debate in the United States.

On a broader level, these opposing views also help us to understand the current battle about sex and gender, especially on social media. On the one side we have proponents of biological reality who hold that facts are facts and sex is real; they believe in the scientific method and esteem empiricism as a mode for apprehending truth. On the other, we have those who behave as if they care about the scientific method, but in fact care only about wielding power.

* * *

Just as Helene Deutsche’s landmark paper led to deeper insights into borderline states and pathological narcissism, recognizing the as if quality of contemporary discourse helps explain why our society exhibits so many features of the Cluster B Personality Disorders. Disordered personalities characteristically display overly emotional and irrational forms of thinking along with an unstable sense of self and its relation to others. As patients, they at first appear to engage in the psychotherapeutic process but remain quietly hostile to the process. They will defend their fragile sense of self in often hostile and verbally abusive ways against attempts by their therapist to illuminate painful psychic truths.

Due in part to the rise of social media and the increasing influence of virtual online spaces, young people today inhabit an as if world that mimics reality but actually denies many hated truths about it—that sex is real, binary, and immutable, for example. Adopt a new avatar or change your pronouns and you can become somebody else, even alter your sex. Your subjective belief about who you are overrides objective truth. And if anyone should challenge your self-image by asserting so-called “facts,” you are justified in weaponizing language and hurling abuse to ensure that objective reality will not prevail. Rage, invective, and crude insults to dehumanize the other are the order of the day.

Welcome to Twitter, a place where daily interactions between two conflicting visions of human nature resemble one prolonged eruption of borderline rage. On one side are those who insist reality must be what they say it is; they feel sorry for themselves and persecuted by those who, on the other side, assault them with facts and arguments about objective reality. It takes a non-defensive therapist with a high tolerance for pain and a strong sense of self to work with disordered personalities, in part because they so often attack your own sense of self-worth when they feel threatened; it’s no wonder that even the rationalists ultimately resort to contempt and abuse as Twitter discourse descends into name-calling on both sides.

How are we to heal a disordered society such as ours? Most of the time, I’m cautiously optimistic that the Colin Wrights and Jesse Singals of the world will eventually prevail and, through dispassionate analysis and assertions of fact, reinforce our connections to objective reality. But sometimes, in the dark of the night, I worry that the proponents of radical subjectivity will win. Like my long-ago patient who defeated my efforts to connect him with psychic truth and who ultimately destroyed his own treatment, they will shout the rest of us down with brutal abuse, in the process annihilating all the glorious achievements of Western Civilization and the Enlightenment.

Existential OCD involves intrusive, repetitive thinking about questions which cannot possibly be answered, and which may be philosophical or frightening in nature, or both. The questions usually revolve around the meaning, purpose, or reality of life, or the existence of the universe or even one’s own existence. These same questions might come up in a university philosophy or physics class.  However, most people can leave such classes or read about these topics and move on to other thoughts afterwards. Similar to other forms of OCD, individuals with Existential OCD can’t just drop these questions.

Scrupulosity is a subtype of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) involving religious or moral obsessions. Scrupulous individuals are overly concerned that something they thought or did might be a sin or other violation of religious or moral doctrine. They may worry about what their thoughts or behavior mean about who they are as a person.

“Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. Their content may include a variety of themes (e.g., persecutory, referential, somatic, religious, grandiose). Persecutory delusions (i.e., belief that one is going to be harmed, harassed, and so forth by an individual, organization, or other group) are most common. Referential delusions (i.e., belief that certain gestures, comments, environmental cues, and so forth are directed at oneself) are also common. Grandiose delusions (i.e., when an individual believes that he or she has exceptional abilities, wealth, or fame) and erotomanic delusions (i.e., when an individual believes falsely that another person is in love with him or her) are also seen. Nihilistic delusions involve the conviction that a major catastrophe will occur, and somatic delusions focus on preoccupations regarding health and organ function.

Delusions are deemed bizarre if they are clearly implausible and not understandable to same-culture peers and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. An example of a bizarre delusion is the belief that an outside force has removed his or her internal organs and replaced them with someone else’s organs without leaving any wounds or scars. An example of a nonbizarre delusion is the belief that one is under surveillance by the police, despite a lack of convincing evidence. Delusions that express a loss of control over mind or body are generally considered to be bizarre; these include the belief that one’s thoughts have been “removed” by some outside force (thought withdrawal), that alien thoughts have been put into one’s mind (thought insertion), or that one’s body or actions are being acted on or manipulated by some outside force (delusions of control). The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity.”

-- American Psychiatric Association, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"

“Where there is evidence , no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round . We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence .”

-- Bertrand Russell

Question: What, if anything, would ever change your mind?

Ken Ham: No, no one is ever going to convince me that the word of god is not true.

“delusion A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture (i.e., it is not an article of religious faith).”

-- American Psychiatric Association, "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" ("Glossary of Technical Terms")

"We only make fun of Scientology because it's new. It's no more bat shit crazy than Catholicism."

-- Sarah Silverman

the extraterrestrial ruler of a "Galactic Confederacy" who brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as "Teegeeack") in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.

Also can you do more citations in your oc

“Faith is the belief without evidence and reason.

Coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.”

-- Richard Dawkins

“‘I have a personal relationship with my toaster.’

‘It loves me unconditionally & it answers me when I talk to it.’

This is what you sound like when you talk about your religion.”