Religion is a Mental Illness

Hard lessons in life | Helen Joyce | The Critic Magazine

Novel gender identities and orientations allow people to claim to be oppressed without suffering any hardship…

The Critic Magazine

Being invited to talk at a conference for psychoanalysts in London last month was not, on the face of it, a surprise. The topic was trans identification in children; I’ve written a book on this and other trans-related issues. What was surprising, given the transactivist tactic of demanding “no debate”, was that the event went ahead as planned.

My refusal to agree that men who identify as women thereby become women means that when I’m invited to speak, there’s usually trouble. Last March I was asked to present at a conference for NHS psychiatrists — and disinvited after a smear campaign. The conference was eventually cancelled. When philosopher Arif Ahmed asked me to speak at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge in October, the college master emailed fellows and students describing me as “offensive, insulting and hateful”. I managed to give my talk, but had to shout to be heard over protestors outside.

The psychoanalysts’ event wasn’t entirely free of drama. During the morning, I and other critics of trans ideology described its spread through the medical profession, and the harm this is doing to gender-distressed children. As the session closed, a young man stood and denounced us as hatemongers, his voice and body trembling as he spoke. He compared us to the psychotherapists who, half a century ago, peddled “conversion therapy” — electrical shocks and nausea-inducing drugs aimed at turning gay people straight. 

I’ve heard opposition to “gender-affirming” care analogised to conversion therapy many times, and it’s absurd. This is the treatment pathway involving giving puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-distressed children, often as a precursor to surgery that will leave them sterile and lacking in sexual function. Most children sent down this path would have grown up gay if left to do so in peace; when they identify as the opposite sex, they become nominally straight. It’s the gender ideologues, in other words, who are the modern-day conversion therapists.

I’m hopeful that the event for psychotherapists going ahead with a critic inside the room is a sign that “no debate” is no longer an effective tactic. The would-be censors haven’t given up, however, only changed tactics. Instead of trying to silence us, they’re starting to argue. The way they do it says a lot about their worldview, in which subjectivity trumps objectivity, emotion trumps reason and words trump material reality.

At the heart of trans activism is a power play which seeks to impose trans-identified people’s inner feelings on the external world. Other people are expected to ignore the material fact of sexed bodies and “affirm” stated identities by the use of “preferred pronouns”.

Pronouns are not the only words now regarded as powerful enough to change reality. Take the rewriting of literary classics to remove racial slurs, often imaginary, and workplace training that purports to root out “implicit bias”. Both are based on the notion that words, rather than describing the world, shape it so profoundly that censorship can be a route to social justice. What makes a word worthy of being erased is entirely subjective: that someone claims to find it harmful, no matter how tenuous or outlandish that claim.

Laws, too, are moving away from objective tests. Hate crimes, which attract longer sentences, are those which the victim “perceives” to have been motivated by prejudice, whether or not that perception is reasonable. Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, not yet in force, will criminalise speech that merely “might” make a minority group feel “vulnerable” or “excluded”. As for “non-crime hate incidents”, as the Orwellian name suggests, these involve no crime and rely purely on perception. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has said that the police must stop routinely recording such incidents. They’ve already been told this by the High Court,  yet the practice continues. 

One reason for this elevation of subjective feelings over objective facts is a trend towards celebrating victimhood. Most early societies were what sociologists call “honour cultures”, in which might was right and maintaining status after an insult or injury meant exacting swift revenge. The rule of law saw honour cultures give way to “dignity cultures”, in which status is formalised in job titles and academic qualifications, self-control is admired and justice is dispensed by police and courts.

In their 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe how honour and dignity cultures are giving way to a moral code which elevates the oppressed. Call-outs and cancellations, they explain, are status-raising tactics, in which people claim to have been harmed by problematic views and to have suffered micro-aggressions in order to don the mantle of victimhood.

The spread of victimhood culture has helped popularise novel gender identities (non-binary, agender) and sexual orientations (aroace, pansexual) since they allow people to claim membership of oppressed groups without experiencing any actual hardship. It is also driving the self-diagnosis of mental illnesses, from quotidian conditions such as anxiety and depression, to boutique ones such as multiple-personality disorder or a novel form of Tourette’s transmitted by TikTok. 

More generally, this is a culture that encourages young people to regard themselves as traumatised. According to Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, US schools and universities have started to promote three pernicious falsehoods: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that feelings are a good guide to reality and action; and that life is a battle between good people and evil ones.

These dysfunctional beliefs, which Haidt dubs “anti-cognitive behavioural therapy”, promote mental fragility. They encourage people to feel fearful of ordinary words and to regard censorship as virtuous. The logic goes like this: being dis-agreed with makes you a victim; victims are good; people saying things you disagree with therefore deserve to be silenced and punished. This is the culture of “crybullying”: using claims of victimhood to harass others.

Haidt thinks social media, with its polarising and conflict-inducing algorithms, is largely to blame. Another culprit is the “post-modern turn” that was underway before the internet era, in which academics, activists and political theorists stopped thinking of reality as something that could be described objectively and studied empirically, embracing a radical subjectivity instead. 

To these, I would add smaller families and later childbearing. A record half of all women now reach 30 without having given birth. Until the past couple of decades, most childhoods involved playing without adults around, if not with siblings then with neighbours’ children whom you were expected to look out for. 

A growing share of young adults have missed out on these formative experiences. One consequence is that they are painfully ignorant of the ways in which children are different from adults. This is part of the reason so many young people give credence to gender-distressed children’s claims to “really be” members of the opposite sex. 

My younger son identified as a train for most of his waking hours between age two and age four. I put it down to a vivid imagination, read and watched Thomas the Tank Engine on repeat, and waited for him to move on. 

These kidults have also been denied the experiences that would enable them to outgrow the vices of teenagers, namely emotional incontinence and a crippling concern for the regard of peers. Looking after children teaches you to enforce boundaries and prioritise long-term interests over short-term desires. You learn how to say no when that makes you unpopular, to exercise self-control while others are losing it. The worst thing you can do when a child screams at you is to scream back. 

To me, that young man who accused me of supporting conversion therapy appeared never to have learned these lessons. His professed concern for gender-distressed children seemed performative, even narcissistic: more about making him feel good and look good to his political tribe than about what was right for those children. He was failing in the most important task of adulthood: understanding that it’s not all about you. 

North Korea defector compares woke US ideology, education to regime tactics

“I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century … And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they inv

New York Post

“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed? It doesn’t even compute,” Yeonmi Park told The Post of students at her alma mater, Columbia University. “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”

The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.

Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.

In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.

“I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom, and found it,” she writes. “I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to my new home … I want us — need us — to keep the darkness at bay.”

She implores readers: “I need your help to save our country, while time remains.”

Park first made headlines back in 2015 with her book “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom” and for her bold claims that the woke environment she endured as a student at Columbia reminded her of North Korea.

In an interview this week with The Post, Park recalled what it was like to be a North Korean defector who escaped tyranny and oppression only to meet college students intent on claiming victim status and earning oppression points. She dubbed her alma mater a “pure indoctrination camp” and said many of her classmates at New York City’s most elite school were “brainwashed like North Korean students are.

“I never understood that not having a problem can be a problem,” Park said. “They need to make injustice out of thin air or a problem out of nowhere, because they haven’t experienced anything like what other people are facing in the world.”

She was born in Hyesan, North Korea, the second child of a civil servant, and grew up under the rule of then-Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il under the bleakest of conditions.

In the first five years of her life, an estimated 3.5 million North Koreans died of starvation. Park recalls hunting for cockroaches on the way to school to quell her hunger — even as the Kim’s regime banned the words “famine” and “hunger.”

“Darkness in Hyesan is total,” Park writes. ”It’s not just the absence of light, power, and food. It is the absence of dignity, sanctuary, and hope. Darkness in Hyesan is … watching your parents and neighbors hauled away by police for the crime of collecting insects and plants for their children to eat.”

After her father was arrested and sentenced to hard labor for the crime of trading dried fish, sugar, and metals, the Park family’s life in North Korea deteriorated even further. Finally, they planned their way out.

“I didn’t escape in search of freedom, or liberty, or safety. I escaped in search of a bowl of rice,” she writes.

Park’s sister fled North Korea first. Park, then 13, and her mother followed, crossing the freezing Yalu River into China. But rather than finding her sister, the pair fell into the hands of human traffickers who sold Park into sexual slavery. 

After years of forced slave labor, a still-teenage Park was finally able to break free and travel across the Gobi Desert to Mongolia with the help of Christian missionaries. From there, she went to South Korea where she found refuge and was granted citizenship.

Seven years after they were first separated, Park also reunited with her older sister. But they found out that their father had died shortly after he managed to escape to China.

Losing him, Park said, made her “step into a different life: one dedicated to human rights, and improving the lives of people suffering under tyranny. A life of meaning. A life that would make my father proud.”

When Park was a young girl, her mother told her the most dangerous thing in her body was her tongue and warned her that, if she said the wrong thing or insulted the regime, her family could be imprisoned or even executed.

“That’s the end of cancel culture,” Park told the Post. “Of course, we’re not putting people in front of a firing squad in America now, but their livelihoods, their dignity, their reputations, and their humanity are under attack. When we tell people not to talk, we’re censoring their thinking as well. And when you can’t think, you’re a slave — a brainwashed puppet.”

Since her time at Columbia, the New York City-based author and activist has started a YouTube channel, “Voice of North Korea,” where she shares information about life under the regime. She also joined the board of the non-profit Human Rights Foundation, where she works with dissidents from around the world and, most recently, helped with efforts to drop anti-regime leaflets in North Korea.’

Recently divorced, Park is also now a mother to a five-year-old son. She wants him to have the same freedoms she found in America — but is afraid they’re under attack by pernicious woke ideology, and especially identity politics.

In North Korea, Park said, the government divides citizens into 51 classes based on whether their blood is “tainted” because their  ancestors were “oppressive” landowners.

“That’s how the regime divided people. What an individual does doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective,” she explained.

Now, when she sees Americans indulging in race essentialism and identity politics, she said, it feels eerily familiar.

“They say white people are privileged and guilty and oppressors,” Park said. “This is the tactic the North Korean regime used to divide people. In America it’s the same idea of collective guilt. This is the ideology that drove North Korea to be what it is today — and we’re putting it into young American minds.”

Park told the Post she hopes her second book serves as inspiration for Americans to fight back against false promises of “equity” while they still can.

“I really don’t think that we have that much time left,” she warned. “Already all our mainstream institutions have the same ideology that North Korea has: socialism, collectivism and equity. We are literally going through a cultural revolution in America. When we realize it, it might be too late.”

I grew up in Singapore, where I felt first-hand what it was like to live in a society where free speech is restricted. Social harmony is prioritized over civil liberties in Singapore's multi-cultural society, fomenting a culture of fear and self-censorship on top of legal prohibitions.

I moved to America for college when I was 17. I wanted a challenging education and a social milieu that valued the free exchange of ideas because I knew that was the only way to grow intellectually and cultivate emotional resiliency. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I realized that the America I had sought was increasingly resembling the conditions in which I grew up in in Singapore.

Across town from me in Boston, Harvard University had disinvited a record number of speakers, for reasons including their views on topics like immigration, Israel, and sexual orientation. Harvard’s guidelines banned “behavior evidently intended to dishonor such characteristics as race, gender, ethnic group, religious belief, or sexual orientation.” This guideline was nearly identical to what was law in Singapore.

But even worse than that, an intolerant ideology that promoted collective guilt and racial essentialism had begun to emerge. I noticed my white and male classmates were not being allowed to express opinions that addressed issues related to people of color or women. Phrases like “check your privilege” became a part of everyday conversation. This was something that I never witnessed in Singapore, a nation that was prosperous despite its faults because of its focus on the equality of all people.

After university, I co-founded an organization named Ideas Beyond Borders, where we translated and digitied texts about Enlightenment ideas into Arabic for free. We worked with translators who lived in places like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran and Iraq. My exposure to so many failed states led me to see the common denominators that undergirded societal dysfunction and civil conflict; many of these places were severely dogged by extremism, intolerance, and sectarianism.

Even more than my life in Singapore, this provided me with an intense appreciation for the freedoms we have here in America. Why were the students around me so focused on the problems with my white male classmates and teachers, while they largely ignored the injustices I was witnessing around the world?

And since I’ve graduated, it seems like these trends have spread through our nation far beyond the reaches of academia. While so many were focused on American culture wars, including for example asking Disney to fire Gina Carano for supposedly offensive tweets, few were paying attention while Disney made deals to film with the government in Xinjiang, China, where Uighur Muslims were being held in concentration camps. 

This way of looking at the world has a goal of raising awareness of racial injustice. That’s laudable. But within this conception of the world there is also a simplistic and reductive understanding of power dynamics in which oppression must always come from people seen as  white, male, western, heterosexual, cisgender, or ablebodied – and be inflicted upon those seen as marginalized – people of color, colonized or indigenous people, women, LGBT, or the disabled. 

This lens ignores the struggle against real repression globally, including what I have witnessed in Singapore and the Middle East. In doing so, it empowers illiberal, authoritarian forces, from China, to Russia, to the stirrings of Islamist groups eager to rebuild their caliphate.

All around the world, from pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong to feminists in Egypt, countless people seek the freedoms that we in the West take for granted. Meanwhile, we are undoing the ideas that have made the modern West the most progressive place on the planet, while shielding the world’s most brazen abusers of human rights from criticism.

If you care about justice for oppressed people, it’s incumbent on us to push back against bad ideas. America has problems, and we need to improve, but the center of the struggle for human dignity isn’t here. Please, let’s keep America the country I wanted to come to.

I’m Melissa Chen. Join me in defending pro-human values at FairForAll.org.

The Tocqueville effect (also known as the Tocqueville paradox) is the phenomenon in which, as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on". For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.

Keep Your Oppression!

I am tired of people telling me how I should feel and labeling me with adjectives that I can't relate to or don't agree with.

www.byezenwanyi.com

I am tired of people telling me how I should feel and labeling me with adjectives that I can't relate to or don't agree with.

I am tired of others trying to seal my fate with their platitudes of oppression and trauma. I am tired of the manipulation and the mental acrobatics that people try to do to make me believe that I am or that my ethnicity is doomed and that the only way to be pulled out of this darkness is by white saviors and reparations.

I am tired of being thrust into victimhood that I did not choose. Or being forced to support people based on their skin color with no atom of thought being given to their character.

I am tired of being a poster child for pity. I am tired of people telling me that the past can never be forgiven and that grace can never be extended for atrocities that I never experienced and treatment that I never had to endure.

I am not oppressed. I never have been and by the grace of God, I never will be. I am tired of society beating this mindset into my brain.

I am tired of being told of the strikes I have against me. Being a woman and being black are not strikes but blessings. I am not at a disadvantage because I am either of these things.

I am tired of being reminded that my life matters. Why wouldn't it? I know it has. I know it does. I know it always will matter. Plastering it on every road, in every commercial, and every restaurant won't make it matter more.

All life matters. Everything that God touches matters.

My life is not more important than anyone else's because of my skin color or any past or present hardship that I face.

I've seen what real oppression looks like. I know what real oppression sounds like. I've smelled it even. I would be remiss to wear this badge of oppression that I don't deserve.

Why do people want to be victims so badly? Who wants to live a life where the tops of their lungs are always met with screams? Or where their hearts are met with the heaviness of harm and pain. Where they steep themselves in depression and angst?

Your invisible shackles are on too tight! They are cutting off the blood supply to your common sense. Release them. Release them so you can see that the only ally that will save you is you. The only way out is through.

Victory has much less baggage than victimhood.

I will not subscribe to the limiting beliefs that society is constantly trying to put on me. I have enough of my own. I am African not afflicted. I am black not burdened. I am anointed. I am blessed.

You can disagree with me because I am not one of those people that you must virtue signal to...

Some people will hear this and think well, she's African she can't relate to the struggle. Her ancestors weren't slaves. Her ancestors weren't maligned and red-lined. Her blood is not filled with trauma and suffering.

But my question to the naysayers is,

Out of everything you can take from your ancestors, why would you pick pain?

Why not all the progress they made? Why would you pick struggle? And not all the strides they took to free themselves from the physical and mental slavery they endured.

Why are you allowing agents of chaos to tell you how to feel? Why are you letting bad actors and manipulators keep you in a constant state of dis-ease?

There are people who benefit from chaos. There are people that will never bring solutions to the table because solutions are far less profitable than problems.. Solutions won’t line their pockets.

Every day these people remind us of how marginalized and disadvantaged we are. Do you ever wonder why they don't remind us of how far we've come? How much progress has been made?

Why don’t we ever question why people like Oprah, Lebron James, Megan Markle, Trevor Noah, Diddy, JayZ, Patrice Cullors, and many others - push this narrative of oppression when they themselves are great examples of black people who beat the odds they constantly complain about?

I need people to ask themselves, is it a white person keeping me from my greatness, or is it me? Are white people the reason that I didn't wake up on time?

Are white people the reason I didn't work out?

Are white people the reason why I was late to work?

Are white people the reason why I missed class?

Are white people the reason why I don't teach my child to read?

Are they the reason why I was unproductive?

Or why I chose not to be present in my child's life?

Why I chose to have several children with several men?

Or why I chose to sell drugs and poison my community?

Why I chose to not finish school?

Why I chose to not start that business?

Why I chose to plaster my genitals on the internet for money?

I mean c’mon.

If you're oppressed in America, it's because you choose to be.

If you're waiting for reparations to fill the gaping void left by your ego and entitlement, I'm sorry to tell you that it's going to take more than money to fill it.

Stop feeding into this narrative that has been written for you.

You are the author of your narrative. Not white people trying to impose their supremacy. Not black people trying to make up for all the privilege they supposedly lost or never had.

Real oppression doesn't raise $90m in one summer and has none of it go to communities that need it.

Real oppression doesn't get companies to rewrite their mission statements.

Real oppression doesn't get school curricula changed or history reimagined.

Real oppression doesn't buy multiple homes.

Real oppression doesn't let you do or say whatever you want.

Real oppression doesn't get government assistance.

Real oppression doesn't buy homes amongst the very white people they say they are oppressed by.

Real oppression doesn’t own their one tv network.

Real oppression doesn’t demand white people to cash app or Venmo them money for educating them on how everything is anti-black.

Every single one of us has every right to question how society chooses to place and define us. So why would you never question why society wants to mark you with oppression?

Why would you never want to question a society that doesn't hesitate to plaster black death on your TV screens every night? Are black people the only ones dying?

Why would you never question a society that perpetuates your victimhood? That dumbs down your grammar and math skills? That tells you that your individualism, critical thinking skills, emphasis on the scientific method, work ethic, aesthetic, and politeness aren't necessary because they are characteristics of whiteness? Why?

I watched a clip where a young man named King Randall said that BP should reduce their dependence on the government and on WP taking care of our communities. And instead, they should do for and take care of themselves. Roland Martin - an unnecessary fixture in black culture, in my opinion, had the audacity to ask him, why. Smh

Let me tell you something. In my first couple of episodes, I discussed breaking unhealthy patterns. I want to add another pattern that I plan on breaking - that I refuse to pass down to my children. I will not be telling my children that they have to work twice as hard. That they are at a disadvantage because of the color of their skin. That is “The Talk” I plan on having with my kids.

I will not prime them to believe that they are going to suffer from stumbling blocks that stem from white supremacy or their lack of privilege. I will not darken their doorstep or burden them with limiting beliefs of oppression and injustice.

I will simply tell them that success is not an entitlement. Progress is not a birthright. That their character will either open doors or close them. That no one can take their dignity away from them without their permission.

I will tell them to amass as many skills as they can. I will provide them with opportunities to act on their curiosity, facilitate conversations, question what needs to be questioned. I will not put the fear of oppression in them, but the fear of God.

Stay away from movements that affirm you in accepting defeat. Stay away from forces that only amplify trials with no mention of triumph.

I am not oppressed. My children will not be oppressed. I will not curse my life to perpetuate a false narrative. I will not renounce my God-given privilege.

Out of everything you can take from your ancestors, why would you pick pain?