By Bill Donohue, Catholic
League president
It was the day after Ronald Reagan
beat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. I was smiling (I had run
Reagan’s campaign in the North Hills of Pittsburgh), but most of the other
professors at La Roche College (now a university) were sulking, and many
appeared depressed. However, their mood was not uncharacteristic of the way
they were most of the time: There are a lot of unhappy campers in the
professoriate, especially in the liberal arts.
Nothing has changed.
In a new study by psychologists in
Finland assessing the state of mind of radical social justice devotees, it was
found that those who bought into progressive ideas are profoundly unhappy.
Published in the Scandinavian Journal
of Psychology, the
researchers started with a sample of 851 persons, mostly students and
professors at the University of Turku, and then expanded it to 5,030 adults.
They distinguished between those who hold to a traditional liberal perspective
and those who identify with a radical one. They focused on the latter.
The researchers devised a Critical
Social Justice Attitude Scale (CSJAS) that measured seven aspects of what they
deemed as representative of “woke” politics. Most of the items dealt with race,
though one tapped transgenderism (the idea that the sexes are interchangeable).
For example, “University reading lists should include fewer white or European
authors” was deemed reflective of the “woke” view.
Social justice attitudes, the
study’s authors said, “perceive people foremost as members of identity groups
and as being, witting or unwitting, perpetrators or victims of oppression based
on the groups’ perceived power differentials; and advocate regulating how or
how much people speak and how they act if there is a perceived power
differential between speakers, and intervening in action or speech deemed
oppressive.”
The conclusions were riveting.
Regarding the initial small sample,
it was determined that high CSJAS scores were “linked to anxiety, depression,
and a lack of happiness.” On the larger sample, “this lower mental well-being
was mostly associated with being on the political left and not specifically
with having a high CSJAS score.” Women were more likely than men to have high
CSJAS scores, which explains why their happiness quotient was smaller.
The researchers noted that their
findings were consistent with that of other studies on this subject. They are
right about that.
“Liberals, especially liberal
women, are significantly less likely to be happy with their lives and satisfied
with their ‘mental health,’ compared to their conservative peers aged 18-55.”
According to University of Virginia sociologist W. Brad Wilcox, this was “the
big takeaway from the 2022 American Family Survey, a striking new poll from
YouGov and the Deseret
News.”
In 2023, Musa al-Gharbi, a
sociologist at Columbia University, examined data from many studies on this
subject and concluded that conservatives are indeed happier than liberals. He
said this finding “is consistent across countries and extends back in time.”
The question remains: Why are those
on the left so miserable?
For starters, consider this.
Imagine waking up each day thinking the world is made up of oppressors,
racists, sexists, homophobes and their victims. Is that likely to put a smile
on your dial?
It’s actually worse than this.
Left-wing professors, which is to say most of them in the social sciences and
humanities, love to bask in their negativity. Smug as can be, they love
thinking that those who don’t share their views are ignorant buffoons; they, of
course, are the only really bright ones. Their darkness is their defining
characteristic.
But why do these malcontents think
this way?
It has much to do with what
Catholicism calls the sin of pride, the belief that we are self-sufficient
human beings and have no need for God. The big thinkers believe they are too
smart to believe in God. Too bad they aren’t smart enough to know that boys who
claim to be girls should not be allowed to compete against girls in sports and
shower with them. There must be a cavity in their brain when it comes to sex.
It must be said that while those on
the left are the most likely to be unhappy, it has been my experience that
extremists on the right are just as likely to be despondent.
I have often said that when I
encounter a highly educated person, or an activist, for the first time, I know
within minutes if I am dealing with an extremist. The individual could be on
the right or the left—it doesn’t matter. The common denominator is humorlessness.
They rarely smile and their bouts of laughter usually come at someone else’s
expense.
Smiling is important. Laughter is
important. They are staples of mental health. Hanging around those who are
habitually unhappy—for reasons wholly due to their cast of mind and their
inflated idea of who they are—is a chore. It’s also a bore.
The Finnish psychologists learned that left-wing “woke” mavens find it hard to be happy. The deeper problem is that they actually like it that way.
