conservatives hide their mental weakness.
Are Liberals Crazy? part IX: tony soprano syndrome.
Emil Kierkegaard claims that liberals are more passive-aggressive, sadistic, resentful, Machiavellian, and psychopathic than conservatives, but a 2024 study contradicts this.1
What does seem to hold up, in study after study, is that liberals have higher self-reported levels of anxiety, loneliness, and depression.
If a conservative feels anxious, they ignore, suppress, or deny that feeling. Is that mentally healthier than a liberal who identifies the feeling, expresses it, and seeks diagnosis and support? It depends on the context.
If you are alone in the forest in a survival situation, it is more adaptive to suppress your negative emotions and focus on surviving. However, in a social context, it can be more advantageous to express your emotions to elicit sympathy and build group coherence. This may be why women, who are more socially intelligent, are also more emotionally expressive, and more likely to go to therapy. Women aren’t more mentally ill; they are just more emotionally expressive.
If negative emotions are suppressed, however, this doesn’t necessarily eliminate the emotion. Men, who suppress their emotions, are more likely to commit suicide. In this way, those who hide their emotions from others aren’t eliminating their problems, but building up pressure which can later explode in destructive ways. When conservatives self-report feeling less negative emotions, this isn’t necessarily an indication of better mental health, but could instead demonstrate greater suppression of negative thoughts, which is a distinct measure.
Self-Reporting is Limited
Psychologists admit the limitations of self-reporting:
“studies [which] lean on self-reports… are often limited by subjective bias and conformity to social norms.”2
Liberals and conservatives have different social norms. Liberals believe that mental illness is a protected status, while conservatives believe that mental illness is an embarrassing weakness for special snowflakes.
Could conservatives be under-reporting and underestimating their own problems? Or are liberals more likely to seek out help? Or, more cynically, are liberals more likely to get a fake diagnosis when it wasn’t necessary, for social-signaling points?
Since liberalism is heritable, which set of parents is more likely to get their child diagnosed with Asperger’s or ADHD? A liberal mother, who is determined to get her child extra time on tests? Or a conservative mother, who doesn’t believe in that woke nonsense, and thinks everyone should be treated equally in a meritocracy?
Conservatives and liberals are not equally likely to be diagnosed with mental illnesses, even if they both struggle with the same underlying conditions.
Tony Soprano as Conservative Nutjob
Conservatives are low in openness, and this makes them more resistant to big changes, like opening up their personal life to a therapist.
Professor Marquita Lewis-Thames, in her research on higher rates of rural anxiety and depression, found that:
“You have this idea of coming in and saying, ‘Let me help you with your mental health,’ and they’re like, ‘Who the freak are you?’… That’s supported by lower personality trait levels of openness.”
Think of Tony Soprano as an archetypal conservative. He resents sharing his feelings and being intimate with an “expert.” He thinks the way to deal with feeling sad is to stop feeling sad. When some shrink comes with a study and asks him, “have you felt suicidal in the last 90 days?” he says, “no.” Maybe he actually has considered shooting himself in the head, but he lies or deliberately mis-remembers and puts it out of his mind.
He’s afraid to show weakness, even on an anonymous form, even to himself. He has trouble being honest with himself about his own feelings. He has a diminished understanding of his own emotions. He has low emotional literacy.
If liberalism is more feminine, and conservatism is more masculine, then the low emotional intelligence of conservatives is in keeping with gender divides in emotional intelligence.
Suppression vs Expression
Conservatism is an attempt at self-masculinization. Historically, the ability of men to hide their emotional weakness was crucial for survival, both in terms of intimidating enemies, as well as for attracting mates. Men who openly display their weaknesses are more likely to be picked out as victims by bullies, and are less likely to be rated attractive by women, who prefer dark triad traits in short-term mating decisions. The conservative strategy is to obscure one’s own mental weaknesses in order to win women and scare enemies. As a result, conservatives under-report their own mental issues.
By contrast, liberals are more cooperative and narcissistic. They see signaling their own weakness (crying in front of others, for example) as an opportunity to increase their social status and receive attention. Women cry more than four times as frequently as men, and when they do cry, they cry more intensely. Women display weakness more frequently and openly because they are competing for attention and sympathy in an emotional economy, rather than competing violently for dominance in physical competitions.
Liberals display their emotions more than conservatives, and we should consider “going to therapy” as an emotional display, or a narcissistic desire for attention from a therapist, rather than “pure measure” of underlying anxiety and depression. If we consider narcissism a mental illness, then yes, liberals are more mentally ill in this category. But they are also more empathetic and less sadistic than conservatives. Instead of liberals being quantitatively more mentally ill than conservatives, it is more accurate to say that the two groups have qualitatively different mental deviances, or rather, different mental strategies.
Conservatives aren’t mentally healthier.
Among men, “conservatives” were less likely to see a therapist than those who were “extremely conservative” or “slightly conservative.” Otherwise, among men, there was little correlation between political ideology and therapy, with the exception of those who were “extremely liberal.”
It may be the case that “extremely liberal” men go to therapy as a social signal to women. Going to therapy is like going to church for liberals, and “extremely liberal” women may prefer men who report going to therapy over those who do not. This may be a sexual strategy, rather than a reflection of greater levels of mental illness.
It’s not that conservatives don’t need mental help. Instead, they systematically deceive themselves and others, because among conservatives, self-reliance is a virtue, and admitting weakness is a sin.
Maybe Tony Soprano is correct, and therapy is a waste of time. I am not endorsing therapy as a use of your time or money, since the evidence that therapy works is mixed. My point is that the use of therapy doesn’t necessarily mean that liberals are more mentally ill; just that they have a false (ideologically informed) belief about therapy.
In the next episode of Are Liberals Crazy?, I will be explaining conservative avoidance of therapy is a product of a broad rejection of institutionalism and academia.
2024, Associations between the dark tetrad and political orientation: A systematic review with meta-analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112498
2023, Ideological values are parametrically associated with empathy neural response to vicarious suffering: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/18/1/nsad029/7175525
The binarism of portraying people as conservatives or liberals bores me to death. 'Americans' are so deep in their sh*t that cannot understand the world is bigger than their physical borders.
Seems like *therapists* ought to be compared to other culturally similarly technologies (priests, rabbis, coaches etc.).
Differences may persist, but it's hard for me to believe that saying Hail Marys after chatting with a priest is entirey distinct from doing a mindfulness exercise post therapy.