Magic Trick

(Also posted on Medium)

Let us perform a magic trick.

Social conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism is linked, likely causally, to stressful and sickly conditions, as research shows in populations with high rates of parasite load and pathogen exposure. This is explained by parasite-stress theory, behavioral immune system, disgust response, stress reactivity, sickness behavior, and conservative-withdrawal behavior. The skyrocketing rates of disease (metabolic, cardiovascular, mitochondrial, autoimmune, neurocognitive, etc) that is worsening over time, combined with a recent infectious epidemic (COVID-19), could be why there is so much social madness and reactionary politics in recent years.

To tip society all the way into a demented hell hole, the American right has pushed (while the American left has relented to) increasing economic inequality and other vast disparities, which is itself strongly correlated to social dominance orientation, Machiavellianism, mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, stress-related diseases, anti-social behavior, paranoia, aggression, conflict, and violence. Plus, the conservative indifference to public health issues like heavy metal toxicity is further worsening neurocognitive problems, behavioral issues, and violent crime across the national population.

All of this harms and deranges those on the left as much as those on the right, of course; precisely at a time when the healthcare system is failing and costs have become exorbitant, potentially threatening to bankrupt our society. As always, those who are most harmed by such problems are the poor and disadvantaged, even as almost no one escapes such large-scale health crises. One might think that the leaders on the political left, the ideological persuasion most focused on public health and helping the needy, would be all over this with organized responses, solutions, and policies. But alas, one would be wrong. The focus on public health, since the early post-war period, has been superficial and halfhearted. The well functioning social democracy we Americans once had was long ago defunded and dismantled.

Meanwhile, American liberalism and leftism at present is so weak and impotent, demoralized and disorganized possibly because of malnourishment and maldevelopment caused by the standard American diet of processed foods (refined starches, added sugar, soy, seed oils, etc), although that is true of the American right as well — as a side note, metabolic diseases cause immunocompromise and are a major comorbidity of infectious disease like COVID-19. This is bad enough on its own, if it weren’t exacerbated by the leftist or pseudo-leftist fear-mongering about and corporate-co-opted scapegoating of animal foods and animal fat (quasi-ethical veganism, corporate greenwashing, environmentalist astroturf, low quality nutrition studies research, etc) that has resulted in the recommendations of severely restricted intake of animal-based nutrition (fat-soluble vitamins, B vitamins, creatine, carnitine, taurine, glycine, etc).

This animal-based nutrition, if it were appreciated, would otherwise offset the harm and promote health — no such luck. Research particularly associates nutritional deficiencies, as related to low intake of animal foods, with mental illness like mood disorders and with what Dr. Weston A. Price talked about in terms of moral sickliness (i.e., anti-social behavior). The push for a plant-based diet, typically high-carb and high-seed oil, could turn out to be one of the most devastating and crippling things that has ever happened to the American left. Without a healthy, strong, and vital political left to push back against an increasingly psychotic right led by dark personalities (narcissists, Machiavellians, psychopaths), it has allowed the invigorated meat-eating minority on the far right to dominate — certainly, the likes of Donald Trump eats his meat.

More broadly, some argue that there are underlying issues that connect so much of these health issues, wrapping them all up as a singular health crisis (Chris Palmer, Brain Energy). There are also rising rates of autism, ADHD, and similar neurocognitive issues — no, this isn’t mere neurodiversity (e.g., autistics have higher rates of de novo mutations). Numerous diseases seem specifically linked by way of metabolic syndrome and mitochondrial dysfunction. And all of this is worsening across generations, with each younger generation more sickly than the last. There is also something weird going on with the sexes. Girls are sexually and neurocognitively maturing at ever younger ages, while boys development is increasingly delayed. This is seen in real world results such as increasing rates of women in college with decreasing rates of men. Many worry that young males are being left behind, yet we don’t understand what is causing it — this has given ammunition to the reactionaries and understandably has fed into moral panic, with the indifference by much of the left not being helpful.

Quite likely related to this shift in the sexes, across this past century, there has been a steady decline of measured testosterone levels, sperm count, and male grip strength. Boys and men are literally becoming effeminized, including rising rates of male infertility, erectile dysfunction, and moobs or man boobs (i.e., gynaecomastia). This could be caused by various factors, such as increased intake and exposure to hormones, hormone-mimics, and hormone-disruptors from food, food packaging, and environmental sources (soy, canned foods, farmed fish, pesticides, plastics, cosmetics, fragrances, cleaning products, herbal supplements, pharmaceuticals, tap water, etc). By the way, a major hormone disruptor is that of heavy metals; and so not only causing brain damage, stunted neurocognitive development, lowered IQ, increased learning disabilities, disturbed impulse control, aggressive behavior, and violent crime.

As a liberal, we have no issue with people expressing non-conforming gender identities and so individuals don’t need to give any reason. We take LGBTQ+ rights as a given, and we support people choosing their own pronouns or whatever. That said, what if the rapid spread of such gender diversity is being artificially induced? It’s one thing for someone to freely choose an identity, but it’s not a choice (i.e., non-consensual) if it’s happening by causal agents that were forced upon people by circumstance, by collectively-created conditions. Yet neither is it a choice on a collective level, since we’re not even publicly talking much about it, at least not in the mainstream. We are just passively allowing ourselves to be affected in unpredictable ways and with unforeseeable consequences. We could implement better regulations. Do we have the political will to do so? No. In our dysfunction, we feel fatalistic about our dysfunction, forming a vicious cycle.

There are many strange and challenging things going on in society. To make matters worse, the fields of research that could better help us to understand have been in the middle of a replication crisis for decades, while the public health experts have become corrupted by big money and powerful interests. We are in the middle of a public health crisis that our leading institutions can’t fully acknowledge as a public health crisis. Instead, it’s often portrayed as a bunch of unrelated issues, typically private concerns, with illness to be treated with expensive drugs to further profit pharmaceutical companies.

The public is not convinced or comforted. The problem isn’t only a crisis of public health but also of public trust and confidence, a crisis of bad governance, along with a crisis in the economy. Polling shows that public trust has declined in every major American institution: Congress, military, corporate media, big business, religion, etc. The general stress and sickliness has created a sense of general malaise, having turned malignant with cynical apathy and learned helplessness at a collective level.

There you go. In having grabbed hold of multiple third rails, this post is officially politically incorrect and lacking respectability. All sides have been equally antagonized and fairly indicted. We are all the problem. We Americans are a population in a vicious spiral, possibly a death spiral; a health crisis drawing us into an existential crisis. The entire spectrum of American politics has been critically judged as sickly and worse. This post has managed to tell the harshest of truths that few would want to hear or be willing to take seriously, and this is why the most important truths remain unseen, invisible. Almost all of the potential viewers, from right to left, who might have benefited from reading this post probably have disappeared before reaching the end of the piece, if they even bothered to read past the beginning.

It’s a disappearing act. Magic!

* * *

Addendum:

There is a simple reason for why most people’s minds would likely shut down and snap closed long before they got near to the end of this piece. In ideological and egoic self-defense, it would be hard for most people to believe that what is argued here is completely true or even significantly true. Sure, those on the left might cheer along with associating the right with a sickly society. And those on the right could nod their heads in agreement about the left being weak. But the majority on both sides would feel instant denial that any of the accusations might fully or partly apply to themselves and those they identify with.

A common weakness of human nature is the lack of and resistance toward self-awareness, self-scrutiny, and self-criticism. It’s not a widespread talent in the human species to be able to look upon oneself from an external perspective, to imagine how other’s would perceive one’s behavior. There is another limitation. Individuals of immense, wide-ranging, and insatiable intellectual curiosity (e.g., highest end of the dual personality trait of ‘openness to experience’ and ‘intellect’) are extremely rare specimens. This post is implicitly asking people to remain open-minded to a greater extent, which simply is something most people are unwilling or unable to do.

Everything argued here is based on a vast amount of scientific research and evidence, but few are familiar with it, much less conversant. It’s not because this knowledge is meager, contested, arcane, and obscure. Rather, it’s just that most people don’t want to know it. These are uncomfortable truths. We don’t find what we don’t look for. If one simply denies it or else refuses to acknowledge it at all, then one never has to face that sense of discomfort, nor think a new thought, nor consider a new perspective. This article is inviting people into radicalism, specifically a radically leftist take. It’s presenting a systems theory that we humans are the products of socially constructed environments and material conditions.

Some of the evidence is already decades old, and in other cases it’s been around for generations, but it’s definitely only now taking hold more fully within the social sciences. It will probably take some decades more for it to spread out into public awareness and mainstream politics. One of the difficulties is that the world we are living in changes faster than does public and political knowledge. That means problems develop faster than solutions. So, we’ll have to utterly destroy our collective health as a society and tumble into total existential crisis before we’ll be able to collectively respond. Our present system is based on old knowledge with much of it already obsolete, if few of us are cognizant of this state of affairs.

As such, we are trapped in the echoes of the past, struggling just to keep up with present realities. We can’t see the world around us for what it actually is, blinded by our ideas about what we think it should be. We stumble along with knowledge claims and theories that often have already been disproven, or are partly false, or shown to be weak. Multiple fields of research have been stuck in replication crises for quite a while now. Some things we think we know have been premised on very few studies that no one ever bothered to try to replicate in the past. We’ve just assumed so much is true according to what confirmed our biases and what agreed with our preconceived conclusions.

Now with better quality research being done, we are coming to entirely new understandings, or else reinterpreting old evidence in new light. That is some of what’s being presented here. Take the first part about the link between sickliness and certain ideologies or rather ideological mentalities. The evidence for that has been building over a long period of time, but it’s taken the development of theories to explain that evidence and bring it together, so as to make it persuasive and compelling. It’s simply not how we’ve thought about something like authoritarianism since World War II.

The fact of the matter is people, including scientists and other experts, rarely change their minds. The old guard of the post-war understanding of ideology will have to die off before new understandings can take hold (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). That is probably even more true for the understanding about not only the nutritional importance of animal foods but also the understanding of how powerfully diet affects psychology, personality, neurocognition, and mental health. Tremendous amount of evidence is already available, but we can’t accept it and make sense of it according to old models. That brings us to the second part of this piece where we talk of the political left.

Since we falsely assume a plant-based and meat-restricted diet is healthier, according to severely problematic epidemiological studies, mainstream experts refuse to acknowledge that numerous other studies show that vegans and vegetarians have higher rates of numerous health issues, such as mood disorders. What is extremely odd is that, as the rate of mood disorders is rapidly rising, one might think we’d be curious about why that is happening. Intake of red meat and animal fat has declined over the past century, although there has been an increase of chicken and fish intake, along with an increase of fruit, vegetable, and whole grains intake. We Americans were told what was healthier and most of us have done what we were told; more or less (e.g., even sugar intake has stopped rising). So, why is health worsening?

The basic point is narrow, though. We aren’t so much, at the moment, making any grand argument overall about the American diet. Even if experts were correct that more plants and less meat is better for physical health, there is no evidence and never has been evidence that severe restriction of meat and other animal foods is beneficial for mental health. It was just assumed that, since such a diet was supposedly better, there weren’t any concerns. Many on the left felt proud of the sacrifices they made to follow a plant-forward diet, as being perceived as ethically and environmentally better, along with presumably healthier. Even many who didn’t become vegans or vegetarians still made major cuts in their meat consumption, specifically that of red meat.

These dietary changes were concentrated among those on the left. We should be unsurprised that, as with vegetarians and vegans, liberals have higher rates of mood disorders. As a left-winger ourselves, we find it shocking that there is relatively so little concern about mental health on the political left, other than what can seem like superficial and weak posturing. We just don’t take public health all that seriously, at least not seeing it as an actual threat to not only individuals but to democracy itself. It’s simply not on the mainstream radar that we might be psychologically and neurocognitively crippling ourselves as a society, and possibly even worse on the left, because of bad dietary advice and practices.

Though the evidence is right in front of us, we can’t quite put together two plus two and get four. It doesn’t fit the dominant paradigm. No matter how human physiology actually works, the appreciation of animal-based nutrition isn’t how many on the left want to believe human physiology works, and belief trumps all else, not that the human body cares what we believe. Entire ideological narratives have been spun in rationalizing ethical veganism in defense of and in conflation with moral commitments to animal rights and environmentalism. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, on ideological grounds, what a moral accounting of the data actually shows about which diet and food system causes the most harm, death, suffering, and environmental damage. That is because most of those who have taken on this ideological identity are no longer open to new info. They just know they’re right, largely because that is what they experts have asserted to be true.

Yet we have diverse sources of scientific evidence from the research literature that challenges this dogmatic self-certainty and self-righteousness. For a fact, we know which nutrients are positively correlated and causally linked to neurocognitive development and mental health. We know those specific nutrients are concentrated in animal foods, particularly meat. We know those who eat less meat or no meat have higher rates of mood disorders. We know that liberals and others on the left on average eat less meat. And we know that liberals, like vegans and vegetarians, likewise have more mood disorders. These are all of the facts that are needed to make sense of what is going on, but we can’t quite put it all together. And so it doesn’t occur to us that maybe the reason the political left has gotten weaker and more disorganized over time might be related to these interlinked facts of mental health decline.

We could go through all of the facts for the other arguments and observations made. The issue of the sexes similarly becomes apparent just by looking at the vast data that has accumulated over the past century. So, we could cite and link to the sources of all this info, all the research, data, and theories. We’ve done that many times before in many other pieces elsewhere. But a large point being made is that all of that is largely irrelevant. Facts only matter if they’re acknowledged. The majority who wouldn’t read this piece to the end don’t stop reading because there wasn’t enough scientific references. If anything, to include all the supporting evidence would make an even more ideologically challenging and threatening piece that would result in even fewer reading it. Public knowledge, awareness, and perception doesn’t change because of facts; at least not in the short term.

* * *

A Personal Note:

The motivation here is highly personal. [And by the way, our chosen personal pronouns are plural, for reasons of the bundle theory of mind, having nothing to do with gender identity.] As a leftist, we are both radical and liberal. But we aren’t extremist, as that is entirely separate from radicalism. Introverted proclivities combined with a mild-mannered Midwestern upbringing has shaped us into a moderate in personality. We are the product of Iowa Nice, but translated through the culture of a liberal and literary college town, and driven by a love of learning.

What our radicalism means is that we have the ability and the tendency to follow lines of speculation, argument, and evidence to their ultimate conclusion, no matter what others think . We are highly principled in that way; and in an unprincipled world, that is radical. But also, etymologically, radical simply means going to the root of things; and hence the connection to a fierce intellectual curiosity. That is what’s being expressed here. It’s our independent-mindedness that leads us to becoming politically incorrect leftists. Our moral commitments demand this of us.

That is how we became liberal leftists, an ideological identity that some leftists claim is impossible — pick a side! Well, we have picked a side, a total commitment to egalitarianism, liberty, and solidarity; the tripartite overlap between the liberal and the leftist. We’d go so far as to argue leftism isn’t possible as anything but liberalism and that leftism so far is the greatest fruition of liberalism. We are both liberal-minded and socially liberal. Our having turned into a malcontent was more incidental, but it’s never turned us to the dark side of misanthropy. We are a tender-hearted feeling type, in Jungian typology (or INFP in MBTI).

Yet though raised in a touchy-feely, hyper-liberal, new-agey church, our parents are actually conservative Republicans. And we spent most of our teen years in the Deep South, the region of the country with the most conservative and authoritarian population, not to mention the highest rates of parasitism and metabolic syndrome, both of which cause immunocompromise. So, our early life spent between different kinds of regions and communities has given us a strong sense of comparison and contrast. That is why we can be an equal opportunity critic, in having seen both worlds up close and personal.

This leads us to troubles, but we can’t help ourselves — like the scorpion, it’s just in our nature. Anyway, our mind resides in an ideological no-man’s land. Hence, when we write freely like this, we guarantee ourselves almost no audience. And of course, we knew exactly what we were doing when we wrote the above, all the text prior to the Addendum. That was the whole point. We occasionally feel compelled to demonstrate what fierce truth-telling looks like, just in case a random person comes along who shares this kind of intellectual radicalism. But admittedly, such people are uncommon; and so we typically have tried to moderate this impulse to make our writings more inviting and accessible.

In the end, we can’t hold back all the time. And as we age, the less we want to hold back at all. The results, though, are predictable. This came up again lately and it’s what directly motivated us here. We were chatting with a fellow Medium writer, Frances A. Chiu, who is a published author. Her most recent book is The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man. As expected, her main focus or at least recent focus is that of Thomas Paine. By the way, Paine was also a radical malcontent who had a way of telling it like it is, eventually resulting in his having become a persona non grata. His later harsh critiques of organized religion was not well received at the time, but he wasn’t one to only speak the truth when it was popular and convenient.

In talking with Chiu, it became clear we had much ideologically in common. We even noticed she had a piece where she described her love of meat, including red meat. So, however she might identify herself, she fits what one could call a red-blooded leftist, in that the deep red color of blood comes from iron that is particularly concentrated in red meat. A century ago, or even earlier in the century before that, almost all American leftists were meat eaters with red meat being widely consumed. With that in mind, we decided to take a chance by mentioning our thoughts related to diet and health, a variation on the argument made here. Up to the point of our writing that comment, she had quickly and positively responded to every one of our comments. But after that comment, there was total silence.

It’s an example of where some people’s radicalism stops other people’s radicalism is just getting started. Rather than an end point for our ideological aspirations, Paine’s radicalism is merely a jumping off point. And Paine, for certain, was a red-blooded American. That was part of the point we made to Chiu, in the above linked comment: “American colonists were able to successfully revolt against a vast imperial force was partly because they were known as the healthiest population in the Western world at the time, with tremendous access to an abundance of animal foods, including lots of lard and butter: farm-raised animals, wild game, and seafood. It’s not a coincidence that the first two centuries of powerful leftism, from the late colonial period to the mid-20th century, was when the majority of leftists were on an animal-based diet.” This apparently wasn’t received with curiosity, excitement, and inspiration.

We’re used to it. Even for radical leftists, this kind of thought is more than a few radical steps too far. It’s not even necessarily that someone like Chiu would’ve been offended by our suggestion that plant-based leftism has led to a weak and disorganized left-wing movement. That is a possibility, although just as likely it just made no sense to her or otherwise felt off-putting. She was all on board as long as our critiques remained within conventional categories of ideological thought. Our bringing up this other angle can be transgressive in a way that, to our experience, few other people seem to grok. It presents an understanding of humanity and society that feels alien to many, sometimes to the point of seeming absurd and incomprehensible. Or else it might feel too personally critical, as people can get really sensitive around all things dietary.

It’s not the first time this has happened. We’ve lost count. It’s not only about diet. The entire health framing of ideology really just doesn’t make much sense to most people, as few people have much knowledge of this area of evidence. It feels wrong, particularly to individualistic Americans, that environmental conditions might shape or possibly even determine our ideological identity and worldview. That suggestion can feel plain wrong, as undercutting a standard ideological bias in American culture. Then throw the dietary theory on top of that and it’s just way too much for the average American, including the average leftist, to handle. Put all this together and you can almost guarantee to have no audience at all, which was the point of this whole exercise.

So, when we say that these kinds of thoughts are politically incorrect, we aren’t exaggerating. What we speculated here about plant-based undermining of movement leftism is a thousand times more harsh of a critique than the mild comment that ended our friendship with Wagner. But it’s not only about overly sensitive liberals. If we were to point out the research on sickliness in relation to conservatism and authoritarianism, it would not go over well with our conservative parents or other conservative family members. Just even mentioning the research showing the real world overlap of conservatism and authoritarianism would be an invitation to a verbal fight. As for those besides family members, if we were to post such blasphemous thoughts on a conservative forum or subreddit, we’d be banned in a sweet second. It’s political incorrectness all around.

As a lover of free speech, this is demoralizing. The thing about free speech is that it requires both negative freedom and positive freedom. It’s not only about being free to speak but also being free to be heard and free to effectively communicate, hence freedom of dialogue which requires there to be multiple sides who are committed to freely engaging, including listening. The response we so often get, though, is disengagement. And as a leftist in general, it’s doubly demoralizing to be shut down by one’s fellow leftists. If other leftists won’t even listen to hard truths from the left, then there is no one else to hear those truths at all and so it’s as though they were never spoken.

* * *

Some Further Thoughts:

Ironically, it’s precisely a sickly left that feels so weak as to be threatened that, in seeking to protect the leftist in-group, the sickly left turns authoritarian in censoring, suppressing, ignoring, or banishing what doesn’t conform to groupthink; which is a betrayal of centuries-old leftist principles (liberté, égalité, fraternité). The potentially anti-authoritarian left that otherwise could offer something different from the authoritarian right, instead, in reaction merely offers another variety of authoritarianism. This confirms the very theory of sickliness that was denied and dismissed by default of silence or refusal to engage.

Even a liberal doesn’t have full access to the greatest potential of liberal-mindedness under illiberal conditions, and all stressful and sickly conditions in this sense are illiberal. Liberal-mindedness, hence social liberalism and liberal democracy, is a result of health and so is only possible through health. In an already stressed-out population within high inequality and dominance hierarchies, one would expect a malnourished, sickly, and weak left to be reactionary toward anyone pointing out that the left is malnourished, sickly, and weak. Whereas in a well functioning liberal democracy, a healthy, strong, and confident left would allow, support, and promote vigorous open debate about such challenging viewpoints.

This is an old thought we’ve had, as we’ve realized that liberal-mindedness requires social, public, and moral health. Left-liberalism is a hothouse flower, in needing optimal conditions to bloom. That is why it’s so easy to turn a liberal or leftist into a reactionary authoritarian simply by putting them under even minor stress or cognitive overload. Such as how liberals will speak in conservative-style stereotypes when just slightly intoxicated, as shown in one study. Or from another study, how liberals who first learned of the 9/11 terrorist attack through tv images, as opposed to radio, were more supportive of the right-wing War On Terror. Stress and sickliness, in shutting down liberal-mindedness, shuts down the capacity of liberals to express their liberal-minded concern for public health.

There is the conundrum. The very unhealthy society that needs to talk about it’s collective ill health is the least able and willing to talk about it, along with having the most compromised liberal democracy and liberal leftism that would support public health policies and interventions. That thought is both intriguing and frustrating. The problem itself obstructs solving the problem; or, heck, obstructs even acknowledging that a problem exists; or else simply obstructs recognition of what kind of problem it is so as to help guide the process of seeking and implementing an effective solution. That is a real humdinger.

Such a conundrum is found all across our society, and so examples of it abound. A similar line of thought occurred to us recently in perusing the research, theories, and treatments of Alzheimer’s disease. Like numerous other illnesses, physical and mental, as Chris Palmer writes about, much of what underlies Alzheimer’s is metabolic and mitochondrial, hence having much to to with diet and nutrition; although interestingly pathogens and toxins can also play a role — — all the factors of Alzheimer’s, by the way, overlap with the previously described conditions of anti-social behavior, social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, the reactionary mind, and deranged leftism. Anyway, the focus ends up being expansive, even as the mechanisms involved are specific. There are connecting points that link together the diverse factors.

Dr. Dale Bredesen, a leading Alzheimer’s researcher, has written about the centrality of amyloid protein precursor (APP), which is directly tied into the mitochondria. Also, in terms of metabolism, the digestive system and microbiome (gut, oral, and nasal) connect to the mitochondria, nervous system, endocrine system, brain, etc through numerous pathways. Once all is accounted for, Dr. Bredesn states there are several dozen primary causal and contributive factors to Alzheimer’s. In looking around at the evidence, the originating and fundamental sources of pathogenesis seems to be a combination of lifestyle, personal habits, diet, and environment. Basically, the individual becomes sick because they’re living in sickly conditions. The near total failure in the development of effective Alzheimer’s treatments is because the healthcare system and the public health institutions have failed to support, promote, and advocate the change of the sickly conditions that cause disease in the first place, with Alzheimer’s merely being one of numerous consequences.

That is the situation we find ourselves also with sickly ideological mentalities. The conditions that cause sickness are also the conditions that prevent healing and health. Those sickly conditions involve high inequality, dominance hierarchies, socioeconomic stressors, over-work, sleep deprivation, anxiety-inducing corporate media, political propaganda, anti-democratic Machiavellianism, toxins, hormone mimics and disruptors, pathogens, antibiotic and antibacterial overuse, immunocompromise, malnourishment, nutritional deficiencies, food additives, pesticides, household cleaners, metabolic syndrome, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammatories, and on and on.

Yet almost everything we know or think we know about humans has been in studying them under these sickly conditions, and so to a large degree we’ve normalized sickliness and the sickness response as part of our normative conception of human nature; which feeds into WEIRD bias since most research subjects are WEIRDos (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). The non-human equivalent of WEIRDos is that of lab animals. Lab chow (industrially-processed, plant-based, high-carb, high-seed oil, etc) is the equivalent of the standard American diet. And the lab animals live isolated and kept relatively inactive in cages that mimic modern urbanization of humans. Like modern WEIRDos, lab animals are some combination of bored and stressed, with an epigenetic inheritance shaped by such unnatural conditions. No wonder we struggle to understand what makes health possible.

In his book Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari brought up an awesome example. A study was done on rats that seemed to imply that addiction was biologically predetermined. When given a choice between plain water and cocaine-laced water, the rodents felt compelled to drink the drugged source. They wouldn’t do anything else and continued until they died. To many researchers and experts, that settled the debate. There is just something genetically inborn about addictive behavior that is elicited by certain chemicals. But a later researcher considered the possibility that caged rats don’t represent normal, healthy rodent behavior. He repeated the study but did so with entirely different conditions. He built his lab animals a rat park. They had everything a rat could need and want: lots of space, separate rooms, places to hide, a community of other rats, nutritious tasty food, and toys. His rats ignored the drugged water.

To put it simply, we are not living in a human park, no where near it, and if anything the opposite. As the research appears to indicate, the mentalities of social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and dark personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism) are how human nature is more likely to express under conditions of parasitism, pathogen exposure, social stress, cognitive overload, perceived threat, high inequality, dominance hierarchies, etc. All of this represents the occasional and fleeting extremes during hominid evolution. Hunter-gatherers will temporarily face a problem (drought, food scarcity, etc), typically remedying it or moving on to somewhere else.

Until the agricultural revolution and hence permanent settlements, it was rare for humans to get permanently stuck in unhealthy conditions. So, we have little evolved capacity for dealing with long-term chronic stressors. It’s just not normal in evolutionary terms, but it has become normal in modern civilization, at least outside of the healthy social democracies. In United States history, there was only one period during which a liberal consensus ruled society and the government, and it’s no coincidence that it was during the time when the country was known as the leading social democracy in the world, not to mention praised as generally having the best run government. It specifically had a reputation as an efficient and well functioning bureaucracy, that is to say the government genuinely served the public good, including public health.

Also not coincidentally, that shift away from the liberal consensus, when the social democracy was defunded and dismantled, simultaneously involved a change in dietary dogma toward plant-based fear-mongering about red meat and saturated fat. Up to that point, meat and other animal foods had been considered central to a healthy diet, along with an understanding that carbs were fattening. And for the centuries prior  —  from Roger Williams, Daniel Shays, and Harriet Tubman to Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs, and Fred Hampton  —  Americans had eaten tremendous amounts of meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and animal fat, particularly lard and butter. Under these healthy conditions, it was a powerful red-blooded left-wing movement that had fought so hard during the American Revolution and other early revolts, fought so hard during the Populist and Progressive eras, fought and won many battles. Through a highly organized movement, they built up the public-minded institutions and policies that made social democracy possible (e.g., Milwaukee sewer socialists). But as the diet and other lifestyle conditions worsened, the left no longer has what it took to defend the public good.