But ... WHY Are Progressives Less Happy?

In this episode, the hosts revisit a previously discussed topic with a focus on the happiness disparity between progressives and conservatives. Based on a post by Mike Pesca and Nate Silver, they examine new graphs showing demographic breakdowns of this happiness gap. Conservative happiness levels are consistently higher across various groups, with demographics like young women and particularly bisexual individuals showing stark differences. The discussion touches on influences such as urban monoculture, political engagement, education, income, and religion. They also explore personal anecdotes, societal norms, and mental health perceptions within these political spectrums.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be revisiting a topic that we have talked about before, but with a different question and with some new evidence which is why are progressives so unhappy? Wind contrasted with conservatives, and this is something that's been very persistent since Pews started recording polling on progressives and Democrats.

Progressives have been unhappy, but it's gotten sharper recently. And you also see many more mental health problems among progressives. You can go to our previous episode on this if you want us to just shower you with data on this.

Simone Collins: We gotta help them.

Malcolm Collins: If we

Simone Collins: find out what makes them so miserable, maybe we can save them.

We can pull them out of the dark hole.

Energy to fight the bug. We must understand the bug. We can. Ill afford another clinda. Would you like to know more? What mysteries will the brain bug reveal? Federal scientists are [00:01:00] working around the clock to trope its secrets. Once we understand the vote, we will defeat it.

Malcolm Collins: . Oh my God.

Simone Collins: I,

Malcolm Collins: Get, they're bugman Simone. They defend it. They. They say this themselves, they have videos on YouTube with like hundreds of thousands of millions of views saying that the bugs were in the right that the federation was evil, that this was a false flag attack that, that the federation deserves to be destroyed.

And by the way, we know it's not a false flag attack because we saw the asteroid. Hit the Tai Rega, the, the big spaceship outside our solar system, meaning that it had to come from quite far away. And because it knocked out their you know what? You should watch our Sara Strip troopers episode.

If you care about how we know it's not a false flag attack. Take his word for it, people. No, don't take my word for it. Go watch that episode. We need the watch time, Simone. And it's a good episode.

Simone Collins: Go watch the episode.

Malcolm Collins: But in this [00:02:00] episode we're gonna be going over a post from Mike Pesca and Nate Silver titled what Explains the Liberal Conservative Happiness Gap.

And this is in the, the Silver Bulletin. And he goes over a few graphs, is that I hadn't seen before. Oh. And what these graphs do is they look at demographically where the gap is biggest. And from that and, and just so people know, these people's like political, like. Nate Silver is a, is a very mainstream Centris pollster.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Of 5

Simone Collins: 38 fame. 5 38. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: He, he, he, he's, he is been pretty sane from what I've seen. And so I'd be very interested to see his views on this as somebody who's not gonna have the, you know, charged conservatives perspective that we're gonna have.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Although he, he has been attacked by the left for one of the reasons being that he called Trump 20 20, 20 16 when everyone else, how dare

Malcolm Collins: Impossible that he could win.

No, he didn't even call it. He just said it's really possible and we need to stop saying it's only a one or 2% chance. [00:03:00] And they said that he was like a Trump agent. Trump won of course. But they never went back on saying he needed to be de platformed. Yeah. But they

Simone Collins: defund istre him for saying that it was a very real possibility.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay.

And this is, this is one of the areas where my, my you know, believing the left really began to broke. And I began to move where I was just like, wait, so you are all lying? We not care about that.

And when I think that this is also really different you know, like the left. Yeah, everyone was lying and everyone was just like, okay, this is all over under the bus right now.

With the Epstein files, we've even gone over why Trump is probably actually keeping 'em quiet in an episode and his own side is just like, Nope. Like at a Trump rally recently, like one of his supporters held up a picture of Trump and Epstein together. You know, and they're like, Nope, you actually gotta explain this.

You got some explaining to do here, buddy. Yeah. Why didn't you release those files that everyone said existed? But anyway. Oh boy. Young people in general [00:04:00] report fairly miserable mental health with rates of anxiety and depression, but this is particularly true for young women and assumptions Democrats make about how to attract younger voters may not appeal to men.

Still arguably the SBSQ.

Buried the most interesting finding, which is that conservatives have a much higher level of self-reported mental health than liberals. It's a wide gap according to the 2020 comparative election study, CESA, very large samples of 60,000 respondents that provides the opportunity for highly detailed demographic analysis among people who report, quote, unquote excellent mental health conservatives, outnumbered liberals, 51 to 20.

Literally have over double the rate. Wow. Yeah. Like, yeah, well, well over double the rate of liberals at the, that category. 51 to 20. Even, even if you've doubled the number of liberals in that category, it'd only be 40 to 51. So this is shocking. Just liberals do not have excellent mental [00:05:00] health.

But liberals outnumber conservatives 45 to 19 among voters who say they have poor mental health. So keep in mind how extreme that is. That means even if you doubled the conservative number there you know, you would still be at 38 to 45 with liberals having way poorer mental health. So is this

Simone Collins: a product of, I, I remember for example, when pharmaceutical companies tried to introduce.

Antidepressants to Japan. They also had to introduce the concept of depression because it just wasn't a thing. Is this more a product of conservatives just not believing in poor mental health the same way that the left does?

Malcolm Collins: Progressives are going to say this, but the reality is, is that if you look at the studies around this, if you do not believe in mental health problems, you typically are not susceptible to those mental health problems.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's, that's kinda my point. Is it like. They, they don't believe in the demons, so the demons cannot possess them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What a progressive would [00:06:00] say is well, they're reporting their mental health as excellent, even though they have depression. Oh. Like,

Simone Collins: you're just, you just don't realize that you're dealing with unrealized trauma.

Yeah, you need to see a therapist.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they there, they're, they just need to go see a psychiatrist