A touch of the 'tism, Part IV

On meds

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

(Parts I, II, and III are linked. This is the final installment of this series.)

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler is a fascinating book about the use of drugs in Nazi Germany. Ohler clearly demonstrates that the Germans of the Third Reich, from the monsters in charge to its citizenry, were more or less constantly ripped to the tits on pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine, which was made widely available to literally everyone in Germany. The Nazi war machine, its leadership, its soldiers, and everyday Germans displayed the symptoms of methamphetamine use: paranoia, bloodthirsty aggression, and furious, libidinous, manic energy. Women in particular were encouraged to take speed; while methamphetamine was famously used as a combat drug by the Wehrmact, it also makes you uncontrollably horny, and the Nazi leadership wanted a population boom for the usual imperialist reasons of demographic conquest.

A culture’s drug of choice is both indicative of and reinforces the values of its elites; Aldous Huxley and Adolf Hitler understood that better than anyone. (If we didn’t believe chemicals change behavior, would society even sanction the prescription of psychopharmaceuticals?) Drugs are also aspirational; people downstream of elites want to consume the same substances elites do.

The drug of choice of American elites, particularly women, is SSRI antidepressants.

I have a whole bunch of mental models I’ve come up with to understand social dynamics, which I think of as essentially mathematical; more aspects of social interaction than people realize follow certain rules that are always true. Two of those heuristics are relevant to this discussion. I call one “bounce,” and the other “cascade.” Bounce describes the predictable consequences of any social interaction, on either a macro or a micro level. Cascade describes the unpredictable ones (enough pebbles with predictable trajectories bouncing down a hill lead to a cascade effect in which so many more pebbles get involved that the trajectories of all pebbles become unpredictable).

Calculating the bounce from cultural elites gulping down SSRIs en masse can be done as follows:

A culture’s drug of choice, as I noted above, is both indicative of and reinforces the values of those elites. You see this in Nazi Germany, of course (big, obvious examples make the best teaching tools), but you see it in a smaller scale in subcultures, too. The drug of choice of hippies was, famously, cannabis. Their stated values included peace and love (no one wants to fight when they’re stoned, but occasional marijuana use boosts dopamine and can induce multiple orgasms in women) as well as a rejection of the culture in which they were raised (a first-offense conviction for possession of marijuana got you 2-10 years and a $20,000 fine in the 1960s). Smoking pot made hippies more congruent with their stated values.

While THC and other cannabinoids in cannabis act most notably on dopaminergic receptors and the endocannabinoid system, SSRIs increase the available serotonin in the brain. The effects are subtle, so it’s worth first looking at a drug that both acts on serotonin and is also about as subtle as a croquet mallet to the skull: MDMA.

MDMA, aka Ecstasy or Molly, does affect other neurotransmitters (including dopamine), but it mostly dumps your brain’s entire supply of serotonin and norepinepherine into circulation. This is useful because it’s a lot easier to generalize behavior from someone who’s got a massive overdose of a neurotransmitter than someone who just has a little extra floating around. (Learning from extreme cases, then generalizing to ordinary ones is a good strategy in general for learning behavioral tells.) The characteristic behavior of someone on Molly includes enhanced extroversion, emotional warmth, empathy, and the tendency to overshare painful memories. It’s worth pointing out that people on Molly are very touchy and huggy, but are most often anorgasmic, so while sex on the drug is pleasurable, it doesn’t tend to result in climax (likely due to increased prolactin secretion). In fact, rolling on Molly is like having just had an orgasm; five hours of post-coital bliss.

This also characterizes people who are on SSRIs, although the presentation of someone on Zoloft is much less extreme than someone on MDMA. SSRI users are docile, emotionally warm, asexual, and plump (weight gain is a near-universal side effect of SSRIs). The predictable result of a culture whose elite drug of choice is SSRIs is that people with significant institutional power will tend to be credulous (if highly-educated), chubby, happy people who don’t question authority.

In other words, children.

While the bounce is predictable, the cascade effects from a culture run by these people are something you can only see in hindsight. They include Funko Pops, the obsession with Harry Potter, and (this one annoys me the most) the dominance of MCU Movies at the box office instead of movies for grown-ups. What’s emotional complexity to people who feel safe and taken care of, 24/7? They don’t want that. It’s confusing and uncomfortable. They they want media that reinforces the way they feel already—they want to watch Saturday morning cartoons, but sophisticated ones, in keeping with the fact they have real jobs now. It’s a country run by the “grown-ups” in “Caring, Sharing,” by Will Self, in which rich, neurotic yuppies outsource their emotional lives to giant manifestations of their inner children.

The social and cultural elites in the United States are overwhelmingly liberal, and the religion of liberal elites is wokism. Fourth-wave feminism is the dominant ideological component of wokism, and an (admittedly uncharitable) way to boil it down is that it divides society into mommies and babies. There’s no room for either masculinity or adult expressions of sexuality in that framework, which is crazy-making for autistic men in particular. We skew heterosexual by a comfortable margin, but we tend to learn social skills late. In a world that’s dominated by people who actively do not want masculinity to be a factor in governance or culture, it’s very difficult for us to learn appropriately masculine social skills at all.

In plain language, a major unaddressed factor in the rise of wokism is the near-universal treatment of anxiety and depression (when they’re treated by psychiatrists) in America with SSRIs. You want to know why so many people with graduate degrees are complacent and infantile? They’re on drugs. Zach Goldberg has done a great (and frequently referenced) analysis of recent Pew Research Center data that reveals that, yeah, liberalism really is a mental illness. Mental illness overlaps with prescription drug dependency.

Lest you think I’m unsympathetic to the libs who take these drugs, let’s talk for a minute about the lived experience of one of them. Laura Delano is as close as you could come to the Platonic ideal of a liberal elite who got on meds and whose life was wrecked for decades as a result. She’s the textbook example of how psychiatric drugs derail the lives of the people who take them. The New Yorker article about her struggle to deprescribe from the cocktail of SSRIs, neuroleptics, and benzodiazepines, among other drug classes, is in my view a must-read. Delano, who had to be put in a medically induced coma after a suicide attempt and was over her life given at least three different psychiatric diagnoses, didn’t have an orgasm until she was in her thirties, after she had deprescribed from the drugs. And having deprescribed, she seems to have fully recovered, not only from the effects of the meds, but from her “diagnoses.” (The Inner Compass Initiative, the organization she started to help other people get off them, is a great resource which I recommend to anyone who’s trying to deprescribe from psychiatric medication.) It was clearly a hellish experience, and she showed great courage in both getting clean and breaking a path for those who want to follow her. And for what it’s worth, though it isn’t stated explicitly in the article, Delano reads as a little spectrum-y to me.

Delano was a nervous, high-strung young woman who was not psychologically suited for the path that was set out for her. She suffered, and she got through it, and she’s trying to help other people get through it, and that’s a net good for society. Hey guys, especially my fellow autists? Try to imagine being one of these women. They may be intelligent. They may not be. They may be competent. They may not be. But regardless of how capable they are, their hormonal biology makes their mood much more variable than ours to begin with, and they’re wired to respond positively to having their mood deliberately altered (they read romance novels and watch reality TV because they enjoy certain kinds of emotional manipulation). The psych drugs many of them are on? They take them to cope with being, by the standards of a man, emotion sponges prone to oversaturation.

I believe women are entirely capable of filling leadership positions in society. I also believe in social roles that are a bit more fixed than the ones we’ve got now, because I think people are happier when what’s expected of them is explicit. In the United States in 2022, many people do not seem to know what their social responsibilities are. One of the social responsibilities of men is to backstop women. We’re supposed to be the anchor, the dancer they pivot around in The Dance. In order to lead effectively (and I use the word “lead” here in the extremely limited sense of leading and following in a dance, such as Argentine Tango), men have to have a better understanding than the majority of us currently seem to of our social role. We have to be better dancers, and that means many of us, especially younger guys, have to learn to be appropriately masculine, which in part involves learning to read women effectively and understand their expectations of us.

My own politics are basically “circa 1960 classical liberal,” which based on the shifts of the Overton Window over the last sixty years probably puts me to the far right today. But I don’t object to present-day libs on a personal level (although I object to their politics), because I can see that so many of their bad takes are due to a combination of ignorance and borderline criminal chemical manipulation being perpetrated against them. A devil is just a sick angel, after all.

I think a lot of bad, crazy policy that causes suffering in this country is either the direct result of drugs and/or environmental contamination or just downstream of it. I don’t think the overwhelming majority of humans need to be chemically tweaked to be okay, and I would like to see prescriptions for psychotropic medication be an absolute last resort employed in cases where there is literally no other option, for as short a period as possible.

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And that’s it for this series! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I’ve received some truly choice Bad Woke Takes to deconstruct from readers, which I’ll be working on this week, and per a reader request, I’ll be organizing them a bit differently, with bullet points to highlight both the tells and the methods I use to untangle them. Stay tuned.

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Post-script:

In the “Be careful what you wish for, Rollins…” department, over at The Microdose, jane c. hu reports that researchers at Yale and the VA Connecticut Health Care System have successfully tested “No-Frills DMT Therapy,” in which patients with treatment-resistant depression were given DMT without the accompanying psychotherapy and carefully adjusted ambiance that has hithertofore gone along with psychedelic therapy. Apparently, a doctor and a nurse casually check on you, but that’s it, and it works well enough to report success.

(Artist’s impression of the procedure: “Hey, little buddy! Feeling down? Stick out your arm!” [insert thirty-minute psychedelic rocket ride here] “You good? Awesome! Okay, out the door and into the sunshine you go! Nurse, send in the next patient!”)

Holy fucking shit. This will undoubtedly be abused, but y’know what? I’m for it regardless. There is no way a half-hour spent communing with machine elves is worse for you than the psychopharmaceuticals produced by Pfizer or Eli Lilly, and DMT has both the endorsement of Joe Rogan and a reputation for being fun. While I’m on record as being against the use of mind-altering substances as a first-line treatment for mental health problems, treatment-resistant depression is a case where chemical intervention seems warranted, and if you must mess with your brain chemistry, you might as well take drugs that you don’t have to take indefinitely and which don’t induce more misery than the condition you’re taking them to treat.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sad face to practice and a road trip to Connecticut to plan.)

Finally, some appropriate music to play us out.