In the internet era, likeminded people will find each other, including those that are suffering from ailments the conventional medical system can’t treat or even define. It’s therefore no surprise that since the whole world went online the number of people claiming to suffer from disputed diseases with shifting symptoms and complex etiologies has risen dramatically. All of those people, I have no doubt, are in some kind of pain, and we are compelled by decency and shared humanity to confront that pain. But it’s also true that the internet creates conspiracists, it heightens distrust of institutions, it magnifies paranoia. On the internet, no matter how fanciful your sneaking suspicions might be, no matter how disordered and unhealthy, someone will emerge from the digital fog and whisper to you that all of it is real. From this stems gangstalking, stems QAnon, stems people who think they’re getting sick from 5G. It’s a problem from hell and one I don’t know how to fix.
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When one group of people in society feels unheard for so long, in time they form a crusade, and the object of that crusade is the most human of all demands: feel our pain. It is natural to want the world to understand our suffering as something different, something deeper, something special. The cacophony of our political lives stems in no small part from the ceaselessly multiplying number of groups that ask that their suffering be seen as something transcendent and unique. The trouble, of course, is that we’re all suffering, and in fact to suffer is the least special, most ordinary thing any person can do.
Thank you Freddie DeBoer for articulating these things, and so beautifully.
Actually, I find the entire article excellent and beautifully written (modulo my not having any other exposure to the Ross Douthat book myself, and after reading this article not caring to try reading it because I don't know if I could emotionally handle it!). The review expresses a lot of profound points besides the ones shown in the two paragraphs I quoted above. I quoted the particular things I did because they reflect particular points of view that I've held and not known quite how to express and not seen directly discussed enough.
Overall, DeBoer has grown on me a great deal over the years. I first knew him shortly after I was introduced to the rationalism community, so sometime not long after mid-2014. I found his writing okay then but often dense; I found the sides he took on lots of issues a bit hard to relate to (in the sense of not being able to grok a full worldview that certain stances naturally flowed from, I guess?) and vehemently disagreed with one of his articles strongly enough to write this post back in 2015 (not sure whether I'd endorse my post today). But, a lot of time (by internet standards) has passed between then and now -- in DeBoer's case, that included a mental breakdown and related hiatus from blogging -- and now he's right around the top of my list of favorite blogs that frequently update. In particular, at this point I honestly consider him to write better anti-SJ stuff than Scott Alexander ever did, although I'm not sure how much of that reflects an evolution in my own tastes and inclinations.
