The Pathocracy Hypothesis and The World That Tumblr Made

Are we literally in the midst of a mass mental health crisis fermented in the bowels of young women's social media?

Early in May, Australia had a Federal Election. As an economist with strongly pro-market viewpoints, I did not like the result. However, one particular aspect of the election result caused me acute pain - one of the newly-elected MPs for the victorious party bullied me in primary school (I will not mention her name). The incident I remember most vividly was when, in a fourth-grade mathematics class, she suggested the following mnemonic as a way to assist the class in remembering a multiplication table: "four sixes are twenty four, Andrew Russell got stuck in the door." When suggesting said mnemonic, she pointed at me and leered at me with a face so truly gleeful in pure sadism that it is hard to put into words. To see such a hateful shrew ascend to federal Parliament really does prove that politics is an Adverse Selection process - the people who want power are typically the kind of people who shouldn't be trusted with it. Hence why, as South Park put it, it is always a choice between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Compounding this indignity is the fact that, because Australia will have to endure three more years of Anthony Albanese's economy-sodomizing government, my taxes will rise and my money's purchasing power will be eroded by higher-than-the-alternative inflation to fund the salary and Qantas Chairman's Lounge membership of this particular creature. That said, I'm sure she'll fit in well with her fellow ALP Mean Girls (a clique in which Senators Penny Wong, Kristina Keneally and Katy Gallagher are allegedly the ruling triumvirate).

I share this not to simply gain sympathy (although sympathy expressed in the form of subscription to my Substack is always welcome), but because engaging in school bullying is common among people whom are later diagnosed with a Cluster B personality disorder (school bullies most commonly have Antisocial Personality Disorder, although the other Cluster B disorders - Narcissistic, Histrionic and Borderline - are also quite well represented among school bullies) and an increasingly-prevalent theme in culture-war-related discourse (commonly alluded to by Josh Slocomb and also discussed by Hannah Spier) is that the culture wars of the 2010s onwards are arguably due to a society-wide endemic of Cluster B personality disorders. In short, society is going crazy because society's rulers are increasingly likely to have (or are under the influence of people with) Cluster B personality disorders and, as such, the relationship between the rulers and the ruled is increasingly resembling the kind of abuse dynamics that Cluster B parents and partners are infamous for inflicting on their victims.

This hypothesis is essentially a more specific, contemporary take on the concept of "Pathocracy" first enunciated by Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski. How true is it, if at all? Are majorities essentially being ruled and abused by mentally ill elites?

I admit I have an innate skepticism towards this hypothesis for several reasons. Firstly, Thomas Szasz's critique of the concept of "mental illness" and that concept's well-known history of political abuse has deeply influenced my thinking. Secondly, because I find the attempt to substitute diagnosis for dialogue to be quite frustrating - ideas such as the "Republican Brain Hypothesis" certainly were soothing and ego-stroking during the insanity of the George W Bush years, but they were clearly coping mechanisms for those frustrated with the political reality of their time rather than genuine scholarly projects (and scholarly projects that did seriously investigate the relationship between neurobiology and politics, such as Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, did not validate every sensibility of those who tried to frame nonleftist viewpoints as akin to brain damage). I certainly don't appreciate when hack-historians like Nancy MacLean (of Duke University) think that describing the libertarian brain as "autistic" is enough to refute libertarian theory (for the record, libertarians are actually disproportionately on the autism spectrum, but the reality is this actually makes us better economists, not worse ones). Trying to reduce political disagreement down to matters of mental health (and in particular trying to frame different beliefs to one's own as proof of psychopathology) not only has a sinister history, but is fundamentally weak argumentation.

Over time, however, I have become steadily more comfortable with the hypothesis that we live in a Pathocracy. Today's Intersectional Social Justice (a.k.a. “wokeness”) Culture Wars are not merely a case of ideological disagreement (despite ideological disagreement being present). Indeed, this ideology is arguably psychopathogenic: in a discussion between Johnathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, one of the founders of the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression (FIRE), both participants realized that Intersectional Social Justice actively encourages the adoption of thought patterns that systematically undermine mental health - it subjects its believers to "reverse Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy" (see Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest). Even if it started as a pure matter of ideological disagreement, it has evolved into a psychological matter.

Interestingly, despite "Pathocracy" being coined by a Pole who survived the brutal totalitarianism of Marx-Leninist Communism, the modern hypothesis seems to be applied very specifically to the post-2010 Culture Wars. No one asks if, say, the Moral Majority or the George W Bush era religionists were motivated by personality disorders - they were religious fundamentalists, case closed. In addition, the "Douche vs. Turd" phenomenon - one which was acknowledged by Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology (if under more scholarly terms) as well as economist Frederich Hayek (in The Road To Serfdom), is hardly new. The Adverse Selection effect of power being attractive to those who should not have it comes from a constant reality of human nature, not anything novel. What is new or distinctive about the era we currently live in? What makes the modern Pathocracy so special? What distinguishes today's Pathocracy from any other of the many historical societies where it was clear the person in charge was a lunatic?

I would argue that there are two interrelated phenomena that set this particular Pathocracy apart. The first is that this is a highly feminine/feminized/high-in-female-participation Pathocracy, almost certainly the most feminine/feminized/female in history. The second is that this Pathocracy can be traced back to a very specific milieu - the internet subculture formed on Tumblr during that social media platform's heyday.

History's First Gynopathocracy
Out of the four Cluster B personality disorders, males are more prone to Antisocial and Narcissistic, whereas females are more prone to Histrionic and Borderline (indeed, the fact that Borderline Personality Disorder is disproportionately found in females has caused the very diagnosis itself to be subject to feminist critique, see Power, Selfhood, and Identity: A Feminist Critique of Borderline Personality Disorder | Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice). In addition, as Slocomb has written, we could fairly describe what are commonly called "toxic masculinity" and "toxic femininity" as amalgams of the two respective-sex-skewed personality disorders.

Let us combine this fact with the historical reality of women's increasing participation in social and civic life (thanks to the emancipation of women in liberal societies). If we presume equal inclination towards civic/political participation across all Cluster B personality disorders, and equal likelihood/ability of attaining political power across all Cluster B personality disorders, it follows that the Cluster B politicians of the past skewed heavily towards Antisocials and Narcissists, and that as women's political participation grows the proportion of political participants with Histrionic and Borderline characteristics grows. It stands to reason that this will change the character of any resultant pathocracy.

In other words, the history of pathocracy is dominated by what we might call a masculine or male-typical version of pathocracy. What we are seeing in today's Culture Wars is, if not a female-typical version of pathocracy, a relatively more feminine version of pathocracy compared to the historical baseline.

We all remember the videos of then Yale professor Nicholas Christakis – the campus protests against him were female-led (see Yale University Students Protest Halloween Costume Email (VIDEO 3) - YouTube). Personality Psychology and Social Psychology research into Left Wing Authoritarianism (the Intersectional Social Justice attitude) shows that being female or having a “feminine temperament” (I presume they’re using this phrase in the standard personality/social psychology way – referring to traits which, for whatever reason, are empirically more common in females than males) is one of the stronger predictors of it (see Christine Brophy describing her research into the subject here: Where Do SJWs Come From?). Brophy specifies two traits – compassion and agreeableness – that are regularly found to be more prevalent in females, are particularly correlated with “PC.” This is further substantiated by the research surrounding Johnathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory – females feel the “care/harm” foundation (compassion) more intensely than males on average, and Intersectional Social Justice ideology strongly appeals to this foundation (it gains its moral force through focusing on those perceived as vulnerable – the same underlying mechanism behind the care/harm foundation).

Clearly things have reached the level of psychopathology, and multiple studies have shown that left-wing women in western societies are suffering elevated rates of psychological disorders (see again Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest). Famous belligerents in the Culture War (or incidents often understood through Culture War lenses), for example Zoe Quinn (of Gamergate infamy) and Amber Heard (of the Johnny Depp Defamation Trial infamy) have been alleged (in Heard’s case, publicly, by a psychologist who testified at the trial) to have Cluster B personality disorders (in both of their cases, I believe its Borderline-with-Histrionic-features). What we have is clearly a psychopathogenic ideology that weaponizes more-typically-female psychological impulses. However left-wing women are not new, and the ideology that drives the current Culture War has existed for decades in the universities. And the people who are subscribing to this ideology, in some way or another, have been getting younger and younger than college age. These young women are not being indoctrinated in college – they already arrive in college, primed with this mindset (as was recognized ten years ago by an article in what is perhaps the most mainstream establishment-left publication out there – Vox Magazine). The typical two-word explanation for this is “social media,” which isn’t wrong, but the full answer can be even shorter: Tumblr.

The Tumblr Institute of Virology
The internet alone – or even social media alone - cannot explain our current Pathocracy. The internet greatly predates it, and its earliest adopters were almost entirely male. They may not have had Facebook, but they did have internet forums and platforms, on which they shared content with each other and talked to each other (ergo they had a communication infrastructure that met the definition of “social media”). They had a very diverse range of political opinions but could be fairly described as sharing an ethos that was countercultural, transgressive, decentralist, anonymized, anti-authoritarian, optimistic about technological progress, and perhaps “libertarian” in temperament even if not necessarily in terms of explicit political belief. In the pre-Obama years, this was the dominant culture on the internet (and, despite Obama’s successful use of internet culture in his campaign for President, the establishment left has always been deeply suspicious of it – see Barbrook and Cameron’s The Californian Ideology, Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Social Network and Jesse Armstrong’s movie Mountainhead for examples of this sentiment). Author Angela Nagle, who has written several books about online subcultures and politics, often describes the infamous website 4Chan as, if not the incubator or headquarters of this culture, the most archetypal example of it.

But, as more young women started using the internet (particularly from 2000 onward), a rival internet culture began to percolate. Unsurprisingly, the norms of this culture were markedly more “feminine” (again, defined as “reflecting characteristics that, for whatever reason, are more empirically common in females than males”) in comparison (prizing agreeableness, politeness and group consensus/cohesion) (to digress, this is not a gender essentialist definition, and I would suggest that one shouldn’t treat the socially-atypical self-selected demographic of “early internet adopters” as representative of males as a whole, but that’s a discussion for another time). This culture had strong roots in fandom communities. In contrast to 4Chan, where anonymity was embraced as a cultural norm precisely because it anonymized people and thus allowed arguments and contributions to be judged on an entirely meritocratic manner unshackled by identity, identity was very valuable to this new subculture, and it is in this new subculture where Intersectional Social Justice activism (in which people are valued, and disvalued, according to their identities) flourished. The website most commonly identified with this subculture is Tumblr back during that website’s heyday (before it implemented a ban on pornography and thus killed itself off). Whilst it was never exclusively confined to Tumblr and it didn’t originate on Tumblr (it was on LiveJournal and various other sites before that), Nagle is fair to cast Tumblr as its archetypal embodiment.

The First Outbreak and The First Politicization
To really comprehend the intersection of Tumblr Culture (which, again, wasn’t entirely confined to Tumblr), mental health contagions and Intersectional Social Justice ideology, two significant developments within Tumblr Culture must be confronted.

The first was the emergence of a pro-eating-disorder subculture within Tumblr Culture. This subculture believed that anorexia and bulimia were not disorders but rather alternative lifestyles. These subcultures, which were referred to pro-ana (for anorexia) and pro-bella or pro-mia (for bulimia), were not treated sympathetically. Rather, they were recognized as incubators of social contagion and deeply damaging to the psychological and physical health of adolescent females (see Anorexia nervosa and social contagion: Clinical implications - Stephen Allison, Megan Warin, Tarun Bastiampillai, 2014). Clinicians correctly noticed the threat and pressured social media companies and internet providers to prohibit pro-eating-disorder (henceforth pro-ED) spaces.

The second, which seemed to happen chronologically after the crackdown against pro-ED communities, was where we first saw the three-way connection between Tumblr Culture, mental health diagnoses, and political ideas straight from Intersectional Social Justice: this trend was called “self-diagnosis.” In Tumblr Culture, having a mental illness was basically a mark of social status because, just like having a disability, it made you a member of an oppressed (or marginalized) group. Unsurprisingly, this created a demand for (or more accurately a demand for being perceived as having a) mental illness. The immediate problem with such a demand is that there are actual diagnostic criteria for having a mental illness and merely wanting the social status that (in Tumblr Culture) comes with having a mental illness doesn’t mean one fits the diagnostic criteria. In addition, diagnoses of mental illnesses require seeing, and consequently paying for, a qualified mental health professional. The workaround is to diagnose yourself, which not only was ideologically framed as a radical act of resistance against medical oppression, but also further evidence of one’s victimhood and consequent status: after all, you must have been too poor to access proper mental healthcare, which is why you had to engage in self-diagnosis in the first place! Again, the consequence wasn’t surprising – tons of adolescent and young adult women started listing growing numbers of mental illnesses in their Tumblr bios.

The Pathogen Evolves: Transtrenderism and ROGD
Because this alludes to a contentious social issue, I will make my views clear. Some people have Gender Dysphoria (I think it should be called “Sex Dysphoria” but I’ll use the established term). Gender Dysphoria is a genuine mental health problem that deserves an evidence-based, compassionate response. People with GD are not suffering from delusions but rather are suffering from a deeply experienced misery that is almost certainly rooted in some sort of neurological reality. Some people who suffer from GD need to undergo medical transition in order to live happy lives, and as an ethical egoist, I support them doing so. In addition, as a libertarian, I believe that adults should be able to transition on an informed consent basis, although I don’t believe medical professionals should be compelled to provide transition (be it hormonal or surgical).

What developed on Tumblr, however, were two different phenomena that are both commonly placed under the umbrella of “trans” – transtrenders (for whom “trans” is essentially an avant-garde youth subculture) and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (which is a social contagion and a genuine mental health issue).

Transtrenderism is the simpler phenomenon since it rarely involves actual GD. After all, the defining belief of the transtrender is “you don’t need Gender Dysphoria to be trans.” For this cohort, “trans” is an aesthetic and subculture package-dealt with a political ideology. Unlike with the similarly gender-bending goth and punk subcultures, where you can have the makeover and like the music without agitating for communist revolution or burning down your local MP’s office, the political ideology of Intersectional Social Justice is absolutely essential to transtrenderism because the same logic that justifies self-diagnosis (“its oppressive to demand I pay a professional a lot of money to get my identity validated!”) is used to oppose the “medical gatekeeping of trans identities.” In addition, the motives that drive transtrenderism are those of attaining social status within a societal milieu that grants said status on the basis of how “oppressed” you are (as defined by Intersectional Social Justice). Without the ideology, “trans” stops being “cool” and thus there’s no reason to claim to be it. The vast majority of these people do not medically transition – they have a goth/emo/hipster makeover, change their pronouns arbitrarily, and the closest thing to surgery they get is a septum piercing. The long-term consequences of transtrenderism are mostly the propagation of a terrible political belief system (and the results of those believers voting and/or running various entertainment companies into the ground by making every upcoming movie a woke lecture).

The long-term consequences of ROGD, however, can be much more severe and personal to the sufferer. ROGD is a controversial hypothesis, but it seems to be the most plausible explanation for the fact at hand: historically, the vast majority of people seeking out the services of gender clinics were biologically male, and the number of people seeking out these services was modest, but demand from adolescents and young adults suddenly surged and the people seeking these services were 75% female (see Diaz and Bailey’s 2023 paper here: Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1,655 Possible Cases | Researchers.One). The timeline and demographics of this surge line up exactly with the rise of Tumblr Culture, which (as the example of pro-ED communities shows) already had a demonstrated history of being able to spread a social contagion. Combine these demographics with Intersectional Social Justice ideology, which simultaneously corrodes mental health, assigns social status to being transgender and encourages self-diagnosis. The result is not a surprise.

The clinicians should have stopped this. There was a massive backlash against pro-ED communities before. But again, Intersectional Social Justice (“wokeness”) played a critical role, this time in immunizing Tumblr’s “trans” subculture from scepticism or criticism. “Trans” had become a sacred minority, and tons of people who were raised in Tumblr Culture had grown up sufficiently to become part of the institutions of mainstream culture - a lot of those young women writing pornographic Harry Potter fanfiction for their Tumblrs were doing so from laptops they also used to take notes in college! They had been trained to see questioning self-identification as an oppressive act. They proudly dedicated themselves to caring for the vulnerable and marginalized (as defined by a very specific ideology). They were already used to living in, and sometimes being part of, cancel culture. They probably had a few (sometimes self-diagnosed) mental illnesses themselves. And, in the specific case of GD, clinicians were explicitly trained to essentially allow and enable self-diagnosis, via what is currently called the “gender-affirmative” approach to therapy. To borrow a phrase, the inmates were now running the asylum. The result has been a wave of outspoken detransitioners (such as Keira Bell and Chloe Cole), surprising absolutely no one.

Is This Really a Pathocracy?
Some may argue that I am not really substantiating the charge of “pathocracy” because the “-cracy” part is lacking – as bad as Tumblr Culture may be, as much as it may provide a lot of “pathos,” were our rulers raised on it? That is a fair question, but certainly a lot of people with great influence in our society were part of this culture as they matured. Huge amounts of cultural influence is wielded by people who grew up in the culture of Tumblr – these are the people writing most of our television shows and movies these days. And sure, there are men from the tech industry who have power in our society and come from Tumblr Culture’s antipode – 4Chan Culture. But they are probably not mentally ill (Asperger’s Syndrome is neurological, not psychological) and many of them are anything but tyrannical – things like Blockchain encourage decentralization and working around authority, things like Wikileaks expose the abuses of power committed by people in authority, and things like DOGE focused on shrinking the burden of the State rather than growing it. Continuing on that issue, Elon Musk specifically bought Twitter to stop what turned out to be extensive government censorship (as demonstrated in the Twitter Files). 4Chan Culture is very, flagrantly, deliberately fucking obscene, but it is anarchic, decentralized, transgressive and reflexively prone to the slaughtering of sacred cows.

Tumblr Culture, on the other hand, is basically a tyranny of the neuroses of young leftist women. And it didn’t stay a subculture – it became a (arguably the) reigning force in pop culture. It took over video games (see the Gamergate controversy), speculative fiction (see the Sad Puppies controversy), huge swathes of film and television (Disney and Netflix are particularly guilty of this), and even professional organizations in (what are meant to be) science-based disciplines such as healthcare (remember when WPATH started demanding the validation of “eunuch” as a real gender identity?). It has long been fermented in the academy, primarily due to the influence of academic feminism, which despite its nominal rejection of gender essentialism has feminized the culture (see the works of Arnold Kling for more on this) instead of demolishing sex stereotypes. And as we should all know by now, politics is downstream from culture. And in my country of Australia, one of our states has the utterly Orwellian “Ministry for Male Behaviour Change” despite a recent case where a woman by the name of Corbie Jean Walpole got a mere 4.5 years in jail for covering a man in lighter fluid and setting him on fire for telling a joke she found offensive. Not all power or rulership or cultural influence comes in the form of a position in an official organization.

In addition, I never claimed that we’re living in a society where every single person is absolutely ruled by the whims of pathological women (and nothing else). I made no such claim. My very modest claim was that we live in the most feminine/female-influenced pathocracy yet witnessed relative to an historical baseline. Again, compare the climate we see within the culture of the authoritarian left today compared to what it was like back in the days of Stalin. Is the hormonal balance less-testosterone-and-more-estrogen today than it used to be? If so, that substantiates my point. And let’s not pretend that the authoritarian left is powerless or irrelevant – the civil libertarian left (the Isiah-Berlin-style Social Liberal tradition) across the entire Western world has essentially been wiped out or driven to the right. The authoritarian left controls all of the significant institutions of culture and most of the institutions of politics (the current US government being one of the handful of exceptions).

Conclusion
The liberation of women is a great thing (this should go without saying). However, the liberation of women combined with the fact that politics selects for the most power-hungry, vicious and awful of human beings means our political culture has changed. We’re familiar with societies ran by fearsome, violent and cruel men with Cluster B personality disorders (or other psychological maladies) – frankly that describes much (maybe even most?) of history. We’re now seeing what happens when the gender mix of “socially-influential-people-whom-are-crazy” becomes more inclusive. Sociopaths and Narcissists have always been there, but now we’re adding more Borderlines and Histrionics to the picture. It will certainly look different to the past, but instead of things getting less bad we’ll most likely be subjected to different ways in which things can get worse. Yay.

We’re already seeing what this new pathocracy looks like. The “Great Awokening” is atypically appealing to feminine sensibilities, enforced with religious zeal by a disproportionately female cohort, and was essentially born on a female-dominated social network. 4Chan’s greatest sin was jokingly using the word “faggot,” whereas Tumblr practically gave birth to cancel culture, psychologically crippled legions of young women, and encouraged some of them to confuse pre-existing psychological problems with Gender Dysphoria and consequently seek irreversible-yet-ineffective treatment. Those raised in Tumblr Culture are today’s working-age adults. Tumblr itself may have committed suicide when it banned pornography, but the culture metastasized, first to Twitter (where it was the reigning orthodoxy for years until Elon bought it), and then primarily to BlueSky and TikTok, where it continues to corrode the mental health of and politically indoctrinate a disproportionately female cohort of adolescents even before they reach college.

Frankly, I suspect things will get worse before they get better. Historically, politics has always selected for the kind of people who sociopathically bully others during childhood. Now, entirely new kinds of horrible people are beginning to attain power.