Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.
While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.
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A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.
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Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.
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It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?
I was thinking of Russia, which was the poorest and most backwards country in Europe when the communists came to power. Within 30 years they transformed it into a military and technological superpower that defeated the Nazis and launched the first human being into space.
They defeated the Nazis, because 1) it’s a huge land and the Nazis were stupid to underestimate its size and 2) because they got help of every kind from their Western allies, without which they would have not lasted a year. Don’t get me wrong, some clever generals and industrial planners that were given more or less free reign by Stalin (provided he would be allowed to take credit) certainly contributed, as did millions of ordinary people who were caught between a rock and a hard place, but it was despite the system, not because of it; keep in mind that Stalin’s purges did not stop in 1941 for example and continued on until his death. Here’s a list of just American help (Britain and Canada also contributed):
Food is an interesting topic of its own. Spam (the canned meat) was such a vital ration for Soviet soldiers that they affectionately referred to it as the “second front”. So much of this stuff was shipped over that it’s still being found all over the territory of the former Soviet Union every once in a while.
When the Soviets launched the first human into space, it was primarily because they snatched up more German scientists than everyone else taken together (because Nazi Germany was irrationally pumping more money into the V programs relative to their economy than the US invested into the atomic bomb - the winners of WW2 reaped the benefits of that gamble) and were far more reckless with human lives than the Americans. Not that they ever admitted as much - unlike for example the US, which just made the likes of von Braun Americans and gladly ignored their war crimes (the Soviets only did the latter with people they needed). The post-war recovery and ascend to superpower status would not have been possible without forced labor, both from their own people, ordinary people they abducted and worked to death, as well as the aforementioned highly qualified experts (that they also abducted). They didn’t just catch rocket scientists, but experts in every field, dismantled entire factories and research complexes in the parts of Germany they had under control, rebuilding them brick by brick in their secret cities that still exist to this day. There were certainly bright minds using these human and other resources well, but they were always hampered by the Soviet system, its bureaucracy, irrationality, wastefulness and blatant disregard for even the most basic human decency. Some of the most brilliant Soviet scientists and engineers were forced to work in the Gulag for years, squandering their potential.
Any successes certainly weren’t due to the economic or political system, but despite of it, because the moment the short-term benefits from forced labor started to dry up, the descent into stagnation began. If this system was so brilliant, why did it never produce any results past the initial mass mobilization, conquering, theft and exploitation phase? Every single Communist nation went through this: Rapid growth industrial revolution style (with all of the same trappings as 19th century Britain, from smoke-filled cities to child labor), followed by the surprising realization that you cannot brute force progress in an autocratic system forever, because it’s ideas that are ultimately worth the most - and ideas, independent thinking are dangerous, comrade. We cannot allow that! The party is always right, after all.
If you’re thinking I’m exaggerating with that last sentence, putting on a bad Hollywood parody of those noble Communists, I’ll remind you that the East German communist party’s official hymn had these exact lyrics.