Are "angry white males" angry? Conservative guys like me have been labeled "angry white males," but are we? My sister-in-law suggested that liberals are the ones who are ticked off about everything.
The General Social Survey asked 1,128 whites how many days in the week they get angry about something. Here are the means by political orientation:
Mean days that the person is angry
Males
Extremely liberal 2.53
Liberal 1.58
Slightly liberal 1.42
Moderate 1.38
Slightly conservative 1.49
Conservative 1.61
Extremely conservative 2.04
Females
Extremely liberal 2.44
Liberal 1.60
Slightly liberal 1.32
Moderate 1.57
Slightly conservative 1.45
Conservative 1.21
Extremely conservative .93
While extremely conservative guys fit the stereotype, it's liberals who are angrier. The pattern is especially clear for women. Very conservative women are the calmest of the bunch.
Now, how do we explain this? Anger comes from the perception that one is not being treated fairly, so perhaps liberals are the type of people who see themselves as frequent victims of injustice.
So there is a message here for libs: chill people, anger's not good for you. Do yourself a favor and look for something positive.
Are gun owners mentally ill?
Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...
I appreciate you posting this; I've been saying this for years. Just imagine how "angry" non-white males are? Or how about non-white females? I don't think there's a more pissed off group than black females? They've been shorted for everything.
ReplyDeleteI thought I recall reading that blacks were actually fairly happy. Neurosies are for whitey.
ReplyDeleteOne possible reason is that liberals have been stewing over Bush and Iraq. Now with Obama they'll be giddy for the next survey (and won't care if there are still troops in Iraq).
It's all about projection in this backwards, topsy-turvy world. The other day I saw a leftie venue (a jokey pack of cards profiling prominent Republicans) describe Fred Barnes as "an angry-looking white guy". Fred Barnes! When I think of Fred Barnes, the words "chipper" and "square" come to mind, not "angry". He seems like an earnest, good-natured person of good will.
ReplyDeleteI won't even even get into the implication that white men aren't allowed to be angry.
I wish you would, green mamba. Let me elaborate on the injunction: white men aren't allowed to be angry.
ReplyDeleteNot much of an injunction. But I'm pulling the web's leg anyway. White men are very much allowed to be angry as long as they are angry on behalf of people from different demographics.
From 1995: "128 Asian Americans and 98 whites were rejected by Cal-Irvine who had both higher verbal and math SAT scores and high school grades than did the median African American enrollee."
I'll go out on a limb and say Asian and white males would be mocked and persecuted for displaying anger about that.
I like Inductivist's message, but the one that will come across is, "By feeling or feigning anger at supposed injustice, we can continue to draw attention to the cause of social justice and draw attention away from things calmer people think are important." Anger is a way of keeping someone on the defensive.
It works well in person, in civilizations in which fistfights are frowned upon. If you start every conversation with someone by yelling and baring your teeth, you'll find they have little opportunity to air their grievances with you. People may think you're a blowhard, but that kind of thinking went out in the 1960s.
When you see the world as an engineered rather than an organic place, the opportunity is there to shake your fist at the engineer. Enter gnosticism. Imagine your conservative ladies just shaking their heads sadly when something seems injust.
Your only big gender gap is among the conservatives and ECs. My guess is that angry rightist males are angry partly because of the aforementioned injunction on their being angry, but also partly because of the way traditionalists view male and female roles vis a vis slurs on the group. In a lot of traditional groups that feel under attack, the women are supposed to play a calming role; the males look to the females for their cue to act based on whether the females are displaying forebearance or fear. During that time the men display anger most of the time as a way of showing loyalty, readiness, and a willingness to ensure group security at the cost of personal danger.
Guys are supposed to be hot-headed and dangerous because if they weren't, they'd be too cautious to stick up for their family. That is the way our bloody history would have it, anyway. The fact that there is no such gender gap among the *ahem* leftists implies a completely different sort of anger - the aforementioned gnostic "offensive" anger rather than "defensive" anger.
One theory: extremely liberal people are more likely than others to live in large cities, and the hustle and bustle of big city life is especially prone to provoking anger in people.
ReplyDeleteRon, please break down the angry male demography if its not too much trouble.
ReplyDeleteMy hypothesis about the angry liberal female:
We're talking predominantly about white women with a propensity toward unstable relationships. Their primitive neurophysiology is telling them that the white men in their environment are wimps for allowing their territory to be invaded (such primitive neurons not recognizing the presence of a government that throws "racist sexist homophobic white heterosexual men" in prison to be raped by ethnic gangs as "correction" for their "psychopathology") -- which triggers three-stages of pathological hatred:
1) They are angry at white men for putting up with their territory being invaded -- the purpose of which is to goad the white men into action: maybe giving the woman a good slapping around for being a bitch or something. The she-monkey doesn't really care... so long as the sperm she's been receiving isn't from too much of a beta male.
2) They notice the white men won't even stand up to a WOMAN for crying out loud, and they become even more contemptuous -- further degrading their relationships with the white men in their environment.
3) They start to notice that when they turn to men of other ethnicities or even other women for companionship, they find they are some combination of treated like trash, given HIV or some other disease or de facto sterile -- and their anger turns on themselves and the universe in a last futile attempt to fix things with anger. I expect to see a trend of the percapita suicide rates (not just attempts) increasing with time among women as they hit the age when the illusion that their "power" comes from something other than their youthful fertility -- and their realization that they have, during their dwerukw years, invested their biosexual moral power in destroying everything they hold dear.
I should say that I think there is more to this than mere pollution of human ecologies by modern technologies. It may be more along the lines of extended phenotypic virulence arising from intraspecific evolutionary arms races.
ReplyDeleteAnthony Burgess, author of the book "A Clockwork Orange" was the artist in residence while I was in the undergraduate program at the Iowa City Writer's Workshop back
in 1974. I think he based his book on the work of Jose M.R. Delgado, M.D. published under the book with the damn spooky title: "Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society".
I managed to get a copy of the book finally, and discovered wonderful passages such as the following on page 115:
ESB [electrical stimulation of the brain -- JAB] may evoke more elaborate responses. For example, in one of our patients, electrical stimulation of the rostral part of the internal capsule produced head turning and slow displacement of the body to either side with a well-oriented and apparently normal sequence, as if the patient were looking for something. This stimulation was repeated six times on two different days with comparable results. The interesting fact was that the patient considered the evoked activity spontaneous and always offered a reasonable explanation for it. When asked, "What are you doing?" the answers were, "I am looking for my slippers," "I heard a noise," "I am restless," and "I was looking under the bed." In this case it was difficult to ascertain whether the stimulation had evoked a movement which the patient tried to justify, or if an hallucination had been elicited which subsequently induced the patient to move and to explore the surroundings.
This rationalization behavior sort of reminds me of most of the "scholarship" that has been going on in "the humanities" for the last century or so.
Moreover, all this rationalization isn't merely random. Genes are quite possibly being served, as is eerily indicated by a passage from Richard Dawkins' "The Extended Phenotype [amazon.com]" chapter titled "Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes":
"Many fascinating examples of parasites manipulating the behavior of their hosts can be given. For nematomorph larvae, who need to break out of their insect hosts and get into water where they live as adults, '...a major difficulty in the parasite's life is the return to water. It is, therefore, of particular interest that the parasite appears to affect the behavior of its host, and "encourages" it to return to water. The mechanism by which this is achieved is obscure, but there are sufficient isolated reports to certify that the parasite does influence its host, and often suicidally for the host... One of the more dramatic reports describes an infected bee flying over a pool and, when about six feet over it, diving straight into the water. Immediately on impact the gordian worm burst out and swam into the water, the maimed bee being left to die' (Croll 1966)."
This sort of reminds me of an "empowered" woman being "downsized" out of her "career" as a corporate concubine about the time she reaches 40.
Angry White Guy is really all about Women/Elite's views on what makes a "desirable" man which is the "Big Man" who is of course Liberal.
ReplyDeleteIt's what the NYT column called the "Gentry" type of person, or the SWPL blog and book.
Jim Bowery,
ReplyDeletecan you please continue?
Mencius Moldbug recommended a book a few months ago entitled 'The Culture of Defeat' by Walter Schivelbusch that covers this topic. Schivelbusch seems to lack hard data in the book (he is a cultural historian), but nonetheless in the book he talks about the roots of vengeful and angry left wing groups (he also covers right wing).
ReplyDeleteSchivelbusch says the strength of ideologies that identify with left wing politics -- like marxism -- is that they think of themselves as consistently 'oppressed', even in the face of evidence that they are not, as they have to continue the ingroup metanarrative as it like a social/ideological 'glue' of sorts. Schivelbusch ends up concluding that anger and revenge is not only a primary motivator of 'defeated' cultures, but that anger and revenge also are a condition for a groups rise to political power.
Schivelbusch ends up concluding that anger and revenge is not only a primary motivator of 'defeated' cultures, but that anger and revenge also are a condition for a groups rise to political power.
ReplyDeleteAS has been said way too often, to the left-liberals (even those who weren't even born then) it is always 1968. They refuse to notice the obvious: the US is a PeeCee-Multicultist state that bears only the most superficial resemblance to the Republic created by the Founders.
They are so deluded by their worldview that they failed to notice that W was a liberal who shares their egalitarian vision of the universe. Yes, in waging his Wilsonian-Utopian war for democracy(and Israel)in the ME he did a lot of harm to civil liberties. But Lincoln, Wilson and (arguably) FDR
did worse.
Everyone remembers FDR's internment camps, but few recall his political persecution of his anti-war critics. One example was the tragic and ludicrous Mass Sedition Trial in which the most unlikely assemblage of characters were accused of belonging to a pro-Nazi conspiracy. The accused included the mixed-race(part black) scholar and former diplomat Lawrence Dennis.
The issue arises because different political types get angry about different things.
ReplyDeleteThe perception of angry conservatives arises because liberals don't get angry about crime and they notice when conservatives do.
Of course liberals get incandescent with anger about issues such as the Iraq war, about which conservatives are more placid.
But liberals interpret conservative lack of anger about liberal issues as wicked complacency.
I think the interesting thing with these data is the gender gap. With women there's a gradient: the more liberal a woman is, the more anger she reports. With men, there's a curve, where the extremes report more anger than the middle.
ReplyDeleteThe simplest explanation I can think of is the generalisation that men are idealists (concerned with ideas) and women are realists (concerned with their own social reality). The male idealist has to deal with the fact that reality doesn't match his ideals: the more extreme the ideals, the poorer the match, therefore the more anger. The liberal female has to deal with the fact the liberal/feminist lifestyle hasn't delivered on its promises (career advancement, sexual fulfilment) and has excluded or slighted what she now sees as valuable goods (children, monogamy). So she's angry. The conservative female pursues an ideal (children, monogamy) that is, for many women, eminently attainable. So she's happy.
IP
Minimalist strategy for non-SWPL
ReplyDeletewhite males in the era of Deep Cultural Marxism:
I. Talk a lot less.
2. Watch the bare respectable minimum of TV sports.
3. Take up Westside Barbell style powerlifting(definitely NOT bodybuilding)and good combat sports like boxing and BJJ. NOT BS like TKD.
I have a feeling this may be a variation on the philosophy of Fight Club, but I never saw the film- or read the novel if there was one.
All this in addition to the obvious common-sense need to cut personal spendng in light of the what looks to be a long economic downturn. But y'all knew that already.
It's not just anger -- it's happiness too. Variables: HAPPY, POLVIEWS, restricted to RACE(1). Doesn't matter if you restrict to males / females.
ReplyDeleteHappiness increases from liberal extreme to conservative extreme.
No, it doesn't. His results clearly show that both extremes are angrier for men and the further you go from moderate, the angrier.
ReplyDeleteFor women, it's a pretty clear angry-liberal gradient.
I'm tempted to start a rival blog where I check how many books conservatives have read or something. You guys can't have all the good indicators. ;) We could link to each other and have a competition.
Jim: more likely liberal women are simply annoyed at the emasculated little shits they've made us men into. (I may be anti-business but I am no friend of feminism.) I wouldn't read the whole racial explanation into it; it's pure gender politics, IMHO.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if TGGP's point about neuroses is right or not, but using RACE and HAPPY the GSS indicates:
ReplyDeleteWhites
Very Happy - 35.3%
Pretty Happy - 55.1%
Not Too Happy - 9.6%
Blacks
Very Happy - 23.0%
Pretty Happy - 57.1%
Not Too Happy - 20.0%
Other
Very Happy - 29.4%
Pretty Happy - 57.1%
Not Too Happy - 13.5%
SFG, I haven't gotten an answer to the books and politics questions. Cross-referencing NEWSFROM and POLVIEWS doesn't say much, since the former only asks about people's main source of news, and that is very low for everyone (highest, 3%, among extreme liberals).
ReplyDeleteAt some point I may crunch a little bit the table generated by BOOKS16 and POLVIEWS. At first blush those numbers imply that liberals are more likely to come from households with extreme numbers of books (less than 3 or more than 100) while conservies are more likely to be in the middle.
As far as I could tell, there wasn't a variable like "How many books, on average, does respondent read in a year?" But I may well have missed something.