Sometime in 2013, Ann Coulter famously said that liberalism is on the spectrum of mental illness. Well, this was surely not the first time when a similar quote emerged. In 2010, Michael Savage released the book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.



Those statements might sound like memes or insults. The only problem is that they're not only memes and insults. They're also approximations of cold hard facts.



Slate Star Codex has organized a survey involving 8043 participants and investigating links between the formal mental diagnoses and the self-identified political beliefs of the people. Slate Star Codex is proud about the survey, it just finds it heretical for others to report the results or to link to them – so I won't do that. Instead, let me link to nicely reviewed stories



All the numbers below divide the people mentally to those who have been formally diagnosed at least with one of four disorders; and those who haven't. The four disorders are depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. OK, let us look at the percentage of the ill people, as defined above, among the political groups determined by self-identification:* 38% Marxists* 23% social democrats* 20% neo-reactionary* 18% liberal* 15% Libertarian* 14% alt-right* 12% conservativeOK, the correlation looks clear. Marxists humiliate everyone else. More than one-third of them them are mentally sick. Social democrats earned the silver, almost one-quarter are ill. On the opposite side, conservatives are healthy and 12% is a small group of exceptions while alt-right folks are close to conservatives.There are similar graphs in the article saying that the percentage of the ill people among the #1 far left... up to #10 far right are... 43%, 31%, 28%, ... and numbers between 18-23%. So it's the first three far left groups, #1,#2,#3, among the ten groups that are significantly more likely to be mentally ill than the rest. And the more far left-wing group you choose, the more ill it is.Needless to say, these 3 groups out of 10 are exactly those that are gaining an extreme power in the contemporary decaying civilization. There are numerous questions about the correct interpretation and attribution of these strong correlations that should be answered very carefully. I will only mention two.I would like to conjecture that there exists a powerful mechanism here. These far left people are really gaining power because they are depressed, unhinged, psychopaths, or another kind of psychopathological mess. Mankind has become sensitive, unwilling to fight, ready to adapt to anything, and that's why aggressive lunatics find it easier to take over today. And that's why the psychologically unhealthy people – Marxists and similar groups – found the weakness of mankind and they started the offensive. A few hissy fits is enough for them to get whatever they want.The notorious ill Scandinavian teenager could very well be the ultimate median role model for what's going on. She may look like an extreme exception but that's only because you are comparing her with mostly mentally healthy people – and those have very little power today. If you compared her to those who determine the atmosphere, especially what is not possible to say etc., in the most heavily mentally infected places such as the universities, you could very well find out that the typical influential people are as insane and unhinged as the Swede.I think that these two alternative explanations are important because a "survey" isn't really a hard scientific measurement of someone's brain. What a person answers in a survey may be affected by lots of non-biological and non-genetic effects, by the environment and its culture, by the individual's immediate strategies, and other things. In particular, it's possible that those people's Marxism turned them into loons; it's possible that their being loons have turned them into Marxists; it's possible that these Marxists aren't really loons but they find a psychopathological diagnosis to be cool or useful enough for them.It seems to me that the third possibility is likely to be important. Why? Because leftists end up being the people who love to invent non-existent problems. They aren't problem solvers, they don't know how how to do something that is actually useful. But they love to claim that there is a problem. They love to increase the number of problems and hate to reduce it. Just think about all the non-existent problems with the climate, discrimination, and all similar garbage that they love to emit (and I won't discuss their nonsensical "problems" with quantum mechanics or string theory etc.). It's plausible that the invention of their own psychological problems ironically helps them to improve their psychological well-being. To say the least, such a diagnosis is a good excuse and an extra tool to claim the status of a victim.On the other hand, some conservatives, and especially Christians, are likely to mask their illness even if one exists because dealing with a psychiatrist is a sin for them. More generally, they like to imagine themselves as the folks who are satisfied with the world: God seems to want them to behave in this humble way (while the leftists' non-God apparently want them to be insufferable whining spoiled brats at all times; that's a contest in which I prefer God over non-God, too bad that both are non-existent). So they're more likely to deny problems, even problems with their mental health.Many of us increasingly often say that a new, scary totalitarian system is emerging. In many respects, it's almost identical to Nazism and communism, in others, it's different. I think that the emerging green and neo-Marxist totalitarian system is the regime that is most heavily influenced by mentally ill people (at least by formally diagnosed ones) in the whole history of mankind. What is coming isn't another generic totalitarian system; it's a spherical inversion of the mental asylum, a possibly ongoing transition into the system in which the patients of the asylum take over the powers of the physicians and the physicians are locked into padded cells.Nations (well, the mentally healthy parts of the nations is what I primarily care about here) that haven't been converted to pigs waiting to be slaughtered should counteract and save their skin.