Rudyard Lynch: The Coming Psychological Black Death

I think as we speak, the world is going through a horrifying process, the extent of which we have never seen before in human history. Over history, plagues have ravaged the world, often like the Black Death, killing half the population of Eurasia. Sometimes it’s even worse, like the outbreaks of European diseases, which killed 90% of Australia’s or the Americas’ population. We’ve accepted this part of the world as a society and have used modern science to be much more durable against pathogens. However, the way the world works is that the problem most likely to kill your society almost always comes from a different dimension that you can’t comprehend. After seeing the horror, you go back through the historic record and realize it was always a threat; you just didn’t know where to look. I believe this will be one of, if not the greatest, stories of all time. Our society is in the early phases of facing a mental health plague on the scale of the Black Death, and I believe it’ll have similar effects, indirectly halving the world’s population. That might sound strange, and it would have been even stranger 10 years ago, but once you change a few assumptions in how your worldview works, you realize this is already happening. Try not to go crazy by the end of this.

One of the things that is pretty easy for me to mentally navigate, and I’m shocked most people really struggle with or haven’t reached, is that I assume a lot of society’s collective wisdom and the academic consensus at any given time are just incorrect. The reason I say that is that if you look over the course of history, theories and paradigms come and go, often being heavily dictated by the political aspirations of the priest class at any given time. What I’d also say is that the biggest reason giant plans go awry or people make incorrect calculations about how the world works is because there’s some other variable they just haven’t thought of. The amount of things we don’t know is infinitely large across the world. Even if you look over the course of modern science, you find that theories people hold with religious-like certainty turn out to be completely incorrect.

A hundred years ago, people believed that the best way to manage the economy was through state planning, that races were discrete things with different abilities, that all women envied men’s penises, that everyone wanted to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers, that the universe operated under perfect clockwork Newtonian principles, and that humans are inherently rational and moral. We don’t believe any of that today, but it was just a consensus that you’d be called an idiot for questioning a century ago. And the thing is, they also had the scientific method in exactly the same form. So, we’re using the same tools to validate our opinions today as they had back then.

For me, I’ll look at entire disciplines and aspects of society and view them as houses built on sand. I don’t attribute malice to the people involved—they’re mostly honest, truth-seeking, hardworking people who discard incorrect premises. Life is brutal, and there are infinite ways to be wrong and only a couple of ways to be right. I believe in the truth more than anyone; I just think it’s very, very difficult to reach.

Before the Black Death, Europeans were primed for a major plague without even realizing it. They didn’t have a concept of germ theory or how diseases actually spread and so lived near their own waste, wouldn’t clean wounds, and didn’t have a concept that cleanliness stopped illness. Families would all sleep naked in the same bed together, among loads of other things. They were unwittingly setting themselves up for a giant plague. We’ve done this in our society too, as our understanding of human psychology is so elementary that we actively do many things that are unwittingly setting us up for a mental health pandemic. In many ways, our understanding of human psychology is one of the least advanced of any society ever in human history. This occurred, as I explain in this video, as we turned science from a single tool used to analyze and arbitrate data into a god, which we use to explain all of reality. And anything that science can’t explain just doesn’t exist.

First, implicit in the scientific method is the removal of any external evidence from the experiment. This is necessary for the scientific method, which needs to isolate which variables are important through a test. However, in the real world, this is incredibly silly, given that we exist in a complex web of existence in which context, common sense, and intuition determine absolutely every choice we make. You can’t make an algorithm to figure out which friend you should trust, who you should marry, what business you should create, or how to win a war. These are things that require real knowledge of the individual context of that situation.

This is why the right and the left disagree on every single thing about the nature of the human condition, economics, the universe, and life in general. Since we don’t appeal to common sense in our culture, when we don’t want to see something, we purposely ignore the context. A great example of how this works is that we didn’t want to believe that there were any real psychological differences between men and women, so we made it a taboo topic to study, and the science agreed with us. However, when people actually did study that topic, it turned out there were some real differences in how men and women think. And the thing is, that’s what literally every other era of history would have told us, but we didn’t want to see that, so we didn’t look.

The logical system our society has—whether social constructionism or the blank slate—literally believes that we construct reality to be whatever we want. This is how every side of the political spectrum has gone through a phase of saying they have the scientific truth, given they just study the things they want to see and ignore those they don’t. Thus, scientific studies become mirrors of their own worldview. What’s even worse is that we shame people who disagree with what are really our fantasies about how we want the world to be. If I say men and women are different, different cultures operate differently, or that war is a necessary part of the human condition, people will insult me and try to destroy my career, whether or not those things are true, which further isolates us from the truth.

Also, once you believe you create the reality of the world, you remove the ability to do anything as a society. Since if you can’t agree on what’s right or wrong, you can’t form plans and thus get anyone to do anything as a group. This quickly spirals into insanity. People like to think that science, untrammeled by emotion, context, history, tradition, and more, will create a utopia. The reality is that it goes insane since there’s nothing tethering it to the real world, and so instead, it just reflects the fantasies of the imaginer. What this translates to is that we ignore things we don’t want to see to push for utopias, which only results in those variables crushing us when we push too far.

Examples of this include how communism actually turned into genocidal slave states, how sexual liberation turned into massive sexual inequality (which ended up hurting women a lot), global warming, and how colonial states meant to civilize were often brutal. The second cognitive bug in modernity that lets this happen is that we are only capable of seeing things as discrete, dead things that don’t exist.

Through time flowing forward, the reality is that all of existence is like water, constantly flowing in every direction, with everything spilling into everything else, connecting all things. There’s no concept that the world around us, especially our minds and societies, is alive. When you deal with a living thing, it activates a completely different part of your brain than a dead thing. For example, communism treats human societies as machines, where you can cut out different gears or social classes to re-engineer utopia in the same way you would for a car. The reality is that societies are alive and holistic, and doing that is the equivalent of blowing up organs in a body. Once you kill the officers, the church, the nobility, yeomen, farmers, and more, you don’t get a utopia; you get a broken society.

One of the great ironies is that psychology and neuroscience have made incredible gains over the course of the 21st century. Most people thought this would create an incredibly advanced scientific society, that we would remake the world with these new discoveries. However, the great irony is that these breakthroughs basically validated the premodern world’s concepts of psychology as correct. Most people in the scientific establishment haven’t realized this, partially, as said before, due to how siloed modern science is, in that people don’t think outside the context of just their field.

I’m going to use the European Middle Ages or early modern period as an example for this premodern view of psychology, given that it’s partially my own specialty, which I like talking about. It’s also the closest parallel to our current society of premodern cultures. However, keep in mind that basically every premodern society everywhere in the world, in every time of history, would agree with what I’m about to say here.

Something I touched on before is that most of the flaws in modern psychology stem from cognitive biases we don’t even think about. This is the biggest problem modern science always runs into—it doesn’t take into account the biases the creator of the test doesn’t even know they have. One of the cognitive bugs we have is something Charles Taylor talks about in his book A Secular Age. His book, which compares the medieval religious worldview to the modern secular one, discusses the “buffered personality,” in which our view of psychology is individual, while the reality is collective.

If you look at modern psychology, all the interventions for problems are on an individual basis. If you’re depressed, go to a therapist and talk out your issues. What we’ve learned, and what the rest of history already knew, is that psychology is a group and ecosystem problem. People’s psychologies aren’t individual but are often controlled by how society manages itself.

In Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis and Johann Hari’s Lost Connections—both of which are amazing books I highly recommend—they talk about the dominant factors that drive mental health issues: weak community, lack of religion, grueling work conditions, trauma, weak families, poverty, and lack of beauty. We’ve found that material comfort and wealth tend not to have very high degrees of effect on happiness. They tend to in the short term, but then people get used to it, and it becomes a new baseline.

If we look to celebrities, this is the case. Once they realize that even with money, fame, and sex they’re still depressed, they tend to hit rock bottom. If the assumptions that feed into our materialistic worldview were correct, celebrities would be the happiest people in the world, but we all know that’s not true. Something I’ll throw out is that being actively in poverty does affect your mental health. If you’re barely getting by and struggling to make sure your kids are okay, that will put a lot of strain on you. However, moving from the middle to the upper class shows rapidly diminishing returns in happiness for greater wealth.

We know that our theory of psychology is inadequate to the reality of the human condition, given that we have the worst mental health in history. This is something I’ll talk about in greater depth later on in this video. However, therapy, which is the big catchall for all of our society’s issues, has been ineffective at dealing with these problems. Therapy has its place. As a person with PTSD, I can comfortably say that EMDR trauma therapy has literally saved my life. However, talk therapy, which forms the vast majority of modern therapy, is incredibly ineffective at solving underlying psychological issues, especially for men. You can correlate the rising number of Americans going to talk therapy, which has skyrocketed over the last few years, with rising mental health problems.

What this means is that traditional therapy has been completely ineffective at dealing with our society’s rising mental health crisis. This is going to upset a lot of people, but religion and community are statistically much, much more effective than therapy. I understand this varies from condition to condition, and if you have a serious mental health issue, going to church won’t solve that. The problem is that most churches and communities are out of touch with what people really need. However, a person who is both religious and has a strong friend network is more than $30,000 a year happier and more psychologically stable than a person who doesn’t.

Strong interpersonal connections and religion are the biggest factors for happiness. This is why the vast majority of the human race, over the course of history, has lived in poverty and not killed themselves, and in fact, had better mental health than we do today. This is why Westerners will go to Guatemala or Egypt and say the people there are happy. I’m not saying material wealth doesn’t matter, especially for people in deep poverty. However, we’ve massively overestimated its importance to our mental health.

These are things that individuals can control up to a certain degree. And I’m a classical liberal, and no one believes in individual responsibility more than me. However, let’s be real—if you’re born a peasant in Uganda, it’s not your fault that you’re not going to become a wealthy tech VC mogul. The things I mentioned above are really supplied by society, and it is society’s responsibility. However, the problem is that our society has completely abdicated responsibility on every single one of those issues.

This concept existed in the pre-industrial world. The reason premodern societies did things that seem insane to us, like burn witches, heretics, enforce religious dogma, and launch crusades, was because they viewed the collective mental health of their societies as something to be defended against encroachments, in the same way that a nation has to be protected against foreign invaders. Witches were burnt because they were destroying the shared collective health of society through their nihilism.

This worldview was in many cases pushed too far, as we can see from how the openness associated with modernity was able to do so many incredible goods. In the Middle Ages, there was a concept that the church existed as warriors against demonic invasion, in the same way that knights fought for the nation’s physical safety. Premodern cities and villages had various rituals to protect the collective spiritual stability of society. This is why the ancient Romans got so angry when the Christians didn’t sacrifice to the gods. If some people didn’t sacrifice to the gods in the city, the gods got angry at the city and punished the entire population.

This is a proxy for how, when a society loses good values like hard work, courage, humility, or respect for the gods and the natural order, the entire society suffers. If you told someone in the Middle Ages, or any part of the premodern world, that we live in a culture without a church, where there was no community, no beautiful art, and where we only believed the material world existed and nothing more, they would say that our society would be so corrupted as to start experiencing demonic possession before complete social collapse.

The concept of demonic possession sounds insane in our current society, and we’ve been trained from childhood to view it as insane and silly, but it makes sense if you tilt your point of view just slightly. I know a lot of you will struggle with this, but please wait until the end of the video before judging.

We know psychologically that the human mind is split between multiple competing subpersonalities. This is what the field of family systems therapy teaches. These different subpersonalities are constantly competing for influence over your mind, and the healthier a person’s psychology is, the better integrated these subpersonalities are. In the same way that a healthy family isn’t constantly fighting, in bad psychologies, these subpersonalities are openly at war, destroying the person’s ability to function.

Most people have no clue who they are. If you ask them to write an estimation of their character and show it to their friends, the friends will often laugh at how off it is. If you tell them to write a plan for the next week of what they’ll do, they’ll usually be wrong. The thing is, people do not understand how little control over themselves they have. The reason you get angry at your wife even when you know she doesn’t deserve it, or why you can’t write the fantasy novel you’ve always wanted to, is that your estimation of yourself is not the full reality of who you are. It’s a small ego attached to giant subconscious forces that are really in control of you.

As a person with PTSD, I am aware that I’m not in control of my entire body. I purposely avoid crowded events, incredibly stressful situations, and I’m more introverted because I know that if something goes wrong, I could literally lose physical control of my body. For people with bad PTSD, part of their personality can seize control and make them do terrible things. Can someone explain to me how that’s different from a demon? Ironically, modern therapy tells us to deal with trauma in much the same way that the premodern world told us to deal with demons—by holding ourselves to an objective moral standard while accepting Christ’s love.

This fits with modern therapy’s approach of accepting the madness in your head while understanding that the world still makes sense, and learning to love yourself and the crazy parts of you. In modern society, we have a complicated relationship with evil. Evil is simultaneously considered a social construct that isn’t real, but at the same time, when someone says something we disagree with, they are seen as pure evil and must be canceled. This is a complex argument that deserves a long discussion, but in reality, no one truly believes that good and evil don’t exist.

Once you say good and evil don’t exist, you have to accept that a man who rapes and tortures his daughter to death should be treated the same as Jesus or Buddha. No one would say that. Isn’t it funny how people who claim evil doesn’t exist immediately use that belief to justify doing something evil? Once you remove evil, you remove the argument for why genociding your opponents isn’t really that bad.

When people argue that good and evil don’t really exist, they don’t believe it in practice. They just want to confuse you enough so you can’t resist. In the same way a physical plague can rip across a society when conditions aren’t right, we have a long history of psychological or demonic plagues destroying societies. You won’t notice them until they’re pointed out, but what separates the totalitarian phases the modern world has gone through from a demonic plague? Look at the French Revolution, Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, or Nazi Germany. In each of those societies, people rejected any objective standards or God and claimed that man was capable of becoming a god and building a perfect world. Their actions then involved killing people in the most horrifying ways, destroying society, freedom, and causing immense harm.

These are some of the most horrifying events in history, and afterwards, reasonable people around the world agreed that these were bad ideas. How is a psychological plague of people doing horrible things that they wouldn’t have done before different from a demonic plague taking the souls of an entire society and making them do evil things?

One of the things we just can’t come to terms with as a society is that sometimes people do evil things because they are evil. You can often use empathy to explain why someone turns evil, and it always makes sense from a certain perspective. However, how do you explain a parent who tortures their own children, which we know happens, or a government killing millions of its own people? How do you explain how often in the historical record people enjoy torturing their opponents? Take, for example, the Nazi slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work will set you free”) at Auschwitz. These people weren’t deriving any benefit from this—evil had simply taken over their personality to the point where they were doing evil things just for the sake of being evil.

In all the cases before, these acts spread like plagues. Beforehand, society was generally functioning psychologically, but afterward, often in a matter of months or years, the society descended into complete insanity as people lost any sense of grounding in truth and began butchering each other. This plague spread socially through the population, through culture, incredibly quickly, like a real virus.

If you look at societies before the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or Nazi Germany, these were societies where modernity broke down communities, religion, and families. Conditions put people into economically unstable poverty or psychological destabilization, even though, in most cases, the society had become wealthier for decades beforehand. I don’t see how this is different from how overpopulated, starving Europe was set up for the Black Death—just on a spiritual, psychological level instead of a physical one.

We can’t come to terms with the traumas of totalitarianism because our mental model for the human condition is simply incorrect. We don’t understand how weak and corruptible we are, and how, when things are set up poorly, we can all lose our minds.

So far, we’ve been talking about the conceptual framework that could explain how we could experience a major psychological pandemic. However, the scary thing is that in crises like this, people usually only realize what the problem with society is once it’s already destroyed. I believe this is occurring right now with our psychological pandemic. Our society is already being ravaged by this disease, but we just don’t have the terminology to talk about it. This is because mental health issues seep into every aspect of society, and we view these problems as discrete things, while in reality, they all stem from mental health problems.

From a purely mental health perspective, a quarter of the American population has a diagnosed mental health condition. This doesn’t include loads of people who have mental health issues but just don’t recognize it, like your boomer gym teacher who is a narcissist but thinks psychiatry is a joke, or your aunt who has undiagnosed OCD which controls her life. For Gen Z, those numbers rise to 40% of the population having a diagnosed mental health condition.

I know people like to say that Gen Z has destigmatized mental illness, and to a certain degree, that’s true. There are a lot of kids on TikTok pretending to have mental illnesses for clout. However, what I’d say is that if you’re faking a mental health condition, in many cases, that extreme need for validation indicates a different mental health issue.

Ninety percent of Gen Z has anxiety, 80% has depression, 90% has experienced burnout in the last year, and close to 90% feel lonely on a regular basis. Half of young men have contemplated suicide. A quarter of Gen Z has contemplated suicide, and 10% of Gen Z has attempted suicide. Forty percent have long-lasting feelings of lack of purpose and depression. Ninety percent of Gen Z has said their mental health has gotten in the way of their lives and lowered their energy and initiative.

As a person who’s a member of this target demographic, I can’t write this off. Having met thousands of people in my age category, I try to talk to them about their struggles, and this is a genuine, real problem that older people tend to dismiss as teens being dramatic. That’s not true. This affects the toughest, hardest-headed members of the demographic as much, if not more, than the rest. It’s really impossible to judge someone’s inner struggles based on their outward success. There’s a reason Harvard and Cornell have the highest suicide rates of any colleges in the country.

A lot of Gen Z is simply incapable of functioning on any level. As a person who’s 22, I know loads of people who are too anxious to take phone calls, go on trips out of their hometowns, get jobs, hear contrary political opinions, sleep over at a friend’s house, go out to get drinks, and more. Older people might not believe me, but a significant part of Gen Z is completely incapable of functioning in the real world.

A story I told in a previous video, which no one saw but I’ll repeat because it’s telling, is that I was visiting my 15-year-old cousin. We were at dinner, and I asked if he wanted to stay the night at my Airbnb, 15 minutes away, since I had an extra bedroom. It took him half an hour to work himself up to agree, as he saw it as a big risk. Even with his parents’ encouragement, he only wanted to stay at my place for another 15 minutes because he felt too anxious.

The problem here is that I don’t think this sort of thing is abnormal, especially for certain sub-demographics and parts of the country. The thing is, a lot of people want to blame Zoomers, and I think that’s partly true, as we’re all responsible for our actions when everything’s said and done. However, the oldest Zoomers are only 25, which means the fault really lies with their parents, who raised them like this.

I think the reason for the psychological collapse is multivariable, due to a combination of breakdowns in religion, community, social feminization, urbanization, and more. Gen Z’s helicopter parenting—where parents wouldn’t let their kids play outside for fear and were constantly shepherding them from event to event—has created a population that is incredibly anxious because they never had enough autonomy to prove themselves and create self-confidence. It’s also indicative of their parents themselves being incredibly anxious and unwell. Imagine explaining helicopter parenting to any other era of history, and they would just tell you to loosen up and grab a beer.

I don’t want to discount the rest of the population’s mental health problems, but I want to use Gen Z as a capstone example for the group that has it the worst. Middle-aged men are also hit really hard, where, for the first time in American history, middle-aged white men saw a decline in lifespan due to deaths of despair.