The Greens are practicing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Reverse.
Political conversations need to be grounded in reality. And at present, they aren't.
Over the last five years I’ve been reading about the trends in mental health on American college campuses. There are skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression. Campuses are awash with demands for ‘safety’, by which many students mean that they should not encounter ideas they disagree with, because that makes them feel ‘unsafe’.
Everybody wants ‘trigger warnings’ on things, to the point that Stanford University’s IT Department asked staff not to use the phrase ‘trigger warning’ because trigger warnings now trigger people. (After public ridicule, the document was taken down.) Students now regard their feelings as the ultimate guide to reality, leading staff to cull readings from the syllabus which might offend anyone. (Try doing courses in politics, criminology or bio-ethics without coming across some idea you don’t like.) Students at Harvard University and other law schools have asked professors not to teach the law on sexual assaults because it might trigger people. After all the efforts of feminists to get reforms to court procedures to get fairer treatment of victims, should law schools produce potential prosecutors and defence lawyers uninformed of a major part of the criminal law?
Watch here as a group of students storm out of a panel discussion, damaging sound equipment, and shouting about fascism and Nazis because an evolutionary biology professor says that men and women have physical differences, such as average height, muscle mass and where body fat is deposited. ‘We should not listen to fascism. It should not be tolerated in civil society’, declares one. ‘The women in there are brainwashed’, shouts another.
Having returned to study, I have commented that I’m glad that we are not seeing this kind of dysfunction on Australian campuses. Nobody stormed out of my bio-ethics class when a lecturer suggested it was important to record some medical data by sex, because men and women have slightly different symptoms at the start of a heart attack, so failing to know this would disadvantage women.
Extreme language in the Greens
When I resumed attending Greens meetings after COVID, I was shocked at how much some public debates among Greens sounded like arguments on American college campuses:
demands for safety – ‘this conversation is becoming unsafe’;
seeing people who disagree with you as haters, bigots and evil people who must be opposed and defeated; and
thinking that people who have a differing opinion want to ‘deny your humanity’ or ‘erase your identity’ or are ‘debating your right to exist’.
Consider the following from a public blog by a Greens member in the ACT, written after she read The Docklands Declaration:
Anyone saying that women are not fit to hold office, for example, or that any member of a particular ethnic group is a terrorist, or less fit for office than any other, is beyond the pale. These things we must and do declare off limits. Freedom of speech means you can say what you like without being jailed. It does not mean you can say what you like and still be a member of any group, or, indeed, be considered fit to hold office. If you insist that no issue is off limits, you open the door to anti science lies like climate change denialism and anti vax movements, yet that’s not even the worst of it. Anyone who argues that some group of people is less human, or who tries to constrain anyone else’s human rights, is clearly unfit to hold office, or even be a member of The Greens … we can’t afford to sit by and say it’s fine for people to debate the human rights, or indeed the very humanity, of trans folks or anyone else. Fuck that noise. Time to shut it down.
Or take this tweet, by Sarah Alice:
When we talk about people like Linda Gale and their language being very much like what the Nazis were talking about before the holocaust? It’s not because it’s hyperbole or a group of sensitive people being dramatic … It’s because these people are the new Nazis.
Somebody in a branch meeting I attended said The Docklands Declaration sounded like ‘a dog whistle to white supremacy.’ This is, or should be, jaw-dropping.
The ACT Greens member above is engaging in catastrophizing. Who, precisely, is arguing that women are not fit to hold office because they are women? The Anglican Church in Sydney does say that in relation to internal church positions (see here), and some fundamentalist American evangelicals say it. But the Greens? Even Donald Trump’s MAGA base elected twelve female state governors and lieutenant governors. No Greens member is saying anything remotely like this, and anyone like this wouldn’t join the Greens. Does anyone think anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers are going to join the Greens, or that the Party would not dismiss them as ridiculous, crank provocateurs? Who, exactly, is debating the ‘very humanity’ of trans folk? Is any of this grounded in reality?
Saying that heavyweight boxers should not compete against bantamweight boxers is not ‘denying the humanity’ of heavyweight boxers. Saying that a twice-convicted rapist like Isla Bryson should not be in a women’s prison (as occurred in Scotland earlier this year) is not denying anyone’s humanity. It is pointing out that Bryson is a violent, repeat sex offender who poses a risk to women prisoners, many of whom have already been victims of domestic violence or sexual offences. Vic Valentine, manager of Scottish Trans, didn’t want a blanket rule on where trans prisoners are located, but agreed that prisoners with sexual assault convictions and who posed a risk to women should not be placed in women’s prisons (see here) but that a transwoman who transitioned 20 years ago, and who is in jail for financial fraud, might pose no risk. Am I a transphobic bigot for saying in an earlier Green Ideas article, that Isla Bryson shouldn’t be put in a women’s prison, because I think the same as Vic Valentine?
There are bigots in Australia. People like Pauline Hanson and Mark Latham. They’re not sitting next to you at a Greens meeting. One Nation has a member in the Victorian Upper House (Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell). There is an actual Nationalist Socialist group meeting in a gym in Sunshine West. And, meanwhile, who are Victorian Greens members fighting? Each other.
Cognitive behavioural therapy and the Greens
American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced ‘height’) in his book The Coddling of the American Mind describes three types of thinking that are driving up rates of anxiety and depression among students:
1. that ideas you don’t like make you ‘unsafe’ (and you therefore need to be protected from them);
2. that your emotions are a good guide to reality (rather than evidence or reasoning); and
3. that the world is a battleground between good and bad people (and ‘your side’ has a monopoly on virtue).
Many people in the Greens seem to believe similar things. See also this video on how the internet drives distorted thinking and mental dysfunction among teenagers.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), one of psychology’s greatest success stories, teaches people to reduce anxiety and depression by replacing dysfunctional thoughts with more realistic thoughts. It says that our self-talk, the stories we tell ourselves inside our heads, determines our emotional reactions to things. Much of this self-talk is a series of cognitive distortions, some of which are listed here and here. CBT says we change our emotional states by changing our self-talk. There are articles on CBT here, here, and here.
Some of the standard distortions relevant to the Greens are:
catastrophising: if someone disagrees with me on something, they are denying my humanity, they are a threat to my existence;
black and white thinking: there are two types of people, good people who think like me and bad people who need to be expelled or destroyed, and nothing in between;
thinking that your emotions are a good guide to reality: if I feel something, my feelings make it true, that’s all the evidence I need; I should always trust my feelings (when in reality your feelings are about the worst guide to reality you could find); and
mind reading: thinking we know what other people think when we have no evidence; if they disagree with me, they must hate me and want to destroy me.
To summarise the dysfunctional thinking going on in the Greens at the moment:
The world consists of two types of people; good people who think like me, and transphobic bigots, who are probably white supremacists as well.
If I feel ‘unsafe’, I must actually be ‘unsafe’.
Disagreement means people are trying to treat trans people as non-human or ‘debating their right to exist’. There are actual Nazis in the room with me.
How has such thinking, so detached from reality, occurred? Looking at current debates through the lens of CBT shows us what is going wrong in the Party. We have people constantly repeating to each other, via social media, some of the distorted thinking that CBT exists to counter. Social media shows us websites and threads that tell us what we already think, and promotes extremist tweets and posts that generate controversy. Expressions of out-group hate makes social media posts go viral. Some people seem to be teaching themselves CBT in reverse.
An example, not related to the Greens, is this, taken from the way I've seen university students react to getting a bad mark in an essay:
Event: new university student fails an essay.
Catastrophising thought: This is terrible. I’ll probably fail the subject. Obviously I can’t write essays. It’s all hopeless. I might as well change courses or drop out of university before I clock up all this horrendous debt for nothing.
More realistic thought: I got 12/30 for this essay. There’s still 70 percent of the assessment to go. I’m only 3 marks below a pass. I can easily make that up. I can get help from an advisor about how to write better essays.
An example more relevant to the Greens:
Event: Somebody holds an opinion I don’t like, on an issue that personally affects me in a serious way.
Catastrophising thought: This is a disaster. They want to erase my existence and deny I’m human. If we let opinions like this in the Party, next thing we’ll have anti-vaxxers and climate deniers running the place. Because this is a war, they need to be crushed and destroyed.
More realistic thought: People don’t normally think the way I do, so it’s not surprising when they don’t. A spectrum of opinions exists on most issues. There are real bigots in the world, but this person is not likely to be one of them. I could try explaining why the issue causes me a problem. They may still not agree with me on some things, but most social change is slow, and incremental, and I can make an incremental gain here.
And another:
Event: Somebody says the rights of trans women and the rights of natal women can conflict.
Black and white thinking: There are only two camps on this issue. There is no spectrum of opinion. People who disagree with me hold the exact opposite opinion and are hateful bigots. They are enemies who need to be expelled from the Party. They are not fit to hold any position and I should demand they resign from their job.
More realistic thought: Situations where the rights of one group are claimed to conflict with the rights of another group are part of the normal stuff of politics. Parties have been dealing with this type of issue for a couple of hundred years. There will always be a spectrum of opinions, and that’s utterly normal. We are quite capable of dealing with it.
And a third:
Event: Somebody says that an issue I have a strong belief on can be debated.
Believing my emotions: This conversation makes me unsafe. If I feel unsafe, I must actually be unsafe. My feelings are the only evidence I need.
More realistic thought: I’m quite capable of having a discussion about alternative views. Nobody in the Greens is attacking me. Nobody wants to shovel trans people into gas ovens. I have no evidence I’m in any danger whatsoever.
A political party that can’t do politics?
Why is such dysfunctional thinking held so dearly? One way that groups build in-group solidarity is by denouncing and vilifying outsiders. It gives us a feeling of righteousness and a sense of belonging. I know who ‘my people’ are because we denounce the same people. Calling for people to be expelled gives us a feeling of power. The outsiders can be people in another political party, or other people within our own party – in which case we obtain a psychological benefit for ourselves, while damaging the Party.
However, as psychologists say, ‘the attribution of hate to the out-group’s behaviour renders negotiation and conflict resolution harder while at the same time justifying severe aggression or even annihilation of the opposing outgroup’ (see here).
In the novel Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell, the main character, Winston Smith, has been arrested by the Thought Police. In prison, O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, begins to lecture Smith about the nature of power:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. … The German Nazis and the Russian Communists … pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
This, I think, is the clearest explanation of what I suspect is presently in its early stages in the Party. The time has come to ask, what is the real purpose of the social media abuse and denunciations of other members? Of demanding in public that people resign from their positions because they don’t answer questions the same way you do? Of demanding that they have to apologise for thinking differently to someone else? What is the purpose of secret complaints processes? Is the purpose of abuse just abuse? Is the purpose of humiliation just to see people humiliated? Is intimidation becoming its own end? Have we slowly become so used to all this that we no longer notice how utterly abnormal it all is?
Situations where the rights claimed by one group are alleged to conflict with the rights claimed by another group are part of the normal stuff of politics. Political parties have been dealing with situations like this for the last 200 years, since political parties as we know them today came into existence. Examples in England this year and the US last year include a lesbian speed dating night being gatecrashed by trans women whom the lesbians didn’t want, because they weren’t into penises, or a teenage girls’ volleyball team in Vermont – 14 and 15-year-olds – not wanting to get undressed while a person with a penis was in their change room (see here, here, here and here). There’s no reason such cases can’t arise here. Are the Greens incompetent to deal with an utterly normal part of politics? If so, then someone needs to give a well-reasoned, logical explanation, with evidence, explaining why. Not just stock phrases and slogans, but reasons. Anyone may disagree with the views of the people in these articles. But if differing opinions are so intolerable that debate cannot be allowed, then we are a political party that can’t do ordinary politics? Do we actually believe this about ourselves?
This mentality won’t help us expand our voter base. The YES campaign didn’t win the same-sex marriage vote in 2017 by accusing everyone else of being homophobic bigots. ‘You’re an arse-hole. Now vote the way I want.’ Some of that happened. But people were won over more by appeals to equal treatment, and by patiently explaining how gay people were disadvantaged in hospital settings or in a disputed will without legal recognition of the relationship.
After reading some comments by a trans student at La Trobe University about the lack of gender neutral toilets on campus – there are many, but not in every building – I wrote to the Vice Chancellor and the Head of Infrastructure urging that, as toilets are renovated around the campus, they reproduce the arrangement that exists in the library where the toilets open off a kind of ‘foyer’ with males on one side, female on the other, and a disabled/gender neutral in the middle. I didn’t need to call anyone a bigot or a Nazi to advocate this change, and I doubt it would have helped if I did.
Some questions:
Where has this infighting gotten us?
While we do this, are we promoting policies about the environment, income inequality, or housing?
Is this helping us expand our vote from 10 to 30 percent?
Amongst the other political parties in Victoria, do we look like the grown-ups in the room?
Would your friends join a party that behaves like this, if they knew what went on inside it? If you weren’t already a member, would you join today if you knew what was going on?
Is any of this even vaguely normal?
What if we can’t revert?
If we can’t get back to normality, if the Party continues down the path I’ve described, what will happen? Well, here is one analysis. Australia is not like the US where the two major parties have stayed organisationally stable for 100 years. We don’t use primaries, and here parties are often legally structured as incorporated associations. That makes expulsions and splits easier to carry out than in the US.
Consider:
In the 1950’s, the Australian Labor Party split over the activities of the anti-communist catholic ‘groupers’. The result was that the party stayed in opposition for 23 years.
In the 1960’s, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) split over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the pro-Soviet ‘tankies’ faction walked out. The CPA dwindled into irrelevance.
In 1977, what became the Australian Democrats, led by Don Chip, left the Liberal Party. Chip was regarded as too centrist on issues like censorship, drugs and war, and insufficiently monarchist for many in the conservative wing. The Australian Democrats subsequently won the balance of power in the Senate and, in the 46 years since, the Liberals only ever regained it during the period July 2005 to November 2007. The Democrats later went through a period of in-fighting over tax policy and their Senate leader, Meg Lees’s, decision to support the GST against the wishes of most of the party. Many left the party, and it went into electoral decline. Later, there were debates over whether policy should be decided top down or grass roots up. The Democrats have dwindled into irrelevance.
In 1998, the Queensland Branch of One Nation won 11 seats in the Queensland Parliament, and soon split over complaints over the degree of centralised control of the party. (Three of the eleven resigned from the party and, while it’s always difficult to understand what goes on in One Nation, the other eight apparently formed into two groups, each of which claimed to expel the other.) The NSW branch of One Nation Split in 2001 after Pauline Hanson expelled former adviser David Oldfield (see here). One Nation has suffered defections over tax policy and complaints of excessive centralised control (see regarding the resignation of Brian Burston here). Only one of their state MPs has ever done a full term and then been re-elected.
Most of these splits begin with fights over policy or how centralised the party’s control over policy and processes are, and they escalate into media wars, expulsions and walkouts. All these elements are now present in the Greens. In every case, the splits left the parent organisation weaker, often in chaos, out of favour with their voters, and often withering away into electoral irrelevance.
What we must do
I really hope that we manage to avoid that.
Our party is not a well person. I signed The Docklands Declaration because I saw it as the first step to restoring normality in the Party – to the Party becoming a well person. Aside from signing and supporting the principles in the Declaration, what else must be done? It will be necessary to explain, over and over, that a variety of opinions is absolutely normal in a political party. Nobody is trying to ‘erase your identity’ or ‘debating your right to exist’. No one is trying to destroy you. Saying that men are on average taller than women, or knowing that men and women experience heart attack symptoms differently, doesn’t make anyone a Nazi. No one in the Greens is shovelling trans people into gas ovens. It just isn’t happening. Repeating this will be tiring. But it has to be done. This party needs to become a well person again. Our conversations need to be grounded in reality, and, at present, they aren’t.
A couple of senior figures in the Party have talked about finding a ‘way forward.’ Calling off the vilification and denunciation of other party members is one good idea. It’s using up time and emotional energy resources responding to a constant flow of name calling and abuse. The infighting in our party is a monster, and it’s out of its cage, causing havoc. We all need to work to put the monster back in its cage. Our senior parliamentarians could just tell everybody to stop the constant abuse, vilification and witch hunting. Some of them might have cause to consider whether or not some of their own behaviour has, perhaps in some way, contributed to the current mess. Stop having secret complaints processes. Make inquiry findings available to all members. If members are subject to oppressive internal complaints procedures, they should seek judicial intervention to halt such proceedings. Once an application is lodged in a court registry, that document is available to the public and the media, the matter becomes public knowledge, and a powerful spotlight would be shone on the Party’s internal behaviour. Ordinary members would become more aware of what goes on behind closed doors.
Our senior Members of Parliament and senior party members risk their legacy being that they inherited a party that could fight for the environment and social justice, and they left behind an inward-looking party obsessed with power games, abuse and vilification, dominated by single issue advocates. And if our senior Members of Parliament won’t do that, at the very least, ordinary members don’t have to participate in it. The monster can’t survive if no one feeds it. Everyone can choose to not feed the monster. Circulate this article, if you wish, to branch members who don’t turn up to meetings very often. Urge them to vote in internal elections. Urge them to vote for the members who are not taking part in (or siding with) the abuse and vilification.
The Party needs to find a way back to reality and common sense. Everybody can be part of that. The climate, the environment, the poor and oppressed people of Australia and the world … all of them need us to do much much better than we have been doing.