…And I agree that in the details a lot of it was completely silly. But Freudian psychology was a huge force. That way of thinking was universal in the United States — people would ascribe motives to human behavior that were based on your childhood, your lived experience. People would do things, and the explanation that you’d hear would be like, well, you know, he had some conflict with his mother in his childhood, or severe toilet training. People talked like that. And a lot of it was silly, Freud himself was kind of silly, but that way of thinking was real. There’s a lot going on inside of people that has to do with the experiences they’ve had. You are a product to some extent of genetics but also, to another hard-to-quantify extent, the product of the life you have lived and the emotions that life has generated within you. Now, we’ve just reduced people to chemicals. Someone decided chemistry could describe human behavior. I don’t know who decided that — probably the biotech firms, pharma. But what it’s done, in effect, is gotten everyone on drugs, which is the trend in American life I hate most. Secondarily, or maybe even more importantly, it ended the conversation about why people do the things they do and why they feel the way they do. Why do you feel that way? There are clearly biochemical reasons for depression, I’m not pretending that’s not true, but for the overwhelming majority of people anxiety and depression are signs that you’re not living in the right way. If you burn your finger on the stove and someone says to you, ‘I have a painkiller that will make that go away so the next time you touch the stove you won’t feel anything,’ you’d say, wait a second! Maybe your body is telling you that your flesh is burning off and you shouldn’t touch the stove. Maybe it’s a sign that you should change your behavior. And that used to be much more obvious. Like Freud, as silly as he was in some ways, pointed us back to something real, which was: the way you live matters.
Tucker Carlson