Latest / Radically Genuine / 190. The Insanity of Our Culture Made Me Question If We Live In a Simulation
Transcript
- Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (00:02.286) Welcome to Radically Genuine. I'm Dr. Roger McFillin. You know, as a clinical psychologist, I do believe I have a professional obligation to understand cultural factors that are driving mental health concerns, especially in a mental health epidemic that exists in our society. The statistics don't lie. They should terrify every parent who's listening to this or watching this. We're over 20 % of adult females currently taking an SSRI. and we have an unknown but rapidly growing number of teenage girls on these same drugs. We're witnessing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, what I can only describe as pervasive emptiness. The standard response, more pills, talk therapy sessions, it's an industry that is growing, conducted often by naive therapists, young therapists who've been indoctrinated into the same system that pushes useless diagnostic labels and pharmaceutical solutions. Many of the general talk therapies aren't just ineffective, they're actively exacerbating the conditions by keeping patients endlessly ruminating on painful aspects of their lives. while completely ignoring the cultural toxins that are poisoning them. You know, exposed to this whole chemical imbalance lie of depression and anxiety, which has been a beautiful marketing narrative designed to distract you from legitimate factors that are influencing our collective wellbeing while systematically undermining our own personal agency and resilience. You know, you don't produce enough serotonin, take this pill, without even caring. about the causes. I have to admit, I've deliberately pulled my attention away from many of the aspects of popular culture, especially post COVID, because it was interfering with my quality of life. But I've realized not having some of this knowledge may actually be hurting my work, because of the content that's brought into sessions and of course, wanting to understand what people who are really struggling with what they're exposed to. So I've decided just to Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (02:14.062) deep dive a little bit, investigate what millions of Americans are consuming daily. You know, I just go to the podcast lists, the charts in America, going back to some mainstream news, looking at what's trending, exposed to social media in my field. And what I discovered that day was so utterly disturbing that I had a question whether I was living in a simulation. So I ended up writing an article on this. this experiment in my sub stack titled I must be living in a simulation because there's no way this is real. It was a popular read very quickly 20,000 views in the first three days and growing. So I knew I struck a nerve with my readership. And most of the comments were certainly understanding exactly where I was coming from. So my first stop was investigating this podcast called Call Her Daddy by Alex Cooper, which is one of the most popular podcasts among young women. Now I've heard her name before, but I wanted to understand what millions of teenage girls and young women were listening to religiously. Of course, she's throwing herself into the mental health world. And I listened to some early episodes, which made me want to vomit to be. completely honest. mean, it was just so such low hanging fruit with just sexual provocation and, you know, just dumb commentary. So I decided to find something that was a little bit more contemporary, some of her newer work, and there was a documentary on Hulu. Because she's hosting a Call Me Daddy tour. And there was a lot about her early life and leading up to the Call Her Daddy. tour that she was putting on. I've only got a couple episodes in, but it was certainly a wake up call for me. You what I observed with this tour was that there are thousands of screaming fans, mostly young women under the age of 25. But what made my jaw drop at times was, you know, the live shots of the audience are coming into the arena. You see like mothers with their teenage daughters. Some even looked like as young as like 13 years old. They're wearing the merch. They're acting like it's Christmas morning. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (04:30.914) walking in the front door, you something that would be similar, a comparison for me would be going back into the nineties or early two thousands and you know, teenage girls going to boy band concerts. So knowing what I knew about the sexual content of the podcast, I found this odd, but I thought maybe I'm just being judgmental. Maybe this has evolved beyond something than what I expected. So I want you to see what I watched and get your thoughts on this. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (06:15.404) Well, I do apologize for the graphic nature of this. Then maybe there should be a warning. See if I can get that somehow placed in here ahead of time. But you see what I see, right? So you have to kind of make sense of this a little bit. She announced to the crowd, and this was her opening, that this is where... she received her first sexually transmitted disease. And she said it with like a triumphant energy as if someone who like just discovered penicillin. Like, and the roar of the crowd. I mean, they went absolutely wild. I mean, some girls look so young, like they couldn't even drive yet. Jumping up and down, screaming with joy about an STD. have we really devolved to this extent? you know, I guess my, my mind goes to kind of like our collective consciousness about like what we're normalizing. Now you jump in a time machine and you go back just simply like 20 years and nothing like that would even be considered the least bit acceptable. But I mean, let me be clear. I'm not attacking Alex Cooper personally. don't know her, this isn't about her, but I'm examining what this represents culturally. Like how do you go from a time when like Spice Girls and Girl Power, which was, you know, meant for friendship and confidence, how do you transfer female empowerment from that to celebrating sexually transmitted infections as feminist achievements? And I've worked with many young women who've been raised on this type of programming. You know, they come in my office, They're obviously empty. They have this hollow eyed emptiness in their eyes. Like they're raised on Instagram algorithms, pornography, self-worth determined by like how many likes you get on a social post. They're kind of, you're programmed to believe that your worth comes from how sexually provocative you can be for what amounts to strangers. And I think this... Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (08:36.738) This is a major factor that we should be exploring in really understanding root causes of this kind of detachment that we're witnessing. I mean, it seems so obvious to me. I don't think there's any path to living well when it comes to just promiscuity and being reduced to how sexually attractive you are and to be detached with so much online content. I think many young girls reality is shaped by this pornification of relationships. And I think it's sad. And in my opinion, it's not accidental. It's, it's purposeful from those who benefit from our decline. wonder, you know, if this is just a spiritual war playing itself out, like not the angels and demons with flaming swords, but you know, like this choice you have. between two radically versions of human existence. Like you get to choose where your attention goes and to understand what it means to live a life of purpose, meaning and love and joy. So like, you, I gotta ask, like, are you happy living this way? Like those who are exposed to this type of repeated content over and over again. You know, for older adults out there, would you want this for your daughter? I guess you can call me old fashioned, but like when I think about aspirations for my girls, meaningless sexual encounters with strangers, it doesn't make the list. And it's something traditionally we have protected our girls from or we have warned against. It's the perfect playbook for normalizing promiscuity, which is absolutely leads to a range of mental health problems and predictably psychiatric drugs. I mean, there's a reason we're numbing 20 % of women because this isn't natural. is toxic to their own souls. So I was feeling sufficiently disturbed. So I decided to subject myself to mainstream news media. Yeah. You know who I'm talking about Fox, CNN and SMBC, the usual suspects that keep us divided and terrified. The holy Trinity of propaganda, propaganda designed to keep us divided, terrified and too busy fighting each other to notice that it's the same sociopaths which continue to govern. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (10:56.768) under policies that will bankrupt the country fuel and just endless wars and certainly take away our freedoms. So I ended up watching this. Why don't you take a look at this wonderful pundit on Fox News. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (12:03.936) Okay, maybe people are so desensitized to this that they don't have the same reaction that I do. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (12:15.608) But there's an energy that comes off of somebody like that. Like it feels so disconnected to our collective humanity. I mean, let's face it, you're talking about another government. And with that, you're just so haphazardly willing to refer to the good old days and blowing an entire country off the face of the earth. Like advocating for the annihilation of what could amounts like 90 million human beings like an entire country as if we're like suggesting we just cancel a Netflix subscription. I mean, I want to think about what this does to our collective psyche. When genocide and war become just casual dinner conversations, which it has become like what happens to our own capacity for empathy? What happens to our mental health when we're constantly exposed to the normalization of mass death. It's celebrated in a lot of contexts. I mean, this seeps into our subconscious. Your kid's teacher absorbs this, your doctor's worldview gets shaped by it, the algorithm that curates everybody's reality learns very quickly that human life is disposable. And it's become that. We're being systematically desensitized to mass murder. And in ways that We haven't been at any other time because of media and social media. I mean, you can really in real time witness the death of children and babies. And we wonder why we feel disconnected, anxious, and hopeless. So my final part of the experiment, I started just again, exploring social media accounts of mental health professionals, specifically those who represent everything I believe is wrong with modern mental health care. It's been a few years since I've done this. So I'm exposed to this dystopian wonderland of professional manipulation disguised as compassion, count after account pushing the most insidious propaganda. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (14:28.928) ADHD being marketed as a superpower because apparently the inability to focus your attention isn't a predictable response to modern life. It's some genetic gift. And so you just ignore that these super powers somehow require like a daily stimulant medication to function. There's this reproductive psychiatrist Instagram account enthusiastically pushing psych drugs during pregnancy. while ignoring the impacts on developing babies. Somehow maternal mental health has just now become, take this pill. And that trumps fetal brain development. There's influencers targeting confused, vulnerable teenagers, convincing them that normal adolescent identity confusion is evidence of being born into wrong body, creating entire communities around medical transition, as this will be, of course, the solution to you feeling better. You have trauma therapists teaching people to build their entire identity around their worst experiences, keeping them perpetually stuck in victim mode while charging $200 a session. See, I just don't think this is random cultural evolution. I think this is a coordinated system that's profiting from human misery. And I think we're witnessing a three-phase systematic dismantling of human psychological wellbeing. And to me, it has strong spiritual components to it. Phase one. You know, destroy healthy models of self-worth, family, especially for young women, like replace genuine empowerment with self objectification. And listen, this is not good for boys or men either. This is, that's obvious that that's a different video. You know, phase two, you normalize violence and dehumanization through media conditioning, make mass deaths seem like reasonable political discourse. And then you capture these wounded souls. who are damaged by phase one and two, and you just create pharmaceutical dependency disguised as healthcare, because listen, a sedated population doesn't rise up against the tyrannical nature of the sociopaths who are running the country. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (16:45.72) So the people walking into therapist offices, I don't think are broken because of some mysterious genetic brain chemistry imbalance that you can't test for that doesn't exist. They're responding normally to a systematically insane cultural environment. So much so we've just been desensitized to it as normal. Yet I think most mental health professionals are completely blind to these forces. They're casualties without ever looking up to see who's firing the weapons. And the most terrifying realization wasn't that this dystopian nightmare is coming. I mean, it's here. We're already living in it. This isn't a future sci-fi story. This is a random Tuesday night in America. So some days I think I'm crazy for seeing what I see. Then I remember that in a world gone mad, sanity can look like insanity. So what do we do with this information? I think we first have to recognize that awareness and awakening is the beginning of resistance. Once you see the programming, you cannot unsee it. Therefore, when it pops up in your life, you can turn your attention away from it. think we have to understand that individual healing must include like analysis of what's going on in our culture and make shifts in our culture. You cannot fix people or assume they're broken in isolations from the forces that broke them. I think we have to take responsibility for the media we consume and especially what our children consume because every click, every view, every stream, it's a vote for this kind of word, world we're creating. And I think this purposely hijacks us at a very biological fear-based level. Ultimately, we are biologically designed to survive. provoking this type of emotion around sex and violence is going to get eyeballs, but we can choose to pull our attention away from it. The mental health crisis isn't mysterious. It's the predictable result of a culture that profits from human suffering while pretending to offer solutions. Roger McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (18:59.148) And the good news, once you understand the game, you can stop playing it. So what do you think? Have you noticed these patterns in your own media consumption? Let me know your thoughts on this in comments. And as this video opened your eyes to something new, share it with someone who needs to see this perspective because the first step to healing a sick culture is helping people recognize that it's sick in the first place.