America seems to be buffeted by a host of existential crises. For starters, there is the (always) looming specter of climate change, the dramatic loss of an industrial base and uncertain transition to a digital economy, mass migration prompted by warfare and failed states, a dismal demographic forecast, and renewed racial unrest wrought by identity politics. Small wonder that we will also need to add a burgeoning mental health crisis to our list. But what if this last item is a cause of the former?
While there is reason to believe that we face a host of dire problems, there are equally compelling reasons to temper the chorus of despondent reactions. With the ascendancy of modernism, technocratic institutions like governmental bureaucracy and the academy have come to shape the public’s sense of what ought to be done when confronted with complicated collective action problems. Erstwhile authorities like religion and community have ceded authority to these representatives of scientism. This arrangement carries within it an irony, however: As power is aggregated by a bureaucratic class the public’s trust in it erodes in corresponding measure. The first step on the road to rebuilding institutional legitimacy is in diagnosing the problem.
Trivial panic is a state of pervasive psychological unease that arises in the chasm between our own experience and the list of problems that are socially constructed for us in the Digital Age. Historically, it has been the elements of civil society, like families, that assumed the mantle of equipping us to confront a vastly complicated set of trade-offs in life. Interpersonal relationships help each of us to absorb the innumerable waves of uncertainty in life. These Burkean “little platoons” root us in tradition, culture, and a network of others with whom we can seek respite; the mainstays they offer are a ballast.
But the enormity of existential problems, as they are presently characterized, paralyzes our rational faculties, undermines our individual initiative, and pushes us toward ideology. Organizing a solution with others who are similarly situated when the problems are infinitely complex becomes a futile and de-moralizing task. Although, atomized society can always overreact to minor matters, because these are the only ones that feel like they lend themselves to solution.
Collective action problems are baked into the human condition. By comparison, the solution to the problem, bureaucracy, is a new arrival. As informal institutions have recessed, more formal entities have assumed their place. In the bureaucratic bargain, citizens surrender a measure of autonomy to an unelected class of specialists who are charged with worrying and strategizing about some of the biggest problems on our behalf. In this clever arrangement, the government serves as the ultimate arbiter of how each of us is to work toward minimizing the threats we face. Some of us are directly employed by an alphabet agency, but all of us are responsible for complying with their commands. From tracking asteroids to avoiding energy crises, managing international tensions, removing impurities from our food and drugs, fighting crime, and offering a social safety net, these technocratic solutions are designed to alleviate our shared anxiety.
There is one distinguishing aspect of government—the right to tax—that complicates the debate over just how accurate the political class’s reading of public fear is. Our efforts to combat any given problem that falls within the public domain are financed by resources extracted from the public, especially from its highest earners. It is out of the public fisc that the state hires bureaucratic experts; collective action problems like caring for the mentally ill, preventing a tragedy of the commons with environmental degradation and ensuring adequate military defense do not lend themselves to privatized solutions. The lack of a profit motive means incentivizing problem-solving on these issues is exceptionally difficult. Government must take the lead in allocating public goods.
There is a fundamental dilemma in taxation though. Its logic is monopsonistic; government is the only buyer and provider in this arrangement, carrying with it an inherent conflict of interest.
Alleviating this inconsistency falls within the breadth of public choice theory. The analytic approach concentrates on disentangling political-economic interests when evaluating the efficacy of public policy. Just like private entities, government agencies engage in rent-seeking. One tried and true means to enhance demand is to engage in what sociologists’ call “moral entrepreneurship.” Social problems workers at named organizations can prime the pump by agitating the public imagination toward emergent threats and, failing that, redefine existing ones in perpetuity (e.g. global warming has morphed into an unfalsifiable term: climate change).
On the other side of this conflict-of-interest-laden relationship, bureaucrats have an incentive to undermine public oversight through tactics like obfuscating the problem with argot and managing their raison d’être, rather than resolving it entirely. Meanwhile, the public remains mystified over the specifics and faces the challenge of organizing for a political cause with a mass of disparate individuals who special interest groups trivially inconvenience. To offer this example some context: how much did you pay in 2024 for DEI programming?
The most straightforward means through with to determine how much of a problem is substance versus hype is to consult with empirical reality. As it turns out, the news is not all dour. A host of measures verify that, partially because of improving economic well-being, we are less physically threatened than ever. In contrast to earlier generations, Millennials tend to avoid promiscuous sex, drug, and alcohol consumption. The broad trend in violent crime in the United States has been on a downward arc for going on three and a half decades. Environmental degradation continues to dissipate. Improvements in construction and greater emergency preparedness, all advanced with the spread of fossil fuels worldwide have resulted in declining numbers of deaths from natural disasters for at least a century. The era is becoming so safe in fact that many pundits have labeled it an age of “safetyism”—we seem to be obsessed with living in a risk-free existence. If only we could accept the mounting evidence that we already benefit from its dramatic reduction.
There is one major asterisk to the litany of good news, the overall increase in mortality, which has been fed by deaths of despair. The regulations surrounding Covid-19 aggravated an ongoing mental health crisis. Then again, Abigail Shrier’s recent book, Bad Therapy, offers powerful reasons to suspect that the current mental health malaise has been augmented by therapists acting toward noble but self-interested goals. Her perceptive analysis draws attention to the growth of Big Therapy and changing cultural frameworks that are assaulting our equilibrium. Many otherwise normal people are talking themselves into mental illness. Our yearning to satisfy the impossible demand for total safety is feeding the spread of iatrogenic risks; the “cure” is creating new problems.
Sober judgement in reacting to the otherwise ordinary kerfuffle is muted in an atmosphere that encourages breathless, emotional responses.
Herein lies a paradox: If genuine threats to life and limb are disappearing why are there disturbing signs that our collective mental health is deteriorating? Are we scaring ourselves into insanity?
One factor at play is how crises are commonly framed. Descriptions of a problem like climate change or systemic racism are nearly always explained by an expert class as either unimaginably complex (the former) or irrevocably steeped in a history we cannot alter (the latter). Because these are so utterly large and historical in their purported origins, they frustrate human agency. Our felt capacity to reject the common characterization of these large-scale crises is backsliding in the Internet age. For example, can you identify a specific way in which climate change or microaggressions have negatively impacted you today? True believers can find it everywhere, while most are blissfully unaware. The framing at both ends of this distribution is frustrating because it assumes we are powerless.
Yet, there is good money to be made in bad ideas. There are two essential institutional ambitions that are fulfilled through placing a problem set beyond our ken. The first is that the complexity of the issue compels the masses to trust in the phalanx of experts deputized by the state to manage the issue; besides, there is a lot of complicated verbiage that makes the issue incomprehensible. This is an aggrandizing strategy that carries the penalty of further undermining individual initiative. Secondly, both examples are defined in a manner that makes them literally unresolvable issues—climate deviating from total stasis is the only stasis, and, as a matter of brute logic, historical events cannot be altered. Therefore, there is an open-ended writ to perpetuate the problem through continually redefining the matter. As public choice theorists eagerly remind us, many bureaucracies become captured by the problems they allegedly attempt to erase; “don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”
The imperative to federalize any given local problem, or at the very least hand off responsibility for it to some faceless authority figure, has served to accelerate the hollowing out of civil society. The assumption is that only with the requisite resources and technical know-how can a problem be contained. The intervening groups that lay between individuals and government, like family, church, and local non-profits are attenuating. Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic ably offers the case that fragmentation has reduced our capacities as a polity to resolve our problems. One illustration of this would be the rise in the management of sexual interaction by Title IX authorities on campus and human resource departments at work. Determining accepted practice around these complicated norms has historically been mediated through informal, cultural institutions.
There is a rapidly expanding list of reasons to discount the effectiveness of the state’s response though. For example, Philip K. Howard has written of the limits of (Rule of Nobody) and unintended consequences (Not Accountable) resulting from the hubris of attempting to subject every decision to a set of operational requirements that bureaucracy depends on. The irrationality of hyper-rationality—think of fast-food restaurants insisting on transforming employees into robots by detailing the most efficient burger flipping sequence—means that many of the peculiarities of life cannot be addressed by an autonomic invocation of rigid rules. That is regrettable, as problems manifest themselves in a local setting that gives us much more contact with reality than does an abstract representation depicted in the spreadsheet of a distant bureaucrat.
The disconnect between the perception of the facts on the ground (How much global warming have you experienced today?) and the shrill convictions of an expert class has spread cognitive-emotional dissonance. This profoundly disorienting psychological condition calls forth a response to make some sense of the conflicting versions of reality. Knowledge abhors a vacuum, just as power does. Historically, trusted third parties like academia and the media could be relied upon to adjudicate claims bearing on the defining issues of the day. Diminishing faith in traditional news providers, and experts more broadly, has now created an ecosystem of providers, some more scrupulous than others, eager to meet market demand by rendering interpretations of what we (think we) are seeing. An era awash in the vacuousness of “my truth” means that each of us can shop for a place to satisfy our confirmation bias online. More and more, public opinion is forged in these communities of limited liability because the ideas, of whatever genuine truth value, draw us out of our fragmented existence. One errant observer is easily dismissed as a kook; a few hundred kindred flat earthers are a movement who have successfully socially constructed their truth.
What are the psychological effects of suffering through this exhausting tension? Insignificant problems are constantly magnified, thanks to an assault of “news” algorithms. Meanwhile, we have been confidently informed that the truly existential problems are beyond our capabilities to address. Trapped in this dilemma, society slides toward dissolution.
Trivial panic (an undue emphasis on our fear of insignificant or non-existent problems because the largest ones are beyond our control) arises in this milieu. Sober judgment in reacting to the otherwise ordinary kerfuffle is muted in an atmosphere that encourages breathless, emotional responses but does lend itself to the individual satisfaction of cancel campaigns. Conquering serious problems requires sustained effort and the command of a host of interrelated facts informing the issue to make meaningful progress. Investing the labor to educate oneself assumes that there is at least an opportunity to effectuate change; the designation of an entire class of problems to bureaucracies, many of which are comprised of international actors, virtually nullifies these incentives.
Disempowered by the political powers that be, the last option for the public seems to be a kind of rolling populist revolt (consult your social media timeline for the latest available options). One expression of a common way to resolve the internal tension trivial panic causes is joining a cancellation campaign. Doing so allows us the advantage of at least momentarily uniting us with others through ritual denunciation. Convening the masses for these episodes of collective condemnation gives us a sense of transcendence, solidarity, and autonomy—even if it is evanescent and grossly disproportionate in the scale of the original offense. As America awakens from a hiatus from history the specter of legitimate problems, like the expanding malevolence of China, will force a reckoning with trivial panic. That solution will require a pivot away from what Mary Ann Glendon calls “rights talk” to an emphasis on character and responsibility.
