4 October, 2002

Does being conservative tend to make you suicidal?

Britain's Leftist "Guardian" newspaper has just had a good chortle over the claim that the suicide rate in Britain and Australia is higher during periods when Conservatives are in government. They imply that conservatism is so bad for your mental health that it can make you suicide.

Shades of that old 1950s Marxist nonsense by Adorno and friends (still popular among psychologists) to the effect that conservatives have diseased "authoritarian" personalities! If you cannot beat conservatives in rational debate what could be better than a good old "ad hominem" response that says your opponent's arguments are wrong simply because he personally is a bad lot? One might as well argue that all dog-owners are evil because Hitler loved dogs.

The statistics are of course shonky. Conservatives are the happy folk. The British study actually RULED OUT the period of the (Conservative) Heath government when suicide was low -- on the laughable grounds that Britain got natural gas about then and that made it too hard for many people to commit suicide. And even with that big fudge the pattern was still far from clear. As Katherine Mangu-Ward puts it in the "Daily Standard" of 30th September, 2002:

"Though the averages are higher for conservative administrations, when one looks at administrations individually, there are numerous exceptions to the supposed trend. For example, in addition to Heath, the suicide rate under Churchill was likewise low, while during Callaghan's Labour administration it was quite high"

Other standard points could and should be made -- such as the old truth that correlation does not prove causation -- but the real clincher that nobody seems to have mentioned yet is the time-period when suicides are usually lowest. Guess when that is? When the nation is at WAR! So that means that low suicides rates are necessarily good??? So we need more wars??? All suicides are truly tragic but like everything else there are swings and roundabouts. Clearly there is NO automatic inference we can draw about people's overall wellbeing from suicide rates. Certainly, any claim that a low suicide rate indicates good times for the nation is laughable. On the other hand, if anybody wants to extend "Guardian" type logic to saying that being ruled by a Leftist government is about as good for you as having your country attacked by a foreign power, who am I to argue?




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