By Steven Yates
December 11, 2023
One of the most hated men in media suffers “zero stress” because of it. Here’s why.
I began streaming episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight a couple of years ago, having read his book Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018). If you haven’t read this book, you should.
His show on Fox News had already become the most watched of its kind.
Obviously, Tucker Carlson is polarizing. This is because he’s hated by the ruling elites, their servile employees and disciples up and down corporate media and among left-indoctrinated populations (young, urban, “diverse,” “educated,” etc.) — but loved by an audience that craves often unpleasant but always truthful information, presented in a manner that is positive, upbeat, and sometimes even funny.
The man clearly loves what he’s doing, loves his life, enjoys serving his audience, and seems genuinely happy!
Fox News abruptly canceled Tucker Carlson Tonight back in April under circumstances no one has revealed. This was on the heels of Fox’s settlement with Dominion, so many suspected a connection. None was proven, so we don’t know; Carlson himself denies knowing what transpired. Obviously, it wasn’t a purely business decision. With Carlson’s departure, Fox lost a lot of viewers.
What struck me was how gracefully he handled it. He didn’t react angrily, or strike out at his former employer. “It’s not my company,” he told podcasters in one interview. Landing on his feet, he created Tucker on Twitter (now Tucker on X) and kept on as if nothing fundamental had changed.
A moment of self-disclosure: I lost the best teaching job I had (early 1990s) because a senior faculty member went behind my back. I’ll spare you the details, except to say: when I learned the truth (two years later), I wasn’t a happy camper! Not for months! No, make that years!
My inability to forgive and move on cost me. My recollection of that era led me to want to know: What was Tucker’s secret?
Well, thanks to Sasha Stone on Substack, we now know. It’s an epiphany!
Not only do we learn Carlson’s secret of happiness and how to move on, but we gain insight into why our national and global ruling classes are so horrible — why everything they touch, they ruin.
A double-whammy, in other words!
Carlson’s secret: care only about the opinions of people who care about you.
Corollary: do not anguish over the opinions of strangers. The opinions of people who don’t know you, don’t care about you, and never will, shouldn’t matter to you.
Choice quotations:
“The opinions of people you don’t know mean nothing.”
“Never hand emotional control to people who don’t love you.”
“Keep the circle of people whose opinions you care about really small. Pay very close attention to what they think, and ignore everybody else. In my case, obviously, I’m one of the most hated people in the world, and that causes me zero stress.”
“Everybody cares what other people think. Make the decision who you hand that power to.”
Who should you hand it to? Family, for sure. If your spouse hates what you do, you should pay attention (!). If your children don’t respect you, you’ve done something wrong. Feedback from close friends, colleagues or work associates, employees: these matter. Neighbors? Possibly. Depends on the neighbors. The resulting orbit whose opinions you should care about will probably be fewer than twenty people.
What about the rest?
Especially if you’re a writer, hardly famous (!), who’d like to expand (or build) an audience!
I’ve no idea how many people see what I write. I have no access to NWV stats. A select number of readers email me semi-regularly. A handful I’ve gotten to know a little. Most enjoy my articles. One or two do not.
Carlson’s point still seems valid, even for guys like me. To obsess over negativity from strangers is a recipe for stress and anxiety — even for relatively unknown writers.
I was recently motivated to do some thinking about who I am writing for — especially as my output goes all across the map, from political economy to personal development to paranormal fiction! What came to mind: (1) Readers suspicious of vested authority, including so-called “experts.” They realize that, at best, “our” political class is as self-interested as everyone else: more so, however much they try to hide it. Many “experts” are where they are for political reasons. Look at Dr. Fauci. Lauded not just as a doctor but “the nation’s Number One Expert in infectious diseases,” he hasn’t treated a patient in decades. He’s an upper-echelon career federal bureaucrat. His enjoyment — if it really is that (and I have my doubts) comes not from serving people but wielding money and power, and in ways that unleashed destruction.
Many of us concluded long ago that trust in authority should be earned, not given away for free.
I’d love to connect with more such people!
Because (2): bad experiences with authority open minds to new options. I’m writing for readers interested in learning more about them. Even if they aren’t about to let a writer they don’t know personally lead them by their noses. (Not that I’m trying to do that.)
The Hidden Psychology Of “Our” Ruling Class Explains Why It Ruins Everything It Touches.
We have, in Tucker Carlson’s ensuing words, an account of why “our” ruling class is so disgusting (his word).
It’s not simply that political and corporate elites want to control others, or get rich through corruption or “passive income,” i.e., income gained without having done any work that genuinely serves others.
Some may be born sociopaths. Others may have become sociopathic because they are emotionally damaged. This compels the worst of them to seek absolute power. The more modestly damaged aren’t content unless they have adulation from masses of strangers.
How does this work?
Earlier this year, a friend and I did some deep dives into the psychology of the desire to control others. I’d vaguely known: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, all grew up under fathers who beat the daylights out of them.
It’s common knowledge: abused children frequently become abusive adults. The neglected become narcissists or develop other personality disorders.
I’ve seen this firsthand. I’ve encountered and even sometimes worked alongside people who were highly intelligent but also opportunists unafraid to use people and situations to get what they wanted. They weren’t self-aware enough to see what they were doing, why others eventually steered clear of them, why their marriages failed, or why in a few cases they even ran afoul of the law.
It’s a matter of degree. Those damaged beyond repair as children learned only violence and hatred. When they got absolute power, they exacted maximum damage on their countries, sometimes sending millions of people to their deaths.
They hate people, because they hate themselves and the world generally.
Sometimes the damage is more modest. Parents were emotionally absent, or families were dysfunctional. These are the folks who live for the adulation of people they don’t know, whose problems they don’t know beyond a few superficials, and whom they can’t possibly care about as persons.
While individual cases doubtless differ, as a group these folks seek attention from strangers because they never received any genuine nurturing as children.
Tucker Carlson called this “the darkest sickness of all.”
That’s “our” political class — even those who see themselves as well-intentioned (doesn’t everybody?).
This need for adulation, even love, from strangers isn’t tied to party affiliation or even ideology, although I suspect it afflicts those on the left more than it does those on the right.
Bill Clinton came from a dysfunctional family.
Donald Trump? Hero to many, but also (sadly!) damaged. His father, Fred Trump, was not a nice person, and his older brother Freddy Jr., cut from a different piece of cloth altogether, sank into alcoholism under their father’s verbal abuse and died tragically at age 42. The Trumps were rich and talented, but also dysfunctional. These are not mutually exclusive.
Carlson implies that when those who seek adulation from strangers don’t get it — the strangers don’t simply fall in line — this tendency easily morphs into a desire to control them. They then rationalize this by proclaiming their Love for the People.
Which is complete BS, of course. This is clear in how they treat the people around them.
Karl Marx’s children nearly starved to death.
Hillary Clinton has a reputation for verbally abusing those under her, and on at least one occasion got physically abusive with her husband. Not because Bill philandered with an intern, mind you, but because he got caught. Hillary’s childhood and upbringing seems fairly normal, suggesting that she was born a sociopath.
Love Trump or not, the world dodged a massive bullet back in 2016 when the country did not anoint her the First Woman President!
Biden family dysfunction is seen in his son Hunter. The man is an utter mess!
Marx proclaimed the “collectivity” of humanity as its essence.
Hillary wrote (or had ghostwritten) a book entitled It Takes a Village (1996), and was heard to say, “It takes a village to raise a child!” She’s a hardcore collectivist who Loves The People.
Tucker Carlson, in a pivotal moment from the talk referenced above:
“It’s all a lie. There’s no The People. There’s just people, with names, fingerprints, unique histories and desires, and weaknesses that need bolstering. They’re individuals, and that’s all there is. God didn’t create groups of people at once. No woman ever gave birth to a community.”
The plain truth: abstract collectives do not exist. Only individuals: you, reading this; me, having written it; the people around us we care about; neighbors; coworkers or other associates; etc. All with their own unique life trajectories!
They fight different private battles. Beyond shared superficials like having food to eat, a roof over one’s head, electricity, work sufficient to sustain these, what keeps you awake at night is probably different from what keeps your neighbor awake at night.
My point here, following Carlson’s: members of the political class — and globalists even more so — don’t get this because they can’t.
Thus their attraction to top-down solutions, sometimes to “problems” which aren’t real.
We’re not talking mere sin here, although in a fallen world, that’s doubtless a factor. I firmly believe most people mean well, even if they need God’s grace. Very few people deliberately try to hurt others, or take pleasure in their suffering.
I could make a compelling case that our globalist and political classes fundamentally hate humanity, and that this is reflected in their beliefs and in their policies.
The point is, we’re dealing with a fairly small group, all with genuine privileges, most of whom have a deep psychological compulsion to be followed, adored, loved, by strangers. When they don’t get this love, their compulsion morphs into a need for control. Subconsciously they hate people. They hate the human race in the abstract, because they hate themselves.
It should be clear: this makes them very dangerous, because when they get power, the results range from the constrained dysfunction we see in Congress to the utter disaster that would occur if the world followed, e.g., globalist dictates to end the burning of fossil fuels for energy in response to the “climate emergency.” These people, in their bid to save the world collectively from itself, elevated a teenage girl to the status of “climate expert.” That’s indicative of how irrational they really are.
Tucker Carlson’s Counsel Revisited.
What can you, as a person, do? What can I, as a writer, do? It all comes back to that.
You can remove yourself from the political and globalist class’s sphere of influence as much as you can. Unless you’re someone like me who writes about these things, you can ignore most of what they do if it doesn’t affect you.
In my case: some will respond, many won’t, so what?
Returning, then, to Tucker Carlson’s counsel, especially relevant as we near the start of what may well be a volatile year.
Make the decision to care about people who care about you, or who you are in a position to help. Don’t hand emotional control to strangers. Otherwise, you’ll suffer chronic insecurity, stress, and anxiety.
Not only that, you’ll be prone, however modestly, to what afflicts our ruling elites.
For many, this will mean making peace with having had abusive or emotionally absent parents. Or having grown up in a dysfunctional family.
Awareness is the first step.
The second is to absorb this, also from Tucker:
“You were put on this Earth to serve the people right around you.”
Not masses of strangers in foreign lands, or even the masses of strangers in your own.
Keep the range of people whose opinions you care about small. Never hand de facto emotional control to others who don’t care about you. Those others don’t know you, don’t know your situation, any more than you know theirs. The conditions for meaningful caring simply aren’t there.
It may sound harsh, but there’s no rational way to care about The People or “the world as a whole”!
This isn’t a license for indifference to those outside your circle but whose paths you cross.
Be kind to the housekeeper in your building, if you live in one. Even if she speaks broken English. Tip your waiter or waitress. Respect store clerks and cashiers. These people’s jobs and lives may make yours look like paradise by comparison.
Be a good human being.
I think our Creator demands this of us. Did He not create us — all of us — in His image?
This means accepting limits.
For most of us, our best bet in “denting the universe” is to make a positive difference in the lives of the people we are in a position to affect for the better. If we’re not serving them, we’re not serving our Creator.
Limitedness is normal. Localness is normal. I don’t think any human being or human institution was meant to have global power. That’s not normal.
We’re not wired for it — designed for it if you prefer.
Which is why honest histories of such efforts record only mayhem, destruction, and suffering.
Maybe the best answer to global, political and corporate ruling classes is: don’t be like them. Don’t be anything like them.
Just work on yourself and be a better you. I think you’ll find in this the key to happiness.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates’s Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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