Michael Shellenberger: What Happened to Progressives?
Why are they letting crime run rampant in cities? Why don't they mandate treatment to the people living and dying on the streets? Originally published at SubstackWhy are they letting crime run rampant in cities? Why don’t they mandate treatment to the people living and dying on the streets?
Watch Michael Shellenberger speak on the ideology behind progressive cities allowing their citizens to live and die on the streets. Shellenberger created the North America Recovers Coalition that Discovery Institute is proud to be a founding member of.
Read some highlights here:
My own journey on this issue began after writing Apocalypse Never. I was getting ready to go on book tour, and save nuclear plants around the world, and then covid hit. It was very disorienting, as all of you can remember
I found myself feeling sad about it. I’ve been teaching myself not to say “depressed.” I’m going to reserve that term for people suffering clinical levels of depression. But I found myself disoriented, and not sure what to do.
I knew that I wanted to finally write on this question of what we call homelessness. What’s it really about?
At the same time, I was starting to watch these old YouTube videos of Viktor Frankl. I was sort of raised on his book, Man’s Search For Meaning. He’s this famous Austrian psychiatrist, who gets sent off to the death camps, sent to Auschwitz, separated from his wife and parents. The Nazis, when they took his coat, lost the book manuscript.
Frankl used that horrible experience of surviving the death camps to construct this beautiful new positive psychology that he called “peak psychology,” because so much of psychology had been “depth psychology,” focused on how to overcome bad things, as opposed to how to achieve beautiful, great things — about how to make yourself a bigger person.