this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Lead poisoning is still biological, but I think both this and his account overstate the importance of this sort of thing compared to just not understanding how horribly living especially in certain parts of America breaks people's brains for purely psychological reasons.
Nobody who's seen the research that's come out over the last fifteen years would consider it an "overstatement", lead is one of only a few common environmental denominators that effects entire generational cohorts and has explanatory power for widespread anti-social behaviors that aren't as prevalent in newer generations, despite degrading economic conditions new gens have to deal with
Lead poisoning compounds with other conditions, but holding a denialist or reductive attitude over one of most insidious neurotoxins known to humankind is just another form of health or environmental denialism
Your argument so far is a moving target. How much of this problem is lead? Until you establish some kind of threshold for that, what you're saying is completely meaningless because any claim that you are overemphasizing it as in the first quote can simply be met with "Oh, it's actually not it, it compounds with other conditions" but then you can still call the claim that you're overstating things a "reductive attitude". I actually have read a little bit of recent-ish research (I guess I read it about 5 years ago maybe?) about how it has done catastrophic cognitive damage, but that's not remotely adequate to explain our situation and that would still be true if it was twice as bad because it's not a matter of reaching some specific "potential IQ" threshold (which I phrase as such because lead poisoning is a severe vector but it's still one of many).
My argument hasn't moved anywhere, you're just being dense; hundreds of millions of people for decades were poisoned from childhood on by one of the most severe neurotoxins known to humanity, obviously this tragedy was brought about by the intersection of capitalist profit seeking and development in specific energy technologies. A catastrophe of this scale is very easy to understate and there are few if any comparable events of this magnitude
I never claimed lead by itself was adequate to explain all conditions under capitalism, I'm pointing out it's ONE OF the major conditions which has shaped modern capitalism, unless you want to assert countless millions of people being poisoned by a neurotoxin is just incidental or irrelevant to how those people interact with capitalism?
Please try to not be quite so personally insulting.
Nor is that what I said you claimed. This is plainly not the scope of the discussion, so what purpose does this serve?
Again, this is nebulous for falsifying your claim. Regarding the specific set of social issues that Yugopnik is talking about, I would not say "that's it" of it being lead poisoning and there are many other factors that I would point to. I obviously cannot say lead poisoning has no effect, especially since it compounds with other conditions as you said, but since I wouldn't consider sheer cognitive power or emotional regulation as the core of the social backwardness we're observing, I would indeed say that it's incidental compared to other primarily social factors in how they were raised and live, which are clearly better candidates for being considered the prime movers.
I'll consider it when you stop reading everything I write in the most obtuse and uncharitable way
You don't know what you're talking about, do you?
lmao sure I'll pretend that's something you actually believe, the sheer idea of living in a suburb and watching Fox News has more valence than a neurotoxin that literally ravages the social centers of the brain, now we're doing some real hardcore materialism
What do you think is going to be accomplished? That if you're abusive enough then I'll have an epiphany that you're right? You're just making excuses for antisocial behavior.
This is a non-sequitur. Obviously I never ascribed to you the position that lead poisoning is responsible for "all conditions under capitalism," and was just reminding you that I didn't make any such accusation, and I'm met with this new insult that doesn't contribute anything beyond being an insult.
And again I'm just confused about why you're even bothering saying this beyond your apparent dedication to hurling insults, because why else would you ignore issues like public education, anti-intellectualism, and economic trends? If you're only still replying to me to insult me, then you can always just choose to stop replying and it's probably better for everyone involved, yourself included.
There is sort of an ironic point here about how emotional dysregulation hampers ideological progress, because why actually talk to someone who makes you feel grumpy when you can just attack them? But I just don't think that's adequate, I think there needs to be an ideological and epistemic direction for people to be put in that such dysregulation is only a supporting element of. If it was merely people being prone to lashing out and having a harder time thinking things through, that is still an extremely surmountable obstacle, it would just take them a little longer than someone who is better-equipped, which is the consistent finding of things like IQ studies.
You cannot be serious with this convulsive-ass reaction to being called "dense"
Idealistic wish-casting does not trump literal severe brain damage, we are animals made of flesh and blood, not monads with unchanging essences guided by ideas and mere social identity, sometimes if you damage our brains badly enough, then we're fucked, that's the unfortunate reality of life on this planet
And lead doesn't just damage the brain, it ravages it, and it keeps ravaging well into old age, leading to more and more damage over time
You do understand that is a massive selection pressure that when multiplied by millions or billions of people does in fact create a major determining factor in negative civilizational outcomes?
I'm literally just asking you to not insult me and saying it's not helpful to either of us. I don't think that's a failing on my part.
Regarding the rest of your comment, you're speaking very abstractly about brain damage but you are neglecting to explain why it is necessary, a core element, of the political backwardness of the people Yugopnik is talking about. Being disabled doesn't cause you to be a fascist and that's not "idealistic wish-casting," nor does it change the fact that someone with the mental capacity to dress themselves and operate a computer to a normal level, even if their IQ is multiple standard deviations below the mean, can still learn how to do basically any task that a higher-IQ person can that doesn't rely on making effective snap-judgements in response to complex new information. This is something that has been studied a lot by our phrenology-loving society.
Yes, obviously the poisoning is very damaging to society, but we aren't arguing about lead being nebulously harmful, we are arguing about it producing fascists at a massive scale, which it does not do. There simply isn't a reason to think that if someone has the mental presence to be able to have a meaningful political ideology, that people are too low-IQ or emotionally dysregulated to be able to be communists. It's baseless to say people are too stupid and cranky to understand the truth because that literally just isn't how cognition works. Understanding the truth can be made more difficult by these factors, as I already said, but fundamentally the problem is that they have been directed away from the truth by the whole of society, explicitly and implicitly, at basically every level, and trained in a very conscious way to take antisocial attitudes.
Studies on the psychologies of reactionaries and right-wingers disproves this assertion, the traits of the average fascist are one-to-one compared to the symptoms of neurotoxin poisoning like lead
You don't know what you're talking about, right-wingers are over-represented among the sufferers of brain related comorbidities, if an already right-wing society suffers an historical period of mass poisoning that causes brain damage leading to those people developing sociopathic and anti-social behaviors, than yes, the vast majority of those people will became right-wing with lead becoming the main driver in their identity formation, not because lead has magic powers, but because it destroyed their brains
We know the effects lead has on the brain, we know the majority of boomers and GenX were lead poisoned during childhood (the worst possible stage to suffer neurotoxin poisoning), we know right-wingers are over-represented in terms of brain injuries
If you can't connect the dots then it's because you don't want to, it's utterly bizarre not to recognize an important environmental multiplier in right-wing societal formation
Your argument as it stands is picking out correlations, assuming a causal direction without demonstrating it by anything but a hypothetical just-so account, and ignoring all other variables (e.g. subsequent economic decline and the resultant wealth stratification with low social mobility causing an exaggerated stratification in political ideology). We have already long-acknowledged several of these correlations, but that in itself is not adequate for a causal account. Also,
Do you not see how this was already my basic claim, that every level of society is built to guide people toward reaction and that's the real core of the issue? Of course, I think your phrasing still understates it a little, because (not that I think you'd actually defend this claim) it's as though society is merely sitting with this orientation rather than a machine actively working to turn as rightward as it can sustain, which I think you'd agree is the reality.
The demonstration is the vast body of evidence of severe brain damage among countless millions of people
Again, you can assert that entire populations suffering from compromised brain development has no MAJOR causal links or effects on the course of society (despite the fact the symptoms manifest as anti-social behavior) be my guest, believe in idealism
And do you not understand that claim is completely dwarfed, subsumed, made subordinate to the reality that brain damage across entire populations has far more valence, for the simple fact that thing between our ears is little more important than ideological conditioning
Certain ideologies do not stick to people who have brains geared towards empathy, so what do you think happens to a society where millions of people thru childhood poisoning literally lose the ability to empathize? Yes, then certain ideologies become more popular than they were ever meant to be, that's my point
Soviet union used leaded gasoline. I think settlerism->petit bourgeois mentality->cars/suburbia being solitary coffins perfectly explain american a-societal tendencies, they don’t think other people aside from coworkers and family are real
Yeah and look what happened to it, maybe we should re-examine some of our priors concerning the causal links that led to the fall of the Soviet Union or for that matter the systematic defeat of socialist projects all over the world, concurrent at the time with the maturing of the first generation completely poisoned by a globally spread neurotoxin
I wonder why so many older people have issue empathizing with others, and why socialist thought experienced a revival among the generations born after lead exposure was curtailed?
Would you like to articulate a positive statement to explain what you say here?
Deteriorating material conditions for the lower classes?
It's the response to a stressor that's important, not merely the existence of the main stressor, and this generation's response to deteriorating material conditions is far different to the response the boomers gave to the recessions and shocks of the 70s
You are tacitly assuming that those are equivalent and they plainly aren't.
We are literally in the middle of a stagflationary bubble, so yes they are equivalent enough to make comparisons
As this point you're just being contrarian
I think revival is overstating, it’s more like the lack of necessity-treats (healthcare/homes) leads people to question the system somewhat, but as we can see as soon as boring bureaucrat is elected, the moral side of the argument falls under, system doesn’t change, they swing back to amusing rightwinger, system still doesn’t change, they vote for bureaucrat again. And activity at low level, while in some cases is inspiring, is roughly at same level as historically.
Re: ussr being complete midwits about marxism because shops in USA had treats is not related to violent outbursts/poor impulse control, which is typical to lead poisoning. No theory of marxism explains glasnost however you put it, i better believe gorbie wife was deep cover agent (for treats)
Americans seem to structurally have one third petit bougie demographic or similarly treated workers to be indistinguishable (which is like 15% in other places), for a century or more, working class cant dislodge it, then big capital will (and does), they go fash as expected, and empire start to search for loot to satiate them
I'm really not overstating anything, there has indeed been a massive revival of socialist thought among the youth of the western world and even the wider world in general, despite the fact economic recessions and degrading conditions have been a constant through out the neoliberal period, yet it wasn't until the late 2010s that we saw any widespread movement back toward progressive politics let alone socialist organizing
This sentiment doesn't make any sense, obsession with American consumerism and lack of interest in collective organizing is precisely the textbook condition of someone who suffers from antisocial outbursts and poor impulse control and most crucial of all those aren't the only symptoms of lead poisoning
By the fall of the Soviet Union lead exposure was more severe than even in the US, particularly in terms of food products and worst of all baby food
Millions of Soviet citizens were lead poisoned from childhood, sorry but that absolutely had an effect
But it wasn’t lack of interest, some collectives continued fighting in the 90s (I’m talking collective farms and strikes), and not just because of infernal conditions of 90s, but over the concept of privatization as such. The destruction was performed from the top, at first bumblingly unleashing private forces and then doing jack shit to kill them. At more involved level you can say intelligentsia did it for treats, but that’s not lead poisoning but lack of cultural revolution/second purges/integration into work force
There was that itty bitty 2008 crash, which was worse than dotcom on real economy, and then shit with healtcare getting worse, cause boomers are attached to the state, while rest of people isn’t.
Was pink tide also lead poisoning? Or black panthers? (You might have a point about amerikan adventurists like bla, i can make up 50 plans more plausible than whatever the fuck they were doing)
I do think environmental factors play underappreciated role in history, but those are bad harvests forcing mass migrations (see from pov of people “invading” rome), either by climate change or pest arrival, pandemics, solar/ice ages interplay, but those psychological stories of ooh everybody was drunk all the time in medieval era, or they all got lead poisoned into stupor are convenient individualism back door of history. Its easier to believe that american cruelty, optimism and lack of memory is something environmental rather than superstructural society producing same people over and over
I'm not claiming lead poisoning is the sole determining factor, I'm claiming it's a major factor, millions of Soviets were lead poisoned, which means unfortunately like their American counterparts they had severe deficiencies in reasoning, memory retention, emotion regulation, mood regulation, impulse control, empathy, compromised hand-eye coordination, damage to the blood-brain barrier (which is a monstrous condition all on its own) and that's just the brain
So yes behind so many movements, events, people and historical outcomes of the late 20th century, lead is the silent killer, the feather that tipped the scales in the favor of reaction over and over again, because billions literally suffered from it
Well for one they didn’t have that many cars, for two - party functionaries (or student dipshits) compared to say tractor drivers are least likely to be exposed, yet it seemed they worked very diligently to get their own candle making factory, while people just wanted them to chill with alcohol ban and adjust the production priorities somewhat
Soviet lead exposure came from food and proximity to lead mining operations and munition factories (which were unfortunately everywhere)
The party functionaries ate lead (from childhood onward), as did a majority of the population