EOH is a particularly dumb episode to make this argument about because I did actually read this book! Peter led the episode but I read it in grad school. So Yglesias is wrong in the micro and in the macro, it's kind of an achievement.

You’ll be ok. Not because things always work out, but because you are incredibly capable. You are loved.

The jury should exclude straight white men

I mean, is it not at least in part a quest for certainty in an increasingly senseless and chaotic world? As someone who grew up evangelical, that is at the core of so much of that kind of thinking. Plus offloading actual thinking by deferring to weird “authority”