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  • A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy

    A Perfect Metaphor of Modern Human Apathy
    2026/10/31
    A skateboarder went to France during the riots.Not to document the uprising, not to support the protesters and definitely not to understand why people were in the streets fighting for their rights. He went to make a skate video. He skated through burning streets and clashing crowds, filmed himself doing tricks against a backdrop of civil unrest, and posted it for likes. He laughs as he runs from street to street trying to avoid the violence. The apathy is so obvious and ugly it hurts me to watch it. This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pattern. And the psychology behind it explains something much larger than one skateboarder with a camera.The empathy collapse is measurable.In 2010, researcher Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan published a meta-analysis of 72 studies spanning 30 years, covering nearly 14,000 American college students. Her finding was stunning and precise. Empathy among young adults had dropped 40 percent compared to their counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s. The largest decline occurred after the year 2000, exactly when social media began reorganizing how young people relate to each other and the world.Konrath measured two specific dimensions. The first was empathic concern, the ability to feel tenderness and concern for people less fortunate. The second was perspective-taking, the ability to imagine how things look from someone else’s point of view. Both declined sharply. Students were less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”That 40 percent decline isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between seeing a riot and feeling something about the people in it, and seeing a riot and thinking about what it would look like as a background for your skate video. The empathy that would make someone stop and say “this isn’t about me” has been measurably and empirically reduced. And the generation most affected is the one that grew up performing their lives for cameras.How social media turned empathy into a liability.Empathy requires one specific cognitive act: the temporary suspension of self-focus. To feel what someone else is feeling, you have to stop thinking about yourself long enough to think about them. Social media trains the exact opposite. Every platform is built around one question: how do I present myself? What do I post? How will this make me look? How many people will engage with my content?Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, spent two decades tracking this shift. Her research, conducted with Keith Campbell and published across multiple studies, showed that narcissistic traits among college students rose steadily from the late 1970s through the 2000s. Two-thirds of contemporary students scored above the narcissistic average of students tested in the early 1980s. Twenge and Campbell published their findings in the book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, arguing that American culture had created a self-reinforcing system where self-promotion was rewarded, self-absorption was normalized, and self-focus became the default mode of existence.Social media didn’t create narcissism. But it created an economy that runs on it. Every like, every comment, every share, every follow is a unit of attention converted into a unit of perceived self-worth. And the platforms are designed, deliberately and with billions of dollars of engineering, to make that feedback loop as addictive as possible. Variable reinforcement, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive, powers every notification. You don’t know when the next burst of attention is coming, so you keep posting. You keep performing. And the performance becomes the only thing that feels real.This is how a person skates through a riot and feels nothing about the riot. The riot is not a human event to him. It is content. It is background. It is production value. And the only feelings that register are the ones connected to the performance: will this get views? Will this go viral? Will this make me famous?Ethical fading: when the moral dimension disappears.In 2004, researcher Ann Tenbrunsel at the University of Notre Dame published a paper that identified a cognitive process she called ethical fading. Tenbrunsel found that people frequently make unethical decisions not because they consciously decide to do something wrong, but because the ethical dimension of the decision literally disappears from their awareness. When people focus heavily on some other aspect of a decision, such as winning, profit, or in this case, content, they stop seeing the ethical issue at all.Ethical fading is different from moral disengagement, where people actively restructure reality to justify harmful behavior. In ethical fading, the person doesn’t even register that there’s a moral ...
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    1 分
  • Why MAGA Wants a Dictator

    Why MAGA Wants a Dictator
    2026/10/30
    In this week’s video, I talked about Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism and how people who score high on his scale grew up in households that trained them to see the world as dangerous. The video covers the basics. This piece goes deeper into the research, because the science behind the authoritarian brain is one of the most well-documented findings in all of political psychology. And it explains nearly everything about what we are watching right now.The researcherIn 1981, psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba published Right-Wing Authoritarianism, a book that refined decades of earlier work on the authoritarian personality. The original research started back in the 1950s at UC Berkeley, where a team of researchers created what they called the F-scale (F for fascism) to try to measure the kind of personality that goes along with authoritarian movements. That scale had serious problems. It was unbalanced, poorly validated, and easy to game. Altemeyer spent over a decade fixing it.What he built in its place was the RWA scale. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. He tested it across thousands of participants over the course of his career, from college students to sitting legislators. And it worked. It predicted behavior, attitudes, and political alignment with a consistency that surprised even other researchers.A note on the name. “Right-wing” in this context doesn’t mean Republican or conservative in the American political sense. Altemeyer used “right-wing” to describe submission to established authority, as opposed to left-wing authoritarianism, which is submission to authorities trying to overthrow the establishment. In practice, though, the political conservatives in North America consistently scored higher on his scale. That finding held up for decades.The three clustersAltemeyer didn’t find one trait. He found three. And they always showed up together. He called them the three attitudinal clusters of right-wing authoritarianism.The first is authoritarian submission. This is a reflexive willingness to obey whatever authority figure a person sees as legitimate. Not thoughtful agreement. Not carefully evaluated trust. Uncritical, automatic compliance. The kind of obedience that doesn’t ask questions because questions themselves feel like betrayal.The second is authoritarian aggression. This is hostility directed at whoever the authority figure identifies as a target. It doesn’t come from personal experience with the target. It comes from the authority’s say-so. If the leader says immigrants are the problem, immigrants become the enemy. If the leader says it’s the media or the schools or the trans community, the aggression shifts instantly. The aggression isn’t principled. It’s outsourced.The third is conventionalism. This is a rigid attachment to traditional social norms and a belief that everyone else should be forced to follow them too. Not a personal preference for tradition. A demand that it be imposed. In parenting, high-RWA individuals value obedience, neatness, and good manners in children above curiosity, independence, or creativity.These three traits don’t just correlate with each other. They predict prejudice, intolerance, and support for anti-democratic policies. Altemeyer spent his career documenting exactly how.The engine underneathIn his later research, Altemeyer identified three personality traits sitting underneath those three attitudinal clusters. They are the engine that makes the whole system run.The first is self-righteousness. High-RWA individuals believe they are morally superior to others. Not in a quiet, internal way. In a way that gives them permission to punish. They see themselves as the last decent people in a world that has gone to rot, and that belief is what licenses the aggression.The second is fear of a dangerous world. This is the one I focused on in the video, because it is the fuel supply. High-RWA scorers genuinely believe the world is a more dangerous place than it actually is. They walk through life with an elevated threat response. New people, new ideas, new norms all feel like incoming danger. Not because they’ve evaluated any of it. Because their baseline fear is already running so high that anything unfamiliar registers as a threat.The third is mean-spiritedness. This one is uncomfortable, but it showed up in the data over and over. People who score high on RWA are more willing to inflict harm on others when they believe authority approves of it. They are less empathetic toward out-group members. They report more willingness to punish people who violate norms, even when the punishment is clearly disproportionate.Self-righteousness gives them permission. Fear gives them a target. Mean-spiritedness gives them enthusiasm.Fear is the strongest predictorAltemeyer was not the only researcher who found the fear connection. In 1998, psychologist Mark Eigenberger studied 522 participants using both the RWA...
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    2 分
  • MAGA is Obsessed with Other Men

    MAGA is Obsessed with Other Men
    2026/10/29
    This week, Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in North Carolina and told the crowd he’d been studying Jon Husted’s body. He described the senator’s backside as “like a pile of muscle.” He went through his shoulders, his jawline, his legs, his hands. He said tapping Husted’s shoulder actually hurt his hand. A few days before that, at a rally in Kentucky, he told the audience he’d “examined his ass.” At another rally in Georgia, he spent time comparing how attractive one male candidate was compared to another. This has been happening at rally after rally all month. The New York Times called his fixation on male bodies “puzzling.” Anderson Cooper aired a montage of all of it back to back. Seth Meyers looked into the camera and asked him directly, “Why are you so weird?”And not a single Republican said a word about any of it.In 1996, psychologist Henry Adams at the University of Georgia designed one of the most uncomfortable experiments in the history of psychology. He recruited 64 men who all described themselves as exclusively heterosexual, meaning they reported no homosexual arousal and no homosexual experiences. He then divided them into two groups based on their scores on a standardized homophobia scale. One group scored high in homophobia. The other scored low. Then he showed both groups three types of sexually explicit videos: heterosexual, lesbian, and gay male.He measured their physical arousal using a penile plethysmograph, a device that measures changes in penile circumference with clinical precision. There was no ambiguity in the data. There was no room for interpretation. The device measured what the body did regardless of what the mouth said.Both groups responded similarly to the heterosexual and lesbian content. The difference showed up only when the gay male content played. In the non-homophobic group, 66% showed no measurable arousal to the gay male video, and less than 25% showed a significant physical response. In the homophobic group, those numbers flipped. Over 54% of the men who scored highest on the homophobia scale showed a significant physical response to the gay male content. Only 20% of the homophobic men showed no arousal at all.And here’s the part that makes the study devastating: when the men were asked afterward to rate how aroused they felt during each video, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their arousal to the gay male content. Their bodies responded. Their conscious minds denied it. The data didn’t care.Adams published his findings in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, one of the most respected journals in the field, under the title “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” The answer, according to the plethysmograph, was yes.The defense mechanism that explains everythingThe concept that explains Adams’ findings is not new. It was first described by Anna Freud in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. She called it reaction formation, and it works like this: when a person experiences a feeling or impulse that produces intense anxiety or shame, they don’t just suppress it. They attack the opposite. They become the loudest, most aggressive opponent of the very thing they feel inside themselves.Reaction formation is not the same as simple disagreement or discomfort. The hallmark of reaction formation is disproportionate intensity. A person who is simply not attracted to the same sex doesn’t spend their career crusading against it. They don’t draft legislation about it. They don’t bring it up in every speech. They don’t think about it at all, because there is nothing to defend against. Reaction formation reveals itself through obsession. The volume of the outrage is the tell.What makes reaction formation so effective as a disguise is that it looks like conviction. It looks like moral clarity. The person performing it often doesn’t know they’re doing it. The defense mechanism works precisely because it operates below conscious awareness. The man who stands at a podium and delivers a passionate speech about the threat of homosexuality to the American family may genuinely believe every word he’s saying. His body, as Adams demonstrated, may be telling a completely different story.The study that connected it to childhoodAdams’ 1996 study established the physical link between homophobia and homosexual arousal. Sixteen years later, a team of researchers led by Netta Weinstein at the University of Essex and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester went deeper and asked a follow-up question that Adams never addressed: where does this internal conflict come from?In 2012, Weinstein, Ryan, and their colleagues published a series of six studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most rigorous journals in the field. They recruited 784 college students across the United States and Germany, measured their explicit sexual orientation by simply asking them, and then...
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    1 分
  • The Psychology of Halloween

    The Psychology of Halloween
    2026/10/28
    I needed a short break from politics, so I researched and made this video instead. I hope you like it. Almost everyone has some degree of morbid curiosity, and most people don’t want to admit it. We slow down at car accidents. We binge true crime podcasts. We watch horror movies that we know will keep us up at night. And every October, we turn an entire holiday into a celebration of death, fear, and disguise. The question isn’t whether we’re drawn to dark things. The question is why.In 2021, behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago published a paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences that introduced the first psychometric tool for measuring this trait. He called it the Morbid Curiosity Scale, a 24-item assessment designed to measure how drawn a person is to information about things that are dangerous, threatening, or related to death.What Scrivner found is that morbid curiosity isn’t rare, and it isn’t a disorder. It’s a normally distributed psychological trait, which means most people fall somewhere in the middle. Almost everyone has some degree of it. The people who binge true crime podcasts, slow down to look at car accidents, and watch horror movies on purpose aren’t broken. They’re normal. And Scrivner’s research suggests there’s an evolutionary reason for that.Scrivner identified four dimensions of morbid curiosity: curiosity about the minds of dangerous people, curiosity about the supernatural, curiosity about body violation, and curiosity about violence. Each one maps onto a category of threat that would have mattered to our ancestors. Paying attention to predators, understanding what dangerous people might do next, and learning about physical harm without having to experience it firsthand would have given early humans an advantage. The people who paid attention to threats survived. The ones who looked away didn’t. Morbid curiosity is leftover survival wiring that most of us still carry.Halloween activates every single one of those dimensions at once. Monsters and ghosts hit the supernatural dimension. Gore and horror movies hit body violation. Scary costumes and jump scares hit violence. Haunted houses are designed to trigger all four. The reason millions of people line up to experience it every October is that the brain is already wired to seek it out. Halloween didn’t create our fascination with death. It just gave it a date on the calendar.Halloween vs. Día de los MuertosOne of the most revealing things about Halloween is what it looks like when you put it next to another culture’s version of the same thing.Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is celebrated in Mexico on November 1st and 2nd, just one day after Halloween. Both holidays exist at the same time of year. Both are built around death. Both involve costumes, decorations, and gatherings. And they solve the exact same problem in completely opposite ways.Halloween was born from fear. The Celts believed the dead were dangerous. They lit fires to keep the darkness back. They wore disguises so the spirits wouldn’t recognize them. They sacrificed animals hoping their gods would protect them through the winter. The entire structure of Samhain was built on the idea that the dead were a threat and the living needed to defend themselves.Día de los Muertos was born from love. Its roots trace back to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, including the Aztecs and Maya, who viewed death not as an ending but as a continuation. When the Spanish arrived and brought Catholicism, those indigenous traditions blended with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day into what the holiday is today. Families build altars called ofrendas and decorate them with marigolds, candles, food, and photographs of the people they’ve lost. They visit cemeteries, clean the graves, and sit with their dead. They tell stories about them. They cook their favorite meals. Sugar skulls and painted skeleton faces aren’t meant to frighten anyone. They’re meant to normalize death and celebrate the people who lived.Halloween hides from the dead. Día de los Muertos sits down to dinner with them.Both holidays are doing the same psychological work. They’re giving people a structured way to process the reality that everyone they love, and they themselves, will die. The difference is in the approach. Western cultures, and the Celtic tradition that became Halloween, tend to treat death as the enemy. Something to ward off, distract yourself from, and avoid thinking about for as long as possible. Mesoamerican cultures, and the traditions that became Día de los Muertos, tend to treat death as part of the family. Something to acknowledge, accept, and carry with you.Neither approach is wrong. But the contrast is striking. One culture builds a holiday around running from death. The other builds a holiday around sitting with it. And both cultures have kept doing it for thousands of years because the need is the ...
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    9 分
  • MAGA is a Support Group for Weak People

    MAGA is a Support Group for Weak People
    2026/10/27
    There is a pattern that shows up in the research on authoritarianism that almost nobody talks about publicly. Not because it is hidden. Because it is uncomfortable.The people who fill megachurches on Sundays and the people who fill MAGA rallies on weeknights are, in disproportionate numbers, the same people. Not metaphorically. Psychometrically. They score the same on the same instruments, hold the same cluster of personality traits, and respond to the same structural incentives. Both institutions offer the same product, packaged differently but functionally identical: status and power distributed on the basis of loyalty, not competence.What Altemeyer Actually MeasuredBob Altemeyer was a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba who spent his entire career studying a single question: what kind of person submits to authoritarian leaders, and why?In 1981, he published Right-Wing Authoritarianism, introducing the RWA scale, a psychometric instrument that measures three interlocking traits. He called them the Big Three.The first is authoritarian submission. This is not ordinary respect for authority. It is a blanket willingness to defer to whoever the individual perceives as a legitimate authority, and to accept their claims without scrutiny, even when those claims conflict with observable reality. High scorers on this trait will tell you that people should obey authority in virtually all circumstances. When given moral dilemmas, they default to “the law is the law” regardless of the situation. They do not evaluate whether an authority figure is competent, honest, or acting in good faith. They evaluate whether that figure occupies a position they recognize as legitimate. If so, they comply.The second is authoritarian aggression. This is a willingness to punish, condemn, or attack people that the authority figure has identified as threats or deviants. The aggression is not indiscriminate. It is directed. High scorers do not attack people in general. They attack whoever the leader points at. And they do so with a sense of moral righteousness, because the leader has told them the target deserves it. Altemeyer noted that authoritarian followers prefer to aggress when the odds are heavily in their favor. They are not courageous. They attack in groups, when they have numbers, or when they have institutional backing. They avoid anything approaching a fair fight.The third is conventionalism. This is an intense attachment to traditional social norms and a hostility toward anyone perceived as violating them. High scorers want everyone to live the way they live. They view deviation from their norms not as difference but as moral failure. They see the world in categories of “normal” and “deviant,” and they want deviance punished.These three traits form a self-reinforcing loop. You submit to the authority. You attack whoever the authority tells you to attack. And you demand that everyone conform to the norms the authority endorses. Submission fuels aggression. Aggression enforces conventionalism. Conventionalism justifies submission.Altemeyer tested this cluster across thousands of subjects over four decades. His results were remarkably stable. The personality profile he identified in the early 1980s predicted the same behaviors in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. It predicted support for punitive policing, opposition to civil rights, endorsement of government surveillance, hostility toward immigrants, and consistent support for leaders who promised order through dominance.He published updated findings in 1988, 1996, and again in his free online book The Authoritarians in 2006. And then, with John Dean, in Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers in 2020, he applied his scale directly to the MAGA movement and found exactly what his data had been predicting for four decades.The Dominators and the FollowersAltemeyer’s framework has two halves, and most people only know the first.The authoritarian followers are the base. They are the submissive crowd. They want someone above them telling them what to do and someone below them to punish. They score high on the RWA scale.But Altemeyer also studied the leaders. He called them social dominators. These are the people who want to be submitted to. They score high on a different instrument, the Social Dominance Orientation scale, originally developed by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius. Social dominators are characterized by a desire for personal power, a willingness to manipulate and deceive, low empathy, and opposition to equality. They see the world as a hierarchy and they want to be at the top.The two types need each other. Social dominators need a compliant base that will follow instructions without asking questions. Authoritarian followers need a leader who will tell them who to blame and who to punish. The relationship is parasitic but stable. The leader lies. The followers believe. The leader points. The followers attack. Neither side examines the...
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    2 分
  • MAGA Uses Words They Don’t Understand

    MAGA Uses Words They Don’t Understand
    2026/10/26
    There is a specific type of person who will tell you with complete confidence that socialism is destroying America but, cannot tell you what socialism is. Not in a vague, hand-wavy way. In a literal, recorded-on-camera, asked-four-times-and-still-couldn’t-answer way. This is not a failure of education or a failure of access to information. It is a measurable psychological phenomenon with decades of research behind it, and the explanation is less about politics than it is about personality.In 1990, psychologist Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia developed what he called the Over-Claiming Questionnaire. The design was deceptively simple. Participants were given a long list of items across a range of knowledge domains and asked to rate how familiar they were with each one. Mixed into the list were items that did not exist. Fake names. Invented concepts. Events that never happened. The test was not measuring what people knew. It was measuring what people were willing to claim they knew, including things that were impossible to know because they were not real.The results were consistent across multiple studies conducted over the next two decades. Certain people reliably claimed familiarity with the fake items. They were not guessing randomly or hedging their guesses. They were stating, with confidence, that they were familiar with things that had been fabricated specifically to catch them. And when Paulhus examined which personality traits predicted this behavior, one trait stood above the rest.Narcissism.Not clinical narcissistic personality disorder in every case, but subclinical narcissistic traits as measured by standard personality instruments. This connection was significant and replicated across studies. People who scored higher in narcissism were significantly more likely to claim knowledge they did not have. The relationship held even when controlling for actual intelligence, meaning this was not simply a matter of smart people knowing more and occasionally overestimating. This was a personality-driven inflation of self-assessed knowledge that operated independently of how much someone actually knew.Why Narcissistic People OverclaimUnderstanding the mechanism behind overclaiming requires understanding what knowledge represents to a narcissistic person. For most people, not knowing something is a neutral event. It carries no emotional weight. You encounter a term you have never heard, you acknowledge the gap, and you either look it up or move on. The gap does not say anything about your value as a person.For someone with narcissistic traits, that same gap is experienced as a threat. Narcissistic self-esteem is not built on a stable internal foundation. It is built on the continuous external performance of competence, intelligence, and superiority. Every interaction is, on some level, an audition. And in that audition, not knowing something is not just uncomfortable. It is dangerous. Because if you do not know something, you are not the smartest person in the room. And if you are not the smartest person in the room, the entire self-image you have constructed begins to wobble.Paulhus and his colleague Peter Harms, in their 2004 follow-up research, found that overclaiming was specifically tied to what they called self-enhancement bias, a pattern of inflating one’s own qualities to maintain a favorable self-image. The overclaiming was not happening at a conscious, deliberate level for most participants. They were not strategically lying about what they knew. Their self-enhancement bias was operating automatically, filling in knowledge gaps before the person even registered them as gaps. The subjective experience, as far as the overclaimer was concerned, was not deception. It was genuine belief. They really did think they knew these things. Their personality would not let them feel otherwise.This is a critical distinction because it explains something that baffles many observers of political discourse. When that man on camera was asked to define socialism and clearly could not, the common assumption is that he was caught in a lie. But the research suggests something more unsettling. He may have genuinely believed he knew what socialism meant right up until the moment he was asked to produce the definition. The knowledge felt real to him. It was there in his head as a feeling of familiarity, a sense of confidence, a certainty that he understood this thing. What was not there was any actual content. The feeling of knowing had been generated by his narcissistic self-image. The knowledge itself had never been acquired.What Happens at the Moment of ExposureThe most behaviorally interesting part of overclaiming is not the claim itself. It is what happens at the exact moment the overclaimer is forced to confront the fact that they do not actually know what they claimed to know. Paulhus’s research focused primarily on measuring the tendency to overclaim, not on documenting the behavioral ...
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    3 分
  • MAGA Cult is Over

    MAGA Cult is Over
    2026/10/25
    Political movements do not collapse all at once. They collapse in layers, from the outside in, with the least committed leaving first and the most committed holding on until long after everyone else has moved on. This pattern is not unique to MAGA. It is one of the most consistent findings in the psychology of group identity, cult behavior, and political disillusionment. And the research that explains it stretches back over seventy years.What makes MAGA’s collapse worth studying is not that it is happening. It is that we already have a detailed historical model for exactly how it will play out, because it already happened once in postwar Germany. The timeline, the psychology, and the sequence of departures are remarkably similar. The research tells us who leaves first, who leaves last, and what happens to the people who never leave at all.Level One: The Identity TouristsIn the 1970s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol conducted a series of experiments that became the foundation for one of the most cited theories in social psychology. Tajfel wanted to understand what it takes for a person to adopt a group identity. His findings were surprising in their simplicity. He discovered that people will identify with almost any group, even one assigned to them randomly, as long as that group provides them with a sense of positive distinctiveness. As long as belonging feels good, people stay.Tajfel called this Social Identity Theory, and its implications for political movements are enormous. People do not need to deeply understand a group’s ideology to join it. They do not need to agree with every position. They do not even need to care very much. They just need the group to make them feel like they are part of something that is winning.This explains the first wave of MAGA’s expansion and the first wave of its collapse. The casual MAGA supporters, the ones who wore the hats to rallies, flew the flags from their trucks, and posted memes online, were never ideologically committed. For many of them, especially younger voters in 2024, MAGA was social currency. It was something to do on a Saturday night in a town where nothing else was happening. The rallies felt like concerts. The online communities felt like belonging. The red hat was a ticket to a party that seemed, briefly, like the winning side.Tajfel’s research predicts exactly what happens to these members when the group stops feeling like a winner. They leave. Quietly, without explanation, without confrontation. One day the flag comes down. The hat goes in a drawer. The social media posts stop. They do not announce their departure because, psychologically, they were never deeply enough invested to require one. The identity was worn, not internalized. And worn identities are easy to take off.This is the level of MAGA that has already evaporated. These former supporters do not want to talk about politics anymore. They insist both sides are equally bad. They bristle when someone brings up the rallies they attended eighteen months ago. They are already rehearsing the line they will use for the rest of their lives: “I was never really into it.”Tajfel’s research tells us this level does not come back. Once the positive distinctiveness is gone, once the group stops providing the feeling of being on a winning team, low-commitment members do not reconnect. They find another source of identity. The group they left becomes something they would rather not remember.Level Two: The InvestedThe second level of departure is slower, more painful, and psychologically more complex. These are the people who did not just wear the hat. They built their social lives around it. Their friend groups became MAGA friend groups. Their media consumption became exclusively MAGA media. Their sense of who they were as people became inseparable from their political identity. Walking away from MAGA, for these members, is not like taking off a hat. It is like amputating a limb.The psychological mechanism at work here is what economists call the sunk cost fallacy: the tendency to continue investing in something because of how much you have already put into it, regardless of whether the investment is still rational. The more time, money, relationships, and credibility someone has poured into MAGA, the higher the psychological cost of admitting it was a mistake. Every argument they had with a family member. Every friendship they ended. Every Thanksgiving they ruined. All of it becomes retroactively meaningless the moment they admit they were wrong.The research on sunk cost psychology, developed extensively by behavioral economists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer in their 1985 study at Ohio University, shows that people are not weighing the current evidence when they decide to stay or go. They are weighing the past investment. The question is not “is this still worth supporting?” The question is “can I afford to admit that everything I already invested ...
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    6 分
  • MAGA is A Personality Disorder

    MAGA is A Personality Disorder
    2026/10/24
    MAGA Isn’t a Political Movement. It’s a Personality Disorder Called Ressentiment.In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morals. It is one of the most disturbing books in the history of philosophy, and not because of its arguments about religion or power. It is disturbing because Nietzsche identified a psychological state that, once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it everywhere.He called it ressentiment.Not resentment. Ressentiment. Nietzsche deliberately used the French word because it described something more specific and more dangerous than ordinary anger. Resentment is a feeling. It comes, it burns, and eventually it passes or gets processed. Ressentiment is what happens when it doesn’t pass. When the anger has nowhere to go. When the person experiencing it is too powerless to act on it, too proud to admit it, and too fragile to let it go. The feeling stops being a reaction to something that happened. It becomes who they are.Nietzsche observed this most clearly in what he called “slave morality,” a value system created not by people who had something to offer the world, but by people who had nothing and needed a way to frame that nothing as moral superiority. Instead of striving for strength, they called strength evil. Instead of pursuing excellence, they called excellence arrogance. They didn’t build a worldview around what they valued. They built it around what they resented.The parallels to modern American politics should be impossible to miss. And yet, most political analysis continues to treat MAGA supporters as rational actors motivated by economic anxiety or cultural displacement. The research tells a different story.Scheler’s expansion: self-poisoning of the soul.Twenty-five years after Nietzsche, philosopher Max Scheler published the most thorough analysis of ressentiment ever written. His 1912 book, titled simply Ressentiment, took Nietzsche’s concept and mapped its psychology in granular detail.Scheler identified the key ingredient: powerlessness combined with awareness of that powerlessness. Ressentiment doesn’t grow in people who are simply angry. It grows in people who are angry and know they can’t do anything about it. They can’t fight the people they envy. They can’t achieve the things they resent others for having. They can’t change their circumstances through action. So the anger turns inward, curdles, and begins to poison the person’s entire value system.Scheler called this “self-poisoning.” The person in the grip of ressentiment doesn’t just resent specific individuals or outcomes. They begin to hate the values themselves that they cannot achieve. Education becomes elitism. Expertise becomes arrogance. Success becomes proof of corruption. The entire moral framework inverts, and what was once aspiration becomes the enemy.This is not metaphor. This is the observable psychology of the MAGA base. They don’t just disagree with liberal policies. They have come to hate the values that liberal life represents: education, professional achievement, cultural sophistication, cosmopolitanism, expertise. Not because those things are wrong, but because those things are reminders of choices they didn’t make and lives they didn’t build. Ressentiment provides the psychological architecture for reframing that failure as someone else’s fault.Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The modern research: ressentiment as the engine of grievance politics.In 2022, researchers Tereza Capelos at the University of Birmingham and Mikko Salmela at the University of Helsinki published a landmark empirical study titled “Grievance Politics: An Empirical Analysis of Anger Through the Emotional Mechanism of Ressentiment.” They analyzed 164 interview excerpts from three major works documenting American resentment: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men, and Susan Faludi’s Stiffed.Their findings cut through one of the biggest misconceptions in political psychology. The “angry citizen” isn’t angry. Not in the clinical sense. Anger is short-lived and action-oriented. A person who is truly angry about their economic circumstances would organize, protest, vote for change, and take concrete action to improve their situation.What Capelos and Salmela found instead were the markers of ressentiment. Victimhood without a specific perpetrator. Envy directed at groups rather than individuals. A chronic sense of powerlessness. And critically, the psychological defenses of splitting, projection, and denial. The subjects in these interviews had not experienced a specific injustice they were trying to correct. They had built entire identities around the feeling of having been wronged. The grievance was no longer a response to something. The grievance was the identity itself.This is the distinction that ...
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