The Lucas Bean Show

Lucas Bean

Sharing insights on psychology, History, human behavior, politics, new technology and business | Author, Scientist, Podcast Host | I make videos & I try to tell good stories. lucasbean.substack.com

  1. 1h ago

    MAGA Cult Collapse: Now What?

    Ten days ago, the American electorate delivered the most comprehensive repudiation of a political movement in modern history. Democrats swept the House, swept the Senate, and won by margins so large that every claim MAGA ever made about representing the will of the people died in the same breath as the vote count. There is nothing left to argue about. The numbers are finished. The argument is over. And now millions of people who made Donald Trump the center of their identity are going through exactly what decades of psychological research predicted they would. This is not speculation. The stages of collapse have been mapped by four separate researchers across four different fields, and every single stage is playing out in real time. Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Stage One: The Identity Crisis In 2009, researcher William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin published a landmark study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with colleagues Angel Gomez, D. Conor Seyle, J. Francisco Morales, and Carmen Huici. Swann had been studying what he called identity fusion, a psychological state in which a person’s individual identity becomes so deeply entangled with a group that the two become functionally inseparable. Identity fusion is different from simple group identification. When you identify with a group, you support it. You cheer for it. You align yourself with it. But you remain a separate person. Your identity exists independently of the group, and if the group goes away, you’re still you. Identity fusion is the point where that separation dissolves. The group doesn’t just represent you. The group becomes you. Your sense of who you are, your personal agency, your emotional stability, all of it becomes tethered to the group’s existence and the group’s success. Swann’s research showed that fused individuals don’t just support their group more strongly than identified individuals. They become willing to fight and die for it, not because they were ordered to, but because an attack on the group registers neurologically as an attack on the self. Swann’s later work, published in Psychological Review in 2012, expanded the theory further. Fused individuals perceive their fellow group members as family. They develop what Swann called “relational ties” to other members, a sense that the people in the group aren’t just allies but kin. This is why MAGA rallies function the way they do. They aren’t political events. They’re family reunions for people who replaced their actual families with a political movement. When a fused identity collapses, the person doesn’t simply lose a political affiliation. They lose their understanding of who they are. The question isn’t “who should I vote for next?” The question is “who am I?” And for people who spent a decade replacing every relationship, every social connection, every source of meaning in their lives with Trump, that question has no answer. Because they never built anything outside of him. Swann’s 2014 research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that identity fusion predicted endorsement of extreme pro-group behavior even when controlling for standard measures of group identification. The fusion wasn’t ideological. It was personal. The group didn’t represent their beliefs. The group represented them. And now the group has been rejected by the country it claimed to represent, and the fused individuals are left standing in a psychological vacuum with no identity to inhabit. Stage Two: The Denial Machine In 1956, researcher Leon Festinger at the University of Minnesota published one of the most consequential studies in the history of psychology. Festinger, along with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, infiltrated a cult led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who believed she was receiving messages from extraterrestrial beings warning of an apocalyptic flood. The aliens, she told her followers, would rescue the faithful before the disaster. The flood never came. The aliens never arrived. And Festinger watched what happened next. The members who had invested the least in the prophecy left quietly. They absorbed the failure, recalibrated, and moved on. But the members who had sacrificed the most, the ones who had quit their jobs, given away their possessions, told everyone they knew that the world was ending, didn’t walk away. They did the opposite. They called newspapers. They recruited strangers off the street. They worked harder than ever to spread the message. The prophecy hadn’t failed, they insisted. Their faith had saved the world. Festinger called the mechanism cognitive dissonance. When a deeply held belief is contradicted by reality, the brain faces two options: update the belief or reject the reality. And the more a person has sacrificed for that belief, the more psychologically expensive it becomes to admit the belief was wrong, because admitting the belief was wrong means admitting that everything they sacrificed was for nothing. The parallel to MAGA requires no imagination. These are people who spent a decade defending Trump publicly. They lost friendships over him. They destroyed relationships with their own children. They gave him money they didn’t have. They wore his name on their bodies. They repeated his claims at work, at church, at Thanksgiving. They made him the single defining feature of their public identity. Now imagine having to say three words: I was wrong. Those three words don’t just change a political opinion. They invalidate ten years of behavior. They mean every argument was wrong, every sacrifice was pointless, every relationship they destroyed was destroyed for a lie. The psychological cost of that admission is so catastrophic that the brain simply refuses to make it. So it constructs alternatives. Trump didn’t fail. He was betrayed. The election was stolen. Republicans sabotaged him. The deep state won. The explanation changes constantly. The function never does. It exists to protect an identity that reality has already killed. Festinger’s research predicted something else that’s happening now: the most committed members are temporarily getting more extreme, not less. The civil war talk, the threats, the escalation. That isn’t strength. It’s the psychological equivalent of a person drowning and flailing. The louder they get, the more certain you can be that the dissonance is consuming them. Because people who are winning don’t need to scream. Stage Three: The Purge In 1988, researcher Jose Marques at the University of Porto, working with Vincent Yzerbyt and Jacques-Philippe Leyens, published research on how groups respond when they feel threatened. What Marques found was counterintuitive: threatened groups don’t just attack outsiders. They attack their own members more harshly than they would ever attack an enemy. Marques called it the black sheep effect. The mechanism is identity maintenance. When a group’s status is threatened, its members become hypervigilant about who belongs and who doesn’t. Deviant insiders, members who fail to perfectly represent the group’s idealized self-image, become targets of judgment more extreme than anything directed at outsiders. The group protects its threatened identity by finding traitors within its own walls and destroying them. This is the stage where the movement eats itself. And the evidence is already visible. Trump called Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor. The woman who defended him through two impeachments and burned her career to the ground for him. Tucker Carlson built the largest media platform for MAGA in television history, and Trump turned on him. Republican politicians who spent years performing absolute loyalty are being accused of never having been loyal enough. One faction says the party establishment betrayed Trump. Another says conservative media sold out. Another says certain members were never really MAGA. Each f… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  2. 1d ago

    Why MAGA Has No Empathy

    Ask a MAGA supporter to care about someone else’s suffering. Don’t argue with them. Don’t challenge their politics. Just ask them to feel something for another human being who is in pain. Then watch what happens. They won’t feel guilty for not caring. They won’t go quiet. They’ll get angry. At you. For asking. In 2020, researcher William Laughey at Hull York Medical School published a study in Medical Science Educator that identified something he called empathic dissonance. Laughey was studying empathy in clinical settings, working with medical students who were being asked to express care for patients they didn’t genuinely feel connected to. What he found was that when people are pressured to demonstrate empathy they don’t actually feel, the result isn’t guilt or shame. It’s discomfort. The gap between what they’re supposed to feel and what they actually feel creates a friction that turns outward. The person who asked becomes the problem. Laughey coined the term in a medical context. But the mechanism he described runs far deeper than a hospital consultation room. It describes what happens inside any person when the world expects them to feel something and they can’t. The expectation itself becomes the threat. And the person who made the expectation visible becomes the target. This is MAGA’s entire emotional architecture. Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Pattern Children separated from their parents at the border. You bring up the children and MAGA doesn’t grieve for them. They attack you for mentioning them. They tell you the parents shouldn’t have come. They tell you the kids are being used as props. They change the subject to crime statistics. Anything, any direction the conversation can go that isn’t “those children are suffering and that should bother us.” A classroom full of children shot to death. You grieve with the parents and MAGA attacks the parents. They accuse them of being crisis actors. They accuse them of wanting to take guns away. They turn the people who lost their children into the enemy because the alternative is feeling something for a dead child and they can’t do it. People losing their healthcare. You express concern and they tell you those people should have worked harder. They don’t engage with the suffering. They assign blame to the person suffering so they don’t have to sit with the fact that another human being is in pain and they feel nothing about it. The pattern is always the same. You ask them to care. They attack you for asking. Every single time. Why Dissonance, Not Disagreement The instinct is to interpret this as a political disagreement. They don’t care about immigrant children because they have a different view on immigration policy. They don’t grieve school shootings because they have a different view on gun rights. They don’t worry about healthcare because they have a different view on government spending. That interpretation is wrong, and the reason it’s wrong is the anger. If this were a policy disagreement, the response would be a policy argument. “I think the border should be handled differently.” “I think gun rights are important.” “I think healthcare should be market-based.” Those are positions. You can have those positions calmly. You can hold them while still acknowledging that a child in a cage is suffering, that a dead first-grader is a tragedy, that a person who can’t afford insulin is in pain. But that’s not what happens. What happens is rage. The question “don’t you feel bad for those kids?” produces not a policy response but a hostile one. Because the question isn’t really about policy. The question is about capacity. Can you feel this? And for people who can’t, that question is an exposure. It reveals something about them that they spend their entire lives trying to hide. Laughey’s empathic dissonance describes exactly this mechanism. The friction between what you’re expected to feel and what you actually feel doesn’t produce introspection. It produces hostility toward whoever made the gap visible. The person who asked you to care becomes the enemy because they just demonstrated, in front of everyone, that you can’t. The Research That Goes Deeper Laughey identified the mechanism. Other researchers have mapped the personality. A study published in 2025 in the Journal of Research in Personality surveyed more than 9,000 participants and found that Trump supporters consistently scored lower on affective empathy, which is the emotional capacity to feel what another person is feeling. They also scored higher on what the researchers called dissonant empathy, which is not discomfort with being asked to care. It is the experience of enjoyment when watching someone else suffer. That finding is worth sitting with. Not indifference to pain. Pleasure in it. In 2021, researcher Joshua Hart at Union College published a study in the Journal of Social Psychology demonstrating that narcissism functions as an upstream personality variable that predicts Trump support. Narcissists scored higher on social dominance orientation, the belief that some groups of people deserve to be on top and others deserve to be on the bottom. They scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism, the preference for obedience, conformity, and punishment of anyone who deviates. And they scored higher on anti-immigrant hostility. The narcissism came first. The politics came after. Aleksandra Cichocka at the University of Kent found in 2018 that narcissists reject democracy itself. They prefer strong leaders and military rule because democracy requires something narcissists are structurally incapable of: the recognition that other people’s views are as valid as their own. Thread these findings together and the picture is clinical. Low empathy. High narcissism. Social dominance. Enjoyment of suffering. Hostility toward anyone who asks them to care. This is not a voter profile. This is a personality profile. And empathic dissonance is what happens when that profile gets asked to perform the one thing it was never built to do. The Cruelty Is the Tell Every political movement has a theory of governance. Lower taxes. Stronger military. More regulation, less regulation. Those are positions people can hold while still being fundamentally decent human beings. MAGA doesn’t have a theory of governance. MAGA has a theory of permission. Permission to not care. Permission to laugh at suffering. Permission to punish people for being vulnerable. The movement’s entire emotional engine runs on the relief of never being asked to feel something for someone else. That’s why the rallies work the way they do. The crowd doesn’t cheer policy announcements. The crowd cheers cruelty. They cheer when someone is mocked. They cheer when someone is threatened. They cheer when someone who was already hurting gets hurt more. The cheering isn’t incidental to the politics. The cheering is the politics. The cruelty is what they came for. And that’s why the anger comes so fast when you ask them to care. You’re not challenging their worldview. You’re threatening their permission structure. The entire point of the movement is that they never have to feel bad about not feeling bad. When you ask them to care about a suffering child, you’re pulling them back into a world where empathy is expected, where cruelty has consequences, where being unable to feel things for other people is a deficiency rather than a political identity. They can’t go back to that world. Because in that world, they’re the ones with the problem. So they attack you instead. They call you soft. They call you a snowflake. They tell you facts don’t care about your feelings, which is the most revealing sentence in American politics because it tells you exactly what they think feelings are: a weakness to be eliminated, not a capacity to be developed. The next time someone asks why MAGA supporters seem to enjoy being cruel, the answer … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  3. 2d ago

    Personality Disorder Disguised as Patriotism

    In 2018, a team of researchers led by Aleksandra Cichocka at the University of Kent and Marta Marchlewska at the Polish Academy of Sciences published a study in the British Journal of Social Psychology that asked a question most political analysis ignores entirely. Not what do people believe about democracy. Who supports it, and who doesn’t, based on who they are as people. They surveyed 407 Americans and 405 Poles. They measured two types of self-evaluation: self-esteem and narcissism. Then they compared those personality profiles to each participant’s attitudes toward democratic governance. People with healthy self-esteem supported democracy. They trusted other people. They could tolerate disagreement. They didn’t need to win every argument or dominate every room to feel secure in who they were. That security made them comfortable with a system where other people get a voice. People who scored high in narcissism rejected democracy. They preferred strong leaders. They preferred military rule. They believed democracies were bad at maintaining order. They did not believe other people’s opinions deserved equal consideration, because narcissists don’t experience other people as equally real. The researchers explained the mechanism in language anyone who has ever lived with a narcissist will recognize immediately: narcissists feel entitled and delusionally superior to others, which results in a lower tolerance of diverse political opinions. That’s a personality disorder expressing itself through a ballot. The Difference Between Self-Esteem and Narcissism This distinction matters because most people confuse the two. They look at someone in a red hat screaming at a school board meeting or threatening a poll worker and they see confidence. Strength. Someone who believes in something. That’s the wrong read. Self-esteem is the quiet knowledge that you’re worth something. It doesn’t need an audience. It doesn’t need to win. A person with healthy self-esteem can hear someone disagree with them and think “they see it differently” rather than “they’re attacking me.” Self-esteem is secure. It doesn’t require constant validation because the foundation isn’t built on other people’s approval. Narcissism looks like self-esteem from a distance, but the architecture is completely different. Narcissism is a defensive structure built on top of fragility. The grandiosity, the entitlement, the dominance displays, those aren’t signs of strength. They’re load-bearing walls holding up a self that would collapse without them. The narcissist isn’t confident. The narcissist is terrified. And every disagreement, every challenge, every person who doesn’t immediately submit to their version of reality registers not as a conversation but as an existential threat. Cichocka’s research showed that this psychological distinction maps directly onto political behavior. Secure people support systems that distribute power, because they can handle not being in control. Insecure people disguised as confident people, which is what narcissists are, support systems that concentrate power, because shared power means someone might disagree with them, and disagreement is something they cannot survive. The Interpersonal Trust Problem The second study, conducted with the Polish sample, found an additional mechanism. Self-esteem predicted support for democracy in part because people with healthy self-esteem trusted other people. They believed other humans were generally capable of participating in collective decision-making. That trust made democracy feel like a reasonable system rather than a dangerous one. Narcissists didn’t trust anyone. And why would they. Narcissism is built on the assumption that other people are either tools to be used, threats to be neutralized, or audiences to be performed for. None of those categories include “equal citizen whose perspective has value.” If you don’t believe other people are real in the way you are real, then democracy, a system built entirely on the premise that other people’s views count as much as yours, makes no sense. It’s not a political system. It’s an insult. This explains why every MAGA position, when you strip away the flag and the slogans, is the same demand repeated in different words: we get to decide, and you don’t. They don’t want free speech. They want their speech. They don’t want law and order. They want their law applied to your behavior and their behavior exempt from consequences. They don’t want election integrity. They want to win, and any election they lose is by definition fraudulent because a world in which they don’t get what they want is a world that’s broken. Every principle they claim to hold dissolves the instant it’s applied to them, because the principle was never the point. The point was dominance. The principle was just the costume dominance was wearing that day. Narcissism at Scale In 2021, Cichocka and her colleague Oliver Keenan published research demonstrating that collective narcissism, the belief that your national group is exceptional and insufficiently recognized by others, predicted support for overriding democratic procedures entirely. Collective narcissists supported Trump’s reelection even if it required violating democratic norms. After January 6, collective narcissism predicted support for the Capitol attack itself. This isn’t a fringe finding. This is a research program spanning nearly a decade, replicated across countries and political systems, all pointing in the same direction: narcissism and democracy are structurally incompatible. Narcissism requires a world organized around the narcissist’s superiority. Democracy requires a world organized around the premise that nobody is superior. These two orientations cannot coexist. One of them has to lose. Cichocka’s 2023 review article in Political Psychology, co-authored with Marchlewska and Cislak, synthesized the body of evidence and drew the conclusion plainly: self-esteem and narcissism play distinctive roles in political life. Self-esteem builds the psychological foundation for democratic engagement. Narcissism erodes it. The two look similar from the outside, but they produce opposite political behavior. Healthy people build democracies. Narcissistic people dismantle them. The Patriotism Disguise The word “patriotism” is doing a tremendous amount of work in American politics right now, and almost none of it is honest. Patriotism means putting the country ahead of yourself. It means service, sacrifice, and the willingness to subordinate personal desire to collective good. By definition, patriotism requires the ability to care about people other than you. It requires empathy. It requires the recognition that other citizens have the same claim on this country that you do, that their rights matter as much as yours, that their votes count as much as yours, that their children deserve the same safety and opportunity that yours do. Narcissists are incapable of this. Not unwilling. Incapable. Narcissism is the absence of the psychological architecture that patriotism requires. You cannot simultaneously believe you are superior to everyone else and believe in a system designed to treat everyone as equals. You cannot wave a flag that represents all Americans while actively trying to strip rights from most of them. You cannot call yourself a patriot while demanding that the country be organized around your comfort and your preferences at the expense of everyone else’s. What MAGA calls patriotism is narcissistic entitlement wearing a flag pin. They don’t love this country. They love what they can extract from it. They love the feeling of belonging to a group that tells them they’re special. They love the permission to call their cruelty something noble. They love the word “patriot” because it lets them frame their personality disorder as a virtue instead of a diagnosis. Cichocka’s data says what the evidence has been saying across every study in this field for the past decade. The people tear… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  4. 3d ago

    The Narcissism Was Already There

    Everyone wants to know what happened to these people who support MAGA. What radicalized them. What broke their brains. What turned your uncle into a person who posts conspiracy theories at 2 a.m. and screams at Thanksgiving dinner about immigrants. The assumption is always that something happened to them. That they were normal and then they weren’t. That a movement came along, or a cable news channel, or an algorithm, and it changed who they were. In 2021, researcher Joshua Hart at Union College published a study in the Journal of Social Psychology that tested this assumption directly. He didn’t study what people believe. He studied who they are. He and his coauthor, Nathaniel Stekler, gave 302 adults a battery of personality assessments measuring narcissism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political attitudes. Then they mapped the relationships between those variables and support for Donald Trump. The finding was not that Trump made people narcissistic. The finding was that narcissistic people found Trump. What I have been saying for months is correct. Narcissism functioned as what Hart described as an upstream personality variable. People who scored higher in narcissism were more likely to adopt right-wing authoritarian attitudes, which reflect a desire for obedience, conformity and hostility toward anyone who doesn’t belong. They were also more likely to embrace social dominance orientation, the belief that some groups of people are simply better than other groups and deserve to be on top. Both of those ideological positions then predicted support for Trump. Narcissism also predicted anti-immigrant attitudes directly, which independently predicted Trump support. What Hart mapped was a personality flowing downhill into politics. The narcissism didn’t come from the politics. The politics came from the narcissism. This matters because it changes the question we should be asking. The question isn’t “how did MAGA radicalize these people?” The question is “what kind of person was already looking for a movement like MAGA?” The Collective Version Hart’s study examined individual narcissism. But in 2018, researcher Agnieszka Golec de Zavala at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Christopher Federico at the University of Minnesota published a study in Public Opinion Quarterly that examined a related but distinct phenomenon: collective narcissism. Collective narcissism is the belief that your group, whether it’s your nation, your race, or your political movement, is exceptional and that the rest of the world doesn’t give it the recognition it deserves. Collective narcissists don’t just love their country. They resent anyone who doesn’t love their country as much as they do. They don’t feel pride. They feel entitlement. And they interpret any criticism, any challenge, any failure to worship the group as an act of aggression. Federico and Golec de Zavala found that collective narcissism was a powerful predictor of voting for Trump in 2016, even after controlling for all the usual suspects: * racial resentment * hostile sexism * personal economic dissatisfaction * authoritarianism * and standard party identification People who scored highest on collective narcissism were 29% more likely to have voted for Trump than those who scored lowest. “Make America Great Again” is not a policy position. It is collective narcissism distilled into a slogan. It says the group is special, the group has been disrespected, and the group’s greatness must be restored by punishing the people who refused to acknowledge it. Golec de Zavala’s follow-up research, published in 2021 in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy with coauthor Oliver Keenan, went further. In three studies, including one conducted just before the 2020 election and another conducted right after the January 6 Capitol attack. They found that collective narcissism predicted not only support for Trump’s reelection, but support for overriding democratic procedures to keep him in power. It predicted support for the Capitol attack itself. Collective narcissists didn’t just want their leader to win. They wanted their leader to win by any means necessary, including violence, because the group’s supremacy mattered more than the system. That isn’t radicalization. That is a personality trait expressing itself through politics. The Pathology is the Point In 2021, researcher Matthew Yalch published a study in PLOS ONE examining pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Trump in the 2020 election. Yalch used a hierarchical model of narcissism that breaks the trait into specific dimensions rather than treating it as a single score. Two dimensions predicted Trump support above all others: antagonism and indifference. Antagonism is the tendency to exploit others, to demand admiration, and to react with rage when challenged. Indifference is the inability to care about the experiences of other people. Not a choice to not care. An inability to care. A gap in the architecture of the personality where empathy is supposed to live. “Trump’s presidency”, he wrote, “was run according to the very dimensions of narcissism that predicted support for him. Antagonism and indifference were guiding principles, both implicitly and explicitly.” Trump didn’t change his supporters’ personalities. He ran a political campaign that functioned as a personality test. And the people who passed it, were the ones who already shared his pathology. A study published in 2025 in the Journal of Research in Personality extended this even further using two large samples totaling more than 9,000 participants. Trump supporters consistently scored higher on measures of Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, manipulativeness, and emotional callousness. They scored lower on empathy. Specifically, they scored lower on affective empathy. This type of empathy is the emotional component of caring about other people’s pain. The scored higher on what the researchers called dissonant empathy, which is the experience of enjoyment when watching other people suffer. Read that again. Not the indifference to suffering, The enjoyment of suffering. What This Actually Means Every conversation about MAGA that begins with “how do we reach these people” is starting from the wrong assumption. It assumes the problem is informational. That they believe the wrong things because they were told the wrong things, and if you tell them the right things, the beliefs will change. The research says the problem isn’t informational. It’s characterological. The cruelty, the tribalism, the contempt for vulnerability, the rage when confronted with evidence they’re wrong, the punishment of anyone who leaves the group, the demand for absolute loyalty paired with the total absence of reciprocity. Those aren’t positions they adopted because Fox News told them to. Those are descriptions of narcissistic personality traits that existed before the first red hat was ever made. Trump didn’t radicalize regular people. Trump gave narcissistic people a social identity. He gave their disorder a flag, a slogan, and a permission structure. The movement didn’t change who they are. The movement is who they are. Golec de Zavala’s research on collective narcissism provides one of the clearest windows into why the movement behaves the way it does. Collective narcissists are hypervigilant to any perceived threat to the group’s status. They interpret even ambiguous situations as attacks. They respond to criticism with retaliatory aggression. They demand recognition while offering none. They define loyalty as submission and disagreement as betrayal. That is not a political party. That is a clinical profile walking around in a red hat. And it explains why nothing works. You can’t fact-check a personality disorder. You can’t debate narcissism out of someone with a newspaper article. The beliefs aren’t the disease. The beliefs are the symptoms. The disease is a personality structure built on entitlement, dominance,… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  5. 4d ago

    Why MAGA Loves Stephen Miller

    Every group has one. The guy who never played a sport, never won a fight, never had the room go quiet because he walked into it. The guy who was picked last for everything and spent his whole life building a personality out of the resentment that produced. The guy who figured out that if he couldn’t make people respect him, he could at least make them afraid of him, and decided that was close enough. Stephen Miller is that guy. He has always been that guy. And the fact that millions of Americans looked at him and saw strength tells you everything about what those millions of Americans think strength actually looks like. The Costume In 2013, sociologist Robb Willer at the University of California, Berkeley published a study in the American Journal of Sociology that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the MAGA movement’s leadership class. Willer tested what happens when men receive feedback suggesting their masculinity is below average. He called the finding the masculine overcompensation thesis. The men whose masculinity was threatened didn’t shrug it off. They overcorrected. They became more aggressive. More hostile. More supportive of war and violence. More likely to express dominance-oriented political views. They didn’t become tougher. They performed toughness, loudly and conspicuously, the way a person who doesn’t know how to fight talks about fighting. Willer found that the men with the highest testosterone levels showed the strongest overcompensation reaction. This is counterintuitive until you understand what it means. The men most invested in being seen as masculine were the most destabilized by any challenge to that image, and the most extreme in their attempts to repair it. The aggression wasn’t overflow from a surplus of toughness. It was panic from a deficit. Stephen Miller’s entire public career is this finding in a suit. He didn’t grow up in a rough neighborhood. He didn’t serve in the military. He didn’t work construction or play football or do any of the things that would have given him a physical frame of reference for the aggression he performs. He grew up writing debate briefs in Santa Monica and picking fights in his college newspaper. He was a skinny kid who figured out that if he said mean things loudly enough and quickly enough, people would mistake the volume for authority. The cruelty he later deployed at the federal level, the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, the systematic targeting of asylum seekers, none of it was designed to solve a problem. It was designed to project the image of a man who doesn’t flinch. Every press conference, every cable news appearance, every leaked memo was a performance calibrated to say: I am not the small person you think I am. Look at what I can do to people who can’t fight back. That is not strength. That is a man who has been cosplaying strength his entire life and finally got access to real power, which he immediately used to hurt the most vulnerable people he could find, because vulnerable people can’t hit back, and hitting someone who can’t hit back is the only version of dominance available to a person who would lose every fair fight he ever walked into. Willer’s research showed that masculine overcompensation isn’t rare. It’s common. It shows up in bars, in offices, in online arguments, and in political movements. But it shows up most visibly in men who have the least natural claim to the thing they’re performing. The loudest tough guy in the room is almost always the one who knows, somewhere underneath the performance, that he is not tough at all. And the performance has to be loud precisely because the reality underneath it is so quiet. Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Two Ladders In 2013, researchers Joey Cheng and Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia published a study demonstrating that there are two completely distinct pathways to the top of any social hierarchy. They called them dominance and prestige. Prestige is earned. A person gains prestige by being genuinely skilled, knowledgeable, or accomplished. People follow a prestigious leader because they want to. They admire what the leader can do. They want to learn from them. The relationship is voluntary and built on respect. Dominance is taken. A person gains dominance through intimidation, aggression, and the implicit or explicit threat of punishment. People follow a dominant leader because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t. The relationship is coercive and built on fear. Cheng and Tracy found that both strategies work. Both produce social rank. Both attract followers. But the followers are different, and the leaders are different. Prestigious leaders are liked. Dominant leaders are not. Prestigious leaders attract people who want to grow. Dominant leaders attract people who want to be safe. And when researchers tracked behavioral patterns, dominant individuals signaled their status through spatially expansive, aggressive postures and intimidating verbal styles, while prestigious individuals signaled through socially attractive behavior and generosity. Miller never climbed the prestige ladder. He never had anything to climb it with. He didn’t build a company. He didn’t win elections. He didn’t produce scholarship or art or policy innovation that anyone admired. He had no skill that inspired voluntary followership. What he had was a willingness to be cruel in public, to say things that made people uncomfortable, and to target groups that couldn’t effectively defend themselves. That is the dominance ladder. And he climbed it the only way a person with no prestige can: by making people afraid. The MAGA movement selected for dominance over prestige at every level. Trump, Miller, Bannon, the entire leadership class was composed of men who gained status through intimidation rather than accomplishment. And the base didn’t just tolerate this. They preferred it. Because a prestigious leader, a leader who earned respect through genuine expertise, would have made them feel inadequate. A dominant leader, a leader who gained power through aggression alone, told them that aggression is all you need. That you don’t have to be smart or capable or accomplished. You just have to be willing to hurt people. And for a base full of men who never accomplished much of anything, that message was irresistible. The Dog They Wanted In 1981, psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba published the first of what would become over forty years of research on a personality type he called right-wing authoritarianism. Altemeyer identified three traits that define the authoritarian follower: submission to perceived legitimate authority, aggression directed at the authority’s designated targets, and rigid adherence to the group’s conventions. The most important finding in Altemeyer’s decades of research was that authoritarian followers don’t just accept aggressive leaders. They actively seek them out. They want an attack dog. They want someone who will go after the people the group has been told to fear, and they will forgive that person virtually anything, any hypocrisy, any incompetence, any personal failing, as long as the attacks continue. Miller was built for this role. He wasn’t a policymaker in any meaningful sense. He was a weapon. His function within the administration was to identify vulnerable populations, design policies that would inflict maximum suffering on those populations, and present that suffering to the base as evidence that the leader was doing something. The Muslim ban didn’t make the country safer. The family separations didn’t reduce unauthorized immigration. The policies failed at their stated objectives. But they succeeded at their actual objective, which was to produce visible suffering aimed at groups the base had been told to hate. Altemeyer’s research explains why Miller’s ob… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  6. 5d ago

    MAGA is a Family of Abusive People

    You push someone. They push back. And then you point at them and say: look how aggressive they are. That sequence is the oldest manipulation in human relationships. It is the move every abuser knows by instinct. Provoke a reaction, then use the reaction to erase everything you did to cause it. The conversation that should have been about your behavior is now about their response. And the longer the argument goes on, the further it drifts from what actually happened. In 1997, psychologist Jennifer Freyd at the University of Oregon gave this pattern a name. She called it DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. And once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it, because it is running in real time across every level of American political life. The Three Steps Freyd introduced DARVO in a paper on betrayal trauma theory published in Feminism & Psychology. She was studying how perpetrators of abuse respond when they are confronted with evidence of their own behavior. The pattern she identified was consistent and specific. It has three steps, and they almost always occur in the same order. First, the perpetrator denies the behavior. It didn’t happen. You’re making it up. That’s not what I said. You’re twisting my words. The denial serves two purposes. It puts the accuser on the defensive immediately, forcing them to prove that what happened actually happened rather than addressing the harm itself. And it establishes the perpetrator’s version of events as the baseline, so that any deviation from that baseline makes the accuser look unreliable. Second, the perpetrator attacks the person who confronted them. The attack isn’t about the substance of the accusation. It is about the credibility and character of the accuser. You’re crazy. You’re a liar. You’re just doing this for attention. You have an agenda. The goal of the attack is to make the audience, whether it’s a family, a courtroom, or a country, question whether the accuser is trustworthy enough to be believed. If the accuser’s credibility can be destroyed, the accusation doesn’t need to be refuted. It simply stops being taken seriously. Third, the perpetrator reverses the roles of victim and offender. The person who caused the harm presents themselves as the person being harmed. I’m the one who’s being attacked. I’m the one being treated unfairly. I’m the victim here. This reversal is the most psychologically destructive step because it doesn’t just deflect responsibility. It rewrites the entire narrative. The accuser becomes the aggressor. The perpetrator becomes the sympathetic figure. And anyone observing the exchange has to choose between two competing stories of victimhood, which is exactly the confusion the perpetrator wants. Why It Works The most disturbing finding in the research on DARVO isn’t that perpetrators use it. It’s that it works. In 2020, researchers Sarah Harsey and Jennifer Freyd published experimental studies in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma measuring how DARVO affects third-party observers. Participants were shown accounts of abuse followed by either a DARVO response from the perpetrator or a control response. The results were consistent. Participants who were exposed to the DARVO response rated the victim as less credible and the perpetrator as less responsible than participants who saw the control response. DARVO doesn’t just confuse observers. It actively shifts their sympathies toward the perpetrator. The denial, the attack, and the reversal combine to create a version of events in which the perpetrator looks like a reasonable person being unfairly accused, and the victim looks unstable, vindictive, or dishonest. In a 2017 study, Harsey, Zurbriggen, and Freyd found that DARVO has a direct effect on victims as well. People who were DARVOed were more likely to blame themselves for the abuse. The perpetrator’s denial and attack eroded the victim’s confidence in their own perception of what happened. If the person who hurt you insists it didn’t happen, and attacks you for saying it did, and convinces everyone around you that they are the one being mistreated, at some point your own certainty starts to crack. Not because you’re wrong, but because being told you’re wrong by someone who hurt you, while everyone watches and does nothing, is one of the most destabilizing experiences a person can endure. This is why victims of domestic abuse often describe the psychological manipulation as worse than the physical violence. The violence is terrible. But the DARVO that follows it is what makes the victim question their own sanity. The Political DARVO Every component of Freyd’s framework maps directly onto MAGA’s operating playbook. Deny: It didn’t happen. There were no kids in cages. The election wasn’t stolen. January 6th was a peaceful protest. We didn’t fire those scientists. We didn’t threaten those judges. Whatever you saw, you didn’t see it. Whatever was reported, the media is lying. Attack: The person who raised the issue is the problem. The journalist is the enemy of the people. The whistleblower is a traitor. The protester is a thug. The prosecutor is partisan. The judge is corrupt. The witness is a fraud. The attack is never about the substance. It is always about discrediting the person who spoke up, so the substance never needs to be addressed. Reverse Victim and Offender: We’re the ones being persecuted. Christians are the real victims. White people are the real victims. Conservatives are being silenced. The president is being treated unfairly. The witch hunt is the real crime. The people who tried to overthrow an election are political prisoners. The people who gutted the federal workforce are the ones being attacked by the deep state. The reversal is the most important step because it turns accountability into victimhood. The moment the perpetrator successfully casts themselves as the victim, accountability becomes persecution. Oversight becomes a witch hunt. Consequences become oppression. And the people who tried to hold the perpetrator accountable become the aggressors in a story that is now running backward. Reactive Abuse There is a concept in domestic violence literature that connects directly to Freyd’s DARVO framework. It is called reactive abuse, and it describes what happens when a victim, after sustained provocation, finally reacts, and the abuser uses that reaction as evidence that the victim is the real abuser. The pattern works like this. The abuser provokes, insults, threatens, or humiliates their partner for weeks, months, or years. The partner absorbs it, tries to stay calm, tries to de-escalate, tries to keep the peace. Then one day, after one too many provocations, the partner reacts. They raise their voice. They throw something. They say something ugly. And the abuser says: look at you. You’re the violent one. You’re the one with the problem. I’ve been telling everyone you’re unstable and now we all just saw it. The reaction becomes the only event in the story. Everything that preceded it, every provocation, every insult, every threat, disappears. The abuser has what they wanted: a moment they can point to that makes the victim look like the aggressor. This is exactly what MAGA does at every scale. They provoke until the other side reacts, and then they use the reaction as proof of everything they’ve been claiming. Liberals are the violent ones. The left is intolerant. The left can’t handle free speech. The entire conversation shifts from what was done to how people responded to what was done, and the people who did it walk away clean. Institutional DARVO Freyd expanded her framework beyond individual relationships to describe what she calls institutional DARVO: the pattern where an institution, not just a person, uses deny-attack-reverse to protect itself from accountability. In studies of educational institutions, Freyd and her colleagues found that 40% of people reporting sexual assault also experienced institutional betrayal, a bad response from the in… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  7. 6d ago

    MAGA Hates Freedom

    In 1951, an American journalist named Milton Mayer moved to a small town in Germany. The war had been over for six years. The trials were finished. The photographs of the camps had been published around the world. And Mayer wanted to understand something that no trial or photograph could explain: how ordinary people went along with it. He didn’t seek out generals or party officials. He found ten men. A baker. A tailor. A high school teacher. A bank clerk. A policeman. Ordinary people with ordinary lives who had all been members of the Nazi Party. He became their friend. He ate dinner at their homes. He sat in their living rooms for months. And he asked them, over and over, the same question: how did you not see it? The book Mayer wrote, They Thought They Were Free, was published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press. It did not sell well at the time. It was nominated for the National Book Award and then mostly forgotten. Seventy years later, it is one of the most quoted books in American political commentary, because what Mayer found in those living rooms describes what is happening in this country with a precision that is difficult to read without feeling physically ill. The Target The first thing Mayer noticed was that every one of his ten Germans had been given an enemy. Before the Nazis, these men were broke, humiliated, and angry without a clear direction for their anger. The Party solved that problem by pointing at a group and saying: they are the reason your life is bad. Mayer found that not one of the ten men he interviewed had ever known a Jewish person. They hated an abstraction. They hated a category. And years after the war, after everything, they still couldn’t let go of the hatred, because letting go of it would have meant admitting that the target was never the problem. In 1939, psychologist John Dollard and his colleagues at Yale University published Frustration and Aggression, a book that formalized what Mayer was observing in those living rooms. Dollard’s research showed that when people are frustrated but can’t fight back against the actual source of their frustration, they redirect the aggression toward a safer target. Researchers call it displaced aggression. The mechanism is simple and ancient. The worker who gets humiliated by his boss doesn’t confront his boss. He goes home and takes it out on his family. The country whose economy is collapsing doesn’t blame its own leadership. It blames the outsiders. The aggression doesn’t disappear when it can’t reach its real target. It finds a new one. And the new target is always weaker, always more vulnerable, and always selected by someone who benefits from the redirection. What Dollard demonstrated in 1939 and Mayer documented in 1955 is the foundational mechanism of every authoritarian movement in history. You don’t need to solve people’s problems. You just need to give them someone to blame. The blame absorbs the anger. The anger sustains the movement. And the actual source of the problem, the leadership that created the conditions in the first place, stays invisible because everyone is too busy hating the target to look up. There is a secondary function to displaced aggression that goes beyond venting. The target gives the group its identity. Without an enemy, the group has no cohesion. A movement united only by what it supports will fracture over policy disagreements. A movement united by who it hates will hold together as long as the hatred is maintained. This is why authoritarian movements never run out of enemies. When one target loses its power to generate anger, a new one is introduced. The content of the hatred changes. The structure never does. In MAGA America, the targets rotate on a schedule. Immigrants. Trans people. Black college students. “Woke” corporations. The deep state. China. The specific target changes, but the function remains constant: keep the base angry at someone other than the people who are actually failing them. The Increments None of Mayer’s ten men could identify a single day when Germany stopped being free. There was no announcement. No dramatic moment of transformation. It happened in increments so small that each one, on its own, seemed unremarkable. A book was banned. Nobody read it anyway. A professor was fired. He was probably difficult. A neighbor was reported and taken away. Must have done something wrong. Each event was small enough to explain away, and the explanation was always more comfortable than the alternative, which was that the country was being dismantled piece by piece while everyone watched. In 1996, sociologist Diane Vaughan at Boston College published The Challenger Launch Decision, a study of the 1986 space shuttle disaster. Vaughan wasn’t studying politics. She was studying how organizations slowly accept things that would have been unthinkable when they started. She called the pattern the normalization of deviance. Vaughan found that NASA engineers had observed O-ring erosion on shuttle flights for years before the Challenger exploded. Each time erosion occurred and nothing catastrophic happened, the danger was reclassified. What was initially an anomaly became a concern, then a known issue, then an acceptable risk, then a normal operating condition. The danger didn’t decrease. The threshold for what counted as danger increased. Each exception became the new baseline, and the new baseline became the foundation for the next exception. Vaughan’s concept translates directly to what Mayer described. The normalization of deviance in a political system works identically to how it works in an engineering organization. The first time a president calls the press the enemy of the people, it’s shocking. The second time, it’s familiar. The third time, people barely register it. The tenth time, it’s just what the president says. The statement didn’t become less dangerous. The audience became desensitized. And each desensitization made the next escalation possible. The genius of incremental authoritarianism is that it makes resistance feel disproportionate at every stage. If you object to a single book being removed from a library, you’re overreacting. If you object to a single professor being fired for political reasons, you’re being dramatic. Each step is small enough that resisting it looks like hysteria. But the steps are all moving in one direction. And by the time the cumulative effect is visible, the window for effective resistance has closed. Mayer’s college professor captured this perfectly: one day, too late, your principles catch up with you. The Overload One of Mayer’s subjects described the regime as giving people “dreadful things to think about” while keeping them so busy with constant changes and manufactured crises that they never had time to process any of it. Underneath the chaos, a quiet relief: at least someone else is in charge. In 2011, psychologist Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University published Thinking, Fast and Slow, decades of research on how the brain handles information. Kahneman demonstrated that the brain operates in two modes. System 1 is fast, automatic, and runs on pattern recognition and instinct. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and handles complex reasoning. Both systems are always active, but they compete for resources. When the brain is overwhelmed with information, stress, and constant decision-making, System 2 shuts down. The brain defaults to System 1: the fastest available answer, the simplest story, the loudest voice. This is what authoritarian information environments are designed to produce. A new executive order every day. A new scandal every week. A new enemy every month. The volume is not a byproduct of chaotic leadership. It is the strategy. When the information flow exceeds the brain’s capacity to process it analytically, people stop analyzing. They react. And reactive people are easier to lead than thoughtful ones, because reactive people follow whoever provides the clearest, simplest narrative, regardl… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Nov 7

    Why MAGA Worships Losers

    After a football game, students at the winning school wear their team’s jersey to class on Monday. After a loss, the jerseys stay in the closet. After a win, students say “we won.” After a loss, they say “they lost.” Nobody teaches this behavior. Nobody announces a dress code based on the score. It just happens automatically. Across every campus, in every sport, in every season. People attach themselves to winners and detach from losers. And they do it without realizing they’re doing it. In 1976, psychologist Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that gave this behavior a name. He called it basking in reflected glory. BIRGing. Cialdini and his colleagues monitored students at seven major universities with prominent football programs, including Arizona State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, and USC. They counted how many students wore school-identifying apparel on the Monday after a Saturday game. The result was consistent across every campus. Students were significantly more likely to wear their school’s gear after a win than after a loss. In a second experiment, Cialdini called students on the phone after a game and asked them to describe the result. After victories, students overwhelmingly said “we won.” After losses, they said “they lost.” The pronoun shift was automatic. Students claimed ownership of success and disowned failure without being aware they were doing it. But the third experiment revealed something deeper. Before asking students about the game, Cialdini gave some of them a fake test and told them they had failed. Those students BIRGed harder. They were even more likely to claim the team’s success after their own self-esteem had been damaged. The association with a winner wasn’t just about pride. It was about repair. The worse a person felt about themselves, the more urgently they needed to attach themselves to someone else’s success. Basking and Blasting In 1980, Cialdini and his colleague Kenneth Richardson at Arizona State published a follow-up study that went further. They gave university students a visible public failure on a creativity test, then measured how those students described their own university and a rival school. After experiencing failure, students did two things. They inflated the quality of their own university. And they attacked the quality of the rival. Cialdini called the first behavior basking. He called the second blasting. Both behaviors served the same function. When a person’s self-image is damaged, they don’t just reach for something positive to stand next to. They also reach for something negative to stand above. The combination restores the balance. You feel less like a failure when the people around you appear successful, and the people you’re competing with appear weak. This is not a quirk. It is a strategy. An automatic, unconscious strategy that the brain deploys whenever it detects a threat to the person’s self-concept. And the bigger the threat, the harder the brain works to find something to bask in and something to blast. Cutting Off Reflected Failure The mirror image of BIRGing is what researchers later called CORFing: Cutting Off Reflected Failure. When a team loses, fans distance themselves. They stop wearing the jersey. They stop saying “we.” They stop posting. They don’t want the stain of someone else’s failure touching their identity. CORFing is a protective mechanism. BIRGing is an enhancement mechanism. Together, they form a system for managing self-esteem through external associations. You pull close to winners and push away from losers, and the entire process is designed to make you feel better about yourself without actually doing anything. This is the system running inside every person who attaches their identity to a political figure, a brand, a church, or a movement. It is the same system whether you’re wearing a jersey on Monday morning or wearing a red hat at a rally. The mechanics are identical. The only thing that changes is what you’re basking in. The MAGA Inversion Cialdini’s research assumed that people would naturally seek out winners to bask in. A successful football team. A famous alumnus. A prestigious institution. The entire framework depends on the glory being real. You bask in reflected glory because the source actually has glory to reflect. But what happens when the glory won’t have you? Real experts don’t associate with the MAGA movement. Accomplished scientists, economists, constitutional scholars, foreign policy professionals, they are not lining up to validate conspiracy theories about stolen elections and microchipped vaccines. The most respected voices in virtually every field have either publicly opposed the movement or quietly distanced themselves from it. This creates a problem for people who need to bask. If the sources of real accomplishment won’t let you stand next to them, you can’t use BIRGing the way it was designed. You can’t attach yourself to genuine success because genuine success has actively CORFed you. It has cut you off. So the movement does something else. It builds its own heroes out of people who failed at everything else. A college dropout who couldn’t get into West Point becomes a political genius. A man who went bankrupt six times becomes the greatest businessman alive. A tech executive who can’t pass a basic general knowledge quiz becomes the smartest man in the world. A man who was arrested for human trafficking becomes a model of masculinity. These figures are not chosen in spite of their mediocrity. They are chosen because of it. Every fraud who becomes famous sends a message to every other fraud watching: you don’t need to earn anything. You don’t need credentials, expertise, accomplishment, or proof. You just need to be loud enough and angry enough, and the crowd will make you a hero. This is BIRGing in reverse. Instead of attaching yourself to something genuinely impressive and hoping the prestige rubs off, you build a fake prestige structure out of people whose only qualification is that they’re willing to say things that real experts won’t. The glory isn’t reflected from a genuine source. It’s manufactured inside a closed system where nobody checks the receipts. Why Mediocrity Is the Point Cialdini’s 1980 study on basking and blasting showed that self-esteem threat drives both behaviors. The worse you feel about yourself, the more aggressively you inflate the thing you’re connected to and attack the thing you’re not. This explains why MAGA supporters don’t just worship their heroes. They also attack everyone outside the circle with disproportionate intensity. Every expert is a fraud. Every journalist is a liar. Every scientist is corrupt. Every institution is compromised. The blasting serves the same function as the basking: it protects a damaged self-image by making everything outside the group look worse than everything inside it. But there is something specific about the selection of mediocre heroes that Cialdini’s framework doesn’t quite capture. It is not just that MAGA supporters need someone to bask in. It is that they need someone to bask in who doesn’t make them feel bad about themselves by comparison. A genuinely brilliant, accomplished person reflects glory, but they also reflect distance. If your hero has an Ivy League degree and you dropped out of high school, standing next to that person doesn’t just boost your self-image. It also reminds you of the gap. The reflected glory comes with a reflected inadequacy. A mediocre hero solves this problem. Charlie Kirk didn’t finish school. Trump couldn’t build a casino that made money. Musk gets humiliated in public conversations by people who actually understand the subjects he pretends to be an expert in. These are not intimidating figures. They are reassuring ones. They tell the audience that you don’t need to know anything, accomplish anything, or earn anything to be treated like a genius. The mediocrity is the product. The audience … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe

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About

Sharing insights on psychology, History, human behavior, politics, new technology and business | Author, Scientist, Podcast Host | I make videos & I try to tell good stories. lucasbean.substack.com

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  • Creator
    Lucas Bean
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    238
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Lucas Bean
  • Show Website
    The Lucas Bean Show

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