The Lucas Bean Show

Lucas Bean
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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. 14h ago

    People Trying to Quietly Quit MAGA

    There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting. This has happened before. It looked exactly the same. In the months after the fall of Nazi Germany, something remarkable happened. The Nazis disappeared. Not into hiding. Into denial. Across the occupied zones, Allied forces encountered a population in which, suddenly, nobody had ever been a Nazi. Nobody had supported the regime. Nobody had cheered at the rallies. Nobody had turned in their neighbors. The denazification tribunals established by the Allied powers categorized former participants into five groups, from major offenders to exonerated persons. The category that swallowed the vast majority of the German population was Mitläufer: fellow travelers. Passive followers. People who went along with it but didn’t really mean it. People who were just following orders, just keeping their heads down, just trying to survive. In 1946, the German writer Luise Rinser, who had herself been arrested under the Nazi regime, wrote a letter responding to Hermann Hesse’s criticisms of postwar Germany. Her assessment was devastating. “Nobody did it,” she wrote. “Everyone wants to be de-Nazified.” She found it despicable that people were claiming to have been mere passive followers, as if that were something to be proud of rather than ashamed of. “Better an evil, real Nazi, driven by the Devil, than a mere passive follower,” she wrote. “What lack of pride and insight.” Rinser saw something that most political analysts then and now tend to miss. The denial wasn’t a psychological phenomenon. It was a moral one. These people knew exactly what they had done. They had attended the rallies. They had displayed the flags. They had reported their neighbors. They had benefited from the regime. And when the regime fell, they didn’t experience sudden clarity about what they had supported. They experienced sudden fear about what supporting it was going to cost them. The psychology didn’t change. The incentives did. The totalitarian ego. Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington published a landmark paper in 1980 describing what he called the totalitarian ego. Greenwald argued that the self operates like a totalitarian regime’s propaganda ministry: it ruthlessly destroys information that threatens its positive self-image and rewrites personal history from the standpoint of the victor. But Greenwald made an important distinction. A totalitarian dictator rewrites history to deceive future generations. The totalitarian ego rewrites history to deceive itself. The goal isn’t to fool other people. The goal is to maintain a version of yourself that you can live with. And the mechanism is automatic, continuous, and largely invisible to the person doing it. This is the layer the video companion deliberately cuts through. The script says they’re just lying. And that’s true. But the Substack can hold a more uncomfortable truth at the same time: they’re lying to us and they’re lying to themselves, and over time, the lie they tell themselves becomes harder to distinguish from what they actually remember. Conway and Ross, in a 1984 study on self-serving memory distortion, showed that people routinely revise their memories of their own past beliefs to make those beliefs consistent with their current views. The researchers called it “getting what you want by revising what you had.” If you now believe Trump was a mistake, your memory helpfully adjusts to suggest you always had doubts. The yard sign you put up with enthusiasm in 2016 gets mentally reclassified as something you did reluctantly, under pressure, because your spouse wanted it, because you were really voting against Hillary. None of that is true. But the totalitarian ego doesn’t care about truth. It cares about maintaining a livable self-image. And a person who cheered for cruelty for ten years needs a very aggressive propaganda ministry to keep that self-image intact. But this is the part that should terrify them. Every previous generation of people who tried to deny what they supported had one enormous advantage: the evidence was perishable. In postwar Germany, the rally photos could be buried. The party membership cards could be burned. The letters could be destroyed. The neighbors who saw you turn someone in could be pressured into silence. The physical evidence of complicity was finite, and destroying it was possible. The MAGA generation has no such advantage. Every Facebook post, every tweet, every Instagram story, every YouTube comment, every TikTok reaction, every text message sent to every group chat is stored, screenshotted, cached, and archived in ways that no amount of deleting will fully erase. The internet doesn’t forget. And the people who watched them do it don’t forget either. When someone deletes their pro-Trump Facebook posts in 2026, they are not erasing evidence. They are creating it. The deletion itself is the confession. You don’t scrub your social media history unless you know there’s something on it you’re ashamed of. And the people who screenshotted your posts before you deleted them know exactly what was there. This is the historical variable that has never existed before. In every previous collapse of an authoritarian movement, the supporters could plausibly deny what they had done because the evidence was gone. The Mitläufer defense worked, at least partially, because proving individual complicity required witnesses, documents, and records that were often destroyed. The MAGA Mitläufer don’t have that escape hatch. The record is permanent, distributed, and in the hands of millions of people who have no incentive to let them pretend. What they’re actually doing when they say “I never supported him.” There are three distinct behaviors hiding inside that sentence, and it’s worth separating them because each one reveals something different about the person saying it. The first is strategic reputation management. Some people know exactly what they did and are making a calculated decision to deny it because they believe the social consequences of honesty are worse than the social consequences of lying. This is the most straightforward version. They’re not confused. They’re doing math. And the math says that lying is cheaper than accountability. For now. The second is what researchers on autobiographical memory call hindsight bias operating on personal history. These people are genuinely beginning to misremember their own enthusiasm. The totalitarian ego is doing its work. The rallies they attended with excitement are being mentally recategorized as events they went to out of curiosity. The posts they wrote with conviction are being remembered as things they shared casually without thinking about. The votes they cast with satisfaction are being reframed as reluctant, lesser-evil decisions. This isn’t a deliberate lie. It’s a self-serving memory distortion that happens automatically, and it accelerates when the person’s current social environment has shifted against Trump. The third is the most insidious. Some people are engaging in what might be called preemptive historical revisionism. They’re not just denying what they did in the past. They’re actively constructing a new narrative in which they were always skeptical, always had doubts, always saw through the con. They’re positioning themselves for the post-Trump world by building a fictional history of private resistance that never existed. They’re auditioning for the role of the person who knew all along. All three of these behaviors produce the same sentence: “I never really supported him.” But they come from different places, and they deserve different responses. The first deserves confrontation. The second deserves evidence. And the third deserves contempt. Why accountability matters more than understanding. There is a temptation in writing about this to be generous. To find the cognitive bias that explains it. To locate the psychological mechanism that makes it understandable. To extend compassion toward people who are, after all, just trying to protect their self-image. The companion video resists that temptation, and the Substack should too. Because generosity here serves the wrong function. It gives the liar a psychological alibi. It reframes deliberate dishonesty as unconscious processing. It turns a moral failure into a cognitive one. And it lets people off the hook for something they should be on the hook for, which is that they spent a decade supporting cruelty and are now trying to pretend it never happened. The German writer Rinser understood this in 1946. The problem with the Mitläufer wasn’t that they had been swept up in something they didn’t understand. The problem was that they understood it perfectly, participated in it willingly,

  2. 1d ago

    Have These People Always Been Cruel? MAGA Antagonistic Narcissism

    Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes. Narcissism predicted the worst part of Trump supporters Yalch didn’t just measure whether Trump supporters were narcissistic. He wanted to know which kind of narcissism predicted voting for Trump. Because narcissism isn’t one thing. It’s a hierarchy of related traits, and researchers have long distinguished between its two major expressions. Grandiose narcissism is the loud version. The inflated self-image, the need for admiration, the belief that you’re special and everyone should recognize it. Vulnerable narcissism is quieter and more defensive. The fragile ego, the hypersensitivity to criticism, the constant feeling that you’re being undervalued. Both types share a common core: antagonism, entitlement, manipulation, and a lack of empathy. Using a statistical technique called principal components analysis, Yalch mapped the hierarchical structure of pathological narcissism and tested which level of that hierarchy best predicted the intention to vote for Trump in 2020. The answer wasn’t general narcissism. It wasn’t even the grandiose or vulnerable distinction. It was a specific cluster that sat deeper in the hierarchy. The antagonistic and indifferent facets of narcissism, what researchers describe as self-centered hostility toward others combined with a lack of concern for the damage caused, predicted Trump voting over and above demographic variables like age, race, and education. In other words, the thing that set Trump supporters apart wasn’t just that they had big egos. It was that they were hostile, contemptuous, and indifferent to other people’s suffering. The cruelty wasn’t incidental. It was structural. Where antagonistic narcissism comes from. The developmental literature on narcissism makes the picture worse, not better. Research on the childhood origins of narcissistic traits has consistently pointed to a few recurring environments. Children raised in homes where emotional vulnerability was punished tend to develop defensive personality structures that protect them from the shame of being seen as weak. Children raised by permissive parents who never set boundaries tend to develop inflated self-concepts that collapse under real-world accountability. And children raised in environments of conditional approval, where love was earned through performance rather than given freely, tend to build what clinicians call a “false self,” a constructed identity that requires constant external validation to survive. The grandiose version of this false self seeks admiration. The antagonistic version seeks dominance. And when dominance is unavailable, it settles for contempt. Looking down on immigrants, gay people, trans people, anyone who can be framed as lower on the hierarchy so that the narcissist doesn’t have to sit at the bottom. This isn’t born cruelty. It’s manufactured cruelty. Built in childhood, reinforced through adolescence, and calcified into a personality structure that can’t process accountability without experiencing it as an existential threat. For people with this profile, being told they’re wrong doesn’t register as feedback. It registers as annihilation. The five mechanisms working as a system. Yalch’s study answers the first question: who are these people? But the video companion to this piece lays out five interconnected mechanisms that explain how Donald Trump turned their personality traits into political loyalty. The first is recognition. People with antagonistic narcissistic traits see themselves in Trump. His behavior mirrors theirs. His refusal to apologize, his hostility toward critics, his contempt for vulnerability all feel familiar. They’re not attracted to a politician. They’re attracted to a reflection. The second is validation through motivated reasoning. Ziva Kunda’s landmark 1990 research at Princeton demonstrated that when people are motivated to reach a particular conclusion, their brains selectively gather supporting evidence and ignore contradictions, all without conscious awareness. For someone who has spent years being told their cruelty is wrong, watching a man with identical traits become president isn’t processed as politics. It’s processed as proof. The third is behavioral disinhibition. Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, developed at Stanford in the 1970s, showed that people learn what behaviors are acceptable by observing powerful models and the consequences they face. When a powerful figure performs prohibited behaviors and faces no consequences, observers’ internal restraint weakens. The behavior that was suppressed becomes expressed. And this effect is strongest in people who already have the impulse. Trump doesn’t create cruelty. He gives it permission to come out of hiding. The fourth is sadistic gratification. Erin Buckels’ 2013 research at the University of British Columbia on everyday sadism demonstrated that ordinary, non-criminal individuals can experience genuine pleasure from observing others’ suffering, and will even perform tedious, unrewarded work just for the opportunity to harm someone who hasn’t provoked them. Trump rallies function as organized public performances of humiliation. The target changes. The pleasure doesn’t. The fifth is vicarious dominance. Joey Cheng and Jessica Tracy’s dominance-prestige model, also developed at the University of British Columbia, showed that there are two distinct pathways to leadership: prestige, earned through competence and respect, and dominance, imposed through intimidation and force. People are drawn to dominant leaders even when prestigious alternatives are available, and this tendency is strongest in people who feel powerless in their own lives. Trump supporters don’t just want a leader who shares their values. They want a bully who will punish the people they resent on a national stage. These five mechanisms don’t operate independently. They form a self-reinforcing system. Recognition draws them in. Validation keeps them invested. Disinhibition gives them permission to act. Sadistic pleasure makes the experience rewarding. And vicarious dominance makes it addictive. Each mechanism feeds the others, and the whole system intensifies every time Trump crosses another line without consequence. What Yalch himself said about the implications. Yalch was careful to note that his findings do not mean all Trump supporters are narcissists, or that all narcissists voted for Trump. Pathological narcissism is one variable among many that influence political behavior. But what he did say is worth sitting with. In an interview with PsyPost, Yalch observed that Trump ran his 2020 campaign and his presidency more broadly on the exact dimensions of narcissism highlighted in the study. Antagonism and indifference, Yalch noted, appeared to be guiding principles of the Trump era, both implicitly and explicitly. And he added that a platform rooted in animosity toward others can generate significant angry enthusiasm, but may not be convincing to the majority of people. The researchers also concluded that when considered alongside the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election, the findings suggest that appealing to the darker aspects of personality may not be the most effective strategy for winning elections. That conclusion aged poorly. The uncomfortable truth about personality and politics. The standard political analysis treats voters as rational actors weighing costs and benefits. Policy preferences in, vote out. And for plenty of voters, that model is probably accurate enough. But personality research, including Yalch’s work and the broader body of literature connecting antagonistic traits to authoritarian political attitudes, keeps pointing at something the rational-actor model can’t explain. Some people don’t choose leaders based on what those leaders will do for them. They choose leaders based on who those leaders are. And when the leader is cruel, hostile, and indifferent to the suffering of others, the people who share those exact traits don’t see a liability. They see themselves, winning for the first time. That’s not a policy preference. That’s a personality match. And no amount of fact-checking, counter-messaging, or coalition-building will reach someone whose political loyalty is rooted not in what they believe, but in who they are. Sources Yalch, M.M. (2021). Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0249892. Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Prentice Hall. Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498. Buckels, E.E., Jones, D.N., & Paulhus, D.L. (2013). Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2201-2209. Cheng, J.T., Tracy, J.L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(1), 103-125. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes

  3. 2d ago

    Why MAGA is Filled With Really Lonely People

    In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could. The factory that produces lonely men. The script that accompanies this piece makes a claim that deserves a deeper examination: conservative culture is to blame for the loneliness epidemic in its own base. The research supports this more directly than most people realize. Ron Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, spent decades studying how traditional masculine socialization affects emotional functioning in men. His research, conducted across multiple studies and institutions, identified a pattern he called normative male alexithymia. Alexithymia is the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions. Levant’s argument was that traditional masculine socialization doesn’t just discourage men from expressing emotions. It actively degrades their ability to recognize what they’re feeling in the first place. In a 2014 study published in Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Levant and his colleagues demonstrated that the mechanism behind normative male alexithymia is suppression, not repression or dissociation. This distinction matters. Repression and dissociation are unconscious. Suppression is conscious. These men are actively, deliberately pushing their emotions down because they have been taught that feeling them is weakness. And the research showed that men who scored highest on masculine norm conformity showed the greatest deficits in processing emotions related to vulnerability and attachment, which are the exact emotions required to build and maintain close relationships. A 2025 study published in Sex Roles extended this model further, testing 740 men across the United States and United Kingdom. The researchers found that three specific masculine norms were most strongly associated with emotional dysfunction: emotional control, self-reliance, and primacy of work. These norms predicted higher alexithymia, which predicted greater difficulty regulating emotions, which predicted higher rates of depression and anxiety. The pathway was sequential and measurable. Traditional masculinity teaches emotional suppression. Emotional suppression produces alexithymia. Alexithymia produces emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation produces misery. And critically, 2024 research highlighted that conforming to traditional masculine norms increases men’s vulnerability to loneliness and social disconnection. The pipeline isn’t theoretical. It’s empirical. Conservative culture teaches men to suppress. Suppression degrades their ability to connect. The inability to connect produces loneliness. And loneliness, as the Amsterdam researchers showed, is one of the strongest predictors of far-right radicalization. Conservative culture doesn’t just fail to prevent loneliness in men. It manufactures it. What loneliness actually does to the brain. To understand why lonely people are vulnerable to movements like MAGA, you have to understand what loneliness does neurologically. The Amsterdam researchers theorized that loneliness has a physiologically dysregulating impact on the nervous system that facilitates greater susceptibility to radical right parties. That’s academic language for something much simpler and much worse. Chronic loneliness puts the nervous system into a state of persistent threat detection. The brain of a chronically lonely person is scanning for danger at all times. It processes neutral social information as potentially hostile. It interprets ambiguity as threat. It experiences the world as fundamentally unsafe. This is not a character flaw. It’s a neurological response to prolonged social isolation. The brain adapts to isolation the same way it adapts to any chronic stressor: by becoming hypervigilant. And a hypervigilant brain is exactly the kind of brain that is receptive to a political message built on threat. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re replacing you. They want to destroy your way of life. The enemies are everywhere. A person with healthy social connections hears that message and filters it through the perspectives of the people around them. A lonely person hears it and has no filter. No one to check the claim against. No one to say “that sounds extreme.” No competing social input at all. Just the message, and a nervous system that was already primed to believe the world is dangerous. MAGA as the loneliness cure that makes everything worse. The RAND study found that former extremists consistently reported social benefits as one of the main reasons they stayed in extremist organizations. Friendship. Camaraderie. A sense of belonging. The feeling that someone finally gave a damn about them. This is what Trump and the MAGA movement provide. Not policy. Not governance. Not even coherent ideology. Belonging. When Trump says “we” and “us” and “our movement,” a lonely person doesn’t hear a political speech. They hear the first invitation they’ve received in years. The rallies aren’t political events. They’re the only social gathering some of these people attend. The online communities aren’t policy forums. They’re the only place some of these people feel recognized. And this is where the trap closes. Because the belonging MAGA offers is conditional. It requires an enemy. You belong because they don’t. You’re us because they’re them. The warmth of the group is inseparable from the hatred of the outgroup. And a lonely person who finally found somewhere they belong isn’t going to question the hatred, because questioning the hatred risks losing the belonging. And they can’t lose the belonging. It’s the only thing they have. So the loneliness that conservative culture created gets temporarily relieved by a movement that conservative culture produced. But the relief is fake. It’s not real connection. It’s shared hostility. It’s not intimacy. It’s tribalism. And the distinction matters, because tribalism doesn’t actually cure loneliness. It masks it. The underlying isolation, the inability to be vulnerable, the alexithymia, the emotional suppression, all of it remains untouched. The man who couldn’t open up to his wife or his friends before MAGA still can’t. He just has a rally to go to now. Why therapy is the real threat to the movement. This is the part that conservative culture will never admit. Therapy is the single greatest threat to the MAGA pipeline. Not fact-checking. Not counter-messaging. Not better candidates. Therapy. Because therapy does exactly what the movement cannot afford its members to do. It teaches emotional awareness. It builds vocabulary for feelings. It makes vulnerability safe instead of shameful. It connects people to themselves and then to others through genuine intimacy rather than shared hatred. Every man who goes to therapy and learns to identify his emotions, process his pain, and build real connections is a man who no longer needs MAGA to feel like he belongs somewhere. Conservative culture knows this. That’s why therapy is stigmatized in conservative communities. That’s why “man up” and “suck it up” and “feelings are for women” aren’t just cultural cliches. They’re load-bearing walls. They hold the entire structure in place. If conservative men started going to therapy in large numbers, started developing emotional literacy, started building genuine intimate friendships, the loneliness pipeline would dry up. And with it, much of the movement’s recruiting power. The MAGA movement doesn’t need its members to be happy. It needs them to be desperate. And desperate people don’t go to therapy. They go to rallies. They go to comment sections. They go to the only place that will take them without asking them to change. And that place will never ask them to change, because their pain is the product. The loneliness is the point. The Amsterdam study measured something that most political analysis refuses to take seriously. MAGA is not a political movement held together by ideology. It is a social phenomenon held together by loneliness. The ideology is the price of admission. The belonging is the product. Strip away the flags, the rallie

  4. 3d ago

    Narcissistic MAGA Boomer Wants Control Back

    A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers. What the estrangement research actually shows. The grandmother at the rally is operating from a narrative that most Americans have been raised to accept without question: family is family, and children owe their parents access. But the research on family estrangement tells a completely different story. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer conducted the first large-scale national survey of family estrangement in the United States. His findings were staggering. Twenty-seven percent of Americans aged 18 and older had cut off contact with a family member. This isn’t a fringe behavior. It’s more than one in four. Psychologist Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement, has spent decades studying why adult children cut ties with their parents. His consistent finding is that adult children rarely cut off contact without years of distress and failed attempts to repair the relationship. The cutoff is almost never impulsive. It’s the final step in a long process of trying everything else first. Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, puts it more directly. Persistent boundary violations force adult children to choose between constant conflict and walking away. When every conversation becomes a negotiation, when every visit comes with conditions, when every boundary is treated as an attack, the adult child eventually runs out of strategies. Walking away isn’t the first resort. It’s the last one. The research also reveals something important about who these adult children are. They are, overwhelmingly, the calm ones. The reflective ones. The ones who went to therapy, did the work, and arrived at the painful conclusion that no version of the relationship was going to work. They are not the dramatic ones throwing tantrums. They are the ones who quietly reduced contact after decades of exhaustion. Which means the grandmother at the rally almost certainly isn’t a victim of a sudden, unexplained cutoff. She’s the end product of years of behavior that her daughter tried to address, tried to work around, and eventually could no longer tolerate. The daughter didn’t abandon her mother. She survived her. Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Why she went to a rally instead of a therapist. This is where Baumeister’s narcissistic reactance meets the broader psychology of MAGA. A narcissist who has been told no needs two things. They need the boundary to be overruled, and they need to be told that the boundary was wrong in the first place. A therapist would give them neither of those things. A therapist would ask what they did to contribute to the estrangement. A therapist would ask them to consider their daughter’s perspective. A therapist would tell them that their grandchildren are not their property and that access to them is a privilege that has to be earned through safe behavior. A political rally does the opposite. A political rally tells her she’s right. That her daughter is the problem. That the world has gone soft. That kids today have no respect. That family values are under attack. That someone in power should step in and restore what was taken from her. The rally doesn’t challenge her narcissism. It validates it. It gives her a room full of people who will clap when she frames her daughter’s healthy boundary as an injustice. And it gives her a politician who will nod along because her pain is useful to him. Not because he cares about her grandkids. Because her grievance is fuel for his movement. This is what MAGA provides for people like this grandmother. Not policy. Not governance. Permission to never look inward. Permission to frame every consequence of their own behavior as someone else’s fault. Permission to feel righteous about the exact patterns that drove their children away. The grandparent rights movement as narcissistic reactance at scale. The push for grandparent rights legislation is not new. Organizations have lobbied for it for decades. And some cases involve genuinely heartbroken grandparents caught in custody disputes or divorce fallout. Those cases are real and painful. But mixed into that legitimate pain is something else entirely. A growing cohort of estranged grandparents who don’t want to repair relationships. They want to bypass them. They don’t want to understand why their children set boundaries. They want the government to override those boundaries by force. This is narcissistic reactance scaled up into policy advocacy. The same psychological mechanism Baumeister identified in individual behavior, the narcissist’s inability to accept a boundary and their drive to restore access through force, expressed as a legislative demand. The narcissist can’t overpower their adult child alone. So they appeal to a higher authority. First it’s the family. Then it’s the church. Then it’s a politician at a rally. The target changes but the mechanism stays the same. Someone make my child obey me. And MAGA is the perfect vehicle for this because MAGA runs on exactly the same fuel. The belief that your pain is someone else’s fault. The belief that accountability is oppression. The belief that the people who set boundaries against your behavior are the real aggressors. The grandmother at the rally and the movement she’s begging for help are psychologically identical. Both are built on the refusal to look inward and the demand that the world rearrange itself around their wound. What she’s actually asking for. Strip away the political framing and what this grandmother is requesting is chilling. She wants the state to compel her adult daughter to give her access to her daughter’s children, against her daughter’s judgment, overriding whatever reasons her daughter has for protecting those children from her. She doesn’t know those reasons, or won’t acknowledge them. She hasn’t asked. And in front of a crowd of strangers and cameras, she isn’t performing grief. She’s performing entitlement. The tears are real, but they aren’t tears of loss. They’re tears of narcissistic injury. The unbearable feeling of being told no by someone who used to have no choice. Because that’s what changed. Her daughter grew up. Her daughter got out. Her daughter probably went to therapy, processed the damage, and made the hardest decision a person can make: that the parent who raised them is not safe to be around their children. That decision cost her daughter more than this grandmother will ever understand. Because the daughter didn’t just lose a mother. She lost the possibility of ever having the mother she needed. And she made that sacrifice to protect her children from the same patterns she endured. The grandmother’s response to all of that pain, all of that courage, all of that growth was to go to a rally and ask a politician to undo it with a law. She doesn’t miss her grandkids. She misses the control. And until she can tell the difference between the two, no law, no rally, and no politician will give her what she actually needs. Which was never access. It was always accountability. Sources Baumeister, R.F., Catanese, K.R., & Wallace, H.M. (2002). Conquest by Force: A Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Rape and Sexual Coercion. Review of General Psychology, 6(1), 92-135. Baumeister, R.F., Bushman, B.J., & Campbell, W.K. (2000). Self-Esteem, Narcissism, and Aggression: Does Violence Result from Low Self-Esteem or from Threatened Egotism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(1), 26-29. Brehm, J.W. (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. Academic Press. Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. Avery/Penguin Random House. Coleman, J. (2021). Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Childr

  5. 4d ago

    How Plato Predicted Trump

    There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian democracy, the most advanced political experiment in the ancient world, turn on itself. He watched it execute Socrates, his teacher, arguably the sharpest mind in the city, for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions. And instead of moving on, Plato spent the rest of his life trying to explain how a society capable of producing genius could also be stupid enough to kill it. The result was The Republic. And while most of the book covers justice, education, and the nature of reality, Book Eight is something different entirely. Book Eight is a manual. It is Plato at his most concrete, walking through the specific sequence of events that takes a functioning democracy and turns it into a dictatorship. Not in abstract terms. In stages. With causes, mechanisms, and outcomes laid out in an order that has repeated across civilizations for two millennia. Why the First Casualties Are Always the Competent The first stage is the one most people recognize but misunderstand. The common assumption is that authoritarian leaders remove their opponents. That is true, but it is incomplete. Plato observed something more specific. The tyrant does not begin by targeting enemies. He begins by targeting the capable. The courageous. The independent-minded. People who have done nothing wrong except be good at what they do. The reason this happens first is not strategic in the way most political commentary assumes. It is psychological, and it is reflexive. In 2001, Carolyn Morf and Frederick Rhodewalt at the University of Utah published a model of narcissistic personality functioning that illuminates the mechanism precisely. Their research described a personality structure they called the grandiose yet vulnerable self. The narcissist projects an image of supreme confidence, but that image is a construction, not a foundation. Underneath it is emptiness. And that emptiness does not simply coexist with the grandiosity. It creates a specific kind of threat detection system. When a narcissistic leader encounters genuine competence in another person, the experience is not neutral. It is not even competitive in the ordinary sense. It is existential. The competent person, simply by being competent, threatens to expose the distance between what the narcissist claims to be and what the narcissist actually is. A secure leader absorbs that competence and puts it to use. A narcissistic leader cannot, because using it means acknowledging that someone else has something he does not. And that acknowledgment is the one thing the narcissistic structure cannot survive. Plato described this with a medical analogy that has never been improved upon. A doctor purges a body by removing the disease and leaving what is healthy. The tyrant performs the opposite operation. He removes the healthiest parts of the state and keeps the sickness. The result is not just a weakened government. It is a government that has been specifically engineered to contain no one capable of recognizing what is happening. The Geometry of Captive Loyalty The second stage solves a problem created by the first. Once the competent are gone, the tyrant is exposed. He is surrounded by a population that increasingly despises him, and he has no one qualified to help him govern. He needs bodies. He needs protection. And he cannot get either from people who watched him gut the institutions they relied on. Plato’s answer was the concept of the drone. In Athenian beekeeping, drones were the members of the hive that consumed resources without producing anything. Plato borrowed the term for the class of people who fill the vacuum around a tyrant. They are not selected for skill. They are selected for dependency. The more a person needs the tyrant in order to survive, the more reliable that person becomes. Not because they are loyal in any meaningful sense. Because their personal destruction is structurally tied to his. What makes this dynamic so durable is that it escalates on its own. The initial selection is based on existing vulnerability. A person with a damaged reputation, a history of failure, or a public disgrace has fewer options than a person with a clean record. Hand that damaged person power and their dependency on the source of that power becomes total. But the tyrant does not stop at the initial appointment. He engineers situations that force the drone to cross additional lines. Each transgression eliminates another possible exit. Each public defense of an indefensible position burns another bridge back to legitimacy. At a certain point, the drone and the tyrant are fused. Not by ideology. Not by shared vision. By mutual destruction insurance. Every authoritarian regime in modern history has reproduced this structure. The pattern is so consistent that it functions less as a political observation and more as an engineering principle. You do not build a loyal inner circle by finding people who agree with you. You build it by finding people who cannot afford to disagree. Why the People Who Suffer Most Complain Least The third stage is the cruelest, and the one that requires the most psychological explanation, because on its surface it makes no sense. By this point in the cycle, the tyrant has consolidated power. The competent are gone. The inner circle is staffed with people whose survival depends on his. But governing costs money. Drones need to be paid. Loyalty purchased through dependency still requires funding. And eventually, the only source of revenue left is the public. Plato described the outcome with his most famous metaphor from Book Eight. The people, trying to escape the smoke of one form of subjugation, fall directly into the fire of a worse one. They voted for freedom. They got chains. And the chains were forged by the person they voted for. The psychological question is not why this happens. It is why the response to it is not revolt but defense. Why do the people absorbing the most damage become the most vocal defenders of the system producing that damage? John Jost’s system justification theory, published in 1994 at Yale, provides the clearest answer available. Human beings are not simply motivated to see themselves positively or to see their group positively. They are also motivated to see the systems they live under as legitimate, fair, and justified. This motivation operates even when the system in question is demonstrably producing unequal or harmful outcomes. The brain generates this motivation because the alternative is psychologically catastrophic. To conclude that the system is broken requires concluding that your participation in it was a mistake. That the leader you championed was a fraud. That the future you believed in was a fiction. And for most people, continued material suffering is less painful than that reckoning. Jost’s research revealed something counterintuitive. System justification tendencies are strongest not among those who benefit most from the system, but among those who are most dependent on it. The people with the fewest alternatives defend the status quo most aggressively, precisely because they cannot afford for it to be wrong. This is not ignorance. It is the brain performing triage, deciding that the pain of economic loss is survivable in a way that the pain of total psychological re-evaluation is not. The Sequence That Never Learns Plato did not write The Republic as prophecy. He wrote it as diagnosis. He had already lived through the disease. He had watched Athenian democracy produce Socrates, the greatest questioner the city had ever seen, and then vote to kill him for the crime of making people uncomfortable. He understood that the problem was not one bad leader or one corrupt institution. The problem was a sequence embedded in human nature itself. A sequence that activates whenever a society begins to value comfort over truth, loyalty over competence, and feeling right over being right. The sequence has no natural stopping point. It does not self-correct. The purge does not reverse because someone notices the talent is gone. The drones do not develop independence because the stakes get high enough. The base does not wake up because the damage gets bad enough. Each stage creates the conditions that make the next stage inevitable and the previous stage irreversible. Plato understood that writing the sequence down would not prevent it. He was not optimistic about that. What he understood was that recognizing the stages while they are happening is the only moment where intervention is possible. Once the fire stage is reached, the psychological mechanisms that keep people defending the system are too deeply embedded to overcome through argument or evidence. The window is earlier. It is in the purge, when the first competent people are removed and no one objects. It is in the appointment of the first drone, when everyone can see the person is unqualified and no one says it out loud. That is the window. And in every democracy that has collapsed into tyranny, that window closed while people were still debating whether what they were seeing was really that bad. Sources Plato. The Republic. Book VIII. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Originally written circa 375 BCE. Morf, C.C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the Paradoxes of Narcissism: A Dynamic Self-Regulatory Processing Model. Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 177-196. Jost, J.T., & Banaji, M.R. (1994). The Role of Stereotyping in System-Justification and the Production of False Consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(1), 1-27. Jost, J.T. (2020). A Theory of System Jus

  6. 5d ago

    MAGA Thinks Like Seven-Year-Old Children

    Every parent who has ever caught a child doing something wrong has heard the same defense. “But I didn’t get in trouble for it.” The child does not argue that the action was right or that the action was justified. The child’s entire moral framework rests on a single variable: did punishment follow? If the answer is no, the child concludes the action was acceptable. This reasoning is normal in a seven-year-old. It is evidence of a brain that has not yet developed the capacity for abstract moral thought. The child will grow out of it, given adequate development, socialization and guidance. Most children do grow out of it. Some adults never do. In 1958, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg began the research that would produce the most influential model of moral development in the history of psychology. Working from his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago, Kohlberg interviewed 72 boys between the ages of 10 and 16, presenting them with moral dilemmas and analyzing the reasoning behind their answers. He was not interested in what they decided. He was interested in how they decided. The structure of their reasoning, not its conclusions, was the object of study. What emerged from that research was a six-stage model of moral development organized into three levels, each representing a fundamentally different relationship between the individual and the concept of right and wrong. The Three Levels Kohlberg’s first level is preconventional morality. This is the level at which most young children operate, and it contains two stages. Stage one is what Kohlberg called the obedience and punishment orientation. At this stage, an action is wrong only if it results in punishment. No punishment, no wrongdoing. The physical consequences of behavior are the sole basis for moral judgment. A child at stage one does not steal a cookie because they will get sent to their room, not because stealing is wrong. If nobody catches them, the cookie was fair game. Stage two, still within the preconventional level, is the self-interest orientation. Morality at this stage operates like a marketplace. Right action is whatever satisfies your own needs, and cooperation with others happens only when it benefits you directly. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” is the highest moral principle available at this stage. Kohlberg’s second level is conventional morality, which typically develops during adolescence. At stage three, moral reasoning is driven by social approval, the desire to be seen as a good person by the people around you. At stage four, the individual develops a broader sense of law and social order, recognizing that rules exist to maintain a functioning society regardless of whether breaking them would benefit the individual. Most adults in functioning democracies operate somewhere between stages three and four. They follow laws not because they fear punishment but because they understand that a society without shared rules collapses. The third level is postconventional morality, which Kohlberg acknowledged most adults never reach. Stage five involves an understanding of social contracts, the idea that laws are agreements among citizens that can and should be changed when they fail to serve justice. Stage six, the rarest of all, involves reasoning from universal ethical principles, moral commitments that hold regardless of law, social convention, or personal consequence. Kohlberg placed figures like Martin Luther King Jr. at this level, people who broke unjust laws because a higher moral principle demanded it. Where MAGA Lives in This Framework The framework is descriptive, not political. Kohlberg did not design it to critique any ideology. But when you apply the model to the observable moral reasoning of the MAGA movement, the result is difficult to look away from. The argument that Trump did nothing wrong on January 6th because he was not convicted is stage one reasoning. The action is evaluated exclusively by its consequences for the actor. The insurrection was broadcast live. The violence was documented from hundreds of angles. Police officers were beaten with flagpoles. Members of Congress were hunted through hallways. The entire country watched it happen in real time. None of that enters the moral calculus for a stage one reasoner. The only question that matters is: did punishment follow? Trump was impeached but not convicted. He was indicted but the cases were delayed. He was not imprisoned. For a person operating at stage one, that sequence of events does not mean Trump was lucky, or that the system failed, or that political dynamics prevented accountability. It means he was innocent. Because innocence, at stage one, is defined as the absence of punishment. This reasoning appears with remarkable consistency across MAGA defenses. “If it was really a crime, why wasn’t he arrested?” “If he really did something wrong, why is he still free?” “If January 6th was an insurrection, why wasn’t he charged with insurrection?” Each question applies the same moral logic a child uses when arguing that eating cookies before dinner was fine because nobody stopped them. The Leader Who Models the Reasoning The framework becomes particularly revealing when applied to the leader himself. Trump’s public behavior maps almost perfectly onto preconventional moral reasoning. His moral vocabulary consists almost entirely of winners and losers, punishment and reward, loyalty and betrayal. He does not frame his actions in terms of whether they served the public good, upheld constitutional principles, or advanced justice. He frames them in terms of whether he won or lost, whether he was punished or got away with it, whether the people around him were loyal or disloyal. When Trump pardoned every January 6th defendant on his first day back in office, he did not argue that their actions were constitutionally protected or morally justified. He called them “hostages” and “patriots,” reframing the question away from the morality of their actions entirely. The pardon removed the punishment. And in a stage one framework, removing the punishment removes the wrongdoing. If the president says you are free, you did nothing wrong. This is not a sophisticated legal argument. It is the reasoning of a child who was told by a parent that the rules no longer apply. Why They Never Moved Past It Kohlberg’s model assumes that moral development proceeds through the stages in sequence, and that progression requires certain conditions: exposure to moral reasoning above your current stage, social environments that reward more complex thinking, and the cognitive capacity for abstraction. What happens when those conditions are absent or actively reversed? Kohlberg’s own research suggested that environments which reward obedience to authority and punish independent moral reasoning can freeze development at the preconventional level. If the only moral framework available to you is one in which power determines right and wrong, you will never develop the capacity to evaluate actions on their own merits. Consider what 25 years of right-wing media has done to moral reasoning. Fox News and its ecosystem operate on an explicit moral framework: our side is good, their side is evil, and the leader is always right. Complexity is weakness. Nuance is betrayal. Questioning the leader is disloyalty. This is not an environment that encourages progression to conventional or postconventional morality. It is an environment specifically designed to keep its audience at stage one. Obey the authority. Avoid punishment from the in-group. Evaluate every action by whether our side won or lost. The result is tens of millions of adults whose moral reasoning has been systematically held at the level Kohlberg documented in young children. They did not arrive there because they are unintelligent. Many of them are perfectly capable of complex thought in other domains. They arrived there because the information environment they inhabit has spent decades training them to reason about morality the way a seven-year-old does. The Inversion The most troubling application of Kohlberg’s framework to the current political landscape is not that MAGA supporters defend Trump’s actions because he avoided punishment. It is what happens to their own moral definitions over time. Every time Trump escapes consequences, his supporters do not update their view of Trump. They update their definition of what is right and wrong. The boundary of acceptable behavior expands to include whatever he just did. Calling for the termination of the Constitution becomes acceptable because he said it and nothing happened. Storing classified documents in a bathroom becomes acceptable because the case was dismissed. Attempting to overturn an election becomes acceptable because he was not convicted. This is moral reasoning running in reverse. Instead of measuring behavior against a fixed standard of right and wrong, the standard of right and wrong is being continuously adjusted to accommodate the behavior. The result is a moral framework with no floor. There is no action so extreme that it would cause a stage one reasoner to break with the leader, because the definition of “wrong” is always one step behind whatever the leader just did. Kohlberg spent his career documenting how moral reasoning develops. He mapped the progression from simple to complex, from self-centered to principled, from obedience to conscience. The MAGA movement represents something his model described but never fully reckoned with: what happens when an entire political culture moves backward through the stages, actively dismantling the moral development of its members until all that remains is the question a seven-year-old asks after taking a cookie. Did I get in trouble? No? Then I didn’t do anything wrong. Sources Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in th

  7. 6d ago

    MAGA is a Daycare for Adult Children

    In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults, mapped those profiles against their political affiliations and views of Donald Trump, and published what he found in the Journal of Research in Personality. The results did not reveal what most people expected. The common assumption is that Trump supporters lack empathy, that something is missing, that there is a deficit or a gap where the ability to recognize and respond to suffering should be. That assumption is wrong, and what Neumann actually found is considerably worse. Trump supporters are not blind to your pain. They can see it perfectly well. They enjoy it. The Three Dimensions of Empathy Understanding what Neumann’s data shows requires understanding that empathy is not a single capacity. It is at least three distinct psychological processes, each operating through different neural pathways, each measurable independently, and each telling a different story about how a person relates to the suffering of others. Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand what another person is feeling. It is a perceptual skill, closer to reading comprehension than to emotional experience. A person with high cognitive empathy can look at someone’s face and know they are in pain. They can read body language, vocal tone, and social cues with accuracy. Cognitive empathy does not require caring about what you perceive. It only requires perceiving it. Psychopaths typically score high on cognitive empathy. They are excellent at reading people. That is often what makes them effective manipulators. They can see exactly what you are feeling. They simply do not care. Affective empathy is the capacity to feel what another person feels. It is the process by which observing someone else’s pain produces a corresponding emotional response in your own nervous system. When you see someone stub their toe and you wince, that is affective empathy. When a child cries and your chest tightens, that is affective empathy. It is automatic, involuntary, and operates below the level of conscious decision-making. Affective empathy is what makes cruelty feel wrong. It is the internal alarm that fires when you witness suffering, the signal that tells your brain that what is happening to that person matters. Without it, the suffering of others is neutral information, the way a stock ticker is neutral to someone with no money in the market. Dissonant empathy is the third dimension, and it is the one that changes everything. Dissonant empathy is not the absence of a response to another person’s pain. It is the presence of the wrong response. A person with high dissonant empathy sees suffering and experiences pleasure. The signal fires, but it fires in the wrong direction. Where affective empathy produces discomfort at the sight of someone in pain, dissonant empathy produces satisfaction. This is not sadism in the clinical sense, though the overlap is significant. Dissonant empathy describes a specific empathic inversion: the neural architecture for responding to others’ emotional states is intact and functional, but the valence is reversed. Pain in others registers as reward in the observer. What Neumann Found Neumann and his co-author Darlene Ngo surveyed over 9,000 American adults across two national samples, one collected before the pandemic and one during it. They measured a comprehensive battery of personality traits, empathy dimensions, and political attitudes, including favorability toward Donald Trump. Three findings emerged that, taken together, paint a portrait of a political base that is psychologically distinct from the general population in ways that go far beyond policy disagreement. First, Trump supporters scored the same as everyone else on cognitive empathy. They can read the room. They can see what you are feeling. They understand facial expressions, social cues, and emotional states at the same level as moderates and liberals. There is no perceptual deficit. Second, Trump supporters scored significantly lower on affective empathy. They are measurably less likely to feel distress when observing another person’s suffering. The internal alarm that makes cruelty feel wrong fires less strongly in this population than in the general public. Third, and most critically, Trump supporters scored significantly higher on dissonant empathy. They are measurably more likely to experience pleasure or satisfaction when observing another person in pain. These three findings together produce a profile that is qualitatively different from what most critics of MAGA assume they are dealing with. The common framing is that Trump supporters “lack empathy,” as though there is a hole where empathy should be. Neumann’s data suggests the picture is more disturbing. They do not lack the ability to perceive suffering. That ability is fully intact. What is different is what happens after the perception registers. In most people, perceiving suffering produces discomfort. In this population, perceiving suffering produces satisfaction. They are not missing your pain. They are consuming it. The Emotional Regulation Problem This finding connects to a body of research on emotional self-regulation that has been developing independently of political psychology for decades. Healthy emotional development produces an adult who can generate positive internal states, feelings of purpose, satisfaction, pride, and contentment, from internal resources. They do not need external inputs to feel good about themselves. They have a functional internal emotional economy. Developmental psychology has long established that this capacity is built in childhood through consistent, responsive caregiving. The child learns to regulate their own emotions because they first experienced having their emotions regulated by someone else. The caregiver mirrors the child’s feelings, validates them, and models how to manage them. Over time, the child internalizes this process and becomes capable of doing it independently. When this process is disrupted, whether through neglect, abuse, emotional invalidation, or chaotic household environments, the result is an adult who cannot self-regulate. They cannot generate positive emotional states on their own. They become dependent on external sources for emotional regulation, whether through substances, chaotic relationships, or the emotional reactions of other people. This is the connection that Neumann’s data illuminates without explicitly stating. A population that scores high on dissonant empathy is a population that is using other people’s pain as an emotional regulation tool. The suffering of others produces a feeling in them, a feeling of power, superiority, and satisfaction, that they cannot produce on their own. Without that external input, they are emotionally empty. This is not a description of strong people being cruel. This is a description of emotionally dependent people who need a supply of suffering the way a child needs a parent to soothe them. They cannot feel good on their own. They need someone else to feel bad first. The Rally as Emotional Feeding This framework transforms how we understand Trump rallies. A rally is not a political event. It is a mass emotional feeding. Trump identifies a target. The crowd watches the target be humiliated. The crowd experiences satisfaction. The satisfaction is the product. Nothing else at the rally matters. Watch the audience at the moments Trump is cruelest. When he mocks a disabled reporter. When he describes violence against immigrants. When he calls an opponent an ugly name. The crowd does not respond with the uncomfortable silence of people witnessing cruelty. They respond with joy. They cheer. They laugh. They lean forward in their seats. That response is dissonant empathy operating in real time. They are perceiving pain and they are experiencing pleasure. This is also why Trump rallies have to escalate. Dissonant empathy, like any external emotional regulation mechanism, is subject to tolerance effects. The same dose produces less satisfaction over time. The cruelty has to get louder, the targets more vulnerable, the humiliation more public, just to produce the same feeling it once did. This is why Trump’s rhetoric has consistently escalated since 2015. The audience is chasing a high that requires increasing doses. The Dependency Neumann’s study did not use the word “dependency,” but the data describes a dependency structure. A population that cannot generate positive emotional states without the suffering of an external target is functionally dependent on that suffering. Remove the target and the positive feeling disappears. Remove the rallies and the emotional supply dries up. Remove Trump and they lose the person who most effectively delivers the product they need. This is why MAGA supporters respond to political opposition the way addicts respond to threats against their supply. The intensity of their reaction is not proportional to any policy disagreement. It is proportional to the threat against their primary source of emotional regulation. Telling a MAGA supporter that Trump is wrong is not experienced as a political argument. It is experienced as someone threatening to take away the only thing that makes them feel alive. Healthy adults do not need a political leader to feel good. Healthy adults do not need someone else to suffer in order to experience satisfaction. Healthy adults can generate pride, purpose, and contentment from their own internal resources, from their relationships, their work, their contributions to their communities, their growth as human beings. The population Neumann measured cannot do this. They are emotionally dependent on a supply of other people’s pain delivered by a man who has built his entire public persona around providing it. What Di

  8. Oct 15

    Fox News Is Making You Dumber

    In 2012, a research team at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll set out to answer a straightforward question: how well do Americans who consume different news sources understand basic current events? The study was not designed to embarrass any particular network. It was designed to measure knowledge, the kind of factual awareness a functioning democracy requires of its citizens in order to make informed decisions. The researchers surveyed 1,185 Americans nationwide. They asked each respondent which news sources they had consumed in the previous week, then posed a set of questions about domestic and international affairs. The questions were not obscure or tricky. They covered things like which party controls the House of Representatives, what economic sanctions against Iran are intended to accomplish, and whether the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Syria had succeeded in overthrowing their governments. The kind of basic information that anyone following the news in any meaningful capacity should know. The results produced a ranking that has since been replicated, cited, and expanded upon by researchers across multiple institutions and disciplines. NPR listeners scored highest. Viewers of Sunday morning political talk shows scored nearly as well. Viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a comedy program, outperformed viewers of every cable news network. Fox News viewers scored lowest. Not just among cable news viewers. Among everyone. People who reported consuming no news at all answered more questions correctly than people whose primary news source was Fox News. The lead researcher, Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson, was explicit about what the data showed. Controlling for education, partisanship, and other demographic variables, the study found that Fox News had a measurable negative effect on knowledge. Someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 out of 5 domestic questions correctly, a score significantly worse than someone who reported watching no news of any kind. On international affairs the pattern held, with Fox News viewers scoring 1.08 out of 4 questions correctly, again behind those who consumed no news at all. Not One Study The Fairleigh Dickinson findings were not an anomaly. They were a data point in a growing body of research that consistently arrives at the same conclusion. In 2010, two years before the Fairleigh Dickinson study, researchers at the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes conducted a similar analysis following the 2010 midterm elections. They surveyed 848 voters and found that greater exposure to Fox News was associated with increased misinformation on a range of factual questions, including the state of the economy, climate science, and the content of the Affordable Care Act. The more someone watched Fox News, the more misinformed they became, and this effect was not explained by partisan identity. It held even after controlling for political affiliation. In 2020, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology by Lindsay Dhanani and Franz at the University of Delaware examined how media consumption patterns affected Americans’ knowledge about COVID-19, their endorsement of pandemic-related misinformation, and their levels of prejudice toward Asian Americans during the early months of the crisis. Fox News viewers demonstrated lower factual knowledge about how the virus spreads, higher rates of belief in misinformation about treatments and origins, and significantly higher levels of prejudice toward Asian Americans. Those who consumed NPR and the New York Times scored higher on knowledge, lower on misinformation endorsement, and expressed substantially lower levels of racial prejudice. In 2022, researchers at Yale and several other institutions designed one of the most rigorous tests of Fox News’s effect on viewers ever conducted. They recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers, verified their viewing habits through actual television data rather than self-reporting, and paid them to switch to CNN for a month. The researchers then measured whether the switch changed the participants’ factual beliefs. It did. Viewers who switched from Fox to CNN became measurably more accurate in their understanding of current events, even though they remained politically conservative. When the incentive ended and participants returned to Fox News, their factual accuracy reverted. This study is significant because it addresses the most common objection to the earlier research: that Fox News does not cause misinformation but merely attracts people who are already misinformed. The Yale study showed that when you change the input, the output changes. Fox News viewers who were given accurate information updated their factual beliefs accordingly. When the accurate information was removed and replaced with Fox News, the misinformation returned. The effect is causal, not merely correlational. How Information Displacement Works The question the data raises is not whether Fox News viewers are less informed. That is established. The question is why. What is the mechanism by which watching more news makes a person know less than someone who watches none? The answer lies in what researchers describe as information displacement. Fox News does not leave viewers with no information. It leaves them with false information that occupies the cognitive space where accurate information would otherwise reside. The viewer is not uninformed. They are misinformed, which is measurably worse because a person who knows nothing is at least open to learning. A person who believes something false will actively resist the correct information because accepting it requires first admitting they were wrong. This is a critical distinction. An uninformed person has an empty glass. A misinformed person has a glass full of something contaminated. You cannot fill a glass that is already full, even if what is in it is poison. The person has to first recognize what they have been drinking and choose to pour it out. And the entire architecture of Fox News’s programming is designed to ensure that never happens. Fox News achieves this displacement through a specific structural feature of its programming that distinguishes it from other news sources. The network presents opinion content in formats that are indistinguishable from news reporting. The visual cues are identical: the anchor desk, the chyrons, the breaking news graphics, the tone of authority. Viewers who lack media literacy, which is a skill, not an intelligence measure, process opinion as news because nothing in the presentation signals that they should do otherwise. The result is that a Fox News viewer who watches three hours of evening programming believes they have consumed three hours of news. They have not. They have consumed a small amount of selectively reported factual content embedded in a large volume of editorial narrative, emotional provocation, and tribal reinforcement, all delivered through the visual grammar of legitimate journalism. They believe they are informed because they feel informed. And the feeling of being informed is, for the human brain, functionally indistinguishable from actually being informed. The Dunning-Kruger Dimension This mechanism interacts with one of the most well-documented findings in cognitive psychology: the Dunning-Kruger effect. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger at Cornell University demonstrated that people who are least competent in a given domain are also the least capable of recognizing their incompetence. They consistently overestimate their abilities because they lack the very skills that would allow them to see what they are missing. Fox News exploits this dynamic at industrial scale. It tells viewers that they are the smart ones. It tells them the experts are lying, the scientists are corrupt, the professors are brainwashing children, the journalists are manufacturing propaganda. The message is not just that Fox News is right. The message is that you, the viewer, are smarter than the people who spent decades acquiring expertise in their fields. You can see what they cannot. You have been chosen to see through the lies. This is the most addictive product Fox News sells. Not information. Not political perspective. The feeling of intellectual superiority without any of the work that intellectual achievement requires. A person who has been told they are smarter than doctors, scientists, and professors will not voluntarily give up that feeling by exposing themselves to information that demonstrates they are not. Returning to reality means returning to being ordinary. And Fox News has ensured that ordinary feels like failure. The Prejudice Connection The Frontiers in Psychology research adds a dimension that the knowledge studies alone do not capture. Fox News does not merely reduce factual knowledge. It actively increases prejudice. The mechanism is direct. Fox News’s editorial framework consistently associates threats, whether economic, cultural, or physical, with specific out-groups: immigrants, Muslims, Black Americans, Asian Americans, liberals. This association is repeated across programs, across segments, across years. The cumulative effect is not that viewers consciously adopt prejudiced beliefs. It is that the association between the out-group and the threat becomes automatic, embedded in the viewer’s pattern recognition system below the level of conscious deliberation. This is why Fox News viewers who are asked directly whether they hold prejudiced views often deny it sincerely. They do not experience their biases as prejudice. They experience them as common sense, as pattern recognition, as self-evident truth. The association has been so deeply reinforced through repetition that it feels like observation rather than indoctrination. The Scale of the Problem Fox News has been th

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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
    214
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    Clean
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    © Lucas Bean
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