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. 5h ago

    MAGA Supporters Gave Up on Themselves a Long Time Ago.

    There is something about MAGA supporters that most political commentary gets wrong. The common explanation is that they are angry. That they are hateful. That they chose cruelty because cruelty is what they wanted. Some of that is true. But it is not the full picture. Underneath the rage, underneath the conspiracy theories, underneath the flags and the rallies and the chanting, there is something quieter and more devastating. These are people who stopped believing that anything they do will ever change anything. They did not start that way. Nobody does. They were taught. The Original Experiment In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, working with his colleague Steven Maier, ran an experiment that would become one of the most cited findings in the history of psychology. Seligman placed dogs in a chamber and exposed them to small electric shocks. One group of dogs could press a panel to stop the shocks. Another group received the identical shocks but had no panel. No matter what they did, the shocks continued. They had no control over what was happening to them. Then both groups were placed in a new chamber. In this chamber, all they had to do to escape the shock was jump over a low barrier. The dogs who had control in the first phase figured it out immediately. They jumped the barrier and the shock stopped. The dogs who had been exposed to the uncontrollable shocks did not jump. They lay down. They whimpered. They did nothing. The barrier was low. The escape was obvious. And they did not try. Seligman called it learned helplessness. The dogs had not become lazy. They had not become stupid. Their brains had learned, through repeated experience, that their actions did not produce results. So the brain shut off the motivation to act. Even when the situation changed. Even when escape was right in front of them. The experiment was later replicated with human subjects using loud noise instead of shocks. The results were the same. People who experienced repeated uncontrollable negative events stopped trying to change their circumstances, even when they could. The Three Deficits Seligman identified three specific deficits that define learned helplessness. Understanding all three is critical to understanding what MAGA actually is. The first is a motivational deficit. The person stops trying. They do not attempt to escape or improve their situation. Not because they are content. Because their brain has calculated that effort is pointless. The second is a cognitive deficit. The person fails to recognize control even when it is available. The barrier is low. The escape route is obvious. But the brain has stopped scanning for solutions. It has stopped generating action plans. The person cannot see the exit because the brain has stopped looking for one. The third is an emotional deficit. The person’s affect flattens. Their response to reward diminishes. They become passive, withdrawn, and depressed. The emotional engine that drives a person to engage with the world has been depleted by repeated failure. Now think about the communities where MAGA support runs deepest. Towns where the factory closed twenty years ago and nothing replaced it. Places where wages have been flat for decades. Communities where the schools are underfunded, the hospitals are closing, and the young people who could have changed things left for the cities and never came back. These are not lazy people. These are people whose experience taught their brains, over and over, that nothing they do changes anything. They voted and nothing changed. They worked and nothing improved. They played by the rules and the rules changed underneath them. They did everything they were supposed to do and the reward never came. That is the experience that produces learned helplessness. Not a single catastrophic failure. A long, grinding series of failures that teaches the brain to stop generating hope. The Attributional Trap In 1978, Seligman and his colleagues Lyn Abramson and John Teasdale published a reformulation of the theory that explained why some people develop helplessness and others do not. They found that the critical variable is how a person explains the bad events in their life. People who are most vulnerable to learned helplessness explain failure with three specific characteristics. They explain it as stable, meaning this will always be true. They explain it as global, meaning this applies to everything in my life. And they explain it as internal, meaning this is my fault. Seligman called this pessimistic explanatory style. It is the cognitive signature of a person whose brain has given up. Now listen to how MAGA supporters talk about their lives before Trump. “Nobody cared about us.” “The whole system is rigged.” “People like us never get ahead.” “Washington forgot about us.” “The American Dream is dead.” Every one of those statements follows the pessimistic explanatory style. The problem is stable: it has always been this way and always will be. The problem is global: it affects everything, not just one area of life. And the problem is a mix of internal shame and external blame that leaves no room for agency. These are not political positions. These are the verbal markers of learned helplessness. These are people whose brains have already concluded that nothing they do will ever matter. The Savior Offer This is what makes Trump’s pitch so effective and so dangerous. Trump did not walk onto a stage and say “here is my policy platform, evaluate it against the alternatives.” He said “I alone can fix it.” For someone trapped in learned helplessness, those five words are not a political promise. They are a rescue. They are the first time in that person’s life that someone said: you do not have to try anymore. You do not have to figure this out. You do not have to do anything. Just follow me and I will make it all better. Seligman’s research showed that learned helplessness produces a specific vulnerability. The person who has given up on their own agency becomes dependent on external sources of control. They stop generating their own action plans and look for someone else to generate plans for them. They stop believing in their own capacity and attach that belief to someone who projects total confidence. Trump projects total confidence about everything. He never hesitates. He never admits uncertainty. He never says “it’s complicated” or “I don’t know.” For a person whose brain has been trained by decades of failure to interpret uncertainty as evidence that nothing will work, Trump’s absolute certainty feels like the opposite of everything that has ever let them down. He is not offering a plan. He is offering the feeling that a plan exists. And for someone who has given up on planning altogether, that feeling is enough. The Dependency Trap Seligman’s research showed that learned helplessness can be reversed. But the reversal requires a specific process. The person must take small actions and see results. They must rebuild, one experience at a time, the belief that their effort produces outcomes. They must relearn that they have agency. Trump does the opposite of this at every level. He does not encourage his supporters to take action in their own communities. He tells them to watch him take action. He does not help them develop skills or build local institutions. He tells them the institutions are corrupt and only he can be trusted. He does not give them tools for independence. He gives them dependency dressed as strength. Every rally is a ritual of passivity. They show up. They cheer. They go home. Nothing in their material circumstances has changed. But they felt something. They felt like they were part of something powerful. And that feeling, for a person trapped in helplessness, is the closest they have come to agency in years. But it is not agency. It is the opposite of agency. It is the surrender of agency to someone who benefits from keeping them helpless. A person who believes in themselves does not need a savior. Trump needs them to need him. So he keeps them afraid. He keeps them dependent. He keeps them believing that the world is too dangerous and too corrupt for them to navigate on their own. Every conspiracy theory reinforces the helplessness. The system is rigged. The deep state is everywhere. The media is lying to you. The only person you can trust is me. Each of these messages does the same thing: it tells the brain that the world is uncontrollable. That effort is pointless. That the only rational response is to surrender your agency to someone who claims to have control. That is not leadership. That is the systematic maintenance of learned helplessness for political profit. The Revision That Changes Everything In 2016, nearly fifty years after the original experiment, Seligman and Maier returned to their own findings. What they discovered forced them to revise the entire theory. They had originally assumed that helplessness was the learned state. That animals and humans start with a default expectation of control and then learn, through bad experience, to become helpless. The new neuroscience showed the opposite. The brain’s default state is passivity. The default assumption is that control is not present. What is actually learned is not helplessness. What is learned is control. The experience of taking action and seeing results is what trains the prefrontal cortex to generate action plans and override the brain’s default passive response. This changes the picture entirely. The people who support Trump the most fervently are not people who learned to be helpless. They are people who never sufficiently learned to be in control. Their life circumstances never provided enough experiences of agency, enough moments where effort produced reward, to train the neural circuits that generate hope and motivation. They did not give up. They were never given th

  2. 1d ago

    Trump Supporters Think Like Children

    There is a stage of brain development that every child goes through. Before the age of eleven, the human brain processes the world in concrete terms. One cause. One villain. One answer. Good guys and bad guys. Simple rules that never bend. Most people grow out of this stage. Their brains develop the capacity for abstract thought. They learn to hold contradictions. They learn that most questions have complicated answers. They learn that the world is not divided into heroes and villains. But most people are not MAGA. What Luguri Found In 2012, psychologist Jamie Luguri at Yale University, along with his colleagues Jaime Napier and John Dovidio, published three studies applying construal level theory to political attitudes. Construal level theory, originally developed by psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, measures how the brain shifts between two modes of processing: abstract thinking and concrete thinking. Abstract thinking is high-level. It focuses on the big picture. It processes values, principles, and categories. It asks why something happens and what it means. Concrete thinking is low-level. It focuses on specifics. It processes surface details, immediate reactions, and individual cases. It asks what something looks like right now. Luguri wanted to know what happens when you measure people’s political attitudes at each level. And what happens when you shift them from one level to the other. What he found should have ended the debate about conservative intolerance permanently. When conservatives were thinking concretely, which is their default cognitive mode, they were significantly more intolerant than liberals. Specifically toward gay men, lesbians, Muslims, and atheists. Anyone who deviated from their Judeo-Christian worldview was a target. When researchers shifted those same conservatives into abstract thinking, the intolerance disappeared. Political orientation stopped predicting prejudice. Conservatives who were thinking abstractly were statistically indistinguishable from liberals in their tolerance of nonnormative groups. The prejudice was not a deeply held belief. It was not a value. It was not something they inherited from their faith or their family or their culture. It was a setting. And it only existed when their brain was operating at the concrete level. The Fairness Finding Study 3 revealed something that deepens the finding even further. Luguri and his colleagues tested what was actually changing inside the conservative brain when it shifted to abstract thinking. They found that the reduction in prejudice was mediated by an increase in concerns about fairness. When conservatives were thinking concretely, fairness was not a priority. Their brain was processing the world in terms of in-group and out-group. Us and them. People like us and people not like us. That is concrete thinking. It sorts by surface-level category and assigns value based on belonging. When those same conservatives were shifted into abstract thinking, their concern for fairness increased. And that increase in fairness drove the decrease in prejudice. Their brain accessed a value it already held but could not reach from the concrete level. This means the problem is not that conservatives do not value fairness. It is that their default cognitive mode does not let them access it. The value is there. The wiring is there. But the operating system they run on by default cannot reach it. The Child’s Brain The developmental framework for what Luguri found was established decades earlier by Jean Piaget. Piaget identified the stages of cognitive development that every child passes through. The concrete operational stage, roughly ages seven to eleven, is when a child can think logically but only about concrete, tangible things. They can sort, classify, and organize the physical world. But they cannot think hypothetically. They cannot consider abstract principles. They cannot hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and evaluate them. The formal operational stage, beginning around age eleven, is when the brain develops the capacity for abstract thought. The child can now think about ideas that are not physically present. They can reason about hypothetical situations. They can consider multiple perspectives. They can understand that the same event can be interpreted in different ways depending on the framework you apply. Piaget’s research showed that most people develop the capacity for formal operational thinking. But having the capacity and using it are different things. Under stress, under cognitive load, under threat, and inside environments that reward simplicity and punish complexity, the brain defaults to the earlier, simpler mode. That is the concrete mode. The child’s mode. One cause. One villain. One answer. The Meta-Analysis In 2003, psychologists John Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie Kruglanski, and Frank Sulloway published the most comprehensive analysis of the psychology of political conservatism ever conducted. They analyzed 88 samples across 12 countries, totaling 22,818 cases. Their findings confirmed what Luguri would later demonstrate experimentally. Political conservatism is reliably associated with a specific cluster of cognitive characteristics: need for cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, low integrative complexity, uncertainty avoidance, and preference for order and structure. In plain language, conservatism correlates with a brain that wants simple answers, wants them fast, and wants them to stay the same. Jost and Kruglanski described a conservative worldview as one that contains the promise of a predictable social order with minimal complexity and minimal risk of change. That promise is not a policy position. It is a cognitive preference. It is the brain saying: make it simple, make it certain, and do not make me reconsider. The need for cognitive closure, which Kruglanski had been studying since the 1980s, is the drive to reach a definitive answer on a topic and to avoid ambiguity. People high in need for closure seize on the first available answer and then freeze, refusing to update even when new information arrives. That is the concrete mode operating at the level of political identity. And the research shows it is the default setting for conservative cognition. Why Propaganda Works on Them This is why Trump’s language works. Every single sentence Trump speaks is constructed at the concrete level. One cause. One villain. One solution. “Immigrants are destroying this country.” That is a concrete sentence. A ten-year-old could follow it. And that is the point. “The election was stolen.” Concrete. One event. One villain. One conclusion. “I alone can fix it.” Concrete. One person. One action. One outcome. Trump does not speak in abstractions. He does not discuss competing interests. He does not acknowledge trade-offs. He does not present nuance. Every sentence is designed to land in the concrete mode and stay there. A brain operating in concrete mode receives these sentences as clear, strong, and true. A brain operating in abstract mode receives them as oversimplified, misleading, and incomplete. The same sentence. Two completely different responses. Determined entirely by which cognitive mode is active. Right-wing media reinforces the concrete mode every single day. Fox News does not present complex policy analysis. It presents villains. It presents threats. It presents one-sentence conclusions delivered with total certainty. The entire information ecosystem is designed to keep the conservative brain in its default mode, because the default mode is the one where the prejudice lives, the fear lives, and the loyalty lives. The Laziness Problem Luguri’s most disturbing finding was not that conservatives default to concrete thinking. It was that they do not shift out of it on their own. The researchers had to force the shift. They had to structure the experimental conditions to push participants into abstract mode. Without that external push, conservatives stayed in concrete mode. Not because they could not think abstractly. Because they did not. That is not a disability. That is cognitive laziness. It is the brain choosing the simplest available operating mode and staying there because the simplest mode is the most comfortable one. The concrete mode does not require you to hold contradictions. It does not require you to consider multiple perspectives. It does not require you to sit with ambiguity. It gives you one answer and lets you stop thinking. These people would rather be told what to think than do the work of thinking for themselves. Trump is the first politician who makes the world as simple as their brain needs it to be. And every day they spend inside his media ecosystem is another day the brain stays locked in the concrete mode. Another day the abstract capacity goes unused. Another day the fairness values stay inaccessible. The capacity is there. They just never use it. And the system they live inside is designed to make sure they never have to. Sources Luguri, J. B., Napier, J. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2012). Reconstruing Intolerance: Abstract Thinking Reduces Conservatives’ Prejudice Against Nonnormative Groups. Psychological Science, 23(7), 756-763. Luguri, J. B., & Napier, J. L. (2013). Of Two Minds: The Interactive Effect of Construal Level and Identity on Political Polarization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 972-977. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375. Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440-463. Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated Closing of the Mind: “Seizing” and “Freezing.” Psychological Review, 103(2), 263-283. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. International Universities P

  3. 2d ago

    Narcissist MAGA Parents Using Fascism for Vengeance

    There is a moment that millions of adult children in this country can describe in almost identical detail. You set a boundary. Maybe it was about how they spoke to you. Maybe it was about how they spoke to your partner. Maybe it was about what they said at the dinner table or what they posted on social media or what they did at Thanksgiving. You did not scream. You did not attack. You simply said: that is not acceptable. And they came apart. Not with sadness. Not with reflection. Not with any attempt to understand what they did wrong. With rage. With accusations. With the immediate reframing of your boundary as an act of betrayal against them. You were ungrateful. You were disrespectful. You were tearing the family apart. After everything they did for you. After everything they sacrificed. They did not hear the boundary. They heard a loss of control. And when a narcissist loses control, they do not self-reflect. They escalate. There is decades of research explaining exactly what happens next. What Horney Found In 1950, psychoanalyst Karen Horney published Neurosis and Human Growth, the culmination of decades of clinical work studying people who organize their entire personality around a false image of themselves. Horney identified a specific psychological drive that activates when a narcissistic person feels humiliated, diminished, or exposed. She called it vindictive triumph. Vindictive triumph is the compulsive need to humiliate and defeat others in order to restore a sense of superiority after feeling humiliated yourself. It is not ordinary anger. It is not a reaction to a specific offense. It is a fundamental reorganization of the person’s entire motivational structure around one goal: making the other person pay. Horney described it as closely linked to the drive for success, but distinguished by its core motivation. The aim of vindictive triumph is not achievement. It is putting others to shame or defeating them through one’s own dominance. The motivating source, she wrote, is the desire to take revenge for humiliations suffered, real or imagined. Horney noted that this drive has an incredible tenacity. Once activated, it can become the primary driver in a person’s entire life. The vindictive person becomes intensely competitive, unable to tolerate anyone who questions their authority, challenges their position, or achieves something independently of them. They must drag down anyone who threatens their sense of superiority. This is not a description of a political ideology. This is a description of a parenting style that millions of American adults grew up under. And it is a description of what happens when the children raised under that style grow up, set boundaries, and refuse to play the role they were assigned. The Narcissistic Parent Loses Control The structure of a narcissistic household is simple. The parent is the center. Everything orbits around their needs, their emotions, their version of reality. The children learn early that their job is not to have their own feelings. Their job is to manage the parent’s feelings. When the child is young, the system works. The child depends on the parent for survival. The parent provides food, shelter, and the appearance of normalcy. In exchange, the child provides what the narcissistic parent actually needs: narcissistic supply. Attention. Admiration. Obedience. The feeling of being important, needed, and in control. The system breaks when the child grows up. An adult child no longer needs the parent for survival. An adult child can set boundaries. An adult child can go to therapy and discover that the family dynamic was not normal. An adult child can say “I am not going to tolerate this anymore” and walk away. For a healthy parent, this is called growing up. For a narcissistic parent, this is an existential crisis. The narcissistic parent does not experience their adult child’s independence as growth. They experience it as abandonment. They experience it as ingratitude. They experience it as humiliation. The supply has been cut off. The audience has left the theater. And the narcissist is standing on an empty stage. Horney’s research predicts exactly what happens next. Vindictive triumph activates. The parent does not try to repair the relationship. The parent tries to restore the power structure. They do not want to understand their child’s perspective. They want their child to submit. How Fascism Became the Tool This is where the personal becomes political. A narcissistic parent who has lost control of their adult children has three options. They can self-reflect and change. They can accept the loss and grieve. Or they can find an external system that restores their authority by force. MAGA is that system. It tells them they are right. It tells them their children are brainwashed by colleges and therapists and social media. It tells them that boundaries are disrespect and independence is betrayal. It tells them that the old way was better, that the authority they lost was stolen, and that the right leader can give it all back. They don’t want to repair the relationship. They want to restore the power structure. They want back in. And if their kids won’t open the door voluntarily, they will vote for a system that kicks it down. They want their children to pay. Pay for not calling enough. Pay for going to therapy. Pay for setting boundaries. Pay for not needing them anymore. Pay for building a life that does not revolve around them. And if they cannot make their children pay personally, they will vote for a system that does it for them. A system that strips away reproductive rights so their daughters can’t make their own choices. A system that attacks LGBTQ rights so their children can’t live authentically. A system that punishes education and therapy and independence because those are the things that gave their children the language to name what was done to them. They sit in their homes watching Fox News and they never face the consequences of their votes. But when they get hurt, they demand empathy from the children they voted against. When their children get hurt, they say toughen up. Empathy is a one-way street that only runs toward them. The Escalation Horney warned that vindictive triumph does not burn out on its own. It escalates. Every time the narcissist fails to restore control, the drive intensifies. Every time the target refuses to submit, the vindictiveness becomes more extreme. Because the alternative to escalation is self-reflection. And self-reflection is the one thing the narcissistic personality structure was built to prevent. When you stop giving a narcissist what they need, they don’t change. They escalate. MAGA is that escalation at a national scale. They couldn’t make their kids listen at the dinner table anymore. So they voted for a system that makes the entire country listen instead. They couldn’t control the conversation in their own homes. So they voted for a man who controls the conversation everywhere. On January 10, 2025, a father in Prosper, Texas shot and killed his 23-year-old daughter Lucy Harrison after they argued about Donald Trump. Lucy had asked her father how he would feel if she were sexually assaulted. He told her, with two other daughters in the house, it wouldn’t upset him that much. She ran upstairs crying. Half an hour later he took her by the hand, led her to the bedroom, and she was shot in the chest with a Glock handgun. The British coroner ruled it unlawful killing. A Texas grand jury declined to indict. A father chose his politics over his own daughter’s life. And a system that was built to protect narcissistic authority made sure there were no consequences. The Final Stage There is one more element that makes this generation’s vindictive triumph particularly dangerous. They are running out of time and they know it. The boomer generation is aging. Their health is declining. Their relevance is shrinking. The world their children are building looks nothing like the world they controlled. And they will not be around to face the consequences of the system they voted for. There is no leverage left. No relationship left to threaten. No future grandchildren to hold hostage. All that is left is rage. And the rage has found the perfect vessel in a political movement that tells them their anger is righteous, their cruelty is strength, and their need for control is patriotism. This is vindictive triumph at a generational scale. An entire cohort of narcissistic parents who lost control of their families and decided to try to take control back through fascism. Not because they believe in the ideology. Because the ideology gives them what they actually want: the power to punish the people who stopped obeying them. If I cannot have my way, I will take your freedom. That is not politics. That is a narcissistic parent who lost control and chose revenge over love. And the entire country is paying for it. Sources Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization. W. W. Norton & Company. Horney, K. (1945). Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis. W. W. Norton & Company. Horney, K. (1937). The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. W. W. Norton & Company. Shaw, D. (2014). Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Routledge. McBride, K. (2008). Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. Atria Books. BBC News. (2026, February 11). Dad Shot Daughter After “Arguing About Donald Trump.” BBC News. 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

    You Can Disprove Everything a MAGA Supporter Believes and They Will Still Believe It

    You have done it. You know you have. You sat across from someone and laid out the facts. Calmly. Clearly. With sources. With data. With court documents. With video evidence. You dismantled every claim they made. You proved beyond any reasonable doubt that what they believed was false. And they kept believing it. Not because they didn’t hear you. Not because they didn’t understand you. Because the belief no longer needs the evidence. The belief is alive on its own. And no amount of proof will kill it. That feeling you had afterward, the sense that you must be losing your mind, that reality itself has stopped working, is not a failure of communication. It is the result of a cognitive mechanism that was identified and proven in a laboratory over fifty years ago. The Experiment That Changed Everything In 1975, psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University, along with his colleagues Mark Lepper and Michael Hubbard, published an experiment that should have changed the way every person in the world thinks about arguing. Ross gave participants false feedback on a task. He told some of them they had performed well at distinguishing real suicide notes from fabricated ones. He told others they had performed poorly. The feedback was completely made up. There was no real score. The outcome was predetermined and randomly assigned. Then he debriefed them. Thoroughly. He told them the feedback was fake. He told them it had been fabricated. He showed them that the entire basis for their belief about their own performance was a lie. And the belief survived. Participants who had been told they were good at the task continued to rate themselves as good at it. Participants who had been told they were bad continued to rate themselves as bad. Even after they knew, with complete certainty, that the evidence was fabricated. Even after the foundation had been pulled out entirely. Ross called it belief perseverance. The tendency to maintain a belief after the evidence supporting it has been completely destroyed. Why the Belief Survives The most important finding in Ross’s research was not that the belief survived. It was why. Ross and his colleagues discovered that the moment a person forms a belief, the brain begins generating causal explanations for why the belief is true. These explanations are self-generated. They come from the person’s own experience, their own self-concept, their own framework for understanding the world. A participant who was told she was good at detecting real suicide notes would immediately begin constructing reasons why that made sense. Maybe she had always been empathetic. Maybe she had experience with people who were struggling. Maybe she was good at reading emotional nuance. These explanations felt personal. They felt organic. They felt like they came from inside. When the original evidence was removed, those self-generated explanations remained. The belief no longer needed the fabricated data. It had new support. Support the person had built themselves, from their own life, without realizing they were doing it. This is the mechanism. The evidence is the spark. But the moment the belief catches, the brain starts building fuel around it from the person’s own identity, their own experiences, their own stories about who they are. Remove the spark and the fire keeps burning because the fuel is the person’s own self-concept. That is why debunking doesn’t work. You can disprove the original claim. You can show them the court rulings. You can show them the data. You can prove the evidence was fabricated. And the belief survives. Because the belief is no longer attached to the evidence. It is attached to the person’s story about themselves. The Explanatory Framework Problem In 1980, Ross and Lepper extended the research with another colleague, Craig Anderson. They found the same effect with beliefs about the world, not just beliefs about the self. They gave participants fabricated case studies suggesting either that risk-taking people make better firefighters or that cautious people make better firefighters. Then they debriefed them completely. Told them the case studies were invented. Showed them the fabrication. The beliefs persevered. And when the researchers asked participants to explain their beliefs, they could articulate detailed, coherent reasons why risk-takers (or cautious people) would make better firefighters. Reasons that had nothing to do with the fabricated case studies. Reasons they had generated entirely on their own in the minutes between forming the belief and being debriefed. The belief had migrated. It started in the fabricated evidence. It moved to the person’s own explanatory framework. And once it was inside that framework, removing the original evidence was like pulling a single thread from a sweater that had already been knitted into a different garment. The thread was gone. The garment remained. This is exactly what happened with election fraud. The original claims were specific. Specific machines. Specific counties. Specific numbers. Every one of those claims was disproven in over 60 courts. The evidence was demolished. But by the time the courts ruled, millions of people had already built their own explanatory frameworks. They had their own stories. They had their own experiences that seemed to confirm it. They had their own sense that something felt wrong. They had conversations with friends who agreed. They had social media feeds full of people who saw the same thing they saw. Remove the original evidence and the framework stands on its own. The belief no longer needs Dominion voting machines or dead voters or suitcases of ballots. It has something stronger. It has the person’s own certainty that they are right. Naive Realism Later in his career, Ross identified the psychological phenomenon that makes belief perseverance nearly impossible to break from the outside. He called it naive realism. The belief that you see the world objectively. That your perceptions are accurate. That your reasoning is sound. And that anyone who disagrees with you must be irrational, uninformed, or biased. Naive realism is not arrogance. It is the default setting of the human brain. Every person, liberal or conservative, educated or not, walks through the world believing that what they see is what is actually there. The feeling of objectivity is automatic. It does not require effort. It does not require evidence. It is the water the brain swims in. The problem is that naive realism makes it nearly impossible to consider the possibility that you are wrong. If you believe you see reality as it truly is, then anyone presenting contradictory evidence is not offering you new information. They are distorting reality. They are biased. They are brainwashed. They are the ones who don’t understand. Now combine naive realism with belief perseverance. A person forms a belief based on evidence that later turns out to be fabricated. Their brain generates causal explanations that make the belief feel organic and personally confirmed. They experience their belief as an accurate perception of reality. And anyone who tries to correct them is experienced not as helpful but as hostile. This is why arguing with a MAGA supporter feels like arguing with a wall. It is not that they cannot hear you. It is that their brain has classified your evidence as a distortion, your reasoning as biased, and your conclusion as evidence that you are the one who doesn’t understand. They are not ignoring reality. They believe, with complete sincerity, that they are the ones who see reality clearly. And you are the one under the spell. The Only Thing That Worked Anderson, Lepper, and Ross found one technique that reduced belief perseverance in the laboratory. They called it “consider the opposite.” Before participants were asked to evaluate their belief, they were asked to generate explanations for why the opposite might be true. Not to believe the opposite. Just to imagine it. To construct a plausible case for why the other side might be right. This simple exercise significantly reduced the perseverance effect. Not because it changed the person’s mind. Because it broke the monopoly of the single explanatory framework. The brain had been holding one story. Now it had two. And with two stories in play, the person’s certainty dropped enough for evidence to matter again. The problem is that “consider the opposite” requires something MAGA supporters have been systematically trained to refuse: the willingness to entertain, even hypothetically, the possibility that they are wrong. The entire media ecosystem, the entire social structure, the entire identity framework they live inside is designed to prevent exactly that moment of consideration. Fox News does not ask its viewers to consider the opposite. Right-wing podcasts do not ask their listeners to imagine being wrong. Truth Social does not reward uncertainty. The entire system is built to make sure the person never reaches the cognitive state that Ross showed is the only one capable of reducing belief perseverance. What This Means You are not failing to communicate. You are not choosing the wrong words. You are not being too aggressive or too passive or too emotional or too cold. You are fighting a brain that has already decided, before you opened your mouth, that the evidence does not matter. The belief does not need the evidence anymore. It has the person’s own explanatory framework. It has naive realism telling the person they see reality clearly. It has an entire media ecosystem reinforcing the framework every single day. And it has a social community that punishes doubt and rewards certainty. You cannot argue them out of it. Ross proved that in 1975. The belief perseveres because the brain protects it the same way it protects the person’s identity. Because at this point, the belief is the person’s identity. Removing it would mean dismantling the story

  5. 4d ago

    Why MAGA Stupidity is Dangerous

    In April of 1945, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated days later. Bonhoeffer had been arrested in 1943 for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. While he waited in his cell for the execution he knew was coming, he did not write about God. He did not write about salvation. He wrote about stupidity. The essay he left behind, simply titled “On Stupidity,” is one of the most unsettling documents ever written about how democracies die. Not from the outside. Not from military force. Not from some foreign enemy. From the inside. From the voluntary surrender of thinking by millions of people who were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves. Bonhoeffer watched it happen in Germany. Doctors. Lawyers. Professors. Engineers. People who could think. People who had been educated to think. And the moment fascist power rose, they stopped. That essay, written by a man who knew he was about to die for opposing it, remains the clearest warning ever produced about what is happening in America right now. What Bonhoeffer Meant by Stupidity Bonhoeffer was precise about what he did not mean. He was not talking about intelligence. He was not talking about education. He was not talking about IQ. He identified three specific mechanisms that turn a thinking person into a stupid one. The first is outsourcing your thinking to someone else. A leader. A party. A media figure. A movement. The person stops evaluating information on their own and begins filtering everything through the question of what the leader would say, what the group believes, what the party demands. The thinking doesn’t disappear. It gets redirected. Instead of thinking about whether something is true, the person thinks about whether it is loyal. The second is willful ignorance. Not the absence of knowledge, but the celebration of that absence. The ancient Greeks had a word for this. Aristotle called it amathia: the refusal to learn what is available to be learned. Not because the information is hidden or inaccessible. Because engaging with it would threaten something the person does not want threatened. We carry the entire accumulated knowledge of human civilization in our pockets. Every study. Every dataset. Every court filing. Every historical record. Available in seconds. And millions of people will not take five seconds to look something up, because looking it up might mean finding out they were wrong. And being wrong is more painful to them than being ignorant. The third is conformity under pressure. Going along with the group even when you know the group is wrong. Not because you were convinced. Because the cost of dissent is too high. You know something is off. You feel it. But you say what they say anyway. Because belonging matters more than truth. And because the people who have spoken up before you have been destroyed in front of everyone as a warning. Bonhoeffer said people are not born this way. They are made this way. Stupidity is not a defect of the individual. It is a product of the system. It spreads through groups. It accelerates when power rises. And it follows what he called a law of human nature: the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The Spell Bonhoeffer described something in his essay that should disturb everyone who reads it. He said that when you try to reason with a person in this state, you feel like you are not talking to a person anymore. You are talking to slogans. You are talking to phrases that have taken possession of them. They are, in his words, under a spell. Blinded. Misused. Abused in their very being. The person is still physically present. They can still form sentences. They can still hold a job and raise children and function in the world. But the part of them that evaluates, that questions, that resists, has been deactivated. They have surrendered the one thing that made them a self-governing individual: the willingness to think independently. And once that surrender is complete, Bonhoeffer warned, the person becomes capable of any evil. Not because they have become evil. Because they can no longer see evil for what it is. The act and the recognition of the act have been separated. They do terrible things and cannot see that they are terrible. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, delegates held up signs that said “Mass Deportation Now” and cheered. At CPAC in 2025, Elon Musk walked onto the stage holding a chainsaw and revved it over his head while the audience roared. Federal workers were being fired by email. Some lost their pensions that day. Some lost their healthcare. An aid worker testified that children overseas would die because food programs were cancelled overnight. And the crowd cheered for the chainsaw. The White House posted a video of handcuffed immigrants being walked onto a deportation plane, set to a pop song. They let Dr. Phil film ICE raids for television. They turned human suffering into entertainment content. And millions of people watched it and called it winning. People capable of cruelty. Completely unable to see that it is cruelty. That is Bonhoeffer’s spell. Not a metaphor. A clinical description of what happens when a person has surrendered their capacity for independent moral judgment to a group. The Cage In 2022, philosopher Chris Ranalli at VU Amsterdam published research that gave Bonhoeffer’s observation a modern framework. Ranalli studied indoctrination. Not the crude version most people imagine, where someone is strapped to a chair and shown propaganda until they break. The structural version. The version that operates in plain sight, in free societies, on people who believe they are thinking freely. Ranalli identified what he called epistemically insulating content. This is any belief that comes prepackaged with a built-in rule: if you question this, you are either stupid or a traitor. The belief is not just something you think. It becomes who you are. Your identity is fused to it. So when someone challenges the belief, they are not challenging an idea. They are attacking you. The insulation works because it preemptively disqualifies all possible counter-evidence. Before the evidence even arrives, the person has already been told that any evidence against their belief is fabricated, biased, or part of a conspiracy. The source is the enemy. The expert is compromised. The journalist is corrupt. The court is rigged. This is the cage Bonhoeffer described, rendered in the vocabulary of modern epistemology. The cage is built from the inside. The walls are not made of steel. They are made of phrases. Fake news. Enemy of the people. Do your own research. Trust the plan. These are not arguments. They are the walls of the cage. Each phrase is designed to disqualify a category of evidence before the person ever encounters it. Ranalli’s insight was that the cage does not require the person inside it to be unintelligent. The cage works on smart people. The cage works on educated people. Because the cage does not attack the person’s ability to reason. It attacks the inputs that reasoning operates on. If you can control what information is allowed into the process, you don’t need to control the process itself. The person will reason their way to exactly the conclusion you want, using exactly the information you permitted. That is why facts bounce off. Not because the person is incapable of processing them. Because the cage classified those facts as enemy content before the person ever saw them. The B******t In 1986, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a paper with a title that became famous in philosophy departments and everywhere else. The paper was called “On B******t.” Frankfurt made a distinction that sounds simple but changes how you understand everything that follows. He said there is a fundamental difference between a liar and a bullshitter. And the bullshitter is worse. A liar cares about the truth. That sounds paradoxical, but Frankfurt’s point was precise. When a liar speaks, they know what is real and they are trying to hide it from you. Truth still has power over the liar. The liar’s entire strategy depends on knowing what is true so they can construct a convincing alternative. The bullshitter has abandoned truth entirely. True or false, it does not matter. Whatever works. Whatever gets a reaction. Whatever wins the next five minutes. The bullshitter is not hiding the truth. The bullshitter has opted out of the truth-telling enterprise altogether. Frankfurt warned that when b******t becomes normal, people stop asking what is real. They stop expecting truth from public figures. They stop believing that truth is even possible. And once that happens, the cage gets stronger. You don’t need sophisticated propaganda anymore. You just need volume. Steve Bannon said it out loud. “Flood the zone with s**t.” That is Frankfurt’s theory weaponized. If you produce enough b******t, fast enough, from enough directions, people stop trying to sort truth from lies. Not because they are stupid. Because the task becomes impossible. And once they stop trying, you can tell them anything. The Language In 1946, George Orwell published an essay called “Politics and the English Language.” His thesis was that political language does not become vague by accident. It becomes vague on purpose. Orwell argued that the function of political language is to make cruelty invisible. To give terrible acts respectable names. To create a layer of abstraction between the act and the audience so that the audience never has to confront what is actually happening. When DOGE fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers, they called it efficiency gains. When they sent emails threatening people to quit or be fired, they called it voluntary resignation. When they gutted Medicaid and slashed programs that kept rural hospitals open, they cal

  6. 5d ago

    MAGA Was Always This Hateful

    In 1971, Philip Zimbardo ran an experiment at Stanford University that was supposed to last two weeks. It lasted six days. He took 24 college students, screened them for psychological stability, confirmed they were ordinary, healthy, well-adjusted young men, and then randomly assigned them roles. Half became guards. Half became prisoners. He built a fake prison in a basement and turned them loose. Within 36 hours, the guards were stripping prisoners naked, putting bags over their heads, forcing them into stress positions, and waking them at random hours for punishment. By day three, one prisoner had a breakdown so severe he had to be removed from the study. By day five, the guards had invented new cruelties that nobody on the research team had anticipated. On day six, Zimbardo shut it down because a graduate student walked in, saw what was happening, and told him he had lost control of his own experiment. Zimbardo spent the next three decades studying what happened in that basement. In 2007 he published The Lucifer Effect, a comprehensive account of how ordinary people become capable of extraordinary cruelty. His conclusion was not complicated. It was terrifying. The cruelty was already there. In everyone. What separates a decent society from a brutal one is not the character of its people. It is the structure of its systems. Consequences. Accountability. Social pressure. The knowledge that if you act on the worst impulse you have, there will be a cost. Remove those consequences, and the cruelty surfaces on its own. You do not have to teach it. You do not have to train it. You do not even have to encourage it. You just have to stop punishing it. The Barrel, Not the Apple Zimbardo introduced a framework that should have ended every conversation about individual blame in organized cruelty. He called it the barrel argument. When something goes wrong inside a system, the instinct is to find the bad apple. The rogue actor. The one person who crossed the line. Punish them, remove them, and the system is clean again. Zimbardo’s research proved that instinct is wrong every time. The apple is not the problem. The barrel is the problem. The barrel is the culture, the rules, the hierarchy, the permission structure, and the presence or absence of accountability. A good apple placed in a bad barrel will rot. Not because it was always rotten. Because the barrel made it that way. But there is a darker reading of Zimbardo’s work that The Lucifer Effect does not emphasize as directly. If the capacity for cruelty exists in everyone, and the only thing preventing it from surfacing is external consequence, then the speed at which a person embraces cruelty once the consequences are removed tells you something about how close to the surface it was sitting the entire time. Some of Zimbardo’s guards took days to become abusive. Others took hours. The guards who escalated fastest were not aberrations in the data. They were the people for whom the gap between impulse and permission was smallest. The cruelty was right there, pressed against the glass, waiting for someone to open the door. The Door Opened Donald Trump opened the door. He did not do it subtly. He did not do it gradually. He stood on a stage in 2015 and called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. He mocked a disabled reporter on national television. He told rally crowds to knock the hell out of protesters and offered to pay their legal fees. He attacked Gold Star families. He bragged about sexual assault on tape and won the presidency anyway. Every one of those moments was a test. Not a test of Trump. A test of the system. Could cruelty go unpunished? The answer, every single time, was yes. And every time cruelty went unpunished, the permission expanded. The barrel got worse. And the apples got worse with it. By 2025 the permission structure was total. Crowds cheer deportations like sporting events. Federal workers lose their livelihoods and millions share memes mocking them. Immigration raids are filmed for entertainment television. Human suffering is content. Cruelty is not a byproduct of the movement. Cruelty is the product. It is the thing that bonds the group together. It is the loyalty test. If you do not participate in the cruelty, you do not belong. The Speed Tells You Everything Zimbardo’s framework predicts that when consequences are removed, cruelty surfaces. It does not predict how quickly. The speed is the variable. And the speed at which millions of Americans embraced public cruelty once Trump removed the social cost tells you that this was not a transformation. It was a reveal. These are people who sat in offices, churches, family dinners, and neighborhood barbecues for decades, performing decency because decency was enforced. Not because they believed in it. Because violating it had a cost. The cost was social rejection. The cost was being seen as cruel, racist, petty, or hateful. The performance of decency was a social contract, and they held up their end only as long as the contract was enforceable. Trump made it unenforceable. He demonstrated, repeatedly and publicly, that you could say the most vicious things imaginable and not only survive but thrive. He proved that cruelty was not a liability. It was an asset. And the speed at which his supporters adopted that proof tells you the decency was never real. It was a costume they could not wait to take off. They Only Care When It Hits Them This is the evidence that the cruelty is not situational. It is selective. Zimbardo’s guards were cruel to everyone equally. They did not exempt prisoners who looked like them or talked like them or came from the same background. The cruelty was indiscriminate because the system was indiscriminate. MAGA cruelty is not indiscriminate. It is precisely targeted. And it reverses the instant it hits home. Tariffs raise prices on their groceries and suddenly trade policy matters. Their healthcare gets cut and suddenly government spending is important. Their family member gets caught in a deportation sweep and suddenly due process is sacred. The cruelty was never about principle. It was about direction. They do not oppose cruelty. They oppose being on the receiving end of it. Cruelty aimed outward is patriotism. Cruelty aimed inward is tyranny. The principle changes depending on who is getting hurt. And that selectivity is not something the Lucifer Effect creates. That is something the Lucifer Effect reveals. What Zimbardo Understood Zimbardo never claimed the Stanford Prison Experiment proved people are inherently evil. He claimed it proved that systems determine behavior more than character does. Good systems suppress cruelty. Bad systems unleash it. And the most dangerous systems are the ones that reward cruelty, because once cruelty becomes the path to status, belonging, and identity, it becomes self-sustaining. The system no longer has to push people toward cruelty. The people push themselves. That is where MAGA is now. Trump no longer has to model the cruelty personally. The system runs on its own. The rallies generate it. The media amplifies it. The algorithm rewards it. The group enforces it. Anyone who hesitates is punished. Anyone who participates is celebrated. The barrel has replaced every apple it started with, and the new apples came pre-rotted because the barrel selects for rot. The Lucifer Effect does not say good people became bad. It says the system removed every reason bad people had to pretend they were good. And once they stopped pretending, they discovered they liked it. The cruelty felt like power. The hatred felt like purpose. The suffering of others felt like winning. And they could not wait. Sources Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House. Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973). The Mind is a Formidable Jailer: A Pirandellian Prison. The New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1973. Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97. 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

    Why Republican Rhetoric Keeps Producing Violence

    On October 27, 2018, a man walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven people during Sabbath morning services. In the weeks before the shooting, he had been consuming a steady stream of online content that described immigrants as invaders and Jewish organizations as the people funding the invasion. On August 3, 2019, a man drove ten hours to a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and executed 23 people. He posted a manifesto before the attack explaining that he was responding to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The language in his manifesto mirrored language used repeatedly by the President of the United States. On August 12, 2022, a man attacked an FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun and an AR-15. He did it days after Donald Trump posted on social media that the FBI was corrupt, weaponized, and out to get him. None of these attackers received a direct order. No one told them to pull a trigger. They were never contacted by anyone in power. They acted alone. But they all chose the same targets that a political leader had been publicly demonizing for months or years before they acted. Psychologists wanted to understand why this keeps happening. The Research In 2021, forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy and retired FBI behavioral analyst Molly Amman published a formal analysis in the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Terrorism. Meloy is a board-certified forensic psychologist and former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Amman spent her career at the FBI analyzing threats, extremism, and targeted violence. They were trying to answer a specific question. Why do lone wolf attackers keep appearing after political leaders demonize the same targets over and over? The leader never directly tells anyone to commit violence. But the violence keeps happening. To the same targets. Following the same rhetoric. With the same justifications. They wanted to understand the mechanism. What they found has a name. Stochastic Terrorism Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communication to repeatedly demonize a person or group in ways that make violence statistically predictable but individually impossible to trace back to the speaker. The word “stochastic” comes from statistics. It refers to a process that is random at the individual level but predictable at the population level. You cannot predict which specific person in an audience of millions will commit violence. But you can predict with near certainty that someone in that audience eventually will. The speaker never says go hurt someone. The speaker says these people are destroying your country. They are coming for your children. They are traitors. They are groomers. They are vermin. They are an invasion. The country is being stolen from you. Say it once and it is rhetoric. Say it every day, on every channel, to millions of people, for years, and it becomes something else entirely. The math is straightforward. If you expose millions of people to repeated dehumanization of the same target, the probability that someone in that audience decides to act on it approaches certainty. You do not need to give the order. You just need to keep talking. How It Works Meloy and Amman’s analysis identified the psychological pathway that connects public speech to private violence. It operates through a concept in linguistics called pragmatic inference. The speaker uses language that carries an implied meaning beyond its literal content. The speaker does not say “kill them.” The speaker says “they are destroying everything you love and no one is stopping them.” The implied conclusion, that someone needs to stop them, is left for the listener to complete on their own. This is what makes stochastic terrorism so effective and so difficult to prosecute. The speaker maintains plausible deniability at every step. They can always claim they were speaking metaphorically. They can always say they never told anyone to commit violence. And technically, at the level of literal language, they did not. But the pattern of outcomes tells a different story. Meloy and Amman also identified that this process accelerates dramatically in conditions of what they call large group regression, a state in which a political movement begins functioning psychologically like a group under siege. Nuance disappears. The world is divided into pure allies and existential threats. The leader becomes infallible. And the perceived enemy becomes less than human. The Pattern in Practice The incidents are not isolated. They form a pattern that maps directly onto the rhetoric that preceded them. In December 2016, a man drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., walked into a pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong, and fired an assault rifle inside the building. He was looking for a child trafficking ring that did not exist. The conspiracy theory, which claimed prominent Democrats were running a pedophile ring from the restaurant’s basement, had been amplified for weeks across social media and by political commentators aligned with the incoming Trump administration. The restaurant does not have a basement. In October 2018, a man mailed pipe bombs to fourteen prominent critics of Donald Trump, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and CNN. The targets corresponded precisely to the people Trump had been publicly attacking in rallies and on social media. In August 2019, the El Paso shooter drove ten hours to target a community Trump had repeatedly described as part of an “invasion.” His manifesto used the word “invasion” directly. In August 2022, the Cincinnati FBI attacker acted days after Trump publicly accused the FBI of corruption and political persecution following the search of Mar-a-Lago. In every case, the attacker chose targets that had been demonized by the same political leader or media ecosystem. In every case, the attacker believed they were defending the nation against a threat the leader had identified. In every case, the leader denied any connection. No order was given. Just the same words. Every day. On repeat. Until someone decided the words were not enough. The Deniability Problem This is the feature of stochastic terrorism that makes it so dangerous and so difficult to address through existing legal and institutional frameworks. The causal chain between speech and violence is real but indirect. It operates through probability, not instruction. The speaker can always say they did not mean it. The speaker can always say the attacker was mentally ill, a lone wolf, unconnected to their rhetoric. But the pattern is not random. The targets are not random. The timing is not random. And the language in the attackers’ own manifestos, social media posts, and statements to law enforcement consistently mirrors the language used by the political figures they follow. Meloy and Amman’s work establishes that this is not a coincidence and it is not a mystery. It is a statistically describable phenomenon with identifiable precursors, predictable dynamics, and a documented body count. The Current State The rhetoric has not slowed. It has escalated. Trump has called Democrats “the enemy from within” and said they should be handled “if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” He has called them “vermin” who need to be “rooted out.” He has described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country” and as “animals” who are “infesting” the nation. Fox News, Newsmax, and an ecosystem of aligned social media accounts amplify these characterizations to millions of people every day. The dehumanization is constant, systematic, and directed at the same targets. Under the framework Meloy and Amman established, this is not political speech that may hypothetically lead to violence at some point in the future. It is the exact communication pattern that has already produced violence, repeatedly, with a documented trail connecting rhetoric to action. The speaker never said do it. The speaker created the conditions where someone eventually decided to do it for them. That is what stochastic terrorism is. And it is happening in plain sight. Sources Molly Amman and J. Reid Meloy, “Stochastic Terrorism: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis,” Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume 15, Issue 5, October 2021 Molly Amman and J. Reid Meloy, “Incitement to Violence and Stochastic Terrorism: Legal, Academic, and Practical Parameters for Researchers and Investigators,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 2022 Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij, “The Age of the Lone Wolf Terrorist,” Columbia University Press, 2017 FBI Criminal Complaint, United States v. Sayoc, October 2018 (pipe bomb mailings) Patrick Crusius manifesto and El Paso shooting investigation, FBI and Department of Justice, August 2019 FBI investigation of Ricky Shiffer, Cincinnati FBI field office attack, August 2022 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. Sep 11

    Conservatives Pretend To Be Things They Aren’t

    There is a difference between being something and wearing the costume. A strong person doesn’t need a Punisher sticker on their truck. A smart person doesn’t need to use big words they can’t define. An athletic person doesn’t need to wear someone else’s jersey to feel like an athlete. A patriotic person doesn’t need a flag the size of a bedsheet hanging off the back of their house. People who are the thing don’t need to advertise it. People who are not the thing can’t stop advertising it. That pattern is not random. There is decades of research explaining exactly why it happens, who it happens to, and why the symbols never stop getting louder. What Wicklund Found In 1982, psychologist Robert Wicklund at the University of Texas at Austin, along with his colleague Peter Gollwitzer, published research on what happens when people feel a gap between who they are and who they want to be. They were studying what they called self-defining goals. These are not ordinary goals like losing weight or learning to cook. These are identity goals. The kind of person you want to be at your core. Strong. Intelligent. Masculine. Patriotic. Moral. Successful. The things that form the foundation of how you see yourself and how you want others to see you. Wicklund and Gollwitzer found that when people feel incomplete in a self-defining area, they do not respond by doing the work required to close the gap. They respond by acquiring symbols that represent the identity they have not earned. They called it symbolic self-completion. A person who wants to be seen as masculine but doesn’t feel masculine will buy the boots, the truck, the gear. A person who wants to be seen as intelligent but hasn’t done the work will buy the books, share the quotes, display the credentials of other people. A person who wants to be seen as tough but knows they are not will put a skull decal on their vehicle and a tactical flashlight on their belt. None of those symbols make the person more masculine, more intelligent, or more tough. But the brain doesn’t care. The symbol fills the gap temporarily. It provides a shortcut to the feeling of being complete without requiring any of the effort that actual completeness demands. Wicklund found that the bigger the gap between who you are and who you want to be, the more aggressively you pursue the symbols. The louder the costume gets. The more flags, the more stickers, the more hats, the more yard signs. The volume is not a measure of commitment. It is a measure of the gap. The Social Recognition Trap But the most devastating finding in Wicklund and Gollwitzer’s research was not about the symbols themselves. It was about what happens when other people acknowledge them. The theory showed that self-completion efforts require social recognition to work. The symbols are not for the person wearing them. They are for the audience watching. Wicklund and Gollwitzer found that the sense of progress toward a self-defining goal is dependent on the acknowledgment of others. You don’t feel complete by putting on the hat alone in your bedroom. You feel complete when someone else sees the hat and treats you like the person the hat represents. Follow-up research made the finding even worse. When a person’s symbolic display is socially acknowledged, when people like the post, comment on the flag, affirm the identity, the person experiences a premature sense of completeness. Their brain registers the acknowledgment as evidence that they have already become the thing they are pretending to be. And once that sense of completeness kicks in, the motivation to actually do the work disappears. The symbol doesn’t just cover the gap. It prevents the gap from ever closing. Every time someone likes their flag photo on social media, the brain registers patriotism achieved. Every time someone affirms their political post, the brain registers intelligence confirmed. Every time someone compliments the truck or the tactical gear or the MAGA hat, the brain registers strength validated. And every time that happens, the actual effort required to become strong, intelligent, or patriotic becomes less likely. The symbol did its job. The brain is satisfied. Why would you do the hard thing when the easy thing already feels like the real thing? This is why MAGA supporters accumulate symbols at a rate that looks pathological to everyone outside the group. The hat. The shirt. The flag. The bumper stickers. The profile picture. The yard sign. The truck wrap. The coffee mug. The phone case. The belt buckle. Each symbol is a deposit into an identity bank account that has no real balance. And each one, once acknowledged by the group, makes it less likely that the person will ever do the actual work of becoming the thing they claim to be. The Costume Economy Now look at what MAGA actually consumes and ask yourself whether any of it is real. They watch WWE, which is scripted fighting. Not because they love martial arts or combat sports. Because real fighting has consequences, and scripted fighting lets you feel the thrill of victory without the risk of getting hit. They watch Fox News, which has been proven in court to broadcast content its own hosts did not believe was true. Not because they want accurate information. Because real news challenges their worldview, and Fox tells them what they already believe. They cover themselves in military imagery despite never having served. Not because they support the troops in any material way. Because the symbols of military toughness fill the gap left by never having actually done anything difficult or dangerous. They plaster their trucks with American flags and patriotic slogans while supporting politicians who attack the democratic institutions those symbols are supposed to represent. The flag is not about the country. The flag is about the feeling the flag gives them. Everything they consume is a costume. And Wicklund’s research explains exactly why. Every item in the costume is a symbol that covers a gap. And the more gaps there are, the more symbols are required. Why the Costume Gets Louder E. Tory Higgins, a psychologist at Columbia University, published research in 1987 on what he called self-discrepancy theory. His work identified three versions of the self that exist in every person’s mind. The actual self, which is who you really are. The ideal self, which is who you want to be. And the ought self, which is who you believe you should be based on external expectations. Higgins found that when the gap between the actual self and the ideal self grows too large, the result is depression and disappointment. The person feels deflated. They feel like a failure. When the gap between the actual self and the ought self grows too large, the result is anxiety and agitation. The person feels like they are falling short of what is expected of them. Both of those emotional responses drive the same behavior Wicklund identified. The person does not close the gap through effort. The person reaches for symbols. And here is the critical connection. The emotional distress caused by the gap is ongoing. It does not go away when the symbol is acquired. The symbol provides temporary relief, the same way scratching an itch provides temporary relief, but the underlying condition remains. So the person needs more symbols. And louder symbols. And bigger symbols. And more visible symbols. That is why the flags keep getting bigger. That is why the bumper stickers cover the entire tailgate. That is why they need you to see the hat, the shirt, the yard sign, and the profile picture all at the same time. Each symbol provides a smaller and shorter hit of relief because the gap underneath it is growing, not shrinking. The more symbols they accumulate, the further they get from doing the actual work. What Is Underneath the Costume Strip away the flags and the stickers and the hats and the jerseys and the merch and the profile pictures and the yard signs and you find the same thing every time. A person who wanted to be strong and isn’t. A person who wanted to be smart and isn’t. A person who wanted to matter and doesn’t. A person who wanted to be respected and hasn’t done anything worth respecting. The symbols are not proof they are that person. The symbols are proof they are not that person. You never see a real fighter wearing a WWE shirt to the store. You never see a real soldier covering his truck in military stickers. You never see a real athlete walking around in someone else’s jersey on his day off. You never see a genuinely intelligent person trying to impress you with vocabulary they can’t use correctly. People who are the thing do not need to advertise it. Their lives are the proof. MAGA’s entire identity is cosplay. And underneath every costume is the same thing. Weak people pretending to be something they are not. And getting further from the real thing every time they put on another piece of the costume. Sources Wicklund, R. A., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1982). Symbolic Self-Completion. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gollwitzer, P. M., Wicklund, R. A., & Hilton, J. L. (1982). Admission of Failure and Symbolic Self-Completion: Extending Lewinian Theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(2), 358-371. Gollwitzer, P. M., Sheeran, P., Michalski, V., & Seifert, A. E. (2009). When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap? Psychological Science, 20(5), 612-618. Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect. Psychological Review, 94(3), 319-340. Braun, O. L., & Wicklund, R. A. (1989). Psychological Antecedents of Conspicuous Consumption. Journal of Economic Psychology, 10(2), 161-187. Longoni, C., Gollwitzer, P. M., & Oettingen, G. (2014). A Green Paradox: Validating Green Choices Has Ironic Effects on Behavior, Cognition, and Perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 40-46. This is a public episode

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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

Information

  • Creator
    Lucas Bean
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    182
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Lucas Bean
  • Show Website
    The Lucas Bean Show

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