Political Psychology Links, 3/3/2026

Conor Fitzgerald on demographic change; Nigel Biggar on intellectual virtues; Thomas Peermohamed Lambert on elite secrecy; Steve Stewart-Williams on recent findings concerning sex differences

Conor Fitzgerald writes,

There is some kind of mind-blindness at play that is stopping powerful people from acknowledging that there are limits to how much change you can demand of people, and that there are psychological costs to changing the demographics of a society. I think it is that human tendency to deny that issues whose roots are worth taking seriously, or exist at all.

…The tendency to overvalue that which can be directly measured, and undervalue that which can’t, is a human problem that doesn’t just impact government bureaucrats. Even people who argue against mass immigration will constantly retreat to the safe territory of resource management, because we have the language to express dissatisfaction on those subjects. But the real trigger for dissatisfaction is often the upheaval and psychological disruption caused by the fact of these changes, and the scale of them, and not how the changes are being managed.

…a managerial and technocratic (and quietly shallow) culture that regards non-material factors as a flimsy distraction we can afford to ignore; but they aren’t, and we can’t. The public needs to find a better way of expressing that; representatives of the system need to find a way of hearing it.

Nigel Biggar writes,

we should exercise the virtue of courage. To be temperate, respectful, careful, patient, charitable, humble, docile, and thoughtful also makes us vulnerable. That is because, by allowing another person to express their disagreement clearly, we may find some of our most cherished convictions are challenged, threatened, or even overturned. And bound up with those convictions may be a career’s worth of reputation, rewards, and accumulated social status. It is brave, indeed, to give another person the freedom to speak clearly.

He is asking professors to model and teach these virtues. If we don’t, who will?

He is an interesting public intellectual, and he has a new book.

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert writes,

Secret societies are not just a vestige of older, quirkier times; they remain one of the most empirically sound explanations we have for why groups that have hitherto been bound together by bonds of community and family suddenly explode into hierarchy. Indeed, they are perhaps best thought of as social technologies for creating hierarchies.

our most venerable institutions do seem very good at devising ways of getting their members ensnared in a web of each other’s humiliating secrets, even without an Epstein to orchestrate it all.

The article presents a dark, conspiratorial view of elites binding together in secret rituals, and I am not a fan of such. But I hesitate to dismiss it altogether. I was reminded of Robert Skidelsky’s descriptions in his biography of Keynes of the Cambridge Apostles, which stuck with me as very disturbing.

Steve Stewart-Williams writes,

A recent US survey reports surprisingly high tolerance for political violence on both sides of the political spectrum - and an unexpected sex difference: Women are more likely than men to say murdering a politician is sometimes justified.

I fear that if women want more war, then men will become more warlike.

Have a nice day.

substacks referenced above: @

The Psychological Toll of Constant Demographic Change

@

Mars and Venus Revisited

substacks referenced above:

@

The Psychological Toll of Constant Demographic Change