Psychology and Politics Links Links, 9/22/2025

Tove K on politics of psychiatry; Randolph Nesse on psychology of politics; Rob Kurzban on mass moral outrage; Lorenzo Warby on status-quo conservatism; Pamela Paretsky on violence and ideology

Tove K writes,

psychiatry is glaringly deficient because it prioritizes what the public prefers to believe about human nature over what science says about human nature. For that reason, psychiatry is most of all effective in the biochemical sphere, where there is no direct competition with politics. As long as psychiatrists act like any doctors and ask patients about their condition and just give them medicine, they constitute no threat to the political order. As soon as psychiatrists start talking seriously with their patients, they will be competing with all the people who think they know how humans are. That is, people who think they know how humans are because they know what is the best way to run the society they are living in. From what I have seen of psychiatry so far, it looks like most psychiatry professionals meekly bend to the politically correct view of human nature of the day without even noticing that they are doing so.

Her main point is that psychiatrists resist diagnosing someone as delusional, because the error of making that diagnosis incorrectly is important to avoid. It makes me think of type I and type II errors—the more you avoid one type of error, the more you errors you make of the other type.

Randolph Nesse writes,

People who have a tendency to engage in mutual admiration behavior with in-group members, who conform to, believe in, and advocate and work for the ideology of the in-group against the interests of other groups, have almost certainly have had a selective advantage over people who tend to be more objective. Subjectivity and the emotions that fuel it are not flaws, but adaptations.

Myside bias. He argues that constructive engagement is much less natural.

Rob Kurzban writes,

some strategic claims are accepted gullibly because they allow people to indulge in a nearly limitless appetite: join in a moralistic attack.

Someone is making a strategic claim when they are arguing for a proposition that helps them. It’s like talking up a stock that you own. Kurzban is saying that ordinarily we treat skeptically a claim that we suspect is strategic. But when we can join in a moralizing mob, we drop our skepticism. He calls this form of unreason thugistry.

We’re all thugs, just waiting for the chance to attack whoever or whatever gets painted with an accusation.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Inferring too much from the advances in civil rights helped to metastasise the Open Society consensus into an attack on boundaries in general and so on the sinews of social cohesion.

To all of these trends, status quo conservatism represented nothing more than a slow-motion surrender. The lack of a social order conservatism willing to wrestle with all these complexities has proved disastrous.

I think that the issue that divides conservatives the most is how much cultural change to accept (conserve) and how much to try to roll back. Is it enough to roll back gender-affirming care for minors and affirmative action? Or should the aim be to roll back feminism and gay marriage? Or to go all the way back before the Enlightenment, and say that everything starting with John Locke needs to be rolled back?

Warby’s essay deserves more analysis, which I may give in a subsequent post. He covers much ground, even including this:

Economist Arnold Kling’s famous schema of the three languages of politics talks of conservatism as operating on an civilisation versus barbarism moral axis. That may have been the language, but it has not been the politics, otherwise the march through the institutions of a socially and institutionally corrosive progressivism would never have got anywhere near as far as it has.

Pamela Paretsky writes,

NCRI’s analysis revealed that this support for political violence correlates strongly with Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA),* a construct that includes moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion in pursuit of political aims. It also correlates with an external locus of control, the belief that one’s fate is primarily shaped by forces outside one’s own influence.

Reminds me of a book review that I wrote.

substacks referenced above: @

Charlie Kirk and The Rise of Assassination Culture

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Thuggistry

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Which conservatism?

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Why constructive engagement is rare

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The Madness Taboo