Fight Like An Animal

We've looked at some of the psychological traits that correlate with ideology, but what about those that don't? Considering the tendency for systems of power to behave the same regardless of their overt ideology, what should we know about the psychology of power? We look at scales of empathy (or lack thereof), manipulativeness, sense of connection to the world, and more.  

Having described innate psychological tendencies associated with other political perspectives, in this interview we examine what makes an environmentalist. Ken Ward describes his path through professional environmentalism and direct action, the values he encountered among liberals and leftists, and how they are in conflict with ecological survival...

Having described the right-left spectrum in psychological terms, we will now examine the psychology of the liberal, an entity sometimes described as moderately left who has no real counterpart on the right. We will ask why the violence-nonviolence binary has proven so consistently psychologically seductive but also so destructive to social movements...

Here we conclude our discussion of the biology of the right-left divide. We discuss how developmental delay shaped human evolution and how aggression and its correlated traits map elegantly to right-left politics. We also talk about the problem of self-referentiality and the capacity for hyper-technological societies to amplify cognitive bias, setting a foundation for future discussions of what the biology of human political conflict implies.

Having described the idiosyncratic collection of traits associated with variation in political outlook in humans, we will now look at the biology of aggression, and how it is correlated with a very similar set of traits. This will lay the foundation to ask the question: is political difference a reflection of differences between people in the biology of aggression?

We will explore the science of political difference, the cross-cultural durability of the right-left divide, the idiosyncratic collection of traits that correlate with ideological difference, and lay the foundations for a theory of where political conflict ultimately comes from.