The political divide between the Left and the Right in America (as well as all other Western nations) is growing wider by the day. This should be a major concern to everybody; first of all, because an inability to communicate makes violence inevitable (and we’ve certainly been seeing a growth in intra-American violence lately) and second, because an inability to communicate means an inability to coordinate. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the only actors on the stage: while these two halves of the body politic fight amongst themselves, other interests – foreign, corporate, criminal – can take advantage of the situation to impose their own interests on the American public. Political polarization is an existential threat to the West, and it demands an explanation.
This article starts with two premises: first, that political orientation is substantially influenced by personality, specifically the Big Five Personality Traits; this is a premise which has been thoroughly studied, and should not be controversial. But while the variations in these traits explain party alignment, they fail to explain the current polarization. Presumably we’ve always had a mix of personalities along these five axis, why should it suddenly result in such a substantial divide?
The second premise is that it has been the Left which is growing more radical, while the Right holds to the same values it held in the 1980s (if anything, today’s conservative is more tolerant of minorities than his 1980s counterpart). Discerning this from the data is difficult, because Pew’s measurements only contrast the current Left to the current Right; while this demonstrates the growing divide, it doesn’t indicate which side is moving. Even on matters of policy, if America has been legislating for the Left, it is inevitable that the Right will start to push back harder, just to get back to where things used to be. Their values haven’t changed; the situation has changed. Which side is acting, and which side is reacting?
To identify which side has radicalized, a cursory glance at political platforms will suffice. When looking at issues such as gay marriage, immigration, privacy, and social spending, most Democrat politicians (Barrack Obama, Bill Clinton) have made public statements, some as recently as ten years ago, which would have them condemned as ‘Nazis’ today; and the policies advocated for by Donald Trump are strikingly moderate by historical standards, and yet are causing hysteria amongst his opponents.
This article aims to answer the question of why he Left has grown so radical, particularly over the past ten years. It will present the hypothesis that Social Media is what’s driving this insanity, primarily through the radicalization and segregation of Liberals into online echo chambers, which are specifically designed to prey on their neuroticism.
Political Orientation and the Big Five
The Big Five Personality Traits are one of psychology’s most consistent and predictive theories. It breaks down personality along five axis:
- Openness to experience (inventive/curious consistent/cautious)
- Conscientiousness (efficient/organized easy-going/careless)
- Extroversion (outgoing/energetic solitary/reserved)
- Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate challenging/detached)
- Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous secure/confident)
Where one falls along these axis can predict a number of things, of interest here is its relevance to political orientation. The research thus far has only looked at how personality relates to the two political parties, the Republicans and Democrats. I’ve expanded it to include other important political alignments, although this is entirely based upon my own personal observations.
The Old Model
It used to be that your political orientation could be explained by two of the five traits: Openness and Conscientiousness. Conservatives are low in the first and high in the second, while liberals are the inverse. For an intuitive understanding of this, Mike Judge’s King of the Hill provides an excellent, if somewhat partisan, depiction. The boring but well-organized Hank Hill is your stereotypical conservative, while the exciting but disorganized antagonists are the stereotypical liberals.
This old system created an interesting quirk: the two groups that didn’t fit in, because they were either high in Openness and Conscientiousness, or low in both. Respectively, these are the Right Libertarians and the Left Libertarians:
If you’ve ever wondered why the Libertarian movement never got anywhere, this is your explanation: it was a group composed of two completely opposite personality types. On the one hand, you have the ‘capitalist’ who loves adventuring and trying out ethnic cuisine (Hank Hill might approve of his work ethic, but he can’t stand the Jazz music he listens to), and the ‘degenerate’ who won’t take responsibility for organizing himself, but who’s terrified of doing anything he hasn’t done before. It’s the latter group that wound up dominating the party machinery, working to undermine Ron Paul’s presidential bid just as much as the GOP establishment.
To explain their alignment – most Right Libertarians vote Conservative, most Left Libertarians vote Liberal – requires the introduction of a third trait, Neuroticism. While not the primary motivator of political alignment, Conservatives are typically far less Neurotic than Liberals. Thus the Left Libertarians devolved into neurotic, fearful, messy, fat men stripping down on stage.
The Expanded Alignments
Since the Libertarian collapse, two new movements have been growing: the Alt Right (Dissident Right, MAGA, Online Right) and the Alt Left (Regressive Left, Social Justice Left). Where do we find these groups, compared to the old ones?
Previously, we ignored Agreeableness (and Extroversion is still irrelevant); now it becomes an important distinction.
The Alt Right is primarily defined by their low Neuroticism, and their low Agreeableness. They’re confident in themselves, and they aren’t afraid to tell somebody that they’re wrong. In other words, they’re loudmouth assholes. They also seem to lean towards the well-organized, conscientious side of things, and they’re ambivalent in their Openness (some of them date transsexuals, others are traditionalists).
The Alt Left, meanwhile, is highly neurotic – they go into a panic over any perceived threat – and they’re highly agreeable – they want everybody to get along. This combination creates a demand for a nanny state, where your opinion is mandatory (so that everybody gets along), and if you dare to disagree, expect an overreaction. On top of this they seem to be low Conscientiousness (their propensity to create ‘poop swastikas’ is but one example), and as for Openness, like the Alt Right they’re a mixed bag: some of them embrace transsexuals, others demand women pussy front-hole only spaces.
The above graph demonstrates why these disparate groups align with one another the way they do, but it doesn’t explain the polarization. For that, we need to look at the technology which saw widespread adoption ten years ago, shortly before the polarization began: Social Media
The Personalities of Social Media
The study “Who interacts on the Web?: The intersection of users’ personality and social media use” sums up the data for us (note: the effects sizes are small, but significant; these are the sorts of effects which compound rapidly, so a small initial divergence will result in a massively different outcome). There are three main takeaways:
- Social Media attracts the Extroverted (unsurprising),
- Social Media attracts the Neurotic,
- Social Media is negatively correlated to life satisfaction.
As the study dates from 2010 – prior to the progressive waves of censorship – it is likely that the degree of Neuroticism levels have increased since that time, as those of the conservative temperaments have been pushed off, one by one. Furthermore – those who align Left report that they’re more likely to block an acquaintance over differing political views. So we’ve found the Left’s echo chamber: it’s their endless social media stream, delivered to them moment by moment on their smart phones.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. In my last post I argued that Social Media is designed to be a Histrionic gas lighting chamber. To briefly reiterate: a Histrionic is a Cluster B personality disorder who seeks affect by becoming the ‘peace maker’ in their social group; but to do this, they first need to have conflict. They accomplish this by whispering rumours to all around them, until everybody they know is exploding with anger at one another, while they remain the eye of the storm.
You can see this effect writ large on Social Media. Every time you log in, you’re inundated with status updates which are designed to cause shock and outrage in you. Unlike the walled-garden of an Internet forum – which will primarily focus on topics you’re interested in, rather than topics which upset you – Social Media throws everybody into one place, Liberals and Conservatives, men and women, cats and dogs – and then the obvious happens. People start fighting.
Social Media is intentionally designed to create this effect, so that those who run things can ‘save the day’ by imposing arbitrary speech codes. Politics has nothing to do with it, except by accident… until you realize what sort of political orientation is most attracted to it.
As noted above, the Alt Left (and to a lesser degree Democrats in general) score high in Neuroticism. Neurotic people are those most attracted to Social Media, out of their constant worries about what everybody else is thinking. They’re the least likely to listen to the ‘other side of the story’, and they’re the most easily manipulated by Histrionic gas lighting (those who are low in Neuroticism don’t care what others are saying about them). Thus, the perfect storm: Social Media has been weaponized against those who are most likely to use it, those who are neurotypally of the Alt Left or Democrat persuasion, and it’s being done in such a way to make them blame everyone other than the person who’s responsible for whipping them into a frenzy.
Social Media is driving the Left insane, pushing them into hysterical echo chambers, and detaching them from reality. The Leftist bent of Social Media isn’t because of the politics of the controllers; it’s because of the personality traits of those who are most easily manipulated by those controllers.
The Future of Social Media
At present, China is experimenting with their social media site Sesame Credit. They’re expanding it beyond what we have in the West, they’re using it to measure your social credit as a citizen, with privileges and punishments connected to your score. While this has brought on comparisons to Black Mirrorand 1984 amongst Westerners, let’s give China the benefit of the doubt. The Communist legacy and punitive legal regime in China have eroded the social trust of the citizenry, and as a result low-level corruption, low-quality construction, and even turning a blind eye to accident victims in need of help, are all regular occurrences there. One of the goals of Sesame Credit is to create incentives for pro-social behaviour, to recreate the sort of norms which were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But if what I have argued here is correct, then it’s a project which is doomed to failure.
Social Media serves no purpose aside from turning Neurotics hysterical; the political polarization in the West demonstrates this. The West implemented these systems (through government funding of Google and Facebook) for the sake of monitoring and controlling their populations; instead, what they’ve created is a population that’s juvenile, furious, and polarized. In other words, in their quest for control, they lost all control. Sesame Credit is likewise doomed to failure. Rather than encourage pro-social behaviour, it will result in mass hysteria; it will manifest along different social lines than here in the West, but its character will be the same: masses of insane people demanding that the witches be set aflame.
As for us Westerners, finding a path out of this morass will be difficult. The one thing the Left desperately needs – exposure to people on the Right, so that they can realize that they’re not the Nazi Demons they think they are – is precisely what won’t happen, as they disappear deeper into their Social Media echo chamber of delusion. For those of us who haven’t fallen into this pit, there’s little that we can do. Arguing with a delusional Neurotic will only confirm their delusions; the best we can hope for is that the constant outrages burns them out (there are some signs that this may be happening), or that the Social Media companies thumb their noses at the citizenry one time too many, and are finally dismantled..
When it comes to Social Media, the only winning move is not to play.