I've always been of two minds about surveys; (Self-)deception is just too strong. There is no reason to believe that a person who is lying a lot IRL isn't lying when filling out a survey; Worse yet, there is no reason to believe that person is even honest to themselves or fully aware of the degree of their own dishonesty.
At the current political moment, I see this most clearly when it comes to "combating disinformation". Strictly speaking, who doesn't support that? Yet, I don't. The problem isn't the idea, it's the practice: It's mostly used to shut up inconvenient voices on technicalities, while the favored voices can usually get away with blatant lies as long as they have some fig leaf to hide behind.
This is what I think when I see "honesty" as an item on one side. It's certainly the side that wants (you) to believe that they're honest. Are they? Hard to say. IRL it's not rare at all for the person who says that lies are sometimes justifiable to be more truthful than the person who claims that you should never lie.
In support of the article, I've been saying for some time now that the current left, similar to other idealistic/religious dogmas, has become the side of "sounds nice, doesn't work". What I want is, obviously, "sounds nice, and works". But if that's not an option, I'll rather settle for "works, but isn't nice".
> I've always been of two minds about surveys; (Self-)deception is just too strong. There is no reason to believe that a person who is lying a lot IRL isn't lying when filling out a survey; Worse yet, there is no reason to believe that person is even honest to themselves or fully aware of the degree of their own dishonesty.
That is a rational view. However, if it were correct, then:
* Self report data wouldn't show moderate heritability,
* Self report data wouldn't correlate with other-report, and
No, all of those three are things I'd expect. The deception you seem to have in mind is the psychopathic style, where someone lies to you but really wants to betray you in an obvious way. That is of course bad and used to be a big problem, but we have mostly conquered that in the west IMO. The deception I am more worried about nowadays is more like a nice-sounding brand optimized for great PR that hides its problems behind a sufficiently convoluted mess so that it's easy for even members to ignore and/or deny them.
It's like the McKinsey advisor who talks third world companies into regenerative energies using sketchy stats and claims the primary problem is a legacy of racism & colonialism. And the companies really do become successful afterwards, but not because it works so well but because it guarantees them a stream of endless easy western money. And the governments and NGOs who give them the money will point to McKinsey to claim that obviously, they have to have sound business plans, it was designed by experts! The end result is a black hole that can eat indefinite amounts of money with little good outcomes except financing legions of advisors, managers, social workers and employees.
Or more simply for each point:
- Almost everything is moderately heritable.
- The entire point of deception is to deceive others.
- The most substantive point IMO. However, objective outcomes in studies I've seen so far just aren't really designed to detect this. Obviously the kind of person who really believes they're nice and honest (and who really wants everyone to believe they're nice and honest) won't blatantly cheat you out of money just because they're in a situation where they might plausibly assume nobody is watching them. Their style of deception is much more longterm and holistic than a shortterm experiment like that can account for. Instead, no matter how good a society is, they will reliably find some alleged social problem that they are fighting against, which will just-so-happen to require everyone to give them lots of money & power.
> The deception I am more worried about nowadays is more like a nice-sounding brand optimized for great PR that hides its problems behind a sufficiently convoluted mess so that it's easy for even members to ignore and/or deny them.
I do see that you're passionate about this and have thought deeply about it, but I understood this as broadly being your view to begin with. Whether we are checking outcomes like being married, divorced, caught cheating on exams, languishing in prison, making unusually large amounts of money, or whatever, these self report inventories predict them. They also predict what others say, and are subatantially heritable; therefore they do work. Thus, we do have good reason to take people who score high in Honesty as more honest than those who score low in Honesty.
However, if you're rather trying to suggest "I'm not interested surveys, I'm more interested in, you know, the other stuff in my comments" then hey, we can talk about that! Obviously both alexythemia and self deception can play a role in allowing us (as organisms driven by evolutionary principles) to pursue goals that were successful in our ancestral history, or even random goals that result from mutations and predictive errors.
Wow, this is incredible. It is the type of post which I believe has the potential to dramatically shift conversations. How can we make it more popular? I have been thinking about it for a while and indeed I concur that it seems to more accurately model the observed politics of people.
I'm glad you found it interesting! But truthfully, I'm not concerned about what most people think; remember, most people will tell me I can't divide by zero in the same way the Ancient Greeks insisted there were no negative numbers.
Lest you think this is just me being a cranky old man, be aware that I *still* can't get young dummies to stop insisting to me "Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors" in real life even after showing them printer cartriges or handing them a prism. So far as I can determine, the best way to get people talking about Tough-Mindedness is to convince Jordan Peterson, Scott Alexander, or, better, their fifth grade teacher, to explain it to them, and that's just not my thing. (If it's your thing, hey, knock yourself out!)
I agree the best way to get people to talk about it would be to convince people with big reaches. If politicalcompass.org included it then it would eventually diffuse into the culture too. The idealistic part of me (haha) likes to imagine that if more people had this accurate map then the world would just be that little bit better off.
What is your definition of primary color? A quick google search reveals that the ordinary definition is "Red, Yellow, and Blue." I know what the electromagnetic spectrum looks like, and maybe a definition based on that would be better. But this is just semantics, no? I am reminded of when I used to think that "The Midwest" referred to the slightly-west-of-middle part of the United States - it doesn't.
I found your argument thought-provoking, especially your insights on tender-minded projection and the importance of acknowledging fundamental differences in perception and reasoning.
Your call for intellectual humility—“If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?”—is a valuable approach to political discourse.
That said, I think the argument could be strengthened by addressing a few points:
1. Cognitive Biases Exist on Both Sides
You argue that tender-minded individuals assume too much similarity, leading to naivety. But tough-minded individuals are also prone to distortions, particularly negativity bias, which can lead to excessive distrust and overestimation of threats (Hibbing, Smith & Alford, 2014). If tender-mindedness risks naivety, doesn’t tough-mindedness risk cynicism?
2. Political Views Can Change
Your discussion of heritability in political attitudes is compelling, but history shows that ideology is shaped by material conditions and crises:
• Post-WWII Germany & Japan embraced liberal democracy after militarism.
• The Great Depression shifted views on state intervention.
If political beliefs were purely biologically driven, we wouldn’t see such shifts. How do you reconcile personality-driven ideology with historical transformations?
3. Tender-Mindedness Can Be Pragmatic
You frame tough-minded realism as practical and tender-mindedness as naive, yet history shows tender-minded policies can be strategically effective:
• The Marshall Plan prevented the spread of communism without war.
• Portugal’s drug decriminalization led to lower addiction rates and crime.
If tough-mindedness leads to realism, what happens when tender-minded policies outperform tough-minded ones?
4. The Limits of Dialogue
Your argument promotes understanding ideological differences, but not all viewpoints are reconcilable:
• A democracy cannot function if one side denies elections.
• Not all perspectives deserve legitimacy—science denial, racism, and authoritarianism must be actively opposed.
• Bad-faith actors exist—some use political discourse as a weapon rather than engaging honestly.
Where do you see the boundary between productive debate and the need to reject certain ideas outright?
I’d love to hear your thoughts—especially on how you see realism, pragmatism, and ideology interacting.
Eysenck liked exploring; people who explore rapidly find themselves climbing over the bars that hold everyone else in conventional reality. The hard part isn't leaving the cage, it's finding a way to get back in and talk to people inside without them freaking out about where you've been.
> I always wondered if the political compass would survive principal component analysis. Nope!
To be fair, they're not *that* far wrong at the political compass - I have successfully recovered a dimension of attitudes under factor analysis that's recognizable as libertarianism. It's just that libertarianism always shows up after Toughmindedness... and even then, the libertarianism I recover is a bit different from what they say it is.
I read that and liked it a lot, even tried to share it with a few people. I might drop a link on Astral Codex Ten, they're into this sort of 'politically non-binary' thing and a lot of them actually have the math background to get what you're talking about.
Hm, I was hoping that would give you what you needed. The truth is that I *do* have factor loadings for a larger study, but, I'm reluctant to spread it around. I'll think about it; maybe I'm just being over cautious and there's no reason not to post the results.
Eh, maybe you have your reasons. If you are doing this is a hobby and fear doxxing, for instance, you may not want a very popular Substack. You probably didn't obtain the consent forms to publish it (just ask Aella). You can certainly scrub the free-response bits and any geographic info so nobody's identifiable.
A fascinating (and chaotic) map of ideological intersections. Some of these connections feel spot-on, others seem like a stretch. What's the source behind this?
Ordinary people do have a mix of values they endorse and reject. Frankly I take it as a sign a person thinks about things, considers the opinions of others around them, and reacts to experience. Accepting a package deal can force a person to swallow a lot of strange things.
But on the other hand, how many attitudes do you really endorse in the upper left corners of any of these maps? I'd be surprised if you agreed with more than four or five statements from the tough-left.
It isn’t on the left and right that I vary, it’s up and down. On the right side of the map there are things I agree with on the upper part and things I agree with on the lower part.
People are different but tough-minded people never pick up on the differences that are there, but some imaginary ontology or classification system or series of folk catgeories near at hand or hatred. But then they are emotionally lazy so why would they bother being accurate??
I feel the work of Mary Douglas (English Africanist anthropologist and Catholic hierarchist) is a much better lead on this,
Mostly because it maps the quadrant described in your post, to perceptions of risk (of nature, of morality) and provides are better framework than purely psych-based mappings even if the link in her work between individual choice/bias and how institutions think is not fully developed (I read her work in the late 90s within a framework of complexity and chaos theories so I just lumped that in.
I've recently been reading up on her work as a bit of a back log, just finished the Fardon 1999 "An intellectual biography " for example, not yet blogged, but will be added to:
In other news I feel that any system to structure society would work if we policed narcissism better rather than attack those narcissists denigrate in order to rile and rule. (this makes me a meta-anarchist, I just made that up).
That Machiavellian gloss in the research you mentioned I see as support for this view.
I can tell you read the article, but either you glossed over the conclusion, or you disagree with the conclusion. What if I re-express it like this?
"This is what we are: not the same, but different. While a gentle and optimistic response to that difference is commendable, the way I’d expect that response to look is less like a series of insults about narcissism and emotional laziness, and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?"
"and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?"
when I read _Thought Styles_ by Mary Douglas in about 1999. This was just before I started a Social Ecology masters and most of my fellow students were counsellors and PTDS psychs etc, who had come along to be 'socialised' as we joked about it, "we just need to start saying we" we said
(back when pronouns were not part of some identitarian caste system and were mostly used to indicate who was saying what to whom as personable location in space, i.e. human prepositions about POV & language facility).
Your question reworded, or at least it's equivalent form for me from my POV, "we are all biased in a compositional foundation sense, <*light globe*> so how are we to get along" has been with me for three decades.
Generally it requires empathy or at least acknowledgement of another's POV. This inform the meta-anarchist comments. That is a hindsight comment. (Using Ardrey's use of Petter's use of the French _noyaux_ for the social area we have an urge to socialise in is another https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/robert-ardreys-the-territorial-imperative )
In that time both at work and in living in a cohousing co-operative the biggest issues in doing that have been with narcissists and psychopaths, and a lesser extent with low affect psychopaths. While they are a part of the human fabric _we_ have in recent years been really bad in regulating them. They do not self-regulate because they lack empathy, or at least did not (could not)(can not) successfully get through what Freud called the reality principle and I would call the world-self ratio of the Janus Dance which is what self-regulation is all about.
Thus I propose that _any_ other preferences we _each_ might have (((((as you outline via Hans Eysenck, or, as I suggest, Mary Douglas) and any social structure they may thus indicate a preference for (and later tribalised or religionised into a _habitus_ or _worldviews_ or _life-project_ or _narrative_ which are then available as a choice in a market based individualist economy - trad societies have less options on offer)))))) do not matter as much as narcissists baleful influence such that we get a return to history as one damn thing after another.
With this question, which requires empathy to ask, "and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?" will fail in its project if, out of humanity, we do not regulate our human failures. (Please quote me on that when people accuse me of being a moral relativist when discussing Mary Douglas' ideas in an even handed manner).
I say this as a tender-hearted soul who has learned people, most people, do not like toughening up until the last minute and this can too often be too late, and thus fail to toughen up and police those who would rush us, rile us and thus rule us, and that whatever systemic failings any system or narrative might have, they would never be so bad if but we regulated the un-empathic among us, and did so with a more clear eyed vision. We need to toughen our heart with more tenderness, and not let laziness, emotional laziness substitute via apathy, for being a good person.
My use of narcissism is more nomothetic than diagnostic (idiothetic). This is about its effects, not about pointing out the individual examples that I have noticed, ... in addition to personal exhaustion dealing with them in isolation…. (their modus operandi is to isolate, so let compare notes bro).
Getting back to the story of me studying along with psychologists as an anarchist in Social Ecology (of which there are at least three types or emphases). The anarchist found the psych professionals by training to be too individualistically framed and the marxists as too non-individualist (I am depressed because capitalism) and lacking any regard for agency, so in this context, consider the recent note framed by complexity theory inclinations https://substack.com/@meika/note/c-99540001
as ending a journey that started with my equivalent of the question : "and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?"
I'm not fond of Narcissists, and you can probably tell! Still, I suspect you exaggerate the damage they do; moreover, I you're making a mistake when you conflate tough-mindedness with emotional laziness. Yes, there's a statistical tendency for the tough-minded to be more aggressive and dominant, and less patient and honest, than tender-minded individuals, but there are plenty of aggressive, dominant, impatient, dishonest tender minded people around as well.
Frankly I doubt anything I say will particularly matter, since my arguments are always heavily based in emperical findings, while Mary Douglas' Grid vs Group model is - though at least loosely based on observation - appears unrelated to tough-mindedness, and instead looks rather like an early version of the left/right and libertarian/paternalism model of politics. This interpretation matches my sense of myself in her schema as an individualist trying to learn to appreciate the unfamiliar ideas of egalitarianism. Is that interesting? Somewhat. More importantly, is her model close to what's really out there? Sure. But I don't see why I'd want to talk about that when I have something that cleaves more closely to the data.
That we let them do. That is the issue. (Current US tariff binge is one example. Most thinking people have let themselves be convinced that free trade is usually better due to the comparative advantage thing, but how does one get narcissistic supply out of consensus worlding?)
Forbearance creates it's own issues in time. Not policing Trump, or Putin or Boris Johnson turns history into one damn narcissist after another.
Admittedly you're right. As in good. Your forbearance is actually the way the world is made in the first place, because that is how we self wholesomely. In recovery or in nurturing...
But I am older, I have been through it all a few times and it would be easy on everyone to nip it in the bud much earlier. To be narcissism aware. And police or regulate the narcs on our side... they are even distributed across society. That's why I say any system would then work as the true believers believe, if we policed them. Forbearance would remedy the difficulties. This tolerance is the heart of common ground "liberalism" a word so badly twisted in the USA.
Unfortunately, forbearance is also what the narcissist surfs (because it is everywhere and so it is at hand) and is what they opportunistically try to turn into supply. They corral forbearance: a cult is mostly a bunch of empaths forbearing a leader who turns them into flying monkeys. For a while.
The world survives even as history interrupts as an interesting time. Repetitive or worse.
What I call emotional laziness is the doubling down on a preference. If your preference is tough-mindedness then doubling down on it is emotionally lazy. i.e. the opposite of ""and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?".
In Pyrrhonism this doubling down is called dogmatic belief and is regarded as unwise.
Mary Douglas is a hierarchist who learned to appreciate libertarian thought after forebearing anti-ritualists and economic rationalists (neoliberals), i.e. a tradcore conservative, almost Edmund-Burckean organic conservatism.
Risk and Culture : An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers by Mary Douglas , Aaron Wildavsky
PS
You POV interpretation / understanding is still stuck in psychology-land, in WEIRD ones in particular, some other anthropology might help. (Although Joseph Henrich is probs a bit wrong on the influence of the Catholic Church on cousin marriage in Western Europe)(posts upcoming one I read another work)
PPS I really appreciate your empirical work with psych data though, it does educate me, and I wish I had the wherewithal to do the same with more anthropological data, but I am a bit distracted by developing a generalist reader position within a complexity framework... as an actual--- like---- discipline, so another lifetime perhaps.
PPPS Our daughter has accepted a offer or two from Oxford for a Masters in Latin & Classics and this will defer my retirement from my day job.
I think that it is difficult to judge which opinions are tough-minded and which opinions are soft-minded. Some are obvious, like giving money to poor people, but I think that questions like divorce and abortion rights are thoroughly ambigious. If banning divorce is seen as a measure to protect children it might be seen as soft-minded. If allowing divorce is seen as a measure to protect women it can also be seen as soft-minded.
The pattern doessn't depend on the definition. And the pattern is quite consistent: sexual freedom, drug freedom, secularity, evolution, and suicide in the tough left; punitiveness, militarism, and ethnocentrism in the tough right; and so on around the map.
Choose whatever name you want for tough-mindedness - realism, pragmatism, whatever - and try to think about it as rationally as you like, but the pattern of attitudes arranged in a dimensional space remains a consistent empirical finding.
I've always been of two minds about surveys; (Self-)deception is just too strong. There is no reason to believe that a person who is lying a lot IRL isn't lying when filling out a survey; Worse yet, there is no reason to believe that person is even honest to themselves or fully aware of the degree of their own dishonesty.
At the current political moment, I see this most clearly when it comes to "combating disinformation". Strictly speaking, who doesn't support that? Yet, I don't. The problem isn't the idea, it's the practice: It's mostly used to shut up inconvenient voices on technicalities, while the favored voices can usually get away with blatant lies as long as they have some fig leaf to hide behind.
This is what I think when I see "honesty" as an item on one side. It's certainly the side that wants (you) to believe that they're honest. Are they? Hard to say. IRL it's not rare at all for the person who says that lies are sometimes justifiable to be more truthful than the person who claims that you should never lie.
In support of the article, I've been saying for some time now that the current left, similar to other idealistic/religious dogmas, has become the side of "sounds nice, doesn't work". What I want is, obviously, "sounds nice, and works". But if that's not an option, I'll rather settle for "works, but isn't nice".
> I've always been of two minds about surveys; (Self-)deception is just too strong. There is no reason to believe that a person who is lying a lot IRL isn't lying when filling out a survey; Worse yet, there is no reason to believe that person is even honest to themselves or fully aware of the degree of their own dishonesty.
That is a rational view. However, if it were correct, then:
* Self report data wouldn't show moderate heritability,
* Self report data wouldn't correlate with other-report, and
* Self report wouldn't predict objective outcomes.
(If you're skeptical about this and would like me to substantiate these three claims with scientific sources, I can do that.)
Put another way, psychometric batteries are perhaps in the category of "works, but isn't nice".
No, all of those three are things I'd expect. The deception you seem to have in mind is the psychopathic style, where someone lies to you but really wants to betray you in an obvious way. That is of course bad and used to be a big problem, but we have mostly conquered that in the west IMO. The deception I am more worried about nowadays is more like a nice-sounding brand optimized for great PR that hides its problems behind a sufficiently convoluted mess so that it's easy for even members to ignore and/or deny them.
It's like the McKinsey advisor who talks third world companies into regenerative energies using sketchy stats and claims the primary problem is a legacy of racism & colonialism. And the companies really do become successful afterwards, but not because it works so well but because it guarantees them a stream of endless easy western money. And the governments and NGOs who give them the money will point to McKinsey to claim that obviously, they have to have sound business plans, it was designed by experts! The end result is a black hole that can eat indefinite amounts of money with little good outcomes except financing legions of advisors, managers, social workers and employees.
Or more simply for each point:
- Almost everything is moderately heritable.
- The entire point of deception is to deceive others.
- The most substantive point IMO. However, objective outcomes in studies I've seen so far just aren't really designed to detect this. Obviously the kind of person who really believes they're nice and honest (and who really wants everyone to believe they're nice and honest) won't blatantly cheat you out of money just because they're in a situation where they might plausibly assume nobody is watching them. Their style of deception is much more longterm and holistic than a shortterm experiment like that can account for. Instead, no matter how good a society is, they will reliably find some alleged social problem that they are fighting against, which will just-so-happen to require everyone to give them lots of money & power.
> The deception I am more worried about nowadays is more like a nice-sounding brand optimized for great PR that hides its problems behind a sufficiently convoluted mess so that it's easy for even members to ignore and/or deny them.
I do see that you're passionate about this and have thought deeply about it, but I understood this as broadly being your view to begin with. Whether we are checking outcomes like being married, divorced, caught cheating on exams, languishing in prison, making unusually large amounts of money, or whatever, these self report inventories predict them. They also predict what others say, and are subatantially heritable; therefore they do work. Thus, we do have good reason to take people who score high in Honesty as more honest than those who score low in Honesty.
However, if you're rather trying to suggest "I'm not interested surveys, I'm more interested in, you know, the other stuff in my comments" then hey, we can talk about that! Obviously both alexythemia and self deception can play a role in allowing us (as organisms driven by evolutionary principles) to pursue goals that were successful in our ancestral history, or even random goals that result from mutations and predictive errors.
One interesting example of what you're talking about is the way this... https://thingstoread.substack.com/publish/post/98165959 ...led to this: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tania-Reynolds/publication/348214199_Our_Grandmothers%27_Legacy_Challenges_Faced_by_Female_Ancestors_Leave_Traces_in_Modern_Women%27s_Same-Sex_Relationships/links/62572b50709c5c2adb786a74/Our-Grandmothers-Legacy-Challenges-Faced-by-Female-Ancestors-Leave-Traces-in-Modern-Womens-Same-Sex-Relationships.pdf
Wow, this is incredible. It is the type of post which I believe has the potential to dramatically shift conversations. How can we make it more popular? I have been thinking about it for a while and indeed I concur that it seems to more accurately model the observed politics of people.
I'm glad you found it interesting! But truthfully, I'm not concerned about what most people think; remember, most people will tell me I can't divide by zero in the same way the Ancient Greeks insisted there were no negative numbers.
Lest you think this is just me being a cranky old man, be aware that I *still* can't get young dummies to stop insisting to me "Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors" in real life even after showing them printer cartriges or handing them a prism. So far as I can determine, the best way to get people talking about Tough-Mindedness is to convince Jordan Peterson, Scott Alexander, or, better, their fifth grade teacher, to explain it to them, and that's just not my thing. (If it's your thing, hey, knock yourself out!)
I agree the best way to get people to talk about it would be to convince people with big reaches. If politicalcompass.org included it then it would eventually diffuse into the culture too. The idealistic part of me (haha) likes to imagine that if more people had this accurate map then the world would just be that little bit better off.
What is your definition of primary color? A quick google search reveals that the ordinary definition is "Red, Yellow, and Blue." I know what the electromagnetic spectrum looks like, and maybe a definition based on that would be better. But this is just semantics, no? I am reminded of when I used to think that "The Midwest" referred to the slightly-west-of-middle part of the United States - it doesn't.
It isn't definitions. It isn't semantics. It's very obvious, and RYB is wrong: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-colors-tell-us-about-philosophy
I found your argument thought-provoking, especially your insights on tender-minded projection and the importance of acknowledging fundamental differences in perception and reasoning.
Your call for intellectual humility—“If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?”—is a valuable approach to political discourse.
That said, I think the argument could be strengthened by addressing a few points:
1. Cognitive Biases Exist on Both Sides
You argue that tender-minded individuals assume too much similarity, leading to naivety. But tough-minded individuals are also prone to distortions, particularly negativity bias, which can lead to excessive distrust and overestimation of threats (Hibbing, Smith & Alford, 2014). If tender-mindedness risks naivety, doesn’t tough-mindedness risk cynicism?
2. Political Views Can Change
Your discussion of heritability in political attitudes is compelling, but history shows that ideology is shaped by material conditions and crises:
• Post-WWII Germany & Japan embraced liberal democracy after militarism.
• The Great Depression shifted views on state intervention.
If political beliefs were purely biologically driven, we wouldn’t see such shifts. How do you reconcile personality-driven ideology with historical transformations?
3. Tender-Mindedness Can Be Pragmatic
You frame tough-minded realism as practical and tender-mindedness as naive, yet history shows tender-minded policies can be strategically effective:
• The Marshall Plan prevented the spread of communism without war.
• Portugal’s drug decriminalization led to lower addiction rates and crime.
If tough-mindedness leads to realism, what happens when tender-minded policies outperform tough-minded ones?
4. The Limits of Dialogue
Your argument promotes understanding ideological differences, but not all viewpoints are reconcilable:
• A democracy cannot function if one side denies elections.
• Not all perspectives deserve legitimacy—science denial, racism, and authoritarianism must be actively opposed.
• Bad-faith actors exist—some use political discourse as a weapon rather than engaging honestly.
Where do you see the boundary between productive debate and the need to reject certain ideas outright?
I’d love to hear your thoughts—especially on how you see realism, pragmatism, and ideology interacting.
Unfortunately, you may have to be patient about this.
Keep up the excellent work! I don't mind waiting for the analysis when it is as well-researched and engaging as this piece.
I always thought the Eysenck thing was funny. Poor guy managed to run afoul of Nazis *and* leftists.
This is really interesting and I always wondered if the political compass would survive principal component analysis. Nope!
Eysenck liked exploring; people who explore rapidly find themselves climbing over the bars that hold everyone else in conventional reality. The hard part isn't leaving the cage, it's finding a way to get back in and talk to people inside without them freaking out about where you've been.
> I always wondered if the political compass would survive principal component analysis. Nope!
To be fair, they're not *that* far wrong at the political compass - I have successfully recovered a dimension of attitudes under factor analysis that's recognizable as libertarianism. It's just that libertarianism always shows up after Toughmindedness... and even then, the libertarianism I recover is a bit different from what they say it is.
So it's PC3 instead of PC2?
You could post the factor loadings. I'm not sure how many people would appreciate it.
My dude though I do have a total n = 800 from things I'm not publishing (and factor 4 is a secret, shh) you can check here if you haven't already, to get a sense of the way it looks when you take it out to 3 factors: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political
I read that and liked it a lot, even tried to share it with a few people. I might drop a link on Astral Codex Ten, they're into this sort of 'politically non-binary' thing and a lot of them actually have the math background to get what you're talking about.
Hm, I was hoping that would give you what you needed. The truth is that I *do* have factor loadings for a larger study, but, I'm reluctant to spread it around. I'll think about it; maybe I'm just being over cautious and there's no reason not to post the results.
Eh, maybe you have your reasons. If you are doing this is a hobby and fear doxxing, for instance, you may not want a very popular Substack. You probably didn't obtain the consent forms to publish it (just ask Aella). You can certainly scrub the free-response bits and any geographic info so nobody's identifiable.
A fascinating (and chaotic) map of ideological intersections. Some of these connections feel spot-on, others seem like a stretch. What's the source behind this?
References are at the end...
Fascinating analysis. I end up all over the map on the 'tough minded' scale. I guess I'm just odd.
Ordinary people do have a mix of values they endorse and reject. Frankly I take it as a sign a person thinks about things, considers the opinions of others around them, and reacts to experience. Accepting a package deal can force a person to swallow a lot of strange things.
But on the other hand, how many attitudes do you really endorse in the upper left corners of any of these maps? I'd be surprised if you agreed with more than four or five statements from the tough-left.
It isn’t on the left and right that I vary, it’s up and down. On the right side of the map there are things I agree with on the upper part and things I agree with on the lower part.
People are different but tough-minded people never pick up on the differences that are there, but some imaginary ontology or classification system or series of folk catgeories near at hand or hatred. But then they are emotionally lazy so why would they bother being accurate??
I feel the work of Mary Douglas (English Africanist anthropologist and Catholic hierarchist) is a much better lead on this,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas
https://fourcultures.com/a-short-summary-of-grid-group-cultural-theory/
Mostly because it maps the quadrant described in your post, to perceptions of risk (of nature, of morality) and provides are better framework than purely psych-based mappings even if the link in her work between individual choice/bias and how institutions think is not fully developed (I read her work in the late 90s within a framework of complexity and chaos theories so I just lumped that in.
I've recently been reading up on her work as a bit of a back log, just finished the Fardon 1999 "An intellectual biography " for example, not yet blogged, but will be added to:
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/reading-mary-douglas-linkpost/
In other news I feel that any system to structure society would work if we policed narcissism better rather than attack those narcissists denigrate in order to rile and rule. (this makes me a meta-anarchist, I just made that up).
That Machiavellian gloss in the research you mentioned I see as support for this view.
I can tell you read the article, but either you glossed over the conclusion, or you disagree with the conclusion. What if I re-express it like this?
"This is what we are: not the same, but different. While a gentle and optimistic response to that difference is commendable, the way I’d expect that response to look is less like a series of insults about narcissism and emotional laziness, and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?"
Thanks for allowing me to be more clear here.
I had this moment-->
"and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?"
when I read _Thought Styles_ by Mary Douglas in about 1999. This was just before I started a Social Ecology masters and most of my fellow students were counsellors and PTDS psychs etc, who had come along to be 'socialised' as we joked about it, "we just need to start saying we" we said
(back when pronouns were not part of some identitarian caste system and were mostly used to indicate who was saying what to whom as personable location in space, i.e. human prepositions about POV & language facility).
Your question reworded, or at least it's equivalent form for me from my POV, "we are all biased in a compositional foundation sense, <*light globe*> so how are we to get along" has been with me for three decades.
Generally it requires empathy or at least acknowledgement of another's POV. This inform the meta-anarchist comments. That is a hindsight comment. (Using Ardrey's use of Petter's use of the French _noyaux_ for the social area we have an urge to socialise in is another https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/robert-ardreys-the-territorial-imperative )
In that time both at work and in living in a cohousing co-operative the biggest issues in doing that have been with narcissists and psychopaths, and a lesser extent with low affect psychopaths. While they are a part of the human fabric _we_ have in recent years been really bad in regulating them. They do not self-regulate because they lack empathy, or at least did not (could not)(can not) successfully get through what Freud called the reality principle and I would call the world-self ratio of the Janus Dance which is what self-regulation is all about.
Thus I propose that _any_ other preferences we _each_ might have (((((as you outline via Hans Eysenck, or, as I suggest, Mary Douglas) and any social structure they may thus indicate a preference for (and later tribalised or religionised into a _habitus_ or _worldviews_ or _life-project_ or _narrative_ which are then available as a choice in a market based individualist economy - trad societies have less options on offer)))))) do not matter as much as narcissists baleful influence such that we get a return to history as one damn thing after another.
With this question, which requires empathy to ask, "and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?" will fail in its project if, out of humanity, we do not regulate our human failures. (Please quote me on that when people accuse me of being a moral relativist when discussing Mary Douglas' ideas in an even handed manner).
I say this as a tender-hearted soul who has learned people, most people, do not like toughening up until the last minute and this can too often be too late, and thus fail to toughen up and police those who would rush us, rile us and thus rule us, and that whatever systemic failings any system or narrative might have, they would never be so bad if but we regulated the un-empathic among us, and did so with a more clear eyed vision. We need to toughen our heart with more tenderness, and not let laziness, emotional laziness substitute via apathy, for being a good person.
My use of narcissism is more nomothetic than diagnostic (idiothetic). This is about its effects, not about pointing out the individual examples that I have noticed, ... in addition to personal exhaustion dealing with them in isolation…. (their modus operandi is to isolate, so let compare notes bro).
Getting back to the story of me studying along with psychologists as an anarchist in Social Ecology (of which there are at least three types or emphases). The anarchist found the psych professionals by training to be too individualistically framed and the marxists as too non-individualist (I am depressed because capitalism) and lacking any regard for agency, so in this context, consider the recent note framed by complexity theory inclinations https://substack.com/@meika/note/c-99540001
as ending a journey that started with my equivalent of the question : "and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?"
I'm not fond of Narcissists, and you can probably tell! Still, I suspect you exaggerate the damage they do; moreover, I you're making a mistake when you conflate tough-mindedness with emotional laziness. Yes, there's a statistical tendency for the tough-minded to be more aggressive and dominant, and less patient and honest, than tender-minded individuals, but there are plenty of aggressive, dominant, impatient, dishonest tender minded people around as well.
Frankly I doubt anything I say will particularly matter, since my arguments are always heavily based in emperical findings, while Mary Douglas' Grid vs Group model is - though at least loosely based on observation - appears unrelated to tough-mindedness, and instead looks rather like an early version of the left/right and libertarian/paternalism model of politics. This interpretation matches my sense of myself in her schema as an individualist trying to learn to appreciate the unfamiliar ideas of egalitarianism. Is that interesting? Somewhat. More importantly, is her model close to what's really out there? Sure. But I don't see why I'd want to talk about that when I have something that cleaves more closely to the data.
" I suspect you exaggerate the damage they do"
That we let them do. That is the issue. (Current US tariff binge is one example. Most thinking people have let themselves be convinced that free trade is usually better due to the comparative advantage thing, but how does one get narcissistic supply out of consensus worlding?)
Forbearance creates it's own issues in time. Not policing Trump, or Putin or Boris Johnson turns history into one damn narcissist after another.
Admittedly you're right. As in good. Your forbearance is actually the way the world is made in the first place, because that is how we self wholesomely. In recovery or in nurturing...
But I am older, I have been through it all a few times and it would be easy on everyone to nip it in the bud much earlier. To be narcissism aware. And police or regulate the narcs on our side... they are even distributed across society. That's why I say any system would then work as the true believers believe, if we policed them. Forbearance would remedy the difficulties. This tolerance is the heart of common ground "liberalism" a word so badly twisted in the USA.
Unfortunately, forbearance is also what the narcissist surfs (because it is everywhere and so it is at hand) and is what they opportunistically try to turn into supply. They corral forbearance: a cult is mostly a bunch of empaths forbearing a leader who turns them into flying monkeys. For a while.
The world survives even as history interrupts as an interesting time. Repetitive or worse.
What I call emotional laziness is the doubling down on a preference. If your preference is tough-mindedness then doubling down on it is emotionally lazy. i.e. the opposite of ""and more like a question: If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?".
In Pyrrhonism this doubling down is called dogmatic belief and is regarded as unwise.
Mary Douglas is a hierarchist who learned to appreciate libertarian thought after forebearing anti-ritualists and economic rationalists (neoliberals), i.e. a tradcore conservative, almost Edmund-Burckean organic conservatism.
On that working with libertarianism see
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/risk-and-culture/paper
Risk and Culture : An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers by Mary Douglas , Aaron Wildavsky
PS
You POV interpretation / understanding is still stuck in psychology-land, in WEIRD ones in particular, some other anthropology might help. (Although Joseph Henrich is probs a bit wrong on the influence of the Catholic Church on cousin marriage in Western Europe)(posts upcoming one I read another work)
PPS I really appreciate your empirical work with psych data though, it does educate me, and I wish I had the wherewithal to do the same with more anthropological data, but I am a bit distracted by developing a generalist reader position within a complexity framework... as an actual--- like---- discipline, so another lifetime perhaps.
PPPS Our daughter has accepted a offer or two from Oxford for a Masters in Latin & Classics and this will defer my retirement from my day job.
I think that it is difficult to judge which opinions are tough-minded and which opinions are soft-minded. Some are obvious, like giving money to poor people, but I think that questions like divorce and abortion rights are thoroughly ambigious. If banning divorce is seen as a measure to protect children it might be seen as soft-minded. If allowing divorce is seen as a measure to protect women it can also be seen as soft-minded.
The pattern doessn't depend on the definition. And the pattern is quite consistent: sexual freedom, drug freedom, secularity, evolution, and suicide in the tough left; punitiveness, militarism, and ethnocentrism in the tough right; and so on around the map.
Choose whatever name you want for tough-mindedness - realism, pragmatism, whatever - and try to think about it as rationally as you like, but the pattern of attitudes arranged in a dimensional space remains a consistent empirical finding.
I was looking for research like this more my next article. This is very helpful -thank you