Political psychology explained

Yes, but it was always going to veer off course if Carty wasn't around to guide it. Keep your expectations realistic.

Reflecting on fifteen years of participation in online politics discussion (pofo.org; pofoUK and this place), I have been endlessly both fascinated and horrified at the psychology behind so many exchanges one can read. The polarity and binary thought on display is staggering, in an arena wherein the object should be to find solutions to society's problems. 

There are structural factors, too, such as our adversarial, 'debating society' model of parliament, which subliminally entrenches that polarity and partisanship, but it is the deeper psychology I find interesting.

Here is something lifted from Twitter, by Prof Jonathan Shedler, a psychology professor from UCSF.


Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks "I'm a sadist" or "I'm a malignant narcissist." They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues. The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right. They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on, who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.



For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one's own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves. Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defence of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That's the projection.



The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called is "projective identification.") The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.



In more everyday language, what it boils down to for me is two factors:

First, people on all sides of politics allow themselves to believe that only they and their allies speak the truth. Ergo, everyone else is deluded.

Second, having convinced themselves of the 'truth' of their position, they feel justified in simply not caring about the impact their 'truth' might have on others.

You'll notice I have not made any party references. This phenomenon knows no party boundaries and can be traced back to Greece and Rome.

What has potentiated and accelerated it in the last decade or so has been social media. Prior to Twitter et al, one's only option was the apocryphal letter to the (broadsheet) paper from the eponymous 'Outraged of Tonbridge Wells'. Now anyone and everyone can, if they wish, comment in real time on the opinion of anyone else and, let's be frank, most of those comments tend to be aggressively ad hominem and without substance.

Taking this place as an example, few threads last more than half a dozen posts before they descend into aggressive, ad hominem attacks that add nothing to the discussion. I hardly post these days, precisely because of that phenomenon. When I see a topic of interest, unless it's only recently been posted it will have degenerated into a slanging match between polarised groups and any comment I might make in relation to the OP gets lost in the bar fight. Unfortunately, a vocal minority only log in for those bar fights. The same has become true of the political world upon which we come here to comment. 'Personality politics' and populism have wrought a political landscape in which little meaningful discussion can take place, thanks to the entrenchment of polarised thinking and the consolidation of notions of righteousness in those polarised positions. 

I don't give a toss what it means in Glasgow.
There is an accepted form of conversation which is neutral and mutually respectable.
This is as I understand it, open to the public. It is not a Glasgow pub or street.

Please note that it was the mods, not me, who designated the Mind Zone "for polite conversation only".

Since we are now in the Mind Zone at the moment, you might like to rephrase your aggressive post according to the rules, as you suggest.


If you have a problem with that, please look up the word "polite" and address the 6.


How you speak to others elsewhere is of no interest to me other than to suggest a certain image.

Well there have already been 3 moderators contributing to this thread, but you cannot force people to post.


As a general point about the level of moderation of Mind Zone - if a post is reported it is generally acted on fairly swiftly. Otherwise control of what gets posted is reliant on a moderator happening to read the thread - we dont spend 24/7 searching through each thread looking for offences against the rules.

I would just personally say that those who complain about the level of moderation tend not to be shy at responding in kind to some of the playground insults we get - so I end up deleting a lot of back and forth  between posters where if they had just reported the original post and then refrained from replying in kind, we wouldn't be seeing so many off topic contributions.